Coming of Age in the Milky Way (6 page)

In words the Greek Stoics would have appreciated, the muse of philosophy upbraids Boethius for his self-pity. “You are wrong if you think Fortune has changed towards you,” she tells him. “Change is her normal behavior, her true nature. In the very act of changing she has preserved her own particular kind of constancy towards you.”
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In Boethius, the universe of Ptolemy is reduced to a symbol of resignation to the vicissitudes of fate:

Boethius was executed in 524, and with the extinguishing of that last guttering lamp the darkness closed in. The climate during the Dark Ages grew literally colder, as if the sun itself had lost
interest in the mundane. The few Western scholars who retained any interest in mathematics wrote haltingly to one another, trying to recall such elementary facts of geometry as the definition of an interior angle of a triangle. The stars came down: Conservative churchmen modeled the universe after the tabernacle of Moses; as the tabernacle was a tent, the sky was demoted from a glorious sphere to its prior status as a low tent roof. The planets, they said, were pushed around by angels; this obviated any need to predict celestial motions by means of geometrical or mechanical models. The proud round earth was hammered flat; likewise the shimmering sun. Behind the sky reposed eternal Heaven, accessible only through death.

           
T
he reawakening of informed inquiry into the nature of cosmological space that we associate with the Renaissance had its roots in an age of terrestrial exploration that began at about the time of Marco Polo’s adventures in China in the thirteenth century and culminated two hundred years later with Columbus’s discovery of America. Astronomy and the exploration of the earth had of course long been related. Navigators had been steering by the stars for millennia, as evidenced by the Chinese practice of calling their blue-water junks “starry rafts” and by the legend that Jason the Argonaut was the first man to employ constellations as
an aid to memorizing the night sky. When Magellan crossed the Pacific, his fleet following an artificial star formed by a blazing torch set on the stern of his ship, he was navigating waters that had been traversed thousands of years earlier by the colonizers of Micronesia, Australia, and New Guinea—adventurers in dugout canoes who, like Jason, carried their star maps in their heads. Virgil emphasized the importance of sighting the stars in his account of Aeneas’ founding of Rome:

Explorers of dry land found the stars useful, too; American Indians lost in the woods took comfort in the presence of Father Sky, his hands the great rift that divides the Cygnus-Sagittarius zone of the Milky Way, and escaped slaves making their way north through the scrub pines of Georgia and Mississippi were admonished to “follow the drinking gourd,” meaning the Big Dipper. Ptolemy employed his considerable knowledge of geography to aid his studies of astronomy; his assertion that the earth is but a point compared to the celestial sphere was based in part upon the testimony of travelers who ventured south into central Africa or north toward Thule and reported seeing no evidence that their wanderings had brought them any closer to the stars in those quarters of the sky.
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Thus, though the principal motive for the new wave of European exploration was economic—European adventurers stood to make a fortune if they could “orient” themselves, by navigating an
ocean route to the East—it is not surprising to learn that one of its instigators was an astronomer. He was a Florentine named Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, and he emphasized that knowledge as well as wealth was to be found in the East. Asia, Toscanelli wrote enticingly to Christopher Columbus,

Much of the romance that colored the Western image of the East had come from Marco Polo’s extraordinary book recounting his equally extraordinary travels in China. Marco came from Venice, itself no backwater, but nothing had prepared him for the likes of Hangchow, which he visited in 1276 and from which he never quite recovered. “The greatest city in the world,” he called it, “where so many pleasures may be found that one fancies himself to be in Paradise.” Hangchow stood on a lake amid jumbled, misty mountains, the literal depiction of which by Sung landscape painters still strikes Western eyes as almost too good to be true. “In the middle of the lake,” Marco reported,

Ornately carved wooden boats were available for hire, the largest of them capable of serving multiple-course banquets to scores of diners at a sitting. Skiffs maneuvered alongside the larger boats, carrying little orchestras and “sing-song girls” in bright silk dresses and boatmen selling chestnuts, melon seeds, lotus roots, sweetmeats, roast chicken, and fresh seafood. Other boats carried live
shellfish and turtles, which in accordance with Buddhist custom one purchased and then threw back into the water alive. The lake was clear, thanks to strict antipollution ordinances, and its banks were given over to public parks—this a legacy of Hangchow’s revered prefect Su Tung-p’o, a gifted poet who was often in trouble with the authorities. Wrote Su:

All of which was a long way from the cold stone walls and plainsongs of northern Europe, and even from the commercial bustle and guile of Venice.

