Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
Oversea Communications Between China
and East Africa Before the So-called Discovery
of New Sea-Route
At the end of the fi fteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, a series of
long-distance sea voyages started out from Western Europe. The earliest and most
widely publicized among them were (1) the trans-Atlantic voyage which in 1492
brought Christopher Columbus to districts now known as Cuba and Haiti; and (2)
the voyage undertaken by Vasco da Gama in 1498, in the course of which he rounded
the Cape of Good Hope, crossed the Indian Ocean and eventually reached the mod-
ern Kozhikode (formerly known as Calicut, mentioned in ancient Chinese records
as Kuli) in South India. With this tremendous expansion of geographical vista, the
Europeans landed in a continent where they had never set foot before and found a
passageway hitherto unknown to the East. These events they commemorate under
the imposing titles of discovery of the new continent and discovery of the new sea-
route respectively. With these began the era of “great geographical discoveries”,
which looms large in the history of European geographical discovery and standard
textbooks on European history.
The subsequent expansion of European colonialism has disseminated these ideas
to practically every corner of the world. In reality, however, the achievements of
Columbus and da Gama may be considered in a certain sense “discoveries” only if
one postulates a limited view point—that of the Europeans. Any attempt to enlarge
the viewpoint to take in other areas or to endow it with a world-wide signifi cance
would be seriously mistaken.
This essay purports to deal exclusively with what the Europeans call the discov-
ery of the new sea-route.
To begin with, a brief retrospect of the historical facts is perhaps called for.
The search for the new sea-route is commonly thought of as entering its last crucial
phase with the effort of Bartholomew Diaz, who by continuing to cruise southward
along the western coast of Africa (many parts of which had repeatedly been touched
by former navigators), fi nally reached in 1487 the southernmost point of the African
