The Indians of the Gulf Region: Cape Bajador and Good Hope

Wild tales were believed of dreadful reefs and stormy headlands stretching far out at sea, and of a fiery climate at the equator which no living thing, not even whales in the depth of the ocean, could pass because of the great heat. It was believed that the waves rolled in boiling water upon the fiery sands of the coasts, and that whoever should pass beyond Cape Bajador would never return. Against every species of opposition Prince Henry persevered. His navigators scattered all these fallacies and tales to the winds by doubling Cape Bajador and penetrating the tropical regions. At length, in the year 1497, Vasquez de Gama, a Portuguese mariner who had been in Prince Henry's service in his youth, passed around the Cape of Good Hope (which he so named), with an Arabian chart directing his course, and crossing the Indian Ocean landed in India at Calcutta. Africa was circumnavigated, and a new way was opened to India by the ocean pathway of Pharaoh Necho. Prince Henry had then been dead twenty-four years. He saw the promises of this achievement from afar, but he did not live to enjoy this full triumph of reason. But a greater triumph had lately been achieved than when De Gama passed the Cape of Good Hope.

Just at the evening twilight of a beautiful day in October, 1485, a man about fifty years of age (tall, well-formed, and muscular; long visaged; a face of fair complexion, a little freckled and usually ruddy, but now pale and careworn in expression; an aquiline nose, rather high cheek bones, eyes a light-gray; his hair thin and silvery, and his whole demeanor elevated and dignified), might have been seen standing at the gate of the Franciscan Convent near Palos, in Spain, asking for a little bread and water for his pale-faced, motherless child, whom he was leading by the hand. It was CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, then in extreme poverty, making his way, with his boy Diego, on foot for the Spanish Court. While he lay sick near Belem, a mysterious voice had said to him in a dream: "God will cause thy name to be wonderfully resounded through the earth, and will give thee the keys of the gates of the ocean which are closed with strong chains." It was a prophecy of the imagination--a sequence of intense thought and weary study on the subject. To the mind of Columbus it had all the reality of a revelation from God.

Columbus was the son of a wool-comber in Genoa, where he was born about the year 1435. Like other boys with busy fancies in that maritime city, he showed a fondness for the sea at an early age, and his father, though straitened in means, sent him, for a short time, to the University of Pavia to study the sciences which might fit him to be a navigator. It was an age of rapid intellectual development. Learning was leaving the monasteries to take up its abode with the laity. Geographical discoveries had created an intense longing for geographical knowledge, and the writings of Pliny, Strabo and others, which the newly-discovered art of printing soon multiplied, were read with avidity.

Columbus became a passionate disciple of geographical teachers. He made his first voyage when he was only fourteen years of age. As his practical knowledge deepened with experience, and wonderful tales of mariners concerning mysterious lands seen in the far-off Atlantic fell upon his ears, his soul burned with an intense desire to penetrate the unknown waste of waters. There was then a popular tradition that there was a very large island in the Atlantic called Antilla, mentioned by Aristotle, which Carthagenian mariners had visited. There was also a tradition of another island, on which St. Brandon, a Scotch priest, landed in the sixth century, and found magnificent cities. Still another spoke of the Island of Seven Cities, on which seven Spanish bishops, who fled from Spain with an immense number of followers, on the invasion of the Moors, had settled and founded seven grand cities. Even the learned geographer, Martin Behm, whom the King of Portugal employed, placed these islands on a globe which he constructed as being contiguous to the eastern coast of Asia. And with the revival of letters, came from Greece the story of Atlantis, which Plato had learned from the Egyptians and told to his countrymen--a story which gave an account of an immense island in the Atlantic, in early times, larger than Asia and Africa together, full of inhabitants, great cities and mighty kingdoms, which, by tremendous earthquakes, had been shaken from their foundations and swallowed by the sea. These traditions, the stories of the people of the Canary Islands concerning land frequently seen westward of them (a mirage?) and scores of other marvelous tales, fired the imagination of Columbus, and he conceived the grand design of attempting the discovery of unknown lands in the West.