by David Boyle
It is from Soncino that we know about Cabot’s taste in silk clothing, though there may have been an element of projection here. Soncino himself had taken Henry’s court aback by arriving in September dressed in a robe of crimson damask with four rows of pearls and jewels around the collar. Soncino also made merry at the expense of Cabot’s two friends, who had islands named after them, and therefore “consider themselves counts.”
“As I have made friends with the admiral,” he went on, “I might have an archbishopric if I chose to go there, but I have reflected that the offices which your excellency reserves for me are safer… Meanwhile I stay on in this country, eating ten or twelve courses at each meal, and spending three hours at table twice a day, for the love of your excellency, to whom I humbly commend myself.” There is an exuberance implied here that goes beyond the mere collecting of supporters, though we have to discount Soncino’s ironic deprecating tone. Cabot had, according to Soncino—and this is easier to believe—a “kindly wit.” It is what drew people to him.
Cabot also still needed support. Henry’s offer shortly after their meeting to equip ten ships rapidly seems to have dissolved. Cabot needed to raise more money in London as well as Bristol, but the stakes were high. The fleet would be equipped—rather as Columbus’s second voyage had been—to facilitate the formation of a colony that would be the basis of a trading outpost near the Indies. They would need colonists—probably mainly pardoned prisoners—as well as food, agricultural equipment and seeds, animals, and construction materials. They would need Franciscans to come on the voyage as well to minister to them. Compared to Columbus, Cabot had played down religion, but it was politic to include it as part of the agenda. All these necessities required money, loans, fixers, and middlemen in both cities, and just as Henry was financially straining the nation to defend his throne.
The Scottish threat was disposed of without too much difficulty. We don’t know whether Cabot was in Bristol or London at the time, but he might have watched on November 28, 1497, as the captured Perkin Warbeck was paraded through London in chains, and then put in the stocks outside Westminster Hall. If he missed the spectacle, he must have heard about Warbeck’s capture and confession with relief. It was one less distraction for the officials and financiers he was dealing with.*
Reassured by de Puebla in London that Cabot had been refused support by the English, Ferdinand and Isabella had stopped worrying about English journeys to the Indies. They had been much more alarmed by the news from Lisbon about the departure of Vasco da Gama, so Cabot’s success took them by surprise. They urgently needed more information. Historians have not seen fit to chart the growth of espionage in this period, before the great Elizabethan spy-masters, but it was becoming increasingly sophisticated. This was partly the new role of diplomats, among which Vespucci had cut his teeth in Paris in the 1470s, and was now providing a wealth of sometimes daily information about thinking in foreign courts.
Diplomats had various methods. Some spent all their time writing dispatches. One used the technique of interrupting with irrelevant comments when anyone was being indiscrete, on the grounds that the less people wanted to listen to you, the more they seemed to be prepared to say. But the rulers needed more. We hear about Ferdinand’s spies at the Scottish court in Edinburgh or at the Portuguese court in Lisbon. We know the great lengths the Portuguese went to to protect their new sea charts, and some Portuguese historians believe Columbus’s voyage was based on deliberate misinformation planted by their spies. The English had their own shadowy networks. The accounts of the merchant king Edward IV record various sums paid out to people he describes as secret “explorators,” which seems to mean spy. Often these spies were merchants, who had reasons to come and go. Ferdinand’s formidable network of spies sent a constant stream of information into the court. But it was weakened by having no proper way of cross-referencing or even indexing the information. A generation later—faced with a threatened divorce—Ferdinand’s successors hunted for months to find the crucial papers about Catherine of Aragon’s marriage to Henry’s son.
As soon as it became clear that de Puebla was wrong, and that the English were indeed taking up the offer of the “one like Columbus,” Ferdinand’s network was once more watching the wharves in Bristol. Ferdinand and Isabella also seem to have asked Columbus’s advice on whether Cabot’s voyage was likely to be any kind of threat. History does not relate what Columbus—locked in combat with Fonseca—told the sovereigns about this or about his own previous relationship with Cabot.
But Columbus felt the need for his own information and remembered the English merchant John Day, who he had met on the docks in Lisbon on his first triumphant return, before he had even reached Castile with the news. The man had put himself unreservedly at the admiral’s service, and he was also likely to be discreet—Columbus knew he was an associate of Berardi and Vespucci’s. Whether or not they had corresponded in the interim, Columbus thought of Day now, and wrote asking for his help. What he needed was information, as long as it was not prejudicial to his loyalties to his own king.
Day was a shadowy cosmopolitan figure, working under a pseudonym—his real name was Hugh Say, an indebted member of the Mercer’s company in London, which had been operating between Portugal, Castile, and Bristol, and was therefore in a position to observe Cabot’s arrivals and departures. He had been a business partner of Berardi’s in the days when Berardi’s business was prospering. Day’s reply addressed Columbus as “Lord High Admiral” and was clearly a letter written after an interview between the two men, presumably in Seville. Day promised to send a copy of Marco Polo’s Travels and another of a fourteenth-century book called Inventio Fortunata about an Oxford friar who went to Greenland, and probably also Labrador, which has since been lost. He also agreed to supply a version of Cabot’s map in London as soon as he had been able to copy it.
