THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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of the first circumnavigation of the world which he accomplished, Magellan was also more of an adventurer than a dreamer; he did not need to overshoot his goal in
order to hit it. And anyway, if the Turks had not obstructed the overland routes to India, if the Spanish feudal and luxury economy had not needed gold in order to
improve its constant balance of trade deficit, above all with the Orient, if the impoverished hidalgos, who later so quickly turned into the white gods of murder, had not
desired to see in Eden primarily the Eldorado which would make them rich overnight, then the whole search for paradise would not have had a single ship at its
disposal, and Columbus would not only have been regarded by his opponents as Jean de la lune, but he would have remained so historically. All of this is true, and yet
it did not dispel an obsession even in the case of Magellan which stems even more strongly from the romance of chivalry than from the much later entrepreneurial
initiative first developed by the Dutch and English. This obsession made the reaction to scepticism really fanatical, to the shipowners first of all, and then — not just in
the case of Columbus, but in that of Magellan as well — to the captains of the escort ships and their own crew. As surely as even a homo religiosus like Columbus
would never have been able to find a ship to set sail for his Eden without an economic mission behind him, this mission could never have been fulfilled without the
traveller’s mystical obsession with his goal. In fact, both Eldorado in Eden and Eden in Eldorado uniquely coincided here, as neither before nor since; and Columbus,
being the utopian­religious dreamer that he was, supplied the courage for Columbus the admiral. The wind which drove his caravels through the terrors of the Atlantic
into what he believed was Eden did not merely blow towards utopias, they sucked it towards them. The premonitions in antiquity of another continent would have
remained literary fantasy as they had previously done for so long without a new economic motive, but also without Eden as a stimulus. Columbus praised Seneca's
allusion that one day the girdle of the ocean would break and Thule would no longer be the outermost part of the earth, and Plutarch's suggestion that the moon, if it
was a mirror of the earth, still indicated an undiscovered continent in its dark patches; but even these reports, strengthened in their authority by the Renaissance, would
not have enabled the horror of the Atlantic to be overcome, nor encouraged the voyage into the dreaded void. The belief in the earthly paradise, and this alone, finally
spurred on the man of action to risk the western voyage with full awareness and planning, and finally fulfilled Seneca's prophecy. And the material interest, that of feudal
colonization, did not clash with the