The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Cão was not offered very large resources. Most probably he set out with just two caravels. But the fact that these ships carried stone columns known as padrões provided a clear sign that the expedition intended to mark out new land. These padrões were inscribed and decorated with the royal coat of arms and installed on headlands, where many of them still stood until the late nineteenth century, when they were carried back to museum collections in Europe. Part road signs, part statements of Portuguese sovereignty, the padrões did not signify control of the African interior: the king remained ‘lord of the navigation of Guinea’, and he charged Cão with making the Guinea coast still vaster than it already was. Cão moved smoothly beyond São Tomé down the southward-pointing coast of central and southern Africa, erecting his first padrão at the mouth of the Congo; uniquely, this padrão was inscribed in Arabic as well as Latin and Portuguese, even though Cão had passed some way beyond the lands of Islam. The use of Arabic suggests that the Portuguese navigators thought it would not be long before they reconnected with the Muslim world.53

  Cão was not convinced that the River Congo was the ‘River of Gold’; he sent a detachment of men upriver to greet the local king, promising to wait for them; when they failed to reappear he kidnapped four of the most prominent villagers, thinking of them both as hostages and as potential sources of information. Reaching a large bay off Angola that extends a long way eastwards, Cão wondered whether he had reached the southern tip of Africa, erecting his second stone padrão with the inscription:

  In the year 6681 of the creation of the world, and 1482 of the birth of Our Lord Jesus, the very high, very excellent and mighty prince King Dom João II of Portugal ordered this land to be discovered and these padrões to be erected by Diogo Cão, squire of his household.54

  Having displayed the royal coat of arms far beyond the Equator, Diogo Cão was granted his own coat of arms on his return in spring 1484, as well as an annual pension, for what the king evidently saw as a very worthwhile expedition.55 Later that year, the Portuguese ambassador at the papal court extolled his countrymen’s achievements in a speech before Pope Innocent VIII, and boasted that Portuguese ships had reached the very edges of the Gulf of Arabia, by which he meant the Indian Ocean.56 By insisting that it was possible to break into the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic, the speaker, the learned Dr Vasco Fernandes de Lucena, was openly challenging the Ptolemaic orthodoxy that continued, in maps being copied at this very time, to show the Indian Ocean as a vast closed sea, with the southern tip of Africa merging into a long southern continent that reached as far as the Spice Islands.

  The claim that Cão had already reached the southern tip of Africa was hopelessly optimistic; but it tempted King João to offer him a second commission in 1485, once again with two caravels; and aboard the caravels were his four captives, now conversant with Portuguese customs and willing to act as King João’s emissaries to the king of Kongo. When Cão reached the village from which they had been kidnapped, everyone there rejoiced; but Cão cannily sent only one of the hostages to the African king, for he was determined to secure the release of the Portuguese men he had sent inland during his first voyage. The presents carried by the released hostage helped convince the African king that he should send the Portuguese men back to their captain, and after they arrived Cão himself headed inland to meet the king. This time Cão and his colleagues clearly hoped to find a river route deep into Africa; they sailed right up to the limits of navigation of the River Congo, and, seeing they could go no further, carved a surviving record of their extraordinary journey on the rocks that now prevented them from penetrating any further: ‘Here reached the vessels of the distinguished King Dom João II of Portugal: Diogo Cão, Pero Añes, Pero da Costa’.57 After that, Cão pressed on to meet the king of Kongo, returned to his ships, and managed to explore further stretches of the coast of southern Africa.

