Excerpt from India in the Nineteenth Century

The discovery of a sea route to India was the uppermost ambition of every maritime state in Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century. The old assumptions of Seneca and Pliny that there were other worlds than that known to Rome breathed again in the poetical predictions of Dante and Luigi Pulci. The belief "in another hemisphere, " and that there were countries at "our antipodes, " was held before Diaz discovered the Cape of Good Hope or Columbus traversed the Atlantic. The Wars of the Roses had retarded the growth of England's naval power, which in the fourteenth century had been supreme in Northern Europe, but with the Tudors came a revival of maritime spirit and adventure, although Henry VII.'s first emissaries were the Italian Cabots, in default of English mariners of sufficient experience.

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