erica was lying at the Vatican when Columbus was
searching for proofs of land within reach,--of India, as he expected, in
the place where he found an unknown continent and a new world. But no
one knew of these; even the Greenland colony had been lost and
forgotten in the fifteenth century; in 1553 the English sailors reached
the land of Archangel without a suspicion that Ohthere or Thorer Hund
had been there six hundred years before; Russia from the thirteenth to
the sixteenth centuries was almost out of sight and mind under the
Tartar and Moslem rule; but the missionaries and merchants and
travellers who followed the crusading armies to the Euphrates, and crept
along the caravan routes to Ceylon and the China Sea, added Further and
Central Asia--"Thesauri Arabum et divitis Indiae"--to the knowledge of
Christendom.

And as this knowledge was bound up with gain; as the Polos and their
companions had really opened to the knowledge of the West those great
prizes of material wealth which even the Rome of Trajan had never fully
grasped, and which had been shared between Arabs and natives without a
rival for so long; it was not likely to be easily forgotten. From that
time, at the end of the thirteenth century, to the success of the
Portuguese on another road, at the end of the fifteenth, European
interest was fairly engaged in pressing in upon the old land-routes and
getting an ever larger share of their profits.

(3) There was another side of the same problem, a still brighter hope
for men who could dare to try it. By finding a sea-path to the Indian
store-house, mariners like the Venetians and Genoese, or their Spanish
pupils, might cut into the treasuries of the world at their very source,
found a trade-empire for their country, and gain the sole command of
heaven on earth, of the true terrestrial paradise.

Then masters of the wealth of the East and of the fighting power of the
West, the Christian nations might crush their old enemy, Islam, between
two weights, hammer and anvil; might fairly strike for the rule of the
entire habitable globe.

It was with thoughts of this kind, vaguely inspired by the Crusades and
their legacy of discovery from Bagdad to Cathay, that the Vivaldi left
Genoa to find an ocean way round Africa in 1281-91, "with the hope of
going to the parts of the Indies"; that Malocello reached the Canary
Islands about 1270; and that volunteers went on the same quest nearly
twenty times in the next four