by David Boyle
Alexander’s priorities were to rescue Rome from itself and the disorder and gang warfare that left new corpses in the streets with every morning light. Ferdinand and Isabella welcomed the election of a pope from Aragon as recognition of their achievement in Granada, but Savonarola fulminated from his pulpit in the Duomo in Florence: “In the primitive church, the chalices were made of wood, the prelates of gold. In these days, the Church has chalices of gold and prelates of wood.”
Throughout the winter of 1491 and into 1492, John Cabot had been in Valencia, looking for a way to earn money. His experience as a construction engineer, helping to rebuild homes on the waterlogged streets of Venice, had given him an expertise in dock building. There had been little chance to exercise this in Milan or Savoy, but in Valencia during the months while Columbus was shaping his expedition, Cabot had been drawing up plans for a new stone jetty on the city’s beach to replace the existing wooden wharf.
Valencia was the biggest financial center in Ferdinand’s kingdom of Aragon; it was a major port on the Mediterranean and a center for silk, oranges, wine, almonds, and cloth. It was the cloth that had originally attracted Cabot there, but his reputation as a debtor did not make him popular with merchants. Even so, there were clearly other opportunities for a man of vision. The city was also the center of massive irrigation systems that distributed water from the nearby rivers and brought it into the city. These had been built some centuries earlier, under the Muslims, and had been allowed to decay, but Valencia was now overflowing with ambitious plans for the future. There was the scheme to bring water in from the Júcar River by canal, among others. The difficulty was that all these projects were awaiting approval from the divided city rulers and for financing in a period where every bit of extra money for municipal investment had been siphoned off by Ferdinand for the war against Granada.
The city’s palm and fig trees gave an impression of coolness and relaxation, but its network of streets and alleyways—culminating in the great mercado where business was carried out—seethed with tensions between the local Aragonese craftspeople and the incoming foreigners who were flocking there because it was such a successful mercantile center. There were silk and paper manufacturers from Italy and seven printers from Germany—Valencia was now one of the key printing centers of Europe. There was also a large Muslim population under royal protection. The burgeoning economic success of Valencia was symbolized by the huge Lonja de la Seda, the silk exchange, now being built above the market.
But by the summer of 1492, Cabot had managed to build a close alliance with the governor-general of the city, Diego de Torres. He had identified where the stone for the jetty could be found, in Cap de Cullera, procured ships that could carry the cut stone at the best time, and worked out how to build the jetty the following summer. It was a coherent and serious plan, and the city authorities brought it to the attention of the king. Finally, at the end of September, Cabot and his local partner, Gaspar Rull, were shown in to see Ferdinand.
In Palos, the process of preparing for the voyage had been exhausting and frustrating. When Columbus arrived there on May 12, he had planned to leave in ten days. In fact, the preparations took ten weeks. Part of the problem was the security that surrounded the expedition. Instructions to the ship fitters and suppliers provided only vague details about the destination, described as “certain parts of the ocean sea.” All mention of the Indies was excised from the agreement between Columbus and the monarchs. Nor was the secrecy effective. Seville was packed with Portuguese spies, and the news of a mysterious expedition led by Columbus soon reached Lisbon, where King John was sufficiently alarmed to prepare warships to intercept the expedition if they could.
Palos harbor is today silted up and the scene of a patchwork of small, run-down agricultural holdings, but in July 1492 it was the scene of feverish activity as the three ships were loaded. The final supplies were delayed by the surrounding roads now crowded with Jewish families, stripped of almost everything they possessed. Almost eight thousand families had sailed from nearby Cadiz, their designated port of departure, before the last weeks of the deadline on August 1. Others were camped in the hills above Palos, singing lamentations, their remaining possessions on carts, waiting for someone who could ship them elsewhere. In a few weeks time, many would be seized by pirates off the African coast and taken to Tangiers, and sometimes even back to Cadiz, to be sold into slavery.*
On August 1 the fleet was finally ready. In the early hours of the following morning, all three crews made their confession and received mass. Columbus was the last aboard, and the small fleet made its way slowly into the Saltes estuary, the white shape of La Rábida above them. Their special expedition banners, which bore green crosses on a white background, each with crowns over the initials F and Y (for Ferdinand and Ysabel), fluttered in the breeze. The ships carried provisions for a year, an Arabic translator, and diplomatic letters addressed to Magnus Canus, the Great Khan, along with some duplicates where the names had been left blank.
