by Tony Horwitz
CHAPTER 2
1492
THE HIDDEN HALF OF THE GLOBE
An age will come after many years when the Ocean will loose the chains of things, and a huge land lie revealed.
—Seneca, Medea
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, ADMIRAL of the Ocean Sea, commands more print than almost any man in history. There are more books devoted to his memory than to Alexander the Great, Leonardo da Vinci, or Adolf Hitler. He appears in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and the Beat verse of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Antonín Dvoák composed a symphony in his honor. Friedrich Nietzsche even penned a youthful poem, “Colombo,” casting the navigator as an existential seeker who cries, “My mind is wrestling with doubts!”
Yet despite this attention—and, often, because of it—the real Columbus remains elusive. No contemporary portrait of him exists. Historians disagree on basic facts about his life: where and when he was born, married, and buried. A scan of Columbus-related titles (more than fifteen hundred in all, in many languages) includes The Mysterious History of Columbus, The Master Puzzle of History, El Enigma de Colón, and two books called In Search of Columbus.
One reason for this mystery is that Columbus invited it. He masked his own story, even signing his name in a pyramid of symbols that has yet to be conclusively deciphered. “Like the squid,” writes the Spanish historian Salvador de Madariaga, “he oozes out a cloud of ink round every hard square fact of his life.”
Mystery, in turn, gave rise to myth. Several centuries after his death, Columbus was disinterred by nationalists in the newly created United States. Eager to establish an identity apart from England, they enshrined the Genoese mariner as a proto-American hero: underdog, individualist, pathfinder, and Pilgrim-like agent of Christianity. Later, Italians and other Catholic immigrants made Columbus a source of ethnic pride. He was even put forth as a candidate for sainthood.
The navigator’s deification peaked with the four hundredth anniversary of his 1492 sail, a gala marked by the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the raising of a statue at New York City’s Columbus Circle, and parades across the land. “Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment,” President Benjamin Harrison declared.
By the five hundredth anniversary of his sail, in 1992, a very different mood prevailed; progress was out, postcolonialism in. Columbus was dug up again, this time to be damned as the first in a long line of Europeans to exploit and exterminate Native Americans. The Indian activist Russell Means set the tone for the 1992 remembrance by pouring blood on a Columbus statue and declaring that the discoverer “makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent.”
The well of Columbian myths and countermyths is now so deep that one can extract from it any number of contradictory figures: devout Christian and closet Jew, medieval spiritualist and modern empiricist, Italian hero and imperialist villain. About the only thing on which most sources agree is that Columbus transformed the world with his sail in 1492.
ON MY RETURN from Newfoundland, I spent weeks that stretched into months navigating the Columbus literature. The first biography of him, by his son Ferdinand, seemed a good place to start—except that even Ferdinand was left in the dark. On the biography’s opening page, he confides that his father “chose to leave in obscurity” all details of his early life.
After piloting through a half dozen other tomes, I turned to Columbus’s own writing. This was heavy sailing, too. No two editions and translations agreed, and some of what Columbus wrote was untranslatable, at least for a lay reader. “The kingdom of Tarshis is at the end of the Orient,” he scribbled in the margin of a book on geography. “Note that the king of Tarshis came to the Lord at Jerusalem, and spent a year and 13 days en route.” Or this: “I saw three sirens that came very high out of the sea. They are not as beautiful as they are painted, since in some ways they have a face like a man.” Before long, I realized I needed a Bible, a bestiary, and a medieval mappa mundi to begin making sense of the man.
Slowly, though, an outline of his thinking started to take form. And what struck me, by the time I’d called an arbitrary halt to my biographical research, was how radically the historic Columbus diverged from my childhood image of America’s “discoverer.” The flesh-and-blood navigator wasn’t just more nuanced than the storybook icon; he was its virtual opposite.
