The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  The trading networks of the Monsoon Seas between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries were the most dynamic of any in the world, with the longest routes, the busiest ports, and the most diverse selection of goods in circulation. As a result, there were many centers of maritime vitality along the southern and eastern littoral of Asia, whose merchants were in regular communication with each other and facilitated the exchange of ideas, manufactures, and raw products over vast distances and incidentally fostered the formation of distinctive hybrid communities whose members mediated between indigenous populations and traveling merchants. In rumor and fact, the vitality of maritime Asia attracted ever more merchants and travelers from the Mediterranean basin and Europe, whose reports added to the region’s allure and helped set in train the events that would culminate in the discovery of a direct sea route to Asia and, incidentally, Europe’s discovery of the Americas.

  a The word Khitan is the origin of the word Cathay, as medieval Europeans called China.

  b Seram is a large island on the northern edge of the Banda Sea. Massoia is a flavoring from the bark of the massoia tree (Cryptocaria massoia), which is native to New Guinea.

  c Cubeb (Piper cubeba) is a fruit of the pepper family.

  Chapter 14

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  The World Encompassed

  Columbus’s crossing of the Atlantic; Gama’s opening of an all-sea route between Europe and the Indian Ocean; Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, from east to west; and Urdaneta’s first west-to-east crossing of the Pacific—these were the navigational triumphs of the age, indeed of any age. They made possible the forging of new links between formerly unconnected regions of the globe, and laid the foundation of Europe’s gradual ascendancy on the world stage. Singular though these accomplishments were they must be seen as the result of deliberate processes of purposeful exploration, as incidents rather than accidents of history. They were the result of long experience through which mariners, shipwrights, and cartographers steadily improved the capabilities of their ships and the art of navigation, expanded their knowledge of oceanic currents and winds, and refined the methods by which to profit from the commercial exploitation of newly encountered lands and people. While we celebrate these milestones, we must bear in mind that such progress was hard won. Hundreds of Spanish sailors died just in the four-decade search for the winds that would carry ships across the Pacific from Asia to the Americas, and the search for the Northwest and Northeast Passages from the Atlantic to the Orient in the sixteenth century were costly failures because these routes were impassable with the technology, experience, and climate of the time. Above all it has to be acknowledged that the introduction of Eurasian and African diseases in susceptible populations of the Americas led to catastrophic and wholly unanticipated loss of life—more than 80 percent (some estimates put the figure at 95 percent) of the population—and the consequent eradication of entire states and cultures.

  The Portuguese and Spanish have received the lion’s share of credit for inaugurating the age of European expansion, but nationalist assignments of credit obscure a more complex reality. The Genoese and Venetians pioneered the first commercially successful long-distance sea trade between the Mediterranean and Flanders and England toward the end of the thirteenth century, but theirs were not the only long-distance voyages taking place on the Atlantic at that time. Muslim and Christian navigators alike had long been involved in the coastal trade between the Iberian Peninsula and southern Morocco, as far south as Salé, while Iberian and French navigators plied their coastal waters to Flanders and England, and English and Danish fishermen and traders routinely sailed to Iceland. Though largely undocumented, these voyages contributed to the collective knowledge mariners brought to the Atlantic enterprise.

