The crusade for gold (1963)

Book Reviews from the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Conquest of New Spain. Bernel Diaz. Translated by J. M. Cohen. Penguin Books, 6s.

Chronicles of the Crusades. Villehardouin and Joinville. Translated by M. R. B. Shaw. Penguin Books, 5s.

Many books have been written about Hernando Cortes and the conquest of Mexico. Many more still have been written about the Crusades. But very few books on either event came from those who were there at the time, and even of these only a handful have survived.

Penguin Books have recently had the happy idea of publishing translations of three of these personal histories. In the first, The Conquest of New Spain, Bernal Diaz, a humble soldier in the Cortes expedition, gives his account of how several hundred Spanish adventurers with a few dozen horses invaded the powerful Aztec empire, overthrew its ruler Montezuma, and conquered his capital of Mexico. The second book, Chronicles of the Crusades, combines two stories: of the Fourth Crusade seen through the eyes of a French feudal lord, Villehardouin, and of the Seventh by a later compatriot Joinville.

Roughly three hundred years separate these two periods, three hundred years which saw the final crumbling of feudalism before the forces of expansion in which the discovery of the New World played such an overwhelming part. The books reflect the deep gulf between the two societies, but even more interesting and striking is the way they reveal the factor common to both of them—the drive of economic interest.

All three histories purport to be written by religious men. Both the chroniclers of the Crusades tell us frequently of their Christian mission, of their joy at the “taking of the Cross" against the Saracen and the infidel. And throughout his story Diaz tells us again and again of the way he and his companions shattered the Mexicans’ “heathen idols” and of how they tried to get them to see the “true faith.” All their disasters (and they were many) were sent by God to punish them for their misdeeds, and their escapes and triumphs were due solely to his intervention.

But through all three stories comes the asides, the complaints, the intrigues, the reproaches, the admissions, that make it clear that whatever the ostensible reason for their campaigns, the real motive was wealth, land, booty, and loot.

Gold is the word that weaves its way into every thread of Diaz’s story. Gold was what he and his companions were after, the fabulous mines in the west which would make them rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Every settlement through which they passed on their long road to Mexico was assessed in terms of the gold it possessed; every present given by Montezuma in an effort to buy them off was meticulously valued in pesos. Gold was the prize for which they went through innumerable and fantastic hardships and for which so many of them died—to have their hearts torn from their still living bodies and their limbs thrown to their opponents to feast upon. And, supreme irony of all, and as so often happens, it was the leaders and rulers who got most of the spoil and Diaz and his fellows nothing.

Our two Crusaders tell the same story. It was the Venetian merchants who supplied the ships and provisions for the Fourth Crusade—at a good price, plus one-half “of everything we win." And whatever may have been the depth of religious conviction of the two authors, it is certain that most of their companions embarked on their adventure for the booty to be won and the lands to be conquered. The Fourth Crusade, in fact, never got further than Constantinople and ended in a bloody struggle between the French and Germans against the Greeks who were, incidentally, also Christians and whose lands bad been seized by the Crusaders. As for the Seventh Crusade, the feudal barons who left so eagerly in search of loot and land were soon tempted to leave their “saintly king Louis'’ in the lurch when they found the opposition keener than they had expected. Louis himself was captured and had to buy himself back to France at the cost of a heavy ransom. The whole campaign was in fact a fiasco, ruined by the greed of the big feudal lords and their primary concern for their own economic interests.

It should be remembered that the wealth to permit these feudal aristocrats to go out on their jaunts, either for religious or just for mercenary gain, was extracted from the vast inert, mass of Western European serfdom. Then, as now, a small minority of privileged lived on the backs of a majority who did all the useful work of society, pawns who were passed from one feudal lord to another as the tide of battle fluctuated between the various warring actions.

