by David Boyle
By the new year 1506, when Columbus was still sick and bedridden in Segovia, the Castilian government had almost ground to a halt, constipated by the uncertainty about the succession. Juana and Philip were finally making their long-delayed journey, leaving their young son, Charles, under the care of Margaret of Austria back in Brussels, when there was an enormous storm in southern England. It was one of those storms that is remembered for centuries. The weathervane of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London was blown down, and the royal couple limped into the tiny harbor of Melcome near Weymouth to take shelter. They were immediately whisked to London, where Juana’s younger sister, Catherine of Aragon, performed Spanish dances for them. It was a rare public appearance by Catherine, who was increasingly sidelined at court after the death of her husband.*
When Philip and Juana finally arrived in Castile, landing at Corunna in April 1506—just as Columbus was making his last journey to Valladolid—they found that Ferdinand was remarried, to the eighteen-year-old Germaine de Foix, in a desperate attempt to produce another son. A peculiar game began as Ferdinand dashed to see his daughter and son-in-law, but the royal couple dodged him and he finally caught up with them near the Portuguese border. It became evident when he did that Philip would accept no limitations on his rule over Castile. There was to be no power sharing, and Ferdinand had no choice but to retire to his own kingdom of Aragon. Philip was proclaimed Philip I of Castile and the tragic Juana was kept under lock and key, where she remained for most of her life.
The sudden disappearance of Ferdinand was a disaster for Vespucci’s new voyage. Desperately he set out to see Philip instead, and spent some time explaining the intricacies of the New World to him, and the importance of a southwest passage to bypass the Portuguese voyages to India. Vespucci now had better access to the court than Columbus had ever had, and Philip grasped the idea immediately, promised financial support, and urged Vespucci to speed up the preparations. But four months had been lost since Ferdinand’s retreat.
On September 25, Philip was at a monastery at Miraflores, playing a game of pelota—an Iberian version of tennis—and shortly afterward was overtaken by a fit of shivering, which they said at the time had been caused by drinking icy water when he was sweating. Before nightfall, he was dead. Juana was sent over the edge of insanity by her grief, refusing to eat, dress, or speak, and she refused to allow her husband’s body to be buried. She kept it next to her, decomposing, in her room.
Once more, Vespucci’s voyage was in doubt, along with the succession to the throne of Castile. Ferdinand himself was in Naples and showed no haste about returning until his supporters had smoothed the way for him to be regent for his six-year-old grandson, Charles, back in Burgundy. The new court was more nervous than the old one, and they felt that if a voyage of exploration for a southwest passage was to go ahead they ought really to consult the Portuguese, because it would mean sailing along the Brazilian coast, and that was clearly theirs.
Unsurprisingly, the Portuguese objected. In fact the Portuguese court was going through their own periodic frenzy of paranoia. King Manuel had even gone so far as to make the possession of globes illegal, in a desperate attempt to prevent the secret routes to the Indies leaking out. Juan de la Cosa, sent as an emissary to Lisbon to discuss the voyages, was arrested as a spy and was only released after high-level intervention.
In this form at least, Vespucci’s voyage could not go ahead. A year passed, while Ferdinand made sure his support was in place for a return to the throne of Castile, and then summoned his leading navigators—Vespucci, de la Cosa, Pinzón, and Juan de Solís—to meet him in Burgos. They arrived more than a year after Philip’s death and found that Ferdinand wanted to discuss whether they could learn anything from the Portuguese about how to make sure the latest developments of navigation could be better used.
This was an excellent idea. Almost everything about the Portuguese arrangements for discovery were better organized, and Vespucci had been urging something similar for some time. He was busy conducting a war against those critics who did not accept his methods of navigation and who claimed he had barely any knowledge of the sea. Many navigators angrily rejected anything of the kind and regarded any claims to be able to measure longitude using means other than dead reckoning as vain and conceited.