  Genoese and Iberians in the Eastern Atlantic

  The discovery and occupation of the four major archipelagoes between the latitudes of Lisbon and Cape Verde, the southwestern tip of West Africa, presaged the European advances down the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and Asia and across the Atlantic to the Americas. In terms of opening new vistas, the seminal discovery of the age was that of the Canary Islands, an archipelago of twelve islands the easternmost of which lies less than fifty miles from Morocco. Some of the islands were settled by Berber-speaking people in antiquity—certainly before Islam reached northwest Africa—and Renaissance Europeans knew that a Numidian king had dispatched an expedition to the islands in the first century BCE. According to Pliny the Elder, the Numidians found no living people, although one island held evidence of human habitation and wild animals including large dogs—in Latin canes, hence Canary Islands. Ten centuries later, the Sicilian geographer al-Idrisi hinted at an Almoravid expedition to the islands. Their fourteenth-century rediscovery is attributed to the Genoese Lanzarotto Malocello, sailing in the service of the Portuguese king. The island of Lanzarote appears on a chart drawn by the Majorcan cartographer Angelino Dulcert in 1339. According to Boccaccio, a Portuguese expedition sailed to the Canaries two years later; but in 1344, the pope assigned temporal jurisdiction of the islands to Luis de España, a Spaniard who had sailed as admiral of France. Although the Portuguese objected on the grounds of prior discovery, in a decision with far-reaching consequences they made no effort to pursue their claim. Later in the decade, a Castilian expedition returned to the Canaries with a group of natives who had learned Catalan in an effort to evangelize their fellow islanders. It was not until 1370 that the Portuguese king granted two islands to Lansarote da Framqua—possibly the same person as Lanzarotto de Malocello—who was later ousted by Castilian rivals.

  Although the Canaries are farther south than Madeira, they were the first to be reached due to their proximity to Africa and because the prevailing northeast winds gave the Europeans’ square-rigged ships an easy run to the southwest. Madeira is favored by the same winds, but because it lies three hundred miles offshore (and nearly five hundred miles southwest of Lisbon), sailors needed great confidence in their ability to return from so far out at sea—or to have been blown off course—before they encountered it. Sailors returning from the Canaries could have encountered Madeira and its smaller neighbor Porto Santo when sailing north in search of favorable westerlies to carry them home to Portugal. Whatever the circumstances of their discovery, Madeira appears in the Medicean Atlas of 1351, where it is identified as Isola de Legname, “island of wood.” (The Portuguese name, Madeira, or wood, was current by 1408, when the island is so named on a map.)

  That those responsible for the discovery of the Canaries and, perhaps, Madeira were Italians is due to the fact that in the fourteenth century Genoese mariners increasingly found themselves in foreign and especially Portuguese employment. The Portuguese had long encouraged foreign merchants to settle in Portugal, and in 1317 King Dinis appointed the Genoese Manuele Pessagno (or Peçanha) admiral of the fleet and stipulated that Pessagno and his heirs should retain twenty experienced Genoese officers—Malocello may have been one—to command the ships and crews, most of whom were Portuguese. Lanzarote Pessagno, the fourth admiral of the family, is credited with finding the Azores, an archipelago of nine islands between seven and nine hundred miles west, and upwind, of Lisbon. Islands that can be plausibly identified as the Azores first appear in sketchy form on the celebrated Catalan Atlas of 1375 drawn by the Majorcan cartographer Abraham Cresques. An independent maritime power from 1276 to 1343, Majorca was a repository for much of the geographic knowledge amassed by sailors and merchants pushing the boundaries of the known world farther into the Atlantic, and Angelino Dulcert and Abraham Cresques were among the finest mapmakers of the day. The islands were probably first encountered by homeward-bound navigators in search of prevailing westerlies. Uninhabited and therefore difficult to exploit, the islands went unnamed in surviving sources until the fifteenth century. The association of Italian names with the Atlantic islands newly claimed by Portugal and Castile and the flourishing practice of cartography on Majorca testify to the multinational character of exp
loration in this period.

  Navigation

  The European exploration and exploitation of the eastern Atlantic was due to any number of causes, and it is impossible to distinguish any one of them as of paramount importance. Newly discovered and translated classical geographies excited people’s curiosity about the world. Literacy was expanding beyond the traditional confines of the church and ecclesiastical universities, which led to the growing secularization of vernacular literature like that of Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. The latter two were especially drawn to, and drew from, the commercial life of their times. Boccaccio’s father represented the Bardi bank of Florence and merchants throng the stories of the Decameron; Chaucer was the son of a wine merchant and his Canterbury Tales reveal a more than passing knowledge of business and trade. His description of the Shipman invites us to consider the mental map of the fourteenth-century English mariner, which spanned from North Africa to the Baltic:

  As for his skill in reckoning his tides,

  Currents and many another risk besides,

  Moons, harbours, pilots, he had such dispatch

  That none from Hull to Carthage was his match.

