Dom Pedro’s principal aim in this was to link Portugal with isolated Christian communities in the East supposedly founded by the apostle Saint Thomas, to encircle Islam and to find a new way to Cathay – a route urgently needed, for while Dom Pedro was travelling, the borders of Egypt were sealed by the Mamluk sultans who ruled the country. By the end of 1421, the Ottomans, who were already in possession of Asia Minor, had surrounded Byzantium and taken control of the terminus of the Silk Road across Asia. An impenetrable barrier had been erected across the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East.
Dom Pedro achieved a magnificent intelligence coup by retaining Fra Mauro and Poggio Bracciolini, the Papal Secretary, and by debriefing the ‘renegade’, Niccolò da Conti. By doing so he obtained the knowledge that da Conti (‘Bartholomew of Florence’) had acquired in twenty years’ sailing the world – from India to the Cape Verde and Falkland Islands, to Australia and China. Dom Pedro now knew that Cathay and the Spice Islands could be reached by sailing westwards.15
The cartographer Paolo Toscanelli (1397–1482) made the same claim after meeting da Conti and extracting every scrap of usable information from him. He later relayed the material in a letter to Christopher Columbus:
I notice your splendid and lofty desire to sail to the regions of the East [China] by those of the West as is shown by the chart which I send you, which would be better shown in the shape of a round sphere … not only is the said voyage possible, but it is sure and certain, and of honour and countless gain …
I have had most fully the good and true information … of other merchants who have long trafficked in those parts, men of great authority.16
Toscanelli sent a map to Columbus showing the westwards route across the Atlantic via Antilia. He also passed on da Conti’s information to Behain of Bohemia17 (1459–1507), who was working for the Portuguese government. Behain then showed the strait leading from the Atlantic to the Pacific on both the globe he produced in 1492 and on his maps, and Magellan acknowledged that he had seen them in Portugal before he set sail.18 A number of other accounts describe Magellan examining Toscanelli’s charts in the Portuguese treasury. One can only imagine the extraordinary impact these charts, based on the Chinese voyages of 1421 to 1423, must have had on the Europeans, for they traced the boundaries of vast, unknown oceans and of lands such as South America and the Antarctic whose very existence had previously been clouded and uncertain.
Toscanelli’s letter to Columbus and the statements of Magellan and his diarist Pigafetta are further evidence that, long before Magellan set sail, the Portuguese knew that the quickest way to China lay westwards through the strait later named after Magellan but first navigated and charted by the Chinese. The information came from Niccolò da Conti, ‘the merchant who travelled in those parts’.19
With the reappearance of Niccolò da Conti, I felt I had almost come full circle. It had been in every sense a long and extraordinary journey since I had first seen a mention of his name and his presence in Calicut at the time Zheng He’s treasure fleet passed through the port. It had led me to every corner of the globe, and everywhere I had found traces of the Chinese voyages da Conti had described. Now it was clear that the Portuguese and Spanish had read and heard the same accounts and been inspired to make their own voyages of discovery.
Having learned of the existence of new lands beyond the seas from da Conti in 1424, Dom Pedro carried back to Portugal in 1428 a map of the world showing ‘all the parts of the world and earth’20 – Africa, the Caribbean (Antilia), North and South America, the Arctic and Antarctic, India, Australia and China. The information it contained was hugely valuable, and for over a century afterwards the Portuguese went to considerable trouble to prevent any knowledge of it from reaching competing European powers.
Coupled with Henry’s improvements to navigation and ship design, the world map revolutionized European exploration for all time. Henry knew that if he could fund his expeditions, Portugal could dominate the world. He needed substantial capital, for there was a large retinue to feed and house, a hospital to maintain, a chapel to be endowed and caravels to be built and fitted out for voyages that might last for months.
The Pope had appointed Prince Henry Grand Master of the Order of Christ in 1420, and its Red Cross motif adorned the sails of his caravels. Funded by tax revenues, the order’s principal duties were to defend Portugal and to lead crusades against the infidel. Both Niccolò da Conti and Marco Polo had described a series of Christian states extending all across India.21 Dom Pedro and Prince Henry now had the knowledge that would enable Portuguese seafarers to reach those Christian communities, and the Order of Christ could fulfil its destiny by linking them.
