The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Since the time of Mehmet the Conqueror, in the mid- to late fifteenth century, the Ottoman court had taken an interest in Western art and letters; but Piri Reis’s connections went deeper, since he had access to secret information. He drew on a very wide range of sources, not by any means all Islamic; the Ottomans were well acquainted with the portolan charts produced by the Catalans, Genoese and Venetians, and a good number of Turkish versions of these maps survive from the period of Piri Reis.48 Piri would have been perfectly familiar with this type of map from his time as a corsair in the western Mediterranean. He said that he used twenty individual maps as well as several world maps to complete his map of 1513; these included an Arab map of India and a Portuguese map of both India and China.49 How he obtained these is a puzzle, especially since the Portuguese were so careful to embargo any information about their discoveries, particularly maps. Further evidence that the Ottomans gained access to western European maps comes from an extraordinary world map of 1519 made in Portugal but preserved in the Topkapı Palace Library in Istanbul. The map shows a circular projection with the South Pole at the centre; it is thus a global map of the southern hemisphere, conceivably created in Lisbon by the court cartographer, Pedro Reinel, and anticipating the route taken by Magellan and Elcano – Magellan would have displayed similar maps while attempting to gain attention first at the court of King Manuel and then at that of Emperor Charles.50 Quite how such a map reached the Ottoman court is a great mystery. The finger has been pointed at Venetian spies, or one could think of Portuguese New Christians of Jewish origin who fled their homeland for the safer setting of the sultan’s capital city. Its apparent theft and its arrival in Istanbul would certainly make an ideal topic for a novel by Orhan Pamuk.

  The surviving maps of 1513 and 1528 are just fragments of larger charts showing the entire world, maybe one quarter and one sixth of the total, preserved by accident – most likely they were the parts of the bigger chart that were thought to be not very interesting, while the other parts, showing the Indian Ocean, were worn to bits.51 For these fragments both show the New World, but in a way that would have removed any Turkish fears that Spanish or Portuguese navigators had found a back door into the Spice Islands by taking a westward route across the Atlantic. South America slants south-eastwards and joins a massive southern continent, and there is no break anywhere along the Atlantic coast letting ships pass through somewhere around Panama.52 The 1513 map shows a number of beautifully drawn ships, such as the ship of ‘Mesir Anton the Genoese’, Antonio da Noli, discoverer of the Cape Verde Islands.53 One ship, standing off the coast of South America, carries this label: ‘this is the barque from Portugal that encountered a storm and came to this land’, and another label on the map describes how a Portuguese ship bound for India was blown on to the shores of a new land. Piri knew, correctly, that a ship had been sent back to Portugal with news of the discovery of Brazil, although he did not know that there was a larger fleet that carried on to India. Another label, placed over the point where South America merges into the great southern continent, begins: ‘it is related by the Portuguese infidel that in this place night and day are, at their shortest period, of two hours’ duration’, which shows that Piri Reis was using Portuguese sources of information, and very early ones at that – Magellan had yet to sail, but Vespucci claimed to have reached a long way down the South American coast.54

  Piri Reis was aware of the importance of Columbus, to whom he devoted another label, much the longest on the map. There were quite a few crossed wires: he told how ‘Qulunbu’ had presented his idea about crossing the ocean to ‘the eminent men of Genoa’, who replied: ‘O foolish man, the end and boundary of the world is to be found in the West. It is full of the mist of darkness.’ But Piri’s uncle, Kemal Reis, had a Spanish prisoner who claimed to have travelled to the newly discovered land with Qulunbu on three occasions. After a long description of the lands Qulunbu visited, Piri Reis remarked: ‘now these regions have been opened to all and have become well known … The coasts and islands on this map are copied from the map of Qulunbu.’55 Piri tried to reproduce the names of places all along the shores he was mapping, and in the Atlantic islands in between. He understood the importance of this information not just in the grand strategy of the Ottoman Empire face to face with Spain and Portugal, but also as valuable knowledge about the world. In that sense he was the intellectual kinsman of the geographers of Renaissance Spain and Italy, even if he wrote in the Turkish vernacular. This does not mean that he was any the less agitated about the intrusion of Christian infidels into the Indian Ocean or that he had any positive feelings towards the Portuguese whose maps he had been exploiting:

