The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Brazil was, then, a sideline, valued up to a point but not able to compare with Elmina or the India trade as a source of profit. Still, the arrival of loggers in Brazil was the first stage in the binding together of this corner of the Portuguese Empire with lands in Europe, Africa and Asia; after 1500 Portugal had a stake in four continents and two oceans.

  III

  It has been seen that French interlopers planned to reach the Indian Ocean but arrived in Brazil instead. By 1500 the reach of Dieppe extended as far as Seville in one direction and the Danish Sound in the other; among the products that reached Dieppe in this period was Madeiran sugar, brought from Portugal, while Norman ships even edged their way into the trade out of Morocco and Guinea, which the Portuguese were unable to seal off hermetically. Gonneville’s expedition, if it really took place, was an exceptionally ambitious example of this constant attempt to break the Portuguese monopoly on movement across the ocean. The Normans were as adept at piracy as they were at trade, exploiting the rivalry between the French king and the duke of Burgundy in the 1470s to prey on ships trading with Burgundian Flanders. The Portuguese often thought of the Normans as ‘thieves’, accusing them of greed and jealousy towards the ever-growing wealth of Portugal.40 Meanwhile the Bretons established a reputation as hardy fishermen, leaving open the possibility that they, like the Bristolians, occasionally crossed to the Newfoundland Grand Banks in search of cod even before Cabot’s first voyage; and they were certainly there by 1514, when the monks of Beauport were levying a tax on cod brought back to Brittany from Newfoundland. In 1508 a Norman, Jean Aubert, sailing out of Dieppe, reached as far as Newfoundland and brought back seven Mic-Mac Indians, the first north Americans to be seen in France.41

  One family, the Angos of Dieppe, played a particularly prominent role in the creation of the French merchant marine. Jean Ango the Elder was a fairly typical merchant, dealing in herrings, barley and other humdrum products (though also some sugar) during the 1470s and 1480s. However, his son, also Jean, greatly enlarged the family business; his interest in the sea was intellectual as well as commercial, for he seems to have received a rich education in geography, hydrography, mathematics and literature. His trade in England and Flanders brought him great wealth – he was still alive in 1541, when a report on his activities was sent to no less a person than the Holy Roman Emperor, describing Ango as ‘a most rich person’, and noting that ‘because of his trading affairs, people call him the Viscount of Dieppe’. This also made his ships obvious targets for attack by the Portuguese: he lost boats to them off Guinea, but it is hard to see how he could complain, as his way of tapping into Portuguese trade with the Indies, or the sugar trade out of Madeira, was to launch pirate attacks on ships returning from those parts loaded with precious cargoes. The booty included Chinese silk and jewels that originated in Bengal and China. At least a million ducats’ worth of loot was seized by Ango’s pirates between 1520 and 1540.42 Ango was presented to the king and became a favourite of the king’s sister, Marguerite of Navarre, the famous author of the Heptaméron.

  The king took an increasing interest in the possibilities for trade in Asiatic spices by way of the western Atlantic. By the 1520s Francis I was determined to receive a cut of transatlantic trade and gave his backing to the plans of Giovanni da Verrazano, a Florentine navigator who also had the support of Jean Ango and – not surprisingly – of Italian merchants, though from Lyons rather than Dieppe; and he made use of the new and successful Norman port of Le Havre as departure point.43 Verrazano’s name is now commemorated in a bridge linking Brooklyn to Staten Island, although the aim of his expedition was not to explore the coast of North America but to find a way to Asia: ‘my intention on this voyage was to reach Cathay and the extreme eastern coast of Asia, but I did not expect to find such an obstacle of new land as I have found.’44 He concluded that the continent he reached in 1524 was bigger than Europe or Africa, and maybe even Asia. He had hoped that he could find a route round the top of the newly discovered continent, the North-West Passage; he may well have known that Magellan had recently explored the southern tip of the Americas, which did not seem to offer a promising route to the Indies; a big ocean west of America had already been spied out by the Spanish commander Balboa standing on his ‘peak in Darien’ in 1513.45 But if one could go round the bottom, maybe one could go round the top, an idea which shows that the assumption that the Americas were a gigantic isthmus sticking out of Asia was beginning to lose its power. Verrazano was chapitano dell’Armata per l’India, ‘captain of the India Fleet’, engaged on a voyage to the espiceryes des Indes, ‘the spice-lands of the Indies’, and as far as can be seen the idea of taking this route was his own.46

