The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Maybe he imagined that all this would deter Elcano; far from it. He loaded one ship, the Victoria, with cloves and set out for Spain by way of the Indian Ocean, carrying a crew of forty-seven sailors who had endured the voyage so far, but sixty in all as they had taken on board some native inhabitants during their travels. A handful of sailors were left in Tidore so that they could set up a Spanish base there. The other seaworthy ship, the Trinidad, would take the trans-Pacific route home with a crew of fifty-three men and nearly fifty tons of cloves, but not by way of the Strait of Magellan; the idea was to send it to Panama and then trans-ship its cargo across Central America and into the Caribbean, always assuming it could find its way and that there was anyone in Panama waiting to greet its arrival. The Trinidad struggled to find a route, ending up in the latitude of Japan and then turning back to Tidore. Alas for her, Tidore had already been visited by a Portuguese squadron which was searching for the Spanish flotilla; the Portuguese closed down the Spanish station, set up their own on Ternate, and found the Trinidad, from which they seized the cargo. Just as importantly, they seized the charts they found on board; the Portuguese were quite determined to keep knowledge of these waters a secret. If anything, the Spanish expedition had drawn the Portuguese deeper into the Spice Islands. Eventually one survivor escaped and three were sent back to Lisbon, where prison awaited them – one found that his wife had remarried, assuming he had died at sea.32 Yet the idea that the only way for Spain to maintain contact with the East Indies across the Pacific was by way of Central America, rather than through the Magellan Strait, was a sound one, as later events would show.

  Elcano also faced a Portuguese threat. His route home would take him right through the waters that the heirs of da Gama were now trying to dominate. He could expect to pass Portuguese patrols, and calling in at coastal stations to take on water and food was beyond consideration. His voyage did start well, though, with a useful visit to Timor, where excellent sandalwood was to be had. Between early February and early May he was at sea between Timor and the southern tip of Africa, sailing far to the south, avoiding Java and Sumatra, where the Portuguese were known to trade; meat taken on board turned rotten, and a landfall in south Africa took them to sterile land where no food was found: as Elcano wrote to the king of Spain after his return, ‘when we had left the last island behind, we subsisted for five months on nothing but corn, rice and water’. Fifteen Europeans and ten inhabitants of the Spice Islands died on this stretch. Worse was to come, as the Victoria still had to wend its way past the Portuguese bases in west Africa. The only solution to the lack of supplies was to put in at Ribeira Grande, the capital of the Cape Verde Islands. The crew told the Portuguese customs officials that they had got lost on their return from the Caribbean, but when an attempt was made to pay with cloves for food and slaves (needed as extra hands), it became obvious that the ship had been poaching on what the Portuguese regarded as their part of the world. Elcano was alert enough to realize that he must set sail at once, but he still had to cope with the prevailing winds, which demanded he should take a convoluted route past the Azores to reach Iberia. On 4 September his lookout spied Cape St Vincent and by 8 September the worm-eaten hulk of the Victoria was tied up on the quayside at Seville. Eighteen Europeans had survived the trip.33

  Elcano had brought specimens of the crops he had found in the Moluccas and Philippines as well as descriptions of crops he had seen and their location; the emperor was impressed enough to write to his aunt, Margaret of Austria, that ‘one of our ships has returned laden with cloves and with specimens of all the other spices, such as pepper, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and also sandalwood. Further, I have received tokens of submission from the rulers of four of the islands.’34 Elcano also brought home something much more valuable than a large cargo – intelligence about what could be found in the eastern extremities of the Spice Islands. The actual weight of the cargo he brought has been estimated at about 20,800 kg, of which more than a twentieth belonged to Elcano. This meant that the costs of the expedition were met, with a small profit – very roughly the same amount as Elcano’s share. A return of 5–6 per cent was rather feeble, but it was also obvious that the profit would be very much higher if this could made into a regular sea route.35

  V

  How to create such a sea route was the problem. The Portuguese would continue to stand in the way, denying that the large western Pacific islands fell within the Spanish half of the world. Discussions with Portugal about where the lines between the Spanish and the Portuguese hemisphere should be drawn achieved nothing, because it was impossible even to agree on where the line sliced through the Atlantic; for a start there were conflicting views about which of the scattered Cape Verde Islands should be used as marker.36 In addition, not everyone was happy about Elcano’s conduct as captain, and still less about Magellan’s, so that commissions of enquiry delayed plans for a second expedition along the same route round South America. Elcano’s fears for his life, which led Charles V to assign a bodyguard to him, were mainly prompted by the knowledge that the Portuguese would happily kill to reserve their monopoly.37 A new expedition set out in July 1525 under the leadership of Garcia Jofre de Loaísa, who was no sailor and who would therefore depend on his pilot-major – Elcano. The fleet consisted of seven ships, carrying 450 men, including four gluttons for punishment who had served with Magellan. But these men had seen what the Far East had to offer and were eager bounty hunters. Moreover, the great Augsburg banking house of the Fuggers, the wealthiest bank in Europe, was willing to invest in the expedition. No doubt this was an opportunistic throw of the dice; the Fuggers can have had few illusions about the dangers involved, whether from natural hazards or enemy attacks, but they were rich enough to be able to take a chance and threw 10,000 gold ducats into the pot. The Spanish dream was to make A Coruña in Galicia the new Lisbon, the base from which the spices of the East Indies would be shipped on to Antwerp and from there into the wider European market.38

