There is evidence to indicate that no one of the shorter routes, had there been no Turks nor any other nation on their lines to take toll upon wares, could have competed for the trade of southern Asia with western Europe against the Cape route. The land transit alone by the Persian Gulf route seems to have cost more than the sea freight from India to Europe.[52] A calculation made about the year 1800 shows that a shipment from India to France by way of the Red Sea would probably make a profit of 4 per cent., whereas the same consignment if sent round the Cape would earn from 36 to 48 per cent.; if a Christian power were in possession of the Red Sea and Egypt the gain by that route would be not more than 10 per cent.[53] The Red Sea is so straight and narrow, and so strewn with rocks and shallows, that sailing-vessels have to wait for favourable winds and waste much time. The Indiamen were not well adapted to this sea, so that transhipment was customary at Aden, Mocha, or Jedda. There was always a transit by land, of some ninety miles at the shortest (from Suez to Cairo), then a passage by small vessel on the Nile, and another transhipment at Alexandria. On the other hand the time necessary for a voyage between India and Europe averaged not much less by the Cape route than by the Red Sea.[54] Until the invention of the steamship, which could run straight through the Red Sea without reference to the winds, and the excavation of the Suez Canal, which eliminated the land transit, the Cape route seems to have been cheaper than all others for long distance wares.[55]
It appears, then, that in the first of the two views set forth at the beginning of this article, the relation of the Turks to the change of the trade-routes has been misconceived. They were not active agents in deliberately obstructing the routes. They did not by their notorious indifference and conservatism greatly, if at all on the whole, increase the difficulties of the oriental traffic. Nor did they make the discovery of new routes imperative. On the contrary, they lost by the discovery of a new and superior route. Had there been no way around Africa the whole story of the Levant since 1500 might have been very different. In the first place, the Mameluke sultans might have found in their uninterrupted trade sufficient financial support to enable them to resist successfully the attack of the Turks in 1516. But if the Turks had conquered Egypt while the full stream of oriental trade still ran through it, they must either have been deprived far sooner than was actually the case of the control of these routes, or they would have had to accommodate themselves to the great and increasing trade through their dominions. In the latter case they might have been forced into adopting modern ways, and into adding to their wonderful capacity for territorial unification a parallel scheme of organizing their trade. The decay of the lands of the Levant (neglecting the hypothesis of climatic change) might have been arrested and reversed. But there was a Cape route, and for three centuries and a half it took the bulk of the oriental trade. Selim I and Suleiman, the greatest of Ottoman conquerors, were powerless in their efforts to bring back the lucrative flow of Eastern wares. The shifting of the trade-routes was done, not by the Turks, but in their despite and to their disadvantage. The desolation of Egypt and Syria, the decline of the Italian cities, perhaps the very decay of the Ottoman empire itself, are due, not to them, but to the great discoveries, in which, positively or negatively, they had no discernible part.