The order, then, was Henry’s prime source of funds, but even its substantial wealth would have been swiftly exhausted without a return on the capital invested in those voyages of discovery. The return was to come first through the colonization of Madeira, an uninhabited island with fertile soil, abundant rainfall and plentiful sunshine. As we have already seen, by June 1421 João Gonçalves Zarco had claimed the island for Portugal and begun the work of planting crops that were to yield huge profits for Portuguese investors and drive the search for new territories to explore, exploit and colonize.
Colonization was carried out methodically, and the governors of Madeira were required to produce monthly reports of progress. Although vast areas of virgin forest were devastated by fires soon after settlers began to arrive, it proved to be a blessing in disguise. By clearing the forest and enriching the soil with potash, the fires merely speeded the growth of an island economy based on the planting of grape vines and sugar cane, and ever larger quantities of sugar and Madeira wine were produced and exported.
The island provided a vivid illustration of the commercial gains to be won from successful exploration, and as increasing numbers of Portuguese entrepreneurs beat a path to Henry’s court, financing voyages of exploration became easier. In the earlier years the strain of fund-raising had taken a heavy toll on the resources of the Order of Christ and on Henry’s stamina, but after colonizing Madeira he was financially secure. Portugal could now begin to look further across the oceans to the west. If one small island could yield such wealth, what untold riches might be made from new colonies beyond the seas? Those lands were not unknown to Prince Henry and his sea-captains, for they had the Chinese charts to lead and guide them.
17
COLONIZING THE NEW WORLD
THE PORTUGUESE LOST little time in extending their search for new territories in which colonies could be established westwards across the Atlantic: ‘As early as 1431 we see Prince Henry the Navigator send Gonzalo Velho Cabral in search of the islands marked on the map which Dom Pedro, the son of King João I, had brought from Italy in 1428.’1
As they voyaged further and further, Prince Henry’s caravels must have quickly discovered Antilia – Puerto Rico – and established a colony there. Andrea Bianco’s 1436 chart describes the Sargasso Sea with the Portuguese name for seaweed, mar de baga – powerful evidence that they had reached the Caribbean, for the Sargasso Sea, a mass of floating seaweed, is unique in the world. It could only have been described by someone who had sailed there; and because of the circular wind and current systems, it can only be easily reached from Europe after passing through the Caribbean. The Portuguese could not have been the creators of the first map showing these lands, for of course it predates their voyages. I could only wonder if those first Portuguese settlers had found traces of the Chinese voyages – a carved stone, fragments of porcelain, utensils or artefacts, or a once neat but long overgrown plantation of rice. Would they have paused to wonder at them, or merely shrugged their shoulders, dismissed them as native curiosities and turned their minds from high-flown thoughts to the gritty reality of winning a living from the soil?
Unlike Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico was populated by peaceable people. If the Portuguese did settle here in 1431, some ten years after the Chinese visit, their descendants should have sur
vived to greet Columbus or later explorers. Columbus’s first visit to Puerto Rico in 1493, during his second voyage to the New World, was a fleeting one. He was in a hurry to reach the Spanish garrison of La Navidad and the gold mines in Hispaniola, the next island to the west, and visited a single port in Puerto Rico, remaining only a few days. Nonetheless, Columbus found the port to be a civilized one:
King Ferdinand sending Columbus to the New World. From Giuliano Dati’s verse rendition of Columbus’s first letter to the King of Spain published in 1493.