Most scholars believe Columbus was born in 1451, to a family of wool weavers in Genoa. After working in the wool trade, he went to sea and literally washed ashore in Portugal after an attack on his ship by the French. He married, only to be quickly widowed and left with a young son. First in Portugal, and then in Spain, Columbus tirelessly peddled his vision of a westward sail to Asia. By the time he finally won support from Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand, the tall, ruddy Genoese was forty years old and his red hair had turned white.
This synopsis of Columbus’s life to 1492 fits an appealing American trope: the up-from-nothing striver, like log-cabin Abe or the millions of immigrants who crossed the Atlantic. But Columbus would have been appalled to be cast in this mold. Not only did he conceal his modest origins; he had a child by a peasant’s daughter but never married her, apparently because of her lowly status. And one reason Columbus struggled to find a patron for his voyage was his excessive demand for noble titles and privileges, including “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” and “Viceroy” of the lands he found. Don Cristóbal Colón, as he became known in Spain, was a man of his feudal day: honor and status meant everything. A champion of the common man he was not.
Nor was Columbus a lonely individualist, struggling to overcome impossible odds. His native Genoa was a bustling international port, renowned for its traders and financiers. Columbus allied himself with the city’s leading merchants, with influential Genoese overseas, and with powerful clerics and courtiers in Spain. He married into a family of noble descent and hereditary privileges, including a governorship in the Azores. Columbus knew how to network.
But the most persistent and misleading myth about Columbus is that he was a farsighted modern, battling medieval darkness. Learned men of the day, the story goes, opposed the mariner because they thought the earth was flat. Anyone who sailed too far west would tumble over the world’s edge, like water spilling off a table. As told by Washington Irving in his 1828 biography (a source of many enduring fictions about Columbus), the “simple mariner” stood “pleading the cause of the new world” before an ignorant Old World establishment. In the end, Columbus boldly sailed off and proved his critics wrong.
It is true that expert councils in Spain and Portugal rejected Columbus’s plan. But their reasons for doing so had nothing to do with flat-earth superstition. The Greeks had first posited the roundness of the planet some two thousand years earlier, and their writings were widely accepted in the fifteenth century. Even the medieval church, an institution unrenowned for its forward thinking, had acknowledged that the earth was round—seven hundred years before Columbus’s birth, in the depths of the so-called Dark Ages. Islamic scholars concurred in this opinion.
The question confronting cosmographers in the late 1400s wasn’t the shape of the earth, but its size. Ignorant of America, Europeans imagined one vast “Ocean Sea” to their west, washing against the shores of Asia. But how wide was that ocean, and could it be crossed? To answer this, Europeans studied ancients such as Ptolemy, as well as Marco Polo and other travelers whose writing held clues to the extent of Asia. The result was a tangle of calculations and conjectures based on flawed data. In this respect, Columbus was indeed a maverick. His image of the globe was the most extreme and wrongheaded of them all.
Everyone knows Columbus landed in America thinking he’d reached “the Indies” (which referred in 1492 to all of Asia east of the Indus River). But this famed mistake flowed from a much more fundamental error. To estimate how far he needed to sail, Columbus took the imperfect coordinates of earlier theorists and magnified their faults. “The end of Spain and the beginning of India are not f
ar distant,” he jotted in the margin of one book. “This sea can be crossed in a few days with a fair wind.”
Columbus buttressed this vision with scriptural passages, such as one stating that six-sevenths of the world is land. In later life, the navigator wrote a manuscript called The Book of Prophecies, casting himself as God’s agent and his westward sail as the fulfillment of a divine mission. “All the sciences,” he wrote, “were of no use to me.” Rather, he was propelled across the ocean by “the Lord having opened my mind to the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies.” He also thought his voyage would bring about worldwide conversion to Christianity and the recapture of Jerusalem from Muslim infidels.
In short, the man so often celebrated as a bridge to the modern era was closer to a mystic knight-errant, tilting at a globe of his own imagining. Columbus sailed off believing that Asia lay about three thousand miles west. The true figure was over eleven thousand miles—not to mention that a huge continent blocked his path. The long-maligned experts in Spain and Portugal were therefore right to doubt the navigator. But he didn’t heed them, and the rest is American history. Columbus changed the world not because he was right, but because he was so stubbornly wrong. Convinced the globe was small, he began the process of making it so, by bringing a new world into orbit of the old.