  Know that Hormuz is an island. Many merchants visit it … but now, O friend, the Portuguese have come there and built a stronghold on its cape. They control the place and collect the customs – you see into what condition that province has sunk! The Portuguese have vanquished the natives, and their own merchants crowd the warehouses there. Whatever the season, trading cannot happen now without the Portuguese.56

  Piri Reis understood, then, that the European irruption into the Indian Ocean had dramatically changed the political and commercial relationship between the Ottoman lands and the rest of the world. Yet, paradoxically, his warnings about the Portuguese were based on knowledge he had derived in part from Spanish and Portuguese maps. Both the Ottomans and the Iberians had acquired a much larger view of a world joined together by maritime connections.

  34

  The Great Galleons of Manila

  I

  The Ottomans were not alone in wishing the Portuguese ill-fortune in the Indian Ocean. When Andrés de Urdaneta reached the court of Charles V at Valladolid in 1536, after more than eleven years spent stuck in the East Indies under Portuguese detention, he was not discouraged by his experiences. He was still young, twenty-eight years old. He could only deliver a verbal report, after the Portuguese had confiscated all his maps and papers, but ‘he was very well informed, and able to relate, stage by stage, all that he had seen’, according to the polymath natural historian Oviedo, who witnessed his performance.1 Forty-four years had passed since Columbus had set out for the Spice Islands by the western route, and Urdaneta was keen to show that a western route was still feasible, even with America in the way and the Pacific to be mastered. He told the emperor: ‘If Your Majesty were pleased to order commerce to be maintained with the Moluccas, there might be brought from there every year over 6,000 quintales of cloves [roughly 600,000 lb], and there are years when there is a harvest of more than 11,000 quintales.’ In addition, gold, nutmeg and mace could be found there; ‘there are many rich and valuable conquests to be made round the Moluccas, and many lands with much trade, including China, with which communication might be made from the Moluccas.’2 It was still unclear whether the Moluccas lay in the Spanish or Portuguese half of the world, as defined by the treaty of 1494, but seven years earlier Charles had renounced Spanish claims in return for a cash payment from Portugal of 350,000 ducats, which was much-needed money at a time when Charles was busy with his Italian wars.3 As the Spaniards consolidated their hold on Mexico, under Cortés, and Peru, under Pizarro, it became clear that vast amounts of silver could be extracted from the New World, and the Genoese were willing to advance money in anticipation of the arrival of the silver fleets from America.4 Charles therefore had reason to believe his money worries would come to an end.

  This explains the rather slow progress the Spaniards made in marking out those parts of the western Pacific that they wanted to take under their control. Gradually they learned that the Pacific was studded with islands, but they took little interest in them – an expedition in 1536 headed into the south Pacific and saw the Kiribati Islands, but the captain, Grijalva, decided he would rather return to South America than press on to the Spice Islands. However, his crew mutinied and killed him. Grijalva had had cogent reasons for avoiding the Moluccas: he knew that Charles V had ceded the islands to the Portuguese, and en
gaging with the Portuguese was always the great fear of Spanish commanders en route to the East Indies. The sailors reached the Moluccas after all and most were massacred by irate islanders, but two fell into the hands of the Portuguese, with the result that their unsavoury story can be told.5 Still, the gaps in the Spanish map of the Pacific were gradually being filled in. In 1542 the Spaniards extended their ambitions all the way to the Ryukyu Islands, which, as has been seen, were lively centres of trade with China and Japan. The idea that was germinating in the minds of the Spaniards was that they could use the Philippines (not as yet known by that name) as a base from which to trade with east Asia. They did not rate the Philippines themselves very highly; greedy for cloves and nutmeg, which fetched startling prices in the Antwerp market, they were disappointed to find that the Philippines could not offer them either spice.

