Vent'rous I sing, on soaring pinions borne,
And all my country's wars[1] the song adorn;
What kings, what heroes of my native land
Thunder'd on Asia's and on Afric's strand:
Illustrious shades, who levell'd in the dust
The idol-temples and the shrines of lust;
And where, erewhile, foul demons were rever'd,
To holy faith unnumber'd altars rear'd:[2]
Illustrious
- ↑ And all my country's wars.—"He interweaves artfully the history of Portugal." Voltaire.
- ↑ To holy faith unnumber'd altars rear'd.—In no period of history does human nature appear with more shocking features than in the Spanish conquest of South America. To the immortal honour of the first Portuguese discoverers, their conduct was in every respect the reverse. To establish a traffic equally advantageous to the natives as to themselves, was the
been supposed that some of their ships might have been driven by storm to the Brazils or North-America; yet there is not the least foundation in history to suppose that they traded to the Indies by the Cape of Good Hope. There is rather a demonstration of the contrary; for it is certain they carried on their traffic with the East, by a much nearer and safer way, by the two ports of Elath and Eziongeber on the Red Sea. Neither is it certainly known in what particular part, whether in the Persian gulph, or in the Indian ocean, the Tarihish and Ophir of the ancients are situated. Though it is certain that Hanno doubled the Cape of Good Hope, it is also equally certain that his voyage was merely a coasting one, like that of Nearchus in Alexander's time, and that he never ventured into the great ocean, or went so far as Gama. The citation from Macrobius proves nothing at all relative to the point in question, for it is certain that the Romans received the merchandise of India by the way of Syria and the Mediterranean, in the same manner as the Venetians imported the commodities of the East from Alexandria before the discoveries of the Portuguese. It remains, therefore, that Gama, who sailed by the compass, after having gone further than his cotemporary Bartholomew Diaz, was literally the first who ever spread sail in the great southern ocean, and that the Portuguese were not the restorers, but literally the discoverers of the present rout of navigation to the East Indies.
