Trade Routes

During the early 16th century Venice struggled tenaciously to maintain her trade long after Da Gama had rounded the Cape, and the last voyage of the Venetian fleet to England and Flanders did not occur until 1532. The 17th and 18th centuries saw a virtual monopoly of the carriage of the world's trade by the sail ing ship on the ocean. Strictly speaking there are no trade routes on the sea. Once the mariner had learnt to go boldly out of sight of land, he was free of all the ocean, and might descend upon any coast. Practically, however, the greater part of the water surface of the globe is left to-day as in the past to the undisturbed pos session of the albatross and the flying fish, for merchant craft are compelled for economic reasons to keep to the courses which on a balance of considerations are likely to yield the best net results to their owners. In the great sailing days, however, ship-masters took other courses from those followed in the later days of steam, and courses, moreover, which varied in most cases on the outward and homeward voyages. In the Atlantic the trade winds, north east and south-east, determined the sailing tracks, and the Gambia became a place of refreshment on the outward voyage and St Helena on the homeward voyage. Algoa and Delagoa are names which record corresponding facts with reference to the voyages of the Portuguese to and from Goa on the seasonal monsoon winds. Thus the new ocean routes to the Indies came to be punctuated with victualling and watering stations and these stations were the property of the "East India Companies" of the several nations.

At first the Portuguese claimed an exclusive use of the new route which they had discovered to the East, and "stapled" the goods which their ships brought home at Lisbon, and other peoples had to come and buy there. This "pride of the wholesaler" brought its retribution, for the Dutch built up a distributing trade from Lisbon throughout northern Europe, and when Portugal was conquered by Spain, the Dutch rebels against Spain steered past Lisbon and sought their own wares in the East. Amsterdam now became the seat of the depot trade in spices, a term which covered many more articles than in modern parlance. It would exceed the limits of this article to enter into the history of the English and French competition with the Dutch on the trade route to the Indies. Suffice it to say that England ended by defeating all her rivals, in no small measure because her motive was to sell even more than to buy.

Europe and the Indies.

The history of human civilization might be written round the story of the trade routes between Europe and the Indies. The facts of physical geography are such that it was inevitable that the main trade of the world, apart from local exchanges, should be between the northwest and the south east of the Euro-Asiatic continent. Those two regions are alike characterized by ample rainfall, lowland soils, and navigable rivers and arms of the sea. They are separated by a belt of great deserts through which lie narrow natural ways, such as the Red Sea and the Nile and Euphrates rivers. Neither the north of Asia nor

the centre and south of Africa offered comparable facilities for early human development. To-day, on an area of some three million square miles in Europe are three hundred million people, and on an area of some five million square miles between Ceylon and Japan are eight hundred million people.

Europe and America.

The second great trade of the world, that between Europe and America, was inaugurated by the voyages of Columbus. He set out to reach the East by way of the West, and as a fact his immediate successors succeeded in accomplishing that feat. The Philippine Islands were approached by the Span iards, not by the Portuguese route round the Cape, but across the Pacific. The track of their galleons was from Spain to Vera Cruz in Mexico, and thence the way led over the Mexican table-land to Acapulco on the Pacific shore, and then by ship across the Pacific. Thus at the very time when trade was abandoning the overland routes in Europe and the Near East, a new overland route was established in America. The reason, apart from the opposition of the Portuguese, was that America projects 2o° of latitude farther south than does Africa, and the passage into the Pacific by dou bling Cape Horn is a far more serious venture than the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean.

The sailing track from Europe to America was on the north east trade wind to the tropical West Indies, whence shipping turned northward to Virginia and so homeward on the prevalent west winds of the higher latitudes—a great triangle of trade. Only Canada and New England were reached laboriously by tack ing against the west winds. In no trade in the world has the advent of steamships been of greater assistance than in the North Atlantic. Elsewhere on favouring winds a sailing ship would often make nearly as quick a passage as a steamer.

The Advent of Steam Power.

The Industrial Revolution of the later i8th and early 19th centuries, though it transformed manufacturing, wrought comparatively little change in commerce. The commercial revolution began only about 187o. In that year only about io% of the world's shipping was moved by steam; today not o% is moved by sails. The newly-made roads and canals, and at first even the railways, remained subsidiary to ocean traffic. There was, however, one freshwater canal the con struction of which effected changes on a world scale. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 from the great lakes of North America to the Hudson River and the Atlantic brought the harvests of the west into relation with the industrial coastland of New England. New York, which had hitherto been a smaller place than either Boston or Philadelphia, shot forward in development to become as is now inevitable the largest city in the world. Today 13o million highly civilized people in the United States and Canada offer as great a basis for international trade as the Boo millions of the Orient, and the North Atlantic trade route balances in importance the ways of the east.