Toward the Setting Sun

by David Boyle

  Columbus had signed a document to this effect in November 1498. In Columbus’s view, the decision to make Roldán chief magistrate of the island for life was unimportant, if this senior official requested from Castile would outrank him, but it made Columbus a laughingstock on his own island. The agreement also said that anyone who wanted to go back to Castile could do so on the ships that had brought them, and these would sail within fifty days. “Our people here are such that there is neither good man nor bad who hasn’t two or three Indians to serve him and dogs to hunt for him and, though it perhaps were better not to mention it, women so pretty that one must wonder at it,” he complained to the queen. “With the last of these practices I am extremely discontented, for it seems to me a disservice to God, but I can do nothing about it . . .” He also told her that because he had not negotiated the agreement himself and had signed it at sea, it might not be legal and she could cancel it if she wished. Isabella was unimpressed.

  Columbus had hoped to use the small fleet to set up his station in the pearl fisheries, but two months later it was ready to take Roldán’s supporters instead. Under the terms of the agreement, three hundred colonists were able to go home and to take one slave each with them. As for Roldán and his remaining backers, they also wanted some kind of settlement that did not involve imposing the hated tax system on the Tainos. The formula they worked out through the first half of 1499, which involved assigning land to settlers with rights over the Indians who lived there, was the beginning of the encomiendas system that introduced a similar pattern all over the Spanish empire. Those who saw the system in action a few years later believed it was a worse tyranny even than the tax, but at the time, it seemed like a relief.

  In any case, the gold tax was unraveling, and Columbus’s officials were already beginning to organize the remaining Tainos into work parties led by Castilian landholders. The encomiendas system treated them less like free men who must be taxed and bludgeoned into submission, and more like Russian serfs who could be bought or sold along with the land. It wasn’t Columbus’s design, yet in practice it allowed a much more systematic exploitation.

  At this point, on September 5, Ojeda and de la Cosa landed in southwest Hispaniola at a place called Yaquimo, on the long peninsula that was controlled by Roldán and his rebels. Their journey there had included a brief visit to the island of Aruba in what is now the Dutch Antilles, where they found people living in strange stilt houses above the water. Ojeda sent a party of men to force their way into the homes and found that they were full of cotton and brazilwood. These products normally came from the East, and were a small piece of evidence that Columbus would have welcomed. Juan de la Cosa said the watery place reminded him of Venice, and the term “Little Venice,” or Venezuela, was used later as the name for the region on the mainland opposite.

  Ojeda knew about Roldán’s revolt—he had been in Hispaniola the previous year—and so he had an advantage once he arrived there again. He therefore claimed to be Fonseca’s representative and began ordering about any colonists he could find. When Columbus heard of his arrival, he sent a message to Roldán—now the chief magistrate of the whole island—to send an expedition to arrest him. The last thing either wanted was a rival rebel leader, and Roldán and Ojeda approached each other gingerly and took the precaution of taking a handful of each other’s men hostage. Yet they had known each other in Isabella in the early days of that abandoned city and were old colleagues, and Ojeda persuaded him without much difficulty to take no action.

  On September 23, 1499, a little over a fortnight later, Vespucci landed on Hispaniola as well. There were worms eating his hulls and maggots in his remaining stores, and his crews were still recovering from wounds and exhausted. He was well aware that this was a potentially awkward visit. He knew how Ojeda would behave on the island. He knew a little about Roldán’s rebellion and did not want his own arrival to become confused with it. He also wanted to protect his friendship with Columbus, and concluded that the best way to do so was to have as little contact with either him or Ojeda on Hispaniola as he possibly could. He therefore steered along the north side of the island, and landed somewhere near the original city of Isabella, now all but abandoned.

  There are no records of meeting Columbus during his time there, but Juan de la Cosa seems to have sought Vespucci out, in order to gather the information for his definitive map of the world. The two men, the preeminent geographers in Spain, pored over each other’s charts, comparing notes about the coast that would become the Spanish Main, while Vespucci explained his pioneering voyage south along the coast of Brazil and the vast rivers he had seen there. Which raised the question: Exactly where were these places? The accuracy of their measurements of latitude were pretty reliable, at least as far as the equator when the North Star disappeared below the horizon. But longitude was a tougher proposition, and longitude mattered very much under the Treaty of Tordesillas. Having time on his hands on Hispaniola, while his ships were being repaired, meant that Vespucci had the leisure to do some serious calculations based on his observations of the sky at night on his long voyage.

