::i:Bl!f5!lS9BHfl.' AR1 l)l^H'%^5'S^l ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The Encyclopaedia's a weighty book; Smith's row of dictionaries took Me long to read at and digest (If so) from East back East by West: These, with a history or two, Say, Finlay, Grote, commend to you I of my stays most warmly do. Nota: Should mention Robertson, His India, for 'twas Robertson Set me about the task here done: And Bancroft of the Western Coast, And others pointed as they almost: Starting with Babylon, long time ago, And ending where none seems to know. Quo dura vocat fortuna. CONTENTS PART I PAGE The Old East of Babylonia ... 1 The Old Ph(enicia 6 Miletus and Coeinth 11 Syracuse and the Italic Geeeks . . 16 Peeiod of the Peesian Control . . 19 The Macedonian Philip .... 23 Alexandee the Geeat 25 Sicily and Afeica 29 Egypt, Alexandeia, and Asia Minor 34 Rome vs. Caethage and Coeinth . . 38 Rome to Augustus 41 The Roman Empiee 43 Hadrian Emperor 53 constantine and his capital ... 56 From Constantine to Heraclius . . 62 The West and the East .... 64 Leo the Iconoclast 68 The New West 71 The Coming of Venice 74 Normans in the Eastern Mediter- ranean 78 Commerce and the Crusades ... 80 Venice and the Belgians and Con- stantinople 83 Bruges of the West ..... 86 Genoa 88 The Ottoman Turk 92 Venice from 1453 96 PART II PAOE Portugal Discovers the East . . 103 Elimination of the Portuguese . . 108 The House op Habsburg .... 112 The Dutch 114 The English East and West . . 118 Iberia in the West 121 ACAPULCO AND THE MaNILA ShIP . . 125 The Darien Company op Scots . . . 128 British America and British India . 132 Apprenticeship of the British Amer- icans 134 The American Revolution .... 137 Boston in the East 140 Salem, Boston, and Other Ports . . 142 1815 AND THE China Trade .... 149 From Mecca to Santa Fe . . . . 152 Oregon and California .... 154 The American Eagle 1846 . . . 157 California and the Merchant Marine 160 The Union Pacific 162 The Twins Suez Canal and U. P. R. R 167 A Few Effects of the Suez Canal . 170 The Bagdad Railway . . . . . 172 The Great Transportation War . . 175 EAST BY WEST PART I EAST BY WEST THE OLD EAST OF BABYLONIA Sir Walter Raleigh said, " We must go a long way back to find the Romans giving laws to nations, and their Consuls bringing kings and princes bound in chains to Rome; to see men go to Greece for wisdom, or Ophir for gold, when now nothing remains but a poor paper remembrance of their former condition." We must go even farther back to the time when the Mediterranean was becoming the nursery of our modern western civilization; when the Etruscans were active in Italy, the Turduli and Turdetani in Spain, whose books two thou- sand years ago were allowed an antiquity of six thousand years. Egypt had seen greater centuries before Psammetichus, and Psammeti- chus ruled a century before the Tarquins were expelled. The planting of Tartessus, of Gades, where a temple was dedicated to the wander- ing divinity Melkarth, son of Baal ; the es- tablishment of the colonial city Utica, older than Carthage, remind us that the Phoenicians had already marked the limits of the Mediter- 1 2 EAST BY WEST ranean long before the Greeks knew the Pillars of Hercules, or even Sicily. The Argonauts, we suppose, sought the Golden Fleece in Colchis, which being inter- preted has been read as signifying that Greeks of Thessaly were early in the Black Sea for the Indian trade. And the Indian trade led any- Avhcre to the East, by Babylon, by Barygaza, the Malabar Coast, Ceylon or Taprobane, and as far as Serica, the silk country, which we call China now. Babylon, formed by position for a seat of empire and commerce (we note to-day a Bagdad railway), even in the time of Ham- murabi must have been a meeting place of East and West for trade. That age, the twentieth century before Christ, was one of great changes in the world, by which Western Asia was as- sured a Semitic predominance to be the shaper of near Eastern civilization until the Mediter- ranean stocks were nurtured. " You only have I known of all the families of the earth, and I will visit all your iniquities upon you " as of Israel, so of Babylon, skilled in the manu- facture of linen and cotton, of all kinds of ap- parel, of innumerable articles of luxury, such as sweet waters, walking sticks, engraven stones, and importing the precious stones of India, Indian dogs, Indian dyes, the gold and gold dust of the deserts where the griffins watched in Gobi. EAST BY WEST 3 Before the Persians had interrupted the navigation up the rivers from the Persian Gulf, there were two main channels of the import trade to Babylon, one by water and the other by caravan. In the old flourishing days of the river trade to Babylon, the inhabitants of Gerrha in East Arabia were one of the richest peoples of the world, and for this they were indebted to their traffic in Arabian and In- dian commodities, which they transported into the West by caravan and to Babylon by their ships. For although the Gerrha men dwelt in a barren district, (but a salt country, and thence a part of their fortunes, as with the Venetians), yet they were near to Arabia Felix, the native region of frankincense and other perfumes, which the Babylonians consumed in quantity: Herodotus mentioning that annually the Chaldseans put to use a thousand talents of frankincense in the temple of Bel. All this valued freight was conveyed to Babylon in such abundance that a great overplus, after the capital was supplied, was carried up the Eu- phrates to Thapsacus, close in to the Medi- terranean, and from Thapsacus over much of far western Asia. The merchants of Gerrha also sent their ships above Babylon to Opis on the Tigris, and from Opis caravans went out to the interior of Asia. The Gerrha men, with little to start upon, became handlers in the 4 EAST BY WEST large products of Arabia and East Africa, cinnamon of Ceylon, Persian and Indian pearls. Babylon was their chief market, Babylon the magnificent. Herodotus saw the place in his mind's eye at least. " Assyria," he wrote, " possesses a vast num- ber of great cities, whereof the most renowned and powerful, Babylon, whither after the fall of Nineveh the seat of government had been removed. The city stands on a broad plain, and is in form an exact square. In magnifi- cence there is no other city that approaches it. The city is surrounded by a broad and deep moat, full of water, behind which rises a wall fifty royal cubits in width and two hun- dred in height. On the top, along the edges of the wall, the makers constructed buildings of a single chamber, facing one another, leaving between them room for a four-horse chariot to turn. In the circuit of the wall are a hundred gates, all of brass, with brazen lintels and side posts. The city is divided into two portions by the Euphrates, which runs through the midst of it, a broad, deep, swift stream. The city wall is brought down on both sides to the edge of the stream; thence, from the corners of the wall, there is carried along each bank of the river a fence of burnt bricks. The houses are mostly three and four stories high : the streets all run in straight lines, not only EAST BY WEST 6 those parallel to the river but also the cross streets which lead down to the waterside. At the river end of these cross streets are low gates in the fence that skirts the stream, which, like the great gates in the outer wall, are of brass and open on the water. In Assyria the river does not, as in Egypt, overflow the com lands of its own accord, but is spread over them by the hand or by the help of engines. The whole of Babylonia is intersected by ca- nals. Of all the countries that we know there is none that is so fruitful in grain. " The greatest wonder of all," Herodotus said, " that I saw in the land, after the city itself, is this : The boats which come down the river to Baby- lon are circular, and made of skins. The frames, which are of willow, are cut in the country of the Armenians, above Assyria, and on these, serving for hulls, a covering of skins is stretched outside, and thus the boats are made, without either stem or stem, quite round like a shield. They are then entirely filled with straw, and their cargo is put on board, after which they are suffered to float down the stream. Their chief freight is wine, stored in casks made of the wood of the palm tree. They are managed by two men who stand up- right in them, each plying an oar, one pulling and the other pushing. The boats are of va- rious sizes, some larger, some smaller. Each 6 EAST BY WEST vessel has a live ass on board, those of larger size have more than one. When they reach Babylon, the cargo is landed and offered for sale : after which the men break up their boats, sell the straw and the frames, and loading their asses with the skins set off on their way back to Armenia. The current is too strong to allow a boat to return up stream, for which reason they make their boats of skin rather than of wood. On their return to Armenia, they build fresh boats for the next voyage." THE OLD PHCENICIA That Avas the near East, reckoning from what West there was. In the West, before our alphabet was, we may fancy the Phoenicians on their beautiful strip of coast between the Lebanon and the sea. There was a genius in Sidon, a faculty for making the most of the data of life in the practical way. We cannot trace the rise of Sidon and the growth of Tyre : certainly by the twelfth century before our era the Phoenicians were a sea power, and en- gaged in the overland trade. They had learned how to work a ship, and how to man- age the business of a caravan. For five hun- dred years after 1200 the Phoenicians of Phoe- nicia ranged far and showed themselves very efficient. The Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Indians, these were not sea-far- EAST BY WEST 7 ing peoples, and the products of India and Arabia must be distributed. The Idumsean Arabs, dealing towards Petra and the Red Sea, and the Arabs of Gerrha addressed themselves to the problem with good success. The Phoe- nicians were more enterprising still. They were settled on the Mediterranean, knew what Babylonia and Egypt were, and looking into the West were led on to discover what was there as well. The merchants of Tyre and Sidon equal to princes were thoroughly efficient. They made their part of the Mediterranean shore a warehouse for the world, where everything that might administer to the necessities or the lux- ury of mankind was to be found, distributed as occasion best offered. The glass of Sidon, the purple of Tyre were the product of their own country and their own invention. And for their extraordinary skill in working metals, in hewing timber and stone, in a word, for their perfect knowledge of what was solid, great, and ornamental in architecture, the reader need only be put in mind of the large share they had in erecting and adorning the temple at Jerusalem, under their King Hiram. Their fame for taste, design, and ingenious in- vention was such that whatever was elegant or pleasing, whether in apparel, vessels, or toys, came to be distinguished by way of excellence 8 EAST BY WEST with the epithet Sidonian. If you had lived in the Mediterranean at the time Rome was found- ing, you must for convenience send to Tyre, we will say, for timber of Hermon, cedar of Leb- anon, oak of Bashan, ivory of the Indies ; fine linen of Egypt, hyacinth of the Peloponnessus, lead, tin, iron and vessels of brass; slaves, (ex- cellent market for slaves), pearls, precious stones and coral, balm, spices, gums, wool and silk; which with grain, wine, horses, mules, sheep and goats, and many other articles of trade came in to Tyre by land and sea from Syria, Arabia, Damascus, Greece, Tarshish, and other places difficult to fix. Who put together our alphabet? Tyre and Sidon, we will say, and the peoples that traded with them, here a little and there a little, signs and symbols found practicable in doing busi- ness. Read the prophet Ezekiel, who says nothing about the alphabet, and form some idea as to where the alphabet came from, and what was the price paid for it. " These were thy merchants in all sorts of things. With thy wisdom and with thine understanding thou hast gotten thee riches. By thy great wisdom and by thy traflfic hast thou increased thy riches. Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering. By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled EAST BY WEST 9 the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned. Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities, by the iniquity of thy traffic. Therefore all they that know thee among the people shall be astonished at thee, thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more ! " These assemblers of our alphabet we must be astonished at. Con- sider them merely as directing a caravan trade to Gerrha, or by Tadmor to Babylon, or by Petra to Yemen of South Arabia ; trafficking to East Africa ; or among the Greek isles for wine, and doing a great wine trade to Egypt; send- ing out their ships to Cadiz, (a long way to Cadiz, more than seventy-five days from Tyre by the old coasting method), and although in Spain for the silver there, not neglectful of the tin of Britain and the amber of the north ; from Cadiz establishing factories far down the Afri- can West Coast, bartering baubles and gew- gaws for leopards' skins, elephants' teeth, and other desired articles. Trade was brisk dur- ing the century before the start of the Persian Empire (to go no farther back), and the merchants of Tyre and that country knew how to carry it on. Ezekiel, the prophet, is good authority, but it is a pity (meaning no irrever- ence) we have not some record in detail of these transactions preserved by the merchants them- 10 EAST BY WEST selves, the honorable of the earth: a bare cal- endar of certain of their books for a year would make interesting reading now. But Ezekiel had spoken, and shortly after- wards came Nebuchadnezzar in the year 585 to besiege Tyre for thirteen years ; coming from the North with chariots and horsemen and companies and much people, and setting en- gines of war against the walls. Babylon planned to impose itself upon the world, and Tyre seemed to stand in the way. Conditions were somewhat thus : There was the Mesopo- tamian East ; there was Egypt, the nearer East, now growing modern what with the ad- mission of foreigners ; there were the Greeks of Europe and Asia, greatly active but not a power in the traditional sense ; and there was Tyre, with the empire of much of the sea, and touching all the world one way or another. What of these forces was to control the world during the next following centuries.-' Should it be Mesopotamia, reclining under a canopy and beholding the industry of the world tribu- tary to Babylon .'* It could hardly be Egypt: might it not be the Greeks? for T3're was com- mercial, and could be counted upon to yield to the political exigency. A century or two, (Mesopotamia getting another chance through the Persian and the Mede), and the issue would be clear. It is not impossible there was shrewd EAST BY WEST 11 philosophy at Tyre already, balancing the weight of the Greeks. For Miletus and Corinth could not be blinked. Naucratis in Egypt was a fact significant at least. Syra- cuse and Massilia were significant. Had not Phoenicia been once fixed commercially in the Black Sea and the ^gean? Who was there now? Time and strategy might bring the world around to a political supremacy with its seat in the West. We may read good poli- tics into the rise of Carthage, New-town in Mid- Mediteranean : " If the West is to grow, let us grow with it." MILETUS AND CORINTH Certainly Phoenicia had lost in the North long before the emergence of the Empire of Per- sia. Since whether or not the Northern route to the East was of extreme importance then, what gain accrued from it fell to Miletus, of all Greek cities the most active and solid for long before the Persian conquest of west- ern Asia. The Milesians were nimble witted lonians. They were perhaps primarily cloth merchants. But from the excellence of its sit- uation and the convenience of its four harbors, one of them capacious enough to hold a fleet, the town Miletus rose to be the preponderant city among the lonians. Indeed, before the year 500 Miletus had become the greatest of 12 EAST BY WEST Greek cities. Its ships sailed to every part of the Mediterranean and even to the Atlantic. But the Milesians gave their attention princi- pally to the Black Sea and the Northern trade ; and as they traded they colonized. Like the Genoese a thousand years after them, they knew the Crimea, the rivers of Russia, and all the shores of the Black Sea. And like Venice they went into Egypt and had their self gov- erning station or factory of Naucratis : where Solon exchanged his attic oil and honey for Egyptian millet and wisdom. Those years from 625 to 550 were interesting years for Egypt: Psammetichus, Necho, Hophra, Ama- sis, Pharaohs opening the country to the for- eigner, Greek and Phoenician ; reviving the old canal project from the Nile to the Red Sea, sending Phoenician ships around Africa, fight- ing Babylon, and finally coming under the rule of Persia. What was the meaning of all that? Egypt was middle ground. Babylon was mov- ing towards the West. Egypt cast aside tra- dition and brought in strangers, Greeks and Phoenicians, soldiers and sailors, mercenaries and traders. It was too late. The Egyptians had been sea-shy too long. The rule must be to new men, or of the East or of the West, Persians or a people speaking Greek. In this respect the fortunes of Miletus were bound up with those of Egypt. Miletus now may stand EAST BY WEST 18 as the symbol of the rising Greeks: this city had found the North, had come into the South, and could not but be concerned at the appear- ance of a new power beyond the Tigris. As a matter of fact, first Egypt, then Miletus (year 494) succumbed to Persia. But that was merely a phase. Empire was due West. A bare fifty years after the decline of Mile- tus, Thucydides could say, " Athens imports everything." Athens was indeed a town of ideas. No doubt the Corinthians had better commercial heads, and learned soonest what the Phoenicians had to teach in the strict arts of trade. Sisyphus, the founder, had a good com- mercial head himself. Periander, whose tragic history has come down to us, lived long and was a wise man ; to him the city owed its great- ness as much as to any man. But Corinth was well placed for trade. The settlement became early important from lying on the Isthmus road, the commerce of Greece being at first mainly by land and necessarily following this road of the isthmus if north was to reach south and south north. The Corinthians were in the way and imposed duties. They grew to a cer- tain opulence by their tariffs. They profited by the conditions at sea as well. North of Crete, stormy seas caused merchants to bring their goods to the Isthmus. Wares of the West, Italy, Sicily, and beyond, were brought 14 EAST BY WEST to the harbor Lechaeum ; those of the East to Cenchrea, merchandise of the Phoenicians, products of the islands, and the coasts of Asia Minor. Commodities were conveyed from one harbor to the other, and means contrived for transporting even vessels. Corinth, now a mart of Asia and Europe, continued to levy du- ties on foreign merchandise, built her own ships and formed a navy to protect her commerce, for example, sailcloth and reams of paper from Egypt, ivory from Libya, leather of Cyrene, incense from Syrian ports, Phoenician dates, Carthaginian carpets, corn and cheese of Syra- cuse, pears and apples of Euboea, Phrygian and Thessalian slaves. The Corinthian Fair must have been a great spectacle in its best days, for the games of the Isthmus also drew to Corinth a prodigious number of strangers, whence an increase to the wealth of the State. Corinth abounded not only with warehouses, but with manufactories of its own. The place was celebrated for its brass (not yet happily for the true " Corinthian ") whether manufac- tured at home or imported; for its earthen- ware besides, bed coverlets, pictures and statues. There were few Corinthian men of letters, but the art of painting is said to have been elaborated there, and the city was a fa- mous dealer in objects of art. A maritime and commercial city, its temple of Venus was EAST BY WEST 15 at one time so rich as to maintain a thousand votaries. Corinth invented the trireme, and was the first of the Greek States to set up a military navy. That policy meant expansion, and the city was successful beyond all Greek States as a colonizer. The aristocracy, as at Carthage, was in trade, and adhered in a special man- ner to the customs of the Phoenicians with col- onies. In the flourishing eighth and seventh centuries at Corinth, the rule was to place at the head of a colony some cadet of the Bac- chiad line, supported by the mercantile nobil- ity. Thus arose Corcyra and Syracuse. Cor- cyra, being nearer home, broke away, at odds with its parent over the trade to the West and the dominance of the sea to the West. Syra- cuse for long was filial enough in cordial re- gard. It is interesting to reflect on the part played by these children of Corinth Corcyra precipitating the Peloponnesian War, Syra- cuse seeing an end of it, Athens done for in its mad enterprise that way. It is to be sup- posed that Greece had a destiny in the West. But there was no union of energies, which per- haps is as much as to say that no part of cen- tral Greece was strong enough to bring all the rest under and then move on any line chosen. Is it possible for small states to accomplish a great deal politically? Hardly, says one 16 EAST BY WEST school, for if they act together they are one state. SYRACUSE AND THE ITALIC GREEKS Even so late as Cicero, Syracuse was called by him the greatest of Greek cities and the most beautiful of all cities. Syracuse was Sicily, a paradise compared to sterile Hellas. Beginning by the ingenuity of Corinthians this colony became the center of Magna Gracia, a world we understand little of, in especial why it accomplished no more in the end. That question need not vex us now, we having our own solicitudes springing from the activities of races with domineering programs. But we may recall that the Greeks in their westward trend came to Sicily from Corinth and Cor- cyra. Other Greeks coming, they all, a few years after Romulus, were active in Italy. Then, when the Calabrian peninsula had grown quite Hellenic, (when Psammetichus was giving outlanders footing in Egypt), still other Greeks found the way to Spain and Gaul. Kolaeus, merchant of Samos, voyaging to Egypt, was driven out of his course and finally somewhat beyond the Pillars of Hercules, among the Iberians and the Phoenicians. This astonishing voyage to the silver coasts of Tar- tcssus was not followed up by system, but shortly after, Greeks of Phocasa, near Smyrna, EAST BY WEST 17 came to settle in Gaul. The old story is a good one. Phocaeans made the coast of Spain, where King Arganthonius the Tartessian was pleased with them and offered them room. They refusing, Arganthonius gave them money to defend their town against the Persians. But the Persians were too many for them, and half Phocasa left home forever, returning to the West, first to Corsica, then settling in Italy. From there, maybe, they colonized Massilia, Marseilles on the southern coast of Gaul. It is said that the daughter of King Nannus of that region, whether by accident or design, gave her hand in marriage to the Pho- casan merchant Eudoxenus : and so the Prin- cess Petta was co-founder of the Grecians at Marseilles. The Massaliot Greeks made their city a gen- uine specimen of Hellenism. They were care- ful in their dealings with the native tribes ; they attempted nothing in the way of domi- nance, merely by superior intelligence and in- dustry supplj'ing the country's wants and showing the country what a lettered civiliza- tion was. The Masaliot Greeks were curious. Their navigator Pytheas explored the coasts of western Europe as far as the Baltic and perhaps beyond. Indeed, after the energy of the Ionic Greeks had been checked by their in- land enemies, the Massaliots were the only en- 18 EAST BY WEST terprising mariners in the western Mediterra- nean, excepting the Carthaginians and the Phoenicians. The Hellenic world was in the sixth century different from what it was in the fifth century. Had not the Ionic Greeks been so hard pressed from behind, from about the year 500, the Phoenicians in Tartessus would have been confronted as they were in Sicily. In the sixth century the Italic and Ionic Greeks were the great ornaments of the Hellenic name, and their trade with each other was more de- veloped than the trade of either with Greece proper. By the middle of the fifth century the independence of the Greeks of Asia Minor was gone, and the power of the Italic Greeks was greatly broken. Sparta and Athens, of politi- cal aptitudes, were now up, and what their rivalship led to we know. The Persian wars came near uniting the Greeks. Then Athens went too far, and Syracuse, most of all, broke Athens down. Let us lump the Persian and the Phoenician as essential factors in that world, remembering that in the same year 480, the Persians were at Salamis and the Carthaginians moved on Sicily. The case was altered since the time when Egypt was being opened up, and Greek mercenaries were defending Phoenicia against Babylon. As affairs went, sea power meaning so much, the struggle was on b}' the year 480, between the EAST BY WEST 19 Greek and the Phoenician naval armaments. The Greeks, very individualistic, had been startled, first by Croesus, then by Persia, into some sort of union. Persia thought to absorb the Ionic cities, lying between Persia and a western sea. Bias, the sage, counseled a gen- eral removal of the Ionic populations to Sar- dinia. His advice was not followed, nor did Persia quite absorb those states. But if Per- sia was to keep its hold of them, and chastise Attica for its sympathies, then Persia, having no ships, must use the ships of the Phoenicians, at hand and in control. Very intricate poli- tics then Greeks everywhere, using their wits everywhere, (Skylax of Karyanda, for instance surveying the Indus for Darius, father of Xerxes) ; Phoenicians everywhere, if we let Car- thage pass as Phoenician; the conspicuous po- litical force of the world lodged in Persia. PERIOD OF THE PERSIAN CONTROL After the event, we may regard Persia as merely the preparer of the way for Macedon ; and the Greeks and Phoenicians in the West as but the shapers of the Mediterranean for Rome. Commercially, the world stood how at the com- ing in of Persia and during the grasp of Per- sia ? About as thus : The whole of central Asia, already brought in closer contact by the policies of Assyria and Babylon, now assumed 20 EAST BY WEST the internal arrangement of a settled empire, and the merchant pursued his way in some tran- quillity from Sardis to Bactria. Central Asia was as well known then as now, perhaps better, there being more to know, Babylon was there, the capital of the world. Tyre and its Phoe- nician neighbors still served as the principal channels of trade from Asia to Europe. Egypt had opened Naucratis to sea-traffic, let- ting in East and West for to try, as it were, which should possess the power there. A phase of the extraordinary Greek expansion of the eighth and seventh centuries, Cyrene, west of Egypt on the coast road to Carthage, had been founded by Battus of Thera, and the region Cyrenaica soon grew great commercially, a rival to Carthage. Across the sea, (" Our Sea " the Greeks might have been saying then), Italic Greece was fast getting the wealth which was to prove so fatal to it later, the pil and wine trade to Gaul and Africa being especially lucrative. Massilia was Greek, for the inter- nal trade of Gaul. Gades and other independ- ent Phoenician toAvns had for centuries been monopolists of the trade of Spain, metals and all the rest. Carthage, which rose to commer- cial greatness under Hanno as Persia was com- ing up, began soon to be more than commer- cial: commercial certainly, holding Africa as its own by trade, with its destiny plain in the EAST BY WEST 21 Mediterranean. The Pontic Greeks (among whom Hannibal was to die), now rather cut off from their bases in Asia Minor, Corinth and Athens had secured for themselves the com- merce of the ^gean and the Black Sea. We have no particular reason to mention Rome or Macedon for a good many years after the ar- rival of Persia in 550. Persia, Macedon, Rome, how pleasing it is to observe them in the rude beginnings of their strength, for we must suspect that civilization, if not certainly a weakener, is so unless very carefully managed. But when all is said, the rise and fall of nations remains a mystery. Nor is it anything but