This was true enough. When Vasco da Gama was once round the South
Cape, he soon found himself not in an unknown and untraversed ocean, but
embarked upon one of the great trade routes of the Mahometan world. The
main part of the distance between the Prince's farthest and the
southern Cape of Good Hope, was passed in two voyages, in four years
(1482-6).
But there was more than this. Henry did not only accomplish the first
and most difficult steps of his own great central project, the finding
of the way round Africa to India; he not only began the conversion of
the natives, the civilisation of the coast tribes and the colonisation
of certain trading sites; he also founded that school of thought and
practice which made all the great discoveries that have so utterly
eclipsed his own.
From that school came Columbus, who found a western route to India,
starting from the suggestion of Henry's attempt by south and east;
Bartholomew Diaz, who reached and rounded the southernmost point of the
old-world continent and laid open the Indian Ocean to European sailors;
Da Gama, who was the first of those sailors to reap the full advantage
of the work of ninety years, the first who sailed from Lisbon to Calicut
and back again; Albuquerque, who founded the first colonial empire of
Modern Europe, the first great out-settlement of Christendom, the
Portuguese trade dominion in the East; Magellan, who finally proved what
all the great discoverers were really assuming--the roundness of the
world; the nameless adventurers who seem to have touched Australia some
time before 1530; the draughtsmen who left us our first true map of the
globe.
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