Toward the Setting Sun

by David Boyle

  By Columbus’s reckoning, they were slightly southeast of the Chinese province of Mangi, which is what he believed Cuba to be. There was no continent to the south of Mangi on any atlas that had ever been drawn. So either every cosmographer in the world was wrong, or his identification of the Indies was mistaken. There was no contest here for Columbus, who had stuck to his theory through greater contradictions than a new continent. But the effort of holding his original views in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary was increasingly exhausting, even without the strain on his eyes and limbs.

  There were other peculiarities too. He took detailed readings with the astrolabe and realized that the North Star was deviating in its position, a phenomenon that he and Cabot had become familiar with farther west, but this time the readings were more extreme. It required a truly magnificent theory to explain it, and in his heightened emotional state, Columbus provided one:

  Now I observed the very great variation which I have described and because of it began to ponder this matter of the shape of the world. And I concluded that it was not round in the way that they say, but is of the same shape as a pear, which may be very round all over but not in the part where the stalk is, which sticks up; or it is as if someone had a very round ball, and at one point on its surface it was as if a woman’s nipple had been put there; and this teat-like part would be the most prominent and nearest the sky; and it would be on the equator, in this Ocean Sea, at the end of the Orient.

  He added that the Garden of Eden was at the top of the pear, and it was impossible to go there without God’s approval. He believed he was now sailing uphill through the Gulf of Paria. Ahead of them lay not just pearls, but paradise as well.

  There wasn’t much to be done. The holds were full of rotting supplies, their freshwater was severely rationed, and he desperately needed to get back to Hispaniola and link up with Bartholomew. The bond between the two brothers was ever stronger the more isolated they became. So regretfully, Columbus asked the locals to collect pearls for him to trade on his return and abandoned what was until then his most valuable find. His failure to quite comprehend its significance laid him open to the whisperings of Ojeda, who suggested later that Columbus had failed to reach the pearl fisheries because he was planning to seize them for himself.

  Feverish from dehydration and bleeding from the eyes, Columbus spent the journey to Hispaniola drifting in and out of sanity. He unwisely began a stream of consciousness letter to the sovereigns setting out his growing conviction that he was the “Christ-bearer,” like his namesake St. Christopher, who would usher in the end of the world. Meanwhile, his lieutenant Alonso de Ojeda had also been busy. In one of his admiral’s moments of inattention or pain, Ojeda had slipped into Columbus’s cabin and made his own copy of the map of the Gulf of Paria, the coast of what is now Venezuela, and the location of the pearl fisheries. When Columbus’s peculiar letters were making their way back across the Atlantic on board El Correo, Ojeda and the stolen map went with them.

  Bartholomew Columbus had been facing one of the most dangerous challenges to his authority from one of the leading members of the new community in Hispaniola. Francisco Roldán’s initial complaint was that, having been named as chief magistrate for Isabella, Bartholomew then chose Santo Domingo as the capital and abandoned Isabella altogether. But Roldán quickly became the focus for all the frustration against the Columbus brothers and their small group of acolytes, with their arrogance, cruelty, and inability to communicate properly with those they now administered. Bartholomew seems to have been behaving with increasing pomposity and was a major focus of discontent.

  But Roldán was also a romantic. Like Columbus, he had been moved by the beauty of the landscape on this island they had annexed. He was also fascinated by the gentleness of the Indians and appalled by the moves to sell them into slavery. And he was a bitter opponent of the tax and the various brutal alternatives used to force the natives to offer up their gold. But he was also romantic in more self-interested ways, and when he seduced a wife of the Taino leader Guarionex, Bartholomew was furious. Roldán bided his time, but when he was sent by Diego Columbus with forty men to pacify Indians near Concepción, he made this the centerpiece of a plan to take over the outpost and use it as a headquarters from which to challenge the Columbus brothers across Hispaniola. But the fort’s commander stayed loyal, and the plan was frustrated from the outset. Roldán marched back with his men to Isabella, tried and failed to launch the only ship in the harbor there, and instead escaped to the southwest part of the island—the most beautiful part—taking tributes and gifts from the Taino leaders on his way. The news that Bartholomew had been appointed adelantado by the monarchs was a blow to the legitimacy of his rebellion, and he settled down in his private fiefdom on the Jaragua Peninsula.

