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World Civilizations, Eighth Edition, Volume
II: Since 1500
8th Edition
Philip J. Adler , East Carolina University, Emeritus
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Dedication
For Gracie, an historical event
—Philip Adler
—Randall L. Pouwels
Preface
World civilizations is a brief history of civilized life since its inceptions some 5000 years ago. It is meant
to be used in conjunction with a lecture course in world history at the introductory level. We the
authors, who bring nearly sixty total years of classroom experience to its writing, have constantly kept
in mind the needs and interests of freshman and sophomore students in two- and four-year colleges
and universities.
World Civilizations deals with the most noteworthy civilizations in world history while attempting to
walk a middle line between exhaustive detail and frustrating brevity. Its narrative embraces every
major epoch, but the treatment of topics is selective and follows definite patterns and hierarchies. It
deliberately tilts toward social and cultural topics, as well as toward the long-term processes that
affect the lives of the millions, rather than exclusive attention being given to the acts of “the captains
and the kings.” The evolution of law and the formative powers of religion on early government, for
example, receive considerably more attention than wars and diplomatic arrangements. The rise of
working classes in cities is accorded more space than the policies of governments. We emphasize
providing students with the basic details needed to grasp and appreciate the distinguishing features of
individual civilizations, while also demonstrating how humans fabricated new strands of global
connectivity through the six ages covered in the text. Selectivity, of course, is forced on authors of any
text, but the firm intent to keep this a concise survey necessitated a particularly close review of the
material. Dividing a brief narrative into fifty-three short chapters both gives the instructor
considerable leeway for including additional material or expanding the topics and also makes it
likelier that students will read the assigned material. This approach has been relatively successful and
has found sufficient favor among many teachers to justify the appearance of this eighth edition.
1. to provide additional content that illustrates how the world has become increasingly globalized
and interdependent;
2. to include more coverage of the non-Western world and the important initiatives of non-Western
The detailed table of contents reflects the important updates we have made, including significant
attention to Africa, Asia, Hispanic America, and the Pacific. Among the other noteworthy changes, not
1. Four new “Historian’s Craft” features have been added, bringing the total number of these to
nine. These are intended to provide students with insights into what tools are available to
professional scholars who conduct original research into the past, how they actually “do”
historical research, and how they go about constructing historical narratives.
2. Each chapter now has a chapter-opening photo with an informative caption that is intended to
provide students with immediate insight into the chapter’s contents and to raise questions in
their minds as they begin their reading.
3. Altogether, fifteen new thematic features dealing with important social and cultural concerns
have been added. Others have been extensively rewritten, revised, and updated.
4. The chapters about Eastern Asia have been extensively revised and rewritten in many parts to
the extent of being almost entirely new chapters.
5. A new design helps streamline the reading experience and adds cohesion to the textbook’s
features and pedagogical elements.
6. Apart from the printed text, we are now offering MindTap, a comprehensive online learning
platform that gives students the opportunity to study in unique and challenging ways.
Chapter 1 includes a new Historian’s Craft feature: “Using the Science of Genomics to Reconstruct
Chapter 2 has additional information concerning the earliest trade networks of the Persian Gulf
Kingdom Egypt.”
Chapter 5 (formerly chapter 6) has been extensively revised, corrected, and updated
throughout.
Chapter 7 (Chapter 5 in the previous edition) now opens Unit II and has new information
concerning the Assyrian and Hebrew civilizations as well as the role of Zoroastrianism in the
Persian empires.
Chapter 9 has a new Science and Technology feature: “Hippocrates: The Man and the Oath.”
There also is new and updated information concerning the Antikythera mechanism.
Chapter 10 has a new Evidence of the Past feature: “Roman Tomb Inscriptions.”
Chapter 11 includes a new Historian’s Craft feature: “Using Critical Textual Analysis to Find the
Historical Jesus.”
Chapter 14 provides more details about Teotihuacan, adjusted chronology, and new information
concerning the city’s regional importance. It also contains more information about the Toltec,
between Teotihuacan and the Aztecs.
Chapter 16 has a new Law and Government feature on “The Special Cases of the Counter-
Caliphates.” The Society and Economy feature on “Women’s Rights Defined in the Qur’an” has
been revised slightly.
Chapter 17 contains additional textual material about secret societies, age sets, and common
Chapter 24 includes a new Society and Economy feature on “Women’s Power behind the Throne:
The Example of Roxelana.”
Chapter 28 has two new features. The Society and Economy Feature, “The Imperial City of Potosí,
Upper Peru (Now Bolivia)” describes colonial life in the silver-mining boomtown of Potosí during
its peak (1550–1750). The new Images of History feature is a painting in the Andean baroque
style of the procession of entry of a viceroy/bishop into Potosí.
Chapter 34 has a new Historian’s Craft feature: “The Role Theory Plays in Reconstructing
History.”
Chapter 38 has added a new Society and Economy feature on “Women’s Voices in Nineteenth-
Century Latin America,” with information about the Argentine writer Juana Manuela Gorriti.
Chapter 39 text and chronology have been revised and brought up to date with more recent
discoveries. There also is a new Science and Technology feature: “Albert Einstein.”
Chapter 44 has seen a considerable amount of revision in the text, plus a new Historian’s Craft
Chapter 46 contains a new Science and Technology feature: “Science in the Service of
Intelligence.”
Chapter 47 includes significant updates and changes to the material concerning decolonization.
Chapter 50 has updated material about Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador. The authors also
have endeavored to make the treatment of U.S.-Latin America relations more objective,
eliminating some outdated statements from a Cold War perspective. The Law and Government
feature, “Women in Mexico’s 1968 Protest Movement,” includes recent interviews of several
participants to show their views 45 years later. The Arts and Culture feature on “Cuban Poet
Nancy Morejón (b. 1944)” is a brief biography and a translation of her most famous poem, “Black
Woman (Mujer Negra).”
Chapter 51 includes revisions and updates to portions of the text concerning the “Arab Spring”
and the spread of Islamic jihadism.
Chapter 52 revises and updates portions of the chapter that concern Russian nationalism.
Chapter 53, though not extensively revised, includes additions to the chapter timeline and
revisions of the text concerning global economic inequalities.
world). Within each unit, attention is drawn to these themes in the introduction to each chapter and
the description of each unit. The number of chapters has been reduced to fifty-three.
The second organizing principle is the prioritization of certain topics and processes. We generally
emphasize sociocultural and economic affairs and keep the longer term in perspective, while
deliberately minimizing some short-term phenomena. In terms of the space allotted, we emphasize the
more recent epochs of history, in line with the recognition of growing global interdependence and
cultural contact.
From its inception, World Civilizations has been meant as a world history and contains proportionately
more material about non-Western peoples and cultures than many others currently in print. (In this
respect, Western means not only European but also North American since the eighteenth century.)
After an introductory chapter on prehistory, we look first at Mesopotamia, Africa and Egypt, India,
Central Asia, China, (Native) America, and the Pacific. In these river-valley, mountainous, and
maritime environments, humans were first successful in adapting nature to their needs on a large
scale. Between about 2500 and about 1000 b.c.e., the earliest civilizations matured and developed a
culture in most phases of life—a fashion of thinking and acting that would be a model for as long as
that civilization was vital and capable of defending itself. Elsewhere—in Africa, Central Asia, the
Pacific Islands, and the Americas—similar processes were underway. However, in two noteworthy
respects these regions provided exceptions to the pattern by which people learned to produce food for
themselves. In the case of Africa, people of the Sahara region domesticated livestock, most likely cattle,
before they learned to grow and depend on crops. Also unlike the patterns established in the Old
World, early Native American farmers of the Western Hemisphere developed forms of agriculture that
did not depend on the floodwaters of major rivers. In Central Asia and the Pacific Islands, nomadism,
based on herding in the former and on fishing combined with agriculture in the latter, became the
prevalent forms of subsistence.
By 500 b.c.e., the Near Eastern civilizations centered in Egypt and Mesopotamia were in decline and
had been replaced by Mediterranean-based civilizations, as well as new ones in Africa, Asia, and the
New World, which drew on the older civilizations to some extent but also added some novel and
distinctive features of their own. First the Greeks, then the Romans, succeeded in bringing under their
influence much of the world known to them, culminating in the great Roman Empire that reached
from Spain to Persia. For Europe, the greatest single addition to life in this era was the combination of
Judeo-Christian theology and Greco-Roman philosophy and science.
In the millennium between 500 b.c.e. and 500 c.e., the entire globe underwent important changes.
