The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  The conviction that he was called by God to make ever greater discoveries became still more powerful during his final voyage. His knowledge that he was God’s agent was confirmed even more strongly at a low point in 1503, during his fourth voyage, when his men were beaten back by the Indians of Panama, where he was hoping to found a colony. Suffering from a high fever and deeply depressed by his failures, his troubled sleep was disturbed by a voice from heaven that said:

  ‘O fool and slow to believe and to serve your God, the God of all! What more did He do for Moses or for his servant David? Since you were born, He has always had you in His most watchful care. When He saw you at an age with which he was content, He caused your name to sound marvellously in the land. The Indies, which are so rich a part of the world, He gave you for your own; you have divided them as it pleased you, and He enabled you to do this. Of the mighty barriers of the Ocean Sea, which were closed with such mighty chains, he gave you the keys.’38

  On the coast of Panama and Costa Rica, he gathered information about a rich civilization in the interior, probably a mixture of memories of Maya glories from centuries earlier (his men found what were almost certainly some Maya buildings), and vague knowledge of the Aztec empire in Mexico. The evidence was there in solid gold ornaments worn by the local Indians, some of which must have been traded from the interior. This gold awakened yet again the greed of Columbus and his followers. He once again tried to found a settlement in lands he suspected were genuinely rich in gold; but when he was beaten off by the locals and when his ships were tossed to and fro in another hurricane, he found himself washed up on the shores of Jamaica, an island he knew vaguely but had never tried to conquer. For a whole year from June 1503 onwards he was allowed to languish there, since the Spanish governor of Hispaniola rather enjoyed leaving him to rot, but one of his companions who had already escaped from Jamaica sent him a ship, and in early November 1504 he was back in Spain, only to discover that his eager patron, Queen Isabella, was on her deathbed; her husband had other priorities, mainly in Italy (following his conquest of Naples a year earlier), so now Columbus was stranded once again, but at least it was in his adopted country; and he himself died there a year and a half later.39

  As has been seen, Columbus saw the Taínos as innocent and beautiful creatures quite different from the dog-headed monsters some had predicted would be found in southern climes; in his logbook Columbus wrote: ‘on these islands until now I have not found any monstrous men, as many expected; rather, they are all people of very beautiful appearance.’ Occasionally he looked over his shoulder at what the Portuguese were doing in Africa (he had visited Elmina), and speculated that they were so docile that they would make excellent slaves or servants, but Queen Isabella was adamant that they were her free subjects and must not be enslaved.40 Attempts to convert the Taínos were half-hearted; a friar was sent into the interior of Hispaniola to learn about their ways, but evidence revealed as recently as 2006 shows that Columbus was unhelpful over conversion, to the point of being obstructive.41 These ambiguities and inconsistencies in his attitude occur again and again. He still had room in his thinking for monstrous peoples, especially when he heard tales of man-eating Caribs (whence the term ‘cannibal’, whose first letters echo the Latin canis, ‘dog’); these Caribs were said to be invading Taíno lands from the south, coming up in their war canoes and seizing boys, whom they castrated and raised for the pot, or women, who bore them children that faced the same terrible fate.42

  Whether they, or indeed the Taínos, occasionally feasted off human meat has become a controversial question. Historians and literary scholars who claim the label ‘post-colonial’ argue that cannibalism was a European invention, employed to justify the subjection of the American Indians. On the other hand, it is surely the height of colonial condescension to assume that the Caribs or indeed the Taínos must have had the same moral values as western Europeans either now or in the sixteenth century; there is no serious reason to doubt that some American Indians, whether in the Caribbean or in Brazil, did occasionally eat their captives.43 Such stories of monstrous conduct led Columbus to divide the inhabitants of the New World into good Taínos, whom he had made into notionally free subjects of the king and queen, and evil Caribs, who were fair game for slaving expeditions: ‘when your Highnesses order me to send you slaves, I expect to bring or send the majority of them from these people.’

