Lectures on Modern History - Faculty of Social Sciences

<strong>Lectures</strong> on Modern History/45of better omen. Nevertheless, Portugal did no more for ten years, theyears that were made memorable by Spain. Then, under a new king,Emmanuel the Fortunate, Vasco da Gama went out to complete the unfinishedwork of Diaz, lest Columbus, fulfilling the prophecy ofToscanelli, should reach Cathay by a shorter route, and rob them oftheir reward. The right man had been found. It was all plain sailing; andhe plucked the ripe fruit. Vasco da Gama’s voyage to the Cape was thelongest ever made till then. At Malindi, on the equatorial east coast ofAfrica, he found a pilot, and, striking across the Indian Ocean by thefeeble monsoon of 1497, sighted the Ghats in May. The first cargo fromIndia covered the expenses many times over. The splendour of the achievementwas recognised at once, and men were persuaded that Emmanuelwould soon be the wealthiest of European monarchs. So vast a promiseof revenue required to be made secure by arms, and a force was sent outunder Cabral.The work thus attempted in the East seemed to many too much forso small a kingdom. They objected that the country would break itsback in straining so far; that the soil ought first to be cultivated at home;that it would be better to import labour from Germany than to export itto India. Cabral had not been many weeks at sea when these murmursreceived a memorable confirmation. Following the advice of Da Gamato avoid the calms of the Gulf of Guinea, he took a westerly course,made the coast of South America, and added, incidentally and withoutknowing it, a region not much smaller than Europe to the dominions ofhis sovereign.The Portuguese came to India as traders, not as conquerors, anddesired, not territory, but portable and exchangeable commodities. Butthe situation they found out there compelled them to wage war in unknownseas, divided from supports, and magazines, and docks by nearlyhalf the globe. They made no attempt on the interior, for the Malabarcoast was shut off by a range of lofty mountains. Their main object wasthe trade of the Far East, which was concentrated at Calicut, and wasthen carried by the Persian Gulf to Scanderoon and Constantinople, orby Jeddah to Suez and Alexandria. There the Venetians shipped theproducts of Asia to the markets of Europe. But on the other side of theisthmus the carrying trade, all the way to the Pacific, was in the handsof Moors from Arabia and Egypt. The Chinese had disappeared beforethem from Indian waters, and the Hindoos were no mariners. They possessedthe monopoly of that which the Portuguese had come to take, and