task of opening up the way. The crown of Portugal
assumed all the cost of these expeditions. Gold, ivory, cinnabar,
dye-woods, spices, and slaves, added to the wealth of the kingdom only
to furnish forth new ventures.

He died before the end came, but not until many of the most important
problems of cosmographic condition had been solved. It was known by
actual experience that the "steaming sea" was a myth. Ships had crossed
the equator, and their crews came back to tell of southward-stretching
shadows. Ships were able, it was seen, to sail up the southern slope of
the world as well as down it. Why they did not fall off into space, none
knew, but that they did not was proved. Gravitation was a force whose
laws and character were yet unformulated. The diurnal motion of the
earth was hardly suspected until a hundred years later. But the facts on
which these two fundamental truths are based were being gathered for
Newton and Copernicus. When he died, those whom he had inspired and
instructed continued the work to which he had devoted himself, under the
patronage of his brother Alfonso and his nephew Joao II.; until, in
1486, Bartholomeo Diaz had sailed two hundred miles to the eastward of
the Cape of Good Hope and returned to assure his sovereign that the way
to India had at length been found.

It was not, however, until Dom Manoel had succeeded to the throne, in
1495, that any successful effort was made to follow up the success which
Diaz had achieved. The way to India was indeed open, but no one seems to
have had sufficient fortitude to undertake so long a voyage in order to
reach it by that route. Dom Manoel had, however, but one idea. He was
not a geographer like his predecessor, Joao, "the perfect," but he was a
man of action, and determined that the route Prince Henry's navigators
had opened to India should not remain unused. Vasco da Gama was then in
his thirty-fifth year, the handsomest man of his age, of ancient family,
and it is claimed was not without royal blood in his veins. As a soldier
he was trained in the war with Castile; as a navigator he had served
under Prince Henry's best captains. Camoens, the historical poet of
Portugal, declares that he was familiar not only with the recorded
achievements of his predecessors, but with all the regions they had
discovered. Dom Joao, on the return of Diaz, selected him to command the
fleet he meant to send to follow up this discovery. In the ten years
that elapsed be