Toward the Setting Sun

by David Boyle

  Cabot and his sons were in the biggest of the ships, the one provided partly by money from the king. The royal banners streamed from the mainmast at the head of this impressive fleet. On deck with him were Thirkill and Bradley, and below were stored “slight and gross merchandises, as coarse cloth caps, laces, points, and other trifles, to trade with the Indians.” Also packed belowdeck in all five ships were water and provisions for a year. Even if they found no land, and reached no trading ports in China or Japan until then, Cabot could sail on—provided that he could persuade his crews to sail with him.

  Elsewhere in the fleet were a number of Italian friars who had been given the task of looking after the spiritual needs of the new trading colony. They were led by Giovanni de Carbonariis, referred to as another Friar Boyle, a reference to Bernardo Boyle who had sailed so unsatisfactorily on Columbus’s second voyage. Carbonariis was finally achieving his ambition to get involved personally in exploration, and he sailed with Cabot on the king’s ship.

  Amid the grief at the Castilian court, Columbus had finally received royal permission to prepare his fleet and leave for the Indies for a third time. He drew up a new will that left the vast wealth he still believed would be his to his son Diego, with a percentage of revenues for his brothers and uncles, and more to go into a fund at the Bank of St. George in Genoa. This would be used to help relieve the taxes on his fellow citizens back home. He left nothing for his mistress Beatriz. His new concern for Genoa was something of a change, and it followed a reconciliation with his former employers and creditors. For this third voyage, his investors would not be Florentines like Berardi or Castilians like Santangel, but his old Genoese colleagues, the Centurione and Grimaldi families.

  Later in the same month that Cabot had put out to sea from Bristol, Columbus’s fleet of six ships lay ready at the dockside in Seville, and sailed down the river to anchor outside the castle of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where the admiral followed the fleet himself, having written to his son Diego that “Your father loves you as he does himself.” On May 30, 1498, they hauled up the anchor chains, and floated slowly on the tide, past the white houses and fig and olive trees, out of the mouth of the Guadalquivir and into the Atlantic.

  Enormously relieved at last to be underway, Columbus had come aboard his flagship shortly before departure, only to find the man he disliked most in the whole of Castile, the royal paymaster and Fonseca’s right-hand man, Jimeno de Bribiesca, waiting for him on deck to question more of his purchases. Columbus was still tired and ill, and had only recently dispensed with his Franciscan garb and his studied air of humility. This was the last straw. He hit Jimeno squarely on the jaw and knocked him down on the deck.

  Columbus planned to divide his fleet in two. He had appointed Beatriz’s brother Pedro de Harana to lead the three supply ships that were sailing directly to Hispaniola. For his own exploration, Columbus had chosen the seventy-ton La Vaqueños (the cow) and the similar-sized El Correo (the mail). Unfortunately he had made the same mistake as he had with Santa Maria, and had chosen a larger ship that had not been designed for exploration and that would prove not nearly as seaworthy as the others. His favorite, the Niña, had sailed back to Hispaniola in January, along with the India.*

  Among those shipping out on the voyage were crossbowmen, priests, agricultural laborers, gold panners, and about thirty women, among the first to go to the Indies from Europe. Also by his side on the flagship was the short but energetic figure of his old lieutenant, the queen’s favorite, Alonso de Ojeda. Ojeda had also become a favorite of Columbus’s great enemy Fonseca and, although Columbus may not have realized it, was deliberately placed as Fonseca’s eyes and ears on the expedition.

  Packed in his trunk were his instructions for the voyage from the queen: “God willing, you will try with all diligence to inspire and draw the natives of the said Indies to ways entirely of peace and tranquility and impress on them that they have to see and be beneath our lordship and benign subjection, and above all that they be converted to our Holy Catholic Faith . . .” It was impossible to interpret any part of this letter as somehow giving the green light to slavery in the Indies. Also packed away was the copy of Cabot’s map, which he had been sent by John Day. One of Columbus’s self-appointed tasks on this third voyage was to try to square this map with his own.

