THE GREAT OPENING 67traders. Could a way be found to bypass these infidel middlemen, one
might grow rich in the service of God.
Those were only the known treasures of the East, things people
could hold in their hands. Rumor and legend told of greater wonders,
the stuff of dreams: on the other side of Africa, the kingdom of Prester
John, a Christian enclave in the world of Islam; somewhere nearby, the
lost paradise of Eden; farther east, the land of Xanadu; and going west,
well, that was the unknown. Most people understood the world was
round and that one could in theory go east by sailing west. But the At
lantic was a terrifying ocean for those used to the waters of the inland
sea. Even the seaboard populations saw only the awful emptiness.
Names like Land's End and Finisterre were more than mere statements
of topographical fact.
Where there is ignorance, fantasy reigns. The west was the place of
the Blessed Isles, of the mysterious Atlantis now sunk beneath the
waves—of magical realms guarded by monsters and whirlpools and sea
spouts—all the hazards that realism and imagination could put to
gether. It took tremendous courage to venture into the ocean sea, well
beyond any of the landmarks that dotted the portolan maps and gave
reassurance from point to coastal point. The Viking voyages, west and
north and west again, testify to their seamanship and courage; also to
an intimate knowledge of the water (its color, moods, and depths,
even its bottom) and the fauna (the fish and birds) that enabled them
to know the presence of land long before they saw it and thus to island-
hop around the top of the Atlantic. The Genoese and other Italians
came later, learning first to round Iberia and sail to England. By the
fourteenth century, in the company of Portuguese and Basques, they
found the near Atlantic isles: the Azores, Madeiras,^12 Canaries—all but
the last, which lie close to the African mainland, uninhabited.* (The
Cape Verde Islands, which lie south of Bojador at north latitude 15°,
were not found by Europeans until the mid-fifteenth century; Sao
- In the Canaries, the Spanish found natives still living in the stone age. These
Guanches, as they were called, after some early, unhappy experiments in coexistence,
made ferocious resistance and in spite of drastic inferiority in weapons (clubs vs. steel
and guns), held the invaders off for more than a century. The Canaries were not fully
subdued until after Columbus.
The Guanches posed a theological and spiritual problem. Were they human? Did
they have a soul? Did they live according to law? Could they be Christian? The major
reason for these moralistic excursions was the justification of conquest and enslave
ment. The Spanish had a need for legitimation; they wanted a blessing on their enter
prises and always got it.