  He had been puzzling over the problem of measuring longitude. Columbus had done it by dead reckoning, estimating course and speed each day to work out how far west he had sailed. Vespucci had come up with something more precise, which used the position of the moon compared with other planets at a set time on a given day. If he was stuck in harbor, as he had been for a week in the Bay of Arrows, and now in Hispaniola, he realized he could compute when midnight was by using half-hour glasses to measure the length of time between sunset and sunrise.

  If there were any planetary conjunctions with the moon on those days in Ferrara in Italy—and he had charts setting out, rather inaccurately as it turned out, the precise times of these in Ferrara—he could look for the same conjunctions in his own sky and pinpoint when they happened. The difference between the time in Ferrara and the time where he was on the other side of the Atlantic meant he could then work out how many degrees of the earth’s 360 they were away. Though he claimed to have invented this “lunar distances” method himself, it was in fact known in the Middle Ages, but only in theory. Vespucci’s contribution was to put it into practice. He reckoned he could measure the longitude of his position to within two degrees—though this was another exaggeration. He was using inaccurate tables and took most of his measurements at sea, and was forced to borrow Columbus’s reading of a lunar eclipse in 1494.

  Taking readings was extremely difficult in those days anyway. Accurate astrolabes needed to be big, but if they were made of metal they were then too heavy, and if they were made of wood, they warped at sea. It is hardly surprising, under those circumstances, that Vespucci’s calculations remained inaccurate, nonetheless he had made the first steps of reinventing himself as a mysterious man of science, who would later pour scorn on mere mariners.

  II

  “In the endeavor to ascertain longitude, I have lost much sleep, and have shortened my life by ten years, but I hold it well worth the cost, because if I return in safety from this voyage, I have hopes of winning fame throughout the ages.”

  AMERICO VESPUCCI, letter to Lorenzo

  di Pierfrancesco, July 1500

  In the first few months of 1498, as Cabot and Columbus were preparing to sail, Milan had seen a flowering of intellectual life in Ludovico Sforza’s court. The duke launched a series of great debates in his castle, bringing together Leonardo da Vinci, still basking in the success of his painting of the Last Supper at the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, and some of the other thinkers attached to the court.* One of these was a Venetian friar, Luca Pacioli, whose mathematical masterwork would go down in history as the first clear instructions for double-entry bookkeeping, a work still in print four centuries later. Along with these contemporaries, Leonardo knew about his former colleague Cabot’s discoveries in the Atlantic. As a pupil of Toscanelli’s, he had also followed the achievements of Columbus, apparently proving Toscanelli’s
old theories about sailing west to get to the East. As a friend of Vespucci’s since childhood, he may also have known about his prospective voyage.

  But since that intellectual flowering, the life of Milan’s court had been torn apart by wars and rumors of wars. The intentions of the new French king were very well known in Milan, but there seemed to be nowhere Ludovico Sforza could go for help. Naples was in ruins and the Holy League in tatters. Florence was barely holding itself together. Venice was in alliance with the other side. His only comfort was the miserable defeat of the Venetian fleet in a series of four battles in April 1499 at the hands of the Turks, after which the Venetian admiral was sent home in chains and the Turks sailed to Lepanto and took the city.

  Even so, it was soon clear that the travails of Venice would not delay Louis and the French. In the middle of August 1499, as Ojeda and Vespucci separately prepared to leave the coast of Venezuela, the French army once again crossed the Alps under the command of a Milanese exile named Gian Giacomo Trivulzio. The first Milanese garrison was massacred, and as the army approached the city, there was an uprising against Sforza rule in the streets. On August 30 Ludovico’s own treasurer was killed by rioters, and three days later Ludovico fled with his family to Innsbruck in Austria. On October 6 Louis marched into Milan at the head of his army and confirmed himself as duke.

