Water_ The Epic Struggle For Wealth, Power, And Civilization Part 8

The most ambitious monastic pioneers of waterwheel technology were the rapidly expanding Cistercians, founded in the late eleventh century, whose monasteries were consciously built near rivers to exploit its waterpower and which often housed large factories. Few individuals in history put waterpower to better use than the celebrated mystic Cistercian leader St. Bernard at his twelfth-century Clairvaux Abbey, in a valley in northeastern France. Water was drawn to the abbey from a two-mile-long millrace fed by the river Aube. Paraphrasing the description of a contemporary observer, the water first rushed to the corn mill where the wheels turned millstones to grind the grain and shake large sieves to separate the bran and the flour. In the next building, the water filled the boiler used for brewing and then drove the heavy hammers that beat the fulling cloth. After the tannery it was routed into many smaller courses, where it was employed in sawing wood, crus.h.i.+ng olives, and providing running water for cooking, was.h.i.+ng, bathing, and ultimately carrying away all refuse. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Cistercians pioneered the breakthrough application of water-power to iron foundries in England, France, Denmark, and Italy and were among Europe's leading iron producers for several centuries.

As waterwheel know-how migrated from the monasteries to Europe's growing commercial towns, it was employed for market-driven industrial applications. Waterpower propelled mechanized sawmills, bore wood and metals, and helped pound beer mash. In mining it was employed to crush metals, power shaft ventilation machines, and raise winches that removed buckets of mine water and excavated ores to the surface.

But it was in the seminal industries of papermaking, textiles, and iron forging that waterwheel-power technology stood out as having the most dramatic impact on Europe's economic rise. Paper mills with giant, water-powered beaters that pounded pulp migrated from Baghdad to Damascus by 1000 and to Muslim Spain by 1151. Christian Europe's first water-powered paper mill was opened in 1276 in Fabriano, Italy, where the watermark was shortly thereafter pioneered. Since papermaking required vast amounts of clean water as an input in the production process, most paper mills were located upstream of the nearby towns that might pollute it. Ma.s.s production reduced the cost of paper, stimulating the nascent commercial bookmaking industry that evolved from the monasteries in the twelfth century and the thriving centers of Islamic civilization. This paved the way for the landmark fifteenth-century invention of the printing press, which in turn helped democratize European society and reinforce the foundations of Western humanism and science through the dissemination of books and knowledge to a wider public-the original information revolution.

Clothing textiles also had a special place in European history. Textiles were one of the earliest major industries to go international, linking raw material suppliers and intermediary and finished goods producers in a web of market activity that stretched from England to northern and Mediterranean Europe. Waterwheel mechanization powered the beaters used by cloth fullers and, when the Chinese silk loom reached the West in the thirteenth century, to drive silk-spinning machines. By the fourteenth century, one silk mill in Lucca, Italy, employed an undershot waterwheel to drive 480 spindles. Eventually, the water-powered spinning of cotton and other low-priced textiles in eighteenth-century England accompanied world history's first fully mechanized factories, the earliest signature hallmark of the Industrial Revolution.

The waterwheel played a decisive role in medieval Europe's catalytic discovery of the blast furnace to smelt iron. Religious demand in the twelfth century for huge iron church bells may have provided the early impetus for the breakthrough. In the ensuing centuries, Europe's iron foundries relocated from wood-abundant forests to riversides and fast-running stream banks to tap the continent's waterpower. Waterwheels gradually supplanted the force of the smithie's arm in pounding the iron by delivering uniform strokes of giant, 1,000- to 3,500-pound trip hammers and lighter ones of 150 pounds that tapped iron into shapes with 200 strokes per minute. By the late fourteenth century, waterwheels were widely used to blast powerful drafts of air through pairs of enormous leather bellows, several feet in diameter, to heat furnaces that could run nonstop for weeks on end at up to 1,500 degrees centigrade. Iron ore heated by these stronger blasts was liquefied, enabling for the first time in Europe the casting of abundant volumes of molten iron. In short order, the water-powered blast furnace transformed iron making from a traditional, small-batch handicraft into one of Europe's earliest ma.s.s production industries. By 1500, iron production in Europe reached 60,000 tons. Soaring demand for iron nails, one of history's humblest but most useful inventions, inspired a new water-powered rolling mill in which two iron cylinders flattened iron into bars that were then mechanically cut into nails by rotary disks. At the forges, mechanical trip-hammers attached to a wooden shaft pounded large volumes of malleable fired iron into various shapes that became farm and industrial tools. Iron's marriage with the contemporaneous spread of gunpowder to fabricate firearms and cannonry, meanwhile, armed Europe's vessels and soldiers with the advanced weaponry it would use so devastatingly to subdue societies around the world.

Although comparatively backward in most other technologies and economic development, Europe by about 1150 was applying waterwheel-transmitted power to early industries on parity with the advanced civilizations of China and Islam. One of history's puzzling questions was why only in Europe this budding mechanical prowess continued to develop into the direct precursor of the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. Islam's failure can be explained partly by the fact that its dearth of small, year-round streams imposed upon it too great a deficiency of waterpower and internal waterway transport, and hitched its historical trajectory intractably to the plodding, overland trade network of the camel. One of China's princ.i.p.al hindrances was its surfeit of cheap labor, which rendered mechanical innovation less urgent, and even potentially threatening to the established social and political order as well if it reduced employment. The Grand Ca.n.a.l transportation network's enabling of the state to a.s.sert stronger internal command over the economy also generally blunted the innovating impetus of private market forces. Whatever the causes, the net effect was that China's vaunted technical and scientific know-how was never rigorously applied to industrial production.

Europe's natural water resources, by contrast, helped create conditions more favorable to the development of market-driven industries and pluralistic, liberal democratic states. Rain-fed, plow agriculture and myriad navigable, and energy-providing small rivers favored the rise of multiple, autonomous, decentralized regions. The natural compet.i.tion among neighboring states, whetted by sea-trading merchants' freedom to choose among ports offering the most advantageous terms, strengthened the development of private property and individual political rights. In pondering the question of why parliamentary democracy and capitalism arose first in Europe, the late anthropologist Marvin Harris advanced an inverse hydraulic theory. In northern Europe, he noted, where there is no Nile or Indus or Yellow River and where winter snows and spring rains provide sufficient moisture for field crops and pastures, population remained more dispersed than in hydraulic regions...Unlike hydraulic despots, Europe's medieval kings could not furnish or withhold water from the fields. The rains fell regardless of what the king in his castle decreed, and there was nothing in the productive process to necessitate the organization of vast armies of workers...And so the feudal aristocracy was able to resist all attempts to establish genuinely national systems of government.

