86 THE OCEAN RIVER 



inquiry into the nature of the world. St. Augustine built a 

 kingdom in his head, and men like Solinus collected the fables 

 and tall stories of all time to make a picture for men to marvel 

 at. Sir Charles Beazley in the Dawn of Modern Geography 

 speaks of early medieval learning as divided into three cate- 

 gories: the ''Fabulists/' or collectors of narratives and legends; 

 the ''Statisticians/' who compiled long categories of what 

 were then considered facts; and finally the "Cosmographers/' 

 who by chart and map and description tried to draw some 

 feasible picture of the world. All these searchers were pretty 

 wide of the mark, because there was little to encourage any 

 scientific curiosity that might lead men's minds from The 

 Holy City of St. Augustine. Not until the tenth century, in 

 fact, was there much of any free geographical enterprise in the 

 west. 



Then came what is called the second period of medieval 

 times, opening with the vigorous burst of voyaging by the 

 Norsemen in the North Atlantic, followed by the sweep of the 

 Crusades in the eleventh and twelfth centuries which stimu- 

 lated the enterprise of the great commercial city-states of 

 Genoa and Venice. The final period, up to the great voyages 

 of Columbus, runs for about two hundred years, largely now 

 under the aegis of the first Atlantic maritime power, Portugal. 



As we have pointed out, with the advent of Christianity 

 the sciences were forced into obscurity. Men's minds were 

 obsessed with a new kind of interior world, and taken away 

 from the actual unknown horizons beyond the waters. In 

 addition the Romans built roads in preference to ships. They 

 centralized authority on the political side, and deplored eccen- 

 tricity and individual initiative; just as the church, as it grew 

 in power, put a quietus to any but the permitted authoritarian 

 channels of thought. This block to intellectual freedom and 

 fresh discovery, increasing under the barbarian invasions, per- 

 sisted until the eleventh century, when the great commercial 