  For Leonardo the invasion was a personal disaster. He needed a new patron, and in the weeks before the arrival of the French, Sforza had requisitioned the sixty tons of bronze earmarked for his gigantic equestrian statue of the duke’s father to make cannon instead. Worse, when a detachment of Gascon archers came across the full-size clay model for Leonardo’s statue, they used it for target practice and destroyed it. Still living near the convent, Leonardo sadly gathered his belongings and headed for Mantua. Six months later, in the spring of 1500, Sforza was briefly back to reoccupy the city, but he was unable to pay his own army, which then abandoned him. He tried to escape in disguise, but was arrested and taken to France. He was a imprisoned at the castle of Loches, where he died in 1508. Only two years before the invasion, ironically, his ambassador in London had joked about preferring to hang onto his steady job with the Sforzas rather than accept any of Cabot’s flimsy promises about being made ruler of some new island.

  For Venice, also at war with Milan, the worst was yet to come. On September 9, 1499, the disastrous news about Vasco da Gama arrived in the city. The city’s days as the international clearinghouse for the European end of the spice trade were not quite over—the old spice routes would be reestablished in the middle of the next century—but for a while, Lisbon would be the new Venice. The Venetians feared they would become instead a small outpost on the edge of the Turkish empire. There was already a financial crisis because of the advancing Turks, and now two Venetian banks failed. The Doge briefly discussed cutting a canal to the Red Sea at Suez, but it was considered impractical. It was a turning point in Italian history.

  Ojeda and Juan de la Cosa set sail again for home sometime in the new year of 1500. It was exactly half a millennium since Christ’s birth and a new age seemed to be dawning. The map they had drawn—though it did not include the discoveries of Vasco da Gama in East Africa and India—was beginning to take shape, and it would set out a world that no geographer would have recognized before. It was going to be a momentous six months in all their lives. By the end of the summer that year, the news about the eastern route to the Indies would have spread, the Portuguese would have stumbled on the coast of Brazil, Columbus would be facing his second revolt, and his nemesis would be on his way from Castile to Hispaniola.

  Vespucci stayed determinedly apart, careful not to let his own efforts be compromised by Ojeda’s ambition. He set sail in spring 1500 for the Bahamas, but ran into serious storms and unpredictable oceans full of rocks and shoals. Food and water began to run short—rationed to six ounces of bread a day—and, after some weeks, the crew approached Vespucci formally and requested that the voyage be brought to an end. The natives of the Bahamas had failed to capture Vespucci’s imagination. He dismissed them as “timid people of small intellect,” adding ominously, “we did what we liked with them.” It was another example of how even the most cultured of people can fall for the doctrine that the weakest somehow deserve to be mistreated.

  Columbus breathed a sigh of relief that Ojeda, at least, had gone. He had been the latest in a long line of former friends and colleagues who he now believed had betrayed him: He never forgave Ojeda for going to the pearl fisheries, and was aware that of all the people who might appear unexpectedly on his island, Ojeda had more potential than any so far for making trouble.

  But only a few months after he had sailed, and after Vespucci followed him home a little later, there was another unfamiliar Castilian sail on the horizon, and once more Columbus was forced to ask himself whether this was a welcome supply fleet or another unwelcome adventurer trespassing on his island and his monopoly. It was, in fact, the latter. Juan Díaz de Solís had teamed up with his old colleague from the the Niña, Vicente Yánez Pinzón, and his nephew, Aruas.

  Solís was a member of an impoverished aristocratic family from Asturias, who had been in Portuguese service but had been forced to escape to Castile because he had murdered his wife. They had set sail from Palos back in November, run into freak weather, and ended up in the mouth of the Amazon, believing it was the Ganges. They had even rounded Cape San Roque, the eastern extremity of Brazil. Eight of their crewmen had been killed in clashes with the locals on the way north again, presumably those who had first encountered Europeans at the hands of Ojeda. When they reached Santo Domingo on June 23, 1500, they were utterly exhausted and down to their last rations.