  However, the Taínos could not produce nearly as much gold as he had hoped, and as he continued to promise to the Catholic Monarchs in Spain. He therefore put them to work sifting and mining for gold in increasingly oppressive conditions, laying the foundations for the encomienda system that effectively enslaved the Indians not just of the Caribbean but, in later generations, of Mexico and Peru as well. Rather than being actually slaves, the Taínos were understood to be legally free; but like other subjects they had to render some service to their rulers, which for Columbus meant tribute in gold dust, an amount per head sufficient to fill a hawk’s bell. The Crown did occasionally try to improve the conditions under which they lived, but European slavers made no effort to distinguish between ‘good’ Taínos and ‘evil’ Caribs. The first major legislation in favour of the Taínos, the ‘Laws of Burgos’, dates from twenty years after Columbus first reached the Caribbean; by then it was far too late to save them. Unaccustomed to heavy labour and corralled into settlements, with families often broken apart for months at a time, the Taínos began to disappear: falling birth rates, ill-treatment by Spanish masters, even massacres, resulted in their rapid extinction. Demand for labour in the gold fields of Hispaniola led to the depopulation of outlying islands, so that the Bahamas were largely deserted by 1510. As will become clear, the disappearance of the Taínos led to the importation of cheap labour from Africa, black slaves who were not even notional subjects of the Spanish rulers and had even fewer benefits of protection. The economic viability of the West Indies was only sustained by a radical transformation in population, both African and European.

  Columbus, torn between his duties as governor of the new Spanish lands and his sense of mission as bearer of God’s word, neglected the people of Hispaniola because he was still convinced that he stood on the edge of the Fabulous Orient and that he would unlock the door that would lead Christian armies and navies to Jerusalem. He had radically different views about how to reach Asia from most of his contemporaries; but that does not make him into an example of ‘Renaissance Man’. When he used the classical writer Seneca to demonstrate that Europe would overwhelm the Indies which lay not too far to the west, he read Seneca as a prophet, indeed as a Christian prophet, for it was often argued that he had been a secret Christian at the court of the Christian-hating Emperor Nero.44 His thinking was rooted in medieval ideas of crusade and Christian redemption as much as it was rooted in the commercial outlook of medieval Genoa.

  V

  Columbus set out on his first voyage with three ships; John Cabot only had one, the ‘shippe of Bristowe’ named the Matthew, a medium-sized boat of around fifty tons. This was not even a new ship, but a commercial vessel that had probably traded towards Ireland and France before Cabot took charge.45 One has to say ‘probably’ because the evidence about Cabot is very fragmentary. His early career was punctuated by failure and scandal: he seems to have fled from Venice to avoid his creditors, and in both Valencia and Seville he offered his services as a harbour engineer, but his projects were never brought to a finish, raising doubts about his competence.46 A respected British historian announced that she was writing a radically revisionist life of Cabot that would, it seems, have brought to light not just his connections with Italian bankers but his attempts to explore large tracts of the North American coastline and even to settle friars and others along that coast. However, she died before her work was complete and left adamant instructions that all her notes and drafts were to be destroyed.47 So there is still plenty of speculation about his origins, his career and his impact, speculation that is further muddied by th
e insistence that he was the real discoverer of America, because Columbus only reached the mainland of America (South rather than North) in 1498, and felt too ill to set foot there, though he did send his men ashore. In reality, the discovery of America was a gradual process of working out that two large continents blocked the way to a further ocean which would present an even greater challenge to navigators than the Atlantic.

  Cabot knew perfectly well that Columbus had found land in the west, but his voyage was designed to show that the Spaniards had been sailing too far to the south in their search for Asia, a route partly determined by the lust for the gold that the sun was believed to have generated in hot latitudes.48 The Milanese ambassador in London reported that Cabot was searching for the real Cipangu, for he was unconvinced that Cuba or any other land Columbus had found was Japan; Cabot, he said, ‘believes that all the spices in the world have their origin’ in Japan, and Cabot supposedly knew about this because he had intrepidly journeyed to Mecca as a young man and had asked where spices originated.49 If Cabot’s hunches were correct, London stood to become an even more important spice market than Alexandria. In March 1496 King Henry blithely granted John Cabot extensive rights of conquest, trade monopoly and dominion in the lands he would discover: ‘whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians’, though King Henry left it to others to finance the expedition, and evidence collected in the last few decades shows that the Bardi of Florence provided essential backing.50 The fact that the king specified these were to be previously unknown lands avoided a direct clash with the interests of Columbus and the Crowns of Castile and Portugal.51 It was simply assumed that Christian discoverers could raise the flag of England in whatever non-Christian land they visited, without reference to the native inhabitants or to the papacy, which, as will be seen, had already divided the globe into Spanish and Portuguese hemispheres.