Vespucci was settling down to his new life in Seville, no longer at the beck and call of his relations and employers, though still working partly on behalf of the Popolano. He had dreamed of exploration and discovery all his life, and now he was engaged in helping Berardi plan for what might be the greatest voyage of exploration in history.
Vespucci was growing into a man whose appearance belied his personality. He was bald, thick-set, and brawny, with a low forehead and an enormous head—like an aggressive wrestler—but one who never lost his temper. He had a talent for friendship with those more powerful than he, like Berardi. Vespucci and his young nephew Giovanni now moved in with the Berardi family in the wealthiest part of Seville, united in their commitment to Columbus and his voyage.
They had heard from the island of Gomera in the Canary Islands about the final stopover for the Santa Maria and the other ships, including the rumor about Columbus and his passion for the fearsome Beatriz de Bobadilla who ruled the island after the murder of her husband. They had heard about the fleet’s departure and how Columbus had dodged the Portuguese squadron sent to intercept him. And then nothing, as Columbus and his ships headed directly west out into the Atlantic.
Across the Guadalquivir, in the bars of Triana, the rough nautical suburb of Seville where the sailors lodged—a second home for Vespucci because he worked there so often, supervising cargoes and engaging ships and crew—it was a common belief that Columbus would never be seen again.
I
“For a time, its sun-gilt peaks and long shadowy promontories would remain distinctly visible, but in proportion as the voyagers approached, peak and promontory would gradually fade away until nothing would remain but blue sky above and deep blue water below.”
Washington Irving describing the expedition leaving
the Canary Islands in 1492
Some thousand or so miles westward in the middle of the ocean, it was apparent that the Santa Maria was not a good choice of vessel. It was no caravel, and at nearly a hundred tons, was bigger, slower, and less seaworthy than the Niña or the Pinta. Columbus’s flagship was constantly falling behind, to the irritation of Martin Alonso Pinzón in the Pinta.
The decision to leave from the Canary Islands was forced on Columbus: They were Castilian; the Azores, his preference, were Portuguese. But Toscanelli urged him to take the Canaries route because that was where the prevailing winds were likely to be. The first few weeks of the voyage were so successful that it began to raise a slight doubt in the minds of the nervous crew. If the winds always blew from the east, as they seemed to do, how would the fleet ever return home?
Day after day Columbus worked out the voyage’s course by dead reckoning, judging position by speed and direction, estimating their direction using a compass and their speed by the bubbles on the surface of the sea. He also measured latitude using the tried and tested method of the Portuguese, who would watch the height of the North Star at night. Congenitally optimistic, he endlessly overestimated thei
r progress, but kept a second set of charts to reassure the crew that they had not traveled too far, “so that if the voyage were long the people would not be frightened and dismayed.” This public chart turned out to be rather more accurate than his personal one.
Through the first few weeks of September, the three ships raced before the wind, in perfect weather, close to the top speed for caravels of around eleven knots. Daybreak was the best time of day, with the cool breeze filling the sails and driving them westward. “The savor of the mornings was a great delight,” wrote Columbus in his journal. “The weather was like April in Andalusia. The only thing wanting was to hear the nightingales.”