  Verrazano has divided historians. In 1875 Henry Murphy looked closely at the documents and concluded that Verrazano’s description of his voyage was a fiction built out of earlier descriptions of the coasts and peoples of the New World.47 For a time that seemed to be the end of the matter, and Verrazano dropped out of history. That his systematic demolition of the story Verrazano told was rather too enthusiastic was proved when a new manuscript came to light in 1909; it is now impossible to doubt that the voyage of 1524 took place. But that is not to say that his letter contains accurate information; he may well have inflated his account, rather as Vespucci did, in order to impress his audience, especially if the audience included the vain King Francis. Murphy may not have been completely wrong. What is clear is that Verrazano sailed out on a second voyage in 1526. His fleet of four ships was scattered, and he reached Brazil, where he loaded brazilwood; but one of his ships entered the Indian Ocean, apparently trying to reach Madagascar. Instead it was blown towards Sumatra and then made its way back past the Maldives to Mozambique, where the Portuguese governor took charge of the crew and reported back to Lisbon in alarm.48 Verrazano had apparently abandoned his idea of looking for a North-West Passage, and the obvious alternative was to break the Portuguese monopoly on the spice trade linking the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. But the voyage can hardly be called a success. On his third voyage, in 1528, Verrazano is said to have been eaten by cannibals, though this did not deter his brother from making another remarkable voyage the next year, from Le Havre to Brazil, then through the Mediterranean to Alexandria and back to Le Havre.49 Long and ambitious voyages in search of spices had become the trademark of the Verrazanos.

  The story of the Verrazanos takes one well into the sixteenth century. However, they built cleverly on the information acquired by an earlier generation, that of Jean Ango the Elder, which was also the generation of Columbus and Cabot. They shared with Columbus and Cabot the backing of Florentine businessmen who were willing to chance several thousand ducats on the possibility – and, increasingly, the likelihood – that these voyages would produce valuable returns. In the three decades after Columbus first arrived in the Bahamas, roving explorers were increasingly outnumbered by fleets of merchant ships that knew exactly where they were going and had a good enough understanding of the seasons (vital in the hurricane-ridden Caribbean) to reach their destination safely. Although it has been suggested that in these decades roughly one fifth of the ships on the India route eventually foundered, this figure does not mean that one in five voyages ended in disaster, as ships were reused, repaired and given new life. Many ended their days being broken up so their timbers could be recirculated. The transatlantic crossing had become a trade route.

  31

  The Binding of the Oceans

  I

  And then there was the third great ocean. The first person to set eyes on it and to realize that another expanse of water separated the newly discovered continents from Cipangu and Cathay was Juan Núñez de Balboa, a Spanish conquistador who in 1513 was trying to create a Spanish settlement on the coast of Panama. His discovery was commemorated, under the wrong name, by John Keats:

  Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

  He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men

  Look’d at each other wit
h a wild surmise –

  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.1

  Advised that Balboa, not Cortés, had stood upon that peak, Keats retained the name of Cortés, so that the scansion would not be ruined. Yet Cortés, conqueror of Mexico, also enters the story: at this point he was secretary to the governor of Cuba, which the Spaniards had invaded in 1511, and, as voyages to the coast of Central America became more frequent, news of a civilization rich in gold somewhere in the interior began to spread.2 Moreover, Ponce de León’s discovery of Florida suggested that the big continent to the north was probably connected by land to the big continent to the south.

