Toward the Setting Sun

by David Boyle

  Having linked up after the Atlantic storms somewhere off Newfoundland, the fleet began the long journey toward Asia, but were actually traveling down the eastern coast of what is now the United States of America, putting in to the major rivers, seeking out the telltale signs that China would be looming into sight ahead. As on the other expeditions, as they came farther south, all the ships must have found themselves suffering from increasing effects of shipworm, manning the pumps day and night to keep the vessels sea-worthy. As they made their way into the Caribbean sometime early in 1499, some of the ships had to be abandoned and the surviving crews concentrated in just two of them or fewer. It must have been at this point that Cabot or his deputies encountered Ojeda and Juan de la Cosa at Coquibaçoa.

  The existence of the map, with all its details, implies that, for a time at least, the encounter was friendly enough. They compared charts and discussed routes and argued about the direction of Asia. These were, after all, the only Europeans—perhaps the only people in the world at that time—who half understood the new geography and could begin to comprehend the size of the continent on the other side of the Atlantic.

  Inevitably relations soured and Ojeda pointed out that they were trespassing on Castilian territory and sent them on their way, struggling north in a remaining unseaworthy ship. It was an enormous achievement to have made it so far north as Newfoundland. It may be that the flagship and commander of the expedition had already disappeared on the way south. But either way, Cabot himself and his son Sancio were wrecked along with their crew off Grates Cove, Newfoundland, and carved that mysterious memorial. At least one academic suggests that they hit an iceberg.

  Still unaware perhaps of the breadth of the continent they had stumbled so unwillingly upon, they made contact with Beothuk Indians on Newfoundland and used what pieces they had salvaged from the wreck, including the sword and the earrings, to trade for basic food. They knew how unlikely it was that they would be rescued, and perhaps—Cabot being who he was—they then set off on foot westward, believing that Asia lay just beyond the horizon. We do not know how long they survived or where they died.

  That would be the best knowledge of Cabot’s fate until the end of the twentieth century. But in 2007 evidence emerged, though still unproven, that Cabot might have survived and returned to Bristol after all. The historian of exploration Alwyn Ruddock, who died in 2006 at the age of eighty-nine, found evidence that Cabot did indeed encounter Ojeda but also that he returned to Bristol alive. Fifteen years earlier, Ruddock had been commissioned to write a book to celebrate the five-hundred-year anniversary of Cabot’s landing and rumors had been filtering through the exclusive world of Cabot research that she had made some staggering discoveries in some newly discovered archives. But she was dissatisfied with the book, tore it up, started again but never finished—and then stipulated in her will that all her notes and research should be destroyed after her death. More than thirty bags of papers were burned.

  The following year, the Bristol historian Evan Jones published an article based on her original book proposal, which set out some of what she found—but without the references to be absolutely certain because, under the terms of her will, they are all gone. There is, though, circumstantial evidence that her findings were based on real documents. But the real bombshell was that Ruddock believed she had evidence that Cabot reached Newfoundland in 1498 and left Carbonariis and his fellow friars there, where they established a church and religious colony, while Cabot and the fleet sailed south along the coast toward the Caribbean and his encounter with Ojeda. Carbonariis sent his own expedition to Labrador, and Cabot himself struggled back north again in the autumn of 1499, reaching England early in 1500.

  If that is true, and Cabot did indeed manage to navigate all the way from Newfoundland and down the coast of the new continent to the Caribbean, then it was an extraordinary achievement—though it must have been a bitter disappointment to him to have run up against the same apparent cul-desac as his great rival and not to have reached China. The real tragedy for Cabot was that the climate at Henry VII’s court was very different in 1500 than it had been eighteen months before when he had set sail. Negotiations for the marriage between Henry’s son Arthur, Prince of Wales, and Isabella and Ferdinand’s youngest daughter, Catherine of Aragon, were now back on again. Nothing would be allowed to upset the delicate new relationship between England and Spain.

