by David Boyle
On June 10, 1496, while Cabot and his recalcitrant crew were being buffeted in the North Atlantic, Bristol had been torn apart by a brutal riot between the forces of city government and the church. Bristol was the center of anticlerical feeling in England, and the heart of an underground trade in heretical books. So when the mayor became involved in a fracas while he was checking the weight of bread sold on the abbot’s precincts on College Green, the townspeople hurried up the hill from the docks to join in. At the height of the fighting, which involved fists more than swords, the mayor was seen swinging his ceremonial sword around his head.† That very same day, two thousand miles away in Cadiz, Columbus sailed quietly into the harbor, to find no crowds and no welcoming committee.
Berardi’s elegant amortization plan was now under way. New money had been raised, and those who had put their faith in the Indies venture were waiting with confidence for repayments to begin. Unfortunately, all the colonists returning from Hispaniola brought with them were the most terrible tales of brutality and crop failure. Their disappointment was now widely understood. There was a little gold, but it was hardly lying around waiting to be picked up and, in any case, the foreign Columbus brothers took it all for themselves. Why sign on for a voyage with the next generation of investors when you were promised nothing at all and ran a 50 percent chance of not returning alive?
Those few who did volunteer for the crews tended to have nefarious, ulterior motives: They were escaping serious debts, prison sentences, or heresy charges, or they were criminals with nothing to lose. Those who had risked sailing with Columbus’s first voyage had still not been paid and information like that got around the wharves of Seville and Cadiz, where Columbus became known as “Admiral of the Mosquitoes.”
Despite these obstacles, Vespucci had succeeded in equipping four more of the twelve supply ships in January 1496, shortly after Berardi’s death. Then disaster struck. The convoy ran into storms in the middle of the Atlantic and were badly damaged, forcing them back to Cadiz for repairs. Three more set out in June, and Vespucci’s enormous head was still to be seen among the merchants of Seville or along the docks in Cadiz. His gray hair was nearly gone and he was prematurely bald, but he was well respected; not only for his supreme efficiency but also because, despite the most trying circumstances, he never lost his temper. Unfortunately, the destruction of the fleet at the beginning of the year was to be the last straw for the company. Berardi was dead and his company was bankrupt, and Vespucci was having to consider his position in the community. He had continuing responsibilities as Berardi’s executor, but it made no sense to continue to struggle with the business of finding ships and crews when there was no longer an obvious role for him.
It was at this point that Columbus arrived back in Seville, marching in his gray Franciscan habit down onto the dockside. As soon as he arrived, it became apparent that just along the quay four ships—which he knew nothing of—were being prepared to set out for the Indies. Clearly the control Columbus believed he could exercise over his discoveries was beginning to ebb. He forwarded his letters of self-justification to the queen and asked for an urgent meeting, but she and Ferdinand were a hundred miles northeast of Madrid, at Almazán, and replied disconcertingly that he must be tired after his journey and really ought to rest.
In fact, they were busy with both the details of a new military expedition to Naples and a whole string of diplomatic marriages to buttress the Holy League against the French. There was the forthcoming marriage of their daughter Juana to Philip of Burgundy, the union that, as it turned out, would carry on their line. There was the parallel marriage of their son and heir, the wild Juan, to Philip’s sister Marguerite of Austria,* and the marriage of the new king of Portugal, Manuel, to their daughter Isabella.
Rumors had also reached the sovereigns about Columbus’s peculiar arrival. Not just that he looked ill, or that despite being given the title of a hereditary admiral he was dressed in the habit of a Franciscan, he had also failed to bring back consignments of the anticipated gold, pearls, and spices, as one might have expected from the discoverer of the Indies, but instead carried peculiar native masks, necklaces, and carvings of what looked like the devil. This was the very picture of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
While the various wedding preparations continued, the sovereigns kept Columbus at bay, to see if his mental state would improve while he was staying at the home of the historian Andrés Bernáldez and then through the summer at a Jeronymite monastery in Medina del Campo. Rumor had it that Columbus had not returned to his long-suffering mistress in Córdoba, who he was now banned from marrying because he was a member of the Spanish aristocracy. He was seen wandering around the city with his hair unkempt and his beard uncut.