  After a first try in 1496, when he was defeated by the weather and the pessimism of his crew, his first full voyage, in 1497, apparently took him to the ‘New-found-land’, and possibly to Labrador.52 As has been seen, spices were not to be had; but there was an astonishing amount of cod. It was widely assumed that Cabot had found more islands, rather than a continent – the duke of Milan was told by his agents that Cabot had found the Island of the Seven Cities.53 The Englishman John Day wrote to ‘the Lord Grand Admiral’, almost certainly Columbus (then back in Spain, between his second and third voyages), with a description of Cabot’s voyage; he patriotically claimed that ‘the cape of the said land was found and discovered in the past by the men from Bristol who found “Brasil”, as your Lordship well knows’; what Columbus made of any of this is unknown, and he was never tempted to try a northerly route across the Atlantic. Day reported that Cabot reached land in late June, but there were only a few clues that any humans lived there.54 So the claim that this was Japan or China did not fit at all well.

  Another, larger expedition set off under John Cabot, in 1498. This time he was more willing to take into account Columbus’s discoveries, for as far as is known he headed towards Newfoundland, with the idea that the ships would strike southwards towards the tropics, in search, perhaps, of a route to India, or at least Japan and China. John Cabot himself disappeared, though it is possible that some sailors made their way back to Europe with three Indians.55 For the Great Chronicle of London reported that in 1501 or 1502 there ‘were browgth unto the kyng iij men takyn In the Newe ffound Ile land’; ‘These were clothid In bestys skynnys and ete Rawe fflesh and spak such spech that noo man cowde undyrstand theym, and In theyr demeanure lyke to bruyt bestis.’56 John Cabot’s son Sebastian, himself an explorer of North America, warned of a ‘very sterile land’, inhabited by polar bears, moose (‘large stags like horses’), sturgeon, salmon, soles a yard long and an infinity of codfish.57 It was not, then, the semi-paradise about which Columbus enthused so poetically, in which seasons were of little importance and crops almost shot out of the soil. The ocean and the rivers, not the land, were the greatest assets of this new-found-land.

  There are hints that Cabot or later visitors from Bristol travelled very far to the south. In June 1501 one of Columbus’s rivals, Alonso de Hojeda, received a commission from Ferdinand and Isabella, instructing him to ‘follow that coast which you have discovered, which runs east and west, as it appears, because it goes towards the region where it has been learned that the English were making discoveries’. He was to set up the Spanish equivalent of padrões, to make public the Castilian claim to this shoreline, ‘so that you may stop the exploration of the English in that direction’.58 This was despite the marriage alliances that bound the house of Tudor to Spain through Catherine of Aragon. These explorations were probably conducted by Bristol merchants; in 1527 Hugh Elyot and Robert Thorne were both credited with the discovery of Newfoundland some years earlier, which may have been not so much a snub towards the Cabot family as a recognition that further new-found-lands were reached around 1500, and the American Indians brought back to the court of Henry VII may have arrived on one of these later sailings, which seem to have continued until 1505 or thereabouts.59 Although a patriotic English historian has claimed that Cabot made entirely clear the fact that North America was not Asia, in reality the discombobulation continued – this was both a New World, of previously unsuspected existence, and at the same time somehow attached to the Old World. Its inhabitants lived so far from the Old World that they might even have been created separately by God; yet they were also ‘Indians’, sharing ancestry with the peoples of the Old World. None of it made much sense.