  It was clear that Cabot had not just breached the Castilian zone, but he had gone absolutely nowhere near China. A furious Henry canceled his pension and sent him away, together with his backers Thirkill and Bradley, while the diplomats suppressed all information about his voyage. Four months later, and in despair, Cabot was dead. The Castilian court was equally nervous about news leaking out that Cabot had encountered a violent Ojeda in the Caribbean, and that information was also suppressed.

  This version of the story looks like a conspiracy theory, and has yet to be confirmed. But if it is true, then Carbonariis was the great hero of the 1498 voyage, setting up the first European church in North America that autumn after they sailed from Bristol, probably in the Newfoundland town of Carbonear, and dedicated to San Giovanni. (St. John’s, Newfoundland, continues to bear this name.) Carbonariis and his friars were left behind with the ship Dominus Nobiscum, while Cabot sailed south with one ship and the rest of the fleet went home. One of the Italian friars became a hermit on an island for some years afterward, while Carbonariis himself took his Bristol supporter William Weston on the Dominus Nobiscum and sailed north to Labrador—before the Portuguese expeditions there. In fact, it was probably his sword hilt and earrings that Corte Real found shortly afterward on Newfoundland. Both returned there to meet Cabot on his way home, but Carbonariis himself remained behind with his church and died in the New World.

  The royal wedding was Henry’s reward for joining the Holy League against France. It was a key part of Ferdinand’s strategy to isolate the French in Europe. It simply had to go ahead, and yet—despite the question of Ojeda’s encounter with the English navigators—there were already difficulties. Cabot’s voyages were an irritation because the Castilians believed they were taking place in an ocean that was theirs to explore under the Treaty of Tordesillas. The mere existence of Perkin Warbeck, a man claiming to be the rightful king of England, was worrisome enough for Ferdinand. Warbeck was also an excuse for him to withhold some of Catherine’s agreed-upon dowry. Castile was undergoing a financial and economic crisis, and the promised dowry was no longer available anyway. By the time Cabot returned, if he did, he had to be sacrificed on the altar of the Castilian alliance.

  The execution of Warbeck at Tyburn, on the western edge of London, in the final weeks of the previous century had reassured Ferdinand and Isabella that the marriage between Arthur and Catherine could go ahead. There then followed no less than three weddings by proxy. Finally on November 15, 1501, Catherine herself was shepherded through London by Rodrigo Gonzales de Puebla for a magnificent pageant and a real wedding. The bells rang and the Anglo-Castilian alliance seemed to be a glittering success for Henry’s foreign policy, symbolizing the unity between two countries and their joint determination to keep the mighty French in check.

  There was not a whisper that an expedition from Bristol had been sent home by an expedition from Cadiz. It may be that the truth about Cabot’s mammoth two-year voyage, all the way along the North American coast to the Caribbean, is just now beginning to emerge—along with the evidence about Carbonariis and his church—to take its proper place in history.

  Columbus struggled down onto the dockside at Cadiz at the end of October 1500, exhausted by the voyage and weighted down by the shackles around his wrists and ankles. He had become attached to them. The ship’s captain had urged him to remove them the moment they were out of sight of Hispaniola. Now his friends and colleagues who greeted him at the dockside urged him to do the same, but he refused. They seemed like a potent symbol of his betrayal. It seemed appropriate to him that he should c
ontinue to wear them, just as he had carried on wearing his Franciscan habit after his second voyage.

  On board, he had written a desperate letter to Juana de Torres, Queen Isabella’s closest friend, hoping that she would drop some of what he saw as the true facts into the queen’s ear. “The Comendator Bobadilla wants to gloss over his own wicked deeds and methods by this means,” he wrote, describing his deportation. “But I shall make him see with my own right arm tied, that this ignorance and cowardice and intemperate greed have tumbled him into a mistake this time.”

