by Cliff, Nigel
126 “his capacity was not greater”: Alvares, Portuguese Embassy, 267.
126 “which were so long”: Damião de Goís, quoted in Henry H. Hart, Sea Road to the Indies (London: William Hodge, 1952), 239. Goís also says that Manuel was of good stature, held his head erect, and had a pleasant expression, but his description is unusually free of the usual airbrushing.
126 a powerful Florentine banker: The banker was named Bartolomeo Marchionni; he was reputedly the richest man in Lisbon. By now there was a sizable Florentine community in Portugal involved in banking and shipping; Marchionni was its most prominent member and did a good deal of business with the crown.
126 cashed in their check: The bank they visited was run by the sons of Cosimo de’ Medici; the hugely wealthy Florentine family had offices throughout Italy.
127 “At this time [Alexandria] looks very glorious without”: Ibid., 392.
127 “sav’d a great part”: “The Travels of Martin Baumgarten . . . through Egypt, Arabia, Palestine and Syria,” in Awnsham Churchill, ed., A Collection of Voyages and Travels (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1704), 1:391.
129 “one little hand”: Wilfred Blunt, Pietro’s Pilgrimage: A Journey to India and Back at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century (London: James Barrie, 1953), 58.
129 “in sport”: Ibid., 55.
129 dated back to classical times: “On the pyramid,” wrote Herodotus, “there is an inscription in Egyptian characters which records the quantity of radishes, onions, and garlic consumed by the laborers who constructed it.” Ibid., 57.
129 “They do positively aver”: “Travels of Martin Baumgarten,” 397. For more on medieval Cairo and other Islamic cities, see Joseph W. Meri, ed., Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2006); Michael Dumper and Bruce E. Stanley, eds., Cities of the Middle East and North Africa: A Historical Encyclopedia (Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2007).
130 “metropolis of the world”: Quoted in Albert Habib Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 3.
130 “surpasses reality”: Ibn Khaldun, An Arab Philosophy of History: Selections from the Prolegomena of Ibn Khaldun of Tunis (1332–1406), trans. and ed. Charles Issawi (Princeton, NJ: Darwin, 1987), 4.
132 “and tho’ one should deface them”: “Travels of Martin Baumgarten,” 401.
134 the same sewn planks: Nails were unknown in Indian Ocean ships; superstitious sailors were said to believe that great undersea magnets would pull them out, while the more practical prized the dhow’s flexibility, which made it easier to beach and more resilient if it struck a shoal.
135 “very strangely attyred”: The sixteenth-century English traveler Ralph Fitch, quoted in Hart, Sea Road to the Indies, 71.
135 “the dirtiest, most disagreeable, and most stinking town”: Quoted in Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 122. The Somali town is mostly known today as Seylac.
137 He wrote a long dispatch to the king: The question of whether Covilhã’s letter ever reached Lisbon has long fascinated historians. The sixteenth-century chronicler Fernão Lopes de Castanheda first said it did and then, in a later edition, suggested it didn’t. His contemporaries Gaspar Correia and Garcia de Resende say it did, but only after John II’s death; Resende adds that it arrived after Vasco da Gama had left. Ramusio says it did, and it contained the news that Portugal’s ships could easily reach the Indian Ocean. James Bruce, an eighteenth-century Scottish explorer of Ethiopia, was adamant that it did and added an imaginative account of its contents, including detailed maps, to boot. Vasco da Gama certainly knew where to head for when he reached India, though he was undoubtedly ignorant of what he would find when he got there. It seems most likely that at least one of the two Jewish travelers made it home with news, if not written proof, of Covilhã’s discoveries, but the truth, alas, will almost certainly never be known.
138 Muhammad’s burial place: According to tradition, Muhammad was buried in the apartment of his favorite wife, Aisha, the site of which was later covered by repeated rebuildings of the adjoining mosque, including a total reconstruction after a fire in 1481. Medieval Christians spread the rumor that the iron tomb was suspended in the air and then ridiculed the supposed miracle by explaining that it was held up by magnets.
