(Roger Bacon, the learned monk of the thirteenth
century seems to have suspected their existence, but he wisely kept his
discovery to himself) they often drank unclean water and sometimes the
whole crew died of typhoid fever. Indeed the mortality on board the
ships of the earliest navigators was terrible. Of the two hundred
sailors who in the year 1519 left Seville to accompany Magellan on his
famous voyage around the world, only eighteen returned. As late as the
seventeenth century when there was a brisk trade between western Europe
and the Indies, a mortality of 40 percent was nothing unusual for a trip
from Amsterdam to Batavia and back. The greater part of these victims
died of scurvy, a disease which is caused by lack of fresh vegetables
and which affects the gums and poisons the blood until the patient dies
of sheer exhaustion.

Under those circumstances you will understand that the sea did not
attract the best elements of the population. Famous discoverers like
Magellan and Columbus and Vasco da Gama travelled at the head of crews
that were almost entirely composed of ex-jailbirds, future murderers and
pickpockets out of a Job.

These navigators certainly deserve our admiration for the courage and
the pluck with which they accomplished their hopeless tasks in the face
of difficulties of which the people of our own comfortable world can
have no conception. Their ships were leaky. The rigging was clumsy.
Since the middle of the thirteenth century they had possessed some sort
of a compass (which had come to Europe from China by way of Arabia and
the Crusades) but they had very bad and incorrect maps. They set their
course by God and by guess. If luck was with them they returned after
one or two or three years. In the other case, their bleeched bones
remained behind on some lonely beach. But they were true pioneers. They
gambled with luck. Life to them was a glorious adventure. And all the
suffering, the thirst and the hunger and the pain were forgotten when
their eyes beheld the dim outlines of a new coast or the placid waters
of an ocean that had lain forgotten since the beginning of time.

Again I wish that I could make this book a thousand pages long. The
subject of the early discoveries is so fascinating. But history, to
give you a true idea of past times, should be like those etchings
which Rembrandt used to make. It should cast a vivid light on certain
important causes, on those which are best and greatest.