idle to enquire the cause at length. The world is a world of souls, and if many people in a nation let their souls get wrong, the nation is bound to fall off. Not even great men can save a rotten people. The Persians as they were at first made a very good showing indeed. They soon learned how to be soft. It has been held that Philip of Macedon was an abler man than his son Alexander. Maybe the hard drinking Macedonians had more virtue in them than the hair splitting Greeks who succumbed to them. If only there was such a thing as an all round man or an all round nation. Is that what we are tending towards, destined to make endless trouble until the happy event.' For instance, the world has 22 EAST BY WEST been full of slaves because of mankind's inborn desire for freedom. This is no apology for Persia. It is matter of gratification that the forms of slavery have changed with the cen- turies ; and we are glad enough that Persia was worsted and Carthage rooted up. We have no fancy for the story Herodotus tells of Xerxes, setting out from Sardis, how on either side the road the army went was hung one-half the body of a man for the purpose of teach- ing the subjects of Persia a lesson. The slaughtered man was the eldest son of Pythius, an ancient of Phrygia, very rich. He had en- tertained Xerxes in the coures of his march from Cappadocia, and had previously recom- mended himself by hospitality to Darius, fa- ther of Xerxes. The moneyed Pythius was so lavish in his offers of aid for the expedition against Greece that Xerxes asked him what was the amount of his wealth. " Besides lands, slaves, and two thousand talents of silver," re- plied Pythius, " I possess four million darics of gold, less a few thousand. All this gold and silver I present to thee, retaining my lands and slaves, which will be wealth enough." Xerxes was pleased, refused the offer, and even gave the old man seven thousand darics, so as to bring his treasure up to four millions exact. Pythius then preferred a prayer: his five sons were all about to serve in the army for invad- EAST BY WEST 23 ing Greece might not the eldest be allowed to keep at home to care for his father in his declining years? The anger of Xerxes was at once enflamed. " Wretch," he said, " you are my slave. I, with my sons, brothers, relations, and friends, am on the march against Greece. Dare you talk to me of your son? The pun- ishment inflicted on you shall not be the full measure of your deserts. You and your four sons shall be spared; but him you wish to keep in safety shall forfeit his life." And so the command was given to put the eldest son of Pythius to death, sever his body in twain, one- half to be fixed on the right hand, the other half on the left hand of the road along which the army was to pass. Conquerors know how to color their narratives, but this story is doubtless really significant of the old fashioned despotism the world had to shake off. And a complicated business it is. THE MACEDONIAN PHILIP On the other hand, Liberty could not feel itself greatly encouraged by the careers of Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander. Those were difficult times, and the side with a definite policy could make advantage of its opportunities. Philip was a Macedonian, not a Greek. He did not understand the Greek spirit, which considered the rights of man a 24 EAST BY WEST good deal. He was not bothered by Greek refinements, and coming into a confused time for Greece, made himself felt throughout, go- ing rough shod. The Hellenic world was de- clining in health: Demosthenes (to take him at the traditional valuation) could not bring it round. Sparta was corrupt and dead. Thebes was not potent now. Athens was strong at sea again, but unable to manage her confederacy : the citizen militia had gone down, there was an aversion for military exercises and a fondness for mercenaries. Philip came to his throne in the year 359. Within ten years he had terrified Greece. His engines of war were admirable the Sarissa, long pikes or lancers ; the phalanx ; light infantry ; siege batteries. He showed the world how an army could be disciplined, not for spring and sum- mer, but for all the year campaigns. He built fast ships, in part merely to prove that he could take the sea, to vex Athens by the sight of his triremes. But he was not trifling. For his empire he needed his neighbors of the Olyn- thian Confederacy. At one time it was thought he might absorb that Confederacy without war. The result was not so. He an- nihilated thirty-two cities of it within two years and a half, and Greece was in terror. Ten years after, notwithstanding the Athenian navy, he could call Greece his own, so to speak. EAST BY WEST 25 At his Congress of Corinth he announced his purpose to invade Asia, and made conditions by which Athens was humbled into giving up a maritime supremacy in Greece. Then Philip was assassinated, aetat. 47, a great man, " de- stroyer of freedom and independence in the Hellenic world." ALEXANDER THE GREAT Alexander his son had already shown him- self a skillful commander, and coming into his heritage of an elaborate military system, was prepared to go on with his father's work. Aristotle had schooled him to believe his mis- sion was somewhat of a divine one. Alexander was an apt pupil. To hold Greece, Alexander knew that he should have to bring Persia to terms. The Persian policy was not now to control Greece, except by diplomacy by bribes to raise up a party that should keep Macedonia from controlling Greece. Hence Alexander's course was marked out for him, even if his ambitions had not been vast. His army was behind him, and he was nominated President of a general Hellenic Confederacy, with full powers by land and sea, each unit of the confederacy to keep its constitution. So much for conventions. The deputies granted to him as to his father permission to invade Asia. But before invading Asia, Alexander 26 EAST BY WEST deemed it prudent to quell Servia (what we call Servia), and the Danube country. He accom- plished this errand speedily. Thebes growing restive, Alexander effaced it from the earth. Afterwards he fancied that ill luck came to him from the inspiration of Dionysus, god of wine, a principal figure in Theban legend. Alexan- der the great was thoroughly familiar with Greek literature. He knew the tragedies and the old theories of retribution. The operations of his mind were just, swift, and vehement as a military strategist he stands before all of antiquity. His mind accordant to fact, in his reading he looked for the interpretation of fact and the indication of the high powers above fact. Meteoric, in some lay manner he drew upon the theoric fund. Moving into Asia in the spring of 334, Alex- ander never came home to Europe again. His life thenceforward was a miracle of eleven years, ending fittingly at Babylon. One opin- ion regarding his achievements has been that the result was much as if Xerxes had conquered Greece in the century preceding. Greece dwindled to a mere community attached to an eastern empire. Some such outcome might al- most have been forecast. Greeks had been long concerned in Eastern affairs, and being Greeks their intelligence was to rule in the end. During Philip's time Greeks had won EAST BY WEST 27 back Egypt for Persia. Alexander overcame Darius, in whose effective force were more Greeks than were in the armies of Alexander. If we are to appraise Alexander, it might be said that he did the rough work necessary to the formal Hellenizing of Asia. No matter what, he would have won, but as it was, his enemies misemployed their wits. Memnon's policy of wearing down and using fleets to strike the rear would have damaged Alexander much. The millions of money in the strong boxes at Susa and Persepolis (hoarded against evil days ) might have been dangerously applied in fending; in bearing gifts to persons influen- tial by land and sea. What policy the Great King permitted availed nothing we check the items of his ruin, and further : the Granicus : Issus: Siege of Tyre: siege of Gaza: Egypt: Arbela: Babylon: Persepolis: India: Babylon, and the end. Chaldaean priests had warned Alexander not to enter Babylon the second time. When the end came, open minded philos- ophers with the army may have entered a memo- randum as touching the untimely death of the monarch whom Kallisthenes, open-minded phi- losopher, had refused to worship, suffering death in consequence. Alexander would have heeded the Chaldaean priests. He was argued out of his decision by the man of letters, Anaxarchus, who had moved 28 EAST BY WEST first in the matter of proposing honors to the conqueror as to a divinity. Besides, Alexan- der was enthusiastic to see the new docks he had ordered for Babylon, and the cypress-wood ships that were building there, and the ships from Phoenicia that were to come down the river, transported from the coast to Thapsa- cus. He was also to consult his admiral Near- chus, with whom he had sailed down the Indus to the ocean, and to receive the reports of other naval officers who had been surveying the Per- sian gulf. It was the determination of Alex- ander to circumnavigate Arabia, learn the sea road to the East from the Red Sea (forgotten since Skylax), found a great maritime city in the Persian gulf to rival in wealth and com- merce the cities of Phoenicia. Tyre and Gaza had stood in his way the hardest fighting of his life. He subdued them, after nine stubborn months. He understood the movement of the world's commerce and meant to control it, but was especially resolved to make sure his hold on western Asia, where neither Greek nor Phoe- nician was to bo left able to support Persia. And so Alexandria was marked by meal in ground plan, year 330, the idea being not so much to establish the commercial city the place became, as to fix a base from which to rule Egypt as part of the founder's empire round the ^gean. There is no saying how insignifi- EAST BY WEST 29 cant Alexandria might have been, if circum- stances had not made it the capital of its own Ptolemaic monarchy. As Kallisthenes said, " There is little to be gained by making Alex- ander out a God." Certainly, he had a devis- ing mind. The Persians had run a few good roads, from Sardis perhaps as far as India. Had Alexander lived he would have multiplied such communications. We read that at the time of his death he was considering a road all along the northern coast of Africa, to involve naturally the brushing aside of Carthage. He met his death from the interest he took in re- storing the old river traffic by Babylon. His admirals had their reports drawn up for sea routes to the East, from the Red Sea to the Malabar coast. Alexander had given orders for a fleet to explore the Caspian Sea. He be- lieved still in the Northern Mystery, that the Caspian was connected with the Eastern ocean. Aristotle, we must not forget, had talked much with him, and had posed the question " May not India lie near the Pillars of Hercules ? " SICILY AND AFRICA After Alexander, what.'' Conspicuously, an Hellenic East, Ptolemaic and Seleucid; con- spicuously in the West, Greeks opposite Car- thaginians ; and, not so conspicuously for many years, the bulking of Rome as a land power 30 EAST BY WEST Greek-Macedonian, Carthaginian, Roman, their destinies very much involved; to which of them the power to direct East, West, or both East and West? The time had plainly come for movements on a great scale in which the West must be more nearly concerned with the East. Alexander had made a stir in the world. Look- ing back it can be seen that he set a fashion that was to have a long vogue ; it can be seen at the least, that there was something inherent in the West that was to make it rule. Alex- ander has had sedulous apes, many of them very able, many not counting palpably. Ophelias, who commanded one of his triremes down the Indus, was a few years later put in charge of the Cyrenaic country west of Egypt, which Ptolemy desired to keep hold of. The report is, that from Cyrene Ophelias had surveyed the whole coast of Northern Africa, to the straits of Gibraltar and round the old Phoenician set- tlements on the West Coast. Ophelias knew something of what Alexandrine meant. When Agathocles the amazing ran the Carthaginian blockade about Syracuse and invaded the fair slavish territory of Carthage in Africa, he made offers to Ophelias, who for his coadjutor- ship was to have North Africa, Agathocles keeping only Syracuse and Sicily, which could not be held unless Carthage w^as checked. Ophelias joined forces and got murdered for EAST BY WEST SI his pains. Agathocles, whose history reads like a sort of bizarre dream, won home to Sicily and carried through a long life successful to the end. His daughter Lanassa was the fourth wife of Pyrrhus, whose character as a restless adventurer, " His eager desire and pursuit after what he had not, hindered him from keep- ing what he had," is written down so nicely in Plutarch. Pyrrhus began his brilliant ac- tions about the year 300, shortly after Aga- thocles had come home from his African ex- cursions. Alexander had done much in the East. Why should not Pyrrhus, Epirot too, subdue the West? He came very near it. But Rome was not dashed by his new engines of war, his elephants, was not to be brought to terms at the worst moment, kept muddling on, and got rid of the Epirot. In Sicily he worsted Carthage, but was unable to manage the Greeks. Leaving the island he said, by the account, " My friends, how glorious a field of war do we leave for the Romans and Car- thaginians to fight in." Pyrrhus knew what the issue was in fact. He had come to grips with both, and had gauged the Greeks. The Italic Greeks had ser\'ed as a stop-gap, giving Rome a chance to rise, although it must be said that, among those complexities, Rome was kept free of Greek dominance by the pres- ence of the Carthaginian. By coming in, the 32 EAST BY WEST Italic Greeks had broken the through East and West traffic of the Tyrians. Trouble from Mesopotamia had caused Tyre to send out its Colony, New-Town in Africa, Carthage, which was increased by the settlement there of old commercial firms and noble families of Tyre, trouble in Asia continuing. A good site, Car- thage grew and formed a political program, to hold the western Mediterranean by organiza- tion. So the Italic Greeks coming into the vague west (like Europeans to America), began to be hampered in their developments. They were pretty widely civilized. Rome and Car- thage, to the North and South of them, cared little for the arts and sciences as such. Car- thage, at the clash with Rome had the more culture. Land at Rome, capital at Carthage were the desiderata. It might be said of both that there was an unscrupulous employment of political ascendancy in the furtherance of the private interests of every wealthy citizen. Rome, gaining more and more land in Italy, must naturally look to a maritime control of the Italian coasts, to a closing of the Adriatic, and the shaking off of Carthage wherever feasi- ble. For after the expulsion of Pyrrhus from Italy and Sicily, had not Carthage warned Rome not to push matters too far? "Unless we will, no Roman may even wash his hands in EAST BY WEST 33 the sea." Inevitably, Punic wars, wars for the purple, a hundred years and more to 146, when Carthage disappeared for a time from the earth. As for the Italic Greeks, what they might have done we cannot say. They knew the doctrine of Prometheus, Sisyphus, Laokoon. Perhaps they had their great chance with Pyrrhus. Their funeral was celebrated by Marcellus when he took their city, Syracuse, in the 3^ear 212, and sent back to Rome so many fine pictures and statues, giving Rome a new taste. The greatest wealth and prosperity of Syracuse was during the sixty years precedent to Marcellus, under Hiero and alliance with Rome, Hiero's grandson went back to Carthage and brought ruin down. Under Hiero Sicily had flourished, that " oecumenical island," a very important melting pot. Commerce, with Egypt in espe- cial, was assiduously cultivated, the Greek Egypt of Philadelphus, Euergetes, and Philo- pator. How edifying to contemplate Rome ap- proaching Egypt by Sicily Sicilian protec- torate, Egyptian intercourse, Egyptian protec- torate ; for after Philopator Rome ruled Egypt with reference to her own Eastern policy : noth- ing could please Rome better than such a pro- tectorate bolstering weak Ptolemies, curb- ing strong Ptolemies. 34 EAST BY WEST EGYPT, ALEXANDRIA, AND ASIA MINOR Egypt, O Ammon, what a country was there. We have nothing to do with the old Egypt of the young world, but begin late with Psamme- tichus and the origins of the western control. Who has put down the Burden of Egypt.'' Concerned with commerce it is difficult to keep moral issues enough before the mind. Com- mercially, Egypt was never so prosperous as under the just, able Ptolemies. It is very cer- tain that during the forty years of Phila- delphus, Egypt was the most flourishing coun- try in existence. Soter had worked to get the kingdom to himself, and had set much a-foot for its betterment. His son Philadelphus, more than capable, carried on the congenial task. Macedonians like the first Ptolemies and their neighbors of the Seleucid line knew how to handle " native populations " and bring them round and out. The Egyptians, from being haters of the sea because it swallowed up their Nile, were brought to understand how their Nile could be made to swallow up the sea, that is, the commerce of the sea. We can imagine the astonishment of old Egyptians at beholding the center of the country shifted to its edge, brought right down to face the great suspected world outside. Alexandria was building many years, but may be ascribed as much to Phila- EAST BY WEST 35 delphus as to any a spacious work for a large purpose, nothing less than to form a capi- tal for the world's intellect and its commercial affairs. The new city looked out North to the Mediterranean, South to the Lake Mareotis. It was intersected lengthwise by straight, par- allel streets, this arrangement leaving a free passage for the northerly winds which alone convey coolness and salubrity into Egypt. A very wide thoroughfare, said to be 2000 feet wide, began at the Gate of the Sea, and ter- minated at the Gate of Canopus. In this ex- tensive range the eye was never tired with ad- miring the marble, the porphyry, the obelisks, destined later to embellish Rome and Constanti- nople. This street, the handsomest in the uni- verse, was crossed midway by another of equal breadth, a square formed at the juncture half a league round. From the middle of this great place, the two gates were to be seen at once, and vessels arriving under full sail from the North and the South, Lake Mareotis being joined by canal both with the Nile and the sea. The high Pharos without, the libraries within gave light to traffic and to the mind. Pharaoh Necho had had some such dream. He planned to join Red Sea and Mediterranean. His priests dissuaded him, arguing that the Mediterranean \vas the higher, Avould flow in and swallow the country. Philadelphus digged 36 EAST BY WEST the canal, from Arsinoe, near Suez, to the Pelusiac branch of the Nile. This was not enough. The Suez end of the Red Sea was dif- ficult for shipping. Philadelphus was deter- mined to bring the South Eastern trade in by all roads possible. He found a sheltered haven at a spot he called Berenice, about midway of the Red Sea. Up the Nile from Alexandria, some three hundred miles, Philadelphus fixed upon Coptos, near the old Thebes, as an in- land emporium. So vessels coming up the Red sea could unload at Berenice, (the port was changed at one time to Myos Hormos, farther north), send their cargoes on by caravan to Cop- tos two hundred and fifty-eight miles, twelve days, and thence by river boat to Alexandria. Strabo and Pliny have described the route at length. At first the caravans traveled by star- light, then cisterns were installed and the cara- van could go as it pleased. In Pliny's time the trade of the Red Sea was largely Indian, but to Philadelphus Indian meant chiefly ^ the Southern or African trade towards Sofala, Solomon's Ophir, John jNIilton thought. At any rate, Philadelphus was damaging Tyre as far as he well could. In pursuance of that end he founded Ptolemais, below Tyre, to supply the Syrian coast with commodities of Europe ; 1 West and East Indies were in the very old times divided at the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb. EAST BY WEST 37 and Philadelphia, on the eastern verge of Pales- tine, connecting with Tadmor, the Euphrates, and the Persian Gulf, So the Alexandria of Philadelphus was ad- justed commercially for the land trade over Asia and Africa, for the sea trade of the Medi- terranean and the sea trade of the Indian Ocean great part of the trade of the world. With respect to the land trade, Philadelphus could have nothing to do with the Northern route from Indus to Oxus to Caspian and Black Sea that was the concern of Seleucus and his son, Seleucus planning a canal from the Caspian to the Black Sea. But Philadelphus at least had his eye on India: he sent the mathematician Dionysius there, whose reports were very ex- act. Seleucus had ordered Megasthenes to In- dia, ambassador to Sandracottus ; and it is to be supposed that the great foundation of Seleu- cus, the city Antioch, drew to itself much of the caravan trade of Mesopotamia. As for the Mediterranean, Alexandria was constrained to share with Corinth, Carthage, and Rhodes, Rhodes at this time beginning to be very indus- trious as manufacturer of war munitions and as organizer of commerce in the large. Corinth was now very active in the Indian trade by the Black Sea and the Northern route. But Phila- delphus, universalist, placed Alexandria on a sure commercial basis, maintained with vicissi- 38 EAST BY WEST tudes for how many centuries until navigation went another way about Africa. After Pyr- rhus left Italy it is said Philadelphus made a treaty with Rome. The Sicilian Greeks were also his rivals in trade, but they found an ex- cellent market with him for their wool. Archi- medes, who went down with Syracuse, followed his studies at Alexandria, under a philosopher attached to the Museum of Philadelphus. The world was pretty closely connected then. And as Rome grew and Roman luxury grew, Alex- andria throve and throve, catering to that lux- ury, before and after absorption by Rome. ROME VS. CARTHAGE AND CORINTH From Rome to Syracuse is not very far to- day: it was a long road in the making. And it is a little curious that from Syracuse to Carthage and from Syracuse to Corinth the distance by the map is much the same as from Syracuse to Rome. Long after the forces have been differently correlated it is pleasing to the fancy to draw such lines and speculate on how the correlations came about. Mommsen affirms that before the overturning of Hannibal and the taking over of Spain, the Romans had no higher aim than to acquire command of the Italian Peninsula, that they achieved the sover- eignty of Italy because they strove for it ; EAST BY WEST 39 whereas the control of the territories of the Mediterranean was a good deal thrown into the hands of the Romans by the stress of circum- stance, they themselves not intending to acquire that control. How startling to hear Mommsen say further : " The living of different nations side by side in peace and amity upon the whole, although maintaining an attitude of mutual antagonism which appears to be the aim of modem phases of national life, was a thing for- eign to antiquity. In ancient times it was nec- essary to be either hammer or anvil." Rome's destiny was great and dreadful, but the early Republic of Rome knew nothing of that: the government then wished and desired nothing but the sovereignty of Italy, and had logically to be careful not to have too powerful neighbors alongside. From the very sound view that they ought not to suffer the kernel of their empire to be dwindled by the shell, the government op- posed stubbornly the introduction, first of Africa, then of Greece, and lastly of Asia into the sphere of the Roman protectorate, until cir- cumstances in each case compelled, or at least suggested with irresistible force, the extension of that sphere. The ancient world knew al- most nothing of a balance of power among na- tions ; the growth of Rome was but the neces- sary development of the international relations 40 EAST BY WEST of antiquity generally. It is well to listen to Mommsen at this stricken moment in the world's affairs. However, if that is the high philosophy of Rome's career, it is certain that there was among the Romans a blind dread of Carthage, leading on to vast results. And it is very prob- able that the dread of Carthage at last, like the dislike of Corinth, was inspired by the mercantile party. Those at Rome interested in commerce must have felt that the year 146 was an excellent year for them, what we call a bullish year. On the fall of Carthage, the bull of Phalaris was returned to Sicily, but most of the booty fell to the Roman State: most of the prisoners were sold as slaves, but not Hasdrubal's wife. The ruins of Carthage, Cato's advice followed, burned for seventeen days. The plow was passed over the site of Carthage, so as to put an end by legal form to its existence. The soil and site of Carthage were cursed forever, so that neither house nor cornfield might ever reappear within the space covered by the bull's hide of the clever Tyrians. Turn we to Corinth, year also 146. The Greeks by their folly brought their troubles upon them, and were better off after Rome's chastisement than they had been before: for the Romans, very enthusiastic for abstract Hellenism, spared the Greeks, all except Cor- EAST BY WEST 41 inth, that greatest commercial town of Hellas. It was the deliberate resolve of the Roman Sen- ate to destroy Corinth conspicuous pressure from the mercantile party, no doubt. The army entered the city and all the men left in it were put to the sword, all the women and slaves sold. Statues, paintings, and valuable furniture having been removed for sending to Rome, fire was set to the houses and the whole city was consumed. Its trade, now Roman wholesale, went to the convenient small island of Delos, which had already drawn away a great part of the business of Rhodes. Delos in its best days, active emporium of East and West traffic, sold as many as ten thousand slaves in a day. From Syracuse as bisector, Rome had now well taken up the two ends of the line from Corinth to Carthage. The two peoples that had so long contended on the plains of Sicily for the dominance of the Medi- terranean fell at once before the rival whose existence they had then hardly recognized. ROME TO AUGUSTUS Rome had been contriving all this manage- ment about the world, but who was to manage Rome? Very important question as between democrats and aristocrats, new men and old established men, plain men and ornate men, hungry men and well fed men, and also as be- 42 EAST BY WEST tween factions inside either party, especially the conservative party. In other words, Rome had grown both so strong and so weak that a hundred years of Revolution must show it the way to some sort of practical balance between its strength and its weakness. Roman and Italian problems were become so acute that for the settlement of them the world must be sub- dued. As regards the process, we may be al- lowed to pass over the Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, and many others, but on our way towards Au- gustus, we are bound to stop a little at Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar Pompey, who did such good work in the East, and Casar, whose great work in the West stands yet. Cae- sar made Gaul Roman, and so caused the early Germans to go about their education in a more orderly manner. Pompey rid the Mediter- ranean Sea of pirates, and completed the struc- ture of the Roman State in Asia, with its feudatory kings and vassals, its priests turned princes, and its series of free and half free cities, not unlike the Holy Roman Empire of the North. When Pompey left Asia, Egypt was the only state of the Hellenic East that was still nominally independent. Alexandria was very rich, and the oligarchy at Rome had been long unwilling for any individual either to conquer or administer Egypt. The Ptole- mies bribed as long as they could. Finally, EAST BY WEST 43 the year Caesar moved on Britain, the Roman protectorate of Egypt was converted into a direct military occupation, Roman infantry and troops of Mark Antony's cavalry (Ger- man and Celtic) being garrisoned at Alexan- dria. In brief, when we use the words " crown," " state," " commonwealth," we mean some- thing ; and a nation is not getting on well unless it understands the meaning of one or another of these terms. The Romans had a good defini- tion once; then, after