The fortunes of the Bordelais depended on reasonable harvests and, crucially, on the possibility of exchanging these vast quantities of wine for staple foodstuffs. At a time when grain was the staple foodstuff and rising population was placing increased pressure on supplies, the Bristol connection offered a lifeline. There was grain to be had from southern England, and English merchants made every effort to send it to Gascony, even when there were shortages at home, which was common in the early fourteenth century. The size of the wine cargoes grew and grew, right up to the final war that culminated in the French occupation of all of Gascony in 1453. In autumn 1443 six Bristol ships carried almost as much wine out of Bordeaux as would, near the start of the century, have been loaded in a whole year. As English cloth cornered the market in northern Europe, this too became a prized export bound for Gascony, and the Gascons reciprocated by supplying Bristol with large amounts of woad, the blue dye that was a speciality of south-western France.36 English defeat did not bring this wine trade to an end, for the French king, Louis XI, was not the sort of person who would turn away the opportunity to rake in taxes. By the end of the fifteenth century, as many as 6,000 English merchants are said to have flocked to Bordeaux to buy wine, even though the wine trade had now passed its peak, as had Bordeaux itself.
Other opportunities beckoned for the mariners of Bristol, or for foreign mariners hoping to sell their produce in Bristol. Basque ships, and ships from further along the coast of northern Spain, came to Bristol in growing numbers during the fifteenth century, and Bristol merchants recognized the quality of Basque seamanship by sometimes loading their own goods on Basque vessels; Basques and Bristolians shared curiosity about the open Atlantic and its fish stocks, while the Basques, whose native lands were poor in resources, looked outwards to the open sea and developed an expertise in whaling that made them the unrivalled masters of the sixteenth-century whale industry – a sixteenth-century Basque whaling vessel has been meticulously excavated off Labrador.37
The hull of another Basque ship, from around 1450, has been found underneath the Welsh city of Newport across the estuary from Bristol; it is said to be the largest fifteenth-century hull yet discovered, with a capacity for 160 tons of cargo (quite likely wine). Coins and pottery found on site indicate that it travelled as far as Portugal, which in the mid-fifteenth century was one of England’s closest trading partners. For a time it may have been operated by a mainly Spanish or Portuguese crew; but it was probably owned by English merchants (possibly even by an English nobleman) by the time that it toppled over and sank in the shipyard at Newport, where it was undergoing repairs, around 1469.38 For a while, English merchants had the good sense to try out the wines of northern Spain, which this ship almost certainly carried. But traffic to northern Spain was not all concerned with trade, and the Bristol ships that set out for its north-west corner, Galicia, carried passengers – pilgrims bound for Santiago de Compostela who preferred not to trek overland on the famous Camino. Beyond the lands that lay under Castilian rule, there were good opportunities in Portugal, whose dynasty was related by marriage to the royal house of Lancaster. As Portugal itself emerged as a maritime power the English were able to take advantage of its successes, importing wine from mainland Portugal, and eventually buying grete salt, that is, sugar, from Madeira, though by way of intermediaries.39
All this generated great wealth, displayed to this day in the great church of St Mary Redcliffe, in which the wealthy shipowner William Canynges built chantry chapels and a tomb for himself and his wife. His endowments resulted from a sad fact: his sons predeceased him and left no heirs. The city of Bristol became his heir instead. He was a member of a trading dynasty whose members had been making their money out of cloth since the late fourteenth century (a much later member of the same family was George Canning, the nineteenth-century British politician). The Canynges traded at first with Bayonne and Spain, but by the middle of the fifteenth century, when William Canynges was in his prime, they were looking much further afield: he despatched ships to the Baltic and to Iceland, as well as Portugal, Flanders and France.40