  How hard it was to connect the mass of new information to existing knowledge became apparent when Greenland once again entered the consciousness of western Europeans. King Henry VII was interested to hear of the rediscovery of Greenland by Gaspar Corte Real, from the Azores, in 1500, news brought to his court by a Portuguese sailor named João Fernandes Lavrador (‘the Farmer’) from Terceira in the Azores. Lavrador received a privilege from the English king and set up an Anglo-Portuguese syndicate that explored the western Atlantic out of Bristol.60 The Corte Reals subsequently, at the cost of their lives, explored the coast of Labrador right down to Newfoundland – confusingly, they applied the name Labrador not to the Atlantic coast of Canada, meant here, but to Greenland.61 A map of 1502, the Cantino Map, drawn in Lisbon, attached a caption to Greenland describing it as the land ‘discovered by licence of the most excellent prince Dom Manuel king of Portugal, the which is believed to be the peninsula of Asia’.62

  Enough reports filtered back to Portugal to confirm that this stretch of sea was good for fishing, but the land had little to offer beyond ice.63 It has been suggested that the real motive of these explorers was to find a North-West Passage to Asia over the top of Canada, which would become a longstanding obsession of navigators; however, it is more likely that they were curious to look further at whatever Cabot had found, and that they concurred with the general view that Greenland was a spur sticking out of Asia.

  29

  Other Routes to the Indies

  I

  It took nine long years to capitalize on Dias’s rather amazing discovery that Ptolemy was wrong, and that the Indian Ocean has an open bottom. One factor that delayed action was that the Portuguese once again became interested in campaigns in Morocco, though their meddling continued to irritate the Castilians, who sent an expedition to Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, capturing Melilla in 1497, and holding it ever since. The Portuguese king was surrounded by doubters who pointed out that the monarchy did not have unlimited resources, even with the profits that accrued from gold, sugar and slaves; surely it made more sense to concentrate on maximizing these profits? It was easy too to insist that little was really known about political conditions in and around the Indian Ocean. Quite apart from the difficulty in keeping such elongated trade routes open, little was known about the Christian prince who was suppo
sed to come to the aid of the Portuguese, Prester John, who had been cited again and again for four centuries.

  In preparation for new voyages, spies were sent into Muslim lands, in the hope that they could penetrate still further, all the way to both India and Ethiopia. Between 1487 and 1491 an agent of King João, Pero da Covilhã, explored the land route to India and ended up in Ethiopia, where he saw out his days. His account of conditions in India was sent back to Lisbon via Portuguese Jews trading in Cairo.1 The Portuguese court also applied the knowledge of the skilled Jewish astronomer Abraham Zacuto, who had taught at Salamanca University before being exiled from Spain in 1492.2 Zacuto was a great specialist in astronomical tables, vital for long-distance sailing; for the aim in sending Covilhã to India was not to create a land route, which was obviously impossible while Turks and Mamluks stood in the way, but to spy out the cities of India, find out what could be bought there, and obtain some sense of the geography of the lands bordering the Indian Ocean.

  Portuguese interest in a westward route across the Atlantic was limited. Columbus had not been taken seriously when he delivered his sales pitch about a short transatlantic route to Asia, still less after Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope and gave the Portuguese good hope of a route to the Indies; Columbus’s calculation of the size of the earth was simply not credible, and his idea that Cipangu (Japan) was within easy reach of the Canary Islands made no sense.3 The Crown had given its blessing to Ferdinand van Olmen’s expedition westwards in 1486, but had invested nothing in it, and, after all, van Olmen never reappeared.4 King João was therefore shocked when Columbus returned from his first voyage to the Caribbean in 1493, carrying Taíno Indians on board. One issue was which newly discovered lands should fall under the dominion of which kingdom; the solution agreed in the Treaty of Tordesillas, in 1494, was to divide the Atlantic, and by extension the globe, vertically down the middle of the ocean; the treaty was mediated by the pope, Alexander VI Borgia, who took the opportunity to express his own overarching authority across the entire world. Spain was granted rights to the west of the line of division, Portugal to the east. The Portuguese therefore remained confined to the eastern flank of the Atlantic during the 1490s.