By Diaz's time this system had virtually broken up and a new one was evolving. He was only one of many who thought to get rich quick by volunteering for expeditions to open up new lands. The old order was disappearing and the world becoming bigger, but much of it was illusion. Most of them died, or came back crippled or broken with disease. Their leaders, true, often shared the same hardships but did have somewhat of a better chance of looking back and considering them worthwhile. But the real winners, as always, were the big men behind the scenes who financed the expeditions—and, of course, the rulers of the time who couldn't lose anyway because they were automatically entitled to a fifth of everything that was going.

Courage, adventure, cruelty, and privation—these two books recount such things on a scale to make us marvel. But, underlying everything, they confirm once more that then, as now, history was shaped by economic interest. The holy cross might have stood out brightly on the banners, but it was the urge for gold, land, booty, and profit, that burned in the breasts of most of those who fell in behind.

Stan Hampson

Material World: Robbery on the high seas? (2022)

The Material World column from the October 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

When there is little benefit to states, particular treaties that promote the interests of humanity as a whole can usually be concluded. Such would be the Antarctica Treaty, the Outer Space Treaty, or the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone. If, however, there exists a potential for profit, good intentions will be tossed aside. For example, the recent failure to achieve the UN Ocean Treaty. This would have meant the further development of other international agreements, the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the International Seabed Authority (ISA) and the International Maritime Organization (IMO).

Healthy oceans are vital to humanity. Less than 1 percent of the high seas are protected without a new treaty. A goal is to set aside 30 percent of ocean area as some kind of marine sanctuary. But it has been pointed out that protecting 30 percent of the area of the high seas doesn’t protect 30 percent of its most valuable conservation features because of the way habitats and species are distributed.

International waters begin at the border of a state’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which by international law reaches no more than 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres) from its coast, and beyond any state’s jurisdiction. Sixty percent of the world’s oceans fall under this category.

Negotiators have been trying for 15 years to agree on a legally binding text for ‘the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction,’ (or BBNJ).

Greenpeace had already predicted in advance that the UN Ocean Treaty talks would fail ‘…because of the greed of countries in the High Ambition Coalition and others like Canada and the United States. They have prioritised hypothetical future profits from Marine Genetics Resources over protecting the oceans’.

Disagreement was partly around the sharing of possible profits from the development of genetic resources in international waters, where pharmaceutical, chemical and cosmetics companies hope to find miracle drugs, products or cures and some of the poorer states did not want to be excluded from potential windfall profits drawn from marine resources.

Dr Essam Mohammed from Eritrea of WorldFish, a non-profit research institute, said: ‘At the moment, there is a governance vacuum in the high seas, and for the ocean and developing countries, the status quo simply isn’t an option’. Advancing marine technology would lead to ‘an unprecedented race for marine resources in unregulated waters’, Mohammed warned. ‘The delay in striking a deal means high risk for the health of the ocean. All member states of the UN need to recognise the urgency to save the ocean and the people who depend on it to survive’ (bit.ly/3eiBQAz).

With many of the earlier technological difficulties overcome, maritime resources could benefit all of humanity but mining firms view the deep-sea bed as a commercial bonanza. ‘Blue acceleration’ is the term used by some ecologists to describe the rapid rise in marine industrialisation.

There exist vast untouched nodules of the most sought-after metals and minerals, nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper, on the bed of the ocean. Negotiations within the International Seabed Authority to oversee the mining also reached no agreement; which may well lead to seabed mining without any environmental protection or economic regulations in place.

Article 76 UNCLOS allows countries to claim seabed that lies beyond the 200 miles of a nation’s exclusive economic zone and since the first application under Article 76 was made in 2001, 83 countries have staked claims amounting to more than 37 million sq km of seabed, an area more than twice the size of Russia.

Exploration permits for the international seabed already cover an area equivalent in size to France and Germany combined, and that area is likely to expand rapidly, despite the risks to biodiversity. About twenty countries are now actively engaged in deep-sea mining exploration.