Another Bristol merchant is remembered for his failures rather than his successes. Robert Sturmy enriched himself by supplying the English army in Gascony with grain. In 1446, his ambitions turned in an entirely new direction, the Mediterranean.41 By the mid-fifteenth century Bristol had become a place where shipowners and seamen planned voyages to the limits of the known world – to Prussia, Portugal, Iceland and eventually right across the Atlantic. The Mediterranean was a better-known area; Sturmy had received news of the expulsion of the prosperous Venetian colony from Alexandria, and he hoped to capitalize on that by creating a direct spice trade from the Levant to England. He had a ship, the Cog Anne, and was prepared to risk it on this venture. He obtained a licence to export wool all the way to Pisa, for the looms of Florence, with the intention of then moving east to the Holy Land. His crew consisted of thirty-seven sailors, but there were 160 pilgrims on board as well, on one-way tickets, since his idea was that on the return journey the hull would be filled with the spices of the East rather than with human beings. The pilgrims disembarked at Jaffa, and made their way to Jerusalem. But his crew showed their inexperience by attempting to cross the eastern Mediterranean as Christmas approached. No doubt they imagined that Mediterranean squalls could never match the high seas of the open Atlantic. As they approached the Venetian naval base at Modon, on one of the southern tips of the Peloponnese, a storm began to blow; they lost control of the Anne and it was torn to pieces on the rocks. Not a soul survived.42
Sturmy had stayed at home, and his wealth had not been lethally dented. Over the next few years, he held high office in Bristol, and was elected mayor. When Parliament asked for help in the war against piracy, Sturmy funded the building of a new ship. All the while, he was listening to news from the Levant, which included the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. He hoped that, with this new political configuration in the eastern Mediterranean, he could at last break his way into the highly profitable Levant trade. So in 1457 he put together another cargo bound for Italy and the Levant, including wheat, tin, lead, wool and cloth; the cloth alone was worth an enormous amount, £20,000. All these goods were to be sent ‘beyond the mountains by the straits of Marrok’ on the ship Katharine Sturmy, which had already proved itself the year before by sailing all the way to Galicia with pilgrims for the shrine of St James. The Katharine reached the Levant, where not just spices were loaded aboard but the seeds of green pepper which, it was hoped, would be made to sprout on English soil. On the way back, however, in 1458, his ship was seized by Genoese sailors off Malta and his goods were stolen. Back in England, the news of the outrage stirred up ever-present hostility to the Italians; the Genoese community in London was arrested en masse. Sturmy was never fully compensated for his losses and died towards the end of the year.43 English merchants realized that attempts to penetrate beyond Portugal were simply too risky, and it was another half-century before regular traffic from England to the Levant was established. That still left vast swathes of the Atlantic, up to and beyond Iceland, open for exploration and exploitation.
V
During the fifteenth century the English, particularly the merchants and shipowners of Bristol, became determined to break into the Norwegian monopoly of trade with Iceland, taking advantage of its increasing isolation. Sheer distance meant that the Norwegian king was hardly in a position to maintain tight control of what happened in Iceland, even though it had submitted to his authority in 1262 on condition that the Norwegians send six ships a year to the island; again and again the Icelanders complained that this was not happening.44 The Hansa merchants based in Bergen, who conveyed Icelandic goods further into Europe, were not themselves supposed to enter Icelandic waters. Occasionally, though, they did venture to Iceland, since no one seemed very interested in stopping them.
In these circumstances, the Icelanders had no compunction about welcoming ships loaded with the food
stuffs and other supplies they needed that had arrived from elsewhere than Bergen. King Erik wrote to the Icelanders, grumbling that they were trading with ‘outlandish men’; he might have added that the English found it easier to fish in Icelandic waters because the hirðstjóri, or governor, of the island had started issuing his own licences for fishing and for trade on the island itself. The governor carried this letter to the court of King Erik:
Our laws provide that six ships should come hither from Norway every year, which has not happened for a long time, a cause from which your Grace and our poor country have suffered most grievous harm. Therefore, trusting in God’s grace and your help, we have traded with foreigners who have come hither peacefully on legitimate business, but we have punished those fishermen and owners of fishing smacks who have robbed and caused disturbance on the sea.45
His justification cut no ice; he was not sent back to Iceland. Forbidding this trade would hardly help the islanders to survive, particularly if, as is often argued, harsh weather conditions were making access to Iceland (and Greenland) more difficult in the fifteenth century. English ships were ready to face these risks, even when twenty-five vessels sank in storms in one day. At Lynn there was an association of English Iceland merchants.46 What attracted them was the swarms of codfish that had migrated towards the waters off Iceland.