Ferdinand and Isabella left him to wait for nearly four months and when they finally agreed to see him, at the luxurious palace of Casa del Cordón at Burgos at the beginning of October, he found that his long letters had done their job. The sovereigns were still friendly and solicitous. They confirmed both his original patent and Bartholomew’s position as adelantado, or military governor. He wanted to support Bartholomew, but most of all, he wanted to be there to choose a new capital city for Hispaniola now that it was clear that Isabella would not do as a site. But there were still disagreements about his legal position. Early in the new year, he was writing to the sovereigns, claiming a full quarter of the whole yield of everything that came back from the Indies. This was impossible, they replied. It would render Berardi’s amortization plan completely unworkable. All he could have was the agreed upon tenth share of their 20 percent. Then there was the question of who was allowed to go to the Indies, and here Columbus began to realize—perhaps under Vespucci’s influence—that the more people who went, the more lucrative it might be for him.
While these discussions continued, it became obvious to Columbus why money was so tight in the royal coffers. A gigantic fleet of 130 ships accompanied Princess Juana to Flanders for her wedding, and then brought back Marguerite. Her wedding to Juan took place in Burgos on April 3, 1497, and Columbus was there. As soon as it was over and the royal couple safely dispatched, Ferdinand and Isabella finally turned to the question of Columbus’s return to the Indies.
The Success of the Holy League had led to an uneasy peace in Italy. The French had gone, at least for the time being—though Charles was known to be preparing to return, delayed only by his grief at the death of his infant son—and the city-states were unusually and suspiciously united. The one exception was Vespucci’s hometown of Florence, where the French had been hailed by Savonarola as God’s chosen instrument.
Vespucci was in constant touch with his friends there, despite his heavy schedule in Seville. He knew that the rapid departure of the Medicis had left Florence once more a republic, which, despite his loyalties, pleased him. He also knew that under Savonarola’s influence, the city had clamped down on the usurious moneylenders, declaring all their debts void and setting up a city bank—the Monte della Pietà—that lent money at no more than 7.5 percent interest. It meant that people could once more risk opening small businesses and that farmers could once again borrow to buy seeds. He knew Savonarola was urging the churches to go further still and to give their accumulated gold and silver to the poor, and to encourage them, the city was busy selling off the treasures of the Medici palace. Vespucci’s elderly uncle Giorgio managed to siphon enough of the proceeds of the sale to buy the Medici library and bring it to San Marco for protection.
The other cities looked askance at this dangerous religious radicalism, and to an extent Vespucci shared their fears. As a quintessential Renaissance man, he regarded Savonarola as dangerously medieval. Pope Alexander, deeply fearful of Savonarola’s prophetic influence and furious that Florence had refused to join the Holy League, invited him to Rome and offered to make him a cardinal if he came. A suspicious Savonarola stayed put, and intensified his rhetoric against the pope. “Be prepared, I tell you, Rome, to suffer dreadful punis
hments,” he thundered from the pulpit of the Duomo. “You are going to be bound in iron chains, you’re going to be put to the sword, fire and flame are going to eat you up. If you want to be healed, give up feasting, give up pride, ambition, lust and greed, since it is food like this that’s made you ill.”
But God seemed to be looking in the other direction. There were disastrous floods that were destroying Florence’s harvests, bringing unaccustomed political pressure to bear on Savonarola. Opposition parties were emerging in Florence, and the Popolano family were encouraging them. There was the Arrabbiati (the Angry Ones), a group of wealthy families who derided Savonarola’s supporters as “the Nodders” and the Compagnacci, led by the homosexual banker Doffo Spini, who spread intense hatred against Savonarola and his purity campaigns. This combination of intense religious fervor and reform, and the growing opposition, led to a series of extraordinary spectacles that have gone down in history as the Bonfires of the Vanities.