developments, they found themselves compelled to agree on another defi- nition, and this, arrived at with Augustus, was accepted by the world for a long time. Is a world-state possible under milder conditions? Dionysius, the Areopagite thought so, and be- came a martyr for his belief. He was in Egypt when the people of Jerusalem brought about the death of Jesus and of the remarkable eclipse of the sun he beheld at that time is said to have declared : " Either the Divinity suffers or sympathizes with some sufferer." -h THE ROMAN EMPIRE PAX ROMANA, short of genuine peace, this the gift to the world of Augustus of the Julian House, must have been grateful to the world 44 EAST BY WEST now long drawn one way and another by war. In ships of Alexandria, about the year 60, when the Julian House was tending to its end. Saint Paul made his celebrated voyage from a port in Asia Minor to Puteoli and so to Rome. Paul of Tarsus in Cilicia, " Roman bom," being imprisoned for his faith at Caesarea, off the coast of Syria, adduced his Roman citizen- ship, appealed his case to Caesar, and was des- patched by Festus the governor and Agrippa the king to Cassar (Nero Claudius Caesar) at Rome. Not until very recently has the world been much at a loss for time. In those days there was plenty of time, and it is very inter- esting to follow how a voyage was made from the coast of Syria, a little below Tyre, to Nero's Italy. Embarking at Caesarea in a ship of Adramyttium, (a place near the jHelles- pont), Paul with other prisoners set sail and the next day touched at Sidon. Putting to sea from thence, they sailed under the lee of Cyprus on account of contrary winds. And when they had crossed the sea off Cilicia and Pamphylia, they came to Myra, a city of Lycia. There the officer in command of the prisoners found a ship of Alexandria bound for Italy. In this vessel they sailed slowly many days, the winds being bad, over against the promontory of Cnidos and under the lee of Crete. With difficulty coasting along the island of Crete, they came EAST BY WEST 45 to a place called Fair Havens, South coast. The winter had now set in, and Paul admon- ished them that by sailing further at that time, the ship's cargo and their lives would be en- dangered ; he had had much experience of the sea. The military officer aboard listened rather to the master and the owner of the ship than to Paul, and it was decided to sail for Phoenix and winter there, a haven of Crete looking north east and south west. A south wind blowing softly, they weighed anchor and sailed along Crete, close in shore. But a tempestuous wind arose, called Euraquilo : the ship could not face this, made no attempt to face it, and was driven. After a time, dreading the Syrtis off Africa, they began to throw freight overboard. Then, no stars nor sun shining upon them for many days, they lost all hope of being saved. Paul reassured them. He was certain that his errand was to Rome. It was as he said. On the fourteenth night of the storm, the sailors fancied they were drawing near to some coun- try; they sounded and found twenty fathoms, then fifteen fathoms. When it was day, not knowing the land, they skillfully used the seas to run the ship aground. It was proposed to kill the prisoners, but the centurion interfered, and all hands got to shore. They had reached the island of Melita or Malta. The barbarians there showed them no common kindness, kind- 46 EAST BY WEST ling a fire and taking care of them. The chief man of the island, Publius, entertained certain of them three days. After three months, they set sail in a ship of Alexandria the Castor and PoUux or Tzvm Brothers, which had win- tered in the island. They touched at Syracuse with the Castor and Pollute, from thence made a circuit and arrived at Rhegium. And after one day a south wind sprung up, and the next day they came to Puteoli fast sailing. And so to Rome. Puteoli, in the Bay of Naples, chief port of Italy under the empire, did a great trade with Africa, Spain, Tyre, but especially with Alex- andria for corn, and India merchandise. The Castor and Pollux was perhaps a corn ship; a pretty large ship if it could take on board the two hundred and seventy-six of St. Paul's company. By Lucian's later description a golden goose at the stern was the sign of a corn ship. Seneca, who may have known Paul, says in one of his letters, that of all the vessels coming into Puteoli, the Alexandria corn ships were alone permitted to enter the harbor with their topsail set. When the Alexandria ships came in the port was much alive. Seneca de- scribes the scene and draws from it an apt com- mentary on life in general no great advan- tage from hurrying through, " non est res magna vivere.^^ As has been observed, navi- EAST BY WEST 47 gation then was not hurried. Shipmasters seem to have been wary of the Mediterranean from the autumnal equinox well into January. The sea traffic of the ancients was a coasting traffic, a dog-barking navigation it is called now, within sound of the land dogs. Mankind learned its business a good deal that way : unex- pected results from small beginnings and keep- ing at it. Indeed, coasting was about the only navigation until the discovery of America until the geographer Ptolemy's ideas began to work again. It is difficult for us to understand that a dozen years, maybe, before St. Paul's tedious voyage from Syria to Rome, one of the most striking achievements of the old naviga- tion was being made that is, the straight- away sailing from the bottom of the Red Sea to the Malabar Coast. Hippalus, commander of a ship in the India trade, ventured thus to make use of the Western Monsoon. By Pliny's end, (near Puteoli), the route was fixed out in midsummer to the Malabar Coast, back in December with the Eastern Monsoon. This Red Sea trade, now so thoroughly or- ganized, had for a long time been working slowly to the disadvantage of one of the main old established routes to the East, the incense route, so called, by Petra in Arabia. In very ancient times Gaza had been a great station in the Eastern or Arabian trade, and Petra was 48 EAST BY WEST the place where the Gaza road branched off to Palmyra and North Syria. Before Egypt made friends with the sea, the eastern trade to Egypt was a caravan trade, following the road through Petra, either from Damascus or from the Persian Gulf. The road from Petra, straight through the desert to the Persian Gulf in the Gerrha country, was the principal road making the old fortunes of Petra. Petra, that is to say, had been long a center for all the main lines of traffic between East and West through it, Egypt and the Western Mediter- ranean had been supplied. Naturally, the sea route of the Ptolemies to Alexandria, enhanced by the Romans, was a blow to Petra. Which loss was somewhat offset by a sea trade to the western coast of Arabia, at Leuce Come, thence by caravan to Petra and Rhinocolura on the Mediterranean a little to the west of Gaza. But this device of the Petra men did not prevent the Eastern trade from going principally to Alexandria. The Nabataeans, in whose country Petra lay, are said to have grown accustomed to piracy and ruthless wrecking in regard to ships coming up the Red Sea. For a long time Petra and the Nabatasans flourished. One way and another they decayed, and the Emperor Trajan in the year 105 subverted the Kingdom of the Nabataeans, a rather mysterious people. From that time Palmyra took on new life and EAST BY WEST 49 grew until its fall, astoundingly. It is pos- sible, also, to interpret the rise of Palmyra differently, to see in Palmyra nothing but the transference of Petra, the Alexandria trade having always to compete with some such car- avan route. Another influence in these shiftings was the up-coming of the Parthians, that vigorous race passing the old Persia on to the new Persia. The Parthians, before Trajan, had damaged the chances of the Nabatseans and encouraged Palmyra. The Arsacids of Parthia, whose course, (226 b. c. 22G a. d.), ran in the pe- riod between the founding of Alexandria and the founding of Constantinople, were a difficult line for Rome. Indeed, the emergence of Parthia marks the turning point in the history of an- tiquity. If the Macedonians of Syria had maintained their grasp of the East, the whole would have come in time under Rome. Since Alexander, the world had obeyed Occidentals alone, but with Parthia shaking off the Seleu- cids and withstanding Rome, the East re-en- tered the sphere of political movement: the world had two masters again. Looked at from the west a retrogression was thus started, lead- ing on to the Alhambra of Granada and the great Mosque of Constantinople. The attempts of Rome to check the Arsacids, the many wars with Parthia, could not fail of effects on the 50 EAST BY WEST commerce of the East to the West. It was the policy of the Parthia to stop the direct inter- course between the East and the West. The Parthians granted passage to no stranger through their dominions. The India trade in consequence went by Alexandria as a sea trade ; or was handled direct, and from Parthia, by the merchants of Palmyra. How much went by the Northern Route it would be impossible to determine. As a matter of fact, Palmyra showed an amazing activity with the decline of Petra and the rise of Parthia. And the Baby- lon of the Parthians, Seleucia, grew to be a great trading town in a state somewhat closed. Palmyra, even more than Petra, was well placed for the caravan trade. Its site, the oasis Tadmor, lay on the best road from the PhcEni- cian ports to the East, considering the inhos- pitality of the country beyond Damascus going east. The oasis Tadmor was also in the road to Central Arabia by Petra. King Solomon had encouraged a Red Sea trade, but after him it fell away for centuries, being replaced by a caravan trade from Phoenicia to South Arabia and the Persian Gulf. The Chaldjean empire shoved the central and southern Arabians for- ward, and Palmyra was discovered by the Arabs in command of trade to Phoenicia to be a very convenient station. At first a mere halt- EAST BY WEST 51 ing place, the oasis grew into a city as condi- tions changed and the caravans from the Per- sian Gulf stopped there more and more. There was no track of road to the east, but west of the oasis wagon transportation was feasible after the Roman highway appeared. As between Parthia and Rome, Palmyra kept a trimming course, a prudent mercantile course, but Rome would have no compromise in the end. For near two centuries Palmyra was, from all accounts, an extraordinary place, more remarkable per- haps than Petra, but the two are not to be compared. Its trade was vastly profitable. The city laid heavy duties, export and import, even farming out the water of its two wells. Sucessfully to plan and conduct a great cara- van was held to be a distinguished service to the State. Hence numerous monuments to mer- chants. Besides those on lesser streets there were seven hundred and fifty such columns on the great central avenue beginning at the Tem- ple of the Sun and running northwest seven hundred and fifty monuments of rose white lime- stone, each fifty five feet high. We must sup- pose, says an observer of the ruins, that this and the other pillared streets were shaded from the fierce heat of the sun like a modern bazaar and in some quarters the pillars seem to have served to support a raised footway from 52 EAST BY WEST which loungers could look down at their ease at the creaking wagons piled with bales of silk or purple wool, or heavy with Grecian bronzes designed to adorn some Eastern palace ; at the long strings of asses laden with skins or ala- bastra of precious unguents, the swinging cam- els charged with olive oil from Palestine or with grease and hides from the Arabian deserts, and the motley crew of diverse nationalities which crowded the streets beneath the slave mer- chant with his wares from Egypt or Asia Minor, the Roman legionary and the half na- ked Saracen, the Jewish, Persian, and Arme- nian merchants, the street hawkers of old clothes, the petty hucksters at the corners of- fering roasted pine cones, salt fish and other cheap dainties, the tawdry slave girls whose shameful trade went to swell the coffers of the State, the noisy salt auction presided over by an officer of the customs. The production of salt from the deposits of the desert was appar- ently one of the chief local industries ; and an- other which could not be lacking on the con- fines of Arabia, was the manufacture of leather. Thus prosperous Palmyra, until the disorgani- zation of Parthia led the rulers of the Palmy- rencs to fancy that they themselves might be rulers of much of that region of the world. We know the story of Longinus and Zenobia, and the nullifying of Palmyra : the city de- EAST BY WEST 6S stroyed and the population put to the sword. Palmyra gone, Aleppo rose, another stage in the progress to Byzantium. HADRIAN EMPEROR Hardly anybody knows how little we know of the commerce of the ancients. We speak lightly of strategical centers and routes of trade, by the Red Sea and Alexandria, by Petra, Palmyra, and other places, but when Hadrian was Emperor who is to say in what manner the cities of the proper Asia were sup- plied by commerce from the East? five hun- dred populous cities there, " enriched with all the gifts of nature and adorned with all the refinements of art." If that many under the Csesars, certainly as numerous under Hadrian. The many inventions of the merchants of that day we know almost nothing of. It is mislead- ing to regard the Empire under Hadrian, com- mercially, as representative of the Empire as far as Constantine ; but those centuries no doubt were as little changeful as any with re- spect to commerce, and it is a pleasing fancy to glance at the Empire, for trade, as if with the Emperor Hadrian, who was so fond of traveling about to see with his own eyes what he had read of in any part of his dominions, from Scotland to Armenia. For this period and for long be- fore and after it, there is evidence enough that 54 EAST BY WEST merchandise could be transported to any good market anywhere, which is no more than saying that there were good markets everywhere, with all that good markets imply. At the Far East, then as until very recently, almost the only com- modity desired in trade with the West was money. But in the articles of spices, silks, and jewels, to go no farther, the Far East found a good market then very far West. It is only a few days, observed Seneca, from Spain to India. If you were born under the sign of Cancer, you should, they said, be a merchant, that is, a trav- eler for merchants had to travel then, just as in the middle ages before the establishment of a fixed postal service and a settled security of the roads. The actuating reasons were a little different. Merchants of Imperial Rome found their way ready paved for them to the three continents, and they could take shipping hither and yon. There was the Via Appia east to the Via Egnatia, Macedon, Thrace and By- zantium ; there was the Via Appia south to the Messana ferry, Sicily, Africa, and the coast road to Spain ; there was the Via Flaminia, north, and the Via Aurelia west to Gaul. At Puteoli has been dug up the grave stone of Ga- ins Octavius Agathopus, merchant of Imperial Rome: "After weary journeys from Orient to Occident, here rests." And the tomb of a merchant of Hierapolis in Phrygia shows by EAST BY WEST 55 the inscription that he "had sailed seventy-two times round Cape Malea to Italy." There was a sort of poetical encyclopaedia written during Hadrian's time. The author sets it down that he was no merchant, no voyager, and had never crossed the Indian Sea to the Ganges, as so many had done who set their lives at stake for riches. Rome had once made laws against its aristocracy being in trade. As Rome grew to be the world such laws could hardly hold. Peo- ple of all ranks took a profit when and where they could. But the strictly Roman attitude was throughout a good deal scornful of trade. The governing class, that is to say, liked to see traffic going forward under its political direc- tion. Political economy may not have been clearly understood as a science for the good of the greatest number. Rome was there to gov- ern the world, and the world's work must some- how settle the costs. But if commerce was ev- erywhere known to be a support of the Empire, here and there it was extremely respectable, as at Alexandria, " where only snow was not to be had." Ships of Alexandria were in every ha- ven, in the Indian Ocean, in the Black Sea, off Cornwall. Descendants of the old Phoenicians, " Syrian merchants," were in every likely coun- try. Tyre and Carthage were great commer- cial towns again under the Empire. What those towns had worked for during centuries 56 EAST BY WEST had come to pass East and West were one sure market. But Carthage and Tyre were merely factors in its management. Carthage, still with three hundred African cities behind it, would have been pleased to have the political direction of the magnificent grazing estates of Gaul under the Empire, the cities of Gaul, the three hundred and sixty cities of Spain ; or the political direction of such a place as Aquileia, (near Venice that is), the staple for the through traffic from the northeast to Italy and Africa; or the political direction of the bestowal about the world of the stewpans of Publius Cipius Polybus, so many of which have been found at diverse places in the North. Animula, vagula, blandula, quae nunc abibis in loca? Ha- drian's question is applicable as well to the spirit of commerce and the life of nations. CONSTANTINE AND HIS CAPITAL The Emperor Hadrian spent the winter of the year 119-120 in Britain. He had his head- quarters at York, whence he surveyed the prov- inces. With him was his wife Sabina, whose presence would be fair proof, if other evidence was lacking, that York was then reached by the India trade, through Londinium, no doubt, that rising town on the Thames. Hadrian in Brit- ain the Romans in Britain ; seven volumes on the Empire, according to the author, are EAST BY WEST 57 " bodied in epitome by what remains of Ha- drian's Wall." For himself, said Merivale, he felt that all that he had read and written on this wide and varied subject was condensed, as it were, in the picture he realized from a few stones and earthworks of the Roman occupa- tion of the British marches. Along that north- ern wall, Gauls and Germans, Thracians and Iberians, Moors and Syrians, to mention no others, held the frontiers of the Empire. They got their orders in Latin. Juvenal spoke of that time very sharply, and gives us to under- stand that Rome itself was then more Greek and Semitic than Roman. The complications of a world State are necessarily many. Races persist, and nation-making is a pursuit that both ambition and duty like to follow. Mere chance enters into the account, and inexplicably pariahs grow into bosses. But chiefly, as the world goes, it looks as if the East was the East. And for a long time there has been the added trouble that the West has been making itself. When Constantine came out to York, (his jour- ney so swift from Nicomedia near Byzantium, by way of Boulogne), he knew very well what a difficult task it should be to keep the East and the West together. The structure of the Em- pire had begun to crack long before. The phil- osophy of Marcus Aurelius was doubtless given a complexion by the thoughts he must have had 58 EAST BY WEST among the QuadI by the Gran what destiny had these people in the world, and how should Rome fare with them so stubborn? Questions recurrent over and over again, the best answer after Marcus Aurelius being to educate the North, bring it into the polity, but that was no simple program even for Diocletian. Problem also in the East, with regard to a new Persia. The Emperor Valerian, and the Emperor Aure- lian, {restitutor orbis, effacer of Palmyra), had found the new Persia of the Sassanids too much for them. Problem also in the new re- ligion, new-modelling wherever genuine and gen- uine in many quarters. Could one man, even bolstered to a divinity as Emperor, or could a committee of emperors, keep control of all the provinces from York to the Oasis of Tadmor, and North to South, from the Danube to the Great African Desert? As for a committee of Emperors, Constantine found it in the circum- stances impracticable. He got the power to himself, and then carried through his plan of removing the focus of his power to the East, hitting upon Byzantium as a capital for the world, Byzantium on the Thracian Bosporus which lo swam. The Balkan States have produced many con- siderable men. For instance, Alexander the Great, Diocletian, and Constantine. These men, with a keen eye for the world and much EAST BY WEST 59 conversant with it, looked especially to the East. By Diocletian's scheme for administer- ing the world, whether from pride or policy, he himself withdrew from Rome, and established the seat of his own particular government at Nicomedia near the Hellespont. He, the greater Emperor, chose the East, leaving the West to his colleague, and Rome insensibly be- came confounded with the dependencies of the West. Constantine, at the first Emperor of the West, then Emperor of the World, resolved to govern from the East. " Born not far from the Danube, educated in the courts and armies of Asia, invested with the purple by the legions of Britain," Constantine looked with cold indif- ference upon Rome. He would found a new Rome, little distant from Troy, parent of Rome. In forcing the Hellespont, on his way to supreme power, Constantine had observed Byzantium closely. There, year 330, Month of May, he solemnly inaugurated his new capi- tal, Constantinopolis, dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Persia, still an enemy, had centuries before cast a bridge below this spot to over- whelm the West, but the West had furnished Alexander to check Persia. Since then the West had changed ; Rome had gone out into all the earth, but in a sense had done no more than take over the work of Alexander, affording Hellenism its development. WTio had made 60 EAST BY WEST Asia-cum-Egypt politically Greek, and whose power had kept it Greek? Now the world had found its capital again where had been an old Greek colony, looking more East than West. The West was still in the making, and the East was the East. Immediately upon the founding of Constantinople, struggle began as to whether it should be a Greek or a Latin city. We know which party won. Seven-hilled Byzantium upon its gently slop- ing promontory which serves as a connecting link between the Eastern and the Western world, a spot meant by nature as it seems for the center of a great monarchy, passed to Con- stantinople, very early a magnificient commun- ity. " Whatever rude commodities were col- lected in the forests of Germany and Scythia, as far as the sources of the Tanais and the Borysthenes, whatever was manufactured by the skill of Europe or Asia, the corn of Egypt and the gems and spices of the farthest east," were brought by the varying winds into this port from the Black Sea, from the Mediter- ranean. Commercially the fortunes of Con- stantinople were at once assured, because the Roman world could show no better site for a trading town. Commerce was much despised by the Romans they suffered in the end from those prejudices. The Greeks of the Empire regarded trade more favorably. Since the be- EAST BY WEST 61 ginning of the third century they had been dominant in the East again, as administrators under Rome. The remains of the Macedonian and Greek colonies in Asia Minor, Egypt, and Syria doubtless composed the most important body of citizens in the empire of Constantine. Everywhere they held themselves apart from the more native populations. Antioch and Al- exandria had been their emporia. Without attributing a perfect statesmanship to Con- stantine statesman enough as organizer of a civil service quite distinct from the profes- sions of arms and the priesthood we may suppose that he desired for his city not only a place in the sun of the world's politics, but the control of the world's commerce besides. Granting Constantine a contempt of trade personally, he knew the Danube country and the importance of the Black Sea commerce in all its phases. Alexandria was much in that trade. Corinth risen again, now both prosperous and miserable, was largely in the Black Sea trade. Why should not Constantinople be great in the Black Sea, greater than any city had been, and draw to itself as well much trade from the rest of the world? At least, the event was so. Antioch, half way from Alexandria to the new capital, declined on the establishment of Con- stantinople. Smyrna the silk market, declined. From the fall of Petra to the rise of Constan- 62 EAST BY WEST tinople we may trace a more northward thrust for the caravan trade from the Southeast. Constantine died at odds with Persia. From the standpoint of traffic, the founding of his city marks the period when the carrying trade of the West was again falling into the hands of the Greeks, and when the Greeks were becoming very active again in trade to the Black Sea and beyond, to Armenia, India, Arabia, Ethio- pia, and even as far as Ceylon. Greek traders and missionaries were going where no Roman had ever been, in Africa and not only there. FROM CONSTANTINE TO HERACLIUS How should the case be put in brief for the three centuries from the death of Constantine to the death of Heraclius? During that inter- val Romania went greatly down in the West; and also Romania in the East fell away. Ro- mans in the one quarter, Greeks in the other, with powerful excuses to be sure, destroyed themselves. Both East and West, the govern- ing class, fated, could not understand. The world was not standing still, and there were few people of the old order to direct the course of it. Theodosius of the Christian faith, last Em- peror of the Mediterranean countries, was pa- tron of Alaric the Arian Visigoth who declared he was driven by a voice he could not withstand to undo the work of Theodosius. Genseric, EAST BY WEST 63 Arian Vandal, sailed out of Carthage for the North, " against whomsoever God's anger was directed." The pagan Attila, a most terribly serious man, failed only by a miracle it was said (at the Battle of the Marne) in imposing his rule upon the Roman West. A thousand years before the Turk came into Constantinople, At- tila, only Emperor of all the North, Slav, Teuton, and the rest, founder of Venice as destroyer of Aquileia, had been kept out of Rome by the merest chance. We cannot say what impelled Attila, nor Odoacer bidden by the saint of Noricum " Fare onward into Italy." And it is a question, even giving Odoacer and Theodoric their just dues, how Rome was en- abled to pass to Justinian in any way Roman. Nor is it clear how Constantinople and the nearer east were preserved so long from the overturnings of a different race, until the West had been to school again and learned an- other way about. Commercially^, the son of Theodosius who received the East had a good heritage, to say nothing of any parts of it but Constantinople, north, and Alexandria, south. The Black Sea trade, the Danube trade, trade of Asia Minor and the Aegean, so much for Constantinople; and as for Alexandria, that city flourished by its old traffic until the Sara- cen made a new dispensation. But Sassanian Persia, symbolized by Bahram that wild ass, 64. EAST BY WEST was the first enemy of Constantinople, and be- fore the Saracen appeared, compact, Persia had been cutting more and more away from the Roman Emperors of the East. Justinian's brilliancies, every way, had been very costly. Heraclius, who was to show himself so great a military strategist, in the six years after he came to the throne saw Persia overrun Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Asia Minor. Hard pressed to the North as well, Heraclius found a modus Vivendi in the Balkans, and then turned upon Chosroes of Persia, whom he extinguished. As with the Achsemenids, so with the Sassanids, their last end was one of considerable ambitions and great futilities. Darius scorned the Greeks ; so did Chosroes and Yazdegerd. The times were different now. There was to be no longer struggle between Greek and Persian. The East had produced something new in the world a United States of Arabia, wild tribes, in the estimation of both Persian and Greek mere " lizard eaters," but of a force sufficient in one and the same year 640 to gain a victory of victories over Yazdegerd, and to remove Alex- andria finally from among the possessions of Heraclius and the Greeks. THE WEST AND THE EAST The West had long been disorganized. Where there are people there will be trade, and EAST BY WEST 65 there was trade in the West of course. But ordered commerce in the warehouse fashion must for an age have