  Cão’s expeditions have been rather overlooked, even if Portuguese historians living under Dr Salazar around 1960 extolled him as one of the founders of an empire that eventually controlled large swathes of southern Africa.58 Cão had shown that it was possible to press on beyond the new Portuguese bases in Elmina and São Tomé, and to find a welcome in lands untouched by Islam that should be the gateway to the Indian Ocean. However, that gateway lay much farther to the south than Henry the Navigator, João II, or their cartographers and navigators had supposed. It made obvious sense to fit out a third expedition, this time under the leadership of Bartomeu or Bartholomew Dias. A third ship, loaded with supplies, was now added to the flotilla, with the notion that it could be parked somewhere off the coast of Africa and could be used to resupply the other caravels on their return from a journey that might well stretch their own supplies to the limit. Setting out in 1487, Dias’s ships were eventually caught in storms off southern Africa; they headed out to sea, moving south-westwards, and in the process made as important a discovery as the discovery of land: the strong winds blowing from west to east could be harnessed to propel their vessels back towards Africa and a more southerly latitude. This led Dias to the coast that stretches beyond the Cape of Good Hope (not in fact the southernmost point of south Africa), reaching hundreds of miles further, as far as the bay in which the modern town of Port Elizabeth stands. By this point it was obvious that the winds and currents continued to trend eastwards and that the ships had rounded the bottom of Africa, entering the Indian Ocean by a brand new sea route.59 Dias set up a padrão, which vanished from sight over the centuries, until a young South African historian, Eric Axelson, scrabbled in the sand on a headland at Kwaaihoek, where he thought it was most likely to be, and found many fragments of it – confirmation of the not always reliable stories in the sixteenth-century narratives.60 Dias’s voyage was a tremendous achievement, and Dias would have liked to carry on further; but his crew was worried at the lack of supplies on board – the next voyage in these waters, by Vasco da Gama, had no great difficulty in obtaining supplies from the local population – and were determined to work their way back to the supply ship. In the process they mapped the parts of the coast they had missed when they had swung out to sea. Dias was back in Lisbon towards the end of 1488, and Christopher Columbus recorded that he saw and was impressed by Dias’s map of Africa, though he remained attached to his own theories. But the king of Portugal failed to reward Dias with either the honours or the money that Cão had received. He had returned to Portugal without exploring the Indian Ocean.61

  Suddenly, though, the search for routes to the East acquired much greater urgency. A Genoese mariner, as boastful as he was learned, was washed up on the shores of Portugal in 1493, claiming to have discovered a new route across the oceans all the way to China and Japan.

  Part Four

  * * *

  OCEANS IN CONVERSATION,

  AD 1492–1900

  28

  The Great Acceleration

  I

  So far this book has been concerned with separate oceans. Admittedly, the western Pacific rim and the Indian Ocean enjoyed close ties through maritime trade during the Middle Ages, whether by means of Tamil and Malay or Chinese navigators; but these sailors never targeted the wide-open spaces of the island Pacific. Links between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic were mediated through the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, after the opening of a regular sea route from Italy to Flanders and England at the end of the thirteenth century. The 1490s, however, saw a great acceleration in contact between western Europe and what were fondly imagined to be the Indies, for in the case of two discoveries they were not the Indies at all, even if Columbus’s voyages resulted in the term ‘Indies’ being applied to the great landmass of the two American continents, whose inhabitants were classed as ‘Indians’. The three European attempts to reach the Indies were those of Christopher Columbus, whose four voyages to the New World spanned the years from 1492 to 1504;1 John Cabot, who sailed west in search of China and the Indies in 1497;2 and Vasco da Gama, whose first expedition to the real India departed
the same year. Amerigo Vespucci, sailing in the wake of Columbus, wrote about the lands to the west, often tendentiously, but his name, not that of Columbus, became attached to the Americas.3 The second Portuguese expedition to India should also be added to this list, as it resulted in the accidental discovery of Brazil in 1500 – a voyage that linked four continents. This linking of the oceans was completed remarkably quickly during the sixteenth century, once the routes from the Atlantic to the Pacific had been mapped out by pioneers such as Ferdinand Magellan, the Portuguese captain in the service of Spain, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, the Spanish discoverer of California, and Francis Drake, sailing in the service of England. The world, as a book describing Drake’s voyages proudly proclaimed, had now been ‘encompassed’.4 The linking of the oceans culminated in 1565 with the despatch of the first Manila galleon tying the western Pacific (and, beyond that, China) to Mexico and, ultimately, the Atlantic trade networks. Bearing these developments in mind, the chapters that follow will concentrate mainly on the navigators, routes and goods that passed between different oceans, rather than continuing to portray the history of three separate oceans. It may then seem odd to begin with Columbus and Cabot, whose expeditions were confined to a single ocean; but they assumed that the waters off Europe and Africa and the waters off China and Japan were part of one great ocean, in modern terms the Pacific combined with the Atlantic.