Day has been described variously as a spy and a double agent. In fact he was a merchant and was not keeping Columbus informed in return for money, but for continued contact with the great man, whom he addressed as “magnificent Lord.” “In payment for some services which I hope to render you,” he wrote, “I beg your lordship to kindly write me about such matters, because the favor you will thus do me will greatly stimulate my memory to serve you in all things that may come to my knowledge.”
The letter is fascinating because Day reminds Columbus that “it is considered certain that the cape of the said land was found and discovered in the past by men from Bristol who found ‘Brasil’ as your Lordship well knows. It was called the Island of Brasil, and it is assumed and believed to be the mainland that the men from Bristol found.”* If this question about what Cabot’s Bristol rivals had discovered before was being discussed openly in letters to Columbus in Castile, it must have been deeply divisive in the Bristol merchant community, especially when Cabot was honored for finding land which some of the locals believed they discovered nearly two decades earlier.
Cabot and Columbus, so long rivals, were now facing similar difficulties getting their new fleets equipped. Vespucci was assisting the management of getting Columbus’s six ships ready for the Indies, but he was mainly engaged with the tedious business of being Berardi’s executor and untangling the catastrophic debts they had incurred on the Indies expeditions. Fonseca was now actively obstructing his old enemy at every stage, determined not to let the voyage go ahead, and only 6 million maravedis had been forthcoming to pay for the ships from the crown. Time after time, Columbus was forced to appeal to the sovereigns. They replied, when they chose to respond, either with support—they wrested control of this voyage from Fonseca and appointed de Torres in charge instead for this voyage—or, more disconcertingly, with more detailed stipulations: There could be no murderers on the voyage, they said, or counterfeiters, traitors, heretics, or homosexuals. They were also now absolutely determined that there was to be a policy of conversion to Christianity not slavery. They wanted the islands colonized, and if there was no gold, the
y wanted Columbus to supervise this by providing plots to enable colonists to produce sugar. Then, suddenly, the intricate diplomacy of Ferdinand and Isabella unraveled in a series of tragic episodes.
The first blow was the death of their only son, the nineteen-year-old Juan, who developed a dangerous fever after a feast in his honor in the university town of Salamanca. On October 6, 1497, he died in his father’s arms. It was never quite clear what had made him so suddenly ill. There were rumors about eating a bad salad the night before, or even about too much sex with his new bride, Margaret. Columbus realized immediately that his sons Diego and Ferdinand, who were pages to Juan, were now out of a job, though, in fact, Isabella took them on herself. Still reeling from this disaster, the news came through in August of the following year that their eldest daughter, Isabella, now queen of Portugal—an alliance that would have united all the nations of the Iberian peninsula—had died in childbirth. “It seemed as if God had been offended with both those illustrious families,” wrote the French diplomat Philippe de Commines, “and would not suffer the one to triumph over the other.”
Neither Ferdinand nor Isabella ever fully recovered from these bitter blows, which destroyed their family and blew apart their carefully constructed alliances. The twin thrones of Castile and Aragon would now be inherited by the Hapsburgs, the dynasty into which they had married their next eldest living daughter, Juana. After Juan’s death, they withdrew from the world to the Episcopal Palace at Guadalajara and saw almost no one until the following April. Columbus had to do without either their instructions or support.
This was a moment in history where a series of deaths unexpectedly shifted the direction of politics. It was Lent, and in Florence for the second year running Savonarola’s supporters were building a giant bonfire on which to throw accumulated art, music, and anything considered to be a luxury. But this time the atmosphere was different. Florence was suffering economically after a succession of failed harvests, and from outbreaks of famine and the plague. The city was almost isolated in Italy and regarded as standing almost heretically against the pope and the Holy League. The news that a Florentine grain fleet bound for Livorno had been driven back by ships belonging to the league was a bitter blow on the streets.
Savonarola himself was defying an excommunication from Pope Alexander. The Popolanos’ campaign against the new regime was reaching a crescendo, and forged letters were circulating around Italy purporting to be from Savonarola urging Charles VIII to bring his armies back to Italy. When he refused to take part in an ordeal by fire against a Franciscan opponent, Florence finally rose up against him, attacked the monastery of San Marco—while Vespucci’s uncle hid in his library—and took Savonarola prisoner. Two papal emissaries arrived to conduct his trial with “the verdict in their bosoms.” On May 23, 1498, he and his closest allies were simultaneously hanged and burned at the stake on the same spot where Savonarola conducted his Bonfires of the Vanities. Vespucci’s old friends the Popolano were prime instigators of his destruction.
Savonarola had been transformed into ashes, collected in secret by his admirers when they were still floating in the Arno, but fate had also overtaken the man Savonarola had believed was God’s chosen instrument for punishing Italy. The day before Palm Sunday, on April 8, 1498, Charles VIII of France was making his way around the back of the castle at Amboise to watch a tennis match. He banged his head on a low door lintel, suffering no ill-effects at the time. But walking back again after the game, he collapsed in the same area.
