The Age of Discovery
IT is easy to picture a great period of history, but not so easy to imagine it. A true imagination of such a period as the discovery, conquest and settlement of the New World, can grow only when we have sloughed off the advantage of our subsequent knowledge and have placed ourselves in the hearts, bodies, minds and purses of the Spaniards, the Englishmen, Frenchmen and Dutch who struggled there. We must believe in angels and devils, the damnation of heretics, the soullessness of negroes, government by favourites ; we must reduce the size of the known world to little more than Europe, diminish populations, scrap most of navigation and science, set a lower value on life. And having done this we must see the story stroke by stroke like a picture that is being painted as we watch, and whose final forms we do not know. We must talk about- Cathay, the Spice Islands and El Dorado rather as if today we believed in the inhabitation of Mars ; and we must repeat the phrase which comes again and again in the captains' reports and relaciones : " By the grace of God we came . . ." as though miracles and not turbines drove the ship. We can then reflect that the Age of Discovery is an experience that can never be repeated by the white race—unless the moon or Mars is another mythical Cathay. (Beside Cathay the strato- sphere has hardly the same exotic interest.) Terrestrial dis- covery on the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth century scale, must now be reserved for some future migration of the coloured races. Their wonder at the sight of conquered Europe, and their opinion of it, would probably resemble very closely the wonder and opinions of C,ortes and Pizarro in the Spanish main.
Mr. Means has written a clear and comprehensive account of this heroic time, for those who wish to exercise their imaginations. He has gone to sound sources, and his economical, readable and intelligent book can claim its place among the few good presentations for the general reader. He is no glamour-monger. He is informed and impartial. Such cele- brated and well-known things as the career of Cortes in Mexico
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