The most fruitful of the four expeditions was that of Bartolomeu Dias, who in 1487 sailed with three ships on a voyage that brought European ships into the Indian Ocean for the first time, to land, on February 3, 1488, at Mossel Bay, 160 miles east of the southern tip of Africa, and 600 miles shy of the southernmost community of Muslim traders in Africa. On his return, Dias saw what he called the Cape of Storms, an apt name given the conditions that prevail at the junction of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, but when he returned to Portugal in December 1488, João dubbed it the Cape of Good Hope, the hope being that the trade of the Indies was finally within reach.b Domestic problems prevented the Portuguese from following up immediately on Dias’s monumental achievement. Moreover, many nobles still tied to the land resisted overseas ventures while even among those who supported commercial undertakings there was considerable debate about the wisdom of actually breaking into the Indian Ocean trade, about which they knew almost nothing. It is against this complex background of intra-Iberian and interfaith rivalry, coupled with the increased opportunities for trade in coastal Africa and the expanding knowledge of the ocean world and the technologies required to work profitably within it, that we must assess the most celebrated accomplishments of the age and the people who brought them to pass.
Christopher Columbus
The exploratory activity on the Atlantic had attracted any number of ambitious mariners, one of whom, the Genoese-born Christopher Columbus, conceived a bold plan “that he would sail south and west, discovering great stretches of highly fertile land, both islands and terra firma, all extremely rich in gold and silver, pearls and precious stones and teeming peoples; and that, sailing in this direction, he would eventually come to the land of India, with the noble island of Cipangu [Japan] and the realms of the Grand Khan.” He was not the first to believe such a voyage was possible, and one can say with complete candor that he failed: Columbus underestimated the size of the earth; he did not reach Asia; and he did not tap into the great spiceries of the Orient. None of this diminishes his epochal accomplishment in establishing an unbroken link between Eurasia and Africa in the east and the Americas in the west. If he excelled his contemporaries, it was not necessarily in navigational ability or intuition, but in his persistent vision and relentless pursuit of the financial and political support without which the honor of bridging the Atlantic would have fallen to another.
Born in the mid-fifteenth century, Columbus served his apprenticeship in the Ligurian and Tyrrhenian Seas and seems to have sailed into the Atlantic for the first time in his early twenties. By 1476 he was based in Lisbon, where he married Filipa Moniz, whose father, Bartolomeo Perestrello, was the son of an Italian merchant in Lisbon and had been raised in the household of Dom Henrique. A participant in the expedition sent to claim the Madeiras, Perestrello was rewarded with the governorship of the island of Porto Santo, where he settled in 1446. Although he died twenty years before his daughter’s marriage, Filipa’s dowry seems to have included his personal papers, including sailing instructions and portolan charts for the Atlantic. According to Columbus’s biographer, Bartolomé de Las Casas, in Perestrello’s day
the world was buzzing with all sorts of discoveries that were being made along the Guinea coast and among the islands of the Atlantic, and Bartolomeu Perestrelo hoped to make some discoveries of his own using Porto Santo as his base. Such discoveries were indeed forthcoming … and it must therefore have been the case that Bartolomeu Perestrelo had in his possession instruments, documents, and navigation charts and that these were given to Christopher Columbus by his mother-in-law. He took great delight in contemplating these and it is believed that this gift … led him to inquire further into the practice and lessons to be drawn from the experience of the Portuguese in making sea-voyages to Mina del Oro [Elmina] and the Guinea coast where the Portuguese were … busily employed.
Columbus gained practical experience of sailing between the Canaries, Madeira, and Azores. He made at least two voyages along the Guinea coast and was part of the expedition charged with building the fort at São Jorge da Mina, while northern voyages took him to Galway, Ireland, and possibly Iceland.
