But that Europe should,
on the one hand, improve and feel enlarged desires as well as means of
purchasing the luxuries of the east, while on the other hand, the
practicability of acquiring these luxuries should diminish, formed a
coincidence of circumstances, which was sure to produce important results.
As access to India by land, or even by the Arabian Gulf by sea, was
rendered extremely difficult and hazardous by the enmity of the Mahometans,
or productive of little commercial benefit by their exactions, the
attention and hopes of European navigators were directed to a passage to
India along the western coast of Africa. As, however, the length and
difficulties of such a voyage were extremely formidable, it would probably
have been either not attempted at all, or have required much longer time to
accomplish than it actually did, if, in addition and aid of increased
desires and an enlarged commercial spirit, the means of navigating distant,
extensive, and unknown seas, had not likewise been, about this period,
greatly improved.
We allude, principally, to the discovery of the mariners' compass. The
first clear notice of it appears in a Provencal poet of the end of the
twelfth century. In the thirteenth century it was used by the Norwegians in
their voyages to and from Iceland, who made it the device of an order of
knighthood of the highest rank; and from a passage in Barber's Bruce, it
must have been known in Scotland, if not used there in 1375, the period
when he wrote.
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