On Shrove Tuesday, 1497, while Cabot was busy preparing his second voyage, and just as Columbus’s permission to prepare a third voyage finally arrived, as many as ten thousand boys carried olive branches and banners of the cross through the center of Florence, singing hymns written by Savonarola himself. They then converged outside the cathedral in the Piazza dell Signoria, where they piled in a sixty-foot pyramid all the wigs, perfumes, pagan books, musical instruments, and sculptures and paintings of naked women and pagan gods they could find. On top was an effigy of Satan himself. As the procession arrived, the crowd sang the Te Deum, the giant bonfire was lit, and some of the greatest works of the Florentine Renaissance were consumed by the flames.
Columbus had been forced to wait ten months, but finally, on April 23, 1497, Ferdinand and Isabella issued instructions for a fleet of eight ships to make a third voyage to the Indies. The news was greeted with great relief by Columbus, but there were immediately complications about where the money would come from.
In the end, it was borrowed from the dowry of their daughter Isabella, the new queen of Portugal. Berardi was dead and his company was no more, so the old Florentine financiers in Seville were no longer adequate middlemen. Columbus fell back on those he could really trust: the Centurione family and another Genoese acquaintance, Bernardo Grimaldi. Fanatically vigilant about whispering against him at court, or the merest whiff of a threat to his privileges, Columbus—still dressed as a Franciscan penitent—wrote to Bartholomew that he had never experienced such anxiety, exhaustion, and difficulties.
Bartholomew was already in the process of choosing a new capital city for Hispaniola. While his brother was still clamoring for an audience with the sovereigns, a party under Miguel Días had found a site on the south coast of the island with a good harbor and good rivers, which looked likely to produce gold. Later in the year, while Columbus was in Burgos, the first bricks were laid on the site of what would be the city of Santo Domingo. Isabella itself was abandoned. Even Columbus’s own house, with its sentry posts to guard him against a murderous assault by his followers, was left to rot. Within a decade, its ruins were said to be haunted by the spirits of slaves or executed Castilians screaming in the night.*
Vespucci was still involved in the business of financing Columbus’s voyages, both as a friend and as a trusted supplier. As 1497 dawned, he had managed to get two more ships ready for Férnandez Coronel in Sanlúcar, as well as the twelve that had already been arranged, and because of his friendship with Columbus, he was busy preparing his ships as well. In the intervals, the two friends spent some time in discussion. Columbus had become obsessed with the political implications of living on a round planet, fears he had been agonizing over on his voyage home. Should there also be a dividing line between Castile and Portugal in the Far East? Should not the line set by the Treaty of Tordesillas go all the way around the planet?
Vespucci found this interesting, but he had his own priorities: He wanted to influence Columbus’s choice of route. In Hispaniola, the Columbus brothers had been obsessed with sailing north or northwest, to where they believed they would find Cipangu or Cathay, but having been back in Castile for nearly a year, Columbus had changed his mind. Vespucci’s research had led him to the same conclusion, and he was now determined to persuade Columbus, when he returned, to head southwest. There he believed he would find the Cape of Catigara, through which Marco Polo had left China and sailed to India, and urged this approach on him.
And it was not just Vespucci’s influence. Both men had heard rumors, reinforced by Ferdinand’s spy network, that the Portuguese believed there was land to the south of Columbus’s islands. Historians have since wondered whether the Portuguese success with the Treaty of Tordesillas, where they successfully pushed the line dividing the Atlantic a hundred leagues farther west, was because they knew more than they let on. Maybe they had sent secret voyages themselves to the area and knew there really was land to the south of Hispaniola and Cuba. Maybe it was just intelligent guesswork. Either way, Columbus now needed to see for himself.