As a result of the meeting in Burgos on November 26, 1507, Ferdinand sent Solís and Pinzón to find the southwest passage, and Juan de la Cosa to the Pearl Coast where he was lobbying to return with Ojeda. But Vespucci was appointed to a new post at the Casa de Contratación, called pilot major. It was a consolation prize for not being allowed to join the expeditions, and a way to formalize and spread his undoubted knowledge of the theoretical aspects of navigation. Under the agreement, he would open a school for navigators in his own home, which was a large house in the Postigo del Carbón, rented from Bishop Fonseca, next to the Torre del Oro, between the city walls and the new shipyards, and near the enormous crane that dominated the wharves. From his home with Maria and Giovanni, he could hear the clattering of metal and wood as the ships bound for the New World took shape, just as he was instilling the principles of good navigation on the skeptical men who had been at sea twice as long as he had. “No-one shall presume to pilot ships or receive pay as a pilot,” Ferdinand wrote to him in confirmation. “Nor may any master receive them on board, until they have first been examined by you, Amerigo Vespucci, our chief pilot, and have been given a certificate of examination and approval by you.”
It is hard to imagine Columbus being appointed to such a post, and that Vespucci was given the job was a measure of the respect that he had achieved, and of his successful reinvention of himself from failed functionary to scientist-navigator. It would now be his allotted task to draw up and develop a master chart, incorporating all the new information that any of the expeditions brought back, just as the Portuguese did. This task he delegated to Giovanni, who rapidly became one of the foremost cartographers in Castile. Before any navigators set sail for the New World from Seville—and Seville was now the official point of departure for all voyages there, even if they actually left from Cadiz—they would need a certificate of competence from the Vespucci household. Then, and only then, would they be allowed to take a copy of the master map.
It was a difficult time to be in Seville. There were terrible floods in 1507, and the influx of adventurers, prostitutes, criminals, and beggars was bringing with it the most devastating waves of plague and famine. In the midst of all this, Vespucci’s first task was to tackle the perennial problem of shipworm. It was already four years since Columbus had returned from an expedition where his entire fleet had been destroyed by precisely this problem. From then on, Vespucci declared, all ships built to go to the New World would have to be fitted with lead-plated keels.
As the Castilians were bracing themselves for another search for the southwest passage, the search for the Northwest Passage was beginning to run out of energy.
After the initial successes of John Fernandez and his Bristol allies, there had been a flurry of activity from Bristol, fueled by rivalry between those who held rights under the patent given to him and those who still held rights under Cabot’s patent. By 1504 there were records of priests leaving Bristol for the New World, an unmistakable sign that somewhere on Newfoundland the Bristol merchants had set up a permanent settlement to dry cod, collect timber for masts, and harvest the wild cats for their furs.
Resources were not inexhaustible, given that the promised Northwest Passage had not actually been found, and it began to make sense for the two sides in Bristol to pool their resources. Between them, the heirs of Fernandez and his colleagues, and the heirs of Cabot and his partners, organized a joint charter and formed themselves into one company: the Bristol Company Adventurers to the New Founde Land.
It was not a success. The problem was that half the fishing communities in northern Europe were now using the waters around Newfoundland. Led by the Basques and the Portuguese, the cod that Cabot had d
iscounted had launched a whole new industry. Newfoundland was even being described by its Portuguese name, Terra de Baccallos (a Basque word) in reference to the cod. It was too late to regulate or control the business there. The new company had no means of enforcing their monopoly. All they could do was to haul back a few consignments of dried fish and some mountain cats. The promised Northwest Passage to Asia remained elusive.
The company disintegrated in acrimony when Hugh Elyot sued Francisco Fernandez for £100 he said was owed him and had him arrested for debt, while Fernandez countersued for £160. The company ended up in the courts, and the king lost interest. Elyot went back to his old occupation, trading with Spain from his office on Broad Street in Bristol.
The Portuguese explorers were no more successful. They were nervous about northern exploration after the disappearance of the Corte Reals. They sent one more expedition to search for them in 1506, but there was no sign. They were also beginning to capitalize on their new route to India and the spice trade, and in itself this was already shifting the balance of economic power around the Mediterranean. The first cargo of Indian goods to England, which came via Lisbon, arrived in Falmouth in 1504.