  For some time, Roldán had been busy rebuilding his friendship with Guarionex after the seduction incident. Guarionex was one of the five most powerful Taino leaders on the island and also one of the most interesting. He had been the only leader to embrace Christianity, but had rejected it later because of the behavior of Christians on Hispaniola, and that made Roldán interesting to him. The two men had agreed to support each other, and when Roldán’s revolt fizzled out in minor exchanges of brutality, Guarionex retreated with his Taino supporters into the mountains, where Bartholomew, infuriated at the murder of two of his messengers, followed him, burning villages as he went. When it was clear that he had taken refuge with a neighboring chief named Maiobanex, Bartholomew threatened to burn their villages as well unless he was handed over.

  Despite pleadings from the local Tainos, Maiobanex held firm, telling them that Guarionex was a good man, but that the Christians were violent and he refused to have anything to do with them. As Bartholomew’s soldiers approached, Guarionex felt that the honorable thing was to leave and give himself up. He did so, but Maiobanex and his family were taken captive anyway, and they were all taken back to the fort at Concepción, and chained up there.

  When Columbus finally arrived at Hispaniola with his three ships, he landed by coincidence in territory controlled by Roldán and his men. With no knowledge of the revolt, Columbus invited him on board and Roldán took the opportunity of speaking to the crew, persuading a number of them to follow him instead. Leaving quickly for an emotional reunion with Bartholomew on Beata Island, it became clear that Columbus’s plans for the pearls—he was hoping to set up a trading colony in the Gulf of Paria—were going to have to be shelved for the time being while he tried to bring some semblance of government to Hispaniola.

  Columbus had arrived on his own island exhausted, nearly blind, filled with conviction that God had a leading role for him to play, and astonished that his own chief magistrate should have been the leader of a revolt against him. The short-term answer was obvious: no more magistrates drawn from the colonists. He needed a man who understood the law and held some authority in order to uphold it. He immediately sent a missive asking Ferdinand and Isabella to send a trained lawyer, or as he put it, a “lettered” official. This letter also went aboard the El Correo.

  The problem underlying everything was the utter failure of his island to pay for itself. The gold was coming in tiny quantities and although there was brazilwood, it was hardly likely to pay for the vast investment that had made Columbus lord of Hispaniola and beyond. In this mood, he set aside what he knew to be Queen Isabella’s views about turning her new subjects into slaves. There was no suitable alternative, as he explained, and he assured her that Hispaniola could export four thousand slaves a year, bringing in 20 million maravedis.

  “Even if they die now,” he wrote reassuringly, explaining that about half the Taino slaves had died on the voyage home so far, “it will not always be this way, for this is what the blacks and Canary Islanders did at first.”

  Back in Castile, Ferdinand and Isabella were unnerved by Columbus’s letters. They were not reassured that he was in charge, as he had intended that they should be. Nor did they find his th
eorizing that the earth was perhaps pear-shaped at all convincing. They were painfully aware, as he kept telling them, that the privileges they had given him meant that they were denied a clear, objective view of the situation in the Indies. Isabella also received with disgust the letter with this extraordinary flouting of her instructions about slavery. “What power of mine does the admiral hold to give my vassals to anyone?” she asked later.

  The effects of the letter’s arrival were immediate. The sovereigns decided they could no longer rely on Columbus alone for exploration. From the following May, they commissioned a whole range of voyages under other commanders, most of them people who had sailed previously with the admiral. In the meantime, they were actively on the lookout for intelligent, trustworthy, calm, and sensible merchants or cosmographers who could be their eyes and ears.

  The second decision was in response to Columbus’s request for a lawyer. They decided to take him at his word, and send an official who could genuinely sum up what was going on around Hispaniola and act in their name. They chose Francisco de Bobadilla, a careful, well-respected, and aristocratic administrator, chamberlain to the monarchs, and the brother of Queen Isabella’s closest friend. They initially gave him powers to act as governor of Hispaniola and to limit Columbus’s responsibilities if necessary, but then they delayed sending him, unsure whether these powers would be enough or exactly what they wanted him to do.