Conservationists say that given the risk of habitat harm, disturbance to fish stocks, water contamination, vibration and light pollution, no new licences should be approved. Greenpeace describe deep sea mining as destructive. Excavation of mineral nodes, for example, is done by huge robotic undersea tractors that crawl across the sea floor, ‘harvesting’ the nodules by sucking them up. Studies suggest that one square kilometre of sea floor will be scoured daily, amounting to 6,000 square kilometres over the 20-year life of a mine site, leaving the area with little chance of recovering from being scraped clean.

Various coastal states have called upon the ISA to exercise caution regarding deep-sea mining, while others (Micronesia, French Polynesia and Papua New Guinea) seek to ban the seabed grabbing. But there are small Pacific island states such as Kiribati, Cook Islands, Tonga, and Nauru that view it as too lucrative a business opportunity to reject.

Many companies lack transparency and are bringing their influence to bear, operating through subsidiaries or partnering small island states. Mining firms have taken the place of government representatives at meetings of the ISA.

‘The health of our oceans is closely linked to our own survival. Unless we act now to protect them, deep sea mining could have devastating consequences for marine life and humankind…This greedy industry could destroy wonders of the deep ocean before we even have a chance to study them.’ explains Louisa Casson, of Greenpeace’s Protect the Oceans campaign. She continues ‘The ISA is not fit for purpose to protect our oceans. It is more concerned with promoting the interests of the deep sea mining industry and lobbying against a strong Global Ocean Treaty’ (bit.ly/3evfxYq).

Socialism involves building democracy for our workplaces and in our local communities. But it also involves an administration on a world scale. We can envisage certain existing UN international bodies such as the World Health Organization, the International Labour Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization continuing. We can expect air traffic and air safety to still be organised globally under the authority of the International Air Traffic Association ensuring that your pilot and those in air control guiding your flight are properly certified and qualified. There will remain the World Meteorological Organisation and the Universal Postal Union. World NGOs such as the Red Cross, Oxfam, War on Want, Save the Children and Doctors Without Borders could continue.

Those conspiracists on the far-right construe that this will result in a globalist one-world government. We are not talking about a world Big Brother but rather about a world cooperative commonwealth, a network of organisations operating in coordination and collaboration for the welfare of the world’s population. Socialism won’t witness the grubby squabbling that is presently taking place for the resources our planet’s seas and oceans.

ALJO

The Great Discoveries and their economic effects. (1926)

From the February 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

When civilisation was concentrated round the Eastern end of the Mediterranean, Phoenician ships from Syria pushed further and further westward, trading; and colonising as they went, and preventing the too credulous Greeks from intruding by spreading tales of the quite mythical sea monsters they had met on the voyage. They eventually reached the Atlantic and coasted south-west round Africa, and tradition has it that their ships made call at Britain for supplies of Cornish tin. Of this we are not sure and we know still less about the Scandinavian voyager, Leif, son of Eric the Red, who it is said reached America in the year 1,000.

But in 1492 Christopher Columbus, fortified by nothing more definite than his inability to believe “that the sun shines upon nothing, and that the nightly watches of the stars are wasted on trackless seas and desert lands,” sailed westward across the Atlantic to look for a route round the world to India and the East, and hit upon the West Indian Islands. This was the era of the Great Discoveries.

Five years later, after half a century of persistent Portuguese exploration of the West African coast, Vasco de Gama succeeded in passing the Cape of Good Hope and in opening direct sea communication with India. By 1500 the Portuguese were settled in Brazil and there followed innumerable explorations from end to end of the Atlantic shores of North and South America. In 1520 Magellan had rounded the southern tip of South America and found a sea route to Eastern Asia, although the voyage of over two years cost the lives of Magellan and half his crew. We read of repeated attempts during the succeeding centuries to find sea passages to the North of America and Asia.

To understand the effects of this era of expansion, we must consider the economic condition of Europe in the preceding centuries, and its relations with the East.