  Columbus had ended his second voyage determined to press forward his exploration to the north, toward the region where he believed Cipangu lay, but the influence of Vespucci and the sovereigns had convinced him that the real challenge lay to the south. Maybe the story that the Portuguese king had somehow identified a continent south of the Indies was nonsense, but it made sense to find out. But most of all, there was Vespucci’s intriguing theory that the Cape of Catigara—the way that Marco Polo had originally returned from China—lay southwest of Hispaniola instead.

  But there was another idea behind the third voyage, which related directly to his absolute failure to find the promised gold. There was a popular view, based on Aristotle’s geographical theories, that precious metals were found in increasing quantities the farther south one sailed, as well as at similar latitudes around the world. If the Portuguese had sailed south and found gold in Africa, then there was a reasonable chance that the pattern would be repeated on the other side of the Atlantic. He was also more aware than anyone how much the future of his islands depended on the discovery of gold. Without paying for their upkeep, he feared that they would simply be abandoned.

  In the meantime, Columbus had to deal with a more pressing and familiar problem. When he left on his second voyage, he had been forced to take evasive action to dodge a Portuguese naval squadron that had been sent to intercept him. This time, Castile was in open conflict with France along the border region, and French agents had relayed the message that the admiral was about to leave for the third time. A French fleet therefore stood off Cape St. Vincent waiting for him, so Columbus was forced to take his six ships directly southward along the African coast.

  From there, he sailed to his old home on the island of Porto Santo, where the inhabitants believed he was a pirate raider and fled into the hills, so they were not available to sell him the food and water he needed. So at San Sebastian instead, where his old romance with Beatriz seems to have died, he divided his fleet and set off southwest. “May our Lord guide me and lead me to something that may be of service to Him and to the King and Queen, our sovereigns and to the honor of Christendom,” he told his captains. “For I believe that this way has never been traveled before by anyone and that this sea is utterly unknown.”

  It was indeed. Columbus and his small squadron became among the first Europeans to record a terrifying journey through that part of the mid-Atlantic known to later generations as the Doldrums, a windless area of intense and deadly heat. For nine terrifying days, the three ships lay becalmed in searing temperatures, while the exhausted crew lay on the decks and the food went rotten below. The wine turned sour, the water supplies evaporated, and their meat supplies putrefied. Without wind to set them free again, Columbus feared they would undoubtedly die.

  Cabot and Columbus had set sail within three weeks of each other. Columbus knew about Cabot’s forthcoming voyage. Cabot assumed that Columbus would return to his islands before long. Both knew about the dispatch of the Portuguese fleet around the Cape of Good Hope the previous year. What neither of them knew was that on May 20, 1498, just ten days before Columbus sailed, Vasco da Gama had finally anchored outside Calicut in India, and opened trade negotiations with the local rajah.

  Da Gama had battled his way around the cape and faced down a rebellion by his own navigators by throwing their instruments into the sea. Disguising his crew as Muslims, they made their way up the ports of east Africa, leaving Mombasa to cross the Indian Ocean on April 7. The scale of possibilities before the Portuguese were only too clear: Anchored outside Calicut with da Gama’s small fleet were as many as seven hundred other ships from all over the East as far as China.

 
It was a defining moment in business and maritime history. Nothing would be the same again.

  The sailing of Cabot and Columbus, together with Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India, coincided with the untimely and slightly sordid last hours of Charles VIII of France. Charles was the most powerful monarch in Europe, and had flexed his muscle terrifyingly in Italy only two years earlier. His death at the age of only twenty-seven, and without an heir, was an enormous shock for Europe’s diplomatic elite, and they dashed off dispatches home with the news. The messenger galloping home to Venice with the news from Paris rode thirteen horses to death in his haste.