found its main depots in the Eastern Empire. Constantine had created a civil service a highly efficient bureaucracy for governing, each department of the State's business a separate profession. This new sys- tem, to last at Constantinople so long, was from the first in direct opposition to the people. The trader, for example, was not counted of the state, except for purposes of mulcting. Commerce, notwithstanding went on, and prosperously enough for the court itself, with its customs immunities, to indulge now and then. The Eastern empire was rich. If it had not been rich it could not have subsisted. There was capital in the East. There were mines and manufactures in the East. Large commercial affairs were transacted from the East ; naval supremacy and a mercantile mar- ine were there. From Constantine to Herac- lius, if the West was growing to be less and less of an expensive market, the Greeks con- trived to supply what market there was, and nearer home their market was very good. The political control of the world had greatly shifted since Hadrian's visitations, at which time there was no lack in Britain and on the Rhine of all the luxuries of the East Aegean vintages and cloths, perfumes, spices, and jew- 66 EAST BY WEST els of India, ivory and slaves of Africa, silks of China, objects of art in marbles, metals, paint- ings, and earthenware. Changed conditions brought impoverishment to the West, and un- der Justinian, where there had been luxury, there was hardly a sufficiency of the rudest commodities. Until long after Justinian, despite of Persia, the management and political control of the world's commerce had lain with Constantinople. Persia in the way, Justinian had been forced to a measure of vast conse- quence to the Greeks, as the event was with the coming of the Saracens. Persia, (like Parthia when Marcus Aurelius, the " Emperor An-Tun," had sent his envoys to China), stood a bar to the trade in silk. Justinian, in alliance with Elesboas, Christian King of Abyssinia, attempted first to turn the silk trade from Per- sia to a route by the Red Sea. This was not feasible. Then Justinian was approached by two monks who had been in China. They brought with them to the audience silk worms in a cane, and a practical acquaintance with the rearing of them. The Emj)eror was pleased, and by the introduction of the silk worm which followed, secured to the Greeks a thorough control of the trade in silk, cutting out the middlemen of Persia. Here was advantagc- ment to the Greeks against an uneasy time when the Saracen had taken over Persia and EAST BY WEST 67 much besides. But Justinian had gone far afield, his ideas and accomphshments had in- volved great outlays. To recover, he devised a system of monopolies which ultimately drove the trade of the Empire into other hands. The conquests of Justinian in Itah'^ were long retained. The people of Rome, Genoa, Venice, Naples, Amalfi, clung to the Empire when they might have been independent. They looked East, and had not the capital to carry on trade with the East without assistance. Their return cargoes were largely slaves from the North and other raw materials. By degrees Amalfi and Venice got a fund of capital. Jus- tinian's monopolies, from being distasteful to them grew alluring. Useful to the Empire, their vessels had been allowed to carry arms. They began to break the customs' laws and fin- ally drew away from all allegiance. So with Justinian and Heraclius there were consider- able changes started in the course of trade. The Arabs coming up so suddenly the Imperial wars with Persia had opened their eyes and getting to the coast around so much of the Mediterranean, gave Constanti- nople and the Greeks a severe jolt. The Greeks missed the ruling of Egypt and North Africa. The Arabs found a numerous maritime popula- tion there and in Syria, but they did not form a maritime power in the West. The Constan- 68 EAST BY WEST tinopolitans remained masters of the sea, and they still possessed the greater share of the commerce they had had in the Mediterranean. Being carriers, they still controlled the India trade, although not politically ; and the North- ern route by the Black Sea had not been inter- fered with. The fur trade and the India trade of the Black Sea was of vast importance to the Greeks, and of vast importance to the peoples settled North and Northwest of the Black Sea. Constantine's city schooled much of the North, and many of the Italian towns, and was there to show the Saracen that Rome was not yet dead. LEO THE ICONOCLAST After Heraclius it was not long until the Roman Empire in the East disappeared, tech- nically. The crescent seemed already to be departing from the Romans of Byzantium. With the second Justianian, last of the family of Heraclius, we close the era begun with Con- stantine founder of the new Rome. Techni- cally, there had been no break Avith the West, even in the year 476- Then, so the interpre- tation was, the West had been merged again in the general empire as under Diocletian. So late as Charlemagne the West made fine points in setting up title to its own Empire. But when Charles Martel was establishing the Frank EAST BY WEST 69 dynasty, it was not a season for nice questions of the law of the crown at Constantinople. Leo III, reorganizer of the Eastern Empire, and first of the strictly Byzantine sovereigns, had to employ all his skill not only to pre- serve the terrain of Constantinople, but to save Europe from the waxing Arab. Leo the Icon- oclast was indeed of a constructive genius. When he came into power in the year 716, the Bulgarians and Sclavonians were wasting on the European side up to the walls of Con- stantinople: the Saracens were ravaging the whole of Asia Minor to the Bosphorus. The Saracen Empire had now reached its greatest compass. From the banks of the Indus to the shores of the Atlantic in Mauretania and Spain, the orders of the Caliph Solyman were obeyed without cavil. Solyman judged the time fit to do away with the Roman Em- pire. With a fleet of eighteen hundred vessels, counting transports, and a large army, he besieged and blockaded Constantinople. He threw his army across the Hellespont, to invest the city ; his fleet was stationed for blockade, both from the Aegean and the Black Sea. Leo utilized the current from the Black Sea for sending down fire ships ; assault he repelled with Greek fire and his heavy artillery. There are romantic stories of grea^ burning glasses used against the Saracen fleet, and the Greeks 70 EAST BY WEST were held to know how to employ fire under water. It is the truth that Leo's corps of engineers were practiced in every art of fort- ress defense, mechanical and chymical, devised by the Romans. Capricious fortune worked for the city, but the saving of it was a great achievement by which Leo averted a worse rev- olution from Europe. A capital historian ascribes to him the inauguration of a new era for the World. Gross proof of the assertion may be drawn from the fact that during the eighth and ninth centuries the commerce of Europe centered at Constantinople more fully than it has since done in any one place. In view of the state of the West in the time of Leo, and in view of conditions to the East when he came to the throne, his reforms, military, fiscal, legal, and ecclesiastical, must have been wise to assure, as they did, so long a tenure of life to the Byzantine Empire. Leo was a puritan and a dealer of justice. His people at large, and traders especially, were glad of a firm hand at last. The Saracen had found encourage- ment because of the fiscal rapacities of Constan- tinople. It was apparent now what Roman law could be, and Mohammedanism was stayed. The tone of society in the Byzantine Empire was high as compared with what went on among the Franks and the Saracens. But that was no golden age. Constantinople was the center, EAST BY WEST 71 Cherson (in the Crimea) and Ravenna were great stations, of the India trade, and slaves then constituted the principal article of Euro- pean export to Africa, Syria, and Egypt, in payment of produce of the East coming by those channels. The great Plague of 745 was spread in Christian countries wherever com- merce went, supposed to have been introduced by Venetian and Greek ships plying the con- traband trade in slaves with the Mohammedan nations. The Greek navy, both for commerce and war, was then the most numerous in exis- tence, and by this plague the Hellenic race was threatened with extermination. New settlers followed the plague, and it looked as if Greece of the Byzantine territory was to be quite Sclavonian. But the Iconoclasts ruled. They subdued the Sclavonians, made them, as it is termed, know their place; and at the end of their time they put a veto on the plundering Russians as well. The Iconoclastic Emperors were, here and there, statesmen all round not like Charlemagne who discouraged foreign commerce, understanding, doubtless, his own ground. THE NEW WEST After the decay of Rome, the new Europe was long enough in finding itself. But as with the old Europe the Mediterranean was its chief 72 EAST BY WEST school. Rome, that is the old Europe, had grown slowly in the Mediterranean. Coming to a control of that sea, Rome very soon began disintegration. The Roman method was then applied from Constantinople, in which region conditions were more favorable. The Saracen emerging, and the West in a welter, Roman method was forced to apply itself within a nar- rower and narrower range. But Constanti- nople was well situated ; there was efficiency and order there, and the use of its resources enabled it to be the world's great city long after its territory was diminished. Its wealth and its conservative Roman method were in many ways to its advantage, while the new Europe was schooling and the Saracen showing himself incapable. Except at Cordova the Ommiad line went out, shortly after Solyman's block- ade of Constantinople, and the extremely clever Abbasids soon fell into the hands of the Turk, better Mohammedan than themselves. The Arabs had been traders from an old time Gerrha men Koreishites with their camels from Yemen by Mecca to Syria ; after INIohammcd, everywhere in the East, and far West, diffusing languages, money, Indian num- erals. Constantinople, nevertheless, was the new Europe's city of commerce far into the second Mediterranean era. There were Mohammedan laws against loans at interest. EAST BY WEST 73 The early Abbasids, who at their beginning founded Bassora to hurt Persia closed the Nile-Suez canal in order to bolster Bagdad, thus ruining the India trade to Egypt. The Abbasids of Bagdad were at odds with the Ommiads of Cordova. These things furthered the business of Constantinople, and besides, the Northern route by the Black Sea was in that city's control, outside the reach of the Saracen. The West, with all the elements of strength, was pretty miserable until the eleventh century when a reform spirit began working. Constanti- nople must have been the real capital of the Mediterranean world until well into the eleventh century. The city was great minded and small minded, powerful and weak. The eighth cen- tury had been a period of wholesome activity in its general life: The ninth and tenth centuries were stationary, and after them sure decline, the West having been anything but stationary. The wealth and laws of the Byzantine Empire placed ample capital in the hands of the Greek traders. The silk manufacture was to Thebes and Argos what the cotton manufacture has been to Lancashire. Monemvasia in the Morea was a trading town after the manner of Venice later on. The slave trade, if not vast, meant a great deal to the Byzantine Empire. Yet there was little of opportunity in the Byzantine Em- pire. Its " period of power and glory," under 74 EAST BY WEST the Macedonian dynasty, was when taxation was very high, absorbing great part of the profits of industry. Absolutism was become plain. Each generation moved exactly within the lim- its of that which had preceded it. Caste was formed. There was no opening for new enter- prise. Positive decline was imminent, and be- gan immediately the Italians could avail them- selves of the natural resources of their region. Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa, and Venice, forced to as- sert themselves, became first the rivals and then the superiors of the Greeks in commerce, indus- try, and wealth. THE COMING OF VENICE In the labyrinth of Italy for two centuries after Charlemagne, it is not well to attempt a way unless much leisure is at command. Ven- ice, it is said, its seat of government trans- ferred to the Rialto the year Charlemagne died, began then its glorious career. Of all the trad- ing towns of Italy, Venice came best through the hard times of the eighth and ninth centuries, and so was best able to gain advantage from the great material changes for the better in Italy beginning with the tenth century. In close touch with Constantinople, lying on the bor- ders of Germany, (a surer market after the checking of the Magyar in 955), at the sea end of an intricate system of inland waterways, EAST BY WEST 76 Venice offered an indispensable channel of com- munication between Greeks and Saracens, Northern Italy, Germany, and the West. How weighty an item in the Venetian commerce of a year must have been the business arising from the caravan of forty thousand horse from Hun- gary, Croatia, and Eastern Germany to fetch salt of Venice from Istria. As early as Theo- doric, his minister Cassiodorus wrote to the Venetians : " All your rivalry is expended on your salt works ; in place of plows and sickles you turn your frying pans. You own many and many a ship, your vessels fear not the stormy winds." When Constantinople was headquarters for the commerce of the more Western world, it was no small advantage for a trading town of Italy to face the Adriatic, and Venice, from dealer in a necessity, grew to over- pass Amalfi, on the West Coast, as merchant at large. It seems to be the fact that Venice came up to the Crusades supreme in the Adriatic and the Eastern Mediterranean. The Amal- fitans, by the commutations of trade, had been on very comfortable terms with their Saracen neighbors to the South. Amalfi may have suc- ceeded to the pleasant relations of Syracuse with Egypt, turned Saracen. At any rate, for a period Venice was glad to be counted a rival of Amalfi. But when the Normans adventured South, the enterprising sons of Tancred, and 76 EAST BY WEST Amalfi became politically Norman, there could be no longer agreeable intercourse with the Saracen of the Maghrib, to whom the Norman was emphatically uncongenial. In the instant rivalries of commerce and the mutual fierce- nesses of the Italian towns, Amalfi was left be- hind, and its business at Constantinople, Anti- och, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and elsewhere, passed a good deal to Venice. Or rather, the Seljuk Turk getting so strong in those terri- tories, commerce as it had been was interrupted, new adjustments were necessary, and Venice was in a position to adjust itself more readily than others. As well representative of the Seljuk powers, we may fasten upon the Sultans of Rum (whom Barbarossa bearded), that is, the Romany Sultans, or Seljuk rulers of much of Romania Levantine. It was their strictly orthodox Islamism and rude enforcements that gave impulse to the Crusading movements from the West. On the other hand, it was the hardening of Greek orthodoxy that enabled the Seljuks to make such progress in the Byzan- tine Empire: the Greeks were persecuting their own heretics, the Seljuks offered some relief. The Greeks at the same time were showing the effects of running after riches as such caste system, sorry intrigues among the ruling class, venality, reliance on mercenaries. It was a critical time when Isaac Comnenus came to the EAST BY WEST 77 throne at Constantinople in 1057, believing as he did that his Roman Empire had attained wealth and power enough to secure it a perma- nent superiority over every other government. The case stood how? In a few years Turkish territory would be visible from the dome of St. Sophia, and but for crusading Latins the city would have fallen to the Turk centuries before the Ottoman conquest. In a few years, upon the usurpation of Alexius Comnenus, Con- stantinople was to be given up to sack by Sclavonians, Bulgarians, and Greeks in the serv- ice of the rebel, and the city was not to re- cover, in prestige or commerce, from the ef- fects of such a blow. And raised to the throne, Alexius, to keep his hold, must at once call in Venice, as against the conquering Norman, Robert Guiscard, for repelling whom Venice was to be given privileges that would lead direct to the Venetian control of 1204. To treat of the matter in so offhand a way, Constantinople as a Greek capital and as a world focus was becoming an impossibility. Islam of the East was at its gates, and the restless West (typi- fied by Italy) finding organization somehow, learning its power, combative, full of life, full of politics the West was up. It was a new time. There could never be another Rome. Constantinople must lose all of its Roman role. The Mediterranean was to be for Eu- 78 EAST BY WEST rope ; and commercially, Venice of Italy was to stand most for Europe until the Far West of the Atlantic loomed. NORMANS IN THE EASTERN MEDITER- RANEAN William the Norman, son of Robert Diable, set up his rule in Britain of the West, and died in 1087. Robert, called Guiscard, son of Tancred the Norman, died in 1085, lord of much of Greek Italy, what was left of Greek Italy in the South and Sicily. On the pretext of alliance by marriage with the Byzantine Emperor, whom Alexius Comnenus had ex- pelled, Guiscard resolved upon a conquest of Constantinople. His first move was against Dyrrachium, Durazzo in Albania, the strongest fortress of the Byzantine government on the Adriatic. Guiscard attacked the place with a large fleet. It was an interesting siege, which the clever Greeks withstood. But the Emperor Alexius bringing up his mixed army Varan- gian guards, Sclavonian legion, Frank mercen- aries, Turkish mercenaries, and others a battle was joined which Alexius lost by ill judg- ment. The King of Servia, an ally of Alexius, was a spectator of the battle, and seems to have considered it an act of imperial folly. Venice, which since the year 1000, had assumed the dukedom of Dalmatia, sent a fleet to aid the EAST BY WEST 79 Emperor. It was, however, a Venetian that be- trayed the city of Durazzo to Guiscard, who shortly after the taking of the place was re- called to Italy to defend Pope Gregory against Henry, Emperor of the West, as it were. Guiscard's son, Bohemond, did not conduct the war wisely in his father's stead. Guiscard himself, having driven out the Emperor of the West, plundered Rome, and then turned again to the East. Off the island of Corfu he de- feated the allied Venetian and Byzantine fleet. Guiscard then died, and with him the idea of a Norman conquest of Constantinople. But in fact, Robert Guiscard was a chief instrument in the overturning of the city from the West. The Emperor Alexius, in his emergency, subsi- dized the Emperor Henry to divert the Nor- man. The Emperor Henry was too much en- gaged with his warfare upon Pope Gregory to be of solid avail. The Venetians were the allies Alexius drew advantage from. They were will- ing, alarmed for their trade with Greece and the Levant should Guiscard control the en- trance to the Adriatic. Alexius paid the Vene- tians well, conceding to them many valuable commercial privileges at Constantinople and in the principal cities of the Empire, exemption from import duties, a street of warehouses as- signed at the capital, permission to trade any- where outside the Black Sea, and within the 80 EAST BY WEST Black Sea under license. Thus were surely laid the foundations of the Venetian mercantile col- onies settled in the Byzantine Empire. COMMERCE AND THE CRUSADES The Crusades, then, which we cannot explain and must in this deduction attribute merely to the awakening of the West, began at a time when the weight of Venice was already great in the Mediterranean. With the Crusades, Genoa and Pisa came to the fore, in trade and po- litically. Genoa and Pisa had done much to clear away the Saracen from the Western Medi- terranean. It was but natural that they should follow on, and assist in the movement against the Musselman in the East, when senti- ment turned that way. Genoa, Venice, and Pisa had the necessary transportation. They went into the Crusades advised, expecting com- mercial gain. The Emperor Alexius knew something of the West, and he gave himself trouble to conciliate the Latin chiefs who came to him with great talk of their purposes. A contemporary memoir brings out clearly the " experienced anility " of the Byzantine gov- ernment then, and the mental inanity of the Latin chiefs who lived at home " engourdis, orgueilleux, paresseux " now " ivres de de- vouement, epris de mourir loin." The Crusad- EAST BY WEST 81 ers, prosaically, were men, western men with western notions ; Venice was behind them, and the Emperor Alexius could not afford to let his boredom show itself conspicuously. The growing antipathy to the progressive Western Church confused the Byzantine government at this time, and was certainly an important fac- tor in the many complications incident to the Crusades. It has been said that the Byzantine government was hurt vitally in its finances, as the Crusades began, by the transference to Norman Sicily of so much of the silk industry. That was patently a mark of western energy. As time went on Western energy grew very distasteful to Constantinople. Venice had be- come strong enough in the city and in the em- pire to be obstreperous. The idea of feudal- ism had assumed proportions. Constantinople was pleased to regard the Italian cities as its vassals, and to check Venice, the Emperor Manuel conferred privileges upon his vassals of Pisa and Genoa. The Venetians growing ugly, their property at Constantinople was seques- trated. There was war with Venice, but its merchants, apprehensive over the chance of losing too much to Genoa and Pisa, came to terms with the Emperor Manuel and went back to their status of most favored nation. Bal- ancing of powers being a ticklish pursuit, in a 82 EAST BY WEST few years after this unsettling of Venice, that republic became receiver, so to speak, of the Byzantine Empire. The Doge Dandolo and emulous Crusaders, at first on the pretext of a muddled dynastic status, then for mere con- quest, laid siege to Constantinople. Details had been carefully worked out in advance: the first charge on the booty was to be for costs of transportation. Villehardouin says that after this Conquest of 1204, Latins who had been in absolute poverty, suddenly found them- selves possessed of wealth and living in luxury. The people of the city looked upon the change as the work of Divine justice upon rapacity and crime. Many merchants in the city were indifferent, regarding the destruction of both the empire and the Patriarchate as needed re- forms. May 9th, 1204, the scepter passed to the Belgians, on the election of Count Baldwin of Flanders, (a brave and virtuous man), to the sovereignty of Constantinople and what ter- ritory could be held around it. It is doubtless pure fancy to argue that Venice allowed the Count of Flanders rule, not only because Flan- ders was far away from Venice, but also be- cause the trade of the West was growing rap- idly, and Bruges, city of Flanders, was a great seat of it, entrepot on the way by coast from the Baltic into the Mediterranean. EAST BY WEST 88 VENICE AND THE BELGIANS AND CON- STANTINOPLE Very full years, those sixty before the birth of the poet Dante and the Parliament of Eng- land. Dante, the terrible, may signify to us what was then the sum of Italy and Europe; but concerned with narrow practical affairs we go to Venice first, perforce, for information as to that time in the Mediterranean. Venice was looking for ducats, not for the direct ruling of much territory. The Rabbi Benjamin of Tu- dela in Spain, who left Spain in the year 1160, on his travels to Chinese Tartary, (by Alex- andria, Constantinople, the Black Sea, and the Caspian), found the merchants of Venice very strongly fixed at Alexandria. Even after the conquest of 1204, the Venetians were not drawn away from their chief aim, which was the com- merce of the Levant. They were wise enough not to hold directly more than Crete, (the isle of Candy), to command the Southeast; and their colony at Constantinople. Certain islands of the Aegean they were willing to administer on a feudal basis. But it was the carrying trade they were specialists in, and if they could hold the carrying trade of the Lev- ant, under the suzerainty of their Belgian emperors, they were content. That overlord- ship being a problem in infinitesimals, the mer- 84 EAST BY WEST chants of Venice had enough to do still, as they had long had, in making themselves acceptable to the diverse spheres of influence they touched. They made treaties, pacts, and conventions all the way from Hungary and the North, through Egypt and Aleppo to Tartary. For the bet- ter ordering of their maritime affairs, they elaborated the system of trading fleets leav- ing Venice in the spring, at the end of June and the end of August, these fleets to drop vessels at certain stations for neighborhood cruises. The spring fleet, for instance, returned in Sep- tember, making rendezvous at Crete with the flota from Egypt. During the Latin occupa- tion of Constantinople there was naturally expansion of the commerce of Venice. It is doubtful whether, under the Belgian rule, Ven- ice gained at Constantinople or in the region near adjacent. The Latins were not efficient there. The difficulties were immense, but the fact is that the Latins were not efficient. Their church was contemned in the East. The Greeks would no ways donform. Politically there was confusion throughout. The Greek aristocracy was doing all it could to take over Constantinople again. The Kingdom of Bul- garia was powerful to the North, and between it and Constantinople were Albanians, Sclav- onians, and Wallachians who desired to main- tain the independence they had been forced to EAST BY WEST 85 assume. Genoa was disgruntled and strong enough to make trouble. We cannot now argue as between Venice and Genoa. Both were strong and clash was inevitable. Genoa could not be indifferent to the prestige of Ven- ice from the conquest of 1204. Immediately after Saint Louis and the French were expelled from Egypt, and shortly before the restoration of 1261 at Constantinople, Venice and Genoa fell out grievously in Sj^ria, the quarrel osten- sibly over the control of a church at Acre. It has been said that these commercial jealousies of Venice and Genoa were the first cause of the Latins losing Syria. Who knows.'' The Tar- tar was coming West then, and great changes were a-foot. While the Belgian line was at Constantinople, managing badly, borrowing gold of Venice, using money of the Pope and Saint Louis, tearing copper for coining from the domes of public buildings in contrast to those methods, the Khan of the World, Genghis, was bringing his rule ever West. Genghis Khan made during those years a plain road from the Black Sea to the far east, forced the Ottoman Turk out upon the Mediterranean (thence into Europe), broke the continuity of Russia's development, causing Russia to be Asiatic for five centuries at least. The elder Marco Polo, merchant of Constantinople and Crim Tartary, could scarcely have had broth- 86 EAST BY WEST ers traveling to Cathay, had it not been for Genghis Khan. Having mentioned the name of Genghis, Khan of the World, it may be said at once that the Greeks, led by Palseologus, got back Constantinople in 1261. Michael, first of the House of Palajologus, trying every method, at last drew in Genoa, which flouting the Pope, engaged to expel the Latins if given all the privileges of Venice at Constantinople. Here then was certain ground for a hundred years' war for trade, between Venice, the ousted, and Genoa, the ouster. BRUGES OF THE WEST Constantinople had been much maimed by the Latins. They did not understand the organ- ization and police necessary for such a city. The Latins would have fared better there if their own part of the world had not been so active at the time. Brisk as commerce was then in the West, there was no considerable emigration from the West following the Latin conquest. That conquest was merely an inci- dent in the decline of the Greeks. The next year after the Restoration, in 1262, how inter- esting to observe the solid grounding of the fortunes of Bruges, city of Flanders, realm of the expelled Emperors of the Latin line. In the year 126i2, remarks Anderson, learned in all the annals of commerce before the Peace of EAST BY WEST 