After a short while, when it appeared that Columbus
had failed to find the road to Cathay, the Venetian merchants
recovered from their fright. But the voyages of da Gama and
Magellan proved the practical possibilities of an eastern water-
route to the Indies. Then the rulers of Genoa and Venice,
the two great commercial centres of the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, began to be sorry that they had refused to listen
to Columbus. But it was too late. Their Mediterranean became
an inland sea. The overland trade to the Indies and
China dwindled to insignificant proportions. The old days
of Italian glory were gone. The Atlantic became the new
centre of commerce and therefore the centre of civilisation.
It has remained so ever since.
See how strangely civilisation has progressed since those
early days, fifty centuries before, when the inhabitants of the
Valley of the Nile began to keep a written record of history,
From the river Nile, it went to Mesopotamia, the land between
the rivers. Then came the turn of Crete and Greece and
Rome. An inland sea became the centre of trade and the cities
along the Mediterranean were the home of art and science and
philosophy and learning. In the sixteenth century it moved
westward once more and made the countries that border upon
the Atlantic become the masters of the earth.
There are those who say that the world war and the suicide
of the great European nations has greatly diminished the
importance of the Atlantic Ocean.
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