275 CHAPTER X. THE END OF THE CATHAYAN QUEST. [1579-1603.] WITH John Davis's third voyage the English search for Cathay was brought to a close. Through the two centuries and a half ensuing, from his day to Sir John Franklin's, the work of north-western discovery, in which he had better success than any of his forerunners, was continued, and besides its great services to geographical science, provided an excellent school for English seamanship. But with that noble work the old fables about Cathay were no longer, or only to a very small extent, associated. Travellers by land and sea, and map-makers and prudent thinkers who stayed at home, had come to the conclusion that, though India and the islands beyond it, from Java to Japan, were worth all the pains that could possibly be taken in exploring and trading with them, there was no such region of wonderful splendour and stupendous riches as Friar Rubruquis and Marco Polo and Friar Odoric had represented. Davis's successors, therefore, sought only to break through the icy barriers of the Arctic Sea and find a passage to the real wealth of India. Entering upon their work with less extravagant hopes, and with better knowledge of the dangers and difficulties incident to it, they were prepared for the disappointments that befell them, and satisfied with the comparatively small results that, from generation to generation, attended the heroic work to which they devoted themselves. In the meanwhile, for those whose only object was to reach the Indies in the easiest way, another route was being opened up. The route was an old one. From 1498, when Vasco de Gama first doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and sailed across the Indian Ocean up to Calicut, it had been followed with growing interest and profit by the fleets of Portugal. But through more than three quarters of a century the East Indies had been reserved as exclusively for Portuguese adventurers as were the West Indies for the hidalgos of Spain; and when, in 1580, Philip II. seized the throne of Portugal, both East and West Indies became the common property of Spaniards and Portuguese. While England was Catholic, it dared not interfere with the monopolies which the southern nations of Europe held under sanction of the Pope; and for some time after Englishmen had learnt to disregard all papal interdicts, they had not naval strength enough to venture upon the seas in which Portuguese and Spanish galleys protected the rich freights of Portuguese and Spanish galleons coming from the East and the West Indies. At first, as we shall see in later chapters, they forced their way into the mid Atlantic Ocean, and began to wrest from Spain some of its West Indian treasures, and then, gaining 1579.] The Observations of Father Stevens. 277 courage therein, they pressed on across the broad Pacific, and came into collision with its forces in the East Indies. Thus while Frobisher and others were attempting to reach the Indies by what was thought to be the shortest passage, the same end was being attained, through the longest passage that could possibly be taken, by Drake and his followers. India being once reached by Englishmen, they determined to pursue their traffic with it; and the great triumph which British prowess, favoured by an accident, secured in the overthrow of the Spanish Armada, made their new enterprise far easier than it could otherwise have been. But one Englishman, at any rate, had sailed round the Cape of Good Hope, and thus made the voyage to India, long before the time of the Great Armada Fight. He was a native of Wiltshire, and a Jesuit missionary, Thomas Stevens by name. In company with others of his order, he left Lisbon in a Portuguese ship on the 4th of April, 1579. "The setting forth from the port," he said, in a lively letter to his father, "I need not to tell how solemn. It is with trumpets and shooting of ordnance. You may easily imagine it, considering that they go in the manner of war." Off the coast of Africa the voyagers met an English ship, "very fair and great,” that offered some fight, but was soon driven back by a broadside from the Portuguese galley, which after that met with no resistance, save from the elements, during the rest of her six months' voyage. Near the equator she was becalmed for a long time. "Some times," said Stevens, "the ship standeth there almost by the space of many days; sometimes she goeth, but in such order that it were almost as good to stand still." In the Gulf of Guinea Stevens had some amusement in watching the Medusa, or Portuguese man-of-war, as the sailors still call it. "Along all that coast," he says, "we oftentimes saw a thing swimming upon the water like a cock's comb, but the colour much fairer; which comb standeth upon a thing almost like the swimmer of a fish in colour and bigness, and beareth underneath, in the water, strings, which save it from turning over." He was also delighted with the sea-birds which met the galley as it neared the Cape of Good Hope. "As good as three thousand fowls of sundry kinds followed our ship; some of them so great that their wings, being opened from one point to the other, contained seven spans, as the mariners said;-a marvellous thing to see how God provided so that in so wide a sea these fowls are all fat, and nothing wanteth them." These were probably albatrosses. Stevens also saw sharks, pilot fish, and sucking-fish. "There waited on our ship fishes as long as a man. They came to eat such things as from the ship fall into the sea, not refusing men themselves; and if they find any meat tied in the sea, they take it for theirs. These have waiting on them six or seven small fishes, which never depart, with guards blue and green round about their bodies, like comely serving men; and they go two or three before him, and some on every side. Moreover, they have 1579-1583.] Father Stevens and Ralph Fitch. 279 other fishes, which cleave always unto their body, and seem to take such superfluities as grow about them. The mariners in times past have eaten of them; but since they have seen them eat men, their stomachs abhor them. Nevertheless, they draw them up with great hooks, and kill of them as many as they can, thinking that they have made a great revenge." Stevens told his father more about the birds and fishes that came in his way during his voyage than about the people whom he saw at its termination, when he reached Goa on the 24th of October. "The people," he says, "be tawny, but not disfigured in their lips and noses, as the Moors and Caffres of Ethiopia. They that be not of reputation, or at least the most part, go naked, save an apron of a span long; and thus they think themselves as well clothed as we, with all our trimming." Stevens lived many years in India, and was able to be of good service to four other Englishmen, Fitch, Newberry, Leedes, and Storey, who made their way overland to Goa in 1583. They were sent thither by the Levant Company, and bore letters from Queen Elizabeth to the great Akbar and to the Emperor of China. They conveyed some cloth and tin, as samples of English commerce, from Aleppo to Bagdad, thence down the Tigris to Ormuz, and so by sea to Goa, where they arrived near the end of the year, to find it frequented by traders from all parts-" Frenchmen, Flemings, Germans, Hungarians, Italians, Greeks, Arme * HAKLUYT, vol. ii., part ii., pp. 99-101. |