  The decision to send Bobadilla was not just a result of Columbus’s intemperate and bizarre letter. A period of peculiar suspicion of foreigners had infected the court in Castile, in part due to the conflict with France and the demise of the Holy League. And of all the foreigners who excited the most suspicion, the wealthy, stateless Genoese merchants in every Spanish port, cornering the market in slaves and sugar, had a special place on everyone’s list of those most distrusted. Rumors were flying around the court that the Genoese Columbus brothers were plotting to hand over Hispaniola to the city-state of his birth.

  Ojeda had returned to court along with the letter, having briefed Fonseca on his way and handed over his stolen copy of the invaluable map of the pearl fisheries. He was a special favorite of Isabella, who admired his combination of courage and good looks, and she listened carefully as he described the pearls. Why had the admiral not investigated more closely? Ojeda could not imagine. It was enough to raise the question and encourage the idea that Columbus was somehow holding back. There was a reason so little gold had been forthcoming from Hispaniola, after all. Because, it was said, the admiral was concealing it, leaving his poor investors and the depleted Castilian treasury to pick up the pieces.

  In Bristol, Cabot’s wife, Mattea, reunited with her son Sebastian, who was either not included on the expedition or was on the king’s ship, scoured the horizon for the return of her husband and other sons, due back in September 1498. She knew, of course, that if they had the opportunity to press on into the unknown, they would do so.

  In London, the investors waited less patiently. The Great Chronicle of London made an entry as the old mayor of the city retired on September 29, and it was about Cabot, “of whom,” it said, “in this mayor’s time returned no tidings.”

  I

  “The land and all its joys,

  The beach, the harbor, all we know,

  The trees fade out of sight,

  And the shore becomes enwrapped by mist;

  Already we begin to want it back

  When hardly any time has passed—

  And the more time we are away,

  The thicker the clouds that we encounter.”

  LOPE DE VEGA, La Dragontea, 1598

  For Vespucci, unable to go home and unable to fully extricate himself from the tentacles of Berardi’s old debts, Columbus’s third voyage was a thrilling chance to test the hypothesis of the Indies, to find Marco Polo’s Cape of Catigara and sail into the Bay of Bengal. He had urged Columbus to take the southwesterly route, and Columbus had done so. The news that returned with Ojeda was a bitter disappointment. Vespucci simply could not understand why Columbus had failed to grasp the opportunity. Why had he not continued along the coast to find out whether it would take him to the Indian Ocean, and prove the enterprise of the Indies once and for all? Why this frustrating drawing back to Hispaniola, to have his energy dissipated in pointless tussles with his fellow colonists? As for this bizarre plan to find the island “where all women were communal”—another possibility floated in letters home—it was the kind of project dreamed up by a man who had been too long on board ship.

  In fact, Columbus now reasoned that it was impossible to go farther toward paradise without God’s permission. Whether Ojeda passed this on to Vespucci or not, he undoubtedly heard rumors to that effect. The idea of asking divine permission to explore anywhere flew in the face of Vespucci’s whole humanist education. Columbus had been Vespucci’s business partner and was now his trusted friend. But there came a time when if you wanted to find out something badly enough, you had to carry out the exploration yourself. Vespucci knew all the wealthiest merchants in Spain, and all the Medici agents who handled the investment. All he needed to do was let it be known that he would like to accompany an expedition across the Atlantic. If Elyot and Thorne, Cabot’s backers, could accompany him on an expedition to the New Founde Land, then Vespucci could go to the Cape of Catigara.