  Though much was gained from past experience, only four ships out of seven actually reached the Strait of Magellan, and Loaísa himself died, with the result that Elcano once again found himself in charge – for a week. For he too did not survive the journey across the Pacific, and three of his brothers also died on the voyage. He had been hoping to achieve the great ambition of Christopher Columbus: to find the route to Japan. The plan was to head for Japan and then to turn southwards towards the Moluccas. The crew of the ship on which Loaísa and Elcano had been sailing did reach Tidore, only to find that the Portuguese were now installed nearby in rival Ternate, and had recently sacked Tidore. Disaster struck another ship, which struggled to reach Mexico and made contact with the conquistador Hernán Cortés. Finding Cortés was the salvation not just of these Spanish castaways but of Loaísa’s ship, which had ended up in Tidore, where the survivors spent their time fending off the Portuguese; little did they realize that they would end up spending more than a decade in these islands before being sent home.

  Cortés had already been corresponding with the Spanish court about routes to the Indies, and the court was keen for him to find out what had happened to Loaísa’s ships. With an eye on the profits he could make as an intermediary in the spice trade, he saw that a route from Mexico to the Spice Islands made much more sense than the elongated route around the bottom of South America, which risked capture in Portuguese waters off Brazil. What the Spaniards really wanted was to carry off some clove bushes and replant them in Mexico, which would render the Portuguese spice route around Africa redundant. Somehow Cortés launched three ships on the Pacific, under the command of his cousin Saavedra, who then set off for Tidore with the aim of carrying off the survivors from Loaísa’s ships (about 120 people in all). Two ships went down near Hawai’i. But in an all too typical act of the time, the crew of the third ship, the Florida, reached Tidore, looked at what was going on, decided there were too many people to take off the island, and filled its empty spaces with a cargo of cloves instead. Tr
ying to beat its way back to Mexico, the Florida made no progress and was forced to return to Tidore. Several attempts to sail away were frustrated by the winds, and all these Spaniards languished in the East Indies for years as unwilling guests of the Portuguese, who were not clear what to do with them; eventually, in 1534, most of them were sent back to Lisbon. Andrés de Urdaneta, who was on board keeping the ship’s accounts, did not reach Spain until 1536, and will be met again in a later chapter.39

  The Spaniards were keen to find out much more about the ocean Magellan had entered, with an emphasis on the Pacific shores of their growing American empire that now embraced not just Mexico but Peru. Cortés and the viceroy of New Spain, Mendoza, were eager patrons of voyages up and down the American coastlines as well, leading to the mapping of the coast of Lower and parts of Upper California between 1539 and 1542. The name most closely associated with the opening up of Upper California to Spanish shipping is that of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo (although the Chumash Indians around Santa Barbara are still there to object that they knew about the coast all along). Cabrillo set out with three ships, the largest of which was a small galleon named the San Salvador, of about 200 tons’ displacement. In many ways his most impressive achievement was the construction of these ships, as well as ships for other explorers, in an inhospitable river mouth on the Pacific coast of America. He brought in Spanish artisans and used native labour, and African slaves for the most unpleasant work: hauling objects as heavy as anchors from the Atlantic coast across to the shipyard in Guatemala. The great advantage of this site was that there was plenty of good, hard wood to be had.

  Cabrillo tested the San Salvador, and the quality of his crew, by taking the galleon on a trading voyage to Peru, where he sold horses at the highly inflated prices they then fetched in a land where they had been unknown until the arrival of Pizarro’s conquering armies a little more than a decade earlier.40 Traffic continued to grow along the stretch of coast linking Central America to Peru, so that even before the Spaniards had mastered the art of sailing right across the Pacific, they were adept at navigation along the eastern shores of the ocean. Cabrillo’s Californian voyage reached as far north as San Francisco Bay, without discovering what they had hoped to find: a channel that would enable ships to pass through the North American continent, which had a name, the Strait of Anían, but no existence. Even if they did not find the strait, there was the lure of a mythical kingdom, that of Queen Calafia, who ruled over a population of black Amazons. It was rich in gold, and man-eating griffins were used to carry heavy goods around.41

  Elcano and the Victoria had crossed three oceans. A few Portuguese had already passed all the way through the Atlantic, had crossed the Indian Ocean and had penetrated the Pacific as far as the eastern Spice Islands. But the sheer stamina, determination and fortitude involved in bringing one ship the whole way around the world continues to astonish. It might seem odd, then, to finish this chapter on a negative note, not just because Magellan, Elcano and Loaísa were not thinking of circumnavigating the world when they planned their expeditions, but because the route taken by the Victoria was proved not really to work. More thought was needed about how to extend Spanish dominion across the Pacific, and about how to use a route from Mexico to the Spice Islands in order to ferry silks, spices and porcelain from the Far East to America and Europe.