  The crisis in France meant real uncertainty for Italy, because Charles’s nearest relative and obvious successor was his cousin Louis of Orleans, who had been one of the most powerful advocates of the invasion of Italy in 1494. Louis had a claim to the dukedom of Milan, Cabot’s former home, which was now ruled by Ludivico Sforza, the uncle of the rightful duke. When Louis XII was crowned in Rheims Cathedral, the worst fears of the Sforza clan were realized. He assumed the title Duke of Milan during the ceremony, to the joy of the Milanese exiles who surrounded Louis at his new court. Louis was thirty-five, at the height of his powers, immensely ambitious and a brilliant diplomat, rivaling even Ferdinand of Aragon. His first act was to have his marriage to the disabled Jeanne, daughter of Louis XI the Spider King, annulled so that he could marry his predecessor’s widow, Anne of Brittany, the key to keeping Brittany in the kingdom of France. His second act was to choose his most able negotiators and send them out to the great cities of Italy to unravel the Holy League.

  In fact, the league was rapidly unraveling on its own, largely because of a change of heart by Ferdinand of Aragon. Naples had just crowned its fifth king in three years, and the only route open to secure his family’s hold over the kingdom in southern Italy seemed to be taking Naples for himself. That meant conflict with the rest of Italy.

  Pope Alexander, the architect of the league, was relatively easy to bribe. He agreed to marry off his son Cesare Borgia—who was bored with his life as a cardinal and yearned for military adventure—to the sister of the king of Navarre. It was already clear that the Borgias no longer had any interest in Milan or the Sforzas. The pope’s daughter Lucrezia Borgia was desperately tired of her husband, Giovanni Sforza, and managed to persuade him to escape from Rome in fear of his life, forcing him before his departure to sign a letter claiming that he had never consummated the marriage because he was impotent.

  To the Venetians, Louis offered part of the duchy of Milan. After long debates in the council, they accepted the offer, and the Holy League was no more.

  Cabot’s and Columbus’s parallel expeditions had been gone less than a month before London’s uneasy peace was briefly at risk again. Perkin Warbeck escaped from Westminster Palace on Trinity Sunday. He was captured a few hours later in the village of Sheen in Middlesex, put in the stocks at Cheapside, and then sent to the Tower of London. For a moment, it looked as though England’s dynastic struggles were about to break out again. Warbeck was executed eighteen months later, alongside the only living Yorkist claimant to the throne, for whom he had originally been mistaken less than a decade before.

  Perhaps it was because of this excitement that Ferdinand’s agents in London missed Cabot’s departure. Maybe they had been persuaded that there would be a delay before sailing. Maybe there was nobody listening on the wharves at Bristol to hear that Cabot, Thirkill, and the others had actually left. But then a chastened Thirkill reappeared in London early in the summer, explaining that his ship had been damaged in a storm in the Irish Sea and the crew had been forced to put into an Irish port for repairs and he had been left behind.

  The two rival Spanish ambassadors were determined to be first with the news. Pedro de Ayala was beginning to outwit Rodrigo Gonzales de Puebla in their daily skirmishes at court in Westminster. De Puebla was now distrusted by both sides: The Spanish wondered about him because of his obvious friendship with Henry VII; the English worried about him because he was always there, looking for something to eat, and was now actually being subsidized by Henry. De Ayala was solving the problem of the nonpayment of his salary in another way, by persuading the king that he deserved preferment. He was in the process of being made archdeacon of London and canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral, an unprecedented honor for a foreign ambassador.

  Both ambassadors dashed to send rival messengers with the news home to Castile. “The king of England sent five armed ships with another Genoese like Columbus to search for the island of Brasil and others near it. They were victualed for a year,” wrote de Puebla on July 25. “They say that they will be back in September. By the direction they take, the land they seek must be in the possession of your highnesses.”

  The same day, Pedro de Ayala was dashing off a rival dispatch saying the same thing, and even using a similar phrase: “I have seen the map which the discoverer has made, who is another Genoese like Columbus. . . The people of Bristol have, for the last seven years, sent out every year two, three or four caravels, in search of the island of Brasil and the seven cities, according to the fancy of this Genoese.” This was dramatic evidence to historians that there were Bristol expeditions across the Atlantic in the 1480s.