Below, through the hatchway, the helmsman steered the course he had been ordered to follow—blind to the sea and the weather, peering at the small compass point in front of him. Seafaring was a business of rituals, from daybreak until dusk. There was a succession of prayers, with a hot meal at eleven A.M. cooked on the ship’s stove, near the quarterdeck, set on a large box of sand. Other meals consisted of olive oil, wine, salt-dried fish, elderly bacon, and maggoty ship’s biscuit, eaten by the crew with their utility knives on the deck. There were no shaving facilities, so every sailor was soon sporting a beard.
September 21, surrounded by an expanse of green and yellow seaweed in the Sargasso Sea, marked the expedition’s first nervous moment, but the journey went on, deeper into what seemed to be the unknown. By October 9, still no land had been sighted—despite endless false alarms—and this was becoming a serious concern. There were mutterings that the way home was now impossible and that they should quietly throw Columbus overboard and turn around. Martin Pinzón had his own theories about the route they were taking. On a visit to Rome the year before, he had been to the Vatican Library and was shown an ancient document about a legendary voyage made by the Queen of Sheba to Japan. It was this that had convinced him to take Columbus seriously, but he was beginning to resent the man he saw as a Genoese upstart and believed he had brought at least as much to the expedition as Columbus had. By his own calculations he came to the conclusion that they had missed Japan altogether.
At a conference with the worried captains in his cabin on the Santa Maria, Columbus persuaded them to continue westward for three more days, after which he agreed they would have missed Cipangu, and he would turn back. But once the captains had rowed to their ships, the crew of the Santa Maria erupted in open revolt. They were only slightly reassured by a speech from Columbus making the same promise: three more days, and if no land was found, they would go home.
Luckily for him, the following day revealed possible evidence of land: plants and sticks floating in the water. Columbus gathered his own crew and told them the monarchs had promised ten thousand maravedis to whoever first sighted land. He would also donate a silk doublet. At ten p.m. on October 11 Columbus thought he saw something on the horizon, “like a little wax candle rising and falling.” But he stared out to sea and could make out nothing more. Then at 2 A.M., with the moon high, Rodrigo de Triana on the forecastle of the Pinta made out a white sand cliff in the moonlight and shouted “land, land!” Pinzón fired the agreed signal and waited for the Santa Maria to come alongside. They had been at sea for thirty-seven days.
“Señor Martin Alonso, did you find land?” shouted Columbus.
At dawn the small fleet edged into a shallow bay and saw naked people on the beach who appeared staggered by the monstrous shapes that had slipped into their world. Columbus took the royal standard ashore and fell to his knees on the beach, bringing the other captains and the notaries together for a ceremony to take possession of the small island, which he named San Salvador. Then he turned his attention to the people watching him and gave them red caps and glass beads “and many things of slight value, in which they took much pleasure.”
The delighted Tainos—the subset of the Arawak race that Columbus had stumbled upon—spent the rest of the day swimming out to the ships, carrying presents of colored parrots and darts. But his remark about “things of slight value” foreshadowed a fatal mistake—the confusion about what these people took to be worth something—which was to damn this collision of Old World and New. Columbus believed the native populations understood little about the value of the goods they accepted and would easily be cajoled into handing over the gold he believed they possessed. This was the fundamental flaw at the heart of the European idea of money. Columbus believed there was no equal exchange that could be made, and that apart from gold there was nothing of value in this culture. In fact, he very much needed information from the locals about how to support a colony in this unfamiliar environment, about what crops were grown and how his own might be adapted.
He did dimly sense that there were other less substantial things he might learn from the Tainos: “No-one would have believed it, who has not seen it,” he wrote. “Of anything that they possess, if it be asked of them, they never say no; on the contrary, they invite you to share it and show as much love as if their hearts went with it, and they are content with whatever trifle be given them.” They enchanted him, but with the arrogance of the European merchant class—backed by the supreme arrogance of the aristocracy—he believed he could not be taught anything valuable by them.