Over the greater part of Europe “natural economy” as distinct from “money economy” still prevailed. That is to say, food and clothing were in the main produced for use in the immediate neighbourhood ; trade, and the use of money, were comparatively rare, and limited to luxury goods. The exceptions were the great trading and manufacturing towns which had sprung up at convenient centres for the collection and distribution of commodities, and on the most important land or sea trade routes.

The sea trade was in the hands of merchants of Genoa and Venice and other Italian towns, and of the Hanse towns in the Baltic. The Hanse traders dealt chiefly with Russia, Scandinavia, and the Baltic lands, and were interested in raw materials such as wool, which they obtained from England, corn which they supplied to many Mediterranean nations, and fish.

The Genoese had a monopoly of the South Russian trade which came overland round the Black Sea bringing silks and spices from India and China. The spices were valued highly because it was only by their liberal use that the meat of those times could be made really palatable.

The Venetians, too, dealt in spices, drugs and other Eastern products transported by caravans which entered Egypt from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. These spices were grown in the East Indian Islands and reached the termini of the caravan routes in the ships of Arab traders who held undisputed sway over the Indian Ocean.

Both Genoa and Venice brought their luxury wares to depots such as Antwerp, where exchange took place with the Hanse merchants. Overland routes ran up the Rhone to Paris; over the Alps and down the Rhine ; and from Venice via Augsburg and Nurembourg to Hamburg and other Baltic centres.

Both groups of merchants made regular calls at English Ports, and the bulk of European trade was in their hands. It was this trade which gave political importance to the cities and was the cause of their rivalries. The chief source of the merchant’s wealth and the goal of every adventurer’s ambition was the East, which up to that time had not been directly and easily accessible to Europe.

During the 15th century, owing to the advance of the Turks into Europe, the whole of this trade was endangered. In 1453 Constantinople fell to them and the Genoese routes were altogether barred; while the Turkish approach to Egypt threatened also the activities of the Venetians. It was the Turkish invasion which was the immediate cause of the desire to reach India by sea, and consequently of the great expansion during the 16th century.

The marked increase of exploration had the effect, which was of great importance afterwards, of giving rise to a new tradition of more daring and skilful seamanship in Portugal and Spain and later in Holland and England. The discoveries caused the shifting of the centres of commerce from the Mediterranean to those countries with an Atlantic coast; the drying up of the overland routes to the Baltic and the consequent decline of the Mid-European cities ; the abandoning of much of the caravan communication with Asia; and the sapping of the vitality of Venice and Genoa. Spain, Portugal and England were thus encouraged to build their own mercantile fleets.

The Portuguese established an Indian Empire and gained control of the East Indian spice islands and a monopoly of the traffic in the Indian Ocean. The amount of trade increased enormously, but the distribution of the wares in Europe was conducted and financed by the Dutch, who obtained the bulk of the profits and laid the foundations of their own later financial supremacy. It was the Portuguese monopoly of the Indian Ocean and the endorsement of their claim which they obtained from the Pope, that induced the Spaniards to finance Columbus in his attempt to reach India by sailing westwards. The discovery of America was, however, not used by Spain to develop commerce. The finding of gold and silver and the extensive mining of the latter which began in 1530 enabled Spain to prosper for a while on a different basis. She attempted to make the new world merely a source of bullion monopolised by her, and to keep this bullion inside the mother country. The result of the monopoly and exclusion of foreign traders was to incite Dutch and English freebooters to attack the bullion ships, and the bullionist policy at home was equally disastrous in the long run. There was a world rise in prices as a result of the inflow of gold and silver, but instead of allowing the food and other industries to profit and grow by satisfying the big demand from the new colonies, the sheep-owning families who were the ruling class deliberately hampered them.