The fleet moved on past Saint Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins [the Virgin Islands] till it reached Porto Rico which was the home of most of the captives taking refuge with the Spaniards [refugees taken aboard at Guadeloupe]. On the west end they found a fine harbour abounding in fish. Here was a native village with a public square, a main road, a terrace – all in all quite an artistic home-like place.2
As I dug deeper into Columbus’s records, I found another story: ‘A storm driven ship landed at the Isle of the Seven Cities [Antilia] in the time of the Infante D Henriques [Henry the Navigator].’ The crew were welcomed by the inhabitants, invited in good Portuguese to attend divine service and urged to remain until their ruler showed up.3 Prince Henry, of course, had died long before Columbus set sail. The story was corroborated by the sixteenth-century Portuguese historian Antonio Galvão:
So in this year, also 1447, it happened that there came to Portugal a ship through the streight of Gibraltar, and being taken with a great tempest, was forced to run westward more willingly than the men would [wish], and at last they fell upon an island which had seven cities, and the people spake the Portuguese tongue, and they demanded if the Moors did yet trouble Spain … The boatswain of the ship brought home a little of the sand, and sold it unto a goldsmith of Lisbon, out of which they had a good quantity of gold.
Dom Pedro understanding this, being then governor of the realm, caused all the things thus brought home, and made known, to be recorded in the House of Justice.
There be some that think that those islands whereupon the Portugals were thus driven were the Antiles or New Spain, alleging good reasons for their opinion.4
It was compelling evidence that the Portuguese did settle Antilia in 1431, and were still there in 1447. The Portuguese regent, Dom Pedro, certainly knew of the island; it had appeared on the 1428 map he had personally brought back to Portugal. I was sure that records of what those visiting caravels found must have existed. It would be absurd to imagine that they had travelled for weeks across the oceans, come across an island of Portuguese-speaking people, then sailed on without making a record of the island and their compatriots’ way of life. It was also likely that some of the people who had landed in Puerto Rico in 1431 would have wished to return home by 1447. Some of them were doubtless yearning for their homeland, longing to hear once more the sad, lilting fado, and hoping to pass their twilight years in their native land. Those people who did return after the 1447 voyage would also have given the necessary information to the cartographers to correct the earlier chart.
Zuane Pizzigano, author of the 1424 map showing Antilia, never produced another chart and history does not record his fate – I assumed that he had died by the 1440s – but I returned yet again to the Map Room of the British Library and examined the first charts drawn after 1447. These proved a remarkable source of information. A series of charts followed one another in quick succession between 1448 and 1489.5 In all, I looked at seven pre-Columbian charts, containing seventy-three names and describing features on Antilia and Satanazes. I would have expected these later charts to be updated with further information, but in fact the map drawn in 1463 by Grazioso Benincasa had the same number of cities as the Pizzigano chart. The only change was that all seven cities shown on the earlier chart had been renamed on the later one. The drawing of the island was identical, save for the addition of one more bay on the north coast of Antilia and a more accurate depiction of the south-west and east coasts. I could not understand why the cartographer had renamed all the cities. The mystery deepened with another chart, from 1476, which yielded yet another set of names. Why had they kept changing the names of the cities?
I was convinced that the names must be in medieval Portuguese because the caravels despatched by Prince Henry would hardly have been manned by mercenaries, so I turned to a dictionary for a translation. With the exception of Antilia, not a single name on the later charts appeared to be in medieval Portuguese. They were incomprehensible.6 If the islands were indeed populated, why did the seven cities not have Portuguese rather than fairytale names?
I asked the owners of the Pizzigano chart for help. The Royal Geographical Society in London had a copy of a pamphlet7 by Professor Carol Urness, the custodian of the chart, describing the efforts of historians over the last fifty years to solve the question of the identity of the islands. It appeared from the pamphlet that the experts were baffled, and it seemed presumptuous of me to expect to succeed where they had failed. I decided to abandon my quest and leave the mystery for others. I headed home from the Royal Geographical Society thoroughly despondent after being frustrated at this last hurdle, unable to get corroborative evidence that the Portuguese had settled in Puerto Rico after the Chinese had discovered the island but before Columbus set sail.