Western and Central Asia became a potpourri of ideas where monotheistic religions took root. First
Judaism, then Christianity and Zoroastrianism, appealed to the growing numbers of urbanites.
Farther south and east, Buddhism and Jainism challenged India’s Hindu religion and philosophy,
while China recovered from political dismemberment to become the permanent chief factor in East
Asian affairs. In the early centuries c.e. both Buddhist and Hindu civilizations appeared for the first
time in both mainland and insular Southeast Asia as India’s merchant classes traded with and settled
in these regions at that time. Japan emerged slowly from a prehistoric stage under Chinese tutelage,
while the southeastern part of the Asian continent attained a high civilization created in part by
Indian traders and Buddhist missionaries.
In the Mediterranean, starting about 800, an amalgam of Greco-Roman, Germanic, and Jewish-
Christian beliefs called European or Western Christianity emerged after the collapse of Roman
civilization. At the same time, the emergence of Islam created what many scholars believe was the first
truly “world” civilization—at least to the extent that the Eurasian and African landmasses
encompassed the world that was known to “Old World” peoples at that time. Rivaling the great
civilizations of Asia and considerably surpassing that of Europe, the great empire of the Abbasid
caliphs in Baghdad (750–1258 c.e.) acted as a commercial and intellectual bridge that transcended
regional barriers from China to Africa and Europe. Therefore, among the many lands and peoples
bordering the Indian Ocean, the spread of Islam along the highways of commerce contributed to the
emergence of sophisticated maritime civilizations in Western Asia, Southeast Asia, India, and East
Africa. The great Sudanic civilizations of Mali and later Songhay and Bornu in West Africa were
likewise solidly based on an Islamic foundation. Despite isolation from the Old World, Native
Americans of the New World created a series of highly sophisticated civilizations in the high Andes
Mountains of South America, in Mesoamerica, and in the southwestern and eastern parts of what now
is the United States.
By 1500, Western civilization began to rise to a position of a temporary worldwide domination, marked
by the voyages of discovery and ensuing colonization. In the next three centuries, the Europeans and
their colonial outposts slowly wove a web of worldwide commercial and technological interests,
anchored on military force. Our book’s treatment of the entire post-1500 age gives much attention to
the impacts of Western culture and ideas about non-Western peoples, and vice versa. In particular, it
looks at the African civilizations encountered by early European traders and what became of them,
southern Asia under the Raj, and the Native American civilizations of North and Latin America and
their fate under Spanish conquest and rule.
From 1700 through World War I, Europe took the lead in practically every field of material human life,
including military affairs, science, commerce, and living standards. This was the age of Europe’s
imperial control of the rest of the world. The Americas, much of Asia, Oceania, and coastal Africa all
became formal or informal colonies at one time, and some remained under direct European control
until the mid-twentieth century.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the pendulum of power swung steadily away from Europe
and toward first North America, then Russia, Japan, and the non-Western (particularly Asian) peoples.
As we enter a new millennium, the world not only has shrunk but has again been anchored on
multiple power bases. A degree of equilibrium is rapidly being restored—one that combines Western
science and technology with those Asian, African, and Native American social values and intellectual
traditions that go back to the preclassical era and whose resilience has enabled them to endure the
West’s imperial era.
Revolutions, Ideology, the New Imperialism, and the Age of Empires, 1700–1920
Pedagogy
From the first edition through this one, an important feature of World Civilizations has been its
division into a number of short chapters. Each of its fifty-three chapters is meant to constitute a unit
suitable in scope for a single lecture, short enough to allow easy digestion and comprising strong
logical coherence. Each chapter contains a variety of pedagogical elements intended to help students
learn and retain important information.
Thematic features and photographs are keyed to the five broad textual themes: Society and
Economy, Law and Government, Patterns of Belief, Science and Technology, and Arts and Culture.
All chapters have one or more features, some of which are based on biography, many others on
primary sources. To encourage readers to interact with the material as historians would and to
compare themes across chapters, each feature concludes with Analyze and Interpret questions.
Two additional features, Evidence of the Past and Images of History, spotlight artifacts and
material culture. Once writing became common, of course, some materials that you will see in
Evidence of the Past are written primary sources, but we point out, where appropriate, their
roots in oral traditions. We also include some eyewitness accounts for analysis.
The Historian’s Craft feature explores some of the methods and sources on which professional
historians rely to illuminate the past.
A chapter outline and a brief chapter chronology help students focus on the key concepts in the
material they are about to encounter.
The For Further Reflection essay questions at the end of each chapter impel students to think
beyond “merely” objective knowledge. The idea, of course, is to exhort them to review, interpret,
and apply that knowledge as a technique for arriving at a better understanding of developments
as seen from the perspective of their regional and (possibly) global implications. These questions
vary in difficulty. They ask students to use their imaginations, as well as their fact-based
understanding of the subject, and they sometimes require that students search for additional
information outside of what the text affords (for example, in class lectures).
Key terms appear in boldface type and are repeated at chapter’s end in a Key Terms list.
Color illustrations, many of them new, and abundant maps appear throughout the text. We
include Worldview maps that show global developments. Descriptive map and photo captions
encourage readers to think beyond the mere appearance of each visual and to make connections
across chapters, regions, and concepts. And critical-thinking questions encourage students to
work with and read maps as a historian might.
accomplishments according to the text’s five major themes. A Cross-Cultural Connections section
at the end of each Worldview encourages thinking beyond regional borders.
Finally, like the For Further Reflection questions at the end of each chapter, essay questions have
been added to each Worldview section to exhort students to think “globally,” to draw on their
understanding of two or more chapters contained in each unit. Appropriately, we have called this
review section “Putting It All Together.”
Supplements
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MindTap allows instructors to customize their content, providing tools that seamlessly integrate
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The additional content available in MindTap mirrors and complements our narrative, but it also
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choice, identification, completion, and essay questions for each chapter. Cognero® is a flexible, online
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Acknowledgments
We are happy to acknowledge the sustained aid given us by many individuals during the long
Phil Adler’s colleagues in the history department at East Carolina University, at the annual meetings of
the test planners and graders of the Advanced Placement in European History, as well as in several
professional organizations—notably the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies—
We extend special recognition to two “expert reviewers” who made particular contributions to specific
chapters in their areas of expertise: Thanks go to Professor Kenneth Hammond of New Mexico State
We also acknowledge Scott Greenan’s contribution as Product Manager, Tonya Lobato’s as Senior
And special thanks go to Joel B. Pouwels, Ph.D., for her important suggestions for and contributions to
the chapters about Latin American civilizations.
About the Authors
Philip J. Adler taught college courses in world history to undergraduates for almost thirty years
before his recent retirement. Dr. Adler took his Ph.D. at the University of Vienna following military
service overseas in the 1950s. His dissertation was on the activity of the South Slav émigrés during
World War I, and his academic specialty was the modern history of Eastern Europe and the Austro-
Hungarian empire. Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities grants have supported his
research. Adler has published widely in the historical journals of this country and German-speaking
Europe. He is currently Professor Emeritus at East Carolina University, where he spent most of his
teaching career.
Randall L. Pouwels earned his B.A. in history at the University of Wisconsin and his Ph.D. in history at
UCLA. His Ph.D. dissertation was on the history of Islam in East Africa. His book Horn and Crescent:
Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800–1900 (Cambridge, 1987) has
become a standard work on African history. The History of Islam in Africa (Athens, Oxford, and Cape
Town, 2000) was jointly edited with Nehemia Levtzion of Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Widely praised
in reviews, it was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2001 and was made a
selection of the History Book Club. Pouwels has written numerous articles and reviews on East African
history, the history of Islam in Africa, and historical methodologies. His other research interests
include the history of the Middle East, the Indian Ocean, and South and Central Asia, and the history
and archaeology of Native Americans. Over the years, his work has been supported by grants and
fellowships from Fulbright-Hays, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Studies
Research Council, the National Geographic Society, and the American Philosophical Society. He has
taught African history for more than twenty years at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and
at UCLA. He retired in 2010 and is now an Emeritus Professor of African and Middle Eastern History at
the University of Central Arkansas.
Giles system has been included in parentheses at the first mention and retained in a few cases where
Physical needs, such as the need for food, water, and breathable air, dictate some actions. Others stem
from emotional and intellectual needs, such as religious belief or the search for immortality. Human
action also results from desires, such as literary ambition or scientific curiosity, or the quest for
History is the record of how people have tried to meet those needs or fulfill those desires. Many
generations of our ancestors have found that familiarity with that record can be useful in guiding
their own actions. The study of past human acts also encourages us to see our own possibilities, both
individual and collective. This may be history’s greatest value.