Then, owing to an anti-foreign agitation, due to a mistaken notion that the presence of foreigners in the country had caused the rise in prices, the Government expelled those who had been their best artisans and merchants and without whom industry declined. Spain then became largely dependent on supplies of fish, corn, and manufactured goods from Holland and England, this again stimulating the economic development of the latter.

The rise in prices had a generally quickening effect on trade outside of Spain, and not only did this affect the trading nations and their industries, but it materially speeded up the introduction of money in place of “natural economy.” This was the immediate cause of the peasant war in Germany in 1525, owing to bitter disputes about the money value of labour services. The war set Germany back economically, and the other advanced nations benefited by the removal of a rival. The working out and decline of her mining industries also affected Germany adversely. Accumulation of capital, which was rendered easier by the abundance of gold and silver, led to the opening of new commercial and industrial enterprises in the East and the New World as well as in Europe.

This growth of capital, the consequent greater power of the merchants, and the new contact with the non-Christian East were also the causes of a revival of slavery and had a depressing effect on the condition of the peasants and wage earners in Europe itself.

England rapidly changed from a wool exporting to a wool manufacturing nation and before the end of the 16th century her commerce was largely carried on in English ships; both the Venetian and Hanse fleets having ceased to call.

The high prices which ruled universally, and the particularly high price of wool due to the demand from Flanders and from home manufacturers were the chief causes of the great decrease of arable and increase of pasture farming in England, a process assisted by the suppression of the Monasteries and the dispersal of their lands in 1536. This agricultural revolution which was in progress up to 1600 had the effect of driving many thousands of tenants and labourers off the land into the towns, where for a long time there was no demand for their services. In the meantime vagrancy grew to be a serious problem and the Poor Law became a permanent national institution.

Great trading companies to East and West were formed and out of the strife of the early buccaneers an English merchant fleet was built which eventually surpassed that of the Dutch, and was to be the foundation of England’s future commercial and naval power.

The development of shipping and the demand for timber from Russia opened up communications with that country and materially hastened its internal political and economic growth.

New East coast towns like Boston and Hull grew up for the Baltic trade, while Bristol flourished on the trade across the Atlantic. England now became the centre of the Christian world, owing to her admirable position as a depot. There was a corresponding decline in the commercial monopoly previously exercised by Jews in the Eastern Mediterranean.

With the rise of her commerce and banking, Holland also carefully developed her agriculture, and her success in the use of root crops and grasses which for the first time made it possible to keep stock alive during the winter, was of great importance to England and other countries which later learned from her example.

For Europe as a whole the results were important and lasting. The need for big accumulations of capital to join in the new commercial enterprises, which were of an unprecedented size and expense, and the need for adequate protection against attack in distant waters, gave an urge towards national instead of city organisation. This was the economic basis of the new nations and Empires, Portugal, Spain, Holland and England.

The great increase in sea voyages, the new experiences and the new knowledge of navigation obtained from the Arabs gave an added importance to overseas trade and, as has been seen, destroyed the old Mediterranean and overland trade routes.

In its turn commercial activity created bigger markets and a steadier demand for raw materials and industrial products, which reacted immediately on the hitherto small and unprogressive industries. Local isolation tended to be broken down as bigger areas were drawn into the sphere of commerce either as sources of supply or as consumers of Colonial and Eastern goods. The use of money became everywhere more general with its disintegrating effect on the old Manorial relationships, and banking began to be of new importance as a support of industry.

In short, the discoveries began the era of industrial and commercial activity which continued without essential change till the Industrial Revolution.

Edgar Hardcastle

Discovering capitalism (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

It would be an exaggeration to say that we owe the Industrial Revolution to the stink of bad offal. Yet the fact is that when Portuguese ships were sent to explore the coast of Africa, it was partly in the hope of discovering an easterly route to the Indies, and so destroy the Muslim monopoly of the spice trade. Spices were essential to the meat-eating classes, in an age of famines and epidemics when refrigerators, deep freezes and canning were unknown.