  He was in a position to know the latest plans for Indies sailings, and it soon became clear that Alonso de Ojeda was to command an expedition, partly to map the coastline Columbus had discovered and partly to seek out the pearl fisheries. That was Fonseca’s plan, but it was the sovereigns who insisted that trustworthy experts should go too. It was objective information they needed, so Ojeda was told to take with him two people who could record the geography of what they saw. Juan de la Cosa, once the captain of the Santa Maria and now one of the most respected mapmakers in Castile, was to be one of them. But to provide an objective view of the geographical evidence, Vespucci was invited as the second, partly as astronomer, partly as director of policy on behalf of the investors, and partly as the eyes and ears of the sovereigns. For Ferdinand and Isabella, it was a dream combination, and hopefully also a solution to one of their nagging questions about Hispaniola: On which side of the line drawn by the Treaty of Tordesillas did it actually lie?

  “It was my intention to see whether I could turn a headland that Ptolemy calls the Cape of Catigara, which connects with the Sinus Magnus,” Vespucci wrote later. It was clear from the beginning that, although he had barely ever ventured to sea before, if he wanted to exercise command, he might also be given some measure of independence. Whether or not he would actually be in command of part of the expedition, he would at least have some influence over where they went.

  Ojeda had come a long way since he entertained Queen Isabella by balancing on a wooden plank above the street in Seville. He was now in full command of his own expedition, with the trust of Fonseca and the queen, a powerful combination. Ojeda had in his pocket a copy of the stolen map of the pearl fisheries that Columbus had sailed past, and may have had secret instructions from Fonseca about what to do if he encountered Cabot, from whom there was still no news. Vespucci had with him his full collection of navigation equipment, atlases, charts, and astronomical tables, and left behind his nephew Giovanni, who had lived with him since his arrival in Seville, and his new fiancée. Over the recent months, Vespucci had become engaged to Maria, the sister of Fernando Cerezo, with whom he had worked trying to disentangle the difficulties of Berardi’s will.

  Ojeda’s fleet of four ships moved out of Cadiz harbor early on May 18, 1499, almost a year to the day since the departure of Columbus. In the flagship, Ojeda had on board not just Juan de la Cosa, but three pilots, a surgeon, and an apothecary. In Palos, a little to the east, and almost ready to sail, was another ship commanded by Peralonso Niño, a former pilot of the Santa Maria, also bound for the pearl fisheries and furnished with the same maps. (Niño would be arrested on his return for failing to p
ay the regulation fifth of the value of his pearls to the crown.)

  The mild-mannered Vespucci and Ojeda had little in common. Both were reinventing themselves, but as rather different characters. Deeply suspicious of everyone, and particularly the ship’s chandlers who equipped his ships, Ojeda took part of the fleet immediately into Puerto de Santa Maria at the mouth of the river. There he hijacked another ship that lay at anchor, transferred his stores to it, and left the suspiciously unseaworthy ship he had been given in its place. If he had any doubt about the adequacy of his supplies, he indulged in a little light piracy to make up the difference. At Lanzarote in the Canary Islands he even plundered a house belonging to the daughter of Columbus’s old mistress from San Sebastian. In the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands, Ojeda divided his fleet into two and he and Vespucci set different courses across the Atlantic, agreeing to meet somewhere between the pearl fisheries and Hispaniola.*

  On June 27, 1499, the moment of truth arrived for Vespucci. For some weeks, Ojeda had left him responsible for two ships, supported by captains and pilots, but, as the representative of the investors, effectively in control. Vespucci had now seen enough of how his commander operated to be absolutely determined he would not, in fact, link up again with Ojeda.

  Vespucci had dreamed of exploration his whole life, and facilitated it for seven exhausting years in Seville, and now ahead of his two ships was a looming shadow on the horizon. As the two ships drew closer to the land, probably near Cayenne in what became French Guyana, the shadow became a green mass and with just a few miles to go, it was clear that up ahead was a vast tropical forest. The smell of rotting vegetation and stagnant water was obvious even several miles out to sea. It was a rich aroma and beautiful in its own way: It smelled of life. Vespucci called it the Land of St. Ambrose, a Christian way of dedicating it to a Renaissance idea, the ambrosia of the gods. While Columbus named his new lands after saints and Christian festivals, and Cabot after his friends, only a Florentine like Vespucci—steeped in the artistic revolution of Botticelli—would name them after a pagan idea.