It was the spot where the castle’s drains discharged, “a place where every man pissed that would,” according to de Commines, but it was felt it might be best not to move him. Charles lay there for nine hours and died just before midnight. His young son had died two years earlier, so his only heir was his cousin Louis of Orleans, a man determined to return to Italy and to wrest Milan from the control of Ludovico Sforza.
If Vespucci had toyed with the idea of going home, he must have put it aside now. He was fed up with his predicament and his constant disappointments in Seville. He had burned his bridges with the Popolano family, and was no longer handling their business. He would go instead to the Indies, or wherever it was that Columbus had discovered, and prove to the world that he had unrecognized wisdom and cosmographical skills.
7
STRANGE MEETINGS
“The land which God has newly given your Highnesses on this voyage must be reckoned continental in extent.”
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, letter to Ferdinand and
Isabella, October 1498
“God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John, after having spoken of it through the mouth of Isaiah, and he showed me the spot where to find it.”
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS,
letter to Juana de la Torre, 1500
THE WHARVES OF the port of London were noisy places. Walking along Thames Street, close to the river, as Cabot did day after day, past the huge warehouses and massive cranes of the various trading leagues and companies, it was possible to hear almost every European language being spoken. The many distinct dialects from around London made communication hard for locals and foreigners alike. When William Caxton set up his first printing press down the river in Westminster, the profusion of them made it nearly impossible for him to print his books in words that could be widely read.
It was, as always, a city of violent contrasts. On the one hand, the future scholar and martyr Thomas More was a successful law student at Lincoln’s Inn in 1498, just across the fields from the Fleet River that emptied slops into the Thames. His friend Erasmus was about to visit the city for the first time, steeped in the new literacy that was sweeping across Europe. On the other hand, the city remained a playground for its traditionally wild and brutal apprentices and maintained its schizophrenic attitude to foreigners and its seedy dockside taverns, and the Bow Bell still tolled the curfew each evening.
On these streets in the early months of 1498, seeking out investors to whom he could sell a share of his rights to the New Founde Land, was John Cabot. The accounts we have describe him as being dressed in the finest clothes and joining enthusiastically into the life of the city—the games of cards over stingo, London’s distinctive spiced ale, until the early morning and then buying pies filled with beef or mackerel or sheep’s trotters in the streets on his way to the next meeting with investors.
After fifteen exhausting years moving from city to city, one step ahead of his creditors, Cabot was hailed as a hero and widely recognized. London’s amateur cosmographers and geographers beat a path to his door, to hear his lectures and to see his globe showing the sloping coastline across the Atlantic, all the way to Cathay and Cipangu and the wealth they represented.
“The English run after him like mad,” said Pasqualigo, reporting home to Milan. “So do our own rogues.” What the merchants of London recognized, though they were no more credulous about the risks than other investors, was that Cabot was planning to make Bristol and London the economic equivalent of Alexandria, the lynchpin of the world’s spice trade, and as wealthy as the Levant. Even so, the original rumors that the king was going to give him ten ships, paid for by the English crown, had unraveled quickly as the treasury was faced with paying for armies to counter an invasion from Scotland, a taxpayers’ uprising in the West Country, and the reappearance of Perkin Warbeck.
Warbeck was under house arrest at the Palace of Westminster, but the English treasury was seriously depleted as a result of mobilizing armies against the uprising he had led. Henry had finally agreed to Cabot’s pension payments—they would be paid at Easter and Michaelmas by the Bristol customs—and he had reinforced the original grant to Cabot in February 1498 to go to “the land and isles of late found by the said John in our name and by our commandment,” but the royal ships had not been forthcoming. Nor had the promised criminals to man the ships on a journey into the unknown and—like Columbus’s early settlers in Hispaniola—to
provide the human foundation for an English trading station in the Indies.
The new letters of patent allowed Cabot to hire six ships of not more than two hundred tons each. To hire them he needed to offer shares in the rights given him by the royal patent to investors in Bristol. Since the Bristol merchants were still suspicious of this Genoese Venetian announcing discoveries in seas they had believed were their own, and which they had hoped to keep secret, he had no choice but to go to London for the money instead.
Armed with introductions from Amerike, Cabot made the 120-mile journey from Bristol to London and back several times in autumn and winter 1497 to 1498, and was soon able to interest a powerful syndicate of London merchants led by two partners, Lawrence Thirkill and Thomas Bradley. They were able to raise the money for the king’s ship as coinvestors with the crown and were given the contract to fit it out—the exhausting work that Berardi and Vespucci had been doing for Columbus. They then traveled back to Bristol to supervise the provisioning of a fleet that looked to number five ships. It was only half the promised number, but it was a respectable expedition nonetheless.
In early May 1498, exactly a year since the lonely and quiet departure of the Matthew, Cabot’s five ships were ready to sail, and this time all of Bristol had turned out for his departure. There were processions and pageantry, as the mayor and abbot vied to outshine each other, and Cabot attended mass at dawn in St. Nicholas Church.