  It is often pointed out that the Canary islanders, the Taíno Indians of the Caribbean, the Tupinambá Indians of Brazil and all the other peoples previously unknown to the Europeans were perfectly well known to themselves; their ‘discovery’ was a two-way process. The Arab traders who already knew the Swahili coast far down the flank of east Africa were surprised to encounter Vasco da Gama as he worked his way into the Indian Ocean in 1498; but they were aware that Christian lands existed beyond the frontiers of Islam, and da Gama even met traders who knew the Mediterranean. ‘Discovery’ was not a purely European phenomenon, but those who were carving out new routes across the oceans were Europeans.

  II

  So far, the history of the Atlantic has been presented as the history of the north-eastern Atlantic, and (by the end of the Middle Ages) the history of navigation all the way down the Atlantic coast of Africa. Another maritime network existed in the Atlantic, within and a little beyond the Caribbean, a ‘New World’ that would be exposed to European view by Columbus’s voyages. It was in reality a very old world, first settled in the fifth millennium BC, with new waves of settlers arriving periodically from South America.5 Unlike the Canaries, seven isolated islands that seem not even to have been in contact with one another, let alone the African mainland, the Caribbean and Bahama chains were lively places of interaction; the analogy, not that Columbus would have been aware of it, is with the small Pacific islands that were linked together by a constant flow of travellers bringing goods back and forth.

  Who these inhabitants were has been much discussed, and it has become increasingly clear that archaeologists have underestimated the ethnic complexity of the pre-Columbian Caribbean. They have generally been content to divide the population into two groups described by European observers, the warlike, cannibalistic Caribs and the more peaceful inhabitants of the large islands, especially Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, some of whom have come to be known as the ‘Taínos’, meaning ‘noble people’ in the principal language of these islands.6 The name ‘Carib’ was derived from a mythical island of Caribe said to be inhabited solely by men (another island was supposedly inhabited solely by women). The Taínos at first wondered whether Columbus and his crew had come from there. But the Spaniards seized upon the negative image of islanders from Caribe and collectively labelled all islanders who paddled their large canoes northwards to Hispaniola in the fifteenth century man-eating ‘Caribs’; that they did occasionally eat human flesh is very likely. These ‘Caribs’ represented a further wave of migrants of Arawak descent, warriors seeking to establish themselves in the lush islands of the Greater Antilles; it is likely that the Lesser Antilles, the line of islands stretching from the South American coast towards Puerto Rico, were becoming overpopulated, and they were looking for new lands to settle. The problem was that some of these lands, notably Hispaniola, were already very densely settled. This set off violent confrontations.

  While it suited the Spaniards to distinguish between those who were regarded as legally free subjects of the king and queen of Castile, and hostile cannibal invaders from the south, who could legitimately be enslaved, the reality on the ground was rather different. On the largest island, Hispaniola, a variety of languages could be heard, reflecting different waves of immigration from South America.7 Jamaica was only settled in around AD 600, as also the Bahamas, at the end of a period known to archaeologists as the ‘First Repeopling’. Although there are uncertainties about the route that the very earliest settlers might have taken, evidence from pottery suggests that the main route taken during this phase was a south-to-north one, along the line of the Lesser Antilles. As in the Pacific, movement was slow, and just as ‘Melanesians’, ‘Polynesians’ and ‘Micronesians’ overlapped and intermingled, here the very earliest settlers were eventually outnumbered by a wave of migrants related to the Arawak population of northern South America, who created a particularly elaborate group of societies on Hispaniola by the time of the arrival of the first European explorers. The Taíno idols, or cemís, often carved out of stone, survive as evidence of a lively culture, dependent on a reasonably nutritious food starch, cassava, and organized into small political units that jostled for power on the main islands.8