BUT THAT WAS, at best, only part of the story. With Columbus, even more than with most figures, it’s easy to fall prey to “Great Man” history. This old-school approach sees the past as the biography of extraordinary individuals: men make the times, not the other way around. Critics of Columbus are as prone to this as his admirers, blaming him for the despoliation of the lands and peoples he discovered. Hero or villain, however, Columbus was only able to put his idiosyncratic vision into practice because he arrived at a propitious moment in Western history.
A sixteenth-century engraving of Columbus taking leave from Ferdinand and Isabel
In 1453, two years after his birth, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, cutting Europe’s traditional path to the spices and other goods of the Orient. This hastened the search for alternative routes and riches, led by Portugal, which had already begun probing Africa under the leadership of Prince Henry “the Navigator.” The sobriquet is misleading; Henry rarely strayed far from shore, and when he did he got seasick. But his expansionist impulses and support of overseas navigation helped turn tiny Portugal into a maritime power.
Among other innovations, the Portuguese developed a versatile, shallow-draft ship, the caravel, which Columbus would use on his 1492 voyage. They also turned long-distance ocean sailing into a rich commercial venture, by founding fortified trading posts on the West African coast and bartering finished goods for gold, spices, and slaves. When Columbus washed ashore in Portugal, in his twenties, he arrived at the perfect place to train as a navigator and colonizer.
But it was the wrong place to peddle his vision of a westward sail to Asia. Portugal was already charting a sea route to the Indies, via Africa, which Bartholomew Dias rounded in 1488. By then, Columbus had decamped to Spain—another timely arrival. The country was just emerging as a unified power, eager to compete with Portugal and to open its own trade routes. Spain was also completing its triumphant Reconquista of lands held by Muslims since the eighth century. Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand’s eventual decision to back Columbus, in April 1492, came just months after the fall of Granada, the last Muslim outpost in Europe, and within weeks of their decree (drafted by the Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada) commanding all Jews to convert or leave Spain. Columbus was the same age as Isabel and appealed to her deep piety. He promised not only to fill Spain’s war-depleted coffers but to use the proceeds toward a Holy Land crusade.
Another reason the monarchs agreed to dispatch Columbus was that they risked little in doing so. Legend depicts Isabel as selling her jewels to pay for the navigator’s voyage. She didn’t need to. The cost of the mission, about two million maravedis, is hard to convert into modern currency, but it was one-thirtieth the amount that Ferdinand and Isabel spent on their daughter’s wedding. The Crown also had a convenient debt to collect: the use of two equipped caravels in the southern port of Palos, punishment for unspecified crimes committed by the town. The ships were called Niña and Pinta, or “Girl” and “Painted Lady.” Columbus borrowed money to charter a third vessel, his flagship, the Santa María.
No drawings of the ships survive and little is known about them. Columbus’s most eminent biographer, Samuel Eliot Morison, believes the Pinta was seventy feet long, with the Niña a bit smaller and the Santa María a larger and less nimble vessel. The captains of the Niña and Pinta were brothers from Palos, and most of the sailors came from the same region. The crew included four men condemned to death, one for murder and three for trying to free him from prison. They won pardons in exchange for sailing with Columbus.
Among the eighty-six or so others who embarked from Palos, the credentials of two reveal the novelty of the entire enterprise. Luis de Torres was a converso, or converted Jew, who knew Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. Rodrigo de Xeres, also probably a converso, had sailed to Guinea and met an African king. It was thought that these two cosmopolitans would act as ambassadors to Oriental potentates on the far side of the Ocean Sea. The Crown also sent along a passport and a letter of introduction to the Grand Khan, written in Latin.
