Название: Amerigo Vespucci
Автор: Frederick A. Ober
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4057664627841
isbn:
In these letters we have outlined by Toscanelli the very voyage that Columbus took in 1492, eighteen years after he had received this precious information. In his journal of that voyage he makes mention of "the islands marked on the chart"; he was constantly seeking the island of Atlantis, and hoped eventually to arrive at the great and noble city of Quinsai, as well as at Cipango and Cathay. As for the "Grand Khan"—of whom he had been informed by Toscanelli, who obtained his information from Marco Polo's works—he not only sent an embassy in search of him, when in Cuba, but was looking for him throughout all his voyages.
It is well known that Columbus was not aware that he had really discovered a new world, but to the end of his days believed he had merely arrived at the eastern coast of India. So persistent was he in this belief that he falsified documents, and forced his crew to swear to what they did not know—namely, that Cuba was a continent, and not an island! He believed he had arrived at Cipango, when he heard the Indian word, cibao, on the coast of Hispaniola; and he says, in a letter written to Luis Santangel in 1493, "In Española there are gold-mines, and thence to terra firma, as well as thence to the Grand Khan, everything is on a splendid scale." Also, "When I arrived at Juana [Cuba], I followed the coast to the westward, and found it so extensive that I considered it must be a continent and a province of Cathay!"
Columbus, it has been said by some investigators, was a man of one idea—and that idea not his own! "It is impossible," says Washington Irving, in his Life of Columbus—which is, throughout, an elegant but labored apology for its hero—"to determine the precise time when Columbus first conceived the design of seeking a western route to India. It is certain, however, that he meditated it as early as the year 1474, though as yet it lay crude and unmatured in his mind."
The year 1474, as we know, was that in which Toscanelli sent him the letter and the chart. In that letter the route to India was laid down, and on that chart it was made clear to any seafaring man how Cathay might be reached, by merely sailing westward! By setting his helm, and persisting in a westerly course, any one might reach the coast that was supposed to lie opposite to Europe and Africa. Columbus did that, according to directions received from Toscanelli eighteen years before. He did nothing more, and he reached, not the coast of India, but the outlying islands of a new world since called America.
The idea, then, which Columbus claimed as exclusively his own was conveyed to him by Toscanelli—or, at least, it so appears—and Toscanelli obtained it from the ancients. For, says one having authority, "Eratosthenes, accepting the spherical theory, had advanced the identical notion which nearly seventeen hundred years later impelled Columbus to his voyage. He held the known world to span one-third of the circuit of the globe, as Strabo did at a later day, leaving an unknown two-thirds of sea; and if it were not that the vast extent of the Atlantic Sea rendered it impossible, one might even sail from the coast of Spain to that of India, along the same parallel."
And again: "An important element in the problem was the statement of Marco Polo regarding a large island, which he called Cipango, and which he represented as lying in the ocean off the eastern coast of Asia. This carried the eastern verge of the Asiatic world farther than the ancients had known, and, on the spherical theory, brought land nearer westward from Europe than could earlier have been supposed. … Humboldt has pointed out that neither Christopher Columbus nor his son Ferdinand mentions Marco Polo; still, we know that the former had read his book."[5]
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