By 1420 the situation had become critical. A German merchant went to Iceland to spy for the Hansa and for King Erik, and insisted that Iceland itself would be lost to the English if the king did not take decisive action. This may sound like exaggeration, but English freebooters did invade the island, ‘in full battle array with trumpets and flying ensigns’. One of their targets was the Danish governor King Erik had appointed; his attempts to maintain tight control of the island’s economy aroused deep resentment, and he catalogued the sins of the English traders, who had been seizing the islanders’ sheep and cattle and even wrecking the island’s churches. The grumbling governor was captured and carried off to England, where he registered a lengthy complaint about the conduct of the English visitors to Iceland, leading to embarrassment at court and, in 1426, official attempts to ban the Iceland trade, a move that went down badly with the merchants of Lynn. The sailings to Iceland simply continued. English smugglers, because in a sense that was what they had become, enjoyed outwitting port officials, and the occasional confiscation of Icelandic goods in English ports did not dent the Iceland trade, which often used out-of-the-way ports like Fowey in Cornwall, though Icelandic stockfish also turned up at Bristol, Hull and elsewhere. Moreover, it was still possible to obtain official approval. An application to the Crown for a licence would cost money, but could be seen as insurance against forfeiture. The Scandinavian king could also be approached in the same spirit. So in 1442, for instance, fourteen English ships were licensed to travel to Iceland; they carried just about everything, from kettles to combs, from beer to butter, from gloves to girdles.47 Over the next few decades, the arguments between the English court, the English merchants, the Danish court and, increasingly, the Hansards continued. It was no help that English raiders killed the governor of Iceland in 1467. King Richard III complained to the city of Hamburg that three English ships had been seized in Iceland by Hanseatic rivals; but the Hansards could tell their own stories of attacks by sailors from Bristol in the very same waters.48
One way of dealing with this constant turmoil was to turn one’s back on Iceland, however desirable its fish might be, and to look for other stretches of the north Atlantic that teemed with cod. In the 1480s, the shipowners of Bristol sought out these waters, and the big question is whether, in the process, they crossed as far as the fishing grounds off Labrador. The claim that English sailors reached America in the 1480s is not simply speculation. An Englishman named John Day addressed a letter to an Admiral of Spain, probably Christopher Columbus, soon after John Cabot’s voyage to Newfoundland in 1497; he wrote:
it is considered certain that the cape of the said land [Newfoundland] was found and discovered in other times by the men of Bristol who found ‘Brasil’ as your Lordship knows. It was called the Ysle of Brasil and it is assumed and believed to be the mainland that the Bristol men found.49
(‘Mainland’ does not mean an entire continent, and could just mean a large island.) This name ‘Brasil’ should not be confused with that of modern Brazil, discovered by the Portuguese in 1500, which became attached to the area because it was rich in brazilwood, much prized as a dyestuff. Rather, ‘Brasil’ was one of the legendary islands of the Atlantic that featured in late medieval maps, and can be traced back to stories of an island out in the ocean woven by Irish mariners in the early Middle Ages.
