These uncertainties stimulated further expeditions that gradually mapped out parts of the North American as well as the South American coast. Inevitably, the presence of European ships on the coast of what much later became the United States of America has created a whole industry built around the nonsensical question: ‘Who discovered the USA first?’ The credit, if that is the right term, for landing on future United States soil is usually granted to Juan Ponce de León, one of the more attractive figures in an age of brutal Spanish conquistadores, although there is not much doubt that slave-raiders had arrived first.18 The great defender of Indian rights, the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, told of the disappointment of Spanish slavers that they could not find any victims in the now-deserted Bahamas, already emptied of their population by earlier raids; so they travelled further north to the land las Casas knew as Florida, and brought back from there the first slaves captured on the North American mainland, who would have belonged to the relatively sophisticated Calusa or Timucua peoples.19
The oldest wreck found in the western hemisphere was found off the Turks and Caicos Islands, close to the Bahamas; it was very probably manned by slave-raiders. Although its exact date is unknown, let alone the name of the ship, of which only a small part of the hull survives, the pottery and firearms found on board indicate that the ship hit a reef within the period 1510–30. The lack of personal equipment belonging to the sailors suggests that they survived and salvaged their own possessions. Life on board was evidently very simple, to judge from the coarse tableware. Tiny glass beads found in the wreck would have been used in trade with the Taíno Indians. A more sinister aspect of Spanish trade is represented by a number of leg irons, used to restrain captives. The ship’s ballast, in the form of big stones placed at the bottom of the hull during construction, is especially revealing. Analysis shows that the stones originated in various places: near Bristol; from the mid-Atlantic islands; and above all from Lisbon. This does not prove that the ship visited those places, but it does show how bits and pieces of ships were recycled, and what sort of maritime connections dominated the trade of the eastern Atlantic around 1500.20 The Casa de Contratación in Seville that took charge of trade with the New World was founded in 1503. The fact that the Crown took an intense interest in these routes does not mean that its supervision was very effective. There were plenty of interlopers, and not just Spanish ones.21
Ponce de León represents the official side of trade with America. His career was moulded by the changing fortunes of his principal backer, King Ferdinand of Aragon, who was spending his money on Italian wars that brought him control of Naples but also deeper and deeper immersion in the quagmire of Italian politics. At the same time, he was trying to maintain his influence in the politics of Castile, which had been checked by the death of his wife, Isabella, in 1504, whereupon he had to cede control of Castile to his short-lived son-in-law, Philip of Burgundy, and his unbalanced daughter, Juana, later known as ‘the Mad’. As if these developments were not enough, he also knew that the situation in Hispaniola was deteriorating, as the governor, Ovando, struggled to keep the claims of the Columbus family at bay; every move the Spanish government made in the Caribbean seemed to be challenged by Christopher’s son Diego Colón, on the basis of the exceptionally generous grant of rights conferred on the admiral by the Catholic Monarchs way back in 1492.22
If Hispaniola was such a nightmare, the answer was to capitalize on the opportunities for finding gold in the other large Caribbean islands, beginning with Puerto Rico; Cuba was only invaded in 1511. Ponce was in Puerto Rico by 1508, if not sooner; he built a Spanish town and his stone house still survives. He tried to encourage the Taíno Indians to work with their new masters, and began to collect gold, providing the king with 10,000 pesos of tribute in 1511. But the chance that he would avoid the interference of Diego Colón was slim. In a great show of its independence from Ferdinand, the Royal Council in Castile decided that Ponce was treading on the legal rights of Diego Colón, and Ponce realized that he now had little chance of carving out a dominion in Puerto Rico. He must have known of previous attempts to explore a mainland to the north of Puerto Rico, and he was aware of legends about an island called ‘Bimini’ somewhere to the north. When in 1511 Ferdinand’s commissioner based in Hispaniola invited him to sail north, this seemed the golden opportunity to break free from the tortuous political struggles dividing supporters of the Crown, supporters of the Columbus family and the Indian chieftains that were ruining Hispaniola and had spilled over into Puerto Rico.