  Six weeks after his arrival, he was finally summoned to see the sovereigns. It was the moment Columbus had imagined ever since his arrest in the summer, shuffling into their presence in chains. They had ordered him to be released before he arrived, and sent him money—his letter had complained of poverty—to get him to Granada, where the court was staying. But he arrived at the Alhambra Palace on December 17, 1500, still determinedly chained, and came face-to-face with Ferdinand and Isabella for the last time, in the great Moorish palace of gardens and fountains. They had already been furnished with evidence from Bobadilla’s officials of Columbus’s guilt on all three charges, but they had decided not to punish him any further.

  Watching this shuffling symbol of their own misjudgment, the sovereigns were absolutely exasperated, but they were also sympathetic about his plight, explaining that Bobadilla had exceeded his orders and would be sacked. “Your imprisonment was very displeasing to us,” they told him, promising to restore his property and position as admiral, but not as viceroy. This would be impossible, they explained, because there was so much land already discovered in the Indies—and who knows how much more to come. One man could not possibly rule it all. Quite apart from that, from what they had heard about the disaffection on Hispaniola, it would clearly be dangerous for Columbus to return.

  Columbus was pleased with this justification, though later increasingly angry that he had lost the viceroy’s position promised him in 1492. His final years were spent obsessed with very little else. He was still in bad health, but was already beginning to turn his mind to persuading Isabella to send him back to the Indies. There were other more esoteric projects as well.

  He already believed he had been singled out by God to “carry Christ” across the Atlantic to the Indies. Now he began an unfinished collaboration with Gaspar Gorrico, a Carthusian monk, to put these achievements in some kind of context. He devoured the esoteric literature of the day, the prophecies, the secret knowledge of the Kabbalah, and he began not just to collect them into a book, but to add references to them to some of his voluminous correspondence with the court. The end of the world was imminent; the world’s peoples would be converted to Christianity; Jerusalem would fall back into Christian hands. And—because of a prophecy that those who would restore the Ark of Zion would come from the Iberian peninsula—he decided that Ferdinand and Isabella were destined to lead the conquest of Palestine.

  Columbus somehow managed to live half in the esoteric world and half in the very practical world of exploration. Isabella had implied no reason why he should not go back to the Indies, as long as he went nowhere near Hispaniola. It was obvious to her that, while Columbus was a disastrous administrator, he was still a great explorer and it made sense to employ him as such. If the Portuguese now had a spice route around Africa, Castile’s advantage—the advantage that Columbus had given them—was that they still had the western routes to explore. If Columbus could find the straits he believed were there from his islands to the Indies, then there was still everything to play for. In the months that followed, he read feverishly through his books of prophecies and piled on the pressure with his letters to the court, urging them to put him in charge of a new expedition.

  But he never quite lost his affection for the chains. They had become a symbol for him, of his own failures, or perhaps of the sins he regarded as being committed against him. For the rest of his life he kept them on his mantelpiece and, in his will, he asked to be buried with them.

  Vespucci was in Seville suffering from debilitating malaria caught on his voyage, and also from a serious dilemma. If he accepted Ferdinand’s proposal and sailed with a Castilian expedition back to Brazil, he knew he would be illegally trespassing into Portuguese territory. If he swapped allegiances and sailed with the Portuguese, he might never be allowed to return home to Seville.

  The letters kept arriving from Marchionni in Lisbon, urging him to join a Portuguese expedition that was being prepared, and to advise on precisely where the division in the oceans began and ended. Vespucci replied that he was too ill to make the journey. He gave the same story to the agents of the crown in Seville. But there was a great danger in doing so. Ferdinand and Isabella were now parents-in-law to the Portuguese king, Manuel, married to their daughter Maria. (Manuel had been married to her elder sister, Isabella, who died in childbirth in 1498.) Relations between the rival nautical giants were as good as they had ever been. It would have been terrible if he personally managed to drive them apart again. Vespucci had an enhanced sense of the politics of any situation and he knew, in any event, that he would never be forgiven. To complicate matters further, the paranoia against foreigners had led to a ban on their inclusion on any further Indies expedition. Vespucci knew that the voyage Ferdinand had promised was probably now closed to him.