Many people are naturally attracted to the study of history, but others find it difficult or (even worse)
“irrelevant.” Some students—perhaps yourself—dread history courses, saying that they can see no
point in learning about the past. My life, they say, is here and now; leave the past to the past. What can
be said in response to justify the study of history?
People who are ignorant of their past are also ignorant of much of their present, for the one grows
directly out of the other. If we ignore or forget the experiences of those who have lived before us, we
are like a person with amnesia, constantly puzzled by what should be familiar, surprised by what
should be predictable. Not only do we not know what we should know, but we cannot perceive our
true possibilities because we have nothing to measure them against. The ahistorical mind does not
know what it is missing—and, contrary to the old saying, what you don’t know definitely can hurt you!
A word of caution here: this is not a question of “history repeats itself.” This often-quoted cliché is
clearly nonsense if taken literally. History does not repeat itself exactly, and the difference in details is
always important. But history does exhibit general patterns, dictated by common human needs and
desires. The French Revolution will not recur just as it did 215 years ago. But, as we know all too well,
people still depose their leaders and rise up in arms to change the way they live. Some knowledge of
and respect for those patterns has been a vital part of the mental equipment of all human societies.
But there is another, more personal reason to learn about the past. Adults who are historically
unconscious are confined within a figurative wooden packing crate, into which they were put by the
accident of birth at a given time and in a given place. The boards forming the feature restrict their
freedom and block their view in all directions. One board of the feature might be the prosperity—or
lack of it—into which they were born; another, their physical appearance, race, or ethnic group.
Other boards could be their religion, whether they were born in a city slum or a small village, or
whether they had a chance at formal education (about three-fourths of the world’s children never go
beyond the third year of school). These and many other boards form the features into which we are all
born.
If we are to fully realize our potential as human beings, some of the boards must be removed so that
we can see out, gain other vistas and visions, and have a chance to measure and compare our
experiences with others outside. And the smaller our “global village” becomes, the more important it is
to learn more about the world beyond the campus, city, state, and country in which we live. An
introductory course in world history is an ideal way to learn about life outside the feature.
As a good student, your best resource is your own sense of curiosity. Keep it active as you go through
these pages. Remember, this and every other textbook is the beginning, not the end, of your search for
P. J. A.
R. L. P.
Note: Some of you may at first be confused by dates followed by b.c.e., meaning “before the common
era,” and c.e., meaning “common era.” These terms are used to reflect a global perspective, and they
correspond to the Western equivalents B.C. (before Christ) and A.D. (anno Domini). Also, a caution
about the word century is in order: the phrase seventeenth century c.e. refers to the years 1601 to 1699
in the common era, and the phrase first century b.c.e. refers to the years 99 to 0 b.c.e. With a little
practice, these terms become second nature and will increase your fluency in history.
Unit IV. Expanding Webs of Interaction c.
1400–1800
Introduction
Within two hundred years of 1400 c.e., a host of events or processes contributed to an atmosphere of
rising confidence in the power of governments and their supportive institutions. In the political and
military realm the Mongol yoke in Russia was lifted; the Ottoman Turks, victorious at Constantinople,
failed an attempt to seize Vienna and central Europe; the Hundred Years’ War ended and the French
recovery commenced. After suffering horrific mortality rates, the civilizations of Eurasia and Africa
finally recovered from the ravages of the Black Death, and maritime trade increased significantly in
all of the three oceans girdling the entire world. Indeed, it can be said that for the first time trade and
But aside from these general developments, the centuries between about 1400 and 1800 usually are
heralded as the beginning of the modern era because of two specific complexes of events: the
questioning of traditional authority in the West, manifested in the Protestant Reformation, and
European and Chinese voyages of discovery that revealed the possibilities of the globe to the
imaginations of some Europeans and Asians. Both of these contributed in different ways to the
expansion of China’s and Europe’s reach and authority that took place in this four-hundred-year time
span, until Europeans began to claim a prerogative to decide the fates of others as almost a God-given
right. This tendency was particularly striking in Eastern and Southeast Asia and the American
colonies, where the native Amerindians either were obliterated or virtually enslaved by their
overlords. But it was also the case—although in a much more limited way—in eastern and southern
Asia, the coast of Africa, and the island or Arctic peripheries of a world that was larger and more
varied than anyone had formerly supposed.
The difference between 1400 and 1850 in this regard is well illustrated by comparing the Aztecs’
Tenochtitlán, which amazed the envious Hernán Cortés, with the sleepy, dusty villages to which
Mexico’s Indians were later confined. Similarly, one might compare the army of the Persian Safavid
rulers of the early sixteenth century that reduced the mighty Mughals to supplicants for peace with
the raggedy mob that attempted—in vain—to stop a handful of British from installing themselves on
the Khyber Pass three centuries later. By 1800, the West—whether represented by Spanish freebooters
European voyages of discovery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the opening of maritime
commerce across the Indian and Atlantic oceans, and the resultant Columbian Exchange and the slave
trade are the subjects of Chapter 22. Chapter 23 considers in detail the successful challenges to the
authority of European monarchs and the Roman Catholic hierarchy and their permanent effects on
Western sensibilities. Challenges to religious authority inevitably led to other confrontations. This
chapter also examines the ideas of absolutism and constitutionalism, as well as their expressions in
religious warfare and the desire for stability, which became the cornerstones of modern governments.
Chapter 24 shifts the focus to Asia, where the rise and fall of the great Muslim empires of central Asia
and India are discussed. Chapter 25 focuses on the continuities and changes that Africa experienced in
this era of global expansion and the slave trade. China’s centuries of glory following the ejection of the
Mongols through the early Qing Dynasty are analyzed in Chapter 26. The history of Japan and
Southeast Asia before 1700 follows in Chapter 27. Finally, the Iberian colonies of America and their
struggle for independent existence are outlined in Chapter 28.
Worldview Map IV, Peoples of the World, indicates the most significant development in the period after
1400: the dramatic enlargement of the areas of the globe where Europeans and East Asians colonized
This Spanish parchment map is the earliest extant depiction of the landmasses (in green) later named the Americas. The
Age of Exploration depended on ever-improving maps to guide mariners over the open seas. The boom in explorations
required a revolution in cartography (mapmaking). In turn, new, more reliable maps spurred a race among European
countries for new discoveries. This world map incorporates a medieval map of Europe and Asia. By contrast, the latest
discoveries by Portuguese, Spanish, and English explorers in Africa and the Americas are portrayed using the newest
mapmaking techniques, the precursors of modern cartography.
Chronology
The unparalleled overseas expansion of Europe in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries
opened a new era of intercontinental contacts. What were the motives for the rapid series of
adventuresome voyages? They ranged from Christian missionary impulses to the common desire to get
rich. Backed to varying degrees by their royal governments, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and
English seafarers opened the world to European commerce, settlement, and eventual dominion.
Through the Columbian Exchange, initiated in 1492, the New World entered European consciousness
and was radically and permanently changed by European settlers. In most of the world, however, the
presence of a relative handful of foreigners in coastal “factories” (as trading stations were called) or as
occasional traders meant little change to traditional activities and attitudes. Not until the later
eighteenth century was the European presence a threat to the continuation of accustomed African,
Asian, and Polynesian lifestyles.
Maritime Exploration in the 1400s
The Vikings in their graceful longboats had made voyages across the North Atlantic from Scandinavia
to Greenland and on to North America as early as 1000 c.e., but the northern voyages were too risky to
serve as the channel for permanent European expansion, and Scandinavia’s population base was too
small. Four hundred years later, major advances in technology had transformed maritime commerce.
The import of new sail rigging, the magnetic compass, and the astrolabe (an instrument used to
determine the altitude of the sun or other celestial bodies) from Asia; a new hull design; and
systematic navigational charts enabled Western seamen, led by the Portuguese, to conquer the world’s
oceans. Firearms of all sizes backed up their claims to dominion over their newly discovered
territories. By the end of the fifteenth century, the map of the Eastern Hemisphere was gradually
becoming familiar to Europeans.
Knowledge of the high cultures of Asia was current by the early 1400s. Muslim traders had long before
established an active commerce with southern and eastern Asia—by their command of the Indian
Ocean routes and the famous Silk Road through central Asia—and had served as intermediaries to
Europe (Chapter 16). Marco Polo’s great adventure was well known even earlier, after the appearance
of his book about his many years of service to Kubilai Khan.
Most of Europe’s luxury imports had long come from Africa, China, and India, whereas the Spice
Islands (as they were called by Europeans) of Southeast Asia had been the source of the most valuable
items in international exchange (see Map 22.1). In the fourteenth century this trade was disrupted,
first by the Ottoman Turkish conquest of the eastern Mediterranean basin and then by the breakup of
the Mongol Empire, which had formed a single unit reaching from China to western Russia.
Map 22.1 Spanish and Portuguese Voyages in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
The shaded areas indicate the portions of the newly explored regions that were mapped and settled. Unshaded areas
indicate those that remained unexplored and relatively unknown.
Using this map, trace the stages of the expansion of global trade, from the earliest ones that
linked southern and southwestern Asia to the beginnings of a world system. What does this
map suggest about what might have prevented a truly global system of travel and trade in
The security of transit across Asia was threatened, as was the Europeans’ long-established and
profitable interchange of goods with the Arabs and Persians. In 1453 Constantinople, the great depot
of Eastern wares, fell into the hands of the Ottomans. With direct access to this old gateway to the East
now lost, Europeans became more interested than ever in finding a direct sea route to the East by
1460), tiny and impoverished Portugal sponsored a series of exploratory voyages down the west coast
of Africa and out into the ocean as far as the Azores (about one-third the distance to the Caribbean) in
search of African gold and pepper. Portuguese mariners devised innovative navigational strategies
and mapmaking techniques for sailing the open seas—innovations that were quickly adopted by rival
nations. In 1488 the Portuguese captain Bartolomeo Díaz made a crucial advance by successfully
rounding the Cape of Good Hope. Some ten years later, Vasco da Gama (VAHS-coh duh GAH-mah)
sailed across the Indian Ocean to the west coast of India. (For a closer look at da Gama’s exploits, see
Evidence of the Past.) Trying to follow a new route around the southern tip of Africa that took him far
to the west, Pedro Alvares Cabral got blown all the way across the Atlantic, making landfall in Brazil,
which he promptly claimed for Portugal in 1500. By 1510, Portuguese flags were flying over Goa in
India and Macão on the coast of China (see Map 22.1). In 1511 the extraordinary admiral Afonso da
Albuquerque seized the great port-depot of Malacca at the tip of the Malay Peninsula. With the capital
of their Indian Ocean empire in Goa, the Portuguese came to control the most profitable sea trade in
the world. Portuguese expeditions had touched four continents: Europe, Africa, America, and Asia.
One of the most daring of all the explorers sailing in the name of Portugal or Spain was Vasco da
Gama, the first to round the tip of Africa and sail on to India. da Gama made landfall on the
Indian coast in 1498 before returning safely to Lisbon the following year. He kept a detailed diary
of his epoch-making voyage, from which the following comments on the non-Muslim peoples of the
These people are black, and the men are of good physique, they go about naked
except that they wear small pieces of cotton cloth with which they cover their
genitals, and the Senhores [chiefs] of the land wear larger cloths. The young
women in this land look good; they have their lips pierced in three places and
they wear some pieces of twisted tin. These people were very much at ease with
us, and brought out to us in the vessels what they had, in dugout canoes. …
After we had been here two or three days there came out two Senhores of this
land to see us, they were so haughty that they did not value anything which was
given to them. One of them was wearing a cap on his head with piping worked in
silk, and the other a furry cap of green satin. There came in their company a
youth who, we gathered from gestures, came from another far country, and said
that he had already seen great vessels like those that carried us. With these signs
we rejoiced greatly, because it seemed to us that we were going to reach where
we wanted to go.…
This land, it seemed to us, is densely populated. There are in it many villages and
towns. The women seemed to be more numerous than men, because when there
came 20 men there came 40 women.… The arms of these people are very large
bows and arrows, and assagais [short stabbing spears] of iron. In this land there
seemed to be much copper, which they wore on their legs and arms and in their
kinky hair. Equally used is tin, which they place on the hilts of daggers, the
sheaths are of iron. The people greatly prize linen cloth, and they gave us as
What seems to have been the attitude of the East Africans toward these European strangers?
To what do you attribute this view? From where do you suppose the previously seen “vessels”
had come? To what kinds of material technology does it appear the Africans had access?
Where do you think they got it?
Source: Harry Stephan, ed. The Diary of Vasco da Gama (Travels Through African Waters 1497–1499) (Sydney: Phillips,
1998), 32–33.
The Portuguese empire was really only a string of fortified stations called “factories,” from which the
Portuguese brought back shiploads of much-sought-after spices, gold, porcelain, and silk obtained
from their trading partners in East Africa and the Southeast Asian mainland and islands. They paid
for these imports initially with metal wares, cloth, and trinkets, and later with firearms and liquor.
The Lisbon government was the initiator and main beneficiary of this trade because Portugal’s small
upper and middle classes were unable to pay sufficient amounts to outfit ships for the expeditions.
The era of Portuguese leadership was brief. The country was too poor and its population too small to
maintain this lucrative but thinly spread empire. By the late 1500s, the aggressively expanding Dutch
merchants had already forced Portugal out of some of its overseas stations. Previously independent
Portugal was incorporated into Catholic Spain in 1580, which gave the Dutch and English Protestants
an excuse to attack the Portuguese everywhere. Eventually, by the end of the seventeenth century,
Portugal was left with only Angola and the Kongo kingdom in West Africa, plus Mozambique, Macão,
Goa, Brazil, and a few additional enclaves and scattered trading posts around the Indian Ocean rim.
How did a relative handful of European intruders establish themselves as regionally dominant
authorities in these distant corners of the globe? The patterns established by the Portuguese in the
Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia were followed by other European nations that followed them (the
Netherlands, England, and France). The European outreach was seaborne, and control of the sea was
the crucial element. Local populations that tried to resist quickly learned that it was not profitable to
confront the European ships with arms because the Europeans would generally win. Their naval
cannon, more advanced methods of rigging, more maneuverable hulls, better discipline during battle,
and higher levels of training assured them of success in almost all engagements. The intruders
avoided land warfare unless and until mastery of the surrounding seas was ensured, and in that case,
sought. In the normal course of events the Europeans made treaties with paramount regional rulers
that assured them a secure place in the export market. A kind of partnership thus evolved between
the local chieftains and the new arrivals, in which both had sufficient reasons to maintain the status
quo against those who might challenge it.
The Portuguese frequently made the mistake of alienating the local population by their brutality and
their attempts to exclude all competition, but the Dutch and, later, the British were more circumspect.
Unlike the Portuguese, they made no attempt until the nineteenth century to bring Africans and
Asians to Christianity. As a general rule, after the sixteenth-century, Portuguese missionary efforts had
subsided, and the Europeans interfered little with existing laws, religion, and customs unless they felt
compelled to do so to gain commercial ends. Such interference was rare in both Asia and Africa. There,
the European goal was to derive the maximum profit from trade, and they avoided anything that
would threaten the smooth execution of that trade. The Spanish and Portuguese empires in the
Americas were a different proposition, however.
The Spanish Empire in the Americas
By the dawn of the sixteenth century, a newly unified Spanish kingdom was close behind, and in some
areas competing with, Portugal in the race for a world empire. A larger domestic resource base and
extraordinary finds of precious metals enabled Spain to achieve more permanent success than its
neighbor. The Italian visionary Christopher Columbus was able to persuade King Ferdinand and
Queen Isabella to support his dream of a shortcut to the “Indies” by sailing west from Spain. Having
vastly underestimated the distance to Asia, he made landfall in the “West Indies” (the Bahamas).
Columbus’s four Spanish-financed voyages resulted in the European discovery of the American
continents. He remained convinced that China lay over the horizon of the Caribbean Sea, just beyond
the newly discovered continent.
A Portuguese Galleon.
Departure from Lisbon for Brazil, the East Indies and America, illustration from ‘Americae
Tertia Pars…’, 1592 (engraving), Bry, Theodore de (1528-98) / Service Historique de la Marine,
Vincennes, France / Bridgeman Images
In what kind of vessel did the early explorers set sail? Ships such as these opened the trade routes to the East and to
Brazil and the Caribbean for the Lisbon government in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Later, two or three rows
of cannons gave them heavy firepower as well as cargo space.
By then, the Spanish crown had engaged a series of other voyagers, including Amerigo Vespucci, who
eventually gave his name to the New World that Columbus and others were exploring. In 1519–1521
the formidable Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztec Empire in Mexico. Soon, Spanish explorers had
penetrated north into what is now Florida, California, and Arizona. By the 1540s, Spain controlled most
of northern South America as well as all of Central America, the larger Caribbean islands, and the
Perhaps the greatest of these ventures was the fantastic voyage of Ferdinand Magellan. Starting from
Spain in 1519, his ships were the first to circumnavigate the world. A few survivors (not including the
unlucky Magellan) limped back into Seville in 1522 and reported that the world was indeed round, as
most educated people already thought.