138 the court of Alexander: The name Alexander is the Westernized version of Eskender. At its height around the third century CE, Ethiopia was an important power whose lands stretched south to Sudan and east to Arabia. The Solomonid Dynasty, of which Alexander was a member, survived from 1270 to 1974.
139 he was Christian: Ethiopia officially adopted Christianity in the early fourth century, after its ruler was converted by a Greek courtier who as a boy had been kidnapped by pirates from a passing ship. Isolated from much of Christendom by the Islamic conquests, it had preserved its own traditions, including polygamy.
139 “with much pleasure and joy”: Alvares, Portuguese Embassy, 270.
139 “he was not in a position to grant it”: Ramusio, quoted in Hart, Sea Road to the Indies, 76. To his surprise, Covilhã discovered he was not the only European in Ethiopia. An Italian friar turned artist claimed to have lived there for forty years; Alvares noted that “he was a very honorable person, and a great gentleman, although a painter.” Another European, a throwback to the ascetic masochism of the desert fathers, lived in a cavern in a ravine; after twenty years he bricked up the entrance from the inside and presumably died soon after. Other Europeans intermittently showed up; some came voluntarily, some were cast ashore by pirates, and almost none were permitted to leave.
139 fat, rich, happy: The Portuguese embassy arrived around May 1520, and Covilhã, now seventy-three or seventy-four, regaled Francisco Alvares with his adventures. He was, the friar wrote with nice understatement, a man “who did everything he was ordered to do, and gave an account of it all.”
140 August 1487: The record is unusually silent on Dias’s voyage. No official report, log, journal, or chart survives; not all the chroniclers mention it even in passing. Barros, who gives a brief summary, says Dias left in August 1486 and returned in December 1487. The few contemporary witnesses—including Duarte Pacheco Pereira, whose fever-stricken and shipwrecked crew was rescued by Dias on his way home—say he discovered the Cape of Good Hope in early 1488 and returned that December, and a departure date of August 1487 has become accepted.
140 herders were tending their cattle: Dias seems to have named the bay the Bahia dos Vaqueiros, or Bay of Cowherds, and the protected cove where he landed the Aguada de São Bras, or Watering-Place of St. Blaise, after a spring he found there on the saint’s feast day. The Portuguese later named the bay after St. Blaise, and it was subsequently renamed Mossel Bay by the Dutch.
141 The storeship had been left far behind: When the rest of the company returned to it, they discovered that six of the nine men who had been left on board had been killed. A seventh, a clerk, was so overjoyed at seeing his companions that he reportedly expired on the spot.
141 Cape of Storms: According to Barros; Duarte Pacheco says Dias himself named it the Cape of Good Hope.
141 Europe’s maps were hastily redrawn: In 1489 Henry Martellus published a world map that was originally intended to show Africa extending to the bottom of the page. He had already engraved it when news of Dias’s discovery reached him, and rather than start over he added the Cape of Good Hope on top of the border.
142 married a nobleman’s daughter: For Columbus, Filipa was connected in all the right ways. She was the daughter of Bartolomeu Perestrello, who was of Genoese origins and was one of the captains sent by Henry the Navigator to claim Madeira for Portugal; her maternal grandfather had fought at Ceuta.
142 “a shorter way”: The Journal of Christopher Columbus (During His 1st Voyage, 1492–93), and Documents Relating to the Voyages of John Cabot and Gaspar Corte Real, trans. Clements R. Markham (London: Hakluyt Society, 1893), 4–5. Toscanelli’s letter
to Columbus is reproduced in the same volume: “I perceive your magnificent and grand desire to navigate from the parts of the east to the west,” he wrote, and added: “The said voyage is not only possible, but it is true, and certain to be very honorable and to yield incalculable profit, and very great fame among all Christians.” The kings and princes of the East, he confidently declared, were even keener to meet Europeans than Europeans were to meet them, “because a great part of them are Christians. . . . On account of all these things, and of many others that might be mentioned, I do not wonder that you, who have great courage, and all the Portuguese people who have always been men eager for all great undertakings, should be with a burning heart and feel a great desire to undertake the said voyage” (10–11).