  32

  A New Atlantic

  I

  Even though Columbus took a long while to set foot on the American mainland and even though he soon became persona non grata in Hispaniola, his voyages completely transformed Atlantic navigation. Spanish sailors seized the opportunity to look for profit in the New World with enthusiasm. The constant warnings from Queen Isabella that they must take care not to enslave the native population, at least on those islands that were claimed by the Spanish Crown, provides clear evidence that this did happen on an increasing scale by 1500, as does the complete depopulation of the Bahamas by about 1520, after their inhabitants were carried off to work in the gold mines and sugar plantations that were the main attraction of Hispaniola, or were captured by slavers. The history of European relations with the Taínos of Hispaniola and neighbouring islands offers a devastating indictment of Spanish policy in the New World, even if no one could have predicted that the arrival of European diseases such as smallpox would wipe out tens, and maybe hundreds, of thousands of Taínos before these diseases wreaked even worse havoc on the American mainland. The increasing demands laid upon the Taínos by Columbus and his successors also destroyed their communities: backbreaking work in the gold fields demanded more energy than their simple diet of cassava bread could supply; the separation of males from their families meant that the birth rate fell – these and other changes wiped out the Taínos within thirty years of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. The persistent pleas of the Dominican friars Montesinos and Las Casas, enriched by terrifying stories of the mistreatment of the Indians (treated like ‘excrement’ according to Las Casas), fell on deaf ears in the Caribbean. Eventually, it is true, Las Casas gained an audience among conscience-stricken courtiers back in Spain. By then it was too late. Isabella’s great-grandson Philip II sat on the Spanish throne. The Taínos had long ago disappeared.1

  Today, the genetic profile of the inhabitants of the Dominican Republic, constituting the greater part of Hispaniola, reveals how massive this collapse in population actually was: taken as a whole, modern Dominicans are 29 per cent southern European in ancestry (including 0.5 per cent Neanderthal), and only 3.6 per cent Taíno. The largest single element in Dominican DNA is west African, accounting for nearly 45 per cent, with a further scattering of DNA from central and southern Africa.2 Denuded of native workers, the Spanish lords of the Caribbean began to import thousands of west Africans, easily available by way of the Portuguese trading stations on the other side of the Atlantic. The Spaniards were already perfectly familiar with slaves from sub-Saharan Africa, many of whom could be found on the streets of Seville around 1500; indeed, if there was one city where black slaves abounded, it was this great port with its ready access to both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean trade routes.3 Still, the Africans of Seville were by and large domestic slaves, in a longstanding Mediterranean tradition.

  After 1500 the purchase of slaves for hard work in mines and plantations became ever more widespread. Those slaves who survived the ‘Middle Passage’, the journey across the Atlantic, were likely to be robust and resilient, and the constant flow of African labour into the Caribbean, and, once the Portuguese decided to capitalize on its resources, into Brazil, meant that high mortality among the African workers was not seen as a problem: they could be replaced, since the source of labour seemed to be bottomless: African war captives and other victims of internecine conflict in west Africa. For much of his career, Las Casas was so obsessed (with good reason) by the fate of the American Indians that he failed to register the appalling realities of the slave trade out of Africa. He was aware that the Indians were, legally, free subjects of the Crown, and had less sympathy for those who arrived as slaves in the New World, people who had never been subjects of the Spanish kings but had already lost their freedom before they were passed along the trade routes by the Portuguese.

  The infrastructure for this shameful trade was in place now that the Portuguese had established their bases in west Africa. Elmina in Ghana became a centre for the trade in gold and slaves ten years before Columbus reached the New World. War captives were sent down to Elmina and trading stations on the west coast of Africa by the African allies of the Portuguese – noble prisoners of war, peasant farmers, women and children. Elmina itself had only limited holding facilities; but the Cape Verde Islands were the perfect base for a transatlantic slave trade, a collection point that lay astride one of the obvious routes to the Caribbean. Thus there was no need to go to the slave market in Lisbon or Seville to buy slaves. The economy of the Cape Verde Islands was transformed by the growing demand for African slaves. Originally, many of them had been kept o
n the islands in the hope that they could conjure life out of the poor soil of the islands. This was not a success. The transit trade to the Americas began in earnest in 1510. After that, the islands’ slaves fell into three categories: ‘trade slaves’, destined for the slave market in Portugal or, increasingly, America; ‘work slaves’, for sugar and other plantations on the Cape Verde Islands; and domestic slaves, bought to serve in settler households, who were certainly the most fortunate. In recognition of its growing importance, Ribeira Grande – which was not at all grande – was granted city status in 1533, when it became the seat of the Portuguese bishop responsible for west Africa. Even so, most of those who slept in the little city were merchants and slaves who were passing through the islands. Even towards the end of the century there were probably only about 1,700 settlers in the whole archipelago, and about six times as many slaves.4