This was an unprecedented disaster for the economy of the eastern Mediterranean, from which it has never quite recovered. In response to the catastrophic loss of trade, the sultan of Egypt threatened to destroy the Christian holy places in Jerusalem unless these voyages around Africa were stopped. The monastery on Mount Sinai was so concerned that they sent a messenger to plead with the pope to put pressure on the Portuguese. When the news reached Lisbon, Manuel decided he must press on faster. He appointed Francisco de Almeida as governor and viceroy of Portuguese India. Almeida destroyed an enormous combined fleet of Turks, Levants, and Arabs in 1509, which guaranteed the Portuguese presence in the region, and was killed in Africa on the way home. But the commercial empire of the Portuguese was now firmly established in the East.
I
“You can only predict things after they have happened.”
EUGENE IONESCO
The aftermath of Columbus’s death was unsurprisingly complicated for his family. There were the inevitable discrepancies in his accounts, kept by his cousin, and an equally inevitable investigation by his enemies at the royal treasury. His agent in Santo Domingo was working tirelessly on his behalf, and even if he had trouble extracting the money owed to the family in Seville, it was still flowing in.
Ironically, now that it was too late to influence Columbus’s ruined reputation at the Castilian court, Hispaniola was beginning to turn a serious profit. By 1505 the famous quinto—the fifth of the profits due to the crown—was bringing in 22 million maravedis a year. The sheer productivity of the island was also accelerating thanks to the policies of Ovando, who had begun to bypass the exhausted and enslaved local population when looking for labor. It was clear now that the Tainos were not suitable for heavy work in the mines or the fields. They were not used to it. Ovando reversed his policy on slaves from Africa and began to bring them into Hispaniola in twos and threes. That same year Ferdinand intercepted a request for more and ordered a hundred black slaves for the New World. It was a fatal turning point, and the beginning of a trade which would involve up to 30 million Africans and eventually engulf the northern part of the new continent in civil war.
But even Ovando could not retain his popularity with everyone, and once more complaints about the governor began to mount. In August 1508 Ferdinand decided to replace him, and in an ironic gesture, given that Columbus believed he had set his face against the whole family, he decided to replace him with the admiral’s eldest son, Diego Colón.
Diego was twenty-eight-years old, and a sophisticated product of the Castilian court, where he had spent most of his life. He had attracted Ferdinand’s notice as an effective administrator and had made a highly fashionable and advantageous marriage to the niece of the Duke of Alba, another favorite of the king. In 1509 he sailed to take up his appointment as governor, together with his uncles and his brother Ferdinand. He made an easy crossing with his wife on the Que Dios Salve and set up home in the governor’s palace from which Bobadilla had ejected his father. Against all odds, Christopher Columbus’s governorship had been inherited by his eldest son.
The Bristol Company Adventurers may have wound up in disputes about debts, and the whole business of exploration may now have been seriously out of favor as the health of Henry VII began to decline, but there was one youthful advocate in Bristol who would not be silenced. John Cabot’s son Sebastian was alive and well and desperate to capitalize on the patent that had been made out in 1496 in favor of his father and his brothers. For Sebastian the central problem remained how to get past this continent, the so-called New World, to reach the spices, gold, and wealth of the East. It also seemed to him that he had inherited some clues. The series of expeditions from Bristol, starting in 1497, had revealed a whole range of still-unexplored inlets, one of which must go through. For Sebastian, the Northwest Passage was still there to be discovered.
The year Columbus died, Sebastian was twenty-two. The young Cabot moved to London and married a Londoner named Joanna, who soon gave birth to a daughter named Elizabeth. Sebastian had inherited not just his father’s convictions, but also his ability to charm an audience. His cartographic skills quickly impressed the king, and he was given a ten-pound annuity by Henry VII for his “diligent service and attendaunce.” He also managed to find a new source of investment for westward exploration.
Where Cabot differed from his father was that his lifelong quest to match those achievements led him sometimes, perhaps, to believe his own rhetoric a little too much. He claimed he had raised the money from Henry VII; in fact, it seems to have come from the Netherlands. Even so, it was enough to hire and equip two ships, and it was the opportunity of a lifetime. At the back of his mind, as well, he may have hoped to vindicate or rediscover his father, and assumed—knowing John Cabot’s personality—that he had discovered the elusive passage himself before leaving the stage.