Henry the Navigator’s crusading zeal to join forces with Prester John coincided with his country’s economic needs. Portugal possessed few resources, and the strength of the Islamic stranglehold on Mediterranean trade, with the high prices extorted for goods passing through Venice or Egypt, was too great. In 1415 Portugal invaded Morocco, an adventure which finally failed, and Henry began to organise those expeditions south which by 1430 brought corn from Madeira and the Azores. By 1443 regular cargoes of African slaves came to Lisbon, enabling sugar plantations to be developed. By the end of the fifteenth century the Portuguese had reached India and Brazil, and Columbus had found the Caribbean islands.

Religious and political motives combined with the economic needs of the European mercantile class to override the authority of Ptolemy’s world map. They overcame, too, the contemporary belief that near the Equator the heat would frizzle a man like pork crackling and ships would be stuck fast in hot seas thickened to the consistency of treacle.

Yet these voyages would not have happened if various technical problems had not been solved. By the fourteenth century, the use of the magnetic compass made it possible for ships to travel out of sight of land even in dull weather. Henry's shipwrights developed caravels, which combined the speed before the wind of Atlantic square-rigged vessels with the manoeuvrability of Mediterranean lateen-rigged craft. His captains joined the ‘log, lead and look-out’ navigating technique of the Atlantic seamen with a Mediterranean skill in using charts and compasses. Navigation was also assisted by the growing use of astronomical instruments like astrolabes, in use in the 1480s and later replaced by quadrants.

As they reached down south of the Equator, Henry’s captains reported that they could no longer see the Pole Star. This caused his ‘think-tank’ to devise a new method of establishing latitude from the sun’s altitude at noon. Astronomy benefit ted from the navigators' demand for accurate tables. During the seventeenth century, navigation became an art, with quadrants, sextants, telescopes and bulky almanacs, complete with correction tables for the dip of the horizon, refraction, and lunar and solar parallax. The Butterfield quadrant of the seventeenth century was accurate to one-tenth of a degree. Instrument making depended in its turn not just on the needs of astronomers and navigators but on other developments in optics, glassmaking. lense-making and metallurgy.

Another result of the increase in geographical knowledge was the development of map-making. Fifteenth century seamen used charts on which compass-roses and criss-cross rhumb lines indicated bearings. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Ortelius, Mercator and other Dutch cartographers developed maps, charts, globes and atlases to an extent never known before. In 1477 the first engraved (printed) maps were being produced — among them the ancient Ptolemy world map of c.150 AD, destined to be outdated within twenty years by the discovery of the sea route to India. By the end of the sixteenth century, Mercator had discovered how to project an accurate picture of the nearly spherical earth onto a two-dimensional map.

There was a striking contrast between the Elizabethan maps of which Raleigh wrote: “The fictions (or let them be called conjectures) painted in Maps doe serve only to mis-lead such discoverers as rashly believe them.” (his expedition produced, ironically, just such a map of the River Orinoco in South America, complete with Amazons, cannibals, men with heads beneath their shoulders, and tigers!), and the view taken in the eighteenth century when Dalrymple declared: “Geography is a science of facts. . .  Surveys and Astronomical Observations only can give Precision.”

The development of printing and engraving techniques enabled the discoveries of the explorers, combined with the observations and theories of sixteenth century astronomers, to be widely disseminated, which revolutionised the intellectual climate. Facts undermined the authority of Herodotus, Aristotle and Ptolemy, and threatened even religion. The world which produced Newton and Halley was a very different one from that which produced Erasmus.

Yet the old ideas stubbornly held their ground. Ptolemy’s map showed the Indian Ocean as landlocked, a notion which lasted until the end of the fifteenth century. He also suggested that there was a vast southern continent: this Terra Australis Incognita was duly drawn on everyone’s map of the world. Mercator believed (1569) in “a continent so great that, with the southern parts of Asia and the new India or America, it should be a weight equal to the other lands” and Herodotus’ theory of symmetry persisted into the mid-eighteenth century, when Dalrymple wrote that a southern continent was “wanting on the South of the Equator to counterpoize the land on the North and to maintain the equilibrium of the earth's motion”.