143 Columbus stretched Asia: The Catalan Atlas of 1375 represented Eurasia as measuring 116 degrees from east to west; on his 1492 globe Martin Behaim famously stretched its breadth to 234 degrees, an increase even on Marinus of Tyre. The correct figure is 131 degrees. All things taken together, Columbus underestimated the distance from the Canaries to Japan by a factor of more than four.
144 against the consensus of his age: Columbus’s ideas evolved over time, and his first recorded references to some of his sources and calculations postdate his first voyage. Even so, the doggedness with which he presented his case suggests that he had early on found sufficient grounds to support his grand scheme.
144 “promises and offers were impossible”: Quoted in Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), 97.
145 “It pleased our Lord”: Quoted in Joseph F. Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 214.
146 “You call Ferdinand a wise ruler”: Quoted in David F. Altabé, Spanish and Portuguese Jewry Before and After 1492 (Brooklyn, NY: Sepher-Hermon, 1983), 45.
146 Columbus’s wealthy rescuer: The minister, Luis de Santangel, did fund much of the voyage himself, and he raised additional funds to keep Isabella from having to pawn her jewels. It was to Santangel that Columbus sent his letter describing the first voyage.
147 “IN THE NAME OF OUR LORD”: The excerpts are quoted in Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 152–55. Clearly Columbus did not have time to construct an elaborate address at the start of his voyage; the Prologue was written piecemeal and was appended later.
150 Rodrigo Borgia: In one of the brighter spots of his papacy, Alexander VI refused to condone Ferdinand and Isabella’s edict of expulsion against the Jews. He received some of the refugees from Spain—and later from Portugal—in Rome, an act that earned him many Spanish enemies but was hardly, as his bitter rival Giuliano della Rovere alleged, proof that he was a secret Jew himself.
150 a hundred leagues: A league was originally the distance the average ship could sail in average conditions in an hour, or around three modern nautical miles.
150 “discover islands or mainlands”: Dudum Siquidem, dated September 26, 1493. The original text and English translation are in Davenport, European Treaties, 79–83. The earlier bull was Inter Caetera, dated May 4, 1493, which is reproduced at pp. 71–78; it was itself the third of three bulls, issued in quick succession, which progressively ratcheted up the pope’s favoritism toward Spain.
151 The Spanish set about pillaging and slaughtering: Bartolemé de las Casas, an early settler who later took his vows and became a bishop, reported that the colonists, many of whom were convicted felons, “made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow; or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babes from their mother’s breast by their feet, and dashed their heads against the rocks. . . . They spitted the bodies of other babies, together with their mothers and all who were before them, on their swords.” Prisoners were hung on the gallows “just high enough for their feet to nearly touch the ground, and by thirteens, in honour and reverence for our Redeemer and the twelve Apostles, they put wood underneath and, with fire, they burned the Indians alive.” Quoted in Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), 157. The quarterly tribute system was soon replaced by institutionalized slavery; disease, of course, annihilated far more of the indigenous population than even the most wanton cruelty could accomplish.
Chapter 7: The Commander
155 A high forecastle and an even taller sterncastle: The castles were the legacy of the cogs of northwest Europe, merchant and fighting ships that carried battlemented towers fore and aft from which archers could fire at enemies. By the fifteenth century the sterncastle had morphed into cabin accommodation topped by a poop deck and the forecastle into a high triangular platform that projected forward, resting on the knee of the stem.
