by Peter Watson
One final factor was that, with navigation by the heavens, and latitude sailing, the variation between true north and magnetic north became more important, requiring the navigator to relate his course to the true, not the magnetic, north. It was at first assumed that the variation was consistent and systematic (and that a meridian without variation ran through the Azores). As time went by, however, experience in the great oceans of the world–the Indian and the Atlantic–showed that the picture was much more complex than that. Only the combined experience of sailors throughout the sixteenth century eventually produced the true picture, which required local knowledge recorded in almanacs. Longitude remained an even more intractable problem, because it was bound up with speed and time. The problem is that, with the curvature of the earth, the distance of longitude varies: at the poles it is zero, at the equator it is nearly equal to a degree of latitude. If one knew one’s latitude, therefore, one could in theory work out a degree of longitude, but again it was useful only if one could measure one’s speed accurately, and that required accurate time-keeping. Essentially, as J. H. Parry has remarked, throughout the fifteenth and for most of the sixteenth century, navigation in the open ocean was a matter of dead-reckoning ‘checked and supplemented by observed latitude’.60
In the short space of about twenty years, in the middle of the fifteenth century, a major revolution took place in shipping.61 This was a marriage between the lateen-rigged Mediterranean ships and the square-rigged north Europe–Atlantic ships. ‘The marriage produced the basic barque, the direct ancestor of all the square-riggers of the [age of] Reconnaissance and the later great age of sail.’62
The principal warship of the Mediterranean was the oared galley, which remained a component of Mediterranean navies until the seventeenth century.63 Its main drawback was the large crew it required, making it unsuitable for long voyages out of sight of land. The other main idea in Mediterranean sailing had been taken from the Arabs–this was the lateen sail. The only type of sail seen on Arab ships, the lateen sail is essentially triangular, laced to a forward-leaning mast and a long yard. Whether or not the Arabs invented it, the lateen was spread through them, both in the Indian Ocean and in the Mediterranean. Its shape made the most of whatever wind was going and as a form of rig it was very versatile and made ships more manoeuvrable.64
The other tradition, that of the Atlantic seaboard nations of northern Europe, produced sturdier, tubbier more buoyant ships, with a single, massive, square sail. Known as ‘cogs’, they were clumsy and slow, to begin with at least, but had capacious holds and required far fewer men to man them. One calculation has it that fifty men were required in lateenrigged ships to do the work done by twenty men in square-rigged northern cogs.
Fifteenth-century ships made use of both rigs–square forward and lateen aft. There were other changes, to the shape of the keels and to the superstructure, but the rigging and crewing requirements would prove the most important factors in the great discoveries of the world. The two most important forms of this ‘marriage’ were the carrack and the caravel. Carracks were huge by the standards of the day–600 and even 1,000 tons. Caravels were much smaller–sixty or seventy tons–and faster. They were lateen-rigged, more convenient for exploring estuaries and islands, and they turned out to be very safe, despite their small size. Columbus took two caravels with him on the first voyage, of which one, the Niña, was lateen-rigged. She never gave any trouble and was used on the second voyage as well.
As well as helping to bring together the work of astronomers, sailors and geographers, Henry the Navigator and his brother, Prince Pedro, placed gentlemen from their households in personal command of their ships and instructed them to be more ambitious in their aims, demanding longer voyages, more detailed reporting, greater effort all round in pushing expeditions as far and as fast as they could go. Under Henry’spatronage Portuguese ships rounded Cape Bojador in 1434, Cape Branco in 1442, and the mouth of the Senegal river in 1444. In the same year Cape Verde was reached and two years later the mouth of the Gambia. Sierra Leone was discovered in 1460. Muslims and naked pagans were found on these shores, together with markets, where ostrich eggs and the skins of baboons were sold. The explorers saw elephants, hippopotamus and monkeys. Benin produced slaves and strong pepper.