  Hardy he was, prudent in undertaking;

  His beard in many a tempest had its shaking,

  And he knew all the havens as they were

  From Gottland to the Cape of Finisterre,

  And every creek in Brittany and Spain;

  The barge he owned was called The Maudelayne.

  From a technological standpoint, literacy and improvements to navigation were accelerated by the invention of movable type, and the first printed sailing directions were published in Venice in 1490, only thirty-five years after Gutenberg’s Bible. The practice of compiling information about sailing routes was nothing new, but whereas earlier guides tended to emphasize the commercial opportunities in different places, there was now a distinction between merchants’ manuals with raw data about various commodities, their prices, and where to purchase them, and navigational instructions. Ancient works such as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea sometimes combined this information in one text, but as new tools and methods for determining direction or fixing one’s position developed in the early modern period, navigational information was increasingly differentiated.

  As to the actual practice of navigation, we can consider four distinct approaches: coastal piloting, dead reckoning, latitude sailing, and position fixing. Coastal piloting is in principle the easiest but in some respects the most dangerous type of navigation, for inshore hazards are more numerous than those encountered on the open sea. As the term suggests, the essence of coastal piloting is sailing more or less in sight of land and relying on a familiarity with its terrestrial and hydrographic features to get safely from place to place. Sailors everywhere learn from a young age the landmarks and seamarks of their own waters: the location of shoals, rock outcroppings, the best holding ground for anchors, the direction of the prevailing winds, the nature of tidal currents along the shore or in the approaches to a bay, harbor, or river mouth. Similarly, they have a familiarity with terrestrial features: bays, headlands, hills, stands of trees, or man-made structures. Knowing the depth of water is of great importance, but so, too, is a familiarity with the composition of the seabed, which differs from place to place. For this reason, sounding leads attached to long lines marked off at fixed intervals were fashioned with a hollow depression on the underside that could be smeared with tallow or wax; when the lead landed on the bottom, a sample stuck to the tallow. By gauging the depth and composition of the seabed—white sand in one place, crushed shells in another—one could approximate one’s location even when well out of sight of land.

  Regional differences in geography dictated distinctive approaches to navigation. The rivers that facilitate commerce between inner Europe and the English Channel or North Sea deposit tons of silt into shallow waters where powerful tides constantly reconfigure the seabed, so soundings and a knowledge of tides and tidal currents are crucial for sailing northern European waters. The Mediterranean is generally too deep for taking soundings when out of sight of land; the major river deltas are few, the most important being the Rhône near Marseille, the Po south of Venice, and the Nile; and there is almost no tide to roil the shallows twice a day. The distinct concerns of Mediterranean and northern European sailors are reflected in the written instructions developed for the two regions. Whereas the mid-thirteenth-century Lo Compasso da Navigare gives directions by compass bearings and distances within the Mediterranean, northern European instructions give compass directions and information on tides and soundings. Even the earliest written English sailing instructions, which date to the 1460s but may incorporate fourteenth-century material, do not bother with distances:

  An [when] ye come out of Spain and ye be at Cape Finisterre, go your course north-north-east. An you guess you 2 parts over the sea and be bound into [the] Severn [River, for Bristol], ye must go north by east till ye come into soundings.… An if ye have 100 fathoms deep or else 80, then ye shall go north until ye sound again in 72 fathoms in fair grey sand. And that is the ridge that lieth between Cape Clear [Ireland] and [the] Scilly [Islands].

