Toward the Setting Sun

by David Boyle

  It was a deeply frustrating time for Cabot. By then, he knew that Columbus had left on his voyage—the expedition in which he should have been an equal partner—claiming the most extraordinary titles and financial concessions. He deduced the close relationship between Columbus and the queen. If Columbus should fail, it made sense to put down a marker with the king. That done, all he could do was hope for the best—and first of all, hope for the jetty.

  But that hope barely survived the winter. Letters from his creditors in Venice urging his arrest were soon arriving in the city, and thanks to irreconcilable differences among those who ran Valencia, there now seemed no hope of agreement about his jetty plan. In February 1493, Ferdinand wrote to the city canceling the project, given that extra money was not available. Cabot must ruefully have thought to himself that the money he required had been invested in his former friend’s enterprise to the Indies.

  Once again he had to pack up his home and his growing family and move. As he made the painful, expensive, and exhausting preparations, he heard the almost unbelievable news that Columbus had returned.

  Finally back on European soil, after being battered by storms across the Atlantic, Columbus stood before the last person he wanted to see: John of Portugal.

  The winter was cold and tempestuous. Genoa harbor froze over, and as the Pinta and Niña (with Columbus on board) made their uncertain way back across the Atlantic, they ran into a succession of disastrous storms. The terrified, exhausted sailors drew lots with peas, one of which had a cross marked on it, to see who would go on a pilgrimage of gratitude if they survived. Columbus drew first and got the marked pea, but the storm carried on.* At the end of February, separated again from Pinzón, the crew of the Niña took shelter in the Azores. When half of them went ashore to give thanks, they were immediately arrested by the Portuguese authorities under suspicion of illegally trading in west Africa.

  Having talked their way out of the charges and back aboard, the crew set off again, only to have the storm hit them with renewed force. By March 3 it was at its height, and by the light of the full moon they sighted land—only to find to their horror and discomfort that what they saw was Lisbon. Sailing reluctantly up the river, Columbus moored four miles outside the city next to an enormous man-of-war, and sent a preemptive message to the king, asking to see him. He persuaded the master of the warship, who happened to be the explorer Bartholomew Dias, that he was speaking the truth about the Indies. Having done that, Columbus made the thirty-mile journey, with three of the ten “Indians” he had brought back with him, to the monastery of Santa Maria das Virtudes, where John was staying. After a month in a raging ocean beyond anything they had conceived, the hapless near-naked Tainos found themselves struggling on mules in the mud in a completely unfamiliar world.

  John received Columbus honorably, asked him to sit down, and immediately remembered how irritating he found the man’s exaggerations. John explained gently that as far as he could see, Columbus had strayed into areas of the ocean that were Portuguese under the 1481 treaty that divided the Atlantic between their two countries, north and south. Realizing that his survival probably depended on his answer, Columbus said that he had not seen the treaty, but he had been ordered to go nowhere near the African coast and he had obeyed.

  Intrigued by Columbus’s claim that the Tainos were intelligent, John suggested a test. He asked one of them to arrange a pile of beans in the shape of the islands he came from. Then he upset the shape and asked another Taino to do the same thing. Staring down at this whole new world they set out, John banged his hand on the table. “O man of little comprehension,” he said, of himself. “Why did I let slip an enterprise of so great importance?”

  Back on board the Niña, and making ready to sail again, Columbus realized how lucky he was to have escaped imprisonment or assassination, and spent his time busily writing letters—long accounts to the royal treasurer Luis Santangel and others to Berardi, Medina Celi, and the sovereigns themselves, including a request that they ask the pope to make his son Diego a cardinal. He knew his forced visit to Lisbon was bound to raise suspicions in the Castilian court, so it was urgent that he should get his own account to Isabella.

  Before he sailed out of Lisbon harbor, breathing an enormous sigh of relief, he passed a Bristol ship called Nicholas of the Tower, importing wine and oil and owned by a shadowy English merchant called John Day, one of Berardi’s partners back home, who he seems to have met on the dockside. Columbus knew Day from Seville, but this may have been when he first involved him as a kind of personal espionage service.

