When our story opens, Europeans were merely on the threshold of the Pacific: in 1500 no European had seen any shore of the Ocean, and since Marco Polo probably only a few missionaries had ever been even on its border seas. By 1600 the outlines of the East Indies and the China coast were tolerably clear, there was active trade with Japan, and a regular shipping line across the Ocean between Manila and Acapulco; the eastern shores from California to Tierra del Fuego were known to Europeans, and from Acapulco to Valdivia were the scene of a lively coastwise traffic. The northern coast of New Guinea was known, though Australia was scarcely imagined, unless as a hypothetical Terra Australis; the Portuguese may well have sighted much of the continent in the 1520s, but this was not on record. In the Ocean itself, many islands had been sighted, some visited, including the great Solomons group; and if they were cartographically floating islands, at least the Ocean was delimited east and west, and it was known that within it were many places of rest and refreshment (Figure 24, “PACIFIC OUTLINES, 1500–1600. ”). The geographical revolution may be evaluated by comparing the fifteenth century- 290 -
- 291 -world map of Ptolemy in Figure Plate I, “THE PTOLEMAIC WORLD MAP. ” with its academic revision by Wytfliet in 1597 in Figure Plate XX, “PTOLEMY TRANSFORMED: WYTFLIET 1597. ”. It was a great achievement, attained with wretched technical resources and by scarcely imaginable suffering.
Despite Jesuit and other relations, the great empires of Asia were still, in European minds, lands of mystery and fable, although in total there was an immense amount of solid information available to merchants and scholars, and this was already exerting a marked influence on European thought and art, as Donald Lach's massy volumes attest.[74] Across the Ocean, two great unknown empires had been discovered and subverted, whole nations all but extirpated, and on their ruins had been erected a strange new imperium stretching from New Spain to Chile and La Plata; their treasures had at once enormously stimulated and distorted European economies. And already some of the finer spirits of Europe were drawing inferences unflattering to the assumptions and the self-image of Western Christendom: Montaigne had written those devastating essays ‘Of Cannibals’ and ‘Of Coaches’, in which by implication the court of Charles IX appears scarce as civilised as that of some petty Brazilian chief. The silks of China, the spices of Ternate and Tidore, the silver of Zacatecas and Potosi, had been bought with blood and iron ‘and the sweete liues of multitudes of men.’[75]
- 292 -