by Ann Wroe
He also had another side, more courtly and literary, as was required of those close to the king. Garcia de Resende’s songbook of the court, the Cancioneiro Geral, contained a blithe contribution from him, a ‘lyrical poem’ on the set theme Cogitavi dies antiquos, et annos eternos in mente habui: ‘I have pondered bygone days, and have held the years of eternity in mind.’ He began, soldier-style, with a blunt statement of the obvious: Ninguem da o que nao tem, ‘Nobody gives what they have not got.’ He then moved at once to a thought that was paradoxical: that his endless misfortunes, meus males sem fym, had given him the woman he loved.
Nobody gives what they have not got
But my endless woes
Made her come to me.
Now I’ll laugh at my cares
To hold on to her, my life,
And I’ll see them to perdition
Though they’re twice as bad.
I’ll see the end of you, woes,
Woes that have no end,
For because of you, she’s mine!
Inda vos veja acabados
Males, que nam tendes fym,
Poys a vos destes a mym!
The lady, ‘his life’, was probably imaginary, as most were in these contests of poetry. His endless woes sounded more real, and his struggle with them more plausible, but these too were a common literary device. The pain and the love may have been feigned equally, and this, too, was a training he could give.
It is hard to tell how his page got on with him. At first they could barely have spoken to each other, but servants could always be made to understand with a snap of the fingers or a sharp whack with a cana, the heavy cane that was used to chastise pages around the court. Piers said in the confession that he had stayed with Pero Vaz ‘a whole year’, which might sound either excited or tired, before he took leave of him. The Setubal witnesses, including Brampton, said Piers stayed with him a good deal longer, until after las fiestas del señor principe, the celebrations at the end of December 1490 for the wedding of Prince Afonso to Isabella, Infanta of Spain. There, both at the festivals and ‘in them’, as Brampton said, other courtiers noticed the boy in Pero Vaz’s wake. By then, he would have been more than three years about the court. Richard Plantagenet said he had lived for ‘some time’ in Portugal, and implied it was the longest settled period in his wanderings. He went nowhere else, by his account, until he made for Ireland in 1491.
The Setubal testimonies said the same, though ‘settled’ was hardly the word for this kind of life. The court was a movable feast, peripatetic as all courts were: sometimes at the palace on the many-spired hill in Lisbon, raised high above the rubbish-piled streets of the town below; sometimes at Evora or Santarem; more often at Setubal, the king’s favourite boating and hunting place, on a wide fish-smelling bay backed by salt marshes and cork and chestnut woods. Wherever he was, the boy presumably did his duties, carrying his master’s gloves, holding his stirrup, kneeling to offer him water at meals, in a servant’s silence made all the deeper by the fact that he was fifteen and fresh out of Flanders. He did not know this language in which, according to Resende – then a page too, and not much older than himself – his young companions endlessly versified and sighed for the love of girls. He was, or should have been, a nobody.
Two things were necessary, wrote Fernão da Silveira, the king’s steward, to succeed at the court of Portugal. The most important was to know how to dress, from the holland shirt to the otter-fur gloves; to look ‘fair, slim and like a Frenchman’ was devoutly to be wished. In that respect, the boy was already interesting. The other vital accomplishment was to be silver-tongued: not just a reciter of poetical conceits, but a story-teller and a self-promoter. Outspokenness was a virtue, but the best of all was to ‘boast and lie like a trooper’, mentyr de macha mano. Though da Silveira gave his advice tongue-in-cheek, every young man at court was in competition to be better, or other, than he was. Dissembling was both game and burden. Nam posso vyuer comyguo, nem posso fogir de mym, ran another song from Resende’s book: ‘I can’t live with myself, and yet I can’t run away.’ One court songster explained that he had lived so long in his self-deception that he did not dare to disabuse himself, in case it killed him.