  In the Pinta, Pinzón was having similar thoughts. He had landed in Castile, just north of the Portuguese border at Bayona in the last week of February, desperate to beat Columbus home with the news. He dashed off an immediate message to the sovereigns in Barcelona, asking permission to come there and tell them what had been found. The reply, when it arrived a week later, was a snub: They preferred to hear the news from the admiral himself.

  Mortified, Pinzón set sail southward, rounding Cape St. Vincent at the same time as the Niña, but out of sight. As he sailed up the Saltes estuary and into Palos, there ahead of him was Columbus, the sails of his ship being stowed away. His last hopes dashed, furious and jealous of Columbus and his exaggerations, and sick and exhausted from his stormy crossing, Pinzón asked to be rowed ashore. From there he went straight home and to bed.

  He never got up again, and in the few days left to him, local doctors treated him for a strange disease involving ulcers all over the skin, which they had never seen before and which would reappear catastrophically the following year in Barcelona and Naples. Those early European victims of syphilis died quickly, sometimes within months. It is quite possible that Pinzón was the first European to die from the disease.

  After arriving at Palos, Columbus recovered for two weeks at La Rábida and then set out with his ten Taino captives for Seville, arriving on Palm Sunday. There he received his first reply from the sovereigns that they had heard the news, addressing him by all the titles he had demanded: “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” and “Viceroy” and “Governor of the islands that have been discovered in the Indies.”

  “We have seen your letters and we have taken much pleasure in learning whereof you write, and that God gave so good a result to your labors,” they wrote, encouragingly. They urged him to make the eight-hundred-mile journey to them in Barcelona, but also to start preparations for going back to Hispaniola as soon as possible. Setting out via Córdoba, Columbus was welcomed by Beatriz and his sons, and then in Murcia and along the coast of western Spain, he organized a series of public displays. But it was in Valencia, where a frustrated Cabot was preparing to leave again, that he gave a glimpse of himself to his former partner in the enterprise of the Indies.

  There was Columbus, standing like a Roman senator, proud and unsmiling, wearing as much gold and finery as he could find, six of his almost naked Taino captives around him, each of them carrying a brightly colored parrot in a cage. Everything brought back in triumph from the expedition was on display: hammocks, pineapples, iguana skins, gold masks. It was one of those great events that nobody in the surging crowds who saw it can ever have quite forgotten.

  But nobody paid such close attention as did Cabot, with mixed feelings of exhilaration and fury that his former colleague should have carried out this bold plan—their plan—and come home alive to tell the world. And the more he stared at his sumptuously dressed rival, the more his doubts began to gnaw at him.

  The triumphal northward march of Columbus with the Tainos and the parrots culminated finally in a massive public reception at the Alcazar in Barcelona before Ferdinand and Isabella. Ferdinand was still recovering from a knife wound in a near fatal assassination attempt in December, but Isabella was radiant. When the admiral kissed their hands, they gave him the extraordinary privilege of sitting beside them and Prince Juan on the raised dais in the throne room of the Plaza del Rey, with its gothic murals and high vaulted ceil
ing. Then on to the royal chapel for a celebratory mass, tears running down the faces of Columbus and his royal mentors.

  Before he hurried back to Seville to prepare for his second expedition to the Indies, there was a ceremony baptizing the six Indians. Of these, just one stayed behind as a servant in the royal household—he was baptized Don Juan, after the heir to the throne.

  The celebrations in Barcelona led directly to the ambitious plans for a fleet of seventeen ships. Columbus was now at the height of his prestige and favor at the court. Those who had ridiculed and frustrated him during his years of waiting were silent. He rode down the streets next to the queen, and she had appointed a powerful representative to assist him, Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca.