More controversial is the idea that Ponce de León was sent by the ageing king of Aragon to search for the ‘Fountain of Youth’.23 This fountain would restore his virility and offer him the chance to father a child by his second wife, Germaine de Foix, giving him an heir in Aragon (though not Castile, which would pass to Juana the Mad’s son, the future Habsburg emperor Charles V) – better Aragon without Castile than a Habsburg Spain. That was the practical dimension to a fantasy about the ‘Fountain of Youth’ that drew on both Indian and European myths, and acts as a reminder that the miraculous and strange were still an important part of European ideas about the New World.
II
Meanwhile, demand for maps of the lands Vespucci described grew and grew. A small coterie of scholars interested in geography gathered in the little town of Saint-Dié among the hills of Lorraine, under the patronage of their duke, René II, titular king of Naples. They reprinted one of Vespucci’s most popular pamphlets and added to it a massive world map by Martin Waldseemüller, published in 1507, which portrayed the New World as a separate pair of continents to the linked-up continents of Europe, Asia and Africa. A small part of the southern continent was labelled AMERICA in honour of Amerigo Vespucci.24 Although the west coast of South America was drawn as a straight line, for want of any information about it, only a fragment of North America was shown, and on the main map (though not in a miniature version in the margins) North and South America are separated by a short stretch of water close to the land Columbus had explored on his fourth voyage, without, obviously enough, finding such a channel. Vespucci’s explorations southwards had revealed plenty of large rivers but no seaway that would take one towards Asia. It was becoming more and more obvious that the transatlantic routes tried so far did not and could not reach the true Indies. Waldseemüller optimistically assumed that Japan lay close to South America; he had no conception of the vastness of the Pacific. At least his judgement was more accurate than that of the maker of the small globe now preserved in the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and thought to date from around 1510. There, a transatlantic continent resembling South America is labelled as ‘New World’, ‘Land of the Holy Cross’ and ‘Brazil’, while an irregular chunk of land in the eastern Indian Ocean becomes ‘Newly Discovered America’; here is the work of a cartographer who was thoroughly puzzled by the news that Vespucci had been exploring unknown lands in the Indies.25
Amid all this confusion about how to reach the Indies, John Cabot’s son Sebastian set off with two ships and a royal licence, in 1509, right at the start of the reign of Henry VIII, on a voyage to Labrador and, he hoped, the route to the wealth of Asia. He reasoned that Newfoundland was blocking the way to Asia, but the strait that he found north of the island, which was probably the entrance to the large sea that became known a century later as Hudson Bay, was full of ice and his crew refused to take the ships any further.26 In any case, Henry VII was not really interested in the sea, and his son Henry VIII was much more interested in building a fleet which would outrank that of France – one can imagine his annoyance when the French king built a ship with a tennis court and windmill on board, and his delight when it proved too heavy to float. In England, the American lands only came into focus in the second half of the sixteenth century, when Spain was a bitter enemy, and serious colonization only began when Jamestown was founded in 1607. By then Protestant England had no reason to accept the pope’s division of the world between Spain and Portuga
l.
The French also attempted to join the race to reach the spices of the Indies by choosing a westward route. The first reported journey across the Atlantic by a French ship happened, rather like Cabral’s voyage, by accident; and like Cabral its captain, Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, was not trying to reach land across the Atlantic but the ports of India. The phrase ‘reported voyage’ is important, because sceptics have argued that the surviving narrative of this voyage was cooked up in the seventeenth century to bolster French claims to authority in Madagascar, or South America, or some other land such as the massive, temperate ‘southern continent’ that was believed to encompass the bottom of the world, counterbalancing the continents of the northern hemisphere. After he published the account of Gonneville’s voyage, one of the captain’s descendants received the reward he craved and in 1666 was nominated as Papal Vicar in the southern continent.27 What follows can therefore be treated as fact or fantasy.
The Espoir, of 150 tons, is said to have set sail in 1503; its captain came from Normandy and was named Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, and before then the furthest the Espoir had ever travelled was to Hamburg. This was a private expedition, not a royal one, but Gonneville was well connected and had persuaded a group of businessmen from Honfleur to invest in his risky venture.28 Gonneville knew a certain amount about what the Portuguese had achieved in India, and he even secured the services of two Portuguese pilots, who had been out to India and who might well have been executed had they fallen into Portuguese hands.29 Nevertheless, the ship was loaded with a good supply of armaments, to fend off enemies in the Atlantic or the Indian Ocean, including cannon, harquebuses and muskets; there were enough salted fish, dried peas, local cider and water for over a year, and enough ships’ biscuit for two; and then there was the merchandise – scarlet cloths, fustians, a velvet cloth, a cloth embroidered with gold, but also simpler goods such as fifty dozen little mirrors, knives, needles and other hardware, as well as silver coins.
