The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  It is important to keep remembering that the first American voyages were conceived as voyages to Asia and as ways of opening up access to the spices of the East. They were planned according to exact expectations of finding gold and spices. The waters they reached were deemed to be part of what would now be regarded as the western Pacific. Some gold and spices were indeed found, though not by Cabot. Oddly, therefore, it makes sense to play along with the geographical assumptions of Columbus, and to assume that the routes they had found did lead to Asia, and that the goods the Spaniards acquired in the Caribbean were from the ‘Indies’. Only then can one understand how more and more Spanish efforts were pumped into the transatlantic voyages, which became quite regular within ten years of Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean. Even the discoveries claimed by Amerigo Vespucci at the start of the sixteenth century did not definitively disprove the idea that South America was somehow connected to Asia; the idea that there might be a land bridge between the continents was only decisively rejected in the late nineteenth century. The Americas and Asia and indeed eastern Africa were all las Indias, ‘the Indies’. After he had heard of da Gama’s success in reaching Calicut, Columbus even speculated about carrying on westwards to meet the Portuguese in India. What discouraged him from an attempt to circumnavigate the globe, according to his son (and biographer) Ferdinand, was the lack of supplies on board his ships, rather than any notion that this was an impossible achievement.15

  Just like the Portuguese, Columbus and Cabot were guided by the grand strategy of bypassing the Red Sea and eliminating dependence on the dhow traffic carrying spices across the Indian Ocean. The aim was not simply to make a grand profit: Columbus shared with the Portuguese the ambition of undermining the economy of the Muslim world by diverting the spices of the Indies directly to Christendom; and he shared with King Manuel (and with Ferdinand and Isabella) the messianic expectation that the discovery of a new route to the Indies would fund a massive attack on Islam that would culminate in the reconquest of Jerusalem by the greatest crusade of all time, in which, it was fervently hoped, various Christian kings of the East would also take part – Prester John was never far from the thinking of these new-style crusade strategists. Ideally, Christian navies would force open the Red Sea and clear the way to the Mediterranean – the spice route, but also the route to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Columbus’s apocalyptic thinking dipped and soared depending on circumstances, and he was generally most obsessed by his sense of a divine mission when he found himself in a tight corner, but his combination of materialistic greed and the conviction of having been chosen by God never left him. Whatever riches he acquired in the ‘Indies’ were also to be understood as God’s gift; the material and the spiritual were intertwined like the strands in a rope.16

  At no stage did Columbus express serious doubts that he had reached Asia, even if the geography of the Indies had proved far more mysterious than his reading of existing maps had led him to believe it would be. This is not to deny that Columbus had private doubts: when he made his sailors swear that Cuba was part of the Asian mainland, subject to a penalty of 10,000 maravedís and excision of the culprit’s tongue, he was unconsciously expressing his own uncertainty about where on earth he had arrived.17 But such evidence as existed for lands across the Atlantic seemed to confirm the assumption that Asia was within reach. The bodies of strange people had been cast up on the shores of Ireland, and their features were rather like those of Tartars, in other words, the ‘Orientals’ with whom westerners were reasonably familiar through political contact and through the trade in slaves from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. Almost certainly these were the bodies of native North Americans which had been washed out to sea. If, as is possible, the young Columbus travelled to Iceland he might well have heard tales of lands to the west visited by Norse sailors in the past. In Bristol he could also have picked up rumours of lands to the west, because several Icelanders had taken up residence there, and because English expeditions had penetrated deep into the Atlantic in the 1480s. Besides, he seems to have read some mysterious papers in the possession of the Perestrello family of Porto Santo near Madeira (into which he married), which provided further evidence of land to the west.18

  Building into their work the mass of rumours that circulated throughout the Middle Ages, several fifteenth-century cartographers liberally sprinkled the Atlantic with imaginary islands. One such mapmaker was Andrea Bianco, a citizen of Columbus’s own home town of Genoa, who made charts in 1436 and 1448. Still, the distances looked formidable, unless one followed the argument presented by the Florentine geographer Paolo Toscanelli, who shrank the distance between western Europe and the Far East by arguing for a narrow Atlantic that separated the continents, a judgement that also stretched the distance overland from Portugal to China, making it greater than Ptolemy had assumed.19 Columbus conveniently slotted Toscanelli’s version of the Atlantic into Marco Polo’s description of Japan to show that Cipangu, or Japan, was within relatively easy reach of Europe. Moreover, it was virtually paved with gold:

  The people are white, civilized, and well-favoured. They are Idolaters, and are dependent on nobody. And I can tell you the quantity of gold they have is endless; for they find it in their own Islands, and the King does not allow it to be exported. Moreover few merchants visit the country because it is so far from the mainland, and thus it comes to pass that their gold is abundant beyond all measure [passages in italics appear only in some manuscripts].20

  The emperor of Japan was said to have a palace roofed with gold, ‘just as our churches are roofed with lead’, with golden floors made of great golden slabs, ‘so that altogether the richness of this Palace is past all bounds and all belief’.21 Conceivably this description was based on Chinese whispers about the Golden Pavilion and other beautifully decorated temples in Kyoto.