  Columbus realized that the sovereigns were not keeping what he believed to be their side of the bargain, and it seemed that worse was to come. Enthralled by the possibilities of redirecting the Indian spice trade via Portugal, King Manuel was determined to capitalize on Vasco da Gama’s achievements as soon as possible. But two other things bothered him: One was Columbus and the other was Cabot.

  The rumors from Columbus’s third voyage, confirmed by spies at the Castilian court, were that a continent-size landmass had been found south and east of Hispaniola. It seemed quite possible that some of this land did, in fact, lie on their side of the Tordesillas line. The rumor from Cabot’s voyage on the Matthew was also that he had found land around the same longitude far to the north, and had set off to follow where it went. There had been no news since he left, now nearly two years before. But was it not possible that this New Founde Land was also on their side of the line? What if his English fleet encountered the Portuguese in the Indies? There was an opportunity first to warn the English off their territory and, second, perhaps to reach some agreement that could provide them with an ally against Castile. So one of Manuel’s first new acts of policy after Vasco da Gama returned was to send a diplomatic mission to London to discuss Cabot’s voyage.

  But he took more aggressive steps as well. First, he gave permission to sail north to a trader from Terceira in the Azores called John Fernandez, known also by his nickname as yeoman farmer or “labrador.” Fernandez and his associates had long experience in the North Atlantic, because they had been sailing to and from Bristol since at least 1492. He was an obvious choice to push forward Portugal’s knowledge of the ocean in the far northwest. Fernandez the Labrador and his colleagues huried to prepare an expedition. Sometime in the summer of 1500, while Vespucci was sailing home from the Bahamas, they found part of Greenland, believing it to be much farther west. They were prevented from landing by ice, but named the new land Labrador, more as a joke than anything else. The name was later applied to the coast north of Newfoundland.

  Second, Manuel gave secret orders to Pedro Alvares Cabral, commanding the fleet of thirteen ships that was going to consolidate Vasco da Gama’s route to India, to swing far out into the Atlantic on their way south to see what they might find. Cabral sailed from Lisbon on March 9, 1
500. The bishop of Ceuta, Diego Ortiz, who had been on the committee of scientists that first turned down Columbus’s enterprise of the Indies, presided at mass on the beach in front of the king and the court to send them off.

  On April 22 Cabral reached Brazil, convinced that the land he had found was the same as that found by Columbus in 1498. He named it Terra Sanctae Crucis. He stayed ten days then headed back on his voyage to India, certain that this was a large island and absolutely not Asia. He sent one ship, the Anunciada—chosen presumably because of her name—back to Lisbon via the Cape Verde Islands, with the news and a consignment of parrots.*

  The owner of the Anunciada was a Florentine merchant living in Lisbon named Bartholomew Marchionni, a business partner of Vespucci’s, who, though Vespucci may not have known it—was spying for the Portuguese. He was also a fellow agent for the Popolano family back in Florence, and deeply involved in the slave trade. Marchionni had paid for one of the ships in Vasco da Gama’s original fleet, and had underwritten some of the costs of Cabral’s as well. The discovery of Portuguese land on the Portuguese side of the treaty line was precisely what he had hoped for.

  Faced with a potential revolt by his crews, Vespucci held a conference with them to decide what to do. Apart from a number of massive pearls, his part of the voyage had not in fact filled the hold with spices and precious stones. Like Columbus before him, Vespucci fell back on a tried and tested solution. He continued to sail around the Bahamas, sending expeditions ashore to seize slaves. Having filled his two ships to capacity with a miserable human cargo, Vespucci set off into the Atlantic and sixty-seven days later he arrived in the Azores, where he heard the extraordinary news of Vasco da Gama’s return. After six days at sea, his two ships sailed into Cadiz harbor in June from Madeira, having thrown thirty-two dead slaves overboard. Two hundred were left, and these he sold immediately, repaying his investors the other money he had borrowed to equip the ships. There were just five hundred ducats left to pay the crew. He divided this equally among them at the rate of about ten ducats each—and just in time. Only a few days later, Ferdinand and Isabella declared a general amnesty for all slaves brought from the Indies. Those that were still just alive on the dockside in Seville, after Columbus’s other voyages, would be sent home to Hispaniola and resettled.