The Second Motive Which Encouraged The Admiral To Undertake His Great
Enterprize, And Which Might Reasonably Induce Him To Call
The countries he
proposed to discover by the name of the Indies, was derived from the
authority of learned men;
Who had affirmed that it was possible to sail
from the western coast of Africa and Spain to the eastern bounds of India
by the westwards, and that the sea which lay between these limits was of
no great extent. This is affirmed by Aristotle, in his Second Book of the
Heaven and of the World, as explained by Averroes; in which he says that a
person may sail from India to Cadiz in a few days. Seneca, in his book of
Nature, reflecting upon the knowledge of this world as insignificant in
comparison with what shall be attained in a future life, says that a ship
may sail in a few days with a fair wind from Spain to India. And if, as
some suppose, the same Seneca were the author of the tragedies, he
expresses himself to the same purpose in the following chorus of the Medea:
Venient annis
Secula feris, quibus Oceanus
Vincula rerum laxat, et ingens
Pateat tellus, Typhysque novos
Detegat orbes, nec sit terris
Ultima Thule.
"There will come an age in latter times, when the ocean shall loosen the
bonds of things, and a great country shall be discovered; when another
Typhys shall find out new worlds, and Thule shall no longer remain the
ultimate boundary of the earth."
This prophecy has now certainly been fulfilled by my father. In the first
book of his cosmography, Strabo says that the ocean encompasses the whole
earth; that in the east it washes the shores of India, and in the west
those of Mauritania and Spain; and that if it were not for the vast
magnitude of the Atlantic, men might easily sail in a short time from the
one to the other upon the same parallel; and he repeats the same opinion
in his second book. Pliny, in the Second Book of his Natural History, Chap.
iii. says that the ocean surrounds all the earth, and extends from east to
west between India and Cadiz. The same author, in his Sixth Book, Chap.
xxxi. and Solinus in the sixty-eight chapter of the Remarkable Things of
the World, say that, from the islands of the Gorgonides, which are
supposed to be those of Cape Verd, it was forty days sail across the
Atlantic Ocean to the Hesperides; which islands the admiral concluded were
those of the West Indies. Marco Polo the Venetian traveller, and Sir John
Mandeville, say that they went much farther eastward than was known to
Ptolemy and Marinus. Perhaps these travellers do not mention any eastern
sea beyond their discoveries; yet from the accounts which they give of the
east, it may be reasonably inferred that India is not far distant from
Spain and Africa. Peter Aliacus, in his treatise on the Figure of the
Earth, in the eighth Chapter respecting the extent of habitable land, and
Julius Capitolinus upon inhabitable places, and in several other treatises,
both assert that Spain and India are neighbours towards the west.
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