202 THE OCEAN RIVER 



Fifteenth-century Europe in many ways seemed to be at a 

 dead end. Men bemoaned the slack and hopeless times. The 

 great crusading spirit was at an ebb. Turkey, nearby, and China 

 in the Far East, were the two most powerful nations in the 

 world. China had no contact with the West because of the 

 wall of Moslem hostility across the eastern Mediterranean. 

 But there is no static situation in time. This very frustration 

 created a pressure that was to open a new world in the west 

 and renew around the encircling waters of the Ocean River a 

 fresh area of civilizing energy. The Portuguese already were 

 pushing farther and farther down the coasts of Africa, looking 

 for a way to get around the Turkish blockade to the treasure 

 of eastern spices. A generation before Columbus the Italian 

 and Portuguese navigators under the aegis of Prince Henry 

 pushed beyond the equator into the South Atlantic — but 

 the way was long. Then, suddenly, with the first voyage of 

 Columbus, the dam broke; and a vast new world opened for 

 the frustrated hopes and pent-up energies of western European 

 nations. Here the Old World could renew its youth in the 

 arms of the west, and find easy ways to China and Japan and 

 the fabulous Indies. In Spain, the Church and the State com- 

 bined to exploit the Caribbean world. Today, nothing short of 

 easy communication with a neighboring habitable planet 

 could equal this sense of a new lease on life that slowly 

 gained momentum in European minds at the opening of the 

 sixteenth century. 



Columbus, a Genoese navigator who had traveled from Ice- 

 land to the Canaries learning his trade, believed that Japan — 

 or ''Cipangu," as he spelled it — and China could be reached 

 by sailing straight west across the unknown waters of the 

 Atlantic. Most intelligent men of his time held that the world 

 was round; that was not the hazard. The pinch was that no 

 one had put it to the trial; no one was quite sure whether the 

 Sea of Darkness was myth or fact. No one was quite sure that 