There were immediate disappointments too. There was no sign of the expected lions, elephants, and camels. The only creatures of note were the extraordinary parrots, which were to become the unofficial symbol of America for the next few centuries. There were some iguanas and the mysterious dogs without a bark, which the Tainos ate as a delicacy (“none too good,” according to Columbus’s party).*
It was also clear that the Arabic translator would be of no use at all.
In the West Indies—the very name conjures up the enterprise of Columbus—Pinzón was becoming increasingly infuriated with his expedition commander. He heard a rumor of gold to the south and decided he would benefit by getting there first. So on November 22 the Pinta left. Columbus continued to explore the island, which the Tainos called “Haiti” and he renamed Hispaniola, with what remained of the fleet, aware that the natives they had aboard were getting increasingly nervous. They said they were now in the territory of the Caribs—fierce people they described as being one-eyed with the faces of dogs—who captured them and ate them.† Going onshore, Columbus’s men were horrified when they went into a hut and found a man’s head in a basket. Whether this was actually what they saw—the reality of cannibalism remains controversial—that is certainly what they believed.
As Christmas approached, Columbus and the rest of the crew of the Santa Maria were exhausted because the Tainos had been climbing all over the ship for the previous two nights. In the early hours of Christmas morning with little moon, and the sea dead calm, the ship’s captain Juan de la Cosa went to bed, leaving the ship’s boy at the tiller. A little later, the ship slipped so gently onto a coral reef that at first nobody noticed. When it did become apparent, part of the crew panicked and set off in a boat for the Niña. By the time they had been sent back, the coral had cut into the hull and water was pouring in.
Columbus sent an urgent message for help to the local chief, Guancanagarí, and through the day the weeping admiral, his crews, and the local Tainos struggled to rescue the stores and as much from the ship as they could before it broke up completely. Shocked, bedraggled, and frightened, the crew of the Santa Maria lay on the beach and wondered if they would ever get home.
There was still no sign of the Pinta, so what was to be done with the Santa Maria’s crew? Columbus’s solution was to use the wood from the ship to build a fort and have the crew man it until his return. That day, the first European settlement in the Americas was founded and called La Navidad, after Christmas Day. By early January, a tower was built, together with the first of the thatched huts that would form the basis of the new town. Columbus set off with emotional farewells to the Santa Maria’s crew, leaving Diego de Arana, the cousin of his mistress and now Marshal of the Fleet, in charge. Later that day they saw th
e Pinta sailing toward them, having heard about the wreck through the native grapevine. There was a furious exchange between the two commanders in the Niña’s cabin.
Now that Columbus was considering what to tell the sovereigns, the fatal whiff of empire was clouding his mind. “All the islands are so utterly at your highnesses’ command that it only remains to establish a Spanish presence and order them to perform your will,” he wrote to Isabella and Ferdinand. “They are yours to command and make them work, sow seed and do whatever else is necessary and build a town and teach them to wear clothes and adopt our customs.”
“I am still determined to proceed to the mainland and the city of Quinsay to present the letters of your highnesses to the Great Khan,” Columbus had written in his running letter to Ferdinand and Isabella on October 24, 1492. Back in Spain the following day, the governor-general of Valencia, also the chamberlain of Aragon, was writing to Ferdinand to say that he had examined all of John Cabot’s plans for a new jetty and thought they would work. But he warned that if the various factions in the city had to come up with the money, they would never agree, so some other way to finance the project would have to be found.
It was time for Cabot’s second meeting with Ferdinand about the jetty proposal. It is hard to imagine that during the meeting, as Cabot stared into the eyes of the great strategist of the Mediterranean, Ferdinand did not ask him about Milan. He knew this Venetian in front of him had lived there for some time, knew about the tension between Ludovico Sforza and his own relatives in Naples, and would want to know every detail. At the same time, it is hard to imagine that Cabot could have resisted the temptation to mention that he had his own plans for an expedition to the Indies. History does not record the conversation, but we can imagine that Ferdinand looked amused—he had his own doubts about Columbus—but kept his own counsel.