  The spread of literacy and quantitative approaches to navigation made the dissemination of rutters—a guide to sea routes—and portolani increasingly common in the Renaissance. Yet some of the finer points of navigation are so changeable and require such an intimate familiarity with specific waterways that recording them is little more than a temporary expedient. This is still true, hence the periodic release of “notices to mariners” giving changes to published charts.

  Medieval laws governing pilots included severe penalties for negligence or fraudulent claims of ability. Il Consolato del Mar (the customs of the sea), a codification of some five centuries’ worth of maritime laws and customs published at Barcelona in the mid-fifteenth century, specifies that

  If it should happen that the pilot would not know the waters in the locality that he had claimed he knew well and will not be able to perform the services that he had agreed to perform, he should be immediately decapitated, and no mercy or leniency should be given him. The patron of the vessel may order that his head be cut off without taking this matter before any tribunal of justice if he does not wish to do this, because the pilot lied to him and exposed him, all those who are in his company aboard the vessel, as well as the vessel and everything aboard it.

  It shall not, however, be within the exclusive determination of the master of the vessel whether the pilot is decapitated. Such a decision shall be reached after consultation and examination of the issue by the navigator, the merchants, and the rest of the crew.

  Likewise, the fifteenth-century English Black Book of the Admiralty stipulates that “if a ship is lost by default of the lodeman [leader, or pilot] the mariners may, if they please … cut off his head without the mariners being bound to answer before any judge because the lodeman has committed high treason against his undertaking of the pilotage.”

  In addition to having a good feel for the features above and below water and the forces acting upon them, sailors had to know how to determine a ship’s direction and speed, and how to estimate leeway, a vessel’s sideways drift due to the wind or current. Drawing on this information enabled one to estimate one’s position by dead reckoning. An observant mariner did not require sophisticated equipment to do this well. For instance, speed could be calculated by throwing a floating chip overboard and counting the seconds it took to pass between two points on the ship’s hull. So the data that could be compiled in a portolan or rutter was useful but no substitute for experienced observation, especially when venturing into unknown waters of which no one had any prior knowledge.

  Navigational Instruments

  One reason navigational guides became more common in this period is that the growing number of ports that mariners might visit made it harder to retain all the information one might need, especially after the compass came into use. The earliest written evid
ence that Europeans had discovered a navigational application of a magnetized needle comes from a work of about 1180 by the English polymath Alexander Neckham:

  [S]ailors, as they sail over the sea, when in cloudy weather they can no longer profit by the light of the sun, or when the world is wrapped up in the darkness of the shades of night, and they are ignorant to what point of the compass their ship’s course is directed, they touch the magnet with a needle, which is whirled round in a circle until, when its motion ceases, its point looks to the north.

  There is no evidence of a Chinese origin for the western compass, but this echoes Zhu Yu’s description of the south-pointing needle earlier in the century. At first, the “needle and stone” (lodestone, or magnetite) were used to locate Polaris when a visual sighting was impossible.a According to Vincent of Beauvais, writing about 1250, “When clouds prevent sailors from seeing Sun or star, they take a needle and press its point through a straw and place it in a basin of water. The stone is then moved round and round the basin, until the needle, which is following it, is whirling swiftly. At this point the stone is suddenly snatched away, and the needle turns its point to the Stella Maris.”

  The notion that the needle was attracted to the North Star was soon abandoned, although the magnetic pole was not understood for centuries. Even so, the traditional star shape of the compass rose reflects this original belief that the compass had a celestial orientation. At the same time, sailors’ tradition of sailing “by the wind” is reflected in the division of the mariner’s compass into points. Although astronomers divided the circle into 360 degrees in antiquity, Mediterranean sailors thought of direction in terms of the eight winds: north, northeast, east, southeast, and so on. With the development of the compass, these “winds” were further divided into eight “half winds” (north-northeast, east-northeast, east-southeast…) and sixteen “quarter winds” (north-by-east, northeast-by-north, northeast-by-east, east-by-north, and so on), for a total of thirty-two points of 11.25 degrees.