In addition to the documented discoveries of the time, there was a growing body of lore about lands to the west of the four archipelagoes. Medieval tradition, some of it embellishing more ancient stories, spoke of various islands to the west, notably St. Brendan’s Isle and Antilia, the Island of the Seven Cities supposedly founded by Iberian bishops fleeing the Muslim invasion in the eighth century. Voyages by accident and design also expanded sailors’ knowledge of the Atlantic, especially its great size. Shortly before the start of his voyage in 1492, Columbus and his fellow officers met a man who forty years before had sailed west as far as the Sargasso Sea—a vast stretch of ocean strewn with patches of sargassum seaweed, which he told Columbus not to fear—and had seen land birds flying west before fear of winter storms made the crew turn for home. In the Portuguese archipelagoes, reports circulated of flotsam drifting in from the west: unfamiliar trees and plants, canoes and boats, strangely carved pieces of wood, even people and corpses of neither European nor African origin. According to a marginal note written by Columbus in one of his books, “Men of Cathay came to the West. We have seen many notable things and especially in Galway, in Ireland, a man and a woman with miraculous form, pushed along by the storm on two logs.” His son likewise related how “On the island of Flores, which is one of the Azores, the sea flung ashore two dead bodies with broad faces and different in appearance from the Christians. Off Cape Verga, and elsewhere in that region there once were seen covered boats or canoes [kayaks, perhaps] which were believed to have been crossing from one island to another when a storm drove them off their course.”
Sebastiano del Piombo’s portrait of a man thought to be Christopher Columbus was painted in 1519, thirteen years after the navigator’s death at the age of about sixty. The inscription above his head reads “the Ligurian Colombo, the first to enter by ship into the world of the Antipodes 1519.” Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource, New York.
The possibility of a westward route to Asia also attracted the interest of cosmographers armed with Ptolemy’s second-century Geography, which circulated widely in a Latin edition of 1476. Among the first to promote the idea was Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, a Florentine banker, geographer, and cartographer who wrote the king of Portugal that China was only five thousand miles west of Portugal and that a voyage there could be broken by stops on the islands of Antilia and Cipangu (Japan). The suggestion was never acted upon, but Columbus seems to have seized upon the theory, and may have corresponded with Toscanelli. A major problem with both Toscanelli and Columbus was that their estimate of the length of a degree (Columbus’s is found in another marginal note) was too short by about a third. By his calculation, “the perimeter of the earth on the equinoctial circle is 20,400 millas” of 4,810 to 4,860 feet. In fact a mile is 5,280 feet, and the equator is 24,901 miles (40,075 kilometers) long. This error was compounded by his belief that Asia ended thirty degrees east of where it does and his reliance on Marco Polo’s erroneous claim that Japan was fifteen hundred miles east of China. In sum, Columbus thought China lay about thirty-five hundred miles west of the Canary Islands; the actual distance is more than four times that. The possibility of an intervening continent was not even considered.
After nearly a decade in Portuguese shipping, and with allies at court thanks to his wife’s family, Columbus approached João II with his proposal for a westward voyage to the Indies. After consulting with his advisors, João declined to sponsor him but suggested that he might reconsider later. He may have withheld his support because his advisors told him Columbus’s theories were incorrect, because Columbus sought excessive compensation, or because João did not want to divert resources from the encouraging progress in the newly revived African voyages. Regardless, in 1485, Columbus left Lisbon for Castile, where he hoped to interest Isabella and Ferdinand in the sa
me venture. Although he was ultimately successful, the outcome of his lobbying was by no means a foregone conclusion. The commission convened to examine his calculations judged him overly optimistic; but the Catholic Monarchs held out the possibility of considering his proposal after they had defeated Granada, the last Muslim kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula, and they backed their assurances with the occasional stipend of a few thousand maravedis. (Masters and pilots normally earned two thousand maravedis a month, and seamen half that.)
These gifts notwithstanding, Columbus’s first loyalty remained to his dream, and in 1488 he returned to Lisbon at João’s invitation. His timing could not have been worse, as his arrival coincided with the return of Dias from his voyage beyond the Cape of Good Hope. With a sea road to the Indies beckoning, João lost interest in Columbus’s venture and the Genoese returned to Spain. Isabella and Ferdinand continued to string him along but after a further rebuff in 1492, again on the recommendation of experts, he decided to try his fortune in France. (His brother Bartolomé had already floated the idea to England’s Henry VII and the French court.) He had just set out when he was summoned back to court, thanks to Luis de Santángel, who was in effect Ferdinand’s business manager. Santángel reasoned that whatever emoluments Columbus sought for his venture, the crown’s outlay was modest and the profits that might accrue could be substantial, whereas the potential loss should he make a worthwhile discovery for someone else would be impossible to recoup. In the event, Columbus secured ample guarantees: the hereditary offices of admiral, viceroy, and governor-general in all lands and islands he might discover, with the right to name his own governors, and 10 percent of the profits from trade. While one can see in these demands the vanity of a social climber, whatever his mistakes and faults, Columbus cannot be accused of underachievement. No one ever accomplished more to earn ennoblement and its attendant perquisites. Moreover, it has to be acknowledged that lobbying played a crucial role in his success. Funds, honors, and profits were not lowlying fruit, and as the stories of Henrique, Columbus, and countless others demonstrate, in the history of exploration persistence, flattery, and self-confidence are often as important as—if not more important than—being right.