  Fonseca was a protégé of Talavera’s, a distant cousin of the Hungarian royal family, and a collector of Flemish painting. He had only just been ordained, but had already proved himself as an administrator and diplomat. He was sent to Seville to take charge of the Indies operation, a position which he filled with growing power and influence, shaping policy in the new world, until his death in 1523. That is how Seville became what it was to be for two centuries or more—the “Great Babylon of Spain,” the gate through which all trade with the Indies passed.

  Already in the weeks since Fonseca’s appointment on May 20, 1493, Seville—later the backdrop for Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Carmen—was showing the first signs of what it was to become. The narrow winding street through the heart of the city—the Calle Sierpes running from the palace of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, past the royal prison to the Plaza de San Francisco and the cathedral—was already filling with assorted adventurers, beggars, and laggards hoping for a chance in the Indies. The prison was soon to be receiving eighteen thousand prisoners a year, and even now the city was bursting with a new underclass. The traditional place where merchants like Berardi and Vespucci sealed their deals was on the steps of the still-unfinished cathedral and this was increasingly crowded and uncomfortable.* Already, the seafaring and gypsy suburb of Triana, across the river, was packed with sailors from all over Europe dreaming of gold.

  For the first and only time in this story, the three key figures in the race for America were in the same city at the same time. Columbus was basking in glory, writing secret messages to the queen, aware of the danger posed by spies, but also enjoying the intrigue. They were rather taken with each other, and with each other’s dreams. “By this post I am sending you a copy of the book you left me,” Isabella wrote to him. “The delay has been caused by the fact that it had to be written secretly, so none of those who are here from Portugal, or anyone else, should know anything about it.”

  He was also finding that he did not really see eye to eye with the formidable Fonseca, who was coming to very much the same conclusion about him. While Isabella saw in Columbus an enlightened visionary, Fonseca could see only an accomplished dissimulator and liar.

  Across the city, Vespucci was beginning to work less as an inspector for the Popolano and moving more permanently into a new role as Berardi’s partner, helping him with a schedule and set of business responsibilities that was rapidly burgeoning out of control. Seventeen ships needed to be bought or leased for the new voyage. Their crews had to be persuaded to enlist. The equipment and food had to be procured: cannons, ammunition, swords, biscuits, wine, oil, flour, vinegar, bread, cheese. It was clear from the outset that Fonseca was an inspired administrator. He put an official from the Inquisition in charge of ordering supplies of bread for the voyage, a magnificent idea to discourage cheating. But it was Berardi and Vespucci who were organizing most of the contracts.

  Vespucci had been desperate to volunteer for the fleet himself, but he was held in Seville by duties for the Popolano family and his work with Berardi. As a lodger in Berardi’s house, Vespucci was rubbing shoulders with four of the Tainos brought over by Columbus. These refugees were now in a desperate state—cold and ill, exhausted by all the new tastes, smells, and sights—and subject to the enthusiastic experiments by the gentlemen of the house, who were trying to teach them Castilian Spanish.

  Even after the fleet had been equipped, a still bigger task remained and that involved equipping and manning a whole new colony. Masons, carpenters, and smiths needed to be recruited. Farmers needed to be lured away from the land, together with tools, seeds, and equipment. It was exhausting but had the potential to be enormously lucrative—though Berardi had already invested a great deal of money in the voyages.

  Cabot was also in town, attempting to persuade the city to use his skills to rebuild the pontoon bridge that linked the main city with Triana across the river. Perhaps he was attempting to organize an audience with his former friend, but in any case he was knocking on Fonseca’s office door urging a different approach, farther to the north, and begging to be allowed to lead an expedition there himself. Time and time again he was rebuffed. If he were allowed to launch an expedition it seemed likely to be a disruptive influence on Columbus’s second voyage. But to everyone he talked to about the Indies—and that was about the only conversation taking place in Seville—he urged them to look again at Columbus’s “Indians,” who bore no resemblance to the traders from the East he had encountered in Mecca.

