Prince Henry did not himself live to see the success of his schemes, but within eighty years of the occupa tion of Sagres, Portuguese sailors had won their way southwards along the coast of Africa, Diaz had doubled the Cape, and Vasco da Gama had sailed to India and returned with bags of spices to show that he had been there. Henceforward in history there were not two oceans but one, and henceforward world trade fell to the ocean sailors, because there was a saving of energy in carrying goods all the way by sea. Another great advance in civilization was thus made. Less than five years after da Gama returned from India the galleys from Alexandria and Beirut, which were wont to bring the spices, entered the harbour of Venice empty. Within a dozen years of his return, the conquest of the Indies— the East Indies—was complete, the Arabs were defeated in the Arabian Sea and in Malacca, and the power of the Portuguese was established all along the coast of India.
Thanks to her position and to Prince Henry, Portugal had taken the lead in discovery. Thanks to the fact that the Iberian peoples were Christians and zealous Roman Catholics, the bull of the Pope granting a monopoly of her discoveries to Portugal was not likely to be disregarded by her rival Castile; but interest was roused in the advance southwards, especially when the Guinea coast had been reached and its products actually brought to Europe.
Then, and not till then, the fact that the world is round became of importance. If the world was round there was another way to the Indies—westward. This way lay open to whoever would take it. As Iberia lies at the west end of the Mediterranean, round which lived all the sailors who till now had been engaged in world commerce, it was most natural that many Genoese, Venetians and Pisan sailors should find employment under Portuguese authority when Portugal embarked on a career of world conquest overseas, especially as there had been little reason in earlier times why Portuguese should be sailors. It is no wonder that Columbus—a Genoese, familiar with trade conditions, a resident for many years in Portugal, where ideas of world trade were in the air, a sailor on the open sea to Madeira, the Azores and even to Iceland, familiar with the theories as to the shape of the globe—should have thought it worth while to make a voyage westward.
But Portugal was not interested : all her energies were engaged in the exploration of the obvious way eastward. The Italian states wished rather to keep the Mediterranean as part of the route to the East than to open any new route. Britain had not yet realized what world trade meant. It was in Castile that Columbus found a certain sympathy with hig ideas, though it is not to be wondered at that it took him many years to break down that distrust of the open ocean which had possessed the minds of men through all time. As
in the case of Prince Henry, though the great work was done by a single man, yet it would probably have been done within a comparatively short time by someone else if not by him, and he was just such a man as the geographical conditions were likely to produce.
That the discovery of Columbus was rated at its true value by the Powers of Europe is seen by the fact that within seven weeks of the return of Columbus, in 1493, a bull was issued by the Pope, assuming that the world was round and giving the Western Hemisphere to Spain as the East was given to Portugal. Now these lands, which Columbus had discovered in his attempt to reach the Indies, had not belonged to the circle of lands that then mattered. The Portuguese in the Indies had merely diverted to their own ships such trade as had already used the ships of the Arabs. In the New World there was no trade to divert; there were no spices. The Spaniards who followed Columbus in ever-increasing numbers came with the three ideas, fighting, Christian izing, and the possession of gold and silver. Trade did not enter their minds. Again this is not surprising. Castilians had for centuries been accustomed to fighting, to fighting for Christianity, and their own plateau land yielded precious metals and was unsuited for trade.
But though the Western Hemisphere was given to Spain, the Spaniards did not conquer the whole of the lands set therein. The parts which came under their influence were determined by geographical conditions. A map showing the winds in the Atlantic will show that the trade winds still blow south-westwards, so that Columbus did not go due west across the Atlantic but west-south-west, with the result that he reached the islands now called the West Indies. In later voyages he reached South America and Central America. Because the Isthmus of Panama is narrow he heard of the exist ence of the Pacific Ocean, and within a few years Spaniards had crossed the Isthmus and built vessels on the shores of the Pacific. But Columbus never knew of the existence of North America. The Spanish dominions, then, spread from the West Indies to Mexico, and southwards along the Pacific coast of South America in the mountainous parts where the precious metals were mined. The old inhabitants were killed or converted at the point of the sword, and sold into slavery to toil for their new masters, so that the lands which the Spaniards conquered became Spanish even in speech.