87 Paris (1763), the Hanseatic merchants first began to resort to the city of Bruges in Flan- ders, and soon after to make it one of their four great comptoirs, from which circum- stance, Bruges greatly increased in riches and commerce; for the bulky commodities of the nations within the Baltic Sea, such as naval stores of all kinds, and iron, copper, corn, flax, timber, etc., beginning to be well known to the more Southern parts of Europe, by means of the numerous shipping of the Hans towns, became increasingly an object of demand. But the direct voyage in one and the same sum- mer, between the Baltic and the Mediterranean seas, being thought in those times hazardous and difficult, the mariner's compass not being as yet applied, a middle or half-Avay station or port became very desirable, to which traders of the seas should bring their respective mer- chandize in summer, viz., the naval stores, etc., of the northern parts, and the spices, drugs, fruits, cotton, et cetera, of the Levant by the ships of Venice, Florence, Pisa, Genoa : also the wool, lead and tin of England, and the wines and staples of France there to be lodged as a market for the reciprocal supply of Europe. Of all ports whatever, the ports of Flanders were the best suited for such a half- way station or entreport; more especially as the long established manufactures, both of 88 EAST BY WEST woollens and linens, equally necessary to all nations, were now flourishing there in the high- est perfection. To Bruges, therefore, most nations sent their merchandize, and brought from thence the produce of other nations which they had need of. So that this famous city soon became, as it were, the general magazine of merchandize for all Europe; and the country of Flanders in general, as well as Bruges in particular, became from this circumstance extremely rich and populous. A French Queen happening there was querulous at finding hun- dreds of queens, to judge by their dress. The West thus active, and central Asia lying open to the inspection of Christendom as never before, the statement may well be credited that Venice was not dashed at the restoration to the Greeks of the decaying old city of Constan- tinople, albeit the merchants of Genoa were instrumental to the shift. GENOA The Greek empire was drawing to its end. The House of Palaeologus was too busied in occasional defense to bestow the necessary care upon the essentials of internal economy. The factory system, managed from the West, was now firmly established in the Eastern Med- iterranean. The Greeks, still a name, were losing the greater part of the carrying trade of EAST BY WEST 89 that region. The Italians, placed where they could see Europe whole, had the method and the means to use the East as tributary to the ever rising West. But to which of the Italians should the prize most fall? Matter of doubt for a space. The Pope was giving away parts of the Earth then. He gave the Sicilies to Charles of Anjou in 1265, alarming Venice and Constantinople to the point of alliance involv- ing new concessions to Venice. Thereupon the family of Doria (inimical to Charles of Anjou) gaining power over the Genoese, Palasologus went back to Genoa, firmly rooted Genoa at Constantinople. So the Pope, Venice, and Charles of Anjou resolved upon a conquest of Constantinople. The Sicilian Vespers changed all that, by which we are to know that the Catalan was also strong in the thirteenth cen- tury Mediterranean. As the upshot of these diplomacies of twenty years, Genoa was left established at Constantinople in its quarter of Galata, whence the merchants of Genoa looked up the Black Sea, and soon controlled its com- merce. They built up a long chain of fac- tories, from Chios to Caffa-in-the-Crimea and Tana at the mouth of the Don. The north shore of the Black Sea was at this period, and for long after, the especial trading ground of Genoa. At Trebizond also, on the South Shore, Genoa grew to be active, in touch in 90 EAST BY WEST some measure from that station with Bassora and the Persian Gulf. Musselman corsairs were in the Black Sea, but the Genoese, forti- fied at Galata, fortified at Caffa, could regard themselves for near two centuries as somewhat masters of the Black Sea. There were ancient traditions of large commerce there, and Genoa maintained them. Near Sebastopol that now is, had stood the old free city of Cherson " A Homer's language murmuring in her streets. And in her haven many a mast from Tyre." To the East, towards the Volga and the Cas- pian, the mysterious Khazars were long settled, skilful traders, with whom Constantinople kept up good relations. The Kief Russians had dis- placed them. The Kief Russians were apt for trade themselves. Now the Tartar had come in, the western merchant and the Franciscan fnar had a clear road to the East, to Kara- korum and beyond the Wall of China. Genoa might find inspiration in this setting. Besides, there was the old Danube trade, down to the Black Sea and up as far as Ratisbon and Augsburg, cities more logically in the sphere of Venice. The world was drawing very close together, as it learned to its cost on the appear- ance of the Black Death, starting dreadful among slaughtered Chinese, following the trade EAST BY WEST 91 route to the Volga and the Euxine, dispersed west and west from a Genoese fort in the Crimea. Small wonder to hear of the Vene- tians, around the year 1350, as extremely active in the Egyptian trade, supporting the Mameluke Sultans by their customs dues. Venice knew a way to India, even in plague years, drawing spices and other India wares in plenty from Aden in Arabia, by caravan to the Red Sea, thence overland to the Nile, and down to Grand Cairo (foundation of the Fatimites), and so to Alexandria. Special- ists in the Alexandria trade, Venice relinquished no trade that could be held. Its five years' war with Genoa from 1350, was over the fur trade of the Russian rivers, and Venice got the worst. A few years after, the Emperor at Constantinople granted Venice the island of Tenedos, at the entrance of the Dardanelles. Then the Genoa men besieging Tenedos, the Venetians used cannon upon them a weapon newly improved by the Germans and greatly terrified the Genoa men. The war grew fierce to extermination. A great disaster befell Ven- ice at Pola. Genoa thought to rid the seas wholly of its rival: blockaded Venice in 1380: found Venice too resourceful to be overcome. That was the climax. Genoa split by faction, came under foreign rule, French or Lombard, 92 EAST BY WEST and by the close of another century had not the energy to furnish its son Columbus with shipping for his quest. THE OTTOMAN TURK Meantime, that is with the Era of the Black Death, something new had appeared in Europe the Ottoman Turk. About coeval with the House of Habsburg, the House of Othman reached power in northwestern Asia Minor through wisdom and efficiency. Bending to the necessities and using the opportunities brought about by the incoming of the Tartar and the status of the Greek Empire, Othman and his son Orkhan made themselves free of a great territory south and southwest of Con- stantinople, about Brusa, Nicomedia (Ismid), Nicaea and Pergamus. The Sultan Orkhan " stands forward in the world's history as one of the few lawgivers who have created a nation and founded an empire by legislative enact- ments." He looked through appearances to realities, and, of a constructive turn, was severely insistent upon realities. The slave trade then being a matter of course, slaves still the most marketable commodity throughout all Western Asia, Orkhan hit upon a policy of training Christian tribute children for his pur- poses : he took them at the age of eight, and brought them up in his household for war or EAST BY WEST 93 for the civil service a college of conquerors and administrators. For a long time the Otto- man Sultans were men of progress, stimulating intelligence, open to suggestion for any better- ment in their armies or their government. So they gained ground fast and surely in the clos- ing evil days of the Greek empire. It is aston- ishing and dreadful to observe how susceptible government is of disaffection, springing from misrule in part. The price of existence is eternal vigilance. The Saracens had taken Constantinople, but for the reforms of Leo. Everywhere the Ottoman found the people glad of a change. The times were, to be sure, much out of joint: Revolution in the Balkans; the old line of Comnenus holding out at Trebizond ; at Constantinople, theological bigotry, intrigue upon intrigue, Palasologus and Cantacuzene, Turkish mercenaries bribed by permission to make slaves of Greeks ; round about, the ships and men of Genoa and Venice (to say nothing of Catalans) choosing any side that offered profit to them ; South and North, the Ottoman Turk, dedicated, incorrigible. By the time Genoa's naval power began to go down. Sultan Murad, son of Orkhan, had taken Adrianople and won the battle of Kossova, thus gaining the Balkans; and Bajazet, son of Murad, had imposed terms on the Emperor at Constanti- nople, his vassal and tributary. What could 94 EAST BY WEST be the future of the Greeks, when Manuel, Emperor at Constantinople, took command of the Greek contingent of Bajazet's army besieg- ing Philadelphia, last independent Greek com- munity in Asia Minor? The people of Phila- delphia, when they saw the Emperor Manuel and the imperial standard in the hostile army, perceived that the cause of Greek liberty and of the orthodox church was hopeless, and capit- ulating, got very fair treatment. Greek lib- erty needed something. Marshal Boucicault of France came out to defend Constantinople ; the Emperor Manuel set off for Italy, France and England begging help. He got little solid aid in the West, and Constantinople was saved from direct Ottoman rule only by the incur- sions of Tamerlane the Tartar and his chas- tisement of Bajazet. Bajazet's sons falling to civil war, the life of the Greek Empire was pro- longed awhile. As a means of defense, the Act of Union with the western church proved to be as good as nothing. Except for the close con- junction of heart and treasure, it is doubtful whether Constantinople could have made any resistance, when the Sultan Mohammed, son of the second Murad, planned the city's final fall. Constantinople was necessary to Mohammed, and he was convinced of that. It does not at once appear why the city did not seem more necessary to powers of the West to Venice, EAST BY WEST 95 for example. It may be that the case was altered now that there was determination to take the city by land forces. As matters stood, all the nations then trading to Constan- tinople furnished contingents to defend its walls. Of the twelve general officers in com- mand of the city, only two were Greeks. Genoa sent two galleys and a handful of troops to aid the last Constantine. Venice furnished three galleasses and a body of troops. The consul of the Catalans and his Aragonese coun- trymen undertook the holding of the great pal- ace. There were a few papal troops. A Ger- man named Grant, who came with the Genoese, was the most experienced artilleryman and military engineer in the place. The Sultan Mohammed moved the first division of his army from Adrianople in February 1453. It was difficult to get his artillery through, but he balked at no obstacle. Mohammed had built up a fleet, which was of no great use to him. He had studied the whole problem well, and despite mishaps, pushed the siege fiercely. The night before the final assault, end of May, the whole Ottoman encampment was resplend- ent with the blaze of lanterns. The Ottoman army was silent through the night, except for solemn chants, calling true believers to prayer. May 29th was the end. The walls had been battered at a great breach, and the assault was 96 EAST BY WEST not withstood. Constantine the Emperor fought to the last: a column of janissaries dashed into the city over his lifeless body. The young Mohammed, riding through the streets, was struck with the desolate aspect of the place and the proofs of old decay : he was moved to quote Firdausi " The spider's curtain hangs before the portal of Caesar's palace; The owl is the sentinel on the watch tower of Afrasiab." VENICE FROM 1453 Think, in this battered Caravanserai Whose portals are alternate Night and Day, How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp Abode his destin'd Hour and went his Way We may fancy certain of the merchants of Venice, (not a few of them writer, philosopher, merchant, and statesman all in one), quoting some such lines of Khayyam, on learning the news of the fall of Constantinople. How had Venice regarded the encroachment of the Osmanli Turks? Was it the hypothesis that the Republic might keep what it had, see Genoa depressed, and be the gainer in the end? Was there only a muddling policy at Venice, in view of the astounding organization of the line of Othman? Was the business of the West so EAST BY WEST 97 vast that the rottenness of the Greek Empire was looked upon with indifference? Whatever the basis of opinion, it is clear that the Levant factory system that had grown up before 1453, along with the exuberant commercial activity of the West since the Crusades, had caused Venice to regard the East differently. Maybe it had become very plain that the East was the East, and that backshish diplomacy with what- ever was the power there was the only program for a trading people of the West. But it was soon to appear that the Levant factory system had suffered a heavy jolt, that the Turk, from Constantinople, was intending to make life dis- agreeable for all Franks within reach, and long reach. Not long before his death, some twenty years after the conquest of Constantinople, the Sultan Mohammed finished his task of expelling the Genoese from Asia Minor and the Black Sea. He began in a small way, and ended by forcing Genoa out everywhere, denying them at last their especial depots at Caffa in the Cri- mea, and at Tana-on-Don. Genoa had already assigned Caffa to its Bank of St. George, which bank iNIachiavel thought, later, might be assignee for Genoa itself. Nor Genoa nor its bank could hold Caffa. The Black Sea was now closed. All knowledge of its shores was lost to the West, its cities lay beyond the sphere of trade, and the countries 98 EAST BY WEST once frequented by Genoese and Venetian mer- chants became as much a region of mystery as they had been before Jason sought out the Golden Fleece that way. Seamen of Genoa could only repeat vague tales of the stormy Euxine, and Genoese merchants recall some memory of rich Caffa and splendid Trebizond. The result was that Venice was left with a vexed monoply in the Levant, vexed enough in the light of the Venetian and Turkish annals of Greece and the Archipelago for a half cen- tury after 1453. But the monopoly was there, else the West might have done more to strengthen the arm of Venice against the Turk who came as far as the Isonzo for slaves and Frank plunder. Venice had so put on great- ness that these things were annoyances rather than portents, for it is significant that Venice held Crete, that important naval station, long after 145S. Notwithstanding the Turk, the republic of Venice was sensibly great when Prince Henry of Portugal died, and so also after Prince Henry of Portugal's work had led to what was to undo wholly the Venetian sys- tem. The second half of the fifteenth century must interest the curious discovery then of the Far West, new discovery of the Far East, new discovery of the Heavens above. The Venetian system was not amenable to such data. That system grew out of skilful adap- EAST BY WEST 99 tation to the facts of the old Christian world with the Mediterranean as its main sea. Dur- ing the salad years of Albuquerque and Her- nan Cortez, Venice had the comfortable assur- ance that the India trade in the large could not but pass through the warehouses of merchants of Venice. The Venetian system seemed fixed as the Ptolemaic, what with commerce courts, government shipping flotte armate in mer- canzia consular agents, banks, highly organ- ized manufactures, marine insurance, caravan insurance: the western market very much the commercial oyster of Venice, through its Syria fleet, Flanders fleet; through its overland and river trade to Austria and Germany, (art route as well) by Augsburg, Ratisbon, across to the Rhine and down to Cologne and the coast, in close touch with all the business of the Hansa. A^enice had the trade, so much so, that looking into Venice before America was, it is easy to overlook even the Hansa League, the Cham- pagne fairs, Flanders, London, Barcelona, and all the rest, outside Venice, that went to make up the merchants' world then. For one thing, " Dives opum divesque virorwm " Venice would have none of the Inquisition, and it may be doubted whether Corinthian manners were any worse for the municipal soul than the Inquisition could be. " Qua sinus Adriacis vnterlitus ultimus undis, subjacet Arcturo " 100 EAST BY WEST placed thus Venice, as the old world was about changing, by sea change to get baptism for a new time, the Great Republic must stand for us representative of the old activities of the Old West: Central Europe, let us say, come to growth with the Renaissance of the Mediter- ranean regions. It was fitting indeed that when Prince Henry of Portugal desired a gen- eral map for his navigators' school he should go to Fra Mauro, Camaldolese, of Venice; and nowise astonishing that Fra Mauro produced the finest map that has come down to us from the Middle Ages, on which, south of Africa, was figured a little ship standing for Asia. Piccolo mondo antico, in some respects. Prince Henry of Portugal pointed the way to America as Constantinople was falling to the Turk. So the old times gave place. EAST BY WEST Part II EAST BY WEST PORTUGAL DISCOVERS THE EAST It was no business of Venice discovering America, any more than it was business of Ven- ice finding an all sea road to the East. What could Venice gain by an Atlantis, the traffic of which (should there be any) would in the cir- cumstances redound to ports outside the Med- iterranean? And what certainly could Venice gain by an approach to the East around Africa from bases beyond Gibraltar? Considering the year 1492, it is as if all the troubled cen- turies were as nothing since the Phoenicians were monopolists in Tartessus and sent their ships far down the African West Coast: as if the enterprise of Tyre and Sidon, after two thousand years, was but fostering a logical excursion from the Gadeira, territory of Cadiz. On the contrary, those twenty centuries had been very full, crowded to such a degree that there was now a place in the world for new con- tinents. The New West had grown up, and to continue growing must go farther yet into the West. The West being of a curious mind, its belief that the world was a sphere could not 103 104 EAST BY WEST fail, as the situation was, to lead to an estab- lishment of the theory. That is to say, the time had about come for the world to begin its slow task of knowing itself as a round world. Italy had some part in these new developments. Amalfi, we will say, supplied the compass ; Genoa, Columbus ; Venice, the Cabots ; and Florence, place of literature, the man to name Atlantis at last. But the needle of this activ- ity was pointing away from Italy. Prince Henry of Portugal, half English and Fleming, by his genius and industry had made Lisbon known as a haven of steadied adventure, and Columbus, of Genoa, was drawn to the Iberian peninsula: Vespucci was in the service of rulers there as well : the Cabots served England first, then Spain. Men of the school begun by Prince Henry of Portugal found the sea road to the East for Portugal and made use of it for Portugal. If the Musselman had grown strong in the near East, no sick man whatever from Egypt to Hungary, the energy come from expelling him out of the West had found employment that was to diminish the relative importance of the Mussclman's prowess. When the Sultan Selim was taking over Egypt and giving Constantinople another name Islambol, Hernan Cortez was staking out Mexico for a power upon whom the Pope had conferred large privileges indeed. But the EAST BY WEST 105 Pope had fixed a meridian, delimiting Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence in emer- gent parts of tfte world, and at this juncture it is Da Gama, Albuquerque, and the Portugals that are most interesting commercially " Arms and the heroes who from Lisbon's shore." The Portuguese had some notions as touch- ing the shape of the earth themselves, and some idea of the possible place of India in the gen- eral ocean. They had been for years marking off degrees by sea nearer and nearer to the Line. They regarded themselves as well on towards India, and Columbus being no more specific with respect to Atlantis, the Portu- guese had little interest in what he proposed. He had been in their Guinea trade, and they were familiar with his signs. The facts of 14-92 sharpened their appetites, somewhat. They had reached the Turbulent Cape, choos- ing rather Good Hope for a name; had sent their envoys through Cairo and Aden to Ethio- pia and India, one of them returning by sea from India to Sofala. Therefore Portugal had only to round the Cape to Sofala, and all that Columbus could promise was Portugal's. Da Gama made the voyage from the Cape to Sofala, and " past Mozambic," there was noth- ing to do but follow the established route up the coast and across to the Malabar towns. 106 EAST BY WEST For near Sofala Da Gama found a man able to speak a little broken Arabic, who said that not far distant was a place where large ships resorted, traders to Arabia, India, and other parts of the world. So Portugal reached India thus the 20th day of May, 1498, and as for Atlantis, two years later Portugal came upon Atlantis by accident, in sending out a second fleet around the Cape, For some time as yet the Portuguese had reason to think that the accomplishments of Columbus were nothing extraordinary, whereas they, the Portuguese, had done most to make a new world. " Before these our discoveries," says one of their old historians, " the spicery and riches of the eastern world were brought to Europe with great charge and immense trouble. The merchandize of the clove of Malacca, the mace and nutmeg of Banda, the sandal wood of Timor, the camphire of Borneo, the gold and silver of Luconia (Luzon), the spices, drugs, dyes, and perfumes of China, Java, Siam, and the adjacent kingdoms centered in the city of Malacca, in the Golden Chersonesus. Hither all the traders of the countries as far westward as Ethiopia and the Red Sea resorted and bar- tered their own commodities for those they received. By this trade the great cities of Cal- icut (Malabar Coast), Cambaya, Ormuz, and Aden, were enriched. Nor was Malacca the EAST BY WEST 107 only source of their wealth. The western regions of Asia had full possession of the com- merce of the rubies of Pegu, the silks of Bengal, the pearls of Calicare, the diamonds of Nar- singa, the cinnamon and rubies of Ceylon, the pepper and every spice of Malabar, and wher- ever in the eastern islands and shores Nature had lavished her various riches. Of the more western commerce Ormuz was the great mart; for from thence the eastern commodities were conveyed up the Persian Gulf to Bassora, on the mouth of the Euphrates, and from thence distributed in caravans to Armenia, Trebizond, Tartary, Aleppo, Damascus, and the port of Barut on the Mediterranean. Suez on the Red Sea was also a most important mart. Here caravans loaded and proceeded to Grand Cairo, from whence the Nile conveyed their riches to Alexandria at which city and at Barut, some Europeans, the Venetians in particular, loaded their vessels with the riches of the eastern world and at immense prices distributed them throughout Europe." All this gorgeous East, so long hedged off, had been laid open directly to the West by Portugal. And we can understand how Spain, (whose new West seemed for awhile rather meager), should have shown alarm at the incidence of the Pope's meridian, and boggled not when the chagrined Magellan, late of the Spice Islands, offered to 108 EAST BY WEST find a way thither for Spain, saving Spain's face as far as might be as to the Far East. Magellan, then went West about the Horn of the last West, and before he died among the Philippines in 1521 had been around the world. Sir John Mandeville says the world was amused in his youth by the story of a man who had been around the world. The world had grown too sophisticated to be only amused by the voyage of Magellan. But in the light of what was happening then, it is amusing to read of Genoa's proposal the year before Magellan's death Genoa proposed to Czar Basil of Muscovy (as if Peter I was in being) to open a way for the India trade by the Caspian and the Volga to Moscow, from Moscow to the Baltic and Europe. Reformation was afoot, and Central Europe had perforce to wait a long time for other results, as Holbein might have said. ELIMINATION OF THE PORTUGUESE Deliver us from sudden riches how won- derful and essentially sorry the career of Por- tugal, at home and in the East, during the period of its hold on the India trade, the cen- tury to 1611 when Portugal was not altogether by bull alone " lord of the navigation, con- quests, and trade of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India." Those years show a splendid EAST BY WEST 109 paper record here and there for Portugal. For instance, immediately before Portugal came under Spain for its sixty years' captivity, there was appointed a Viceroy of India with direct jurisdiction from Cape Gardafu, at the bottom of the Red Sea, to the coast of Pegu or Siam. Subordinate to the Viceroy were two governors, one from Gardafu to Cape Corrien- tes, below Madagascar, the other from Pegu to China, called the Governor of Malacca. These sounding titles were bestowed at a time when the glory of Portugal in the East was past: the nation had about split on Africa, (not the first or the last of nations so to do), and the East was learning from other items also how unstable Portugal was. When Albuquer- que was in charge, it was an opinion in India that the Portuguese were among men what lions are among beasts ; " and for the same reason," said an Indian captive to a Portuguese officer, " nature has appointed that your species should be equally few." Then the Portuguese turning luxurious, venal, and outrageous, opin- ion changed in the East " Let them alone," said one Indian prince to another, " the frauds of their revenue and their love of luxury will soon ruin them. They now conquer Asia, but Asia will end by conquering them." And a Shah of Persia asking a Portuguese captain how many of the Indian viceroys had been 110 EAST BY WEST beheaded by the Kings of Portugal, " None," rephed the officer. " Then you will not long," returned the Persian, " be the masters of India." Albuquerque had not been of so shabby a sort. He conquered and ruled from Ormuz and Diu and Goa to Malacca, through intrepidity and just dealing: the people worshipped his mem- ory. But he died in disgrace for his pains, and later despoiling viceroys branded his conduct as madness. Mens est qui duros sentiat ictus. Albuquerque seems to have had a program to shew the strength of Portugal by feats of arms ; to organize the commercial business of the eastern coasts, reducing and equalizing customs dues ; to govern even-handedly, making way for Portugal in the nexus of conflicting in- terests. A steady policy of that kind might have strengthened Portugal more and more in the East. At best, the Portuguese control falling in the time of the great Mogul years, it may be that there was nothing for Portugal in India but to catch at shifting advantagements. Although Akbar was by no means lord of all India, his work must have been influential everywhere, causing the work of Portugal to appear trivial as it mostly was. The Portu- guese could supply the eastern coasts with a better market than those coasts had been accus- tomed to. That was an incidental gain to the East, and as such might have been skilfully EAST BY WEST 111 used to the progressive enhancement of the Portuguese control. But Portugal undertook to bluster with a regal monopoly of trade and a very expensive military establishment. The regal monopoly was in name only, for pri- vate adventurers were everywhere. The expen- sive military establishment consumed the rev- enues, and moreover was made use of in private quarrels, embroiling the Portuguese endlessly. The Portuguese coalesced with the natives, and perhaps that is the sum of the history. At any rate, it was an astonishing record, that of Por- tugal in the East during the century after the discovery of America. From Mozambique to Macao and Japan, the ships, the factories, the arms, the heroes, villains, and missionaries