  In 1542 the viceroy of New Spain (that is, Mexico) despatched his brother-in-law, Villalobos, to the Philippines, where his crew was at first discouraged to find that the inhabitants did not bother, or need, to produce a surplus and had no food to offer. Before long they were reduced to a diet of grubs, psychedelic crabmeat and luminous but poisonous lizards. Yet the Spaniards could see the potential of these islands not as sources of wealth in their own right but as a strategic location looking towards Borneo, China and Melaka, and they were impressed to find a market on the island of Sarangani, where the Spanish crew spent seven hungry months; here, silk, porcelain and gold were to be had. When a local king based on a neighbouring island offered the Spaniards plenty of food and water, and showed them his wooden palace with its collection of Chinese pottery and silk, Villalobos decided that, henceforth, the island group would be known as the Philippines in celebration of the heir to the throne of Castile, the future King Philip II, an honour that meant far more to the Habsburg dynasty in Spain than to this king.6 But once again the explorers were stymied by their ignorance of the prevailing winds in the Pacific; when they tried to reach Mexico, they could not make any headway, and Villalobos died on Amboyna, an island west of New Guinea, in 1544. The Spaniards began, however, to see that the Philippines were not a complete desert, even if they were less sophisticated than some parts of the East Indies. The native peoples wore gold ornaments made out of local metal; there was cinnamon bark; and ginger, long the second most popular eastern spice, grew in the islands. The inhabitants were drawn from several peoples; the area had been settled in the remote past by Malay navigators, and the different languages spoken in the Philippines were related to Malay and the Polynesian languages. The coastal peoples had often retained the skill in seamanship for which the Pacific peoples are famous.7

  The problem was that the Philippines seemed so inaccessible. Only in the 1550s did the Spanish king, now Philip II, decide that the time was ripe for a new expedition, and his decision may have been influenced by short-term inflation in the spice market: between 1558 and 1563 spice prices nearly trebled in Old Castile, and cloves and cinnamon were particularly badly affected. Quite why this occurred is not clear – one explanation is runaway speculation in the spice market of Antwerp.8 The plan to reach the Philippines was all very well, but the question remained whether there was anyone who knew enough about the Pacific to guide a new venture across the ocean. There was one person: Andrés de Urdaneta, who, moreover, was conveniently convinced that the Philippines lay within the Spanish hemisphere of the world. However, Urdaneta was well into his fifties and had entered a convent of Augustinian friars; no one in his right mind wanted to join such a risky voyage, which ensured that many of the crew were not Spanish at all but Portuguese, Italian, Flemish and even Greek. But a personal appeal from the king of Spain to Urdaneta persuaded him to leave his convent and take up the position of senior pilot, advising the captain-general, Miguel López de Legázpi.9

  The fleet was to consist of two galleons and three smaller vessels, and the first problem was that no shipyard capable of building large galleons existed on the Pacific shore of Mexico. Everything had to be created from scratch, including a workforce; and the right sorts of wood had to be obtained and hauled down to the coast. The cost of building this tiny fleet was 7,000,000 pesos.10 It set out from Navidad, a port on the Pacific coast of Mexico, late in 1564.11 One of the small ships, of a type known as the patache, or pinnace, became detached from the rest of the flotilla but reached Mindanao in the Philippines on its own; after patiently waiting for the other ships, which had headed off elsewhere, its captain, Arellano, decided that he did not have enough food to stay any longer and returned to Mexico, having spent eight and a half months away from Navidad. This was the first really successful return journey, because Arellano had the good sense to seek out the east winds that would blow his ship back to the Americas. In the process he discovered a route back from the Philippines, ignorance of which had frustrated previous attempts to reach Mexico. There was a Kafkaesque finale, though: he was accused of abandoning his commander and avoiding any attempt to find him in the Philippines. After his own return to Mexico, Legázpi submitted a request to the Audiencia, the highest court in New Spain, demanding that Arellano be put on trial. Arellano was forced to defend his conduct before the Audiencia but he was never actually punished for his supposed crime.12