Claims have often been made that Norman sailors (particularly from Dieppe) knew as much about the Atlantic – or more than them – as the men of Bristol, even that they reached America a few years before Columbus in a ship commanded by a certain Jean Cousin; but like all these claims it is based on an optimistic reading of very vague evidence – in the case of Cousin the so-called evidence dates from 1785.30 More to the point – bearing in mind that Gonneville in any case was trying to round Africa – is the simple fact that the ports of Normandy were undergoing a lively revival in the late fifteenth century now that war with England was at an end, and now that the western European economy was returning to stability after a century and a half of plague and disruption.31 A school of mapmakers existed in Dieppe by 1540, though one can assume there were earlier mapmakers in the town, simply because it was home to ambitious merchants and mariners. Many of the maps seem to have been plagiarized from Portuguese models, despite the extreme reluctance of the Portuguese to permit others to peruse their charts.32
According to the surviving narrative, the Espoir set out from Honfleur on 24 June 1503; avoiding a landfall in the Spanish Canaries, the ship hugged the African coast and was fortunate to pass the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands without challenge. The crew spent ten days at Cape Verde itself, on the African coast; there, they traded some of their iron goods with the native Africans, buying chickens and couchou, ‘a sort of rice’, in other words the thick couscous still eaten there. The ship then swung out to sea, hoping to catch the Trade Winds and to be swept eastwards in the wake of da Gama. Instead, it was caught by fierce gales, and was swept westwards, as Cabral had been, though the crew were convinced that they were in the right latitude to pass the Cape of Good Hope – they saw Manche-de-velours, ‘velvet sleeves’, or penguins, which someone, no doubt the Portuguese pilots, identified as birds that lived on the southern tip of Africa. For weeks they were tossed about, and then drifted. However, on 5 January 1504 ‘they discovered a great land’, which reminded them of Normandy itself.33 The sailors felt they had gone far enough and that the ship would bear no more; they persuaded Gonneville that it was pointless to try to recover their route to India.
The inhabitants of this land were fascinated by everything they saw in the ship: ‘had the Christians been angels who had come down from heaven, they could not have been more loved by these poor Indians’. Simple items of truck like knives and mirrors meant as much to them as gold, silver or even the philosopher’s stone meant to Christians. They were particularly fascinated by the sight of written words on paper, for they could not understand how paper could be made to ‘speak’. But the spiritual dimension was not neglected by Gonneville. The Normans built a great wooden cross in time for Easter 1504, and this was carried in barefoot procession by Gonneville and his senior crew, joyously accompanied by the Indian king, Arosca, and his sons, one of whom would later join Gonneville’s ship, be taken back to Europe and marry Gonneville’s daughter. Gonneville inscribed his cross with the names of King Louis XII of France and of the pope, thereby staking some sort of French claim to these lands.34
The Espoir had no better fortune on its return journey than on its outward journey. Foul weather forced the ship to put in twice on the coast of Brazil before it was able to cross the Atlantic. They found Indians whom they regarded as more primitive than Arosca’s followers. They were cruel eaters of human flesh: au reste, cruels mangeurs d’hommes. This accusation was not levelled against Arosca’s people. No less extraordinary was evidence that these man-eaters had had some contact with Christians in recent times; they possessed some trinkets that must have come from Europe, and they were not very surprised to see the ship, though they were well aware of the threat posed by European artillery. Gonneville had probably arrived in the areas visited by the slave-raiders in the last few years. The Normans were desperate to leave, and sailed off as soon as they could; the voyage home past the Azores was slow, but it was easy enough until they came within sight of home. For as they entered the waters off Jersey and Guernsey the ship fell prey to two pirates, Edward Blunth of Plymouth and Mouris Fortin, a Breton corsair. After such a long voyage the Espoir was in no condition to escape. The pirates caught up with, pillaged and sank the ship; many of the sailors were massacred. Only twenty-eight men reached Honfleur alive; but among them were Gonneville and his future son-in-law, Essomericq, who aroused considerable wonder, ‘since there had never been anyone in France from such a distant land’.35 However, the logbook went down with the ship, and only in the nineteenth century was a detailed narrative of the voyage discovered in the archives. Gonneville had promised King Arosca that he would return after ‘twenty moons’, but he never did so, and Arosca was left wondering what had happened to his long-vanished son.