  If there was no route across Central America, there were three options. An icy North-West Passage over the top of America might be accessible if Asia and North America were not joined together, as they were often thought to be. This was an idea that motivated Sebastian Cabot as he tried to follow up his father’s discoveries, and it was still alive in 1845, when Sir John Franklin led his ill-fated expedition into the ice floes of northern Canada.3 Another Arctic route entered the calculations of mid-sixteenth-century English explorers, who wondered whether a North-East Passage over the top of Russia all the way to China was feasible.4 Both of these ideas, or rather fantasies, will be examined in another chapter. But there was a third possibility, based on Vespucci’s observations, accurate and otherwise, about the extended coastline of South America. Just as Catalan and Portuguese explorers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had imagined that a channel or river might cut right across Africa, Spanish explorers now held out hope for a more direct route to the Spice Islands rather than the long haul around south Africa through hostile waters in which, as will be seen, Ottoman navies contested control with the sparse and scattered fleets of Portugal. A route round South America might offer Spain its chance to dominate the spice trade, by taking the spices eastwards out of the Indies towards America and then Europe.

  At the end of his life King Ferdinand of Aragon was playing with several ideas about how he might challenge Portugal’s dominance of the oceanic trade in spices. It makes sense to use the adjective ‘oceanic’ because there were still spices to be had in the eastern Mediterranean, though the conquest of Egypt and Syria by the Ottoman Turks had only increased the risks of going to Alexandria and Beirut to buy them. In 1512 Ferdinand gave his support to a plan to send ships round the Cape of Good Hope, in the wake of Portuguese ships; the target was to be Maluco, the Moluccas, ‘which lie within our demarcation’, and ultimately China, but the challenge to the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean was too obvious, and the scheme never materialized. Three years later he commissioned the same commander, Juan de Solís, to lead a voyage westwards that would find a way round the bottom of, or through the middle of, South America. Solís discovered the River Plate in 1516, and thought it was a freshwater sea that would take him to the Spice Islands. However, Solís fell out with the Indians and was killed, so the survivors turned back to Spain.5

  II

  The same idea motivated Ferdinand Magellan when he approached the Spanish court with a proposal to reach the Spice Islands by way of a South-West Passage. He was born as Fernão de Magalhães in Portugal and was a member of the minor nobility; he also had close experience of Indian Ocean waters, for he sailed out to India in 1505 under the Portuguese commander Francisco de Almeida, visiting Mombasa, where the local ruler was summarily deposed; Kilwa, which was sacked; and Cochin, where he saw the spices of the East being loaded on board. He went out again in 1507, and apparently stayed in the Indian Ocean for several years. The fleet on which he was serving visited Melaka, which Portugal seized in 1511. He acquired a Sumatran servant, whom he baptized under the name ‘Enrique’, and whom he brought back to Europe in around 1512.6 One of his companions was Francisco Serrão, a Portuguese officer, who made quite a reputation for himself in engagements with hostile forces on the ground.

  Lured eastwards by his wish to penetrate deep into the Spice Islands, Serrão reached the Molucca chain, finding islands almost unbelievably rich in nutmeg. The Moluccas lie at the eastern end of the Spice Islands, to the west of New Guinea, north-east of the eastern tip of Java and south of the Philippines; even by the standards of the ancient trade routes of the East Indies they were remote. But remoteness did not erode their fame – rather the opposite; these were seen as the most desirable of all the Spice Islands. After a number of adventures, during which he lost his ship and took over a pirate vessel that had been chasing him, Serrão sorted out a bitter dispute between the rival Moluccan sultans of Ternate and Tidore, both of whom were Muslim. The sultan of Ternate was so impressed that he appointed this Portuguese Christian as his vizier. Serrão sent letters to Magellan in Melaka in which he told of his luxurious life at the court of the sultan of Ternate, and described the lush lands full of precious spices in which he now lived: ‘I have found here a New World richer and greater than that of Vasco da Gama.’7 India was already an extraordinary distance by sea from Portugal, Melaka another great leap, but reaching the Moluccas meant making a half-circle around the world. Serrão was very possibly the first European to find his way to the Moluccas, and it is one of those constant ironies of the age of exploration that his extraordinary career has received so little attention. (A rival case can be made for the Italian traveller Ludovico di Varthema, who travelled extensively in Asia between 1503 and 1508 and claimed to have seen cloves growing in a place he called Monoch, which may be one of the Moluccas.)8 Serrão showed that it was all very well to control Melaka, but Melaka was itself the main point of trans-shipment for the spices that came from still further to the east; and, while the pepper of south India was a great prize, the cloves, cinnamon and camphor of the Spice Islands might be accessible at their point of origin. This would be the culmination of all those schemes to reach the source of spices, for the Portuguese still relied on middlemen to obtain the spices they bought in Melaka.