The new Cabot expedition set sail early in the summer of 1508 and headed for the Hudson Strait, and to Sebastian’s excitement, he found that it opened out into what seemed like a sea, but which we now know was Hudson Bay. It was a perilous expedition. The ice floes were everywhere. The unknown seemed even more unknown than it should have, a misty, insubstantial white emptiness, so far north that the sun never set. It is hardly surprising that he faced the same problem his father did. The crew would not go on, and insisted that he turn around. He held them off throughout the winter of 1508 into 1509 in a small camp on the north coast of Labrador, and when spring came he made another attempt, managing to get as far north as Baffin Island, searching for ways through before the crew finally had enough.*
It was an enormous disappointment to Sebastian, and a fatal moment in his life. He never stopped believing that had he been permitted to go on, the Northwest Passage would have been before him. From then on, he kept the route a closely guarded secret, aware that it was sometimes senseless—sometimes actually dangerous—to reveal it, and battled to return there until he died. But a bigger problem loomed as they arrived at the mouth of the Avon in the early summer of 1509—the king was dead.
Henry VII had not been well for some years. He had suffered from cataracts since 1505 and ever since his wife had died had developed an obsession with the poor incarcerated widow Juana the Mad, since meeting her during her brief stay in England after she was nearly shipwrecked in the English Channel in 1506. He already loathed Ferdinand, who was still refusing to send the rest of Catherine of Aragon’s dowry, and he became convinced that Juana was being deliberately shut away with her husband’s coffin and wasn’t mad at all.
Ferdinand deftly avoided all Henry’s diplomatic requests that he should marry Juana himself. Henry developed “consuming sickness” (probably tuberculosis) and died on April 21, 1509. He was only fifty-two. His heir since Arthur’s death was his seventeen-year-old son, also called Henr
y, who had, according to John Cabot’s Venetian friend Pasqualigo, an “extremely fine calf to his leg.”
The young Henry VIII was tall, handsome, and magnetic. His first act on succeeding to the throne was to sort out the ridiculous scandal of the treatment of Catherine of Aragon. He wanted a sumptuous coronation and he wanted a queen beside him, now that the pope had given him permission to marry his brother’s widow. Henry buried his father in Westminster Abbey on May 10 and went straight from there to Greenwich for a quiet wedding to Catherine, who was ten years older than he. The following month, Henry wore crimson and gold ornamented with flashing diamonds, rubies, and emeralds to parade through London for his coronation. Catherine followed, with her long red hair flowing behind her, wearing white satin and sitting on a golden cloth.
Ojeda’s expedition to found a colony of New Andalusia on the mainland, the project which was supposed to stop the English, was a disastrous failure. He had struggled back to Hispaniola, to find his great ally Queen Isabella had died. But after the famous meeting between Vespucci, de la Cosa, and Ferdinand in Burgos, and a period raising the money and lobbying in Castile, Ojeda set out again in the Magdalena and three other ships to the site of the new colony. Among those on board, apart from de la Cosa, was Ojeda’s friend and ally Diego de Nicuesa, the future conquistador Pizarro, and three hundred men.
They landed near what is now Cartegena. The brutal capture of slaves had become an obsession with Ojeda. De la Cosa, now sixty years old, strongly advised him against going on to Calamar in search of slaves, but he was overruled and the two of them led a slaving party of seventy men deep inland. They made one of Ojeda’s trademark surprise attacks on a nearby village, capturing sixty locals, and pursued the rest into the jungle, where Ojeda and his men soon found themselves isolated and surrounded and attacked by waves of enraged local Indians, finally taking revenge for the cruelties meted out by Ojeda. On February 28, 1510, the rescue expedition found Ojeda unconscious, hiding in a mangrove swamp. Juan de la Cosa’s body, horribly swollen and covered with poisoned arrows, was found in a hut. The former captain of the Santa Maria was dead.