Nam posso vyuer comyguo, nem posso fogir de mym. But a boy who had already escaped or run away could surely keep on trying, running towards the adventure he thought he wanted or the person he thought he was. In every version of his story, this was why he had come to Portugal at all.
iii
From the harbour wall in Lisbon, where the caravels were hauled up for repair and hammers chinked constantly like birds, the vast Atlantic – the Ocean Sea – stretched out before him. He did not know what lay across it. People said it was India, the furthest limit of the world, or, to the north, the Isles of Orchady. The first islands out there, the Canaries, had been discovered decades before but were still unknown. The only news of them that had reached Flanders was that the people were fierce and hardy and wore the skins of beasts; that a huge, many-branched tree grew there, which caught clouds of sweet rainwater once a day; and that one of the smaller islands contained flowering shrubs whose seeds, if you ate them, could have any flavour you liked: ‘partridge, pheasant or quail, meat or fish, all you have to do is imagine’.
Imagine; and sail on to the west and the south-west, trying not to recall how far away the safe harbour was. He wanted to do this. I desired to see other Countries. The churchmen warned him that he should not care to: that the pilgrim soul’s longing to break away should be directed only to Heaven, his shining home and haven, not to the illusions of the world. To wish to see other places for their own sake was as foolish and dangerous as to wish to read the hundreds of books now pouring from the newfangled presses. But at the harbour wall it was the great sea, rather than Heaven, that shone and beckoned to him.
The world was round; he knew that. To head in one direction had to bring a man back somehow to the point where he had started. Although it ran contrary to sense to think of men standing on firm ground on the other side without their tunics up over their ears, you could understand it if you watched a fly creeping on an apple. He did not fall off, but the surface curved gently to him everywhere. The flies of Lisbon crept also on oranges, those fruits that so surprised northern boys, from the brightness of their colour to their thick corky rind and the way the fruit fell apart in segments, ornamented with beads of bitter juice. These too came from out there, as far as people knew: from the West Sea, and whatever lay beyond it.
Those who sailed to the west had almost nothing to aim for. Philosophers and poets dismissed it as a place of fading and dying, the reverse of the bright dawn-tinted Orient, and a place where sailors lost heart. Once you were past the Canaries, past Madeira and the Azores, you were in a world of empty sea, the old ‘green sea of darkness’, alone save for the frigate birds and whatever beasts of the deep might find you. But it was also certain that something lay on the other side. Men thought they had seen islands there, heaped up on the horizon like rain-clouds. Antonio Leone, a sailor from Madeira, said he had seen three of them, though more experienced sailors thought these might be the great trees mentioned by Pliny that floated on the sea like islands, their roots encrusted with earth, or Seneca’s pumice-stone islands that were blown about by the wind. Canarians had seen one vast, westward island crowned with mountains. They had seen it many times, in both cloudy weather and clear, and always in the same place. On occasions, however, and in the clearest weather, it was not there. There was no explanation. On some days every peak and valley could be picked out, solid rock in the sunlight. Other days showed only the empty and baffling sea.
Whatever these lands were, men had gone in search of them and had not returned. Possibly they had drowned, and their bones had been picked by great fish that bristled with scales like plates of armour; possibly they basked in some terrestrial paradise. The ‘Authentic Island’ of Antilla and the Isle of the Seven Cities lay somewhere in that ocean, already marked on c
harts, and from time to time objects that might have come from them were found on west-facing shores. Sailors who had been in the Azores reported pine cones washed up on the beaches, although there were no pine trees nearby, and the bloated bodies of two drowned men, ‘with very big faces, not looking like Christians’.
Huge hollow canes had also drifted in, capable of holding nine carafes of wine. John Mandeville said that canes like this grew on the Island of Salamasse, beside a dead sea in which objects, once dropped, were never recovered. On another occasion, one of the King of Portugal’s pilots had found a piece of wood ‘ingeniously worked, but not with iron’. Some of these stories came from Pedro Correa da Cunha, captain of the island of Graciosa in the Azores. Doubtless other members of the clan, like Pero Vaz, heard them too. Pedro Correa was particularly excited by the big hollow canes, one of which he showed to João II; he supposed it had been blown by the wind from India.
