Again we have seen how the twelfth,
thirteenth, and fourteenth century progress in science, especially in
geographical maps and plans, the great extension of land travel and the
new beginnings of ocean voyaging during the same time, must be taken
into any view of the Prince's life and work. We have now to look for a
moment at the immense results of that same life which had so vast and so
long a preparation.
For just as we cannot see how that work of his could have been done
without each and every part of that many-sided preparation in the
history of the past, so it is quite as difficult to see how the great
achievements of the generation that followed him and of the century,
that wonderful sixteenth century, which followed the age of Henry's
courtiers and disciples, could have been realised without the impetus he
had given and the knowledge he had spread.
For it was not merely that his seamen had broken down the middle wall of
superstitious terror and had pierced through into the unknown South for
a distance of nearly two thousand miles; it was not merely that between
1412 and 1460 Europeans passed the limits of the West and of the South,
as legend had so long fixed them; not merely that the most difficult
part of the African coast, between Bojador and the Gulf of Guinea, had
been fairly passed and that the waterway to India was more than half
found.
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