1) The first grand discovery was time, the landscape of experience
The first grand discovery was time, the landscape of experience. Only by marking off months, weeks, and years, days and hours, minutes and seconds, would mankind be liberated from the cyclical monotony of nature. The flow of shadows, sand, water, and time itself, translated into the clock’s staccato, because a useful measure of man’s movements across the planet. The discoveries of time and space would become one continuous dimension. Communities of time would bring the first communities of knowledge, ways to share discovery, a common frontier on the unknown.
2) Artificial light tempts us to forget the meaning of night
No change in daily experience is more emptying than the loss of the sense of contrast between day and night, light and dark. Our century of artificial light tempts us to forget the meaning of night. Life in a modern city is always a time of mixed light and darkness. But for most of the human centuries night was a synonym for the darkness that brought all the menace of the unknown. ‘Never greet a stranger in the night,’ warned the Talmud (c. 200 B.C.), ‘for he may be a demon.’ ‘I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day,’ announced Jesus (John 9:4-5), ‘the night cometh, when no man can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’ Few subjects have been more enticing to the literary imagination. ‘In the dead vest and middle of the night’ was when Shakespeare and other dramatists placed their crimes. The first step in making night more like day was taken long before people became accustomed to artificial lighting. It came when man, playing with time, began measuring it off into shorter slices.
3) Few revolutions in human experience exceed that of mechanical time
There are few greater revolutions in human experience than this movement from the seasonal or the ‘temporary’ hour to the equal hour. Here was man’s declaration of independence from the sun, new proof of his mastery over himself and his surroundings. Only later would it be revealed that he has accomplished this mastery by putting himself under the dominion of a machine with imperious demands all its own.
4) Ptolemy suggested the vastness of lands still to be discovered
Ptolemy rejected the Homeric image of a known world surrounded by uninhabitable Ocean. Instead he suggested the vastness of lands still unknown and still to be discovered, and so opened minds for knowledge. It was far more difficult to imagine the unknown than to chart the outlines of what people imagined that they knew. Not only for Columbus, but for the Arabs and others who had put their faith in classical learning, Ptolemy remained the source, the standard, and the sovereign of world geography. If, in the millennium after Ptolemy, mariners and their royal sponsors had freely and adventurously carried on where Ptolemy had left off, the history of both the Old World and the New World might have been different.
5) Pilgrims might spend a lifetime wandering from one place to another
Within a century after the death of Jesus a few intrepid believers were journeying to Jerusalem for penance, for thanksgiving, or simply to walk the earth where their Savior had walked. By the early fifth century there were two hundred monasteries and pilgrim hospices near Jerusalem. Saint Augustine and other Church Fathers warned that the Christian tourist to the Holy Land might be distracted from his journey to the Heavenly City. Still the stream of pilgrims grew, aided by countless handy guides and a chain of hospitable lodgings all along the way. The pilgrim, blessed by his priest before setting out, carrying staff and mussel shell, wearing his board flat-crowned hat and bearing the badge of his destination, became a picturesque figure in the medieval panorama. The Latin peregrinatio came to mean any wandering, and peregrinus for pilgrim, became a synonym for stranger. But the pilgrim, properly speaking, was someone, whatever his regular occupation, on the way to a sacred destination and the ‘palmer’, so called from the palm branches brought back from Rome, was a religious vagrant who might spend his whole life wandering from one place to another.
6) On the land-faring pioneers of Europe’s first Age of Discovery
The land-faring pioneers of Europe’s first Age of Discovery who went eastward in the mid-thirteenth century needed resources quite different from those of the later, the seafaring, age. They could live off the land, finding food and finding drink along the way. While they did not need to be fund-raisers or master organizers, they had to be adaptable and affable. Overland pioneers could extend their journey as long as necessary, by another month, another year, even another decade. Merchants or missionaries could practice their vocation along the way, learning as they went. The perils of the land were as varied as the landscape, and helped make the journey interesting and suspenseful in surprising way. Were robbers lurking in this inn? Could you digest the local food? Should you wear your own or a native costume? Would you be allowed entry in this city gate? Could you crash the barriers of an unknown language to explain your wants and show that your mission was harmless? Overland travel was not an adventurous communal leap, but a laborious, individual trek. From that age came our English word ‘travel’ — originally the same as ‘travail’, meaning labor, especially that of a painful of oppressive nature — an accurate description of what it meant to go long distances overland. A few pioneers tool up this travail and opened the way from Europe to Cathay.
7) On the way Chinese travelers promoted their nation as the center of civilization
The voyages became an institution in themselves, designed to display the splendor and power of the new Ming dynasty. The Chinese would not establish their own permanent bases within the tributary states, but instead hoped to make ‘the whole world’ into voluntary admirers of the one and only center of civilization. With this in mind, the Chinese navy dared not loot the states that it visited. Cheng Ho would not seek slaves or gold or silver or spices. Nothing would suggest that the Chinese needed what other nations had. While peoples of Asia would be struck by the Portuguese power to seize, the Chinese would impress by their power to give. They would unwittingly dramatize the Christian axiom that it was nobler to give than to receive. Instead of shoddy trinkets and childish gewgaws, they offered treasures of the finest craftsmanship. European expeditions to Asia revealed how desperately Europeans wanted the peculiar products of the East, but the prodigal gestures of Chinese expeditions would show how content the Chinese were with what they already had. This ‘tribute’ system, which then dominated Chinese relations with other Asian states, was bafflingly different from any to which the Western mind has become accustomed. A state bringing tribute to China was not submitting to a conqueror. Rather, it was acknowledging that China, by definition the only true civilized state, was beyond the need for assistance.
8) On the shortcomings of the Columbus expedition
Columbus’ first voyage had many features of a Caribbean cruise, for he mainly enjoyed the sights and sounds and curiosities which he could witness from the coast, with only occasional short excursions inland. He had speedily coursed through the Bahamas, then skirted the northern coasts of eastern Cuba and of Hispaniola. Just three months after he first sighted the land of ‘the Indies’, the island of San Salvador, his caravels set sail from Samana Bay on the eastern end of the island of Hispaniola to return home.
9) For explorers, the ability to come home again was essential
The ability to come home again was essential if a people were to enrich, embellish, and enlighten themselves from far-off places. In a later age this would be called feedback. It was crucial to the discoverer, and helps explain why going to sea, why the opening of oceans, would mark a grand epoch for humankind. In one after another human enterprise, the act without the feedback was of little consequence. The capacity to enjoy and profit from feedback was a prime human power. Seafaring ventures, and even their one-way success, were themselves of small consequence and left little record in history. Getting there was not enough. The inter-nourishment of the peoples of the earth required the ability to get back, to return to the voyaging source and transform the stay-at-homes by the commodities and the knowledge that the voyagers had found over there. Fourth-century coins made in Carthage have been found in the Azores, and ancient Roman seem to have been left in Venezuela by vagrant wind-driven vessels. But these acts and accidents that produced no feedback spoke only to the wind.
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