The death of Henry, in 1460, temporarily halted exploration, though there was the added reason that, by the time Sierra Leone had been reached, the Pole Star was so low in the sky that sailors feared for their navigating abilities if it disappeared altogether. In 1469, however, the Crown leased Guinea to a private individual, Fernão Magalhães, who undertook to explore a hundred leagues of coastline annually for the five years of his lease. In those five years the Portuguese got as far as Cape St Catherine (in what is now Gabon), sited at 2° S. In a way, these discoveries were disappointing, because they showed that Africa extended much further south than many had hoped, which meant that an easy passage to India was less and less likely. King John II was not deterred, however, and he sponsored a series of further expeditions down the African coast. Bartolomeu Dias left Lisbon in 1487, and reached 40° S (the Cape of Good Hope is 34° S) before turning east, and then north, and making landfall in Mossel bay, between what is now Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. He had reached the cape without sighting it and Dias’ people, tired and worried about their lack of provisions, persuaded him to turn back. On his way home he sighted the great cape and surmised that, without realising it, he had discovered the route to India. He got back to Lisbon in December 1488. He called the cape the Cape of Storms but it was the king, according to tradition, who changed its name to the Cape of Good Hope.65
Vasco da Gama’s epic voyage did not leave Lisbon until July 1497, nearly eight years after Dias’ return. J. H. Parry argues that during the interval many voyages, whose records have since been lost, must have been made in the south Atlantic during this time, and that da Gama’s expedition made use of the knowledge amassed on these journeys. Parry maintains this because da Gama’s expedition was at sea in the Atlantic for thirteen weeks without sighting land, ‘by far the longest passage made until then by European seamen’.66 Da Gama rounded the cape, provisioned from the store ship he had with him in Mossel bay, and then pushed on north. He gave the name Natal to the coast they passed at Christmas time, and eventually reached Mozambique and the area of Muslim influence. He was forced to use gunfire to repel boarders at Mombasa but found a better welcome at Malindi on what is now the Kenyan coast, at about 3° S. By great good fortune, da Gama secured the services of Ahmad ibn Majid, the best-known Arab navigator of his day, and the author of a collection of rutters and nautical instructions known as Al Mahet, who took the Portuguese across the Indian Ocean, to Calicut, which was reached in May 1498. Wherever da Gama went in the East he was disappointed to find that the Muslims had beaten him to it. In addition, he found that the goods he was travelling with–cloth and hardware that were popular on the coast of west Africa–were not at all suitable in the East. It was only with great difficulty that he managed to put together a return cargo of pepper and cinnamon. His journey back across the Indian Ocean met ferocious storms but once in the Atlantic he made good time and reached Lisbon in September 1499. He had been at sea for three hundred days and lost more than half his company. The great church and monastery of Jeró nimos at Belem was built in his honour.67
Columbus, the son of a weaver in Genoa, had sailed in Portuguese ships as far as Guinea, but he was less a professional seaman than an ‘extremely persuasive geographical theorist’.68 The agreement which sanctioned his voyage in 1492 stipulated that he was to ‘discover and acquire islands and mainland in the ocean sea’. India had not yet been reached by way of the Cape and this was understood to mean Cipangu and Cathay. Such an expectation was by no means extraordinary: the earth was known to be round and there was no suspicion of intervening continents. Columbus had first made his proposal to the Portuguese Crown in 1484. He was turned down, and by the French and the English. He tried a second time
with the Portuguese, and on this occasion, in 1488, he might have been successful but for the coincidence of Dias’ triumphant return, which diverted all energies and attention. Columbus turned, therefore, to Castile. Here he was at last successful, finding support from the Crown and from wealthy individuals. He set sail on the ‘Sea of Shadows’ from Palos in August 1492.69
Modern scholarship has it that Columbus was not a very up-to-date navigator, but he was careful and meticulous. His course took him due west of the Canaries (27° N), though his later voyages were further south, where the winds were more reliable. But on that first voyage he was fortunate and, after thirty-three days of sailing, seeing nothing but weeds and birds, he sighted the outer cays of the Bahamas (San Salvador is 24° N). There is no question but that Columbus thought these cays were the outlying islands of an archipelago of which Japan formed a part. (This is exactly what Martin Behaim’s 1492 globe depicts.) It was a combination of Marco Polo’s errors (the east–west extent of Asia), the same man’s mistaken report that Japan was 1,500–1,600 miles from China, and Ptolemy’s underestimate of the size of the earth (25 per cent smaller than reality). Thus Columbus thought that Europe to Japan was about 3,000 miles, when in fact it is 10,600 nautical miles.*
The next step, therefore, was to find Japan itself. Columbus pressed on, found Cuba, and Hispaniola (the modern Haiti and Dominican Republic). The latter yielded a little alluvial gold, while gold nose-plugs and bracelets were obtained by barter from the ‘natives’. After losing his flagship, wrecked by grounding, he decided to return home, leaving a few men behind with instructions to build a base and look for gold mines. On this return journey Columbus found that he needed to travel further north, near the latitude of Bermuda (32° N), to pick up the westerly wind. Approaching Europe, Columbus encountered heavy storms and was eventually forced to seek refuge in Lisbon harbour. The Portuguese interrogated him but remained sceptical about his story, having encountered Italian exaggeration before.70 Still, they laid claim to his discoveries just in case.