  Here Vespucci shared some of Cabot’s doubts. Columbus had spent some days staying at Berardi’s house as well, and had discussed details of the voyage with Vespucci there. He had seen the calculations Columbus had made about the length of a degree around the equator, and knew how much it had been underestimated. He knew there were grounds to doubt Columbus’s interpretation of what he had found.

  The news of the discovery of a western route to the Indies was spreading across southern Europe. Columbus’s letter to Santangel was published in Latin twelve times within months of his return, in six European cities and five different countries. Such was the power of the new printing presses. What those hearing the news for the first time tended to remember were the descriptions of the naked women, the new animals and birds—mainly in terms of how they tasted—and Columbus’s portrayal of the Tainos. “They love their neighbors as themselves,” he wrote, planting in European minds the seed of the concept of the noble savage.

  Ever protective of his own image as a competent pioneer, his letters glossed over the disappointments. The loss of the Santa Maria was not mentioned. His original letters explained simply that he had “left” the colonists at La Navidad one caravel, omitting the detail that he had left most of it at the bottom of the sea.

  The first surviving evidence of the spreading news is a letter dated April 9, 1493—when Columbus was still in Seville—from a Barcelona merchant named Hannibal Zenaru to his brother in Milan, explaining that a new province had been discovered where men were born with tails. Zenaru gave a copy of the letter to Jacome Trotti, ambassador for the Italian city of Ferrara in Milan, who sent it on to the duke. The Duke of Ferrara understood the diplomatic significance immediately and wrote an urgent message to his ambassador in Florence, passing on a rumor that Toscanelli—apparently the originator of the whole idea—had left all his books and papers to his nephew Ludovico, and urging him to contact Ludovico and find out if Toscanelli had written any more about these islands.

  Letters were also arriving in Florence via the Medici network, thrilled with the stories of the naked Tainos with “only their private parts covered.” Peter Martyr in Spain also wrote to his Italian humanist friends explaining that the Antipodes had been found. Suddenly it seemed to those who followed such matters that Toscanelli had been right after all. But even Peter Martyr had his doubts. “I do not deny it entirely, though the magnitude of the globe suggests something else,” he was writing later in the year. But then in November, in a letter to Cardinal Sforza, he was the first to coin a critical phrase, describing “the famous Columbus, the discoverer of the New World.”

  What had been an obscure theory among geographers and obsessives was suddenly now high politics. Ambassadors were primed. Spies were commissioned to report back on anythi
ng related to the discoveries, and, especially in Lisbon and Seville, a heavy diplomatic and intelligence traffic crisscrossed the continent.

  One of the courtiers in Lisbon, when Columbus and his Indians had stood before the king of Portugal, was Francisco de Almeida, the future governor-general of Portuguese India. He had watched John’s experiment with the beans and the maps with consternation, aware that the Tainos exactly fit the description of Indians that he had in his own mind. In the urgent consultations in Lisbon that took place after Columbus had gone, Almeida had urged the king to act. If the Spanish had landed near Asia, they were in the Portuguese sphere of influence, and these islands must be seized back by force.

  Almeida’s argument prevailed, and as Columbus’s new fleet took shape in Cadiz, a similar expedition—but with specifically warlike intentions—was being prepared in Lisbon harbor, with Almeida in command. The preparations had been noticed by spies who now were working in every European port, and were reported back to Castile. Ferdinand and Isabella responded by fitting out six warships in the north, ready to sweep through Portuguese waters and intercept the fleet—and, at the same time, carry King Boabdil of Granada into exile in Morocco. But when the small fleet was ready and sailed south along the Atlantic coast of Portugal, there was no sign of the Portuguese. Almeida’s war fleet remained in the harbor.

  What had happened was that Ferdinand realized he needed to exert an urgent diplomatic effort. He sent emissaries to the new Aragonese pope, in order to provide a legal protection for their new discoveries, and Alexander responded immediately. On May 3, 1493, he issued the bull Inter caetera Divinae—mentioning “our dear son Columbus”—which divided the world down a line one hundred leagues west of the Azores, giving the eastern half to Portugal and the western part to Spain.