Without control over water resources, no authoritarian, centralized state could rule firmly over a great area, leaving a wider berth for independent, cooperative manorial villages and compet.i.tive market-centric towns to shape the political economic norms of society. In Roman times slavery had r.e.t.a.r.ded the incentive for labor saving innovation; by the Middle Ages slavery had all but disappeared and cheap labor was scarce. The profit-seeking logic of market forces applied Europe's waterpower potential to mechanized technologies to overcome labor scarcity. Further accelerated by the compet.i.tion between states, it drove European commerce and industry toward innovations that, in the end, could not be restrained by centralized command. The way was paved for developments that would eventually help drive Europe's economic rise.

First, however, the commercial and mechanical revolutions between 950 and 1350 spurred market-driven exchanges between northern and Mediterranean Europe that gradually linked the two regions into an integrated economic area. Initially, the central axis of trade between north and south was overland and concentrated on a series of seasonal fairs, which attracted merchants from all over Europe, who negotiated trade contracts based on sample goods displayed at the fair. From the late twelfth to early fourteenth centuries, the largest were six fairs held in rotation nearly year round in the Champagne region of northeastern France, astride the main roads and waterways running from the Mediterranean Sea to the North Sea, and from the Baltic to the English Channel. Yet the Champagne fairs rapidly declined in the early thirteenth century as soon as a much cheaper, faster and more reliable alternative became available-the opening of a direct Atlantic coast sea route between the Mediterranean and the north. It was this private commerce-driven, Atlantic seacoast trade route that bonded Europe's two disparate environmental zones together into a dynamic, unified marketplace that ignited Europe's rapid takeoff and the ascension of Western civilization.

The first of what would become the famous Flanders Fleet set sail from Genoa to Bruges in 1297. By 1315 regular convoys were traveling to the North Sea from Venice and Genoa. For 235 years to 1532, the Flanders Fleet sailed between Italy and the Low Countries, twin hubs of the European economy until the eighteenth century when the center moved decisively to England. In its cargo holds it transported bulky commodities of wool, raw materials, and salted herring, as well as some luxuries and spices from the Orient.

One key event in the rise of the Atlantic coast trade was the breaking of the Muslim grip over the Strait of Gibraltar. Throughout history, control of the eight-mile-wide strait had been a source of power and wealth. For centuries from antiquity, the strait known to the Romans as the Pillars of Hercules had been firmly controlled by the long-vanished city-state of mysterious origin, Tartessus. Located outside the Pillars at the mouth of Spain's Guadalquivir River, Tartessus flourished as an emporium for locally mined silver and lead and precious tin for making bronze that was imported from as far away as Brittany and Cornwall. Despite founding a trading colony close by to the east at Gades, modern Cadiz, the Phoenicians could not challenge Tartessus' Atlantic monopoly. Finally, around 500 BC, soon after Tartessus disappeared from history, the Phoenicians of rising Carthage sent an expedition under a captain named Himlico into the North Atlantic along the old Tartessian trade routes. Thereafter, for over two centuries, Carthage was master of the strait and the rich trade monopoly it conferred. With Carthage's defeat in the Punic Wars, Rome took control of the Pillars. It helped secure Rome's empire through sea power control of the mouths of the major western and northwestern European rivers and supported Emperor Augustus' sending of fleets as far as the coasts of the North Sea in his unsuccessful effort to extend Rome's frontiers from the Rhine to the Elbe. The next great civilization to profit from the long-held monopoly over the Strait of Gibraltar was Islam through its control of the land on both sides in Spain and Morocco.

The European breakthrough at the strategic strait was accomplished in 1291, when Benedetto Zaccaria of Genoa destroyed the Moroccan fleet that defended it. Zaccaria was a colorful figure, whose exploits embodied the animating spirit of Europe's early rise. Marco Polo of Genoa's archrival Venice was his contemporary; indeed, Polo was imprisoned in Genoa dictating his tales of the Silk Roads and the Orient while Zaccaria was living outsized adventures influential in European history. Over the course of Zaccaria's eclectic career-which included being a pirate in the Aegean, mercenary naval commander for several states, diplomat, crusader in Syria, ruler over a Greek island, governor of a Spanish seaport, and Europe's most powerful alum baron-his many s.h.i.+ps put in at almost every important seaport from Flanders to the Crimea in the Black Sea. Zaccaria was a member of the upper merchant cla.s.s of the Genoese republic, which had arisen as a great Mediterranean power from the late eleventh century after it and other city-states from Italy's western coast, including Pisa and Amalfi, had united to drive out piratical Muslim sea raiders from their waters.

As a youthful trader in the international wool, cloth, and color dye business, Zaccaria in 1274 had seized the opportunity to exchange naval a.s.sistance to the Byzantine Empire for the right to develop a huge, virgin, extremely high-grade deposit of alunite he had surveyed in Asia Minor. When processed, alunite provided the basis for alum. Alum was widely used in medieval times, most importantly as a color fastener in dyeing textiles and as a hardener in tanning. Because colors fastened best with the highest-grade alums, alum quality was a key determinant of the order of economic supremacy among the competing dye centers of Italy, Flanders, and England. Because alum's great bulkiness made it expensive to transport overland, comparative advantage accrued to states on the sea routes of the Mediterranean, where the era's best deposits were located. One other Asia Minor quarry had alunite deposits of superior grade to Zaccaria's; through political maneuvering, Zaccaria was able to get its exportation rights temporarily blocked-until he himself succeeded in securing an owners.h.i.+p interest in it. Zaccaria's huge alum refining operation featured giant processing vats that were protected on land by a fortress and at sea by cruising s.h.i.+ps. Armed soldiers helped ensure the safe transport of the alum cargo s.h.i.+ps once the convoys put out to sea for the textile markets. As he sought the best market price, Zaccaria was inevitably drawn northward. One of his s.h.i.+ps got through Gibraltar and reached England as early as 1278. Ultimately, the lure of lucre drew him toward his showdown victory over the Islamic Moroccan fleet at Gibraltar in 1291 that opened the Atlantic coast to unimpeded European s.h.i.+pping. A naval warrior and would-be crusader to the last, Zaccaria died in 1307 or 1308, bequeathing his heirs one of medieval Europe's earliest and largest private commodity empires.

Despite the Genoese's pioneering, it was archrival Venice that ultimately profited most from the Flanders-Mediterranean sea trade. From the redoubt of its island-flecked lagoon on the upper Adriatic Sea, the Venetian republic had been one of the earliest Italian city-states to lead the revival of Mediterranean Europe from the tenth century. From its earliest roots, Venice was wedded to the sea; indeed, a great festival symbolically commemorating this marriage was consummated anew each year with the tossing of a ring into the waters. From the fifth century, when Roman citizens from the countryside fled the invading barbarians for the protection of its mucky marshes and islands, Venice's fate had hinged on its response to one of urban society's most water challenged environments. With no agriculture and sinking soils, its flat, muddy, and often waterlogged islands had to be constantly drained, built up with soil dredged from its lagoon beds, and protected from the sea tides by laboriously constructed artificial barriers. Malaria and the diseases of miasmic swamps abounded. Indeed, when Dante Alighieri's special emba.s.sy in 1321 regarding navigation rights on the Po River was unfavorably received by Venetian leaders, the great author of The Divine Comedy The Divine Comedy and professional diplomat was forced to return to Ravenna via malarial swamplands, from which he took fever and died. and professional diplomat was forced to return to Ravenna via malarial swamplands, from which he took fever and died.

