As, However, The Length And
Difficulties Of Such A Voyage Were Extremely Formidable, It Would Probably
Have Been Either Not
Attempted at all, or have required much longer time to
accomplish than it actually did, if, in addition and aid
Of increased
desires and an enlarged commercial spirit, the means of navigating distant,
extensive, and unknown seas, had not likewise been, about this period,
greatly improved.
We allude, principally, to the discovery of the mariners' compass. The
first clear notice of it appears in a Provencal poet of the end of the
twelfth century. In the thirteenth century it was used by the Norwegians in
their voyages to and from Iceland, who made it the device of an order of
knighthood of the highest rank; and from a passage in Barber's Bruce, it
must have been known in Scotland, if not used there in 1375, the period
when he wrote. It is said to have been used in the Mediterranean voyages at
the end of the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century.
With respect to the nations of the east, it is doubted whether they derived
their knowledge of it from the Europeans, or the Europeans from them. When
we reflect on the long and perilous voyages of the Arabians, early in the
Christian era, we might be led to think that they could not be performed
without the assistance of the compass; but no mention of it, or allusion to
it, occurs in the account of any of their voyages; and we are expressly
informed by Nicolo di Conti, who sailed on board a native vessel in the
Indian seas, about the year 1420, that the Arabians had no compass, but
sailed by the stars of the southern pole; and that they knew how to measure
their elevation, as well as to keep their reckoning, by day and night, with
their distance from place to place.
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