Funding for Columbus’s first expedition, an estimated two million maravedis, came from a variety of sources. Santángel’s deft accounting enabled the crown to contribute little more than half the total, while Columbus put up about a quarter, probably borrowed from Giannoto Berardi, a Florentine trader who had moved to Seville in 1485 and was “a central figure in the lobby that promoted Atlantic expansion as an objective of Spanish policy and raised Columbus to eminence” at court. To satisfy a debt owed the crown, the town of Palos de la Frontera paid for the caravels Niña and Pinta (captained by the brothers Vicente Yáñez and Martín Alonso Pinzón, respectively) and their crews, and Columbus hired the Santa María, a Galician-built nao, as his capitana, or flagship. She was not an especially large vessel for her day, twenty-seven meters long and eight meters in beam at most; with only one deck and a year’s provisions, there were few creature comforts, and sleeping arrangements for the forty crew were fairly rude. (Crew accommodations in European ships improved somewhat after Columbus’s crew adopted the hammocks used by Caribbean islanders.) The caravels were even smaller, the Niña measuring no more than twenty-one by six meters and the Pinta twenty-three by seven meters.
Sailing from Palos on August 3, 1492, the ships reached the Canaries nine days later. There the Pinta’s rudder was repaired and the rig on the Niña was changed from a caravela latina to a caravela redonda, with square sails on the fore-and mainmasts, and a lateen on the mizzen. This made her much better suited to capturing the northeast trades, and she became Columbus’s fastest and favorite ship. (The Pinta was rigged as a caravela redonda from the start.) The ships sailed again on September 6. They reached the seaweed-thick Sargasso Sea after ten days, and three days later they were out of the trades and into a week of light and variable winds. Conditions improved considerably between October 2 and 6, when they sailed an estimated 710 miles, including their best day’s run of 182 miles. By this time they were close enough to land to follow the paths of birds heading southwest, but despite this and other tantalizing indications that land was near, by October 10 the crew of the Santa María were near mutiny and Columbus apparently agreed to put about if they did not sight land within a few days.
The next night they were in the Bahamas archipelago and on October 12, after a voyage of about three thousand nautical miles in thirty-three days, they landed on the Taíno island of Guanahaní, which Columbus claimed for Spain and named San Salvador. Sailing through the Bahamas for two weeks, they took aboard seven Taínos, who returned with Columbus to Spain, to be taught Castilian and Christianity so they could help with the work of conversion on their return. The Taínos also directed him to a place called Cuba, “which I believe must be Cipango according to the indications that these people give of its size and wealth.” Yet Cipangu and China would remain nothing more than shimmering mirages on an ever-receding horizon, and Columbus’s frustrated haste was already obvious in a diary entry (addressed to his king and queen) for October 19:
I am not taking much pains to see much in detail because I want to see and explore as much as I can so I can return to Your Highnesses in April, Our Lord pleasing. It is true that, finding where there is gold or spices in quantity, I will stay until I get as much of it as I can. And for this reason I do nothing but go forward to see if I come across it.
The Spanish explored the northeast coast of Cuba for six weeks, and at the beginning of November Columbus dispatched an embassy to the inland village of Holguín in the hope that it would prove to be a major Asiatic capital. He was disappointed to learn that his interpreter, whose languages included Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, could make no headway with the local people. Despite being told that it took more than twenty days to circle Cuba in a canoe, Columbus defiantly maintained that it was not a large island but a peninsula of Asia. In late November, Martín Alonso Pinzón in Pinta split off from the others without authorization to explore on his own. On December 5, Santa María and Niña sailed east to Cape St. Nicholas, the northwestern tip of Hispaniola in what is now Haiti, and a week later they took possession of the land in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella. The presence of gold artifacts and the friendliness of the local chief were encouraging, but disaster struck shortly after midnight on Christmas Eve when the Santa María grounded on a reef. No one died but the ship was a total loss. It would have been virtually impossible to cross the Atlantic with more than sixty men in Niña—Pinzón was still absent with the Pinta—so thirty-nine men volunteered to remain in a fