The second Godspeed, replica of one of the three ships that settled Jamestown in 1607, is caught in a timeless moment on her voyage to the Americas last year. Photo, George Salley.
OPENING THE ATLANTIC WORLD by Peter Stanford ''God taught us to make ships, not to transport ourselves, but to transport Him.'' So said the poet and preacher John Donne. He was speaking to the Virginia Company, in 1622. His ringing assertion carries curious echoes in our time-as though there were a more enduring truth within the truth he so clearly saw and felt. Certainly it was a long, hard journey to the point where Europeans burst forth into the Atlantic, and, through their sailing ships, developed on the lands around this storm-beset ocean a uniquely productive if often fractious and too often murderously combative community of nations . The Phoenicians , that vigorous if somewhat enigmatic (to our eyes, across the haze of distance) people may have gone by sea to England for tin about the time that David killed Goliath-around 3,000 years ago. Some students say No , the tin crossed the channel, ascended the European rivers, and spilled down into the advanced Mediterranean world that way. In any event, a thin traffic of some kind reached the Atlantic coasts of Europe from at least this early on, though it does seem to have been a coastal and riverine rather than deepwater exercise. The smashup of the Roman Empire at about halfway from David's time to ours, entailed a great destruction of cities . This left people living literally among the ruins of what had been. That "used-to-be" which haunted the European psyche for centuries had been sustained by massive seaborne trade centered, of course, on the Mediterranean . With the revival of civilization (with communications networks , credit systems, shipments of goods and the flow of arts and ideas that is essential to the life of cities, and which is both stimulated and nourished by cities), the great Italian city states began to venture far afield . Genoa and her rival Venice began sea transport to the British Isles in the 1200s. By the 1400s the rival galleys of Venice had begun to make the open-sea run direct from Finisterre in Spain to Southampton in England-a passage of about 700 miles across some of the world's roughest waters. But by then the conventional light, fast Mediterranean "galley" had undergone a sea change. And indeed, by then, the whole Atlantic scene had entered a period of bewilderingly fast change. The Vikings had swooped across the northern seas to Greenland and Newfoundland . They had set up a seaside duchy in Normandy that leapt across the channel to conquer England 6
in 1066. It has long been said that they did not leave much behind-but they founded the cities of Dublin in Ireland and Kiev in Russia (a country which took its name from them) and many more between . The Moors and been masters for over half a millenium of the Levant and the African shore of the Mediterranean, bringing a rich culture into sometimes violent-(but for long periods peaceful)-<:ontact with Western Europe. The Italian city states, Venice and Genoa in the van, and the eastern Iberian state of Catalonia led in trade and conflict with the Moorish presence. Then a revived Portugal, aided by the knight errantry of emerging Europe , drove the Moors from theirs territory, defended it from Spanish takeover with the aid of England's John of Gaunt, and crossed over the straits to take Ceuta in Africa in 1415-an enterprise on which John of Gaunt' s daughter, who became Queen of Portugal , lived to pronounce her dying blessing . (This English connection, born in the Crusades hundreds of years earlier, survived as " the Old Alliance" which played a vital role in World War II, over 500 years later.) Other things were happening along the European shore. Bretons and Basques-people who had to make their living from the sea- fished the banks of Labrador before the century was out. And in 1492, only months after the last Moorish kingdom was driven from Iberia, a newly united Spain sponsored Christopher Columbus's first voyage to the west to discover for Europe what everyone soon called the New World of the Americas. A critical step toward this culminating venture away from any known land into the ocean sea was the foundation of a center of seafaring studies by Prince Henry the Navigator at Sagres on Cape St. Vincent. His captains did not get far geographically, pushing down the hostile coast of Africa in his lifetime (he died in 1450, a generation before Bartolomeo Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, or Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in India in 1498)-but the force that would break through was set in motion . What makes people set out toward great goals in the face of difficulty and uncertain reward? We do not really know. But at Sagres we can see the results of many cultures, and varied experience coming together in the meeting of Arabian mathematics and world picture and ship design , Genoese and Venetian deepwater experience, entrepreneurship and a quality SEA HISTORY , SUMMER 1986