With scant natural resources save fish and the salt of its lagoons, Venice depended from the start on commerce and sea power. By the sixth century, its flat-bottomed trading barges crawled along the rivers of northern and central Italy. In the ninth century, it ventured forth into the Muslim-dominated Mediterranean under the protective s.h.i.+eld of the largest and wealthiest city in Christendom, Constantinople. By the tenth century, it began to emerge as a thriving sea trading power in its own right. Its s.h.i.+ps sailed among the ports of the Mediterranean, Europe, and the Levant, exchanging Eastern luxuries like spices, silks, and ivory that arrived by sea and camel train from Islamic Alexandria for bulky Western commodities like iron, timber, naval supplies, and slaves, as well as Venetian salt and gla.s.s.

As an entirely maritime, merchant-oriented republic, Venice resuscitated the democratic, free-market traditions of ancient Athens. Yet in the favorable environment of commercially awakening medieval Europe, these Greek traditions took deeper root and flourished. They also were transplanted to other parts of Europe. Venice itself became history's longest-enduring republic-1,100 years-and one of important progenitors of modern capitalism. Its devotion was to the pursuit of profit and commerce; more than once its leaders, who actively partic.i.p.ated in speculative ventures, defied the Latin Church, even accepting excommunication, rather than obey a papal directive that crossed its vital commercial interests.

By 1082 Venice had attained parity with Constantinople as a Mediterranean power. In that year its merchants became exempted from Byzantine tolls and received other special trade privileges when Venice agreed to provide naval help against the regional invasions of the Normans. By 12031204 it became master of the Mediterranean when, through astonis.h.i.+ng cunning, calculated risk, and bravery of arms, its blind, octogenarian elected doge, Enrico Dandolo, diverted the Norman armies of the Fourth Crusade from their original target of Egypt and, against the pope's wishes, induced them to successfully besiege and sack Constantinople as repayment for Venice's furnis.h.i.+ng of the crusaders' fleet. The Venetians succeeded where the Muslim besiegers 400 years earlier had not by capturing the Golden Horn. Its soldiers seized control of the huge windla.s.s used to raise and lower the great iron chain across the Horn's mouth that regulated entry. Then, led by the charging Dandolo, and his banner of St. Mark, the Venetians from one side and the Normans from the others breached the walls for the first time since Emperor Constantine had founded the city nearly 900 years earlier-250 years before it would fall out of Christian hands to the Turks. Following several months of political intrigue, and a final siege and customary three-day sacking of Constantinople, Enrico Dandolo, by treaty with the Norman crusaders, took the best parts of the Byzantine Empire for Venice. Venice got three-eighths of Constantinople, including prime frontage on the Golden Horn, free-trade rights throughout the Byzantine Empire, from which its archrivals Genoa and Pisa were to be banned, and a choice string of ports stretching all the way from Venice to the Black Sea. Thus Venice was the clear winner of the Fourth Crusade, which in the end never fulfilled its purpose of a.s.saulting Egypt or the Holy Land.

Christian Europe's new control of the Mediterranean, the rise of s.h.i.+pping in the northern seas, and the linking of the two regions through the Strait of Gibraltar helped stimulate a series of breakthroughs in naval architecture, navigation, and rigging that transformed European s.h.i.+pping from the early fourteenth century. The advent of st.u.r.dy, maneuverable, large, oarless sailing s.h.i.+ps created vessels that, for the first time, could carry their cargo year-round in all weather. They became the direct progenitors of the world-changing transoceanic Voyages of Discovery at the end of the fifteenth century.

The adoption of the magnetic compa.s.s from China facilitated sailing in the thirteenth-century Mediterranean, which was too deep for navigation by feeling the way along the bottom as was common practice in the northern seas. From about 1280 to 1330, rigging and s.h.i.+p design underwent a fundamental advance. Two important s.h.i.+p designs emerged. Venetian s.h.i.+pyards began producing a large sailing s.h.i.+p with two, and later three, masts, and rigged with triangular, lateen sails that made it highly maneuverable against headwinds. Although the s.h.i.+p had oars like a traditional galley, they were used only to enter and leave port. Even larger and st.u.r.dier from about 1300 was a new model northern sea cog. Clinker-built with overlapping planks and a central sternpost rudder, the cog ultimately became the workhorse of the Atlantic coast trade. To overcome the cog's clumsy maneuverability in the Mediterranean and its problem exiting against the westerlies that prevailed at the Strait of Gibraltar due to its possessing a single square sail, the cog was enhanced with a second, or mizzen, mast rigged with a lateen sail. The Genoese, in particular, adopted this new model cog. They increased the size of its hulls so that by 1400 it could carry cargoes of alum and other bulk commodities up to 600 tons, or two to three times more than the compet.i.tive carriers of the northern Hanseatic League. The new vessels, which debuted in the Mediterranean, had much smaller crews and relied upon crossbows for defense against the ramming and boarding tactics of traditional oared galleys.

The combination of new s.h.i.+p design and improved navigation helped trigger a quantum leap in Mediterranean s.h.i.+pping volume and velocity-Italian round-trips made to the ports of Egypt, the Levant, and Asia Minor doubled from one to two per year. Instead of being forced to winter in foreign ports as had been customary for centuries, Italian fleets left for the eastern Mediterranean in February and returned in May, reloaded their holds, and departed again in early August for a Christmas return. All-weather s.h.i.+pping spread to the Atlantic and to the northern seas. For the first time, a coherent, price-integrated commercial network of markets served by Zaccaria's alum s.h.i.+ps, the Flanders Fleets, and others emerged along Europe's three sea coastlines from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The enormous economic impetus helped European growth survive the multiple catastrophic setbacks of the mid-fourteenth century-colder climates, famines, peasant revolts, and finally the Black Death-which annihilated one-fourth to one-third of Europe's inhabitants. Europe's population did not return to its pre-bubonic-plague level until after 1480.