Bolstering the travelers’ tales was tangible evidence of Asian glory, in the form of silks and lacquer boxes and spices and drugs that had reached Europe overland. The Silk Road by which these treasures arrived, however, had long been a costly bucket-brigade of middlemen and brigands, and was now being constricted by the Black Death and the retreat of the Mongol khanates before an expanding Islamic empire. By the fifteenth century the European powers were ready to try reaching the East on their own, by sea.

The epicenter of this venturesome new spirit was Sagres, a spit of land at the southwesternmost tip of Europe that juts out into the ocean like a Renaissance Cape Canaveral. There, in 1419, a spaceport of sorts was established by Prince Henry the Navigator. A devout, monomaniacal Christian in a hair shirt, his eyes baggy with the fatigue of overwork and the vexation of debt, Henry was the first to explore the coast of Africa and to exploit its riches in gold, sugar, and slaves, and the first to navigate a seaway around Africa to Asia.

His library at Sagres contained an edition of Marco Polo (translated by his wandering brother Pedro) and a number of other books that encouraged Henry’s belief that Africa could be circumnavigated, opening up a seaway to the East. The evidence, though fragmentary, was tantalizing. Herodotus in the fifth century
B.C.
recounted (though he did not believe it) a story that Phoenician expeditionaries had rounded Africa from the east, eventually finding that while sailing west they had the sun on their
right
—which Henry understood, as Herodotus did not, to mean that they were south of the equator. Two centuries later, Eudoxus of Cyzicus (no relation to the astronomer) was reported in a book by Strabo the geographer to have found, in Ethiopia, the sculptured prow of a wrecked ship that the natives said had come from the west; Eudoxus took the prow home with him to Egypt and was told by the local sailors and traders that it belonged to a vessel that had sailed out through the Columns of Hercules, never to be seen again. In the
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea
, an anonymous geography dating from the first century
A.D
., Henry could read that “beyond the town of Rhapta”—i.e., opposite Zanzibar—“the unexplored coast curves away to the west and mingles with the Western Ocean.”
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Emboldened by these and similar accounts, Henry installed on Sagres’s windswept promontory an astronomical observatory and navigational institute, staffed by German mathematicians, Italian cartographers, and Jewish and Muslim scholars who were put to work determining the circumference of the earth and drawing improved maps. He drew on the stars for spiritual as well as for navigational guidance; his horoscope had predicted that he was fated to direct the conquest of unknown lands. He did not sail himself, but rather dispatched his expeditions, more than a dozen of them, down the coast of Africa.

His captains proceeded with understandable trepidation. Many believed, on the authority of the ancient geographers, that the Torrid Zone to the south was too hot to endure and that it was guarded by a Green Sea of Darkness that was perpetually enshrouded in fog. Nor did the realities prove to be much less unpleasant than the fables. The sea off Cape Non opposite the Canaries did indeed turn blood red (from ruddy sands blown off the deserts near the coast) and farther south the waters turned green, and there was, to be sure, plenty of fog. At Cape Bojador, called by the ancients “the end of the world,” the coast rose up in a seemingly interminable wall of harborless cliffs. Fifty-foot waves threatened to smash the explorers’ caravels against the rocks of Cape Juby. One landing party stumbled on elephant chips nearly the size of a man. Another was attacked by natives shooting poisoned arrows; only five of the twenty-five man crew survived. Several of the captains turned back,
only to be chastened and threatened by Henry and refitted and sent south again.

In 1455 a Venetian in Henry’s service, Alvise da Cadamosto, watched anxiously as the pole star, theretofore the guiding light of all European navigators, sank from sight beneath the northern horizon. But he was cheered when, as if by way of compensation, the “six large and wonderfully bright stars” of the Southern Cross hove up into view. In 1488, twenty-eight years after Prince Henry’s death, Bartholomeu Diaz finally rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and ten years later Vasco da Gama reached India, after a stormy, ninety-five-hundred-mile voyage that consumed ten months and twelve days. Asked what he was seeking, Da Gama answered, “Christians and spices.”
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