The Spanish were no less careful. They instructed him to make a second voyage as quickly as possible, and to forestall the Portuguese claims they sought papal recognition for a monopoly of settlement and navigation. Since the pope of the time was himself Spanish, this support was not difficult to obtain. On his second voyage, begun in September 1493, Columbus discovered Dominica, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Jamaica. The third, in 1498, was made without volunteers–instead, men had to be pressed, or released from prison. He went further south this time, and discovered Trinidad and the mouth of the Orinoco. The river was much larger than any other known to Europeans and the amount of fresh water it brought down showed how big the continent of which it was a part must be. And he toyed with the idea that it was too far south to form part of Asia. Columbus then turned north but at Hispaniola he found the men he had left there in open revolt. He was never as good a governor as he was an explorer and was himself sent home in irons. He was allowed one more voyage, in 1502, when he discovered the mainland at Honduras and Costa Rica. He died in 1506.71
By now it was beginning to dawn on people that the many islands that had been discovered were not part of the archipelago off Cathay, which was much further away. The discovery of the Orinoco was the first inkling that there was a whole continent in between. As early as 1494 Peter Martyr wrote, ‘when treating of this new country one must speak of a new world, so distant is it and so devoid of civilisation and religion’.72
In the years ahead the English and Portuguese would discover North America (no silk or spices) and, gradually, the immense extent of South America was unveiled. Interest in the East began to wane as pearls were discovered off Venezuela, a valuable red dye in brazil-wood, and cod off Newfoundland. Eventually, in September 1519 Fernão Magalhães, or Magellan, sailed from Seville with a fleet of five ships laden with goods the Portuguese had found useful for trading in the East. He shared with Columbus the fact that he was a foreigner in command of awkward Spaniards.73 Following a mutiny in Patagonia, which required Magellan to hang the ringleaders, and after losing two ships in the strait that bears his name, he arrived in the Pacific. The crossing of this vast ocean seemed as if it would never end and the men were reduced to eating rats and raw leather. They made landfall at Cebu in the Philippines, where they were involved in a local war. Forty men, including Magellan himself, were killed.
Magellan shares with Columbus and Vasco da Gama the title of greatest explorer but we should never forget that his own journey ended when he was only half-way round the world. It was completed by Sebastián del Cano, who avoided the Portuguese men-of-war in the area, crossed the Indian Ocean, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and arrived back in Spain with one ship, the Victoria, and fifteen men, out of five ships that had left. It was, arguably, the greatest voyage of all time. And it changed the way men thought about their world.
21
The ‘Indian’ Mind: Ideas in the New World
To Chapter 21 Notes and References
In many ways, the events of 1492 were as much an end as a beginning. If one accepts the evidence that, some time between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago, early man crossed from Siberia into the Americas, via the Bering Strait, then the epoch between that time and the close of the fifteenth century represents a unique natural experiment, when there were two huge groups of people, on two vast landmasses–what we might call the Old World and the New–entirely separated from one another and developing side-by-side, oblivious to the existence of each other. Such a state of affairs, though it has a great deal of shortcomings as a perfectly designed experiment, ought still to tell us a great deal about what is intrinsic to human nature, and what can be put down to environment. The same goes for ideas: what ideas were shared by the Old World and the New, and what were specific to each? Why was that so?
Equally fundamental is the question: Why was it that the Europeans discovered America rather than the other way around? Why did the Incas, say, not cross the Atlantic from west to east and subdue the Moroccans or Portuguese? This issue has been examined recently by Jared Diamond, a professor of physiology at California Medical School but also an anthropologist who has worked in New Guinea, and who won the Rhône-Poulenc Science Book Prize in 1998 for Guns, Germs and Steel. Examining the evidence, Diamond found that the answer lay in the general layout of the planet, in particular the way the continents are arranged over the surface of the globe. Simply put, the continents of the Americas and Africa have their main axis running north–south, whereas in Eurasia it is east–west. The significance of this is that the diffusion of domesticated animals and plants is much easier from east to west, or west to east, than from north to south, or vice versa, because similar latitudes imply similar geographical and climatic conditions, such as mean temperatures, rainfall or hours of daylight. Diffusion from north to south, or south to north, on the other hand, is correspondingly harder to achieve and this simple geographical fact of life, Diamond says, inhibited the spread of domesticated animals and plants. Thus the distribution of cattle, sheep and goats was much more rapid, and thorough, in Eurasia than it was in either Africa or the Americas. In this way, he argues, the dispersal of farming meant the build-up of greater population densities in Eurasia as opposed to the other continents, and this had two further effects. First, competition between different societies fuelled the evolution of new cultural practices, in particular the development of weapons, which were so important in the conquest of the Americas. The second consequence was the evolution of diseases contracted from (largely domesticated) animals. These diseases could only survive among relatively large populations of humans, and when they were introduced to peoples who had developed no immune systems, such as the Incas or the Aztecs, they devastated them. Thus the global pattern was set, says Diamond. In particular, Africa, which had ‘six million years’ start’ in evolutionary terms compared with other parts of the world, failed to develop because it was isolated by vast oceans on three sides and desert on the north,
and had few species of animals or plants that could be domesticated along its north–south axis.1