What worried Vespucci was that Columbus’s other priorities seemed to be becoming increasingly bizarre. It wasn’t just the religious mania, it was his growing obsession with the island of the Amazons—an island of seminaked warrior women or, as he put it, the island “where all women were communal”—which Columbus was now determined to find. It was becoming clear to Vespucci, with his growing experience of voyages of exploration and his great knowledge of experimental geography—learned at the feet of Toscanelli himself—that waiting around for other people to make the required journeys might just be folly. He would have to do it for himself.
Berardi was gone, and apart from their friendship, Vespucci’s five years in Seville seemed exhausting and somewhat thankless. He had some reason to hope that his association with Berardi would catapult him to higher things, to exploration and recognition. In fact, it had given him the tedium of association with a bankrupt business and the whiff of failure. But Savonarola’s revolution ruled out going home to Florence, where he would be forced to take sides among his bitterly divided family and friends. Vespucci knew all the wealthiest merchants and Medici agents in Spain and he was still respected enough. There really was no reason why he should not accompany an expedition himself, if he was determined to do so.
In the early months of 1497, while Cabot was making preparations for his second attempt to reach the Indies, another fleet was being prepared in Lisbon which was to go in the opposite direction. The new Portuguese king, Manuel, was proving to be unexpectedly decisive on the throne. He had consulted his astrologer, Abraham ben Zacuto—a privileged member of the Jewish community who had escaped the expulsion and pogroms—who told him that the stars favored an attempt to reach India via the East.
In fact, John of Portugal had been planning such a trip for years, and had put the experienced royal servant Estêva da Gama in command. Da Gama had died unexpectedly at the same time as John, and Manuel decided, after further astrological advice, that his son Vasco should take his place. Manuel hailed him as he was passing through the palace in Lisbon and made the announcement, which was as unexpected to the inexperienced Vasco as it was to everyone else. Bartholomew Dias, the discoverer of the Cape of Good Hope, was overlooked because Manuel knew he needed a diplomat.
Vasco da Gama was then twenty-six, a discreet, diplomatic loner from a fishing village in the north of Portugal and in service to the Almeida family. His mother was partly English. But there would be no scrambling for investment or leases for ships: Manuel’s expedition would include four specially built, specially designed galleons—much bigger than caravels, after Dias’s advice about the weather around the cape. As winter turned to spring, da Gama, Vespucci, and Cabot were all putting the finishing touches on what would be historic expeditions.
It was dawn on May 2, 1497, and high tide in Bristol, where the fifty-foot tides rose and fell with such tremendous force that they propelled ships over the mudflats of the Avon River and out to sea. For the second time, Cabo
t received mass at the mariner’s church of St. Nicholas by Bristol Bridge, walked down to Redcliffe Wharf, and boarded the Matthew. It again seemed extraordinary, to Mattea and those families who watched from the dockside, that such a small ship could travel to the sources of spices on the other side of the world.
On a good day, Cabot could have expected to reach north Devon and anchor there for the night. This was not a good day: History suggests that Cabot’s first day at sea was frustratingly slow once the tides had stopped changing, and he put into port before even reaching the mouth of the Avon, perhaps to take on kegs of salt. This journey was so underinvested that some of the bills would have to be paid with a consignment of cod caught in the North Atlantic.
In the days that followed at the quay, there were disturbing stories: talk of a rebellion in the far west of England over the taxes levied to pay for defense against the Scots, and rumors that Warbeck was considering another landing in their support. Within days, the stories were confirmed and the uprising had spread to Somerset. Up to forty thousand rebels were said to be on their way toward Bristol, sending demands ahead that the mayor should surrender the city. The last thing Cabot wanted was for the Matthew to be caught up in any kind of civil disturbance, especially since it looked as though Bristol was going to be the focus of the fighting. But something—whether it was lack of wind or basic repairs—held up the Matthew for more than a fortnight, as the news filtered down the river. The mayor of Bristol had sent back an insulting refusal to the rebels and called out the city’s militia. Guns were being hauled onto the city walls.
