we might call " push," German Hanseatic determination and experience in long voyages (albeit in not very nimble or seakindly ships), and perhaps a dash of the elan and superb shiphandling skills of the Vikings . All that , and of the Renaissance feeling that people were born to exceed recognized limits, which breathes fire and color through the majestic cantos of Camoens ' epic poem The Lusiads-so named for the Lusitanians who went back in Portugal to the time of Odysseus. The silver Spain wrestled out of coerced peoples in the New World did not buy them what they expected. It was used to pay the armies that just failed to master all Europe and that failed to conquer England in the Armada Campaign of 1588 (as the Enterprise of England) in the century after Columbus's epochal first voyage . Some believe (I among them) that that flow of ready cash chilled Spanish initiative in a crucial era of new initiatives in European policy-it froze the grandees in a "successful ," increasingly sterile world outlook and way of going at things , while the world around them changed . The opening of the New World and of complimentary, challenging civilizations on the opposite shores of the Atlanticfive times as much English is spoken in the New World as the Old , and five times as much Spanish , and thirteen times as much Portuguese-this was the lasting result of the voyages. The lust for wealth-and for slaves, land , women-is a powerful presence in the expansion of the West by sea. The very imposition of the Christian religion was surely in large part a drive for power and domination . Geoffrey Scammell drives these things home in hi s recent (and excellent) survey, The World Encompassed. But these things were not all that was present , and do not explain all that happened.
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The ships of the early voyages have a dreamlike quality to us now-we can well understand the awe of the native American Indians who came to see Drake's ships and "stood as men ravished in their minds." They are such little ships, to our eyes, and indeed they would have seemed so to a merchant importing the grain which fed Ancient Rome , or to the owner of a Genoese carrack of the day , or a Venetian Flanders galley , or a Hansa hulk making her way round from the Baltic-such ships ranged up to 2,000 tons burthen . Columbus's Santa Maria was 100 tons, and her consorts smaller than that. But they had the racehorse lightness of hull of Moori sh tradition in them , with an Atlantic robustness of build and with the tough Northern squaresail , which was soon wisely split into two and , by 1600, three sails per mast. The men who sailed them kept trying for improvements. (Columbus changed Nina's rig from lateen to square en route-she became his favorite ship.) Their efforts formed a ship fit to " keep the sea" in the old and honorable phrase.
The best Europe had achieved came together to make these voyages. The Italian city states , about to be eclipsed at sea came into it: Columbus was Genoese. John Cabot, who followed him by a few years with his northern voyages from England , was Venetian . It is as if those two rival cities had to be in it, contentious parents of a new age in seafaring. It was perhaps a more conscious act than we usually think . Diaz was right in there telling da Gama how to build ships to reach the Indies he 'd failed to reach-and da Gama li stened. We could listen to the voice of a great English voyager, hailing us to tell us how he sailed round the world with ship and crew in good heart: " I will have the gentleman to haul and draw with the mariner, and mariner with the gentleman .'' That was Sir Frances Drake , on the eve of rounding Cape Hom to enter the Pacific. And then, there 's John Donne: " God taught us to make ships, not to transport ourselves, but to transport Him ." Certainly they haunt our imaginations, the ships of those early voyagers. Perhaps we come back to them to find out-if we can-what they really did carry .
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I came by Sagres one April evening in a sailing vessel bound north for England. It was with real awe that I watched the headland come up with the Atlantic stretching westward beyond it and south forever it seemed, and east behind us into gathering dusk. The old ocean was as still as it ever is and in that hush you could hear it booming , booming against the steep rock cliffs of Cape St. Vincent. It 's arbitrary, always, to choose any point and say " This is the beginning"-but here was, sure! y, a place where things of wonder and great meaning happened in the development of the Atlantic World , with high human resolve tempering an amalgam of cultures. There seems to me still something godlike in that dedication and gathering of human purpose , and that is the li ving spark contained in John Donne 's great thought. The forced conversion of distant peoples to the Christian faith was not the true product of the voyaging launched at Sagres. It was the venturing forth, and the beating out of new purposes in the course of the oceanic experience , that changed us all, and shaped a vital chapter in the story mankind is writing across the face of its planet. Do read: The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, AD 500-1600 (Oxford University Press, New York , NY , 1971); The European Discovery ofAmerica: The Southern Voyages , AD 1492-1616 (OUP, 1974) , by S.E. Morison, or selections from both in The Great Explorers: The European Discovery of America (OUP , 1978). And also The World Encompassed: The First European Maritime Empires, c. 8001650, by G.V. Scammell (U niversity of California Press, Ber- ¡ keley and Los Angeles, 1981 ). These works include excellent bibliographies to guide you in exploring the Atlantic world.
Below, Iberian Caravels, 1500-1545: emergence of the ocean chariot that opened the Atlantic world. Drawings by Bjorn Landstrom from The World Encompassed by Geoffrey Scammell.