of Portugal the Lusitanian question must have seemed very important then over many degrees of the earth and the ocean. As was but nat- ural, the Burden of Lisbon was a pretty heavy one. To Lisbon, by nature a sort of Constan- tinople, the West had to come for its India goods. The people flocked to town, such of them as were not making their own fortunes abroad, and the country side of Portugal was given over to slaves from the Slave Coast. King Sebastian attempted to make his hold surer on Africa, and Portugal went to pieces rather suddenly. Since 1500 very much of an Arabian Night's entertainment for Portugal, 112 EAST BY WEST and prodigious ensample of how not to go about the business of dealing with the East. THE HOUSE OF HABSBURG In the year 1580 Spain, that is to say the House of Habsburg, annexed Portugal for sixty years. Consider for a moment what the House of Habsburg was in the year 1580 and thereabouts. By the ancient system of ruling houses and dominion come by dower, the fam- ily of Habsburg had by that year assumed proportions to make the Empire of the Anton- ines seem worthy of comparison, to say the least. Marcus Aurelius died at Vienna. Pannonia had changed complexion since then. The Turk was now close by, but the House of Habsburg, if stopped that way, had done much in quarters more to the West had become hereditary keeper of the Holy German Empire, had fallen heir to Spain, to the Low Countries and other countries, and now had Portugal. Spain and Portugal going well around the world then, the House of Habsburg in 1580 went as far with its place in the sun, and to the alarm of not a few statesmen of the West. The Pope's meridian was now so slight a divid- ing line, maybe none at all, but rather a dis- agreeable national date line. Not pretending technical exactness, let us put the case of an Antwerp merchant in the India trade toward EAST BY WEST 113 the year 1580. Bruges and the Hans towns declining with the discovery of America, Ant- werp had succeeded to the large affairs of Bruges, as comptoir for the business of West, East, North, and South. Shortly before 1580 an Antwerp India merchant was still accus- tomed to go to Lisbon for his imports. The Lisbon ships went as far East as Macao, Japan, and the Spice Islands. From Macao or the Spice Islands to Manila was no great matter. From Manila to Acapulco, on the Mexican West Coast, there had been for some years before 1580 a regularly established traffic. Acapulco and all Mexico were obliged to deal with Seville under the Habsburg-Span- ish rules. The flota from Vera Cruz must return to Seville and nowhere else. It is not impossible that an Antwerp merchant, wanting certain India goods towards the year 1580, might be in doubt whether to apply for them in the right quarters at Lisbon or at Seville. Come 1580, with Portugal under the House of Habsburg, and grave discontents of several kinds in the Low Countries, there is no saying how embarrassed an Antwerp trader in India goods might be. By 1585 the situation at Antwerp was far worse: the House of Habs- burg sacked the town and ruined its great trade. Like Napoleon, the House of Habs- burg held Antwerp more or less as a " pistolet 114 EAST BY WEST charge qu'on tient sur la gorge de VAngle- terre." Queen Elizabeth was about to aid the city when it fell. These things were alarming, and in 1588 the Spanish Armada, so called, was smashed by skill and good chance. That great, ill managed fleet, of an undeniable cru- sading spirit, was smashed. The western world had long been tending towards such an issue, (Henry VIII knew his ground), and the result was momentous enough. For England the significance was that England had become and was to continue a country of progressive intelligence ; for the Low Countries, that the revolting provinces were to be their own mas- ters ; for the North of Europe at large that the reformation in opinion was to work itself out ; and for Spain of the Habsburgs the sig- nificance was that the back of Spain was broken. The posture of affairs was changed. For one thing, there were men in England now whose high purpose it was to take England into the West, into those vague reaches of the wild North beyond the mines, monuments, and soft populations of the Spanish realms in Atlantis. THE DUTCH America and the East had been all at once made tributary to the Iberian peninsula, and Iberia after a century had shown itself some- thing less than these wide and instant respon- EAST BY WEST 115 sibilities demanded. Portugal was going down in the East, when by becoming vassals of Spain, the Portuguese had to meet the jealousies of the Low Countries. Notwithstanding his plate fleets from America, Philip II was financially in straits before the year of the Armada. The discovery of American bullion brought finan- cial stress upon Europe in general. The price of wheat did not during the sixteenth century fall to the level of 1492. Poverty increased throughout Western Europe, both Catholic and Reformed. Iberia fell short of the right adjustments, and was obliged to relin- quish what others knew better how to use. Or to put it more narrowly, it looked for a time as if that corner of Europe might rule the world from the luck of having been pioneers in so much of it. The result was not so, and it is easy now to give the reasons. At a first glance it seems a little strange that Latins, (Latins having had so long an apprenticeship in trade to the East, and with all the opportunities in the neAv conditions), should have lost their hold on the East within a few decades after finding the sea road thither. But the Latins who had had the apprenticeship were not the Latins who approached the East around Africa. Nor was the East so reached the same as the East most familiar to Latins earlier. And approach by sea is very different from any 116 EAST BY WEST other approach. More than anything else, no further to quibble, the Latins who found the Far East and the Far West were not Liber- als but Conservatives. Commerce certainly they regarded in a strictly conservative way, and commerce looked at that way cannot best flourish. Who can understand the history of nations? Nobody very well, and nobody at all who does not understand something of the vag- aries of his own neighbors in the parish, not overlooking himself. People are seldom bom blind, and they do not often become blind; but they grow shortsighted, squinting, really evil- eyed. And they have many troubles, even in times of prosperity, not good for their wits or their souls. People are subject, besides, to the workings of angels and devils, that is plain. So whence cometh wisdom and where is the place of understanding.'* As regards Iberia the Portuguese and the Spanish all we can say is that Iberia lost the India trade to the Dutch and the English, peoples altogether Atlantic, and lost in a way that seems now explicable. The emporium of Antwerp being hit hard by the family of Habsburg, commerce removed to Amsterdam, chief port of the State of Holland. Amsterdam naturally put no bars in the way, indeed began a policy of damaging the Scheldt thoroughly. For ten years after EAST BY WEST 117 the breaking up of Antwerp, Amsterdam was in straits somewhat for India goods. Imports still came to Lisbon. Thither Amsterdam sent ships to take off the goods under neutral col- ors. Such ships began to be confiscated, and the sailors imprisoned. The story is that Cor- nelius Houtman, a Dutch seaman apprehended at Lisbon, made careful inquiries there with respect to India trade routes and markets. This information he contrived to lay before merchants of Amsterdam, who had been con- sidering plans for a northeast passage, and now despatched Houtman to the East with four vessels, around Africa. He returned a century after Da Gama went out, and the era of the Portuguese in the Spice Islands and that neigh- borhood was about over. For with the seven- teenth century, English ships also appeared in India waters for trade and conquest. In the year 1587, says Camden, Sir Francis Drake took a rich Portugal carrack at the Azores, " out of the papers whereof the English so fully understood the rich value of the East India merchandize and the manner of trading into the Eastern world, that they afterwards set up a gainful trade by establishing a company of East India merchants at London." Incentive also, was the Dutch putting up the price of pepper. 118 EAST BY WEST THE ENGLISH EAST AND WEST Dutch and English had been made to see wide use at last for their own good bottoms. These peoples knew how to work and how work breeds power. They had shown themselves stubborn for what is called political liberty. When they reached the point of going directly into the commerce of the round world, they found them- selves equal to their destinies. Both the Dutch and the English, once getting the hang of the open sea, learned the trade to the far east at tlie expense of Iberia, and were drawn inevit- ably on to designs against Iberia in the far west. By the end of the seventeenth century it was plain that England was to do more than Holland in both regions. In the East, Holland attempted a stem monopoly of the spice trade, and forced England to what led to a broader, continental policy. In the West, in Virginia, that bare country all to the North of Spain, English custom came to rule, ruled even before the Revolution of 1688 and, so it seems, merely because it was English custom. It was of no small significance that the first parliament of Virginia was assembling when the Dutch in the Indian trade at Manhattan had obviously become the creatures of a com- mercial monopoly. And also, but a few years before. Sir Walter Raleigh had said of the Hoi- EAST BY WEST 119 landers " Be their estates what it will, let them not deceive themselves in believing that they can make themselves masters of the sea, for certainly the shipping of England, with the great squadron of His Majesty's navy royal, are able in despite of any province or state in Europe to command the great and large field of the ocean." It is necessary to think of cer- tain men at the beginning of the sixteenth cen- tury if we would understand how England came through that century. Sir Walter Raleigh we know. We do not know so much of Anthony Jenkinson and Sir Thomas Smythe and William Adams and John Smith. Of these in brief: Anthony Jenkinson was living in 1611. He was long in the service of the Muscovy Com- pany, established in 1554, negotiating for it Avith the Czar Ivan the Terrible, even dining with the Czar " directly before his face." An- thony Jenkinson was the first Englishman who penetrated into Central Asia, to Bokhara, and was very skillful in commercial diplomacy with the Russians. Somewhat as a result of Jenkin- son's activities, the Northern trade being now better understood, Queen Elizabeth shook off the Hansa League ten years before the Ar- mada. King James sent Sir Thomas Smythe ambassador to Russia in 1604. The grandfa- ther of Sir Thomas Smythe had been one of the founders of the Muscovy Company. Sir 120 EAST BY WEST Thomas Smythe himself was largely interested in that company, was interested in the Levant Company, was first governor of the East India Company and governor for many years to 1621, and was Treasurer of the Virginia Com- pany from 1609 to 1620. His horizon was pretty wide William Adams was pilot and master for the old company of Barbary Merchants which gave place to the Turkey Company which showed the way to the East India Company. When the Dutch began to go to India Adams engaged with them " to make a little experience of the small knowledge God had given him of the Indish traffick." After many hardships he reached Japan. Be- ing a man of great practical sense he was taken into the service of the Shogun lyeyasu, build- ing ships for him. In 1611 Adams learned that the English were in the East. He indited them a letter, which they received at their Bantam factory. His countrymen had already heard of him, and had dispatched three ships the same year to open a trade with Japan. Adams was very useful to the London East India Com- pany in Japan until 1616 when the Japanese began to curtail the priviliges of both Dutch and English. Dutch and English were at war in Japan before William Adams died in 1620, and shortly after, the mainland of Japan was closed to all Europeans. While Adams was EAST BY WEST 121 building ships for the Japanese navy, John Smith of Lincolnshire was seeing to it that the Colony of Virginia in America did not fail. Before coming to Virginia, Captain John Smith had fought the Turk in Transylvania and been a Turkish slave at Varna in the Black Sea. From such items we know what England was doing in the first years of the seventeenth cen- tury, " A nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy." IBERIA IN THE WEST But the greatness of Iberia in the West is not to be gainsaid. There was a Latin-Amer- ica in the West. " Americans no Jews," thus argued a learned man in disproof of the tenet that the Americans who had America first were Jews. Whoever they were. North or South, they did not offer the inertia of the East upon the direct approach of the West. Certainly, Latin-America showed in the seventeenth cen- tury, and must still show, a Semitic tincture, Spain and Portugal deriving from the Semitic East a good deal. If family trees were known root and branch it might not be impossible to trace Latins of America to Sidonians of Tar- tessus or, coming nearer home, to Cartha- ginians. At any rate, Rome flung its shield far across the dim ocean, and where it fell. 122 EAST BY WEST often crushing, Rome set up another life in the West. Trajan, Hadrian, Theodosius, were Spaniards, all perhaps of the country of the Turdetani, near Seville. The Emperor Ha- drian, interested in so many things, would have been pleased to know of the fortunes of Se- ville, how Seville was to become headquarters for great part of a New West. For with the opening of the sixteenth century, the an- cient town of Seville (famous for its snuff market later) was granted the exclusive privilege of Spanish trade to America. And within a few years after the discovery of the Potosi mines in 1545, there were sailing an- nually from Seville two fleets for the West one, the Flota, destined for Vera Cruz, the other, the Galleons, to touch at Carthagena and Porto Bello. These fleets sailed together as far as the Antilles on the outward voyage, and returning made rendezvous at the Hav- annah. For two hundred and twenty years Seville was in this manner the gateway to the West for Spain. When the staple was trans- ferred to Cadiz the system of trade fleets was already declining. For two centuries and more the Flota and the Galleons took their orders from Seville. To Vera Cruz came the Flota, that port being the natural (or licensed) cen- ter of the American treasure and the magazine of all the merchandise of New Spain. At Vera EAST BY WEST 123 Cruz were the warehouses to supply many Latin Americans with what they must have to maintain their cost of living. Upon the yearly arrival of the Flota, a fair was held at Vera Cruz, lasting many weeks. But of all the Spanish fairs that at Porto Bello Bel Haven of the plate fleet was the greatest, in its business and its pageantry. The galleons, touching first at Carthagena of Colombia, sup- plied from thence the trade of that shoulder of South America, Terra Firma so called. When advice was received at Carthagena that the Peru fleet had unloaded at Panama, the galleons set sail for Porto Bello, across the Isthmus from Panama. As soon as the ships were moored in the harbor, the seamen erected in the square a large tent of sails, where they deposited all the cargo, each owner's goods marked with his mark. While the seamen and the European traders were thus employed, the land adjacent grew covered with droves of cat- tle from Panama, laden with chests of gold and silver on account of the merchants of Peru. When the ships were unloaded and the merchants of Peru, with the President of Pan- ama, were come up, the formalities of the fair commenced. The deputies of the several par- ties repaired on board the ships, where in the presence of the commander of the galleons, acting for the Europeans, and the President of 124 EAST BY WEST Panama, acting for the Peruvians, the prices of the several kinds of merchandise were fixed, the contracts signed and pubhcly announced. After this every merchant began disposing of his own goods : that done, the Spanish mer- cliants embarked their chests of silver, and those of Peru sent away their purchased goods in vessels up the river Chagres, and thus the fair of Porto Bello ended. Porto Bello was quiet again, except for its dreadful storms, its multitudes of monkeys and a few tigers. The wealth of America had been exchanged for the manufactures of Europe. House rents had been high as the fevers. During the forty days of the fair a rich traffic had been negotiated " with that simplicity of transaction and that unbounded confidence which accompany exten- sive commerce." The Porto Bello fair over (Isthmian spectacle), the galleons or plate fleet repaired about the middle of June to the Havannah, where joining the flota from Vera Cruz, the plate fleet and the flota thence kept together for safety home to Cadiz, down river from Seville. Nevertheless, what, as the stars were, befel the plate fleet on the return voy- age, how many rovers of the sea could tell, were they summoned. And arrived in Spain the plate, despite of high protection of the traf- fic, was subject to many demands. Work breeding power, from the end of the sixteenth EAST BY WEST 125 century the treasure of the New World of America may be said not to have belonged to Spain. ACAPULCO AND THE MANILA SHIP An excellent opera, then, might be composed on phases of the Panama and other western trade of Seville long before the Southern Eu- ropeans-in-America were much perturbed by what the Northern Europeans-in-America were doing. Those were non-competing groups for some time. In further illustration may be cited the business of the Acapulco fair, which had been well established off the West coast of New Spain a good fifty years before the English and the Dutch (to say nothing of the French) turned their minds effectually to America. After Magellan found the Philip- pines, trade thither was carried on from Callao in Peru. The voyage between was always very tedious and troublesome: Bacon may have based thereon the opening of his New Atlantis " We sailed from Peru for China and Japan by the South Seas, taking with us vic- tuals for twelve months." But Spaniards of New Spain having conquered the island of Luconia, or Luzon, it was found good praxis to change the course from the Philippines to east-north-east for better winds and so make the harbor of the Mexican West Coast. 126 EAST BY WEST Hardly had Manila been set going, when an active Chinese trade to that port began, due to the energetic commercial policies of the Ming dynasty in China. For many years the only articles permitted for export from the Philip- pines to Spanish America were these Chinese goods from Manila. The strict regulation, en- forced now and then, was that Manila exports to America should be limited in quantity and destination, and that return cargoes should be so much silver bullion and nothing else. Ma- nila and Acapulco, thus conditioned, did a very good general business together for a great many years. At one time, early in the seventeenth century, the merchants of Seville and Cadiz, and even the governments of Old and New Spain, grew so jealous of the Philip- pines trade that it was proposed to abandon the islands. Spain was already short of money, and the argument was that Manila took out little but silver from the Americas, which silver had better be sent home to Spain. These matters were long in dispute before the Span- ish Council of the Indies. INIeanwhile Manila and the islands prospered, and the trade be- came settled on the basis of an annual ship, (or nao or galleon), plying to Acapulco, touching at the " Island of California." The great Manila ships, so called by the English Cavendish and Lord Anson made prize of EAST BY WEST 127 two of them were built at Bagatao not far from Manila, where there was a fine arsenal and shipyard, the vessels carrying often as many as six hundred people, crew and passen- gers. The captain's emolument was enormous, sometimes forty thousand pieces of eight for the voyage. Acapulco, like Porto Bello, was a very inconsiderable place in the dead season. The region was one of tremblings of the earth, and the climate, besides, was prejudicial to strangers. But upon the arrival of the Manila ship, the town was populous and gay, crowded with the richest merchants of Mexico, Peru, and even of Chile, who provided themselves with tents, and formed a kind of large encampment. This was the Acapulco fair great event for more than two centuries. They have no rain at Acapulco from end of November to end of May, and the yearly ships were timed to set sail from Manila about July to reach Acapulco in the January following. Their cargo dis- posed of, they returned for Manila some time in March, and arrived there generally in June. On the voyage out to America they were so sure of rains between the thirtieth and fortieth parallels, that they took no care to provide themselves with water, but fixed mattings up and down the ship in the rigging, and caught the rains in jars supplied by bamboo troughs at the bottom of the mats. In the season 128 EAST BY WEST there was naturally a brisk trade from Aca- pulco to the City of Mexico, mules and pack horses taking up the goods brought from the East, what was not kept in the country being forwarded to Vera Cruz on the " North Sea " for shipment (regular or irregular) by the Flota to Spain. THE DARIEN COMPANY OF SCOTS By ill management, as causes go, Spain went down, and by good management, so it seemed, France came up. " No Pyrenees now," Louis XIV said at the end of the seventeenth cen- tury, and there was a general alarm, especially on the part of England and the Dutch. Dur- ing the century the Dutch had fallen off in the West ; the English were solidly strengthened there; and the French had made a fair show of dominion extended from the fur countries of their Canada down the Mississippi to the Mex- ican gulf. Should France control all that was Spain's off the Spanish Main and in the Great South Sea, how unbalanced would the world ap- pear. There could be no sounder reasons for a general war. If Spain was not efficient, there were others there to manage Spain's business. To say the least, the through East and West traffic by Mexico and Panama had its allure- ments. Those middle regions, between the Americas, and the trade to them, offered in- EAST BY WEST 129 ducements. Hence the Darien Company, to damage and take over the Porto Bello fair; hence the South Sea Company, to encroach as much as possible upon the Spanish trade in that territory. And hence also the Mississippi Company of Crozat, for encroachment both upon Spain and England. It was a time of far reaching plans and speculations, and very com- plex reactions. The parties to these ideals, with their confederates, fought everywhere and came to some sort of terms as Louis XIV was dying and the House of Hanover establishing. The Duke of Marlborough no doubt settled the business, and if he took his commissions it is what others have done, with applause. Not to rehearse or apologize, it may be said that the period was certainly one of brilliant jobs and ideas. Of them the most interesting in some respects was the Darien Company, which came to nothing in itself but furthered the mak- ing of the United States of England and Scot- land. William Paterson, the projector (and of so much else) had been in the West Indies and in touch there with the growing New Eng- land trade to those islands. He could enlist his fellow Scots easily, their commercial status before the Union not being acceptable; and he was able to get large subscriptions in Ham- burg, which the English minister resident there secured the canceling of. William Paterson 130 EAST BY WEST argued that by his plan " the time and expense of navigation to China, Japan, the Spice Islands, and the greater part of the East In- dies would be lessened more than half, and the consumption of European commodities soon be more than doubled. This door of the seas and key of the universe, with anything of a reason- able management, will of course enable its pro- prietors to give laws to both oceans and be- come arbitrators of the commercial world." His policy, however, was for an international usufruct. Contra, it was observed that all the inducements Mr. Paterson could offer were grounds the more for the opposition of estab- lished commerce. At their Height of the World the Scots Company proposed setting up business to trade with Africa, to supply Mex- ico and Peru with whatever they wanted from Europe, and within four or five months to bring the riches of China and Japan to Europe, and greatly undersell all the East India Companies very practicable, " supposing all Europe but themselves to be fast asleep." It was not so. The Dutch were uneasy, in the first in- stance, for their contraband trade to South America from Cura^oa, The French consid- ered their own West India prospects good. The London East India company could not but look askance. And the Spanish had nom- inally the trade already that the Darien Com- EAST BY WEST 131 pany was planning for. Mr. Paterson came to Darien with his colonists, but stronger com- mercial organizations worked his ruin by get- ting his supplies cut off. He returned to Eng- land by way of New York, and just before King William's death submitted to him a proposal for a West India expedition, holding that to se- cure the Spanish monarchy from France it would be more feasible to make Spain follow the fate of the West Indies than to make the West Indies, once in the power of France, fol- low the fate of Spain. King William's general war, the importance of which he knew in all its bearings, ended rather tamely for the far West. The P^^renees, indeed, had not been allowed to disappear, but in the West the outcome was little more on the surface than a modification of the Darien Scheme viz : Permission to the South Sea Company to trade to parts of Spanish America by an annual ship, and an Assiento to the same company for importing into the Spanish West Indies four thousand eight hundred blacks annually from the Guinea Coast, both contracts for thirty years. The trading ship now and then did a good business but it met with difficulties and was not at all annual. The assiento contract was never very profitable. Flemings had had it, Genoese had had it, also the Portuguese and the French had been Assientists. It was said that the British 132 EAST BY WEST plenipotentiary at first demanded a free trade to Spanish America : " But that was a mere illusion, since it would have enflamed the jeal- ousy of all the rest of Europe." BRITISH AMERICA AND BRITISH INDIA The treaty of Utrecht, then, left Great Britain, France, and Spain all good Ameri- cans, (not excluding the Portuguese), and it would require a few years yet to show how the balance might be moved. This treaty also left Great Britain and France pretty good In- dians. France, instructed by Richelieu and Colbert, had grown to some degree of diplo- matic and commercial strength in India by the year 1713. As for the British, it is almost enough to say, that in 1710 Governor Pitt, grandfather of the Great Commoner, returned to England rich, with the Pitt diamond (48,- 000 to begin with) in his son's shoe, his for- tune having been built up largely by interlop- ing, by trading, that is, outside the East In- dia Company. Thomas Pitt, " the Governor," was of a haughty, huffying, daring temper, and it may be that English traders in India, regular or irregular, had brought the century through to such good advantage by reason of tempers like Thomas Pitt's. The Dutch had grown confiiTHcd as masterly pepperors and skilled carriers they were not in the compe- EAST BY WEST 133 tition East or West. The treaty of Utrecht left Great Britain and France in both quarters susceptible of Empire. India and North America the Ganges and the Mississippi : to whom the politcal control.'' The policy of muddling is not one of an indiscriminate appli- cation. The grandson of Governor Pitt came into Parliament for Old Sarum, a family bor- ough, about sixty acres of plowed land with no indweller. Of a piece with such methods was General Braddock's expedition towards the Ohio twenty years later, and British strategy on the Continent at the same time. " We are no longer a nation," they said in England. To such a pass had good business, among trad- ers and administrators, brought the country. Indeed, muddling as we know the term has come to stand for belief in latent character