OCEANUS 7 



So used are we in our day to think of the orderly and system- 

 atic progress of learning and science as natural that we find it 

 hard to believe that the ruling authority of the Mediterranean 

 world, the early Christian church, for almost a thousand 

 years, helped to suppress scientific inquiry. The dark ages for 

 political Rome were ushered in at about the third century 

 after Christ by the barbarian invasions from beyond the Alps, 

 but the dark age for free intellectual inquiry in Europe was 

 prolonged until the Renaissance broke the spell of repression 

 in the fourteenth century. Map-making in particular suffered 

 because the value of maps as keys to commercial domination 

 was so keenly felt that the utmost secrecy surrounded their 

 making and their use. Even as enlightened a ruler as the 

 Emperor Augustus kept all his charts in secret vaults within 

 his palace. Carthaginian and later Spanish sea captains were 

 sworn to destroy or sink all their charts if threatened by cap- 

 ture. What we might call bootleg map-making by unofficial 

 persons was likely to lead to prison or the torture chamber. 



But no amount of restriction or penalty could keep the bold 

 and curious minds of men from probing the mystery of the 

 Atlantic. Merchants and explorers kept pushing back the dark 

 curtain of the oceanic horizon. And the fraternity of pilots and 

 navigators and map-makers by the fourteenth century circu- 

 lated up and down the coastal ports of Europe and Iceland, to 

 Bristol, to Portugal and France, and even to the harbors of 

 northwest Africa. Before all the others, however, the Norse 

 were the first to break the long inactivity of the dark ages that 

 held the Mediterranean explorers in leash. By the year 1000 

 the Norse had discovered the American continent at Labra- 

 dor, and a few years later had pushed succeeding voyages as 

 far south along the North American coast as Cape Cod. The 

 greatest hazard Columbus had was not the physical unknown 

 beyond the sunset but the medieval spiritual darkness of man's 

 superstitious mind. 