Integration by sea transport recalibrated compet.i.tive market conditions throughout the region. Baltic populations suddenly were able to preserve herring and cabbage throughout the winter with salt imported from southern Europe. Salted herring became a major export to the Mediterranean. When the Baltic herring, in one of the great ecological mysteries of history, migrated in the fifteenth century to the North Sea and within reach of Dutch fis.h.i.+ng nets, it contributed to the concentration of commercial power in the north in the Netherlands. Another of the many natural changes that altered the course of history occurred when Bruges's harbor silted up around 1500, diverting the Atlantic coast fleets to nearby Antwerp, which happily took over as the northern center of the north-south trade. But all that paled in historical significance beside the momentous water breakthrough that lay on Europe's immediate horizon.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

The Voyages of Discovery and the Launch of the Oceanic Era The seaborne fusion of Europe's disparate northern and Mediterranean resources into a coherent, market-driven, maritime civilization comprised of many autonomous, competing states set the stage for one of history's epochal turning points-the advent of transoceanic sailing. Europe's Voyages of Discovery were highlighted by three breakthrough trips in the 1490s scarcely noticed at the time by the rest of the world-Christopher Columbus to Central America, Vasco da Gama around the coast of Africa to India, and John Cabot from England to Newfoundland in North America-that crowned a century of sea exploration by suddenly decrypting the secret code of trade winds and sea currents of the Atlantic Ocean to enable them to sail to and fro across Earth's open oceans. In so doing they converted what had always been Europe's impenetrable, storm-tossed water barrier into a dynamic navigational advantage that launched Western civilization on its historic path to global supremacy. Within only a quarter century of the Atlantic voyages, one of Ferdinand Magellan's s.h.i.+ps completed history's first round-the-world trip. In his 1776 The Wealth of Nations The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith heralded Columbus's discovery of America and da Gama's pa.s.sage to India as no less than "the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind." Adam Smith heralded Columbus's discovery of America and da Gama's pa.s.sage to India as no less than "the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind."

The Atlantic opening ushered in the modern era in which sea power and control of the world's sea-lanes eclipsed the importance of dominion over the land as the preeminent key to global power and wealth. The new sea-centered world system bound all the regions of the planet more closely together and created a web of international communication and maritime trade that has continually thickened and tightened in s.p.a.ce and time into today's integrated global economy. Although the new era started around 1500, its long-term trajectories did not become clear among the world's leading civilizations for about two centuries. No civilization gained more than the West, whose maritime position on the Atlantic and superior naval power, often spurred by market economic forces, gave it access to the world's choicest sea trade superhighways. Whenever land-centered civilizations had broken beyond their frontier boundaries across narrow bodies of water or open plains or deserts, their expansions generally had been regional. Likewise, changes in control of axial sea routes in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean mainly fomented realignments of regional power relations. But the global oceanic opening, by contrast, catapulted Europeans as an irresistible power that reordered world power balances for the next half millennium.

The fitting symbol of Europe's maritime fusion and its momentous Atlantic breakthrough was the caravel, a small Portuguese vessel that was first launched upon the seas in the first half of the fifteenth century. About 70 feet long, displacing only 50 tons, and manned by a small, 20-man crew with minimal supply needs, the caravel had been specially designed for exploration. It had an internal sternpost rudder and a st.u.r.dy, lap-jointed, rounded hull whose flatish bottom allowed it to put in at shallows and other perilous sh.o.r.es. The s.h.i.+p had three masts, often two with square sails for power and one lateen or triangular sail that facilitated nimble maneuvering through headwinds which crucially a.s.sured explorers that they had a reasonable chance of returning home as they ventured into the unknown currents and wind systems of the ocean. Both Columbus's and da Gama's fleets included caravels.

The caravel married features of both northern and Mediterranean vessels and sailing traditions. Geographically, Portugal made a natural midwife. With its fabulous natural harbor of Lisbon on continental Europe's westernmost point of land as well as other good Atlantic harbors linked to navigable rivers, Portugal had prospered as a port of call for the coast-hugging Flanders Fleet. Without a window on the Mediterranean, and constantly menaced by large neighbors on the Iberian Peninsula that were coalescing into Spain, moreover, Portugal's survival and wealth hinged extraordinarily upon its ability to exploit the ocean. For two centuries from 1385, when its independence was secured with the help of an alliance with England, to 1580 when King Philip II successfully a.s.serted Spanish hegemony over it, tiny Portugal had an outsized effect on world history through its pioneering of the Age of Discovery, and its ocean-crossing caravel.

The caravel's inspirational spirit was one of history's intriguing, idiosyncratic individuals, Prince Henry the Navigator. The third son of the king of Portugal and his English queen, the tall, blond-haired Prince Henry, then in his mid-twenties, in 1418 set up what amounted to the world's first scientific research inst.i.tute. It was dedicated to pure discovery and sea exploration through uncharted Atlantic waters down the African coast to unknown lands. Until his death in 1460, his fortress atop the promontory at Sagres at Portugal's southern tip was home to the age's most knowledgeable a.s.sortment of sea captains, pilots, cartographers, astronomers, mathematicians, s.h.i.+p instrument makers, s.h.i.+pbuilders and other experts, all collaboratively guided by a scientific methodology unusual for the age and rare to that point in human history. Muslim astronomers and Jewish cartographers escaping religious persecution in Spain, master mariners from Genoa and Venice, German and Scandinavian merchants, visiting world travelers, and even African tribesmen, pooled their knowledge and observations. Henry's experts systematically mapped what they learned of the Atlantic and its coasts, devised methods to measure lat.i.tudes, and in general acc.u.mulated as much concrete information about the known world as possible. Every year Henry's s.h.i.+ps were sent out on exploratory missions to bring back logbooks and charts filled with new data and observations, which were used to fill in the maps and help with planning new voyages.

In the spirit of the dawning age of the Renaissance, Henry's chief purpose was the quest for pure knowledge and discovery for its own sake. But Henry, who lived a monkish existence and is said to have died a virgin, also possessed the crusading zeal of the pa.s.sing age to find the rumored lost Christian kingdoms of Prester John in East Africa. A third, initially lesser, motivation was the pa.s.sion for commercial wealth stirring throughout Europe. Henry and his countrymen were tantalized by the prospect of finding the original sources of the gold, ivory and slaves that were brought by middlemen from Africa and the peppers, cloves, cinnamon, ginger and other luxuries from the Indian Ocean that might be reachable by circ.u.mnavigating Africa's cape. Indeed, public support for Henry's unorthodox enterprise at Sagres, as well as the pace of voyages, picked up dramatically after 1444, when one of Henry's explorers returned with 200 African slaves-Europe's first direct involvement in the African slave trade.

The circ.u.mnavigation and coastal exploration of Africa had been attempted, in both directions, many times over the course of history. The most famous voyage, recounted by Herodotus, was commissioned by Egyptian King Neko around 600 BC after the oracle had warned him off completing his ca.n.a.l linking the Red Sea to the Nile and the Mediterranean. Neko outfitted a Phoenician crew that in a spectacular voyage sailed south through the Red Sea, around Africa, up the west coast, and returned through the Pillars of Hercules three years later. The only problem was that it probably never happened. Scholars believe that such a voyage was perfectly feasible-indeed, circ.u.mnavigating Africa from east to west is technically easier than the reverse-but there is no supporting evidence and most important, it left no historical legacy if it did happen. Other east African coast explorers included the Greek Ptolemies who succeeded Alexander the Great and got as far as the Horn of Africa and figured out that the source of the Blue Nile lay in the Abyssinian highlands of modern Ethiopia. Greek sailors in Roman times reached Pemba and Zanzibar, while Roman military explorers, sent inland along the Nile to do reconnaissance for a contemplated, deep African invasion, reached the Sudd swamps and Lake Victoria. Muslim dhows went all the way south to Mozambique, but never pushed on to the unknown lands beyond the much-feared sea pa.s.sage between Madagascar and the mainland.