Like the Portuguese, the Spaniards’ motives for exploration were mixed between a desire to convert
non-Christians to the Roman Catholic Church and thus gain a strong advantage against the
burgeoning Protestants (see Chapter 23), and the desire for wealth and social respectability. Land, too,
was increasingly in short supply in Europe, especially for the younger offspring of the nobility and the
landed gentry. Gold, God, glory, and acquiring land were the motives most frequently in play. By
whatever motivation, however, the middle of the 1500s saw the Spanish adventurers creating an
empire that reached as far as the Philippine islands. The Spanish crown claimed its share of treasures
found by the explorers under royal charters. Indian gold and silver (bullion) thus poured into the
royal treasury in Madrid. Those metals, in turn, allowed Spain to become the most powerful European
state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Whereas the Portuguese were primarily interested in quick profits from the trade in luxury items
from the East, the Spanish explorers came in search of wealth and status denied them in Spain. Those
who succeeded did so by confiscating land and workers from among the indigenous population, while
converting them to Christianity. Finding that El Dorado and the much-dreamed-of cities of gold and
silver were mirages, the Spanish immigrants gradually created agricultural colonies in much of
Middle and South America, using first Amerindian and then African slave labor. The Spanish colonies
thus saw the growth of a multiracial society—Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans—in which the
Europeans held the dominant political and social positions from the outset. The dominance of the
whites would assume increasing importance for the societies and economies of these lands both
during their three hundred years as colonies and later as independent states.
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cautioned me against talking too much here in Leadville; especially
against giving any hint of the locality. You’ll look out for that?”
Bromley laughed. “I’m deaf and dumb—an oyster—a clam. Where
can I find this Mr. Stephen Drew who is going to help us transmute
our hard rock into shiny twenty-dollar pieces next spring?”
Philip gave him Drew’s Leadville address, and then went to climb the
ladder-like stair to the room with the dirty window, where he flung
himself upon the unmade bed without stopping to undress, and fell
asleep almost in the act. When next he opened his eyes the room
was pitchy dark and Bromley was shaking him awake.
“What’s happened?” he gasped, as Bromley struck a match to light
the lamp; and then: “Good God, Harry!—have you let me waste a
whole day sleeping?”
“Even so,” was the cheerful reply. “I’ll tell you about it while you’re
sticking your face into a basin of cold water. To make it short—the
way you did this morning—the cat’s out of the bag. This whole town
knows that there has been a big gold strike made on the other side
of the range. What it hasn’t found out yet is who made the strike, or
where it is located. Mr. Drew put me on.”
“Good Lord!” Philip groaned. “And we’ve lost hours and hours!”
“They’re not lost; they’ve only gone before. Friend Drew is
responsible. He said, since the news had got out, we would better
wait until after dark to make our start, and then take the road as
quietly as we could; so I let you sleep. So far, as nearly as Mr. Drew
could find out, we haven’t been identified as the lucky discoverers.”
“That will follow, as sure as fate!” Philip predicted gloomily.
“Maybe not. While there’s life there’s hope. I’ve paid our bill here at
the hotel, and we’ll go to a restaurant for supper. Everything is done
that needed to be done; claim recorded, grub-stake bought, jacks
packed and ready to move, and a couple of tough little riding
broncos, the horses a loan from Mr. Drew, who pointed out, very
sensibly, that we’d save time and shoe-leather by riding in, to say
nothing of leg weariness. Drew has one of his hired men looking out
for us at the livery stable where the horses and jacks are put up, and
this man will give us a pointer if there is anything suspicious in the
wind. If you are ready, let’s go.”
As unobtrusively as possible they made their way down the steep
stair to pass out through the office-bar-room. As they entered the
smoky, malodorous public room Philip thought it a little odd that there
were no card players at the tables. A few of the evening habitués
were lined up at the bar, but most of them were gathered in knots
and groups about the rusty cast-iron stove in which a fire had been
lighted. With senses on the alert, Philip followed Bromley’s lead.
There was an air of palpitant excitement in the place, and, on the
short passage to the outer door, snatches of eager talk drifted to
Philip’s ears; enough to make it plain that the new gold strike was
responsible for the group gathering and the excitement.
“I’ll bet a hen worth fifty dollars that Hank Neighbors—that big cuss
leanin’ up ag’inst the bar—knows who struck it, and whereabouts it’s
located,” was one of the remarks that he overheard; and, glancing
back from the door, he saw the man to whom the reference was
made—a tall, loose-jointed man, with deep-set, gloomy eyes and a
curling brown beard that masked something more than half of his
face.
Upon leaving the hotel, Bromley led the way down Harrison Avenue
toward a restaurant not far from the stable where their outfit waited
for them. With the mining excitement now at its most populous
height, and the sidewalks filled with restless throngs of men, there
was curiously little street disorder; this though the saloons, dance-
halls and gaming rooms of a wide-open mining-camp city were
running full blast, their garishly lighted entrances lacking even the
customary slatted swing doors of concealment. For the greater part,
the crowds were good-natured and boisterously hilarious; and where
the not too infrequent drunken celebrator came weaving along, the
sidewalk jostlers gave him room, shouting such encouragements as
“Walk a chalk, old boy!” or “Go it while you’re young—when you’re
old you can’t!” One of the staggerers who bumped against Philip and
his partner was repeating monotonously: “’Rah for Jimmie Garfield—
canal boy, b’gosh—nexsht presh’dent!” an exotic injection of the
politics of a campaign year into an atmosphere as remote as that of
another planet from matters political or governmental.
In the side-street restaurant Philip chose a table in a corner and sat
with his back to the wall so that he could see the length and breadth
of the room. The hour was late, and the tables were no more than
half filled; but where there were groups of two or more, there was
eager talk.
“It’s here, too,” Philip commented in low tones, indicating the eager
and evidently excited groups at the other tables.
“It is everywhere, just as I told you. The town is sizzling with it. When
I was a little tad I used to sit goggle-eyed listening to the tales of a
cousin of ours who was one of the returned California Forty-niners. I
remember he said it was that way out there. A camp would be
booming along fine, with everybody happy and contented, until word
of a new strike blew in. Then the whole outfit would go wild and
make a frantic dash for the new diggings. It’s lucky nobody has
spotted us for the discoverers. We’d be mobbed.”
“I wish I could be sure we haven’t been spotted,” said Philip, a wave
of misgiving suddenly submerging him.
“I think we are safe enough, thus far,” Bromley put in, adding: “But it
was a mighty lucky thing that we came in after dark last night with
those sacks of samples. If it had been daytime——”
The Chinese waiter was bringing their order, and Bromley left the
subjunctive hanging in air. Philip sat back while the smiling Celestial
was arranging the table. As he did so, the street door opened and
closed and he had a prickling shock. The latest incomer was a tall
man with sunken eyes and a curly brown beard masking his face;
the man who had been leaning against the bar in the Harrison
Avenue hotel, and who had been named as Hank Neighbors.
“What is it—a ghost?” queried Bromley, after the Chinaman had
removed himself.
“It is either a raw coincidence—or trouble,” Philip returned. “A fellow
who was in the bar-room of the hotel as we passed through has just
come in. He is sitting at a table out there by the door and looking the
room over ... and trying to give the impression that he isn’t.”
“Do you think he has followed us?”
“It is either that or a coincidence; and I guess we needn’t look very
hard for coincidences at this stage of the game.”
“Don’t know who he is, do you?”
“No, but I know his name. It’s Neighbors. Just as we were leaving
the hotel, one of the bar-room crowd named him; pointed him out to
his fellow gossips as a man who probably knew who had made the
new gold strike, and where it is located.”
“Well,” Bromley began, “if there is only one of him——”
“If there is one, there will be more,” Philip predicted. Then, at a
sudden prompting of the primitive underman: “I wish to goodness we
had something more deadly than that old navy revolver we’ve been
lugging around all summer.”
Bromley’s smile was cherubic.
“As it happens, we are perfectly well prepared to back our judgment
—at Mr. Drew’s suggestion. Our arsenal now sports a couple of late
model Winchesters, with the ammunition and saddle holsters
therefor. I bought ’em and sneaked ’em down to the stable this
afternoon.”
Philip looked up with narrowed eyes. “Would you fight for this chance
of ours if we’re pushed to it, Harry?”
Bromley laughed.
“I’ll shoot any man’s sheep that’ll try to bite me. Have you ever
doubted it?”
“I didn’t know.”
“How about you?”
“I have never fired a rifle in my life; not at anything—much less at a
man. But if I had to——”
“I know,” said Bromley with a grin. “You’re a chip off the old Puritan
block. If the occasion should arise, you’d tell your New England
conscience to look the other way, take cold-blooded aim, pull trigger
and let the natural law of expanding gases take its course. But we
mustn’t be too blood-thirsty. If we are followed to-night it needn’t be a
foregone conclusion that the trailers are going to try to take our mine
away from us. It is much more likely they’ll be tagging along to do a
little hurry stake-driving of their own, after we’ve shown them the
place.”
Philip had drained his second cup of coffee. “If you are through?” he
said; and as they left the restaurant he shot a quick glance aside at
the man who either was, or was not, a coincidence. To all
appearances, suspicion had no peg to hang upon. The Neighbors
person was eating his supper quietly, and he did not look up as they
passed him on their way to the street.
At the stable they found Drew’s man; a young fellow who looked like
a horse-wrangler, and who dressed the part, even to a pair of jingling
Mexican spurs with preposterous rowels, and soft leather boots with
high heels.
“Everything lovely and the goose hangs high,” he told them; and as
they were leading the loaded jacks and the saddle animals out: “The
big boss said I was to ride herd on yuh till yuh got out o’ town. He
allowed it’d be safer if yuh didn’t go pee-radin’ down the Avenoo.”
In silence they followed their mounted guide through the lower part
of the town and so came, by a rather long and dodging detour, into
the rutted stage road at some distance beyond the last of the
houses. Here their pace-setter turned back and they went on alone.
It was a moonless night, but they had no trouble in following the well-
used road over the hills and down to the valley of the Arkansas.
At the river crossing, however, the difficulties began. Though hardly
more than a mountain creek at this short distance from its source,
the river still held hazards in places for a night crossing with loaded
pack animals, and it was some little time before they found the
shallows through which they had led the burros the previous
evening. Just as they reached and recognized the crossing place
they heard the sound of galloping hoofs, and Philip jerked his rifle
out of its saddle scabbard and began to fumble the breech
mechanism.
“Don’t shoot!” Bromley warned; and when the single horseman
closed up they saw that he was the guide who had piloted them out
of Leadville.
“Sashayed out to tell yuh there’s a bunch a-trailin’ yuh,” he
announced laconically. “Five of ’em, with Hank Neighbors headin’ the
procession. Must’ve got onto yuh, some way.”
“Did you see them?” Philip asked.
“Passed ’em as I was goin’ back, and circled round to get ahead of
’em.”
“What sort of a man is this Neighbors?”
“Minin’ man, is what he lets on to be.”
“Straight or crooked?”
“You can’t prove nothin’ by me. But if I was you-all, I’d try to make
out to lose him and his pardners in the shuffle somewheres betwixt
here and wherever it is you’re a-headin’ for. I shore would.”
“Have they horses?” Bromley inquired.
“Yep; and three jacks, packed same as yourn.”
“Then they can’t make any better time than we can,” Philip put in.
“That depends on how much time yuh make and how much yuh lose.
But that don’t make no difference. They can trail yuh, if yuh don’t
figger out some trick to throw ’em off.”
“Are they armed?” Philip asked.
The horse-wrangler chuckled at the tenderfoot naïveté of the
question.
“Folks don’t trail round much in this neck o’ woods without totin’ their
artillery. Leastways, a hombre like Hank Neighbors don’t. Far as that
goes, you-all seem to be pretty well heeled yourselves.”
“We’ll try to hold up our end of the log,” Philip boasted. Then: “If
they’re chasing us, I guess we’d better be moving along. Much
obliged for your trouble—till you’re better paid. Get hold of that
canary’s halter, Harry, and we’ll pitch out.”
The river crossing was made in safety, and, to their great relief, they
had little difficulty in finding their way to the high basin. Since the trail
threaded a dry gulch for the greater part of the ascent, there were
only a few stretches where they had to dismount and lead the
horses, so not much time was lost. Nevertheless, it was past
midnight when they reached the easier travelling through the basin
toward the pass of the crusted snowdrifts. Riding abreast where the
trail permitted, they herded the jacks before them, pushing on at
speed where they could, and slowing up only in places where haste
threatened disaster.
“What’s your notion, Phil?” Bromley asked, when, in the dark hour
preceding the dawn, they found themselves at the foot of the
precipitous climb to the pass. “Don’t you think we’d better camp
down and wait for daylight before we tackle this hill?”
Philip’s reply was an emphatic negative. “We can make it; we’ve got
to make it,” he declared. “If those people are chasing us, they can’t
be very far behind, and if we stop here they’ll catch up with us. And if
we let them do that, we’d never be able to shake them off.”
“As you like,” Bromley yielded, and the precipitous ascent was
begun.
With anything less than tenderfoot inexperience for the driving
power, and the luck of the novice for a guardian angel, the perilous
climb over a trail that was all but invisible in the darkness would
never have been made without disaster. Convinced by the first half-
mile of zigzagging that two men could not hope to lead five animals
in a bunch over an ascending trail which was practically no trail at all,
they compromised with the necessities and covered the distance to
the summit of the pass twice; once to drag the reluctant broncos to
the top, and again to go through the same toilsome process with the
still more reluctant pack animals. It was a gruelling business in the
thin, lung-cutting air of the high altitude, with its freezing chill; and
when it was finished they were fain to cast themselves down upon
the rocky summit, gasping for breath and too nearly done in to care
whether the animals stood or strayed, and with Bromley panting out,
“Never again in this world for little Henry Wigglesworth! There’ll be a
railroad built over this assassinating mountain range some fine day,
and I’ll just wait for it.”
“Tough; but we made it,” was Philip’s comment. “We’re here for
sunrise.”
The assertion chimed accurately with the fact. The stars had already
disappeared from the eastern half of the sky, and the sharply
outlined summits of the distant Park Range were visible against the
rose-tinted background of the coming dawn. In the middle distance
the reaches of the great basin came slowly into view, and in the first
rays of the rising sun the ground over which they had stumbled in the
small hours of the night spread itself map-like below them. Far down
on the basin trail a straggling procession of creeping figures revealed
itself, the distance minimizing its progress so greatly that the
movement appeared to be no more than a snail’s pace.
“You see,” Philip scowled. “If we had camped at the foot of this hill it
would have been all over but the swearing.”
Bromley acquiesced with a nod. “You are right. What next?”
“We have our lead now and we must hold it at all costs—get well
down into the timber on the western slope before they can climb up
here. Are you good for more of the same?”
“A bit disfigured, but still in the ring,” said the play-boy, with his
cheerful smile twisting itself, for very weariness, into a teeth-baring
grin. Then, as the sunlight grew stronger, he made a binocular of his
curved hands and looked back over the basin distances. As he did
so, the twisted smile became a chuckling laugh. “Take another look
at that outfit on the trail, Phil,” he said. “It’s my guess that they have
a pair of field-glasses and have got a glimpse of us up here.”
Philip looked, and what he saw made him scramble to his feet and
shout at the patient jacks, lop-eared and dejected after their long
night march. The group on the distant trail was no longer a unit.
Three of the dots had detached themselves from the others and
were coming on ahead—at a pace which, even at the great distance,
defined itself as a fast gallop.
VI
With the vanguard of the army of eager gold-hunters fairly in sight,
the two who were pursued cut the summit breathing halt short and
resumed their flight. Avoiding the sand-covered snowdrifts in which
they had come to grief on the journey out, they pushed on down the
western declivities at the best speed the boulder-strewn slopes and
craggy descents would permit, postponing the breakfast stop until
they reached a grassy glade well down in the foresting where the
animals could graze.
After a hasty meal made on what prepared food they could come at
easily in the packs, and without leaving the telltale ashes of a fire,
they pressed on again westward and by early afternoon were in the
mountain-girt valley of the stream which had been their guide out of
the western wilderness two days earlier. Again they made a cold
meal, watered and picketed the animals, and snatched a couple of
hours for rest and sleep. Scanting the rest halt to the bare necessity,
mid-afternoon found them once more advancing down the valley,
with Philip, to whom horseback riding was a new and rather painful
experience, leading his mount.
One by one, for as long as daylight lasted, the urgent miles were
pushed to the rear, and after the sun had gone behind the western
mountains they made elaborately cautious preparations for the night.
A small box canyon, well grassed, opened into the main valley on
their left, and in this they unsaddled the horses and relieved the
jacks of their packs and picketed the animals. Then, taking the
needed provisions from one of the packs, they crossed the river by
jumping from boulder to boulder in its bed, and made their camp fire
well out of sight in a hollow on the opposite bank; this so that there
might be no camp signs on the trail side of the stream. But in the
short pipe-smoking interval which they allowed themselves after
supper, Bromley laughed and said: “I guess there is a good bit of the
ostrich in human nature, after all, Philip. Here we’ve gone to all sorts
of pains to keep from leaving the remains of a camp fire in sight,
when we know perfectly well that we are leaving a plain trail behind
us for anybody who is even half a woodsman to follow. That’s a
joke!”
“Of course it is,” Philip agreed; and for a time before they
extinguished the fire and recrossed the river to roll up in their
blankets in the box canyon where the animals were grazing, they
discussed the pressing matter of trail effacement without reaching
any practical solution of the problem.
The next morning they were up and on their way in the earliest dawn
twilight. As yet, there were no signs of the pursuit. The mountain
silences were undisturbed save by the drumming thunder of the swift
little river and the soft sighing of the dawn precursor breeze in the
firs. Convinced that all the haste they were making was clearly so
much effort thrown away unless they could devise some means of
throwing their followers off the track, they resumed the camp-fire
discussion, falling back in the end, not upon experience, which
neither of them had, but upon the trapper-and-Indian tales read in
their boyhood. In these, running water was always the hard-pressed
white man’s salvation in his flight, and, like the fleeing trapper, they
had their stream fairly at hand. But the mountain river, coursing
along at torrent speed, and with its bed thickly strewn with slippery
boulders, was scarcely practicable as a roadway; it was too
hazardous even for the sure-footed broncos, and entirely impossible
for the loaded jacks.
Next, they thought of cutting up one of the pack tarpaulins and
muffling the hoofs of the animals with the pieces, but aside from the
time that would be wasted, this expedient seemed too childish to
merit serious consideration. In the end, however, chance, that sturdy
friend of the hard-pressed and the inexperienced, came to their
rescue. Some seven or eight miles beyond their night camp they
came upon a place where, for a half-mile or more, the left-hand bank
of the stream was a slope of slippery, broken shale; the tail of a slide
from the mountain side above. Bromley was the first to see the
hopeful possibilities.
“Wait a minute, Phil,” he called to his file leader; “don’t you
remember this slide, and how we cursed it when we had to tramp
through it coming out? I’ve captured an idea. I believe we can delay
this mob that’s chasing us, and maybe get rid of it for good and all. Is
the river fordable here, do you think?”
Philip’s answer was to ride his horse into the stream and half-way
across it. “We can make it,” he called back, “if we can keep the jacks
from being washed away.”
“We’ll take that for granted,” said Bromley. “But we don’t need to go
all the way across. Stay where you are, and I’ll herd the rest of the
caravan in and let it drink.”
This done, and a plain trail thus left leading into the water, Bromley
explained his captured idea. While they couldn’t hope to make a
roadway of the stream bed for any considerable distance, it was
quite possible to wade the animals far enough down-stream to
enable them to come out upon the shale slide. After they had been
allowed to drink their fill, the expedient was tried and it proved
unexpectedly successful. On the shale slide the hoof prints vanished
as soon as they were made, each step of horse or burro setting in
motion a tiny pebble slide that immediately filled the depression.
Looking back after they had gone a little distance they could see no
trace of their passing.
“This ought to keep the mob guessing for a little while,” Bromley
offered as they pushed on. “They’ll see our tracks going down into
the creek, and think we crossed over. They’ll probably take a tumble
to themselves after a while—after they fail to find any tracks on the
other side; but it will hold ’em for a bit, anyway. Now if we could only
scare up some way of hiding our tracks after we get beyond this
slide——”
Though the continuing expedient did not immediately suggest itself,
the good-natured god of chance was still with them. Before they
came upon ground where the tracks of the animals would again
become visible, they approached the mouth of one of the many side
gulches scarring the left-hand mountain, and in the gulch there was
a brawling mountain brook with a gravelly bottom.
“This looks as if it were made to order, don’t you think?” said Philip,
drawing rein at the gulch mouth. “If we turn up this gulch we can
walk the beasts in the water.”
“But that isn’t the way we want to go,” Bromley objected.
“I’m not so sure about that. The map shows our valley lying on the
other side of this southern mountain range. The route we took,
coming out, was along two sides of a triangle, following the streams
—which is the long way around. I’m wondering if we couldn’t cut
straight across and save a lot of time. We’ve climbed worse
mountains than this one looks to be. And there’s another thing: we
can take the water trail up this gulch for a starter, and the chances
are that we’d lose the hue and cry that’s following us—lose it
permanently. What do you say?”
“I’m good for a try at it, if you are,” was the prompt reply; and so,
without more ado, the route was changed.
For the first half-mile or so through the windings of the gulch they
were able to hide their tracks in the brook bed, but the farther they
went, the rougher the way became, until finally they had to drag the
horses and pack animals up out of the ravine and take to the
mountain slopes, zigzagging their way upward as best they could
through the primeval forest. Luckily, though there were craggy
steeps to be climbed with shortened breath, perilous slides to be
avoided, and canyon-like gulches to be headed at the price of long
detours, they encountered no impassable obstacles, and evening
found them far up in the forest blanketing of the higher slopes, with
still some little picking of grass for the stock and with plenty of dry
wood for the camp fire which they heaped high in the comforting
assurance that its blaze would not now betray them.
It was after they had cooked and eaten their first hearty meal of the
toilsome day, and had stretched themselves luxuriously before the
fire for the evening tobacco-burning, that Bromley said: “How about
it, Philip?—are you getting a bit used to the millionaire idea by this
time?”
Philip shook his head slowly.
“No, Harry; I can’t fully realize it yet. For a little while after I saw the
figures of those assays I thought I could. But now it seems more like
an opium dream. It doesn’t seem decently credible that after only a
short summer’s knocking about in these hills, two raw green-horns
like ourselves could stumble upon something that may change the
entire scheme of things for both of us for the remainder of our lives.
It’s fairly grotesque, when you come to think of it.”
“Well, I guess it isn’t a dream, at any rate. Mr. Drew gave me a good
bit of his time day before yesterday; went with me to the land office,
and afterward helped me in the horse market where I bought the
extra burro. He asked a lot of questions; about the width of the vein,
how far we had traced it, and how fair or unfair we’d been to
ourselves in picking the samples; and after I had answered him as
well as I could, he said, in effect, that we had the world by the neck,
or we would have, if the ‘Little Jean’ pans out anywhere near as
good as it promises to.”
Again Philip shook his head. “I’m not at all sure that I want to grab
the world by the neck, Harry. That doesn’t seem like much of an
ambition to me.”
“All right; say it doesn’t. What then?”
“Oh, I don’t know. If the miracle had happened a year or so ago ...
but it didn’t; so what’s the use?”
“Go on and turn it loose,” Bromley encouraged. “Set the clock back a
year or so and let us see what it strikes.”
“I had a few ideals then; modest ones, I guess you’d call them. I’d
had to break my college course in the third year—family matters. At
that time I wanted nothing so much as to go back and finish; and
perhaps have a try for a Ph.D. degree afterward.”
“And past that?”
“More of what you’d call the modesties, I guess: a teaching job in
some college back home, or something of that sort; a job in which I’d
have some leisure for reading, thinking my own thoughts, living my
own life.”
“No wife and kiddies in the picture?” Bromley asked, with his most
disarming smile.
“No; not then.”
The play-boy laughed softly. “No sentimental foolishness for the
austere young student and pedagogue, of course. But the ‘not then’
tells a different story. You’ve met the incomparable ‘her’ in your later
avatar?”
It was some measure of the distance he had come on the road to
freer human expression that Philip did not at once retreat into the
speechless reticences.
“Yes,” he said: “I’ve met a girl.”
“The ‘angel’ you spoke of, the night you fed a hungry hold-up?”
“Don’t get it wrong. She is not so angelic that she can’t be perfectly
human.”
“But didn’t you say you’d met her only twice?”
“I did; and the saying still holds true.”
“Bowled you over like a shot, did she? I’d never have believed it of
you, Philip.”
“You needn’t believe it now. There was no ‘bowling over’ about it. I
first met her on the train coming to Denver—with her family; sat with
her for part of an afternoon. She isn’t like any other girl I’ve ever
known.”
“And that is as far as you’ve gone? You are a cold-blooded fish,
Philip, dear. But we were talking about futures. I take it the teaching
job in a New England college doesn’t appeal to you now; or won’t if
our mine keeps its promise?”