  This was a well-connected world. The sea lay at the centre of their elaborate myth-making, which included strange stories about all the fish and all the water in the seas raining down from a great gourd, recorded by a puzzled friar named Ramon Pané whom Columbus had sent into the interior of Hispaniola to find out about the islanders’ religious beliefs.9 Hispaniola is a fairly large and mountainous island, and there were certainly Taínos and other groups who lived in the interior and did not have much to do with the sea. Their aim was to achieve self-sufficiency, and this they did by and large manage to do, which led occasional admiring Europeans to speak in glowing terms of their societies: ‘theirs is a Golden Age’, an Italian scholar at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella opined, describing a society where envy and property were absent, and there was no need for laws and judges – the writer Peter Martyr never actually went to see for himself, but his words set off some fantastic ideas in the mind of Thomas More, recorded in his Utopia.10 But that is not to say that there was no trade. The inhabitants of the Bahamas, which they called the Lucayos, were familiar with the bigger islands to the south, trading goods such as coloured stones, foodstuffs, cotton thread and carved cemís: Columbus was amazed to find that glass beads and coins traded by his men on 13 October 1492, the day after he arrived in the New World, were already being taken south in a native boat he encountered off Long Island (Fernandina) on 15 October, along with some dried leaves and food. Not just European goods but reports of the coming of the strangely attired visitors in their flying boats were diffused at top speed throughout the island chain.

  A maritime highway ran all the way from Cuba to Trinidad and the South American mainland. Inter-island trade was conducted using the dugout canoes, propelled by paddle power, which attracted Columbus’s attention from the moment he made contact with the Lucayan Taínos. The largest of these canoes, made from a massive felled tree trunk, could seat as many as a hundred Taínos, and the chieftain’s boat might be specially painted and carry on board a canopied area. The process of making these boats was long and complex, involving a massive collaborative effort by the village. The tree trunk had to be split open and hollowed out, by burning away the wood and chopping away at the residue. The outside of the boat was trimmed and ‘marvellously carved in the native style’, to cite Columbus’s first reaction.11 The smallest, carrying a single person, were also very seaworthy, skimming back and forth between
the islands. Not for nothing was the native word canoa adopted in western European languages. In 1492 the Caribbean was not home to static cultures rooted in centuries of unchanging traditional practices; it was a little world on the move.12

  III

  Yet this Caribbean world could only be the outer edges of the luxurious empires crowded with great cities described by Marco Polo. From the European perspective, da Gama’s voyage to India was the true success story. Columbus and Cabot were convinced that they had reached the edges of Asia, and yet Columbus’s first voyage did not reveal the silks and spices of China and Japan, as he so confidently promised Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Instead, he brought back some strips of gold foil (though not a shipload of gold), some attractive feathers and some interesting but puzzling inhabitants of the Caribbean, who, he had to admit, were little more advanced in technology than the Stone Age Canary Islanders being conquered at the same time. It seemed that the islands he had reached were richer in cotton than in gold; and the mystery remained: where were the teeming cities whose harbours were crowded with massive junks, ruled over by the Great Khan, of whom Marco Polo had informed western Christendom two centuries earlier?13 Cabot’s voyage in 1497 was even less satisfactory: he was almost certainly aware that Bristol ships had strayed towards distant coasts somewhere near Newfoundland, but once he returned home he had to admit that the best chance for profit came not from rich ports and courts but from codfish – it was so plentiful that English fishing boats would no longer need to sail to Iceland.14