Voyagers sailing south along the Atlantic likewise had limited success mastering Africa's western coast. The most celebrated and well-recorded was the voyage of Carthage's Hanno, who successfully established African coast colonies sometime in the fifth century BC. Precisely how far Hanno got is still a matter of dispute, but by most reckonings he reached the crocodile-infested waters of the Senegal River and beyond to Sierra Leone, and turned back before reaching the searing heat and stagnant currents of the Gulf of Guinea. Less successful was the Persian explorer Sataspes, who explained to an unsympathetic King Xerxes that he had been unable to complete his mandate to circ.u.mnavigate Africa because his s.h.i.+ps had simply stopped while his men were attacked by hostile natives when they put in at sh.o.r.e: Xerxes, who had mandated Sataspes' venture in reprieve of his death sentence for violating one of the court ladies, promptly had him impaled. A Greek explorer of the late second century BC managed to get only partway down the coast of Morocco. Nor did Muslim merchants a thousand years later risk the many hazards of west coast exploration while their camel caravans already enjoyed a trade monopoly with the sub-Saharan kingdoms of west Africa. Without question, sailing Africa's Atlantic coast was dangerous, as the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa discovered in 1291 when they outfitted two galleys filled with merchant wares for trading, made it partway down the coast, and then disappeared without a trace.

So difficult was the circ.u.mnavigation feat that by late antiquity Greek writers had concluded that doing so was simply impossible-the heat was too great, the waters of the Atlantic too windless, muddy, shallow, and choked with seaweed to be sailed. Thus little was known of the western sh.o.r.es of Africa when Henry the Navigator, enthused by the budding European revival of Greek knowledge, Herodotus' story about the Phoenicians' circ.u.mnavigation of Africa for Pharaoh Neko, and the rediscovery of treatises like Ptolemy's, determined to undertake his explorations to open an Atlantic sea route to India. Yet the revival of cla.s.sical knowledge also reconjured Greek terrors of the Atlantic, including the belief that at a certain point the waters coagulated so that s.h.i.+ps became stuck and sailors could never return home.

Overcoming these Greek-inspired fears posed at least as daunting a challenge to fulfillment of Henry's dream as the physical challenge itself. Among the gargantuan psychological barriers in the minds of Henry's mariners was Cape Bojador, just south of the Canary Islands on the northwest coast of Africa. Henry's explorers believed that the waters beyond this small cape, a barely noticeable b.u.mp on today's map of Africa, were so shallow and rife with treacherous currents and winds that no s.h.i.+p could return from it. To conquer Cape Bojador, Henry sent out 15 expeditions between 1424 and 1434, enticing captains with the promise of great rewards to push ever farther. Always they returned before pa.s.sing the dreaded cape, until one finally veered boldly westward into the open ocean and then south, to find that he had successfully rounded the cape. Once the psychological barrier of Bojador was overcome, it was merely a matter of time before the rest of the African coast yielded to Prince Henry's systematic scientific methodology and explorations. By the time of Henry's death in 1460, Portuguese s.h.i.+ps had pa.s.sed Cape Verde near the mouths of the rich Senegal and Gambia rivers and reached as far as modern Sierra Leone. Fittingly, that was the year of the birth of Vasco da Gama, the man who would fulfill Henry's dream of circ.u.mnavigating Africa and in the process crack the Atlantic's final enigmas and inaugurate the great age of cross-ocean sailing.

In contrast to the navigationally simpler, reversing seasonal monsoons that governed sailing back and forth across the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic's predominant feature was three large trade wind systems that blew in the same direction all year round. The central trade wind system blew west toward the Caribbean from northwest Africa and in the summertime, to the great natural advantage of Portugal and Spain, as far north as the Iberian Peninsula where Henry's mariners easily gained access to it. Farther south, after pa.s.sing through nearly windless lat.i.tudes called the Doldrums, was a second trade wind system that blew steadily from Africa toward South America. In the far north was a third belt of trades blowing west toward the New World, that in spring offered a brief, easterly moving wind that enabled an easy return sail home at the lat.i.tude of Britain. Beyond the trade wind systems, at extreme lat.i.tudes in both the Southern and Northern Hemispheres, were countervailing west-to-east wind systems; in the far south at the 40 degree lat.i.tudes they led around the African coast into the Indian Ocean with such strength that mariners called them the "Roaring Forties." Cutting across and interlinking the trade wind system were several strong sea currents, notably the warm Gulf Stream flowing from the Caribbean to northwestern Europe, and in South America, the southerly flowing Brazil Current. "Considered as a whole," writes historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, "the wind system resembles a code of interlocking ciphers. Once part of it was cracked...the solution of the rest followed rapidly."

The three breakthrough voyages of the 1490s finally unraveled the interlocking Atlantic codes that Prince Henry and his successors had been trying to decipher for decades. Genoese captain Columbus's second Atlantic crossing for Spain in 1493 established viable routes outbound and home across the central Atlantic. Sailing for England, fellow Italian John Cabot's 1497 round-trip between Bristol, England and Newfoundland, Canada utilized the briefly available spring westerly later much exploited by the British colonizers of North America. Finally, and most important, Portuguese da Gama's 14971499 round-trip from Lisbon around the Cape of Africa to India revealed the secrets of the wind and current system of the South Atlantic, which ultimately girdled the globe. Once European sailors had broken the navigation codes of the storm-tossed Atlantic, all the world's seas suddenly became penetrable by their st.u.r.dy s.h.i.+ps. With it came monopoly access to the wealth of the New World and an alternative, cheaper, and faster all-water route to India and the Spice Islands. The Voyages of Discovery crowned Europe's transformation into history's first, world-straddling maritime civilization.

After Henry's death, the commercial allure of Africa was sufficiently tangible for the Portuguese king to be able to lease monopoly rights on the Guinea trade in gold, ivory, slaves, and pepper to a wealthy Lisbon citizen, Fernao Gomes, in exchange for a promise of further exploration and a state share in his profits. Within five years, Gomes's profit-seeking sailors had explored a length of the African coast equal to the distance covered by Henry the Navigator in thirty years. By 1481 the economic rewards of exploration were so great, and the risk of failing so reduced, that the king granted the trading and exploration franchise to his own son, who himself soon became King John II and vigorously carried on Prince Henry's legacy. In retrospect Henry the Navigator's research inst.i.tute effectively proved to be as much a precocious landmark in Europe's evolving political economic marriage between private markets and governments as it was a scientific prototype. The state, in the person of Prince Henry, effectively underwrote the front-end cost of the speculative, basic research until commercially profitable returns became foreseeable enough to attract private risk capital for further targeted development. Once actual profits materialized, entrepreneurs and governments equitably apportioned the new wealth between themselves through politically negotiated tax rates, lease fees, and other revenue-sharing arrangements. This model was very similar to the pattern of government-funded research in the West to the present day.