In times of trouble, my habit is to pray to the Virgin and eat bacon sandwiches. Having done so, a thought occurred to me. Sagres, the home base of the caravels, is only a day’s sailing from Sanlúcar de Barrameda on the estuary of the Guadalquivir. In 1431, it was a major Castilian port. Had there been any Castilians aboard those caravels, and if so, could the writing be in medieval Castilian? I hurried back to the British Library. I found a Castilian dictionary in six volumes, but only A–D was available. That scarcely mattered, because six of the seven names on Grazioso Benincasa’s 1463 chart began with the letter ‘A’. Not one appeared in this massive medieval dictionary; the names were not Castilian. Were they from Aragon, then? The people of Aragon spoke Catalan, but once again, not one name appeared in the dictionary of medieval Catalan. I made a final, desperate search in the Basque and Latin dictionaries, to no avail. I was beaten.
I left the reading room and paced around the courtyard outside the library, cudgelling my brains without success. I then went back to the reading room to put away the dictionaries. There were seven of them strewn across my desk. As I closed the medieval Dizionario Etimologico my eye was caught by a section on the code employed in medieval times. Y meant ‘there is’ or ‘and’; a meant ‘towards’; j emphasized the letter before or after it; and an before a word meant particular negativa, ‘the opposite of’. To describe black, they would write anblanco (the opposite of white). Was this the key I was looking for?
I went back to the charts. Six of the names began with an, ‘the opposite of’. Instead of looking for ansollj in the dictionary, I should have been looking for its opposite, sollj – and sollj meant ‘sun’. Feverishly, I worked through the medieval Catalan, Castilian and Portuguese dictionaries, cross-referencing with modern dictionaries. There were now ten of them scattered across the desk. One of the names was indeed Catalan, a few were Castilian, but the great majority were medieval Portuguese. I began to compile an alphabetical list. Sixty-three of the seventy-three names were in medieval Portuguese, four of the remaining ten were Castilian, one was Catalan and five were unaccounted for. I expected the last five to be medieval Venetian – Pizzigano came from Venice – but surprisingly, only one was. Three were in the Veneto language of Treviso. One name, anthib, had me beaten.
I checked the names against a modern map of Puerto Rico and within half an hour I had found the solution: the names were not of the seven cities but descriptions of natural and man-made features, and the descriptions on the 1448–89 charts put it beyond argument that Antilia was Puerto Rico. Mountains, rainforests, harbours, rivers and salt-pans were described on Antilia exactly where they are found on Puerto Rico. There were no discrepancies between the chart
s: the later ones merely amplified the former. Some Castilian names were used on later charts, but they still described the same place. Only two islands in the whole world fit these descriptions: Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe.
Con is marked on the south-east part of the island of Antilia/Puerto Rico – the conical mountain of Pico del Este. To the north, the cartographer has placed ansollj, ‘no sun’, corresponding precisely to the El Yunque rainforest, deluged with 240 inches of rain a year. Similar tropical downpours – choue, choue-due, cyodue – are shown at the western end of the island at the end of the Cordillera Central. This area has an annual rainfall of a hundred inches, still prodigious by European standards. The draughtsman described marshes (ensa) around present-day Mayaguez, the waterlogged estuary of the Grande Rio de Añasco, but one of the most interesting descriptions was antuub or an tuub, literally ‘without drainage tubes’, placed on the north coast to the east of Arecibo. Today, the area remains a vast mosquito-ridden swamp called Cienaga Tiburones. The name Tiburones is Castilian, tiberon, or ‘drainage’, in turn deriving from the Portuguese tubaro. Brilliant red and green Puerto Rican parrots, ansaros, are denoted in the south-west – presumably the Portuguese wore the feathers of these exotic birds in the same way Columbus’s sailors later did. The forest of Boquerón where the cartographer drew these parrots remains a bird watcher’s paradise today. The lack of arable and fertile land is vividly caught in the descriptions of the cartographers (Puerto Rico to this day has less than 5 per cent arable land): ansessel, ‘no grass’, appears four times, supplemented by an suolo, ‘no arable land’. Redeeming features are found on the narrow coastal plains.
1421: The Year China Discovered the World Page 30