Columbus’s ships weighed anchor in August 1492, one day after the last of the vessels carrying Jews from Spain had been ordered to depart. He spent a week reaching the Canaries, an Atlantic outpost newly colonized by the Spanish, and a month on the islands provisioning for the voyage ahead. Columbus believed the ocean crossing to Asia would take twenty-one days. But to be safe, he carried ample supplies, including olive oil, wine, dried meat and fish, and biscuits, or hardtack. Then he launched into the Atlantic.
In open water, a different Columbus emerges. Though often deluded on land, he was utterly clear-eyed at sea. “Only by looking at a cloud or by night at a star, he knew what was going to happen and whether there would be foul weather,” a shipmate observed. Using simple instruments of the day—quadrant, compass, sand-filled half-hour glass—Columbus set a course due west. He may not have realized where he was headed, but he knew how best to get there: by dead reckoning along a latitude that put the prevailing winds at his back, propelling him across the ocean. These breezes, now known as the trade winds, move clockwise in a giant circle in the middle of the Atlantic; they later helped carry Columbus back to Europe.
From the time of his departure from Spain, we also have his own impressions, recorded in a daily journal. The original has been lost; what survives is an abridgment—some of it transcribed, some summarized—by others after the voyage. It is hard to determine how much these versions corrupted Columbus’s words, or what was omitted. But the voice and content of the journal accord with other writings by Columbus. For the most part, it has the feel of a reliable and contemporaneous record of his thoughts and actions—including some that aren’t flattering to the navigator. The first such passage appears on September 9, just after Columbus left the Canaries. “This day we completely lost sight of land, and many men sighed and wept for fear they would not see it again,” he wrote. “I decided to reckon fewer leagues than we actually made. I did this that they might not think themselves so great a distance from Spain as they actually were.” The next day, the ships sailed 180 miles, but “I recorded only 144 miles in order not to alarm the sailors if the voyage is lengthy.”
For a few weeks the journey was uneventful, except for the Sargasso Sea, a vast area of ocean covered in dense weed: a strange sight to the crew, but no impediment to sailing. Columbus, an acute and sensuous observer, noted the ocean’s smoothness and color and the air’s “sweet and balmy” feel, “so fragrant that it is a pleasure to breathe it.” As the voyage progressed, he saw signs everywhere that land was near. Whales, weeds, bird flocks—all became for the navigator “a sure sign of land,” the constant refrain of his vo
yage.
His crew wasn’t so sanguine. Reaching the northern edge of the trade winds, the ships lost speed, slowing from 165 miles one day to 75 the next, and then only 24. As the wind weakened and shifted, so did the sailors’ morale. “The crew is agitated, thinking that no winds blow in these parts that will return them to Spain,” Columbus wrote on September 22. “I am having serious trouble with the crew,” he added two days later. “They have said that it is insanity and suicidal on their part to risk their lives following the madness of a foreigner.”
Columbus also sensed that the Pinta’s captain, Martín Alonso Pinzón, “cannot be trusted.” Pinzón sailed ahead, and Columbus suspected he did this so he could be first to sight land and claim “the rewards and honors of this enterprise for himself.”
At sunset on September 25, Pinzón shouted from the Pinta that he’d sighted shore. Sailors on the Niña climbed the rigging and seconded the claim. In the morning, however, Columbus saw it “was nothing more than squall clouds.” Eleven days later, the Niña fired its cannon and raised a flag to signal that land had appeared. This, too, “was only an illusion.” Columbus adjusted course to the southwest, following a flock of birds in hopes they would fly toward shore.
By then, the ships had sailed for four weeks since last sighting land. This was double “all previous records for ocean navigation,” writes Samuel Eliot Morison. The ships were also well past the point by which Columbus had expected to reach Asia. The hourglass on his men’s patience had run out.
“They could stand it no longer,” Columbus wrote on October 10. He reproached the sailors for their lack of spirit, and made it plain their complaints were useless. “I had started out to find the Indies,” he told them, “and would continue until I had accomplished that mission, with the help of Our Lord.”