Europe went to the cusp of its maritime breakthrough in February 1488 when two caravels of Portuguese captain Bartholomew Diaz rounded Africa's southernmost Cape of Good Hope. If not for a rebellion among his crew after a terrible storm, Diaz would have continued on as the first European to sail into the Indian Ocean. His reluctant return to Lisbon harbor in December 1488 instead shaped a dramatic twist in the course of European history. By riveting King John II's energies on the singular ambition of a follow-up trip that would yield for Portugal the grand prize of the all-water route to India, Diaz's voyage promulgated the king's final rejection of a proposal by Christopher Columbus, who had been entreating the sovereign and his experts since 1484, for funds to sail westward across the Atlantic, where he believed India lay at a distance no more than the length of the Mediterranean Sea. King John II's experts were far more correct than Columbus in reckoning the actual, much-farther distance to India. Nevertheless, Columbus's blind faith and perseverance withstood further rejections by England and France until 1492 when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain agreed at the last moment to outfit his voyage into the western unknown in celebration of their decisive triumph at Granada over the last Islamic stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula. His three s.h.i.+ps departed on August 3, 1492-on the very same tide that carried away many emigrating Jews on the deadline date of their expulsion by the Spanish Inquisition-and sighted the islands of the West Indies two and half months later on October 12. Columbus returned to the New World a year later with a 17-s.h.i.+p fleet and 1,500 people to establish the first of many permanent Spanish settlements.

The far-reaching impacts of Spain's sweep through the New World are well recorded by history. Armed with muskets, and unknowingly with far-deadlier European diseases like smallpox and measles, Spanish conquistadores decimated the native Amerindian populations they encountered, reducing their number from about 25 million to only a few million within a century. The disease-enfeebled Aztec empire in Central America fell to them between 1519 and 1522; the South American Inca gave way between 1531 and 1535. By 1513 the Pacific was reached across land, some six years before Magellan's s.h.i.+ps set sail from Spain on the first round-the-world sea voyage. Soon Spanish galleons were sailing the Pacific Ocean, and serving colonies that stretched from the Rio Grande on the modern Mexican-U.S. border to the River Plate dividing modern Uruguay and Argentina. While Spanish vessels discovered vital New World foodstuffs such as potatoes, corn, and squash that provided a huge boon to European population growth and health over the long run, the Spaniards' overwhelming obsession was gold and silver, which began to be exported home to the Old World in vast quant.i.ties during the 1530s. At Columbus's parting, King Ferdinand purportedly exhorted, "Get gold, humanely if possible, but at all hazards-get gold." High up in the Andes, at over 13,000 feet, the Spanish discovered a veritable silver mountain at Potosi, which filled its treasury and tempted its ambitions for many decades. Water-powered mills to crush the silver ores were introduced in the 1570s, fed by an expanding network of storage dams and feeder ca.n.a.ls to turn the waterwheels. In 1626 one of the dams collapsed, doing so much damage that the then-declining mining operation never recovered to full capacity and striking a powerful blow against the Spanish economy.

New World bullion transformed Spain into a rich and powerful state and helped launch its Habsburg monarchs, Charles V and his son Philip II, on their overweening quest to unify Europe as a Catholic region under their political aegis; this in turn helped stir a long period of religious and political wars and conflicts critical to the forging of modern Western society. The influx of so much bullion into the European monetary economy also fueled a great continental inflation in which prices rose three to four times by the end of the sixteenth century. The ironic, unintended net result of this inflation was a stealthy redistribution of wealth that hastened the rise of northern Europe with its bourgeois tradesmen, sea merchants, and private capitalists who could respond fastest to rising prices and unsettled the static economic and cla.s.s relations.h.i.+ps underpinning traditional, land-based aristocratic societies, including Spain itself.

To prevent Columbus's discovery of the New World from triggering a land grab war between two loyal Catholic states, the pope drew a demarcation line from the North to the South Pole and granted all new lands to the west to Spain and those to the east to Portugal. However the pope, the notoriously wanton, Spanish-born Borgia pope Alexander VI, drew the line with such a heavy bias in Spain's favor that it did not even leave Portugal sailing room to continue its African voyages. But Portugal's clearly superior naval power facilitated a swift diplomatic settlement between the sovereigns and the dividing line was relocated some 865 miles farther west through a new 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.

The line dividing the world between Portugal and Spain cleared the way for Portugal to carry out its planned rounding of the African cape to exploit the first all-water sea trade route to India. For the task Portugal's king chose Vasco da Gama, then thirty-seven. The son of a minor official, da Gama was well qualified for a nautical and political task that was far more challenging than Columbus's. He was a skillful and disciplined sea captain, and audacious as he was ruthless and diplomatic. His voyage took him across many unfamiliar seascapes and presented complex leaders.h.i.+p challenges onsh.o.r.e and offsh.o.r.e, including managing a crew that was out of sight of land for 4,500 miles and ninety-six days, nearly three times more than Columbus.

Da Gama's four s.h.i.+ps departed Lisbon harbor on July 8, 1497, with stores for a three-year voyage. He was accompanied by Diaz as far as the Cape Verde Islands. Then, in order to avoid the treacherous Gulf of Guinea, he began his famous southwest detour almost as far as Brazil. This wide arc enabled him to traverse the southeast Atlantic trades and catch the strong far south westerlies that carried him back east toward the African cape. He ultimately rounded it on November 22. Vast distances of wild coastlines and unsailed seas followed. Finally, in March 1498, after an arduous voyage and a month of delay for s.h.i.+p repairs and rest, da Gama sailed through the treacherous channel between Mozambique and Madagascar and thereby shattered the insuperable barrier that had thwarted the advance of Muslim dhows down the African coast. Entering into the civilized sphere of the Indian Ocean, da Gama's fleet docked at the thriving, Muslim port on the island of Mozambique. The gold, jewels, spices, and silver of the Muslim merchants heartened him, as did news, which eventually proved spurious, of lost Christian kingdoms inland and up the coast. Proceeding northward, he finally dropped anchor at Malindi, one of several important ports along the Zanzibar coast near modern Kenya and Tanzania, where earlier in the century Chinese Admiral Cheng Ho had secured a giraffe for his emperor's amus.e.m.e.nt. With good fortune, da Gama secured at Malindi an expert Arab pilot-some historians believe it may have been Ahmad Ibn Madji, the most renowned Arab navigator of the era-to guide his fleet in twenty-three days across the tricky Arabian Sea. On May 20, he reached his intended destination of Calicut on India's Malabar coast. The next three months were spent in difficult diplomacy with the local Hindu ruler, to whom he explained his mission as seeking "Christians and spices." Da Gama failed to conclude a treaty with him, however, due to hostility from Calicut's established Muslim merchants and the unimpressive gifts he could offer as a foretaste of future trade benefits with Portugal.