strong to the point of general negligence. It is a dangerous habit, for there is no telling where inspiration may, or may not, start up. How- ever, at a very black moment William Pitt stood forward, saying: " I am sure I can save this country and nobody else can." The country was glad to have him make the attempt, and within four years he had done what he said. Saving the country then was no parochial task. It involved the establishment of the country in the world. Pittsylvania : so might much of North America have been called 134 EAST BY WEST in 1760. By virtue and fortune Great Britain had widened out. How India became British why stop to enquire? East as West the answer is muddling and miracle. The miracles worked had to have a basis. The East India Company's servants, Job Chamock and his fel- lows, held on somehow until the brilliant days of conquest. The Virginians of New England and nearer the Chesapeake persevered from hard beginnings to something rather like glory. " I will win America for you in Germany," said Pitt. But America could have been won by Pitt nowhere, except for the British-Americans. APPRENTICESHIP OF THE BRITISH AMERICANS The British-Americans, now Pittsylvanians, had learned long before methods of trade in what the}' had and in what they had not. The Rhode Islanders knew how to import from Britain, dry goods from Africa, slaves from the West India islands, sugar, coffee, and molasses and from the neighboring colonies, lumber and provisions. With the bills they obtained in Surinam and other Dutch West In- dia settlements (Cura9oa for example) they paid their merchants in England ; their sugars they carried to Holland ; the slaves from Africa they took to the West Indies, together with the lumber and provisions procured at home; the EAST BY WEST 135 rum distilled from the molasses was carried to Africa to purchase negroes ; with their dry goods from England they trafficked with the neighboring colonies. By this kind of circuit- ous commerce they subsisted and grew rich. Philadelphia in Pennsylvania was doing an ex- cellent trade at the time William Pitt was com- posing sound Latin verse at Eaton, as he spelled it. Merchants of Philadelphia sent raft ships of timber to England, and other ships ; sent great quantities of corn in the shape of wheat to Portugal and Spain, frequently sell- ing the ship as well as cargo, the produce of both being laid out in English goods for the home market. Philadelphia traded besides to Virginia and the Carolinas, and to all the islands, except the Spanish, in the West Indies as also to the Canaries, Madeira, and the Azores ; and to Newfoundland for fish, exported to Spain, Portugal, and up the Mediterranean. Remittances all to Great Britain. But with- out their trade to the French and Dutch Col- onies in the West Indies, they should have suffered; their rum, molasses and sugar en- abling them to carry on their traffic with the red Indians. At the same time, thirty years before 1760, Massachusetts was transacting a very similar business, but in the circumstances was more engaged in the fisheries, whale fishing and other. Massachusetts Bay shipping early 136 EAST BY WEST found the way to the sugar islands, and to Hon- duras for logwood. British merchants and manufacturers were on the whole pleased with Northern America towards the year 1760. They sent out thither all manner of wearing apparel, woolen, brass, iron, and linen manu- factures, and East India goods in some plenty. Arthur Young in 1772 called the Pennsylva- nians the Dutch of America. The term was applied also to the New Englanders. Arthur Young, in his " Political Essays," enlarges upon the importance of keeping the inhabitants of colonies absolutely without manufactures. But he adds, " There is some amusement at least in reflecting upon the vast consequences which some time or other must infallibly at- tend the colonizing of America. This immense continent will be peopled by British subjects, whose language and National Character will be the same. The few Frenchmen in it, or for- eigners imported, will be confounded by the gen- eral population, and the whole people physic- ally speaking one. The inhabitants of this potent Empire, so far from being in the least danger from the attacks of any other quarter of the globe, will have it in their power to en- gross the whole commerce of it, and to reign not only lords of America, but to possess in the utmost security that dominion of the sea throughout the world which their British an- EAST BY WEST 137 cestors enjoyed before them." Arthur Young thought that by a good system of politics the allegiance of these portentous colonies might be retained for a long while; after they had set up independence, adverting to his principles, he thought the loss to Great Britain trifling, " north of tobacco." Burke was, on the whole, more concerned. In his youth he had com- piled a large book on America, and in 1775 he said he could pardon something to the spirit of liberty : " Let us get an American revenue as we have got an American empire . . . ; a great empire and little minds go ill together." THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION Undoubtedly, the British at home were mud- dling again. The contraband trade of the Colonies, in West India waters especially, al- though useful to Great Britain, was taking on alarming proportions. The estimate has been that in 1775 Massachusetts employed more hands in navigation and in shipbuilding than in agriculture; and that most American mer- chants at that time were smugglers. It is written that a fourth part of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were bred to commerce, to the command of ships and to the contraband trade. John Hancock was a con- traband trader doTni forisque: the battle of Lexington took place on the day appointed by 138 EAST BY WEST the Admiralty Court of Boston for hearing the case of John Hancock, (John Adams his at- torney), charged with evasion of customs dues in the amount of five hundred thousand dollars. After the colonies had been made securely Brit- ish by war, the policies adopted for making them secure by tariff were perhaps a little blind. British America had grown very fast under the Georges, and it may be that nothing could have been done to avoid a break. Very little that was advised was done. Small matters are awfully important. The idea of the East In- dia Company must have been repugnant to a good many of the British in America. The British government would not withdraw its tax on tea in America, and yet allowed the em- barrassed East India Company to send its teas out to America free of any duty payable by the Company. So, a little by the maxim, " love me love my dog," Great Britain lost the colonies. It was, after all, necessary the les- son should be well taught that monopoly of a colony trade worth anything is worth nothing. And, after all, a man born in 1760 on coming to his majority faced a dismal time in the for- tunes of Great Britain. Winning America in Bayreuth and other small German circumscrip- tions had not been found practicable. The Colonies, lately saved from France, had won themselves in France, so swiftly the wheel had EAST BY WEST 139 turned. And yet, while the issue was deciding, the inalienable enterprise of Great Britain had gone far to show a new world to the Americans of the North. We can imagine that before the Revolution, Boston and Philadelphia chafed somewhat at having nothing to do with the East, at the monopoly of the East India Com- pany and the Hudson's Bay Company. A few years before the war a good observer wrote: " If ever the second act of the tragedy of Am- boyna, or anything tending towards it, comes in play, pray heaven we may not have a James upon the throne." And urging the importance of a chain of British settlements across the Pa- cific Ocean, from Cape Horn to Mindanao, this observer emphasized the corallary of new dis- coveries in the Terra Australis, where there should be much earth to countervail the weight of Asia. Captain Cook sailed from Plymouth, on his last voyage, 12 July 1776 ; with him was John Ledyard of Connecticut. They were off the North American West Coast the spring of 1778. There they were struck with the mul- titudes of sea-otters, and were sure that for- tunes could be made in the skins of them. Ledyard returned to the United States At- lantic Coast Confederacy, and convinced Robert Morris of the feasibility of trade to the Northwest Coast. Ledyard had no luck, but the idea was a taking one. Very soon Yan- 140 EAST BY WEST kee adventurers were up and down the West Coast from Nootka to Valparaiso, and trading furs to China for teas, silks, and nankeens. A new people had come into the East. BOSTON IN THE EAST Miraculous and yet altogether in keeping, this sudden swing around the Horn to the North West and the Far East on the part of the Boston ships, as those ships were for a time best known. There is a legend that a year or two before King Charles lost his head to the Commonwealth, a small ship left the port of New Haven in Connecticut for England. A long time went by, and there was no news. Then upon a day after a great thunderstorm, about an hour before sunset, a ship of like di- mensions appeared in the air, with her canvas and colors abroad coming up the harbor against the wind for the space of an hour. Many, as the narrative goes, were drawn to behold this great work of God, yea, the very children cried out, " There is a brave ship ! " When so near that a man might cast a stone on board of her, her maintop seemed blown off, then her mizzentop, then her masting seemed blown away by the board she overcast, and so vanished into a smoking cloud. That was the news. Ports like that, with such visions, and that harbored witches, had a future, in- EAST BY WEST 141 dubitably. Men and ships of the New Eng- land had learned the seas. The New England had grown virtually into independence largely by the sea. War came on because of a ham- pering of the sea, and during the war the soundest strokes for freedom were perhaps de- livered by the armed trading ships of the New Englanders. Strength and consciousness of strength grew every way, and after the war men bred to the sea as whalers. West India trad- ers, contraband traders, privateers, knowing immediately that their opportunities were en- larged, at once seized upon them and found the way to the East. They liked the idea of doing business with all the world. The East had been something of a vacuum to them which was now quite abhorrent. It is an idle question how much support they got from British trad- ers inimical to the great London Companies. Nor is it worth itemizing who sent out the first vessels. There was impetus from several quar- ters, Philadephia and New York were pleased with Captain Cook's and John Ledyard's de- ductions for the North West Coast: very soon there was an enthusiasm for that coast in the states of the East. West India traders and privateers, like the Derbys of Salem, saw their account in a direct Russia and a direct East India trade. Old East Indians like John O'Donnell of Baltimore, began a China trade. 142 EAST BY WEST O'Donnell, having brought in a full cargo of China goods, held out to the Congress, in 1786, the prospect of supplying not only their own citizens but also those of the West Indies and the Spanish mainland with Asiatic products, " which before they had through the hands of monopolizing and avaricious European Com- panies." The same year Samuel Shaw, in his report to Secretary Jay of his voyage as super- cargo in the Empress of China to Canton, mentioned the goodwill of the Chinese them- selves " The Chinese were very indulgent to us, though our being the first American ships that had ever visited China, it was some time before they could fully comprehend the distinc- tion between Englishmen and us. They styled us the New People; and when by the map we conveyed to them an idea of the extent of our country, with its present and increasing popu- lation, they were highly pleased at the pros- pect of so considerable a market for the pro- ductions of theirs." How necessarily like all this was to the first beginnings of the Portu- guese, the Dutch, and the English in the East. SALEM, BOSTON, AND OTHER PORTS Not long before his death, Washington said: " If we can hold together for twenty years we are secure." The debate would not be out of the question as to whether the United States EAST BY WEST 143 could have subsisted but for the phenomena of Europe during the quarter century following the Constitution of 1789. The Jay treaty, with its fortunate rapprochements facilitated the opening of the North American West, and made commerce with the far East simpler. Relations with Great Britain continued un- stable, but, as the conditions were, the money of Stephen Girard, accumulated by 1812, in the West India and East India trade, was a use- ful factor in the accomplishment of the war formally on with 1812, by which in 1815 the United States found themselves. Capital vastly increased in the United States during the quarter century after 1789, and the new com- merce with the East, in all its branches, helped much to that end. What the dangers of cap- ital precisely are nobody has determined: granting dangers there, capital as the upshot of exuberant energy, often right enough, must be defended, it is evident. Who without a has- tening of the pulse can follow the fortunes of the House of Derby of Salem, for near a cen- tury before and after 1800? Captain Rich- ard, the founder, sent small vessels of fifty to a hundred tons up and down his own coasts, into the West Indies, to the Madeiras and Spain ; his sons dispatched ships about the world, to the Columbia River, the East Coast of Africa, Batavia, and Canton ; his grandson. 144 EAST BY WEST just out of Harvard, was placed in England and on the continent to learn methods of trade to the East, learned fast and applied his knowl- edge. It was this house that did most to give Salem for years its lucrative business with Can- ton, India, the East Indies of the Dutch, Ma- nila, Mocha, Isle of France, Madagascar, Zan- zibar, " when India was a new region and only Salem knew the way there," as Hawthorne said, who could make romance from the Cus- tom House. Thomas Perkins, starting mainly as supercargo for the Derby s in 1789, within a few years established at Boston a very solid house trading to the North West Coast and China. This American merchant, Thomas Handasyd Perkins, of symmetrical mind and person, courteous, greatly skilled at diplomacy, made Boston, more than any of its traders then, the port so long of the Boston Ships in the sea-otter and Cliina trade. The Derbys schooled a good many merchants and traders of the broad outlook, among them Richard Cleveland, (his wise narrative must be consulted for these times), who not seldom beginning a voyage with a few thousand dollars multiplied them fifty fold in roundabout cruising say, from Havre round Africa to the West Coast, Canton, and back home to Salem. With 1789, Girard, Wain, and Ralston of Philadelphia were at their middle point of life and making EAST BY WEST 145 money fast in the four seas. Stephen Girard would soon be writing methodically to his su- percargoes " It is my habit to dispatch my ships for Batavia from this port, Liverpool, or Amsterdam as circumstances render it con- venient." Dr. Franklin knew earlier, but with 1789 the North Atlantic men of affairs at sea knew generally how to use and how to avoid the Gulf Stream. That was a great deal on one side. And on the other side, the longest voyage there was, from Boston to Nootka and higher up, was a thing achieved, its feasibil- ities known. The Spaniards of Mexico had be- gun to look into the Coast to the North of them: already they had a settlement at San Francisco, Franciscan in a way, where they were careful a little after to stipulate that their Manila ships should not trade. The com- mandant at San Francisco received an order from his governor, dated May 1789, Califor- nia's first recognition of the United States : " Should there arrive at the port a ship named Columbia, which they say belongs to General Washington of the American State, and which sailed from Boston in September 1787 with the design of making discoveries and inspecting the establishments of the Russians on the Northern coasts of this peninsula, you will take meas- ures to secure this vessel and all the people on board, with discretion, tact, cleverness and cau- 146 EAST BY WEST tion." The Columbia kept clear of San Fran- cisco on that voyage. Soon after, Captain Vancouver was hospitably entertained in port. The good ship United States had been launched. It was by now in touch with the East, and met at once in those far western waters, Spain, Great Britain, and Russia. On the other side the United States faced France, and much of Europe to boot, at the outset of a revolution of twenty-five years. It was what is called a romantic time from which the Americas were to come palpably changed. Americans of the North, interested in all that furthered their new commercial life, were building excellent vessels. They made the mistake of using green white oak for their first great East Indiama^i, of 1789, but they learned on all hands, and with not much re- sort to academic science. Their Baltimore clipper schooners, for instance, were soon known to be extraordinary ; their vessels in gen- eral, with ingenious blocks and miscellaneous contrivances, could sail faster, carry more cargo in proportion to registered tonnage, and with smaller crews, than others. The Chesa- peake schooners, broad of beam before the cen- ter above the water line, sharp in the bow, deep aft, long and low, presented admirable forms for capacity, for stability to sustain a EAST BY WEST 147 large amount of canvas, for great speed, and for holding their course on a wind with little drifting to leeward. Their masts were long and slender, sails unusually large for vessels of the size, and of such true cut and perfect set that no portion of the propelling effect of the breeze that reached them was wasted. Close hauled, they drew well with the vessel running within 40 or 45 of the wind, while the best equipped frigate would be sharp set at 60. In these items therefore, when the revolution in Europe began, and continued, the sea-faring America of the North Atlantic was in fit condition. The oceans being taken and chained by one strong nation, and there being hardly any neutral nation but that of the late British-American colonies, there was as matter of course a flourishing trade in American bot- toms. It was charged that valuable cargoes of bullion and specie and spices were nominally purchased by Americans, in the eastern colonies of the enemies of Great Britain and wafted under the American flag to the real hostile pro- prietors. It was charged that one single American house contracted for the whole of the merchandise of the Dutch East India Com- pany at Batavia, amounting to no less a sum than a million seven hundred thousand pounds sterling. " We defend our colonies," said the author of " War in Disguise," " at a vast ex- 148 EAST BY WEST pense, we maintain, at a still greater ex- pense, an irresistible navy, we chase the flag of every enemy from every sea, and at the same time the Americans are able, from the superior safety and cheapness of their new-found navi- gation, to undersell us in the continental markets of Europe." The American merchant marine prospered conspicuously, could scarcely help doing so. Duties paid at Salem alone for nine 3 ears after 1801, were over 7,000,000 dol- lars. Salem began its wonderful business, long maintained, in the reshipment of pepper. British courts had to revise their opinions on the subject of what made a continuous voyage. Then Orders in Council, Berlin and Milan de- crees, and Embargo bills followed as of course and President Madison's message to Con- gress, suggesting " an armor and an attitude demanded by the crisis." A few months after- wards, Stephen Girard's ship Montesquieu coming into the Delaware was captured by a British frigate. The invoice cargo of the prize was two hundred thousand dollars, teas, nankeens and silks from Canton. The captain of the frigate, instead of risking recapture on his way to a British port, dispatched a flag of truce to Mr. Girard, who replied by sending from his bank ninety-three thousand dollars in doubloons. The cargo, its value now advanced, added half a million to the Girard account. EAST BY WEST 149 This story is proof of what the American North Atlantic could do. Mr, Girard might have lost his cargo, but for the fast privateers the captain of the frigate dreaded. By the end of 1814 those fast sailing vessels, armate in mercanzia, had made prize of more than seven- ten hundred British merchantmen, and Captain David Porter in the Essex (celebrated case of the continuous voyage of the Essex) had swept the South Seas of British whalers. 1815 AND THE CHINA TRADE After the war, Mr. Perkins of Boston said: " Embargoes and non-intercourse, with politi- cal and other causes of embarrassment, crossed our path, but we kept our trade with China." That China trade involved the North West Coast and California. Napoleon Bonaparte changed all the Americas, in the north bring- ing California by map much closer to the United States, and weakening the hold of Spain on California. In 1806, Spain was obliged to send to Archibald Gracie, (merchant of New York trading to the world), bills on Vera Cruz for collection to the amount of $10,000,000. The package of bills was upset in a small boat in New York harbor, found a fortnight later off New Jersey, dried, and exactly collected. The plate fleet was then of American ships. As for the Manila ship, Great Britain did away with 150 EAST BY WEST the old order at Manila in 1814, and the last Manila ship sailed from Acapulco in 1815. At that time a Boston trader to California was constrained to go around the Horn, and Spain reached California strictly by regulation from San Bias, staple port to the north of Aca- pulco. A year or two after 1800, the brig Lelia Byrd, a " Boston Ship " out of Norfolk in Virginia for Hamburg and thence to Califor- nia, got 1,600 otter skins at San Bias, went up the coast trading and smuggling to San Diego, where the crew had a small battle with the Spanish customs force, and kept on to China, selling the furs there. The captain of the Lelia Byrd, William Shaler, published in 1808 the journal of his voyage, the first extended account of California printed in the United States. Another ship trading from Sitka to San Diego, on shares with the Russians for furs, brought news the year of Captain Shaler's voyage (1804) that a Philadelphia American was asking Congress for forty thousand men with which to take Mexico. There was a lively dread in INIexico of Yankee schemes, and orders were framed there to close California to all but Spanish mail ships. The times Avere revolu- tionary in general, and when Mexico fell away from Spain there were those in un-republican California who would not have been displeased at annexation to the Sandwich Islands, under EAST BY WEST 151 an Hawaiian sovereign. Captain William Shaler had printed a broad hint in his journal that California should be an easy prey for some foreign nation. The Nation of Boston was as strong as any on that coast in 1815. The East India Company had possibly hampered British traders there. It was even said that soon after 1815, Boston traders carried to the Columbia River all the stores needed by the western British establishments, and took away to Canton all the furs obtained by the British company. The logic of it was that some sort of Astoria was inevitable. A British reviewer of those years gives a rather disparaging turn to Yankee adventure on the North West coast: " They set out with a few trinkets. In the Southern Pacific they pick up a few seal skins and perhaps a few butts of oil; at the Gallipa- gos they lay in turtle, of which they preserve the shells ; at Valparaiso they raise a few dol- lars in exchange for European articles ; at Nootka and other parts of the North West Coast they traffic with the natives for furs, which when winter commences they carry to the Sandwich Islands to dry and preserve from ver- min ; here they leave their own people to take care of them, and take on in the Spring native crews for the North West Coast, in search of more furs. The remainder of their cargo they make up of sandal wood, tortoise shell, shark 152 EAST BY WEST fins, and pearls of an inferior sort; and with these and their dollars they purchase tea, silks, and nankeens, and thus complete their voyage in the course of two or three years." That was doubtless an aspect of the trade. There was plenty of capital in it. Astoria sprang out of capital in it. For example, an outfit of $50,- 000 at most gave a gross return of $284,000 to Messrs. Bryant and Sturgis of Boston. The basis of the trade was manufactures for raw materials. The California padres collected sea-otter skins a little and sold them to the " Boston Americans " contraband, a harmless pursuit. The trade nearly extinguished the sea-otter of the North West not long after 1815; and with the raw materials went the trade. The sea-otter had answered the pur- pose, perhaps. FROM MECCA TO SANTA FE 1815 was a hundred years ago. It is mat- ter of interest to observe here and there what the fund of capital, money and experience, accumulated then has since wrought out. How might a Cashmere shawl reach the North- ern provinces of Mexico about that time? By Acapulco rarely ; almost certainly by Vera Cruz, sole port for commerce with Europe. To Vera Cruz a Cashmere shawl might easily come from Marseilles, long in close touch with EAST BY WEST 155 Aleppo for Marseilles made friends with the Turk when Mexico was in seisin to Charles V. At Aleppo the European or Frank factories, towards 1815, were English, French, Venetian, Dutch, and Tuscan ; the language in common use there was the Italian. These factors traded with the Damascus Caravan as many as fifty thousand pilgrims a year from Aleppo to Damascus, destined at last for Mecca. A Cashmere shawl might come that way, the pil- grims always trading on the road. But Aleppo dealt direct with Bagdad and Bassora, and Cashmere shawls were articles of import from India to Bassora up the Persian Gulf. From Aleppo, a package of shawls would be sent down to the port of Scanderoon, for ship- ment, say, to Marseilles, Spain, and Vera Cruz. At least, when Major Pike was at Santa Fe a few years before 1815, the only regular channel for Cashmere shawls to New Mexico was by Vera Cruz and the ridge road to the North, through Chihuahua to the Paso del Norte. With 1815 changes were imminent. The North East American traders had powerfully affected the East India Company at London, and were to affect it to the end. The British threw open their own trade to India, and threw open the trade of the Spanish Manila. The South Seas were a good deal liberalized. The American continents felt results. In half a 164 EAST BY WEST dozen years Mexico would be held for inde- pendent, and the old Spanish system gone that was, no regular channel for dry goods and other manufactures except through a port or two. Mexico independent, the Santa Fe trade with the United States began an outgrowth of the Mississippi Valley fur companies, Spanish, French, British, British-American, American with headquarters at St. Louis. Like the Aleppo-Damascus caravan, this Mis- souri-Santa Fe caravan had its chief or aga or caravan-bachi, whose authority was absolute. The Santa Fe caravan had desert to cross, it passed from water to water. The long lines of its wagons, or " Dearborn carriages," were defended by skirmishing cavalry ; at night they formed a hollow wagon square, with fires around. Approaching Santa Fc, couriers went ahead to make arrangements and placate the custom house. Coming into the town each driver of a wagon made a noise with his whip, to the last end of which a new cracker had been expressly fixed. Within a few years the total of the trade for a year was not much below $2,- 000,000, in which cottons (American cottons) figured largely. OREGON AND CALIFORNIA Thtj Santa Fe caravan (freight thither around $10 the cwt.) set out for the South EAST BY WEST 155 West from a point some distance up the Mis- souri from St. Louis. Here, a little later, the beaten Oregon Trail began, known as a path since the hard journey of Lewis and Clark. It is the further modification of time and space and the new manipulation of matter that have given character to the century past. Mr. Roosevelt got his steamboat down the Ohio in 1811. It was at once supposed that the Mis- souri might be similarly made use of, and if the Missouri, why not the Columbia? Boston ships were going to California. Merchants were trading direct to Santa Fe through St. Louis. Trappers