All the rest
should be left in the shadow or should be indicated by a few lines. And
in this chapter I can only give you a short list of the most important
discoveries.

Keep in mind that all during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the
navigators were trying to accomplish just ONE THING--they wanted to
find a comfortable and safe road to the empire of Cathay (China), to the
island of Zipangu (Japan) and to those mysterious islands, where grew
the spices which the mediaeval world had come to like since the days
of the Crusades, and which people needed in those days before the
introduction of cold storage, when meat and fish spoiled very quickly
and could only be eaten after a liberal sprinkling of pepper or nutmeg.

The Venetians and the Genoese had been the great navigators of the
Mediterranean, but the honour for exploring the coast of the Atlantic
goes to the Portuguese. Spain and Portugal were full of that patriotic
energy which their age-old struggle against the Moorish invaders had
developed. Such energy, once it exists, can easily be forced into new
channels. In the thirteenth century, King Alphonso III had conquered the
kingdom of Algarve in the southwestern corner of the Spanish peninsula
and had added it to his dominions. In the next century, the Portuguese
had turned the tables on the Mohammedans, had crossed the straits of
Gibraltar and had taken possession of Ceuta, opposite the Arabic city
of Ta'Rifa (a word which in Arabic means "inventory" and which by way
of the Spanish language has come down to us as "tariff,") and Tangiers,
which became the capital of an African addition to Algarve.

They were ready to begin their career as explorers.

In the year 1415, Prince Henry, known as Henry the Navigator, the son
of John I of Portugal and Philippa, the daughter of John of Gaunt (about
whom you can read in Richard II, a play by William Shakespeare) began to
make preparations for the systematic exploration of northwestern
Africa. Before this, that hot and sandy coast had been visited by the
Phoenicians and by the Norsemen, who remembered it as the home of the
hairy "wild man" whom we have come to know as the gorilla. One
after another, Prince Henry and his captains discovered the Canary
Islands--re-discovered the island of Madeira which a century before had
been visited by a Genoese ship, carefully charted the Azores which had
been vaguely known to both the Portuguese and the Spaniards, and caught
a gl