Unfavorable winds cursed da Gama's homeward journey across the Arabian Sea. So many on board died of scurvy on the three-month voyage that he was compelled to burn one of his s.h.i.+ps for want of a crew to sail it. Nevertheless, in summer 1499 da Gama reached Portugal in triumph. Although less than one-third of his original 170-man crew returned alive, the peppers and other cargo paid for the cost of his voyage sixtyfold. Portugal's l.u.s.t for the riches of the Indies was excited by the discovery that although it had little to offer in desirable traded goods it possessed one irresistible advantage that its would-be trading partners simply could not refuse-vastly superior long-range sea cannonry and a new Atlantic style of naval warfare of small crews fighting from a distance.

Voyages of Discovery: Da Gama & Cheng Ho Suez Ca.n.a.l [image]

Long-range sea artillery stands out among a handful of military innovations that has profoundly altered the course of world history. On land, the Gunpowder Revolution altered long-standing power balances, including by breaking down the defenses of walled fortresses with large cannons, as the Ottoman Turks dramatically demonstrated in taking Constantinople in 1453. Its effects were even more far-reaching when it was applied to sea combat, which since antiquity had been based on ramming and boarding for hand-to-hand combat. An evolutionary step toward missile-launched sea warfare had occurred in the thirteenth-century Mediterranean with the intensive use of crossbows to prevent enemies from approaching and boarding. But it was in the Atlantic that sea cannonry was most precocious. The English possessed some sea artillery by the late fourteenth century, while Venetian galleys in the Mediterranean didn't carry them until the early to mid-fifteenth century.

The big difficulty was handling the cannon's tremendous recoil upon firing. Serendipitously, the st.u.r.dy caravel and its related family of Atlantic sailing vessels had bestowed one last gift upon European civilization. Its superior balance proved highly adaptable to absorbing the recoil across the deck of the heavy, long-range, mid-fifteenth-century French and Burgundian cannons. By the dawn of the history-making Voyages of Discovery, heavy long-barreled guns that could bombard with accuracy of up to 200 yards-sufficient to prevent enemies from approaching near enough to carry out traditional ramming and boarding attacks-were commonly carried aboard Portugal's seagoing vessels. "There is no doubt that the development of the long-range armed sailing s.h.i.+p heralded a fundamental advance in Europe's place in the world," writes historian Paul Kennedy. "With these vessels, the naval powers of the West were in a position to control the oceanic trade routes and to overawe all societies vulnerable to the working of sea power. Even the first great clashes between the Portuguese and their Muslim foes in the Indian Ocean made this clear...[T]he Portuguese crews were virtually invincible at sea."

The Portuguese wasted no time in pressing their naval military advantage. Armadas were dispatched almost annually to the Indian Ocean to seize freely by brute force what they had been unable to win by trade. Da Gama himself led the second armada, totaling 20 s.h.i.+ps, which departed two and half years after his initial voyage. He expressed his cold-blooded intentions unhesitatingly upon returning to India's Malabar coast. Seizing a dhow carrying Muslim pilgrims on their way home from Mecca, he pirated the treasures on board, then burned the s.h.i.+p with its several hundred pa.s.sengers, women and children included, locked up inside. Proceeding to Calicut, he rejected the local leader's friends.h.i.+p offer and instead demanded his immediate surrender as well as the banishment of every Muslim from the town. To demonstrate his seriousness, he bombarded the harbor. When two score fishermen and traders sailed out to sell him their wares, he had them immediately hung, dismembered, and sent their body parts back to the ruler with a note inviting him to make a curry of them. Upon filling his cargo holds with treasures he sailed home, but not before deploying s.h.i.+ps to stay behind as Europe's first permanent naval force in Indian waters.

The sphere of Portuguese power continued to expand rapidly with the sailing of each new armada. To confront its growing menace to Islamic trade, the rival Egyptian Mamluks and Ottoman Turks united to send a large fleet of dhows out of the Red Sea. The decisive battle between Islam and the West for control of the Arabian Sea was fought off the Indian port of Diu near the mouth of the wide Gulf of Cambay in 1509 between heavy cannon-fitted Portuguese wars.h.i.+ps, manned by small crews, and a much larger, oared Muslim fleet. It was little contest. Portuguese broadsides decimated the enemy dhows before they could penetrate close enough with their weak artillery to execute their antiquated naval tactics of ram and board. After Diu, Portuguese hegemony over the Indian Ocean was a.s.serted expeditiously. Goa fell in 1510. Malacca, controlling the narrow straight between Malaysia and Sumatra and access to the Spice Islands or Moluccas of Indonesia, was taken in 1511. By 1515, Hormuz, at the head of the Persian Gulf, was permanently occupied by Portugal, and Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) was captured. The Portuguese failed only to take Aden at the mouth of the Red Sea, which was the route for supplying Alexandria, where goods were reloaded on Venetian vessels for distribution to the markets of the Mediterranean. In 1516, a Portuguese s.h.i.+p sailed up China's Pearl River and docked at Canton. By the mid-sixteenth century, Portugal had a chain of forts that extended from the Gulf of Guinea, around the cape and up the East African coast, across the rim of the Indian Ocean to Malacca and to the mouth of China's Pearl River at Macao. It was a stunning achievement for a nation of only 1 million people-a primacy it owed to its pioneering role in unleas.h.i.+ng the latent power of oceanic sailing and sea power upon the world.

The effects of the sudden rise of Portuguese sea power reverberated everywhere. Power balances were upended. Trade was rerouted. The VeniceAlexandria trade monopoly with the East was shattered; within four years of da Gama's historic voyage the price of pepper in Lisbon was only 20 percent of its price in Venice. Venice's overtures to Egypt, starting as early as 1502, to reopen Pharaoh Neko's old "Suez" ca.n.a.l to shorten transport time and costs likewise came to naught. In 1521 Portugal felt sure enough of its position to refuse Venice's desperate offer to buy its entire stock of spice import. Venetian power never recovered. Islam's decline, too, was hastened by the loss of its monopoly over the rich Indian Ocean trade and compet.i.tion from the far cheaper, faster, and safer all-water route to the Indies. Islam's overland West African trade was likewise outflanked by Portuguese s.h.i.+ps, each of which could carry as many goods as an entire plodding, 5,000 to 6,000 camel train. Within Islam, the Mamluk Empire in Egypt and Syria, which depended mostly on the wealth of the Indian Ocean trade, soon was conquered by the Ottoman Turks. The Turks, in turn, exerted new military pressure on Europe from the east, by land and in the Mediterranean. The Turks' threatening Mediterranean advances throughout the sixteenth century forced Venice and Spain to devote great naval effort and expense to repel them. As a result, the central locus of intra-European power tilted even more decisively throughout the sixteenth century away from the Mediterranean and in favor of the insulated, northwest Atlantic sea powers.