  De Puebla had copied Cabot’s maps, showing the Atlantic journey to the Indies and where he had gone, and sent them out to Ferdinand, just as John Day had sent copies to Columbus. The Spanish sovereigns had already been able to digest the implications and were convinced that under the Treaty of Tordesillas, Cabot had landed in territory that had been ceded to Castile and Aragon by the pope. Ferdinand and Isabella told de Ayala to make a formal protest to the English king.

  It may be that what had delayed their dispatches was the news of the storm that had hit Cabot’s fleet and seriously damaged the king’s ship, which carried Cabot as well as his chief investors. If the expedition had carried on decapitated, then little could be expected of it. The king’s ship was back in Bristol and Thirkill was back in London, but there was no sign of Cabot. He seems to have switched to another ship, probably with his son Sancio and Carbonariis, taken command of his diminished fleet, and headed off across the Atlantic from there.

  Columbus and his three crews sweltering in the heat of the Doldrums for those nine terrifying days were actually lucky. Throughout their period of captivity in midocean, the sky was overcast and it drizzled. If they had been exposed to the full force of the sun, they would probably have died. On the ninth day a faint ruffling of the sails indicated a breath of wind, and soon there was enough to power them out of the area. By the end of July the weather was perfect, and Columbus’s flagship plowed through the waves at a rate of nearly two hundred miles a day. But the crew was becoming increasingly nervous, having been disorientated by their ordeal, and one of them was even convinced they had drifted so far that they were now lying somewhere off Scotland. The water supplies on all three ships were dangerously low, and Columbus agreed reluctantly to turn northward to get supplies in the Lesser Antilles, unaware that the American continent—which still eluded him—had been just ahead of them.

  On July 31, a seaman from Huelva named Alonso Pérez sighted land from the crow’s nest. The crew sank down to their knees and sang “Salve Regina” on the deck. The three regular peaks they saw on the island ahead of them reminded Columbus, in his heightened state of religious intensity, of the trinity, and he named the island Trinidad. By nine p.m., the ships stood off Galley Cape and he sent expeditions ashore to look for water. The distress of preparing for this voyage, and the ordeal in the Doldrums, had brought back Columbus’s sickness, his bleeding eyes and swelling limbs and bladder. He lay below when he could, trying to conserve his dwindling sight.

  A welcoming committee of canoes paddled out to greet them, but when Columbus peered over the rail to look at them, he was bitterly disappointed. These were clearly not Asians. They were Caribs. Trying to get them to come closer, Columbus ordered the crew to play the tambourine and dance. The local
s took this for a war dance and a hail of poisoned darts rained onto the deck. But he took comfort, as ever, from one detail: The men wore a kind of bandana around their heads, like the women did in the Moorish regions of Spain, which was at least a whiff of the East.

  Within days, they had sailed through the Serpent’s Mouth and into the rough water of the Gulf of Paria, where on August 4, the trio of ships escaped disaster from the effects of some kind of tsunami. There was, according to records, a great roar from the south followed by an enormous wave that lifted the ships high in the air and snapped their cables, before dropping them down again. Once more, Columbus’s attempt to land on mainland America was shelved. When they anchored the following day, on the southern tip of the Paria Peninsula, on the coast of what is now Venezuela, Columbus decided not to go ashore. He sent Pedro de Terreros instead with a small party to raise a large cross on this new coast claimed for the monarchs of Castile and Aragon. Out of sight of the admiral, Pedro was soon surrounded by canoes, including some large ones with cabins in the middle for carrying goods, and was offered the usual selection of colorful parrots and necklaces and, in this instance, a powerful local brew called chica, made from fermented maize. But when representatives of the locals came back with him on board, he saw they had something else: The women all wore necklaces of the finest pearls, which they said came from pearl fisheries farther westward along the coast.

  As they sailed on, they realized they were in freshwater, which was flowing into the sea from tributaries of the River Orinoco. The more experienced seamen on board insisted that huge amounts of freshwater like this must be from a vast river, and if that was the case, this could not be another island. But as they sailed carefully along the peninsula, and back out into the Caribbean, heading for the island of Margarita, Columbus refused to draw any conclusions, though he accepted that they had stumbled upon a “large mainland which, up until now, no-one knew existed.”