  Magellan therefore knew a great deal about the lands he was trying to reach from personal experience and from his friend’s enthusiastic letter; and Varthema’s book of travels had been published in 1510. However, despite his rich experience, Magellan was not made welcome at the Portuguese court, where he was accused of trading illicitly with the Moors in north Africa; and King Manuel was determined to press on with what had already been achieved by breaking into the Indian Ocean.9 The Portuguese capture of Melaka in 1511 seemed to guarantee access to the Spice Islands through the traditional routes followed by Indian Ocean navigators over many centuries. There was no obvious reason to look for a westward route, especially because this would dissipate precious resources that needed to be spent on keeping open the supply lines through Guinea, south Africa and the Indian ports where Portuguese factories had been established.10

  Selling the scheme to the new king of Castile, Charles of Ghent, was therefore somewhat easier than selling it to King Manuel. It is important to realize that Magellan never had it in mind to circumnavigate the globe, for all his extraordinary achievements.11 The purpose of his expedition was to reach the East Indies, to load his ships with spices, and to return the way he had come; the fundamental error, which he shared with Columbus, was to assume that the distance between Europe and Asia, sailing westwards, was much smaller than it actually is. Moreover, Magellan was killed in the Philippines at a point 124°E, and did not enter the Indian Ocean. (He had, however, sailed as far east as 128°E earlier in his career, so that he went round the world in separate journeys.)12 The captain who did leave from and return to Seville was the Basque Juan Sebastian Elcano, who took command of the expedition after Magellan was killed and managed to steer one leaky, rotten hull back to Spain through the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, travelling through four oceans, since he sailed through the Atlantic twice. Nor did Magellan open a regular route linking Spain to its Pacific Ocean possessions in the Philippines; as will be seen, the solution to the question of how to reach those islands was quite different. None of these reservations undermines the claim of the Magellan�
��Elcano voyage of 1519–22 to be the most ambitious and impressive act of seamanship in the age of discovery. But, as with Columbus, what was planned and what was achieved were very different.

  The basis for Magellan’s expedition had to be the past agreements between the kings of Castile and Portugal, mediated by the pope. But one can also see the influence of past agreements at a lower level: as in the case of Columbus, Magellan and a cartographer named Faleiro were to enjoy a monopoly on trade to the lands they found, but the Crown had learned a little from its mistakes, and this monopoly was limited to ten years, to avoid the endless lawsuits that were still being pressed by Columbus’s heirs. They also received handsome tax privileges, 20 per cent of the profits from the first voyage, and the hereditary office of governor of the lands they brought under Spanish rule, always bearing in mind the need to avoid interfering in lands that lay under Portuguese rule. This, however, was the real complication: Magellan and Faleiro had managed to persuade King Charles that the Moluccas lay within the Spanish half of the world, assuming one could extend the Tordesillas line through the North and South Poles and wrap it round the world, but there was no chance the Portuguese court would accept that. Faleiro has been described as ‘something of a madman’, ‘a brilliant but deranged man’, who encouraged Magellan to underestimate the breadth of the Pacific, rather as Columbus had underestimated the distance to Cipangu and Cathay.13