Explorers and Freebooters

Abstract

Both Smith, the Scottish economist, and the Spanish chronicler who preceded him by a couple of centuries, lived while the expansion of Europe into the wider world, which they described with such enthusiasm, was still in active and successful progress. It was a major element in the climate of their times. Today’s readers, to whom the entire collapse of those extensive and extraordinary empires that Europeans built in other continents is already a matter of recorded history, may be inclined to dismiss as out of date the united verdict of Spaniard and Scot. Readers of a more philosophical cast of mind may even find the precipitous decline of Europe in half a century as remarkable as the five hundred year ascendancy that preceded it.

The discovery of America and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind (Adam Smith, 1723–90).

the greatest event since the creation of the world, apart from the incarnation and death of Him who created it (Francisco López de Gómara, written in 1552).¹