One other noteworthy water innovation played a complementary role in maritime Europe's speedy conquest of Earth's open seas. Keeping drinking water fresh aboard s.h.i.+ps was one of the ba.n.a.l, yet most frightening challenges of long-distance sea sailing. Despite countless jealously guarded formulas, there was simply no way to keep water fresh aboard s.h.i.+p for a long time. Explorers' first order of business upon landing at any unknown sh.o.r.e was finding a freshwater source. Even putting in at civilized ports didn't always guarantee freshwater in an age when drinking discolored, briny, germy, and polluted water was so much the norm that many restricted their water imbibing to alcohol-disinfected beer or wine, or to boiled hot drinks. The situation for seamen improved somewhat in the fifteenth century when Europeans developed an improved cask to keep water fresh for longer periods. Such casks enabled da Gama to make his long sea voyages to India and barely sufficed on Magellan's landmark first global circ.u.mnavigation from 1519 to 1522. As Magellan's crew wandered lost for thirty-eight harrowing days through the 334 labyrinthine miles of false bays, snowy fjords and narrow pa.s.sages of the thereafter-named Strait of Magellan linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and then needed more than a hundred days to traverse the vast Pacific, which was much larger than expected, a despairing onboard diarist recorded on November 28, 1520, that the water they drank was yellow and putrid.

The wealth earned by Portugal and Spain as first movers of the Age of Discovery whet the desire of the rest of maritime Europe for a share of the prize to be had from the high seas. They did not acquiesce to the pope's a.s.signment of the globe to Iberian, Catholic primacy. Over the ensuing three centuries of the oceanic age of sail, the intra-European struggle for supremacy was a primary force in defining the political, economic, and religious character of Western civilization, and the interlinked, colonial world-system it helped create.

One early effect of the large inflow of New World bullion to Spain was to spur its regal Habsburg rulers, Charles V and his son Philip II, to try to extend their family's mastery over many European states into a consolidated, autocratic Catholic empire by marriage or force or arms. They were hara.s.sed in this ambition by the lesser powers of England and France, whose rulers commissioned entrepreneurial privateers-state-sanctioned pirates-to plunder the gold and silver Spanish treasure s.h.i.+ps sailing out of ports in the western Caribbean on the renowned Spanish Main. From 1566 they were joined by able seafaring privateers from the Netherlands, where a Protestant revolt for religious and political freedom against Spanish overlords.h.i.+p had been answered with brutal reprisals by Philip II's troops. England's Queen Elizabeth covertly and overtly supported the Dutch rebels against their common Habsburg Catholic adversary with financial aid, safe haven for Dutch privateers and on one occasion by interdicting the pay intended for Spanish troops in the Netherlands when the s.h.i.+ps carrying it were forced by weather to dock at English ports. By 1576, the combined effect of piratical disruptions of bullion s.h.i.+pments, the cost of Spain's contemporaneous struggle against the Muslim Turks in the Mediterranean, and Philip's own monarchal overreach forced Spain to default on its international bank loans and to suspend payments to its troops fighting in the Netherlands. Spanish troops mutinied by sacking Antwerp, then the richest city in the Spanish-controlled Netherlands.

Private capital fled to nearby Amsterdam in the also-rebellious free northern provinces, galvanizing its rise and long reign as Europe's leading center of finance, trade and market capitalism. In 1579, the seven northern provinces united against Spain and soon formed the tiny, commerce-centric Dutch Republic. While the southern provinces of the Spanish Netherlands eventually succ.u.mbed to Spanish troops, the north successfully resisted Spain's superior army by opening dikes to defensively flood landscapes that lay below sea level and taking their battle to the northern sea-lanes, where Spain's land power advantage was neutralized by the natural exigencies of seafaring. By the 1580s the Dutch Protestant rebellion had escalated into a full-blown international struggle with its own momentum. It set up an inexorable military collision between Spain and England, whose denouement came in the celebrated summer 1588 sea battle against the Spanish Armada.

The struggle between mighty, prosperous Spain and the small, relatively poor English island-nation proved to be one of history's outstanding examples of the equalizing effect of sea power on otherwise militarily unmatched enemies. England relied exclusively on its naval prowess for its defense. Philip II, on the other hand, planned to bring to bear Spain's formidable panoply of oceangoing galleons and other s.h.i.+ps to hold the English Channel in support of a land invasion led by 30,000 of his troops who were to be ferried across the Strait of Dover from Dunkirk near the Spanish Netherlands. The revolution in naval warfare in which battles.h.i.+ps were employed as mobile batteries fighting from long distance with on-board cannonry was only partly complete by the time the Armada sailed. England's Royal Navy, since the time of Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, had been in the vanguard of that revolution. Its cannons fired long-range, light 17-pound rounds through side portholes. Its naval captains commanded all on board without regard to social rank. Its sleeker and faster s.h.i.+ps were among the most maneuverable on the seas. Spain, by contrast, lagged behind in the naval power revolution. Its large fleet carried heavy cannons that fired 50 pound shots but over a shorter range. It was far less maneuverable sailing windward, maintained an aristocratic chain of command, many swordsmen and musketeers for close-in and traditional on-board fighting.

Underlying these tactical differences, notes British historian George Macaulay Trevelyan, was a more profound "difference of social character between Spain and the new England. Private enterprise, individual initiative and a good-humoured equality of cla.s.ses were on the increase in the defeudalized England of the Renaissance and Reformation, and were strongest among the commercial and maritime population." Enriched by its New World bullion, Spain remained fixedly wedded to its medieval cla.s.s hierarchy, centralized political authority, army-centered military power, and a state-directed command economy anch.o.r.ed in traditional agriculture. The battle of the Armada between England and Spain, in short, contained within it a contest between two competing political, economic, and social tendencies for Western civilization's future.

To lead England's defense, Elizabeth turned to its resourceful privateers of the Spanish Main. Foremost among these was Francis Drake. Although second in formal t.i.tle, he was first in shaping and executing England's strategic battle plans at sea. Drake in many ways personified the spirit of the rising English nation. Born of a Protestant tenant farmer in the early 1540s, his family fled a Catholic uprising and lived for a while in the hull of an old s.h.i.+p moored along the Thames. At 13 he was apprenticed to the captain of a small trading vessel that traveled among North Sea ports. Seeking fortune and adventure, at 23 he sailed for the West Indies. Although an early trip on which he had been second-in-command ended in financial ruin when his s.h.i.+p was attacked by Spanish vessels, Drake's skills came to the attention of Queen Elizabeth, who granted him his own privateeri