157 he would not even see them leave Lisbon: There is no clear answer to the question of why the discoveries paused for nearly a decade between the voyages of Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama. Probably John II was waiting for news from his spies and for the treaty with Spain to be settled; no doubt he was mourning his dead son, and there was the flood of Jewish refugees from across the border to deal with. Manuel I, who was reported by the Venetian spy Leonardo da Ca’ Masser to be spineless, capricious, and hopelessly indecisive, was preoccupied for the first two years of his reign with negotiations for his marriage and was faced with concerted domestic opposition to the explorations. The theory beloved of some Portuguese historians that numerous fleets set out to reach India between 1488 and 1497—and even discovered the Americas before Columbus—has never been proven. It rests on the apparent confidence with which Gama pursued a new route to the Cape of Good Hope; John II’s determination to move the demarcation line with Spain 270 leagues farther west, which put Brazil on the Portuguese side; an apparent reference by the celebrated Arab navigator Ahmad ibn Majid to “Frankish” vessels that visited Mozambique in 1495; and the order book of a Lisbon bakery, which did a roaring trade in sea biscuit between 1490 and 1497. There are reasonable explanations for all these particulars that do not assume the remarkable discretion of hundreds of hypothetical sailors, never mind the unlikely reluctance of the Portuguese king to trumpet his besting of Columbus.
157 “for I am only a sack of earth and worms”: Quoted in Edgar Prestage, The Portuguese Pioneers (London: A. & C. Black, 1933), 246.
158 heir to Castile: Isabella’s brother John had married six months before he died on his way to the wedding; his widow was pregnant but their daughter was stillborn, leaving Isabella as heiress of Castile. Manuel’s hopes of ruling both kingdoms were dashed when Isabella died in childbirth in 1498; their son, who was also briefly heir to both thrones, died aged two.
158 every Jew in Portugal was ordered to leave: In a ceremony held in 2008, Portugal’s Justice Minister José Vera Jardim called the expulsion of Portugal’s Jews a black piece of the nation’s history; the state, he declared, owed Jews moral reparation for centuries of brutal persecution.
159 A maze of streets: The Lisbon district is known as the Alfama, from the Arabic al-Hamma, “the fountain” or “the bath.” In the fifteenth century only one mosque remained, though so long as they kept their heads down, its worshippers were permitted to meet there to regulate the affairs of the neighborhood.
161 sea biscuit: Also known as ship’s biscuit or hardtack. Biscuit comes from the Medieval Latin bis coctus, or “twice baked,” though the ship’s version, a kind of dense wholemeal bread, was baked up to four times to give it a longer shelf life. It was the inescapable sailor’s staple, and during John I’s reign a Royal Biscuit Office had been established to ensure a sufficient supply.
161 “coarse, poor, lacking in good manners and ignorant”: Nicholas of Popelau, quoted in Henry H. Hart, Sea Road to the Indies (London: William Hodge, 1952), 44. Nicholas’s opinion of Portugal’s women was based on keen observation. “They allow one to look upon their faces without hindrance,” he noted, “and also upon much of their bosoms, for which purpose their
shifts and outer dresses are cut generously low. Below their waist they wear many skirts so that their posteriors are broad and beautiful, so full that I say it in all truth in the whole world nothing finer is to be seen.” They were, though, he warned prospective suitors, lewd, greedy, fickle, mean, and dissolute.
162 a gentleman of the king’s household: Fidalgo literally meant “the son of somebody.” It was originally applied to anyone of noble lineage, then to the new nobility created by John I. By Vasco da Gama’s time it distinguished those families from the new wave of parvenus, knights appointed from among the bourgeoisie.
162 the best man Manuel could find: Gama’s most recent (and best) scholarly biographer closely argues the case that Gama was not the king’s choice but that of a group of nobles opposed to the king; Manuel accepted him, he ingeniously suggests, so that if the underpowered fleet met with disaster, he could pin the failure on the opposition. A fleet of four ships, though, was not unusually small for a voyage of exploration; Dias and Columbus had only three. It would have been small for a voyage of trade or colonization, a fact that belies the notion that Portugal was already on the brink of reaching India. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 67.
162 He was most likely born in 1469: Fourteen sixty is the alternative year sometimes given for Gama’s birth. The primary piece of evidence is a pass issued in 1478, in the name of Isabella of Castile, to a Vasco da Gama who must have been older than nine; Gama’s name, though, was not uncommon. Other sources, scant as they are, speak for 1469, which is now the consensus.
163 the Order of Santiago: The Portuguese chapter split from those in the rest of Iberia when Portugal became independent. Its power base was in southwest Portugal, where Gama was born; the extent of its lands made it virtually a state within a state.