  One spring day in 1501, there was another visitor to Vespucci’s lodgings in Seville. It was a Florentine named Giovanni de Giocondo, a silk merchant based in Lisbon.* He had been sent as a special emissary from Marchionni and he was not prepared to accept a simple refusal. Sailing with a Castilian expedition into Portuguese waters was simply unthinkable, said the visitor. Also the Castilians would insist that the voyage made some kind of pointless profit. On the other hand, the Portuguese expedition, financed partly by Marchionni, was intended purely for scientific knowledge. It would not be expected to make a return or to finance itself with those brutal slaving expeditions on the way home. Ambiguity was the cause of wars and only Vespucci was equipped to provide a clear picture of where Portugal’s rights began and ended in the Indies. He had to take this opportunity.

  Vespucci was also keenly aware of the risks. He may not have actually been under surveillance, as far as he knew, but if any breath of his intention leaked out in Seville, he would be arrested before he could leave the country. He represented Castilian national interests and he held secrets that were believed to be critical to their future expansion: He would not be allowed to defect to Portugal, even temporarily. Those thoughts ran through his head as he made his decision. His visitor agreed: They would have to leave together, and immediately. Vespucci could not take more than a handful of vital items or say good-bye to his friends and associates, nor could he explain himself to his fiancée, beyond a scribbled note.

  So it was that Vespucci, a man given to the science of inoffensiveness—at least to those more powerful than himself—took the greatest political risk of his life, and without explaining why. As he later wrote: “My going was taken amiss by all who knew me.”

  By far the safest route was by sea. The mysterious visitor had a ship available in Seville, and within a couple of hours since he had received Giocondo, Vespucci was watching the familiar cathedral tower of Seville pass out of sight along the Gualalquivir River. By nightfall, he was past Cadiz and out to sea, heading for Lisbon and service to the king of Portugal.

  The Portuguse diplomatic mission to England back in 1499 had not improved relations between the two. Thanks to the Anglo-Castilian marriage, England was leaning toward the Castilian view of the world. The Portuguese diplomats had left London, aware that the English were now hazy about the missing leader of their expedition but convinced that this New Founde Land was probably Portuguese under the treaty. The solution, if the English would not listen to polite diplomatic threats, was to accelerate Portuguese expeditions northward and stake a claim. Portuguese King Manuel’s main thrust was still to India, but in 1500 he licensed two rival expedition
s, both setting out from the Azores, to go northwest.

  The first was led by John Fernandez, from the Azores, the so-called labrador, as we have seen, who rediscovered an icy coast later that year that was probably Greenland. The second was led by a nobleman, Gaspar Corte Real, also from Terceira. Gaspar’s father, John Vaz Corte Real, had made a famous voyage westward in 1472 and may even have seen Newfoundland before. Gaspar was also well connected with other explorers. He was a cousin of Columbus’s wife, Felipa, and was related by marriage to Columbus’s old rival Martin Behaim. Sometime in the summer of 1500, just as Vespucci was arriving back in Cadiz with his slaves from the Bahamas, Corte Real’s expedition to the northwest encountered a mountainous cape, which he described as a “point of Asia,” but that was actually Cape Farewell, the southern tip of Greenland.*

  The aristocracy of the Azores was a small community, and it became obvious to Fernandez and his partners that the terms given the aristocratic Corte Real family in their patent from the king of Portugal went much further than those in their own patent. Corte Real had been given a widespread trading monopoly covering any land that he found. It looked as though any discovery Fernandez might make in the northern seas would simply be handed straight over to his well-connected rivals. John Fernandez and his colleagues therefore decided to shift their allegiance. They arrived in Bristol early in 1501, in search of new business partners, just as Vespucci was agonizing about which expedition to lead and when Columbus was first back in Castile. Fernandez had been trading with Bristol for nearly a decade. He knew the waters of the Avon well and had many contacts there. He probably knew Cabot. He certainly knew of his achievements and his disappearance.