  The assumption that Japan lay across his line of travel was not unique to Columbus and Toscanelli. Martin Behaim, a German cartographer who had made the lucky decision not to join van Olmen’s ill-fated voyage west of the Azores in 1487, produced the first proper globe that has survived; now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, it dates from around the time of Columbus’s first voyage, and does not include any of his discoveries. However, the globe shows Cipangu athwart the western Atlantic, about two thirds of the way across; superimposed on a modern map that would place Japan just above the Guianas, while to its south-east a scattering of smaller islands leads down to ‘Java Minor’ and ‘Seilan’, or Ceylon, the Bay of Bengal having evaporated. Even though there is no evidence Columbus and Behaim knew one another, the similarity between their view of what lay out there in the western Atlantic is very striking. In that sense, Columbus was not quite the eccentric fantasist he might at first appear.22

  He was, after all, a citizen of Genoa, a port whose inhabitants had saltwater in their veins – despite many counterclaims there is no doubt about that, for the Genoese archives prove that he was the son of the weaver Domenico Colombo; he was an imposing figure, six feet tall and red-haired, capable of great charm as well as great fury.23 It is certainly striking that three of the pioneers who opened up the Atlantic on behalf of kings in Spain, Portugal and England were Italian. John Cabot appears to have been Genoese by birth, but he lived long enough in Venice to acquire Venetian citizenship, always a long process.24 Amerigo Vespucci was a well-connected Tuscan who lived in Florence and Piombino, a little maritime state on the coast. It has been seen that the Genoese were very active in the colonization of the Atlantic islands, which explains why Columbus was made so welcome when he called on the Perestrello family in Porto Santo.25 At that stage in his career, the young Columbus was interested, like many of the Genoese who sailed the Atlantic, in the sugar trade.

  Wealthy Italian businessmen based in Lisbon and Seville were of crucial importance in funding both the transatlantic voyages and the Portuguese expeditions. Columbus came to depend on Florentine backers, since the king and queen insisted they had run out
of money after spending all they had on the war to conquer Muslim Granada. The solution was to combine their financial support, over a million maravedís (less than it sounds, as this was a low-value coin), with backing from Italians in Seville, notably a certain Giannetto Berardi; this way Columbus was able to inject half a million more maravedís into the preparation of his tiny fleet.26 John Cabot received monetary support from the London manager of a bank operated on behalf of an ancient and illustrious Florentine family, the Bardi, with the intention of seeking out ‘the new land’ (the fact this land is preceded by the word ‘the’ rather suggests prior knowledge of its existence, but may simply refer back to knowledge of Columbus’s discoveries much further south).27 As for Amerigo Vespucci, he was for a time an agent of Berardi’s bank, which brought him into contact with Columbus, and they held one another in respect.28

  Why then did these Italians not set out across the ocean on their own initiative? Political power was an important issue here. By the 1470s the Portuguese and the Spaniards were already sparring for control of Atlantic waters, so lone interlopers travelled at their own risk. And in delivering grandiloquent letters to the Great Khan, of the sort Columbus carried on his first voyage, it would surely make a difference if they were written in the name of Europe’s greatest monarchs, the king and queen of Castile and Aragon, rather than the tiny, if highly influential, republics of Genoa or Florence – even though they were addressed to the ‘dear friend’ of the king and queen, the letters Columbus carried contained blank spaces so that he could fill in the unknown name of whatever ruler he managed to visit.29 Besides, the Italians living beyond Italy were probably better placed to raise funds and take risks; the 1490s were troubled years in Italy, marked by a massive French invasion of the peninsula and by Savonarola’s revolution within Florence. Finally, there was the fact that the Italians had for hundreds of years been selling their nautical skills to the kings of Portugal and Castile.

  Neither Cabot nor Vespucci shared Columbus’s apocalyptic vision. Cabot, at the court of the money-hungry King Henry VII, well understood that the king expected good financial returns from whatever lands Cabot might find. Vespucci was a cultured product of Renaissance Florence, and, though he enjoyed exaggerating his achievements, he did not boast about how his discoveries would end the Turkish threat or usher in the Last Days before the Second Coming of Christ. While Columbus fantasized about how he had discovered the source of all the world’s great rivers and was closing in on the Garden of Eden, Vespucci, even in his most extravagant moments (describing cannibal feasts, for instance), was keener to shock than to moralize. Columbus saw himself as a crusader; Vespucci did not.

  IV

  Columbus’s first voyage, conducted by two caravels and a slightly larger nao, the Santa María, set out in August 1492 from Palos de la Frontera in Andalusia, passed through the Canary Islands, and reached its first stop in the Bahamas on 12 October.30 His crew included at least one convert from Judaism, Luís de Torres, whose great virtue was that he knew both Hebrew and Arabic and would surely, therefore, be able to communicate with the peoples of the East. Oddly, there was not a single priest or friar on board, although Columbus claimed in his own logbook (which survives in a heavily re-edited edition) that one of his aims was to ‘determine what method should be undertaken for their conversion to our holy faith’; but if anything the lack of a priest made Columbus even more conscious that he himself was God’s agent on board the voyage. Also lacking were impressive trade goods that could be offered to the Great Khan; however, the native population of the Bahamas and the Caribbean was only too happy to be given beads, little red caps and other items of truck, which, as has been seen, immediately passed into the trading networks of the Taínos.