  As for Legázpi, he made good progress in extending Spanish dominion over the Philippines. Local rulers, including Muslim ones, were willing to enter into pacts with him when they saw the glitter of American silver, invaluable in trade with China. When the Filipinos objected, Spanish firepower proved irresistible. Less blood was spilled than during the Portuguese entry into the Indian Ocean, but Legázpi could be ruthless when he thought occasion demanded a show of strength. His expedition was not all about conquest, however; he informed King Philip that Chinese and Japanese merchants came to trade in the big Philippine islands of Luzon and Mindoro year in, year out; but he was also aware that he had come into an area where Portuguese merchants occasionally wended their way. To keep them at bay he really needed a base in the islands, and he needed to convince the local sultans, even if they were Muslim, that Spanish overlordship was a good thing.13

  Like Arellano, Legázpi’s men found their way back to Mexico. Urdaneta once again proved to be an able pilot, and the maps he made were not, this time, lost to the Portuguese but were copied for generations. He found a much better route than Arellano, but even so the voyage from the Philippines to Mexico proved to be much longer than the journey outwards; the south-west monsoon took the galleon San Pedro (sometimes referred to as the San Pablo) up to the latitude of Japan, and then into the wind system of the northern Pacific, which drove the ship eastwards in a great arc until it reached the Santa Barbara Channel off California.14 It took a little over four months for the galleon to reach Acapulco, in October 1565. The bare recitation of the route taken does not do justice to the misery the sailors experienced on the long homeward run. As with da Gama’s fleets, scurvy took the lives of several men (sixteen died en route, but the crew numbered more than 200, so the ratio of deaths was much better than on many earlier voyages). The Legázpi expedition is generally taken to mark the beginning of the Manila galleon trade, which lasted for 250 years from 1565 to 1815, punctuated by occasional interruptions during periods of conflict or following the shipwreck of a galleon.15 These galleons frequently displaced 1,000 tons and were perhaps the largest trading ships afloat at the time.

  Once they lay under Spanish rule the Philippines were treated as part of the viceroyalty of New Spain, in other words as an extension of Mexico; and the inhabitants, like the native Americans, were indiscriminately called ‘Indians’, Indios, or, in the case of the large number of Muslims in some parts of the archipelago, they were called ‘Moors’, Moros. These were the traditional broad-brush ethnic categories into which the Spaniards divided much of humanity.

  II

  While the circumnavigators, notably Magellan and Elcano and then Drake, have attracted a great deal of attention, the really important circumnavigation, conducted in stages, w
as that which was created following the opening of the Manila galleon route, and this has been oddly ignored by historians.16 The Philippines were linked to China and Japan, but also to Mexico and Peru; goods transported across Central America reached Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico, were ferried to Havana and were then carried across the Atlantic to Seville and Cádiz. And in the opposite direction, despite the longstanding hostility between the Spanish colonizers and the Portuguese, goods filtered from Manila to Macau, Melaka, Goa and then into the Portuguese spice trading network all the way to Lisbon and Antwerp. The oceans had been joined together, and the nails that held the network together were all these cities. Chinese silk and ceramics might reach a table in Spain by way of Mexico or the Cape of Good Hope. Spanish hidalgos in Mexico, and the native elite, could dine off Chinese porcelain and dress in fine silks brought by galleon once a year from Manila.17 For, as the Spaniards and their Portuguese rivals penetrated deeper into the trade networks of the South China Sea, the search for ever greater quantities of spices was matched by a passion for the exotic products of both China and Japan. These ambitions were independently boosted by the decision of the Ming emperor in 1567 to permit Chinese merchants to trade abroad, after a century and half during which the Ming court had strongly discouraged foreign trade.18

  To achieve their aims the Spaniards would have to identify the best-placed harbour from which they could conduct their trade. An expedition sent out in 1570 had the pleasing result that the sultan of Manila, a settlement on the island of Luzon, entered into a pact of blood brotherhood, in the traditional way (which involved drinking a liquid containing drops of the blood of the parties to the agreement). However, there is a difference between sworn amity and submission, and Sultan Soliman was upset when he realized that the Spaniards now thought he was their subject and owed the king of Spain tribute. This meant that the Spaniards resorted to force, but in 1571 they formally established Manila as the capital of their Philippine colony, a title confirmed by King Philip in 1595, when the city, now booming, was recognized as Cabeza, head, de Filipinas.19 The Chinese had their own story about the foundation of Manila: