United States or Bulgaria ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Nevertheless, the general Government, acting on Linschoten's suggestion, furnished a fleet of seven ships: two from Enkhuizen, two from Zeeland, two from Amsterdam; and a yacht which was to be despatched homeward with the news, so soon as the expedition should have passed through the straits of Nassau, forced its way through the frozen gulf of Tartary, doubled Cape Tabin, and turned southward on its direct course to China.
Posterity has been neither just nor grateful, and those early names which Dutch genius and enterprise wrote upon so many prominent points of the earth's surface, then seen for the first time by European eyes, are no longer known. The impulse given to the foreign trade of the Netherlands by the publication of Linschoten's work was destined to be a lasting one.
The sublime credulity which accepted Linschoten's hasty solution of the polar enigma as conclusive was fairly matched by the sedateness with which the authorities made the preparations for the new voyage.
But the secret was so well kept, that seventy-eight years after Magellan's voyage round the world, Java and Australia were still believed to be one and the same continent by certain otherwise well-informed navigators, as will be seen by Linschoten's "Discours of Voyages into ye East and West Indies," published in London, in the year 1598, in which the following description, from Portuguese sources, occurs: "South, south-east, right over against the last point or corner of the Isle of Sumatra, on the south, side of the equinoctial line, lyeth the island called JAUA MAIOR, or Great Java, where there is a strait or narrow passage, called the strait of Sunda, of a place so called, lying not far from thence within the Isle of Java.
The sublime credulity which accepted Linschoten's hasty solution of the polar enigma as conclusive was fairly matched by the sedateness with which the authorities made the preparations for the new voyage.
Nevertheless, the general Government, acting on Linschoten's suggestion, furnished a fleet of seven ships: two from Enkhuizen, two from Zeeland, two from Amsterdam; and a yacht which was to be despatched homeward with the news, so soon as the expedition should have passed through the straits of Nassau, forced its way through the frozen gulf of Tartary, doubled Cape Tabin, and turned southward on its direct course to China.
Posterity has been neither just nor grateful, and those early names which Dutch genius and enterprise wrote upon so many prominent points of the earth's surface, then seen for the first time by European eyes, are no longer known. The impulse given to the foreign trade of the Netherlands by the publication of Linschoten's work was destined to be a lasting one.
*Gervase Markham. Linschoten's Large Testimony in Hakluyt's Voyages. Poets of the time made ballads of this fight. Raleigh wrote of it as you have just read, and in our own day the great laureate Lord Tennyson made the story live again in his poem The Revenge.
Posterity has been neither just nor grateful, and those early names which Dutch genius and enterprise wrote upon so many prominent points of the earth's surface, then seen for the first time by European eyes, are no longer known. The impulse given to the foreign trade of the Netherlands by the publication of Linschoten's work was destined to be a lasting one.
Nevertheless, the general Government, acting on Linschoten's suggestion, furnished a fleet of seven ships: two from Enkhuizen, two from Zeeland, two from Amsterdam; and a yacht which was to be despatched homeward with the news, so soon as the expedition should have passed through the straits of Nassau, forced its way through the frozen gulf of Tartary, doubled Cape Tabin, and turned southward on its direct course to China.
Word Of The Day