Columbus, too, leaned on Lisbon’s harbour wall when the boy was there, imagining the route that would take him to the Indies and to Cipango, or Japan. The Portuguese had been sailing south for years, and in 1488 Bartolomeo Diaz had reached the furthest cape of Africa. But they had not yet dared to sail far to the west. Columbus would dare, despite the obscurity of his background, his relative poverty and the murmurs that his feats of navigation ‘in all the known seas’ were nothing but false stories. In Lisbon he wrote carefully in the margins of books, especially Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi, his comments on the world as he understood it. He noted where pearls were found, where the happiest people lived (under the Arctic pole, where men never died ‘except from satiety of life’), and how narrow the sea was that separated India from Spain, extreme east from west. His pen occasionally wandered, where there was a spare page, to drawing and meticulously dividing quadrants of circles. In circles creation consisted, as he knew: in the sphere of the earth, in the seven surrounding lower spheres constantly pushed and dragged by the planets, in the eighth sphere scattered with the lights of 1,022 fixed stars. But beyond the primum mobile – the ninth sphere, the domain of the shining and crystalline sky – lay stillness, glory, God, the soul’s rest.
In 1492 a globe was made in Nuremberg that showed the world as far as it was known. The maker of the globe was Martin Behaim, ‘Martin the Bohemian’, a protégé of Maximilian’s, who had been in Portugal in the late 1480s and, before that, in the Burgundian Netherlands. He was apprenticed at the age of seventeen to a cloth merchant in Malines, then bound to a master in Antwerp, from whom he eventually moved away to Portugal: that same common westward urge towards the opening world. Once in Lisbon, trading on some false mathematical credentials, he became immersed in João II’s efforts to take accurate readings of latitude. On later evidence, his path may also have strayed across the boy’s.
On Behaim’s globe – drawn on gores of vellum glued on papier mâché reinforced with hoops of wood – the dark blue sea was reassuringly strewn with islands as soon as there was no discovered coast to cling to. Small imagined isles like stepping-stones crossed the Atlantic, including the Insula de Brazil, the island of Antilla (‘a ship from Spain got close to it in 1414’) and, usefully central, the Island of St Brendan, discovered by the saint. On the other side, below Cipango, lay two identical islands ‘where gold and jewels are’. Behaim himself, to judge from a letter he ghosted to João in July 1493 by the hand of a fellow-Nuremberger, Dr Hieronymus Münzer, had no fear of the Atlantic at all. He and his companions, if so commanded, ‘would start from the Azore Islands and boldly cross the sea, with their cylinder, quadrant, astrolabe and other instruments. They would suffer neither from cold, nor heat, for sailing to the eastern coast they would find the air temperate and the sea smooth.’ Maximilian himself recommended Behaim to João as the man who could discover ‘the rich oriental land of Cathay’ by sailing west, and urged the king to employ him.
The wilder tales of Mandeville and the Imago Mundi were ignored on Behaim’s globe. Only the more reasonable stories – the Three Magi, Prester John, the romance of Alexander – were accepted and recorded, in gold and silver script, by an illuminator. In the islands near Java and Sumatra, instead of Mandeville’s yellow-striped snakes and dog-headed men, there were neat notes on cinnamon and nutmeg. No monsters featured on this map except for two sciapodes, to fill up space, in southern Africa. Instead, the world was peopled with little groups of men who could easily be bargained with: Russians and Polacks in fur hats, Indians hawking powder, fashionably got-up Germans. Only at the top and bottom of his globe did Behaim admit the white emptiness of terra incognita. His world was domesticated with neat knobs of mountains and red-roofed whitewashed towns as far across as China; though anyone who read the books would know that these symbols also hid marvels, such as the 1,200 bridges of the Chinese city of Cassay and the garden, concealed at the city’s heart, where tame baboons were summoned to be fed by the tinkling of dozens of silver bells hung upon the trees.
