THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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Vasco da Gama set sail for it, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and discovered on his voyage not the Presbyter of course, but the real East Indies. At the same time,
though, the legend of Prester John faded, too many failures had occurred, above all the feudal­theological make­up of the thing became alien to the incipient
bourgeoisie. Ridicule and disbelief increased, as in ‘Don Quixote’, where the land of Prester John, which neither Ptolemy described nor Marco Polo set eyes on’, is
classed and equated with the nonsense in the tales of chivalry. Also the western direction, which had never wholly been forgotten since St Brendan anyway, increasingly
appealed to reason and not just fantasy since the blocking of the eastern route by the Turks. A synthesis recommended itself, facilitated by the spherical shape of the
earth, between the Hesperidean direction and the eastern paradise. Columbus thus united the western dream handed down by classical tradition with the eastern dream
from the time of the crusades. The Atlantic alone now leads to the ‘rising of the sun’ again, to the place where India really ought to begin, and which Columbus still
thoroughly believed to be the remaining piece of paradise on earth.
Columbus at the Orinoco delta; dome of the earth
Many a coast has also been discovered by chance, often without any consequences. A crew which landed or rather was stranded after being driven off course rarely
found its way back. Even when the Greenlander Ericson reached the American coast around woo, without intending to, this remained episodic. This coast was
discovered eleven times before Columbus, once even from Eastern Asia, but because this was all just a matter of chance, nothing came of it. There had to be a
mandate and plan behind the voyage, the new land had to be a goal. Of course, the goal was not always as far away or even as extravagant as that of Columbus, the
boldest traveller and dreamer in one. The Phoenicians exclusively sought markets, not marvels, and Pytheas sailed round Britain as an explorer, not as a fairytale hero.
The Carthaginian Hanno, who sailed round the west coast of Africa about 525 B.C. as far as Senegal, and even as far as the Gulf of Guinea to the so­called mountain
of the gods in what is today the Carneroons, wrote his extant report as an army officer, not as a mystic. Magellan only had ‘el’ passo in mind, the passage through
America into the Pacific Ocean, the whole continent from north to south was probed at that time to find it. And despite his fierce doggedness, despite the risk