Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/32

 please, enough to fill the ships, or a hundred ships if you had so many."

Towards the close of May, 1498, the expedition was again ready to sail, but finding they had little chance of successful progress, De Gama resolved to wait till the change of the monsoons. The interval was spent in a more thorough repair of their ships. The pilots whom the king had furnished appear to have been well skilled in their profession, and were not surprised when Vasco de Gama showed them the large wooden astrolabe he had brought with him, and the quadrants of metal with which he measured at noon the altitude of the sun. They informed him that some pilots of the Red Sea used brass instruments of a triangular shape and quadrants for a similar purpose, but more especially for ascertaining the altitude of a particular star, better known than any other, in the course of their navigation. Their own mariners, however, they explained, and those of India were generally guided by various stars both north and south, and also by other notable stars which traversed the middle of the heavens from east to west, adding that they did not take their distance with instruments such as were in use amongst the Red Sea pilots, but by means of three tables, or the cross-staff, sometimes described as Jacob's staff. In those days the seamen of the eastern nations were, indeed, as far advanced in the art of navigation as either the Spaniards or the Portuguese, having gained their knowledge from the Arabian mariners, who, during the Middle Ages, carried on, as we have seen, an extensive trade