Without the backing of the French king, who was more interested in laying claim to Milan and Naples, Gonneville was unable to set in train a French bid for whatever parts of Brazil he had reached. For the time being, Portugal’s priorities remained in Africa and India and colonization was slow. Nevertheless, a small series of commercial ventures was aimed at Brazil. An expedition in 1501 reported that, frankly, there was little to be loaded apart from brazilwood. But this was a prized dyestuff that produced a rich reddish colour, so the next year a royal licence was granted to Fernão de Noronha or Loronha, a wealthy New Christian merchant, who agreed to send six ships each year to Brazil to collect brazilwood; in 1504 he brought back some parrots as well, and we also hear of monkeys being sent back to Lisbon. Noronha already knew the eastern Atlantic, trading in gold and slaves through São Tomé and Elmina, and he was thus a pioneer in joining together the three continents of Africa, Europe and South America. On his first journey to Brazil, Noronha discovered a beautiful offshore island that still carries his name.
King Manuel also wanted to know more about what had been discovered. It had become obvious that the assumption made by Cabral that the ‘Land of the Holy Cross’ was just a fairly large island did not match the news that was filtering back by way of Vespu
cci and others. The shoreline went on and on. So Vespucci was commanded to explore 300 leagues of the coast each year, and the Portuguese decided to set up a small fort, subject to a sliding scale of royal taxation, from zero in the first year to one quarter in the third year. In 1503–4 just such a fort and factory were built at Cabo Frio close to modern Rio de Janeiro, which already lay to the south of the areas Cabral is thought to have visited. It was staffed by twenty-four men.36 These ships were soon bringing back about 30,000 logs (about 750 tons) each year. The ships often carried black slaves and other labourers, whose task was to trim and cut the brazilwood. Brazil’s African connection therefore can be traced back to the very origins of Brazil itself. Here Noronha, with his interest in the African slave trade, played a crucial role. It turned out that the Tupí Indians were willing helpers too. In exchange for small items of truck, such as little mirrors, combs and scissors, they were happy to load logs on the Portuguese ships.37 A small-scale trade in Brazilian slaves also developed, war captives of the Tupís for whom the expected fate was that they would be ceremoniously killed and eaten at a cannibal feast. What they thought about escaping the cooking pot, or rather griddle, for a life of captivity is not recorded.38
In February 1511 a ship named the Bertoa set out for the factory at Cabo Frio in Brazil, where it spent two months before heading back home, reaching Lisbon in October of the same year. By good fortune a manifest listing what was on board still survives. Everything in the account of the voyage suggests that trips to South America were becoming routine: the Bertoa set out via the Canaries and returned via the Guinea coast and the Azores, making the best use of the prevailing winds. By now it will be no surprise that the principal investors included, among the Portuguese, Fernão de Noronha, and, among the Italians based in Lisbon, Bartolomeo Marchionni, although they did not travel out with the ship. One of Marchionni’s servants was aboard, however, as was one of his black slaves. The Crown also took a strong interest in the voyage, which was being conducted under royal licence, and this meant – as with the contemporary voyages to Elmina – that every stage of the journey was tightly managed and recorded. The instructions were very clear: every inch of available space was to be filled with logs of brazilwood, which seems to have left little room for the slaves, wild cats and parrots that were also to be brought back. In the end 5,008 logs were loaded, as well as thirty-six slaves, one of whom was acquired by Marchionni’s servant, who also brought back cats, monkeys, parrots and parakeets. The Bertoa was ordered not to dally in the islands or along the coasts that lay on its route back home, but to head straight for Lisbon. No harm was to be done to the natives of Brazil. Indians who insisted they wanted to come to Portugal were under no circumstances to be allowed on board; were they to die in Europe the Tupís would assume they had been eaten by the Portuguese, ‘just as they have the custom of doing among themselves’. Sailors who blasphemed were to be carried off to prison in chains when they returned to Lisbon, until they paid a hefty fine.39
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