Joseph Jacobs

“ Yet Rome only came in as the heir of earlier empires that spread the knowledge of the earth and man by conquest long before Rome was of importance; and even when the Romans were the masters of all this vast inheritance, they had not themselves the ability to record the geographical knowledge thus acquired, and it is to a Greek named Ptolemy, a professor of the great university of Alexandria, to whom we owe our knowledge of how much the ancient world knew of the earth. ”

“ Important as was the triumphant march of Alexander through Western Asia, both in history and in geography, it cannot be said to have added so very much to geographical knowledge, for Herodotus was roughly acquainted with most of the country thus traversed, except towards the east of Persia and the north-west of India. But the itineraries of Alexander and his generals must have contributed more exact knowledge of the distances between the various important centres of population, and enabled Eratosthenes and his successors to give them a definite position on their maps of the world. ”

“ The next stage in African exploration is connected with the name of the man to whom can be traced practically the whole of recent discoveries. By his tact in dealing with the natives, by his calm pertinacity and dauntless courage, DAVID LIVINGSTONE succeeded in opening up the entirely unknown districts of Central Africa. Starting from the Cape in 1849, he worked his way northward to the Zambesi, and then to Lake Dilolo, and after five years' wandering reached the western coast of Africa at Loanda. ”

“ The ancients, as we have seen, had recognised the rotundity of the earth, and Eratosthenes had even recognised the possibility of reaching India by sailing westward. Certain traditions of the Greeks and the Irish had placed mysterious islands far out to the west in the Atlantic, and the great philosopher Plato had imagined a country named Atlantis, far out in the Indian Ocean, where men were provided with all the gifts of nature. ”

“ After the circumnavigation of the Victoria it was clear to cosmographers that the world was much larger than had been imagined by the ancients; or rather, perhaps one may say that Asia was smaller than had been thought by the mediæval writers. The dogged persistence shown by Magelhaens in carrying out his idea, which turned out to be a perfectly justifiable one, raises him from this point of view to a greater height than Columbus, whose month's voyage brought him exactly where he thought he would find land according to Toscanelli's map. ”

“ Owing to them, in a large measure, Rome was enabled to preserve its empire intact for nearly five hundred years, and even to this day one can trace a difference in the civilisation of those countries over which Rome once ruled, except where the devastating influence of Islam has passed like a sponge over the old Roman provinces. Civilisation, or the art of living together in society, is practically the result of Roman law, and this sense all roads in history lead to Rome. ”

“ The chief gems which decorated the crowns of kings and nobles, the emerald, the topaz, the ruby, the diamond, all came from the East—mainly from India. The whole of mediæval medical science was derived from the Arabs, who sought most of their drugs from Arabia or India. Even for the incense which burned upon the innumerable altars of Roman Catholic Europe, merchants had to seek the materials in the Levant. ”

“ But, as we know from Marco Polo's travels, China could also be reached by the sea voyage; and for all practical purposes, in the late Middle Ages, when the Mongol empire broke up, and traffic through mid Asia was not secure, communication with the East was via Alexandria.
Now it is important for our present inquiry to realise how largely Europe after the Crusades was dependent on the East for most of the luxuries of life. Nothing produced by the looms of Europe could equal the silk of China, the calico of India, the muslin of Mussul. ”

“ For a long time the continent which we now know as South America was called simply the New World, and was supposed to be joined on to the east coast of Asia. The name America was sometimes applied to it—not altogether inappropriately, since it was Amerigo's voyage which definitely settled that really new lands had been discovered by the western route; and when it was further ascertained that this new land was joined, not to Asia, but to another continent as large as itself, the two new lands were distinguished as North and South America. ”

“ A curious survival of this custom lasted on in map-drawing almost to the beginning of this century, when the spare places in the ocean were adorned with pictures of sailing ships or spouting sea monsters.
When men desired to travel, they did not use such maps as these, but rather itineraries, or road-books, which did not profess to give the shape of the countries through which a traveller would pass, but only indicated the chief towns on the most-frequented roads. ”

“ The discovery of the New World had the most important consequences on the relative importance of the different nations of Europe. Hitherto the chief centres for over two thousand years had been round the shores of the Mediterranean, and, as we have seen, Venice, by her central position and extensive trade to the East, had become a world-centre during the latter Middle Ages. ”

“ Again when men go on their wars of discovery, they have to progress, for the most part, along paths already beaten for them by the natives of the country they intend to conquer; and often when they have succeeded in warfare, they have to consolidate their rule by creating new and more appropriate means of communication. To put it shortly, we have still to discuss the roads of the ancient and mediæval worlds, and the commerce for which those roads were mainly used. ”

“ It is only with James Cook that the era of purely scientific exploration begins, though it is fair to qualify this statement by observing that the Russian expedition under Behring, already referred to, was ordered by Peter the Great to determine a strictly geographical problem, though doubtless it had its bearings on Russian ambitions. Behring and Cook between them, as we have seen, settled the problem of the relations existing between the ends of the two continents Asia and America, but what remained still to the north of terra firma within the Arctic Circle? ”

“ Thus the history of England relates how the kingdom of Wessex grew into predominance over the whole of the country; that of France tells how the kings who ruled over the Isle of France spread their rule over the rest of the land; the history of Israel is mainly an account of how the tribe of Judah obtained the hegemony of the rest of the tribes; and Roman history, as its name implies, informs us how the inhabitants of a single city grew to be the masters of the whole known world. ”