The strangest stories were already understood as simple tests for the credulous. You could believe these claims, or you could laugh at them. One of Mandeville’s tales involved a type of fruit that grew in the kingdom of Cadissen, near Scythia. When it was cut open, according to local people, ‘men find therein a beast as it were of flesh and bone and blood, as it were a little lamb without wool, and men eat the beast and the fruit also, and sure it seemeth very strange’. Mandeville himself could cap that story: ‘I said to them that I held it for no marvel, for I said that in my country are trees that bear fruit that become birds flying, and they are good to eat . . . and they marvelled much thereat.’ Tales of the unconscionable wealth of native kings in undiscovered places were outdone, by Portuguese explorers in Benin and the Congo, by stories of the Great White King of Portugal and his 50,000 vassals in velvet and jewels.
Some bookmen made it clear that they did not wish to propagate tall tales. The French translator of Virgil’s Aeneid, in turn translated and printed by Caxton in 1490, refused to include Aeneas’s journey to the Underworld because ‘it is feigned and not to be believed’, despite the fact that he had just regaled his readers with the tale of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. Yet travellers’ tales were not always dismissed. In The Mirror of the World, also printed by Caxton, readers were admonished not to disbelieve in the marvels of the physical world ‘until the time we know it to be so or no’; for if God could make the earth so that it hung suspended in the heavens like the yolk in an egg, there was obviously no limit to the strange things He could create.
Besides, despite Behaim, the world was well known only in small patches. To travel widely at all was still unusual; men did not know, or care to know, each other’s countries. In 1505 Henry VII’s agents in Aragon reported that many gentlemen and common folk ‘imagine there is no other country but Spain’, and in 1498 a Venetian in London remarked that the English thought there was no other world but England. Although most of them knew this was not so, they had no desire to investigate. It was small wonder that men believed in regions of actual and perpetual darkness, like the lands at the poles or, near Azerbaijan, a country lost in night from which only the crowing of cocks, and occasional cries of men, gave evidence of life and habitation.
Columbus in 1492 set sail with extraordinary countries in his head. His chart showed imagined Cipango, roughly rectangular and three times the size of Spain. Not on his chart, but jotted in the margins of d’Ailly, was an even more fantastic place. Columbus had concluded that, though the earth was round, it was not perfectly so. Instead it was shaped like ‘the stalk end of a pear’ or the breast of a woman with, to the far south, aureole and nipple rising out of the sea. The land-mass protruded so far that some thought it touched the circle of the moon, or at least the calmer reaches of the air above the flux and reflux of the atmosphere. That southern pap was the land of all delights, shade-trees and continual flowers, palaces of gold. This might well be where his ships were going, if they did not find the land of the Great Khan first.
His vo
yage was marked by many deliberate deceptions. In trying to explain to his men where they were, and how far they had come, he deliberately reckoned forty-eight leagues instead of sixty, and instead of twenty ‘somewhat less’, to prevent them being frightened by their distance from home. As they sailed on, seeming to come no nearer to the imaginary islands he had shown on his chart, he said that the currents must have carried them off course; they must have left those islands behind. Once landed on the other side of the Ocean Sea, he kept up his remarks about the closeness of the Great Khan although it was clear, as the hamlets of tents or palm-leaves succeeded each other, that they were not in a land of great cities at all. As for himself, he tried to soften the strangeness of the scene, with its gaudy flowers and huge trees and multicoloured darting fish, by noting how similar it was to what they knew: breezes like April in Castile, soft shallow seas like the river in Seville, birds that sang like the nightingales of Asturias.
He said, of course, that he knew where he was, but this was not true. The ‘true north’ of the Pole Star and the north of his compass were already out of alignment. His observed latitudes were sometimes out by almost twenty degrees; he might have done better to trust to dead reckoning or, like the frigate birds, to his own instinct. Vasco da Gama, aiming for India, also found that he could not determine latitude properly once he was out at sea. The currents and ‘secrets of the sea’ spoiled the reading of the sun’s meridian altitudes, and the Pole Star disappeared. On the heaving deck of a ship, small brass quadrants would not work, and astrolabes gave errors of four or five degrees. The men in charge of observing would sit braced against the mainmast, endeavouring to keep the astrolabe steadily suspended from a finger as they moved the rule against it; and still at the end of the day they would not know how far they had gone, south or west, in the great ocean. Columbus, with his Castilian comparisons, suggested the roughest calculation of all, latitude from birdsong and the mildness of the air.