had found their way from St. Louis across the mountains to the Pacific. St. Louis looked out to the West upon Spain: Missouri brought pressure to bear in the mat- ter of connecting the United States by land with the Pacific. As early as 1818 the Oregon Question had taken shape Mr. Benton of Missouri, prefacing his remarks then by a brief history of the trade of all nations to India, sug- gested a river navigation ascending the Mis- souri, a land carriage across the Rocky Moun- tains, a river navigation down the Columbia, and a sea voyage across the North Pacific : " An open channel to Asia, short, direct, safe, cheap, and exclusively American." The fab- ric of Astoria was persistent. When Congress took up the proposals for occupying the mouth 156 EAST BY WEST of the Columbia, the bill found pessimists and optimists in debate was not the country being drained already of mpney by the China trade? Mr. Floyd of Virginia and Mr. Golden of New York were very cogent and far-sighted in support of the bill, year of the Monroe Doctrine. Mr. Golden, like Mr. Floyd, put stress upon the China trade, showing how it was not the impoverisher that Pliny thought the Indian was. Mr. Golden said: " Sir, I do verily believe that in twenty years, and if not in twenty, in fifty years, a person setting out from London to go to India will find New York, Albany, and Sandusky post towns on his route. By pursuing continually nearly a west course, he will cross the Atlantic, reach Albany, fol- low the New York canal, embark on Lake Erie, pass through the Ohio canal, and pursue the Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri to the foot of the Rocky Mountains, over which he will tra- verse a turnpike of only seventy-five miles, which will bring him to the waters of the Col- umbia ; upon these he will reach the Pacific, and from thence he will cross a ferry to the Asiatic continent. Sir, I am aware that by many these will be considered as extravagant and visionary ideas. But, let mc ask, are they more extrava- gant than it would have been, only ten years ago, to predict that the waters of the Great Lakes Avould be emptied into the Atlantic at EAST BY WEST 157 New York?" The fancy of DeWitt Clinton, author of the New York Canal, was slightly more startling. Nonplussed by the ancient fortresses of the South Shore of Lake Erie, he thought how if some day Asia should " revenge upon our posterity the injuries we have inflicted upon her sons " meaning that he took the red Indians to be Asiatics, and that Asiatics might at some time, " after subverting the neighbor- ing despotisms of the old world, bend their course toward European America." THE AMERICAN EAGLE 1846 The North American West was diverging to 1846. Missouri was an uncompromising state with regard to the West. The Austins had been drawn from the lead mines of Virginia to the lead mines of Missouri, and thence to the Texas country where under a republican reg- ime it was desired that American energy should develop the resources. Captain Fremont, mar- ried to a daughter of Mr. Benton of Missouri, got his father-in-law to send him out on gov- ernment scientific expeditions to Oregon and California. Captain Sutter had been lead from Switzerland through France to the Santa Fe trade, and then to the Sandwich Islands and his " New Helvetia " in California. St. Louis gave Captain Sutter his far- Western look : and it is not saying too much to say that, among 158 EAST BY WEST the gente de razon of California, Captain Sut- ter and the Boston colony did most to change the allegiance of the province. New Helvetia, with its hospitality, furs, hides and tallow, was in good touch with the patently American col- ony, looking back to Boston. Even in 1842 Commodore Ap Catesby Jones served sharp notice of a day that the United States was not going to be forestalled in California, no matter what the vaguely manifest destinies of other powers. So the Spring of 1846 was a busy season at St. Louis. The young Parkman found emigrants there from every part of the country preparing for the journey to Oregon and California, and an unusual number of traders making ready their wagons and outfits for Santa Fe. Those bound for California were often persons of wealth. The hotels were crowded, and the gunsmiths and saddlers were kept constantly at work providing arms and equipment for the different parties of travelers. Almost every day steamboats were casting off from the levee, and passing up the Missouri, crowded with passengers on their way to the frontier. Many of them were to change the frontier: others in Missouri at the time meant certainly to change the frontier. Young Mr. Parkman, on his vacation, went one way towards the end of April. In June the Army EAST BY WEST 159 of the West set out from Missouri for Santa Fe, taking with it the annual caravan, this year 414 wagons heavily laden with dry goods for the markets of Santa Fe and Chihuahua. " The boundless plains, lying in ridges of wavy green not unlike the ocean, seemed to unite with the heavens in the distant horizon. As far as vision could penetrate, the long lines of cavalry, the gay fluttering of lances, and the canvas covered wagons of the merchant train glisten- ing in the distance, might be seen winding their tortuous way." The historian of this expedi- tion, John Hughes, was not long out of college himself. He says Santa Fe traders told him, that a few months earlier, on their road back to Missouri, they beheld just after a storm and a little before sunset, the perfectly distinct image of the " bird of liberty," the American eagle, on the disc of the sun. Missouri had visions too, and occupied New Mexico in fact, having traded thither for several years. The Army of the West was but a more martial Santa Fe caravan. From Missouri and the West, and from around the Horn, Oregon, California, and New Mexico were added. The China trade, the East India trade and trade to the country of the Western Indians had added a good deal since 1789. 160 EAST BY WEST CALIFORNIA AND THE MERCHANT MARINE California, whether consciously or not to 1846, had been the chief objective. Here was a New Atlantis, regarded as of value if for nothing else than its lying on the Pacific near Oregon, and being a good place to make up cargoes of hides and tallow. The Spaniards themselves had not considered the region until the Russians began to come South; and when they relinquished the country, the Spaniards had not long given up their belief in a Northern Mystery that there was a strait from the strait of the Venetian Juan de Fuca to New Mexico at the Gulf of California. Presidio, pueblo, mission, rancho, and other life in Cali- fornia was rather sleepy even in 184>6, and lit- tle different in January 1848. But in Febru- ary 1848 there was an unmistakable shock, and everything was confused. Somebody found gold in nuggets at Captain Sutter's Columa sawmill. Much gold set all prices very high in the neighborhood. In August flour at Captain Sutter's was worth thirty-six dollars a barrel and would soon be worth fifty dollars. The people were abandoning their wheat fields to the cattle; and it was thought that unless wheat could be conveyed promptly from Chile and Oregon, there would be hard times. Such conditions gave energy to the Boston and other EAST BY WEST 161 Northeast American merchant marine. The gold of Columa and thereabouts pulled the East West by faster ships and greatly speeded on the traffic overland, for steam was now in the air. So much so, that for some years yet freight to California would find its best road by what was still the longest voyage in the world, although the Maury Sailing Directions, wind and current charts, were shortening the voyage by thirty days precisely at this time. The new California trade stimulated every ship yard on the opposite coast, of the requisite skill and capital, in the building of clipper ships for that trade. New York was perhaps the cen- ter of the industry, Salem having lapsed to Boston, and Boston to New York. The clip- per builders, it is said, took the bonito, fish of the South Atlantic, for their model. The ship that they turned out, "the noblest work that has ever come from the hand of man," wrote Commodore Maury, " was sent through the oceans, guided by the light of science, to con- tend with the elements, to outstrip steam, and astonish the world." A very famous race of four clippers was run towards the end of 1852, over the New York-California course. Four new clipper ships put to sea from New York, Oct. 12, Oct. 29, Nov. 1, Nov. 14 the WUd Pigeon, the John Gilpin, the Flying Fish, and the Trade Wind, The Flying Fish won. She 162 EAST BY WEST made the passage in 92 days 4 hours from port to anchor at San Francisco; the Gilpin in 93 days from port to pilot; the Wild Pigeon's log showed 118; the Trade Wind, having taken fire and burned for eight hours on the way, con- sumed 102 days. Navigators, with gold bul- lion at the dropping of their anchors, and with charts of the winds and the currents of the sea in their cabins, could do well as steam was com- ing in. It is astounding that the American merchant marine began to fall off almost im- mediately after 1855 seems to have been the greatest tonnage year, and that due to the Black Sea war somewhat. THE UNION PACIFIC The complications of steam were numerous. Money gained in the East India trade, at Phil- adelphia, at Boston, at New York, had turned to manufactories and steam railroads. Ear- lier, as an instance, Boston's ice trade to Cal- cutta, in connection with the importation of India cottons, (paid for in Spanish dollars), had been profitable ; now American cottons were cheaper and better. At the same it appeared that the British were able to build iron steam- ships more advantageously than the Americans. The Americans were very much interested in steam railroads. Their country was vast. The application of steam in this way was a EAST BY WEST 163 logical accompaniment, a function almost, of the movement of their center of population. Testifj'ing before a committee of Congress, regarding the causes of reduction of American tonnage, Admiral Porter said: " I think that I could have carried on the business at one third the amount it cost to carry it on." You mean to say distinctly that the American steamship lines before the war were badly managed? " I think they were." And then also the subsidy to the Collins line was withdrawn? " Yes." You also remember the man who was most prominent in the withdrawing of that subsidy? " I do not." Commodore Vanderbilt did more to break up the American line to Europe than any other man. If that was so, we cannot now ascertain the reason why exactly ; it is too short a time since this kind of transportation war began. Com- modore Vanderbilt went the most effectual way to any point. California coming into his pur- view, he hit upon the Nicaragua route, and sup- plied it for a while with steam ships on both oceans, taking a profit as the Panama railroad was constructing and the Pacific Mail getting 164 EAST BY WEST started. He may have been impatient at the bulking of North America between the Hud- son and the Columbia, between Hell Gate and the Golden Gate, but so far as appears, he bothered little with dreams of a line of railroad across the thickness of the Continent. The idea bothered other people. It was repugnant to the age in America to consider that freight could not go unbroken from one side of the country to the other, except by shipping and a voyage of fifteen thousand miles. The SAving around the Horn had become burdensome, and the mixed communication by Central America was only tolerable. The United States were loosely hung ; it was thought that a line of rail- road from coast to coast would consolidate the United States. British iron steamships were about to affect the American carrying trade. There were many incentives to a better com- munication, across continent, with Oregon and California. Chicago and the Lake country understood something of what was to be their future. At the close of the Revolution, Hut- rim Hutrim, seer of the Alleghanies, had men- tioned the coming empire of our Middle West : there was prophecy now, sixty years after, that Toledo, on Lake Erie would be the industrial center of North America. Asa \^^litney, who was to end his days in the circumscribed tasks of a butter and milk farm, began to occupy EAST BY WEST 165 himself after the Oregon treaty with the large possibilities of a railway from Lake Michigan to the Pacific. In his early memorials to Con- gress on the subject (his campaigns opening with the Mexican War) Mr. Whitney touched upon how his imaginations were first fired. Being engaged in business at New York, he was in China in 1842 and for a year or two there- after. He looked at the vast commerce of all India, of all Asia, and he was convinced that his country was not getting its share. His pro- posal to Congress was for a grant of public land towards the construction of a railway that would enable the delivery in thirty days of a cargo of teas to any Atlantic City. And besides, added the memorialist, " without this road Oregon must become a separate nation, or belong to some of the powers of Europe." There were at the time several schools of opin- ion in the country, regarding the structure of the Union, the powers of the general govern- ment, the sovereignty of the States. The old Cumberland freight road to the West had been abandoned by the general government which had also abandoned its central bank. Mr. Whitney's proposal, carefully examined by Congress from time to time, involved the bal- ance of power. Congress being interested in Japan and sending out Commodore Perry to those islands, at the same time authorized sur- 166 EAST BY WEST veys for a steam road to the Pacific by the best of five routes over five parallels of latitude from the 49th to the 32nd: The Northern Route, the Overland Route or Mormon Trail, the Buffalo Trail, by the 35th parallel, and the Southern Route. These different lines of approach were advocated, reading from North to South, by a New York-Boston-Philadelphia- Baltimore party ; by a St. Louis party ; by a Memphis party ; by a Charleston party ; by a Texas party. The proposal was in politics at a very political juncture. There could be no agreement, symptom of the bloody disagree- ment soon to show itself. During that bloody disagreement the road got its charter the railroad called Union Pacific was chartered by a middle route from Omaha to Sacramento. The road was built rapidly, blazing through the frontier, doing away ^nth it, indeed keep- ing straight on across Siberia in Asia. Nu- merous INIongolians were employed in its con- struction. The last spike, effecting the union between the western and eastern ends of the line, seems to have been driven in May 1869. A California poet, writing of the eastern and western engines met at the union of the lines, made the western engine expostulate with the over-puffing eastern : " Why, I bring the East to you. All the Orient, all Cathay EAST BY WEST 167 Find through me the shortest way Really, if one must be rude, Length, my friend, ain't longitude." At the St. Louis Pacific Railroad Convention of 1849, Mr. Benton had said that " such a road should be adorned with a colossal statue of Columbus, hewn from the granite mass of a peak of the Rocky Mountains to point to the Western horizon " " There is the East ! There is India ! " THE TWINS SUEZ CANAL AND U. P. R. R. From definite inception to completion it had taken a quarter century to build this road. It was a modern work. The methods found expedient in its making and solidifying have been questioned ; * settled principles of law will be found inadequate in this case to attain the ends of abstract justice, and the term justice itself to have been offered a new and strange definition in response to the demands of a dan- gerous industrial growth.' Was ever any- thing substantial accomplished simply and straightforwardly.'' Defoe, best of writers on the old commerce, remarks, " I make no doubt but that notwithstanding all that has been said of our vice propagating our commerce, yet our trade might be supported, our tradesmen kept employed, and their shops still be opened, 168 EAST BY WEST though a time of reformation were to come, which I doubt is but too far off." At any rate, the Union Pacific railway was a Consolidator, a very efficacious engine, like Defoe's of that name. It has not been easy to construct any United States. The cost has always been high. In the matter of its subsidy bonds, the Supreme Court held that the Union Pacific was estopped to deny that at the time the last bonds were delivered, November 6, 1869, the road was com- pleted. Less than a fortnight later, another Consolidator was finished, the job turned over that was to work immediate and serious eco- nomic changes in many parts of the world Nov. 17, 1869, the Suez Canal was connected up. This enterprise also had been of slow growth. The Victorian era was one of steam, but the application was halting even among the Brit- ish for a while. They subsidized the Cunard and P. and O. steamships. They could not be made to see at once where the advantage lay in opening a more direct steam road to the East. In 1829, Lieutenant Waghorn formally proposed a regular communication with India by the Red Sea. He took despatches out to Bombay by that old path, and returned within three months, the time consumed by the fastest vessels on the outward voyage alone. He was the originator of the nineteenth century Over- land Route to India: to Alexandria, across EAST BY WEST 169 desert to Suez, from Suez to Bombay time less than fifty days. The French raised a monument at Suez to Lieutenant Waghorn; otherwise his reward was slight. M. de Les- seps was good enough to call Colonel Rawdon Chesney the father of the Suez Canal. Colonel Chesney, who barely missed being a South Car- olinian, went to Constantinople in ]829 to help the Turk. He became interested in the Near East and made an inspection of Egypt and Syria. In Egypt, in 1830, he proved that the canalization of the Isthmus of Suez was a per- fectly feasible undertaking, in spite of the adverse conclusions of Napoleon's engineers. It was on the strength of Colonel Chesney's report that M. de Lesseps, on his own frank admission, was led to his great achievement. Colonel Chesney next, in 1831, explored the Valley of the Euphrates. He carried through, under many difficulties, a close examination of the lower Euphrates, and after a tour through Persia to Trebizond, returned to England by Aleppo. In 1835, he undertook for his govern- ment the transportation of two steamers from the Bay of Antioch to Birejik, above Thapsa- cus on the upper Euphrates ; and one of these boats he took quite down to Bassora and the Persian Gulf. No definite action followed on the part of the British government. Twenty years later, that government permitted another 170 EAST BY WEST expedition, in which Colonel Chesney figured largely, to determine the best route for a Euphrates Valley railway. The line was sur- veyed and the necessary concessions were obtained from Constantinople, but Lord Pal- merston would not encourage a scheme that was regarded with dislike by the Emperor of the French. Again in 1862, at the age of sev- enty-three. Colonel Chesney went out to Con- stantinople and got fresh concessions for his railway, but was balked again by his govern- ment. In 1869, he was at Paris, and received the compliments of de Lesseps, who was then giving final realization to General Chesney's Suez ideas. A FEW EFFECTS OF THE SUEZ CANAL The construction of the Suez Canal helped to revolutionize one of the greatest departments of the world's commerce and business, destroy- ing a vast amount of what had previously been wealth, and altering the employment of millions of capital and thousands of men. Tonnage was destroyed. Ships fitted to go around the Cape could not go through the Canal. At the same time, mechanical improvements were greatly changing the working of ships, by which crews were diminished. And with tele- graphic communication between the markets of the world, there was no longer need for the EAST BY WEST 171 laying up of great supplies. The voyage to India consuming thirty days or less, and mer- chant being able to communicate at once with merchant, the elaborate India warehouse and distribution system of Great Britain was much affected, with all the labor and capital incident to that system. Railways everywhere in con- nection with steamships were giving the world a new face as a market. With the organization of the railway, distribution, that had been so much through Great Britain to the Continent of Europe, was made direct to the Continent. The Suez Canal and the railways gave Central Europe many opportunities, some of them apparently along lines blocked out by Holbein. Old continental Hansa towns sent their ships not only into the Mediterranean, but to all the world. Hamburg and Bremen, through Prince Bismarck, got subsidies for German ships to deliver German goods to foreign customers. The new Imperial German Government rail- ways encouraged shipping by hauling shipyard materials at a nominal figure. British mer- chants began to observe that these policies were throwing more and more of the Far Eastern carrying trade into German ships, at the expense of London and Hull and Plymouth and Liverpool. The world was round and fixedly looked upon. East as West, as an oyster. Japan had come West, and American steam- in EAST BY WEST ships in the Pacific felt soon the keen competi- tion of the Japanese Tojo Yusen Kaisha from California by the Sandwich Islands to Japan and Hong Kong and of the Japanese Nippon Yusen Kaisha from the Strait of the Venetian Juan de Fuca to Japan direct. One thing at least remained to do : the cutting of a ship canal between the Americas, so as to save the steamship companies of the world a consid- erable expense, and change absolutely the traf- fic across the American Isthmus that had grown up since the first half of the sixteenth century. THE BAGDAD RAILWAY While this last work was forwarding, skilful negotiations were a-foot for the railway con- trol (to say no more) of the Euphrates Valley, territory of the old Babylon. About the year 1888, Doctor Von Siemens, head of the Deutsche Bank, conceived the idea of restoring to civilization the great wastes of Asia Minor and INIcsopotamia ; he thought railways would be the surest means. At that time there were many restrictions upon travel in Asia Minor, Armenians, for example, being quite restrained from moving from one place to another. These conditions affected the price of commod- ities. Just as in America, for some years after the Revolution, wagon freights from Philadel- phia to the Ohio River were almost prohibitive. EAST BY WEST 173 so at Asia Minor seaports grain could be deliv- ered from the United States at a less cost than was chargeable to bring grain down from the interior. Doctor Von Siemens and his group secured concessions from the government at Constantinople for a railway from Ismid to Konia, that is from Nicomedia to Iconiuum a Rum railroad. Shortly afterwards an English and Austrian group was dispossessed by the Porte of its railway from Haidar, opposite Constantinople, to Ismid. The Anatolian or Deutsche Bank railroad was carried through to Konia within seven or eight years from its in- auguration. Then the German Emperor vis- ited Constantinople and was granted a further railway concession from Konia to the Persian Gulf: the whole enterprise to be known as the Imperial Ottoman Bagdad Railway Company. This short cut to India, from the Bosphorus to the Persian Gulf, was manifestly a large idea, not of necessity aiming at anything but the commercial development of the country, a fine country long badly administered. A road to pass from the Bosphorus, through Nicomedia and Konia, connecting with Damascus and Aleppo, to be pushed on through Northern Mesopotamia across the Euphrates and along the valley of the Tigris to bring the ancient cities of Nineveh, Babylon, and Nippur within reach of the railway traveler, and to end at 174 EAST BY WEST Bassora and the Persian Gulf, such a road of wonders could not fail to be, in many ways, of international interest. The holders of the concession were to have the advantage of cut- ting timber in government forests, of making harbors, quays, and warehouses at Bagdad, Bassora, Scanderoon, and other places, and of utilizing water powers for electric traction. The concession gave a number of preferential rights to mines near the road way, and permis- sion to construct so many branch lines as almost to constitute a monopoly of railway traffic through a wide sweep of the Empire from Constantinople to Bagdad. Indeed, the most valuable privileges granted were for the build- ing of branch lines to places of considerable population, when it was believed a good paying traffic could at once be had. For a long time the Turk in control of the country had given almost no thought to internal improvements. Here was a new era beginning. But the polit- ical difficulties in the circumstances were not slight. The Germans invited England and France to participate in the road. They needed money, their engineers reporting the Taurus Mountains expensive. Nor did they disregard the problems of conflicting interests. Naturally, the Germans desired their own com- mercial advantage, and the chief management of the railroad they had projected. England EAST BY WEST 175 was at first willing to participate, and then for some reason unwilling. Financiers there regretted in 1903 that public opinion was against participation. France also demurred at official recommendation. THE GREAT TRANSPORTATION WAR Arthur von Gwinner, reorganizer of the Northern Pacific, succeeded Doctor von Sie- mens in 1901, as head of the Deutsche Bank. In 1903, he made a further contract with the Ottoman Minister of Public Works regarding the Bagdad Railway : if Constantinople was to guarantee the road anything, there must be a reorganization of the Ottoman Public Debt, Turkey's bonds being held largely by foreign- ers since the collapse in 1875 of the Porte's finances. Arthur von Gwinner, writing for a British Review in 1909, made a good argument for the German program in Asia Minor, quot- ing Faust on swamp-draining, and stating the case for the Bagdad Railway excellently well. Speaking of the debates in Parliament of 1903, he said that the opponents of British partici- pation in the Bagdad Railway the political opposition, the Russian party, " and a few private interests who had as legitimate a grudge against the railway's competition to their trade as Mr. Weller, senior, had against railways in general " all these getting 176 EAST BY WEST together, managed so to " misrepresent " the whole affair as to lead public opinion astray: the overruled " Lord Lansdown would have preferred no doubt to let the Suez Canal remain the only highway to India, but as he discerned the short cut which the Bagdad Railway rep- resents would be built anyhow, though perhaps slower, he decided it was good policy for Great Britain to have a hand and a say in that momentous undertaking. No doubt he likewise saw that railway connection is possible from the Bagdad Railway by Ispahan and the road by which Alexander led his army to Kandahar and India, and perhaps he even considered that one of Linde's ice machines in every car, and a little liquid air, might make a railway journey quite comfortable even in those hottest of regions." With regard to the railway itself, Director von Gwinner declared that the Turks, old and young, were justly proud of the road, which was selling the peasants agricultural machin- ery, and without any profit, was subventioning schools, planting trees and making experiments and demonstrations in agriculture, and advanc- ing without interest large amounts of grain in drought years. The road was making, of mis- cellaneous bandits, good stationmasters and others, " parties as respectable as the late IVIr. Micawber after his conversion to thrift." In June 1914, the Bagdad Railway Com- EAST BY WEST 177 pany, officially Ottoman, was managed by an Administrative Council of twenty-seven eight Frenchmen, four Turks, two Swiss, one Austrian, one Italian, and eleven Germans. In June 1914, it was charged that the Italian, Austrian, and Swiss representation in the Coun- cil was merely German ; that the company with a great flourish had proclaimed itself Interna- tional and open to everybody; but that never- theless, since the end of 1899, " there have been a few little facts to prove the unalterable decision of the Germans to remain absolute masters of the affair." That was an affirmation of June 1914. What is this Bedlam since .'' God preserve us in the conclusions of our essays. PERIOD r^ r ' UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A 001 039 654 7