“Honestly, Harry, I can’t see very far ahead. I’m not at all sure that I
want to go back and finish my college course. There is nothing truer
than the saying we have hurled at us all the time out here—that the
West lays hold of a man and refuses to let go; that you may be as
homesick as the devil, but you’ll never go home to stay. But this is all
dream stuff—this talk. We haven’t got the millions yet. Even if the
mine is as rich as it seems to be, we may find jumpers in
possession, and so many of them that we can’t get away with them.”
“That’s so. ‘There’s many a slip,’ as we read in the copy-books.”
For a time the high-mountain silence, a silence curiously bereft of
even the small insect shrillings of the lower altitudes, enveloped
them. The cheerful fire was beginning to fall into embers when Philip
began again.
“A while back, you thought the money fever was getting hold of me,
Harry, but I hope you were wrong. Of course, there are things I want
to do; one in particular that money would help me to do. It was my
main reason for heading west from New Hampshire a little less than
a year ago.”
“Is it something you can talk about?”
“I guess so—to you,” and, breaking masterfully through whatever
barrier of the reticences remained, he told the story of his father’s
disappearance, of the cloud which still shadowed the Trask name, of
his own unshakable belief in his father’s innocence, and, lastly, of his
determination to find the lost man and to clear the family name.
“You see how the money will help; how I couldn’t hope to do much of
anything without money and the use of my own time,” he said in
conclusion. Then, the ingrained habit of withdrawal slipping back into
its well-worn groove: “You won’t talk about this, Harry? You are the
only person this side of New Hampshire who knows anything about
it.”
“It is safe enough with me, Phil; you ought to know that, by this time.
And here is my shy at the thing: if it so happens that the ‘Little Jean’
is only flirting with us—that we get only a loaf of bread where we’re
hoping to hog the whole bakery—you may have my share if your
own isn’t big enough to finance your job. I owe you a good bit more
than the ‘Little Jean’ will ever pan out on my side of the partnership.”
“Oh, hell,” said Philip; and the expression was indicative of many
things not written down in the book of the Philip who, a few months
earlier, had found it difficult and boyishly embarrassing to meet a
strange young woman on the common ground of a chance train
acquaintanceship. Then, “If you’ve smoked your pipe out, we’d better
roll in. There is more of the hard work ahead of us for to-morrow.”
But the next morning they found, upon breaking camp and emerging
from the forest at timber line, that the blessing of good luck was with
them still more abundantly. With a thousand and one chances to
miss it in their haphazard climb, they had come upon an easily
practicable pass over the range; and beyond the pass there was a
series of gentle descents leading them by the middle of the
afternoon into a valley which they quickly recognized as their own.
Pushing forward at the best speed that could be gotten out of the
loaded pack animals, they traversed the windings of the valley with
nerves on edge and muscles tensed, more than half expecting to
find a struggle for re-possession awaiting them in the treasure gulch.
At the last, when the more familiar landmarks began to appear, Philip
drew his rifle from its holster under his leg and rode on ahead to
reconnoitre, leaving Bromley to follow with the jacks. But in a few
minutes he came galloping back, waving his gun in the air and
shouting triumphantly.
“All safe, just as we left it!” he announced as he rode up. And then,
with a laugh that was the easing of many strains: “What a lot of
bridges we cross before we come to them! Here we’ve been
sweating blood for fear the claim had been jumped—or at least I
have—and I don’t suppose there has been a living soul within miles
of it since we left. Kick those canaries into action and let’s get along
and make camp on the good old stamping ground.”
VII
The autumn days were growing perceptibly shorter when the
discoverers of the “Little Jean” lode began to make preparations to
be snowed in for the winter in the western mountain fastnesses. By
this time they had heard enough about the mountain winters to know
what they were facing. With the first heavy snowfall blocking the
passes they would be shut off from the world as completely as
shipwrecked mariners on a desert island. But hardships which are
still only anticipatory hold few terrors for the inexperienced; and with
the comforting figures of the assays to inspire them, they thought
more of the future spring and its promise than of the lonely and
toilsome winter which must intervene.
Since there was still sufficient grass in sheltered coves and forest
glades to feed the stock, they postponed the journey which one of
them would have to take to find winter quarters for the animals. The
delay was partly prudential. Though each added day of non-
interference was increasing their hope that their ruse at the shale
slide had been completely successful in throwing their pursuers off
the track, they had no reason to assume that the Neighbors party
would turn back without making an exhaustive search for the new
“rich diggings”; and Philip was cannily distrustful of the Neighbors
purpose.
“It may be just as you say: that they are merely hungry gold-chasers,
breaking their necks to be the earliest stake-drivers in a new district;
but then, again, they may not be,” was the way he phrased it for the
less apprehensive Bromley. “If they happen to be the other sort—the
lawless sort—well, with both of us here to stand up for our rights,
they’d be five to our two. We can’t afford to make the odds five to
one. I’d rather wait and take the horses and jacks over the range in a
snow storm than to run the risk of losing our mine.”
“Meaning that we needn’t lose it if we can muster two to their five?”
said Bromley, grinning.
“Meaning that if anybody tries to rob us there’ll be blood on the
moon. Get that well ground into your system, Harry.”
“Ho! You are coming on nicely for a sober, peaceable citizen of well-
behaved New England,” laughed the play-boy. “But see here, didn’t
you tell me once upon a time that you had never fired a gun? If you
really believe there is a chance for a row, you’d better waste a few
rounds of ammunition finding out what a gun does when you aim it
and pull the trigger. It’s likely to surprise you. I’ve shot ducks in the
Maryland marshes often enough to know that pretty marksmanship
is no heaven-born gift.”
“Thanks,” returned Philip grimly. “That is a sensible idea. Evenings,
after we knock off work, we’ll set up a target and you can give me a
few lessons.”
Making the most of the shortening days, they had become pioneers,
felling trees for the building of a cabin, and breaking the two broncos,
in such primitive harness as they could contrive out of the pack-
saddle lashings, to drag the logs to a site near the tunnel mouth. Like
the drilling and blasting, axe work and cabin building were unfamiliar
crafts, to be learned only at a round price paid in the coin of aching
backs, stiffened muscles and blistered palms. Nevertheless, at the
end of a toiling fortnight they had a one-room cabin roofed in,
chimneyed and chinked with clay, a rude stone forge built for the drill
sharpening and tempering, and a charcoal pit dug, filled and fired to
provide the forge fuel. And though the working days were prolonged
to the sunset limit, Philip, methodically thorough in all things, did not
fail to save enough daylight for the shooting lesson, setting up a
target in the gulch and hammering away at it until he became at least
an entered apprentice in the craft and was able to conquer the
impulse to shut both eyes tightly when he pulled the trigger.
They were bunking comfortably in the new cabin when they awoke
one morning to find the ground white with the first light snowfall. It
was a warning that the time had come to dispose of the animals if
they were not to be shut in and starved. In his talk with Bromley,
Drew, the Leadville mine owner, had named a ranch near the mouth
of Chalk Creek where the borrowed saddle horses could be left, and
where winter feeding for the jacks might be bargained for; and after a
hasty breakfast Philip prepared to set out on the three-days’ trip to
the lower altitudes.
“I feel like a yellow dog, letting this herding job fall on you, Phil,”
protested the play-boy, as he helped pack a haversack of provisions
for the journey. “I’d make you draw straws for it if I had the slightest
idea that I could find the way out and back by myself.”
“It’s a stand-off,” countered the potential herd-rider. “I feel the same
way about leaving you to hold the fort alone. If that Leadville outfit
should turn up while I’m away——”
“Don’t you worry about the Neighbors bunch. It’s been three full
weeks, now, with no sign of them. They’ve lost out.”
“I’m not so sure of that. Better keep your eye peeled and not get too
far away from the cabin. If they should drop in on you——”
“In that case I’ll man the battlements and do my small endeavors to
keep them amused until you put in an appearance,” was the
lighthearted rejoinder. “But you needn’t run your legs off on that
account. They’ve given us up long ago.” Then, as Philip mounted
and took the halter of the horse that was to be led: “Are you all set?
Where’s that old pistol?”
“I don’t need the pistol. If I’ve got to walk back, lugging my own grub
and blankets, I don’t want to carry any more weight than I have to.”
“Just the same, you’re going prepared to back your judgment,”
Bromley insisted; and he brought out the holstered revolver and
made Philip buckle it on. “There; that looks a little more shipshape,”
he approved. “Want me to go along a piece and help you start the
herd?”
“Nothing of the kind,” Philip refused; and thereupon he set out,
leading the extra horse and driving the jacks ahead of him.
It was his intention to back-track over the trail by which they had first
penetrated to their valley in the late summer, and being gifted with a