Columbus, overestimating the width of Asia and therefore underestimating the westward distance from Spain to Asia’s east coast, believed he could quickly reach Asia by sailing west. This mistake was as fruitful as was Dalrymple’s argument in promoting Cook's new discoveries. In both cases, the new discoveries were not at all those expected.

It has been said that ’great men are beginners'. The ships’ captains who sailed to Africa’s Gold Coast in the fifteenth century began the slave trade. Sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations developed in the New World. On Barbados the first settlers were dispossessed by subtle and greedy planters in the seventeenth century. Monoculture took over in Europe’s colonies: sugar and tobacco in the Caribbean, rubber in the Congo, coffee in Brazil, opium, jute and tea in India. The oceans of the world teemed with capitalist shipping: slavers from Bristol and Liverpool (they could be smelt a mile off), sugar, cotton, tobacco, tin, gold, silver, rubber, guano, palm oil, coffee, cocoa, jute and copra — these are only some of the goods brought to swell Europe’s capital. The labour employed on plantations was not usually free labour. Cotton and sugar cane plantations were mainly slave-based, though some convicted or indentured labour was also employed. ‘Blackbirding’ raids on Pacific islands like the New Hebrides to provide ‘contract labour’ for Queensland sugar plantations went on right through the Victorian era.

The effect of capitalism on relatively backward peoples was to destroy their cultures (Benin in West Africa sunk into a Dark Age of catastrophic wars and human sacrifices), to decimate or annihilate their populations by disease, forced labour and often by deliberate genocide and to reduce agricultural villages or tribal communities into debt-ridden peons, share-croppers and indentured labourers on massive plantations.

Even in the twentieth century, indentured or contract labour, hardly distinguishable from slavery, was producing cocoa on San Thome; the ‘labourers’ were still being shipped from Angola in the fifties (John Gunther. Inside Africa, 1955). In the Belgian Congo, “the monstrous assembly line which spewed out the rubber was very simply worked. The only machinery required was a supply of guns, knives and whips. Labour presented no problem.” (Rene MacColl, Roger Casement). Torture, mutilation, murder and terror were as common on the Putumayo in Brazil as in the Congo. The same can be said of eighteenth century Jamaica, which Dr. Johnson described as “a place of great wealth, a den of tyrants and a dungeon of slaves”.

These are only some of the horrors produced by the capitalist system. The early discoverers bartered and plundered. The Merchant Venturers used profits from early ventures to accumulate greater capital. Expanding colonial trade helped develop Europe's big ports, shipping and industry. The growth of the cotton plantations assisted the development of the factory system. The world market in commodities expanded at an increasing rate from the sixteenth century onwards.

The discoveries also led to a development of scientific techniques and instruments. By the eighteenth century naturalists travelled with Cook on his expeditions, Linnaeus was able to classify many botanical species, and in the nineteenth century a sea-going naturalist, Charles Darwin, developed the theory of evolution. A hundred years ago, the Challenger, on a three-year voyage, took five hundred deep bearings with a hemp line several miles long; each sounding took a day. In 1926-7 a German research ship took 67,000 soundings while under way at twenty-minute intervals. Now Glomar Challenger and Explorer can drill deep into the earth’s crust at the bottom of the oceans - a measure of the tremendous growth of human knowledge and technology under capitalism.

The history of exploration and discovery provides numerous illustrations of the extent to which many interrelated factors - ideas, outstanding individuals, technology, economic needs — contribute to developing our knowledge and how we use nature. Knowledge is a social product; not abstract pure science but something sought and accumulated in a given social, political and economic context, only to be obtained in certain historical circumstances. “Men make their own history”, wrote Marx, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” (18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte).

Charmian Skelton