How the World Became Known By Joseph Jacobs With Twenty-four Maps, &c....

In attempting to get what is little less than a history of the world, from a special point of view, into a couple of hundred duodecimo pages, I have had to make three bites at my very big cherry. In the Appendix I have given in chronological order, and for the first time on such a scale in English, the chief voyages and explorations by which our knowledge of the world has been increased, and the chief works in which that knowledge has been recorded. In the body of the work I have then attempted

How was the world discovered? That is to say, how did a certain set of men who lived round the Mediterranean Sea, and had acquired the art of recording what each generation had learned, become successively aware of the other parts of the globe? Every part of the earth, so far as we know, has been inhabited by man during the five or six thousand years in which Europeans have been storing up their knowledge, and all that time the inhabitants of each part, of course, were acquainted with that parti

THE WORLD AS KNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS Before telling how the ancients got to know that part of the world with which they finally became acquainted when the Roman Empire was at its greatest extent, it is as well to get some idea of the successive stages of their knowledge, leaving for the next chapter the story of how that knowledge was obtained. As in most branches of organised knowledge, it is to the Greeks that we owe our acquaintance with ancient views of this subject. In the early stages they p

THE SPREAD OF CONQUEST IN THE ANCIENT WORLD In a companion volume of this series, "The Story of Extinct Civilisations in the East," will be found an account of the rise and development of the various nations who held sway over the west of Asia at the dawn of history. Modern discoveries of remarkable interest have enabled us to learn the condition of men in Asia Minor as early as 4000 B.C. All these early civilisations existed on the banks of great rivers, which rendered the land fertile through

GEOGRAPHY IN THE DARK AGES We have seen how, by a slow process of conquest and expansion, the ancient world got to know a large part of the Eastern Hemisphere, and how this knowledge was summed up in the great work of Claudius Ptolemy. We have now to learn how much of this knowledge was lost or perverted—how geography, for a time, lost the character of a science, and became once more the subject of mythical fancies similar to those which we found in its earliest stages. Instead of knowledge whic

MEDIÆVAL TRAVELS In the Middle Ages—that is, in the thousand years between the irruption of the barbarians into the Roman Empire in the fifth century and the discovery of the New World in the fifteenth—the chief stages of history which affect the extension of men's knowledge of the world were: the voyages of the Vikings in the eighth and ninth centuries, to which we have already referred; the Crusades, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and the growth of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth

ROADS AND COMMERCE We have now conducted the course of our inquiries through ancient times and the Middle Ages up to the very eve of the great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and we have roughly indicated what men had learned about the earth during that long period, and, how they learned it. But it still remains to consider by what means they arrived at their knowledge, and why they sought for it. To some extent we may have answered the latter question when dealing with the

TO THE INDIES EASTWARD—PRINCE HENRY AND VASCO DA GAMA Up to the fifteenth century the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula were chiefly occupied in slowly moving back the tide of Mohammedan conquest, which had spread nearly throughout the country from 711 onwards. The last sigh of the Moor in Spain was to be uttered in 1492—an epoch-making year, both in history and in geography. But Portugal, the western side of the peninsula, had got rid of her Moors at a much earlier date—more that 200 years b

TO THE INDIES WESTWARD—THE SPANISH ROUTE—COLUMBUS AND MAGELLAN While the Portuguese had, with slow persistency, devoted nearly a century to carrying out Prince Henry's idea of reaching the Indies by the eastward route, a bold yet simple idea had seized upon a Genoese sailor, which was intended to achieve the same purpose by sailing westward. The ancients, as we have seen, had recognised the rotundity of the earth, and Eratosthenes had even recognised the possibility of reaching India by sailing

TO THE INDIES NORTHWARD—ENGLISH, FRENCH, DUTCH, AND RUSSIAN ROUTES The discovery of the New World had the most important consequences on the relative importance of the different nations of Europe. Hitherto the chief centres for over two thousand years had been round the shores of the Mediterranean, and, as we have seen, Venice, by her central position and extensive trade to the East, had become a world-centre during the latter Middle Ages. But after Columbus, and still more after Magelhaens, the

THE PARTITION OF AMERICA We have hitherto been dealing with the discoveries made by Spanish and Portuguese along the coast of the New World, but early in the sixteenth century they began to put foot on terra firma and explore the interior. As early as 1513 Vasco Nunez de Balboa ascended the highest peak in the range running from the Isthmus of Panama, and saw for the first time by European eyes the great ocean afterwards to be named by Magellan the Pacific. He there heard that the country to the

AUSTRALIA AND THE SOUTH SEAS—TASMAN AND COOK If one looks at the west coast of Australia one is struck by the large number of Dutch names which are jotted down the coast. There is Hoog Island, Diemen's Bay, Houtman's Abrolhos, De Wit land, and the Archipelago of Nuyts, besides Dirk Hartog's Island and Cape Leeuwin. To the extreme north we find the Gulf of Carpentaria, and to the extreme south the island which used to be called Van Diemen's Land. It is not altogether to be wondered at that almost

EXPLORATION AND PARTITION OF AFRICA: PARK—LIVINGSTONE—STANLEY We have seen how the Portuguese had slowly coasted along the shore of Africa during the fifteeenth century in search of a way to the Indies. By the end of the century mariners portulanos gave a rude yet effective account of the littoral of Africa, both on the west and the eastern side. Not alone did they explore the coast, but they settled upon it. At Amina on the Guinea coast, at Loando near the Congo, and at Benguela on the western

THE POLES—FRANKLIN—ROSS—NORDENSKIOLD—NANSEN Almost the whole of the explorations which we have hitherto described or referred to had for their motive some practical purpose, whether to reach the Spice Islands or to hunt big game. Even the excursions of Davis, Frobisher, Hudson, and Baffin in pursuit of the north-west passage, and of Barentz and Chancellor in search of the north-east passage, were really in pursuit of mercantile ends. It is only with James Cook that the era of purely scientific e

EUROPE. Great Britain. —B.C. 450. Himilco. Circa 333. Pytheas. 60-54. Cæsar. France. —B.C. circa 600. Marseilles founded. 57. Cæsar. Russia. —A.D. 1554. Richard Chancellor. Baltic. —A.D. 890. Wulfstan and Othere. Iceland. —A.D. 861. Naddod. ASIA. India. —B.C. 332. Alexander. 330. Nearchus. Circa 300. Megasthenes. A.D. 400-14. Fa-hien. 518-21. Hoei-Sing and Sung-Yun. 540. Cosmas Indicopleustes. 629-46. Hiouen-Tshang. 671-95. I-tsing. 1159-73. Benjamin of Tudela. 1304-78. Ibn Batuta. 1327-72. Mand