When Christopher Columbus risked his life and that of many others to complete his first voyage across thesea to the unknown, his journey led to a great wealthof knowledge and commerce for Europe.
He thinks that the Pacific Ocean could become for present-day Russia what the Baltic Sea was for the country in the age of Peter the Great: a source ofwealth and a gate to modernity.
Nor, he suggested, had she sufficiently digested the fact that the Scottish government had already been preparing a revised estimate of substantial North Sea oil wealth.