much of this paralysing
cowardice to the Christian nations. Only the Northmen of Scandinavia,
living a life apart, and forced to make their way over the wild North
Sea, were untouched by this southern superstition, and ventured across
the ocean by the Faeroes, Iceland, and Greenland, to the coast of
Labrador.

The doctors of the Koran indeed thought that a man mad enough to embark
for the unknown, even on a coasting voyage, should be deprived of civil
rights. Ibn Said goes further, and says no one has ever done this:
"whirlpools always destroy any adventurer." As late as the generation
immediately before Henry the Navigator, about A.D. 1390, another light
of Moslem science declared the Atlantic to be "boundless, so that ships
dare not venture out of sight of land, for even if the sailors knew the
direction of the winds, they would not know whither those winds would
carry them, and as there is no inhabited country beyond, they would run
a risk of being lost in mist, fog, and vapour. The limit of the West is
the Atlantic Ocean."

This was the final judgment of the Arabic race and its subject allies
upon the western limits of the world, and in two ways they helped to fix
this belief, derived from the timid coasting-traders of the Roman Empire
on Greek and Latin Christendom. First, the Spanish Caliphate cut off all
access to the Western Sea beyond the Bay of Biscay, from the eighth to
the twelfth centuries. Not till the capture of Lisbon in 1147, could
Christian enterprise on this side gain any basis, or starting-point. Not
till the conquest of the Algarve in the extreme south-west of the
peninsula, at the end of the twelfth century, was this enterprise free
to develop itself. Secondly, in the darkest ages of Christian
depression, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, the tenth centuries,
when only the brief age of Charlemagne offered any chance of an
independent and progressive Catholic Empire in the west, the Arabs
became recognised along with the Byzantines as the main successors of
Greek culture. The science, the metaphysic, the abstract ideas of these
centuries came into Germany, France, and Italy from Cordova and from
Bagdad, as much as from Byzantium. And on questions like the South
Atlantic or Indian Ocean, or the shape of Africa,--where Islam had all
the field to itself, and there was no positive and earlier discovery
which might contradict a natural reluctance to test tradition by
experiment--Christendom accepted