The "New World," as it was called, of America, unlike the East, scarcely had a story at all. A few, a very few, historical records were discovered by the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru. The inhabitants whom the Spaniards found there had been workers in gold and silver, and the riches which Spain obtained by robbery of this treasure and, later, by working the gold mines and silver mines from which the precious metals were taken, made a large difference, as we shall see, in the history of men in Europe. But for the rest the "New World" had no history, no activities, which worked into and altered the history of the old. {3} The old world was vastly affected by the discovery nevertheless. Just because it was so new, and occupied by savages who were able to make very little resistance to invasion, it enlarged the actual size of the world both for men's imaginations and also as a place for them to live in. But except for the treasure which the Spaniards took, it had little to send back to the old world. All else was a going out of the old world to the new. Da Gama did not discover a new world. He merely--but it made a vast difference to the story--proved possible a new and far more convenient route to a country already known. Thus he brought that known land into contact with Europe so that the story of the far East interpenetrated the European story as it never had done before. The whole, in fact, became one world-wide story. The East had been sending her produce to the West ever since the West--by which term we here mean Europe--had been civilised enough to need and to value it. There was a very ancient overland route from the north-west of India through Persia and Mesopotamia to Tyre and the Mediterranean coast. Another way was oversea from some Indian port as far as the head, that is to say the northern end, of the Persian Gulf, and thence, as before, overland to a port on the coast of Syria. And thirdly, there was a route by longer sea, again starting from India, calling perhaps at one or two ports in Arabia and up through the Red Sea. At a port in the Red Sea the goods would be landed and taken, probably on camel-back, to the Nile, and would be brought down the river and transhipped at its mouth into vessels which would carry them to Venice or Genoa. The chief Indian port from which the trading vessels sailed, whether to the Persian Gulf or to the Red Sea, was Calicut, which we still see marked on {4} the maps of India. It is a town on what is called the Malabar Coast, on the western side of India, low down towards the west. And not only did ships bearing the produce of India start from Calicut, but Calicut was also the port to which came ships, some of them of great size, from the farther East, bearing the silks of China, the spices of the islands of the Malay Archipelago, and so on.