More important than the name is the evidence that sailors from Bristol were setting out on journeys deep into the Atlantic in the 1480s.50 On 15 July 1480, John Jay sent a ship out from Bristol; its master was a highly reputable mariner named Thloyde, or Lloyd, and its destination was ‘the island of Brasylle in the western part of Ireland’. But after nine weeks at sea it was forced back to Ireland by bad weather and found nothing.51 John Jay or his namesake (this was a prominent trading family) had been importing stokffish from Norway in 1461.52 In 1481, just under a year later, the Trinity and the George, also from Bristol, set out ‘to serch & fynde a certain Isle called the Isle of Brasile’.53 Although their owners also insisted this was not a trading voyage, the ships were loaded with salt, which makes one think that the aim was to catch fish, which would have had to be preserved without delay. There is no evidence that these ships found whatever they were seeking. The master of the Trinity and other ships bound for ‘Brasil’ would not be the first or last to mask their real destination behind a fanciful one. In 1498 the king and queen of Castile, Ferdinand and Isabella, received a report from their agent in England which stated that for seven years the men of Bristol had been sending from two to four ships in search of Brasil and the ‘Seven Cities’, another mythical territory out in the Great Blue.54 If fishing was the aim, then they had very different ambitions to John Cabot, who set out in 1497 to gain access to the fabulous wealth of China and the East, sharing with Christopher Columbus the assumption that Asia could be reached by sailing westwards. Myths of lands such as the Isle of the Seven Cities, inhabited by Christian refugees fleeing from the Muslim invasion of Spain, remained potent, and there were romantic dreams of making contact with long-lost Christian brethren. In the same decade, Ferdinand van Olmen, a Fleming in the service of the Portuguese king, set out from the Azores in the hope of finding the Seven Cities; he was never heard of again.55
There are other possibilities. The Bristol ships may have made their way to Greenland, of which knowledge certainly survived, even though the Norse population had probably vanished by now; they might then have realized that following the currents down the Labrador coast would net them much bigger catches. The explanation might also be more humdrum. Only in 1490 did the king of Denmark relax his ban on direct English trade to Iceland. Some ships did set out from Bristol bound for Iceland in 1481, as the city’s customs records reveal; but there were still people who preferred not to pay for formal licences.56 Even if they did reach Labrador, a secret discovery by men of Bristol was no discovery at all. Another Atlantic destination that was within the sights of Bristol merchants was Portuguese Madeira, with its abundance of fine sugar, to which they were sending goods on Breton ships in 1480, and beyond that the Azores; there were plans to create a route to Morocco, but the Portuguese objected, as they did when English merchants contemplated a trip to west Africa in 1481.57 It is time to see what the Portuguese were doing in Atlantic waters, and how their little kingdom became the seat of a great empire.
25
Portugal Rising
I
The north-east Atlantic was becoming a well-integrated maritime region by the end of the Middle Ages. The history of the early Atlantic cannot, however, be written without paying attention to the shorelines further south. Even so, the vast expanse from the Canary Islands
to the southern tip of Africa remains blank. The Canary islanders, whose ancestors had unquestionably arrived by sea, had lost the art of navigation by the time that European explorers chanced on their islands, in the fourteenth century. The peoples of sub-Saharan Africa did not venture out to sea, and long-distance sea routes down the coast of west Africa were first developed by Europeans – by the Portuguese in the second half of the fifteenth century. The ambitious voyages of the Portuguese southwards along the coast of Africa and westwards towards the Atlantic islands have overshadowed the earlier maritime history of Portugal and Atlantic Spain, for when Prince Henry the Navigator launched the first expeditions southwards the major interest of Portuguese sailors lay in northern waters, in Bruges, Middelburg and England.1 The first aim of this chapter is to see whether the maritime history of Portugal really began well before the fifteenth century.
Even before the Portuguese and the Castilians launched fleets in the Atlantic (having secured the service of highly competent Genoese admirals), the ocean waters off Iberia were far livelier than is generally supposed. The Viking raids on Spain prompted the rulers of al-Andalus to create an Atlantic fleet, and to take more seriously the dangers that might threaten from the open Atlantic. In 859 Muslim fleets set out to challenge the Viking raiders, carrying on board flasks of Greek fire and teams of archers; they scoured the seas as far away as the northern coast of Spain, so that the presence of these ‘Moors’ (Mauri) alarmed the Christians who ruled there as much as did the arrival of the Vikings. But Muslim fleets kept up the chase and scored a series of successes, culminating in the destruction of fourteen Viking ships near Gibraltar; in 966 a Muslim fleet from Seville scared off Vikings who had penetrated right up to Silves, an important town that lay a little way upriver in what is now the Portuguese Algarve.2 All this shows that the Muslims were perfectly capable of launching fleets in the Atlantic, often based upriver at Seville; moreover, since the Viking raids were lightning attacks, these fleets were not specially built for the occasion, but were clearly part of the standing forces of the emirs and caliphs of al-Andalus.
The Boundless Sea Page 61