  Over the next few months Columbus explored the Bahamas and the coast of Cuba, but decided that the large island he called Hispaniola (modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic) would be most suitable as a base. Although his initial relations with the Taíno population of these lands were by and large friendly, and he wrote very positively about how sweet, docile, good-looking and innocent they were, he had great difficulty fitting them into his world view; they were, for one thing, naked, which was not what one expected of the subjects of the Chinese or Japanese emperor, who would surely be clad in silk. The closest parallel he could find was with the Canary islanders: they too were naked island people, ignorant of metal tools (although the Taínos were, he was glad to report, familiar with a gold and copper alloy called guanín); and they too were pagans who lived without any ‘law’, by which he meant that they were not Christians, Muslims or Jews. Some early accounts and maps show the newly discovered islands as Novas Canarias, ‘New Canaries’, reflecting the view that he had found more of the same on the same latitude, but much further away.31 He attempted to found a small settlement in the north of the island. He returned to Europe in March 1493, after a difficult voyage through the Azores that washed him up in Lisbon, where King João II was deeply disconcerted to learn of his discoveries, having previously ignored him as a fantasist.32

  Had he really reached India? Evidently there was something out there, and after Columbus had presented himself, and the Taínos he brought back with him, to Ferdinand and Isabella at court in Barcelona he received a second commission, setting out in September with a much more impressive armada of seventeen ships; and this time there were priests on board. Much of his energy was spent trying to subdue the interior of Hispaniola, as he became sucked into rivalries between the different chieftaincies on the island. He established a new centre of operations at La Isabela in northern Hispaniola, of which more later; and the Taíno Indians were subjected to harsh demands for tribute in gold. Accusations of incompetence reached the court in Spain

  When the first inspector, named Juan Aguado, was sent out to Hispaniola in 1495, Columbus was deeply resentful. Normally such inspections took place when a governor demitted office, but the king and queen had appointed him ‘Admiral of the Ocean Sea’ and governor of all newly found lands for life. Columbus, an agile social climber, expected to make a fortune out of the share of the wealth of the Indies that the king and queen were willing to assign to him. His pretensions did not endear him to people back at the court of Castile. The Genoese were not popular, even though their contribution to the Castilian economy, notably in Seville, and to the creation of a Castilian navy had been crucial; some of the hostility that had been building up against the Jews, expelled as Columbus set out on his first voyage, was redirected towards the Italians. Columbus was also accused, with good reason, of attending too much to the interests of his family, promoting his brothers and his son to high office in Hispaniola and exploiting the resources of Hispaniola to enrich himself – there was a real issue as to whether he was legally entitled to one tenth of the value of goods sent back to Spain, or merely one tenth of the tax of one fifth that the Crown would receive on goods sent back to Spain, in other words one tenth or a mere fiftieth.33

  The result of all this was that Columbus hurried back to Spain in 1496.34 He had a difficult time making his case to the Catholic Monarchs, but – taking into account his undoubted skill as a navigator – he was allowed to go out a third time in 1497, and now he headed further south, through the Cape Verde Islands, in the hope that he would find a route to the Far East somewhere to the south of Hispaniola. He discovered ‘a very great continent, which until today has been unknown’, the north coast of South America, but not too much should be made of this: the term ‘continent’ simply meant a large area of mainland, which could still be connected to, or lie just offshore from, Asia. Still, the mystery of what was out there deepened further. Columbus was convinced that he had reached the outskirts of the Garden of Eden, which, as the Book of Genesis explained, was guarded by angels bearing flaming swords and could not be entered. He decided that the garden stood at the top of a great protuberance ‘something like a woman’s nipple’ – the earth was not round, but pear-shaped.35 Sometimes he insisted that these were not just
the Indies; he had discovered Paradise – even its Taíno inhabitants, tame and beautiful, unashamedly naked, seemed to live in prelapsarian innocence.

  Back in Hispaniola, reality intruded: trouble with the Taínos was compounded by trouble with his fellow Europeans, and he faced a series of rebellions by his Spanish lieutenants. These culminated in the despatch of yet another official investigation under a somewhat dubious figure, Bobadilla, and in the arrest of Columbus. In 1500 he was sent back to Spain in chains that he refused to have removed until he stood in the presence of the king and queen, whom he was still, remarkably, able to charm.36 Even so, it is surprising that he received a fourth commission, hedged about with conditions about where he could put in, since his presence in Hispaniola was rightly seen as a source of trouble. He was only able to raise funds for four ships, while the governor of Hispaniola, Nicolás de Ovando, sailed out to the Indies ahead of him with thirty.37 In June 1502 Columbus’s ships stood off Santo Domingo, the third attempt at European settlement in Hispaniola and now the island’s capital; but they had to sit out a hurricane, as he was not supposed to set foot on the island that he had discovered and ruled.