“ We have hitherto been dealing with the discoveries made by Spanish and Portuguese along the coast of the New World, but early in the sixteenth century they began to put foot on terra firma and explore the interior. As early as 1513 Vasco Nunez de Balboa ascended the highest peak in the range running from the Isthmus of Panama, and saw for the first time by European eyes the great ocean afterwards to be named by Magellan the Pacific. He there heard that the country to the south extended without end, and was inhabited by great nations, with an abundance of gold. ”

“ Every part of the earth, so far as we know, has been inhabited by man during the five or six thousand years in which Europeans have been storing up their knowledge, and all that time the inhabitants of each part, of course, were acquainted with that particular part: the Kamtschatkans knew Kamtschatka, the Greenlanders, Greenland; the various tribes of North American Indians knew, at any rate, that part of America over which they wandered, long before Columbus, as we say, "discovered" it. ”

“ The Arabs had practically the monopoly of this trade, and as Europe had scarcely anything to offer in exchange except its gold and silver coins, there was a continuous drain of the precious metals from West to East, rendering the Sultans and Caliphs continuously richer, and culminating in the splendours of Solomon the Magnificent. ”

“ For the first time since the disappearance of the Phœnicians, a great naval power came into existence in Norway, and within a couple of centuries it had influenced almost the whole sea-coast of Europe. The Vikings, or Sea-Rovers, who kept their long ships in the viks, or fjords, of Norway, made vigorous attacks all along the coast of Europe, and in several cases formed stable governments, and so made, in a way, a sort of crust for Europe, preventing any further shaking of its human contents. ”

“ The great difficulty in maritime discovery, both for the ancients and the men of the Middle Ages, was the necessity of keeping close to the shore. It is true they might guide themselves by the sun during the day, and by the pole-star at night, but if once the sky was overcast, they would become entirely at a loss for their bearings. ”

“ Following the example of his uncle, Marius, Cæsar extended the Roman dominions beyond the Alps to Gaul, Western Germany, and Britain; but from our present standpoint it was Pompey who prepared the way for Rome to carry on the succession of empire in the more civilised portions of the world, and thereby merited his title of "Great." He pounded up, as it were, the various states into which Asia Minor was divided, and thus prepared the way for Roman dominion over Western Asia and Egypt. ”

“ Page 36 CHAPTER II THE SPREAD OF CONQUEST IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
In a companion volume of this series, "The Story of Extinct Civilisations in the East," will be found an account of the rise and development of the various nations who held sway over the west of Asia at the dawn of history. Modern discoveries of remarkable interest have enabled us to learn the condition of men in Asia Minor as early as 4000 B.C. All these early civilisations existed on the banks of great rivers, which rendered the land fertile through which they passed. ”

“ It is impossible here to go into any of the details which rendered the tale of Arctic voyages one of the most stirring in human history. All we are concerned with here is the amount of new knowledge brought back by successive expeditions within the Arctic Circle.
This region of the earth's surface is distinguished by a number of large islands in the eastern hemisphere, most of which were discovered at an early date. We have seen how the Norsemen landed and settled upon Greenland as early as the tenth century. ”

“ The trade routes through Germany became at once neglected, and it is only in the present century that she has at all recovered from the blow given to her by the discovery of the new sea routes in which she could not join. But to England, France, and the Low Countries the new outlook promised a share in the world's trade and affairs generally, which they had never Page 133 hitherto possessed while the Mediterranean was the centre of commerce. If the Indies could be reached by sea, they were almost in as fortunate a position as Portugal or Spain. ”

“ Up to the fifteenth century the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula were chiefly occupied in slowly moving back the tide of Mohammedan conquest, which had spread nearly throughout the country from 711 onwards. The last sigh of the Moor in Spain was to be uttered in 1492—an epoch-making year, both in history and in geography. But Portugal, the western side of the peninsula, had got rid of her Moors at a much earlier date—more that 200 years before—though she found it difficult to preserve her independence from the neighbouring kingdom of Castile. ”

“ North Africa has been Mohammedan since the eighth century, and Islam has always recognised slavery, consequently the Arabs of the north have continued to make raids upon the negroes of Central Africa, to supply the Mohammedan countries of West Asia and North Africa with slaves. The Mahdist rebellion was in part at least a reaction against the abolition of slavery by Egypt, and the interest of the next few years will consist in the last stand of the slave merchants in the Soudan, in Darfur, and in Wadai, east of Lake Chad, where the only powerful independent Mohammedan Sultanate still exists. ”

“ This is a process which applies not alone to geography, but to all branches of knowledge, which, after the fall of the Roman Empire, ceased to expand or progress, became mixed up with fanciful notions, and only recovered when a knowledge of ancient science and thought was restored in the fifteenth Page 49 century. But in geography we can more easily see than in other sciences the exact nature of the disturbing influence which prevented the acquisition of new knowledge. ”

“ So much interest had been aroused by Livingstone's previous exploits of discovery, that when nothing had been heard of him for some time, in 1869 Mr. H. M. Stanley was sent by the proprietors of the New York Herald, for whom he had previously acted as war-correspondent, to find Livingstone. He started in 1871 from Zanzibar, and before the end of the year had come across a white man in the heart of the Dark Continent, and greeted him with the historic query, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Two years later Livingstone died, a martyr to geographical and missionary enthusiasm. ”

“ We might, of course, take the earliest geographical work known to us—the tenth chapter of Genesis—and work out how the rest of the world became known to the Israelites when they became part of the Roman Empire; but in history all roads lead to Rome or away from it, and it is more useful for every Page 16 purpose to take Rome as our centre-point. ”

“ That is to say, how did a certain set of men who lived round the Mediterranean Sea, and had acquired the art of recording what each generation had learned, become successively aware of the other parts of the globe? ”