* Or, to make a different comparison, a fertilized egg takes as long to wander from the Fallopian tubes and implant itself in the uterus as Apollo 11 took to journey to the Moon; and as long to develop into a full-term infant as Viking took on its trip to Mars. The normal human lifetime is longer than Voyager will take to venture beyond the orbit of Pluto.
The fifteenth through seventeenth centuries represent a major turning point in our history. It then became clear that we could venture to all parts of our planet. Plucky sailing vessels from half a dozen European nations dispersed to every ocean. There were many motivations for these journeys: ambition, greed, national pride, religious fanaticism, prison pardons, scientific curiosity, the thirst for adventure and the unavailability of suitable employment in Estremadura. These voyages worked much evil as well as much good. But the net result has been to bind the Earth together, to decrease provincialism, to unify the human species and to advance powerfully our knowledge of our planet and ourselves.
Emblematic of the epoch of sailing-ship exploration and discovery is the revolutionary Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century. Having recently declared its independence from the powerful Spanish Empire, it embraced more fully than any other nation of its time the European Enlightenment. It was a rational, orderly, creative society. But because Spanish ports and vessels were closed to Dutch shipping, the economic survival of the tiny republic depended on its ability to construct, man and deploy a great fleet of commercial sailing vessels.
The Dutch East India Company, a joint governmental and private enterprise, sent ships to the far corners of the world to acquire rare commodities and resell them at a profit in Europe. Such voyages were the life blood of the Republic. Navigational charts and maps were classified as state secrets. Ships often embarked with sealed orders. Suddenly the Dutch were present all over the planet. The Barents Sea in the Arctic Ocean and Tasmania in Australia are named after Dutch sea captains. These expeditions were not merely commercial exploitations, although there was plenty of that. There were powerful elements of scientific adventure and the zest for discovery of new lands, new plants and animals, new people; the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
The Amsterdam Town Hall reflects the confident and secular self-image of seventeenth-century Holland. It took shiploads of marble to build. Constantijn Huygens, a poet and diplomat of the time, remarked that the Town Hall dispelled ‘the Gothic squint and squalor.’ In the Town Hall to this day, there is a statue of Atlas supporting the heavens, festooned with constellations. Beneath is Justice, brandishing a golden sword and scales, standing between Death and Punishment, and treading underfoot Avarice and Envy, the gods of the merchants. The Dutch, whose economy was based on private profit, nevertheless understood that the unrestrained pursuit of profit posed a threat to the nation’s soul.
A less allegorical symbol may be found under Atlas and Justice, on the floor of the Town Hall. It is a great inlaid map, dating from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries, reaching from West Africa to the Pacific Ocean. The whole world was Holland’s arena. And on this map, with disarming modesty the Dutch omitted themselves, using only the old Latin name Belgium for their part of Europe.
In a typical year many ships set sail halfway around the world. Down the west coast of Africa, through what they called the Ethiopian Sea, around the south coast of Africa, within the Straits of Madagascar, and on past the southern tip of India they sailed, to one major focus of their interests, the Spice Islands, present-day Indonesia. Some expeditions journeyed from there to a land named New Holland, and today called Australia. A few ventured through the Straits of Malacca, past the Philippines, to China. We know from a mid-seventeenth-century account of an ‘Embassy from the East India Company of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, to the Grand Tartar, Cham, Emperor of China.’ The Dutch burgers, ambassadors and sea captains stood wide-eyed in amazement, face to face with another civilization in the Imperial City of Peking.*
* We even know what gifts they brought the Court. The Empress was presented with ‘six little chests of divers pictures.’ And the Emperor received ‘two fardels of cinnamon.’
Never before or since has Holland been the world power it was then. A small country, forced to live by its wits, its foreign policy contained a strong pacifist element. Because of its tolerance for unorthodox opinions, it was a haven for intellectuals who were refugees from censorship and through control elsewhere in Europe – much as the United States benefited enormously in the 1930’s by the exodus of intellectuals from Nazi-dominated Europe. So seventeenth-century Holland was the home of the great Jewish philosopher Spinoza, whom Einstein admired; of Descartes, a pivotal figure in the history of mathematics and philosophy; and of John Locke, a political scientist who influenced a group of philosophically inclined revolutionaries named Paine, Hamilton, Adams, Franklin and Jefferson. Never before or since has Holland been graced by such a galaxy of artists and scientists, philosophers and mathematicians. This was the time of the master painters Rembrandt and Vermeer and Frans Hals; of Leeuwenhoek, the inventor of the microscope; of Grotius, the founder of international law; of Willebrord Snellius, who discovered the law of the refraction of light.
In the Dutch tradition of encouraging freedom of thought, the University of Leiden offered a professorship to an Italian scientist named Galileo, who had been forced by the Catholic Church under threat of torture to recant his heretical view that the Earth moved about the Sun and not vice versa.* Galileo had close ties with Holland, and his first astronomical telescope was an improvement of a spyglass of Dutch design. With it he discovered sunspots, the phases of Venus, the craters of the Moon, and the four large moons of Jupiter now called, after him, the Galilean satellites. Galileo’s own description of his ecclesiastical travails is contained in a letter he wrote in the year 1615 to the Grand Duchess Christina:
Some years ago as Your Serene Highness well knows, I discovered in the heavens many things that had not been seen before our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions commonly held among academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of professors [many of them ecclesiastics] – as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset Nature and overturn the sciences. They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts.**
* In 1979 Pope John Paul II cautiously proposed reversing the condemnation of Galileo done 346 years earlier by the ‘Holy Inquisition.’
** The courage of Galileo (and Kepler) in promoting the heliocentric hypothesis was not evident in the actions of others, even those residing in less fanatically doctrinal parts of Europe. For example, in a letter dated April 1634, René Descartes, then living in Holland, wrote:
Doubtless you know that Galileo was recently censured by the Inquisitors of the Faith, and that his views about the movement of the Earth were condemned as heretical. I must tell you that all the things I explained in my treatise, which included the doctrine of the movement of the Earth, were so interdependent that it is enough to discover that one of them is false to know that all the arguments I was using are unsound. Though I thought they were based on very certain and evident proofs, I would not wish, for anything in the world, to maintain them against the authority of the Church . . . I desire to live in peace and to continue the life I have begun under the motto to live well you must live unseen.
The connection between Holland as an exploratory power and Holland as an intellectual and cultural center was very strong. The improvement of sailing ships encouraged technology of all kinds. People enjoyed working with their hands. Inventions were prized. Technological advance required the freest possible pursuit of knowledge, so Holland became the leading publisher and bookseller in Europe, translating works written in other languages and permitting the publication of works proscribed elsewhere. Adventures into exotic lands and encounters with strange societies shook complacency, challenged thinkers to reconsider the prevailing wisdom and showed that ideas that had been accepted for thousands of years – for example, on geography – were fundamentally in error. In a time when kings and emperors ruled much of the world, the Dutch Republic was governed, more than any other nation, by the people. The openness of the society and its encouragement of the life of the mind, its material well-being and its commitment to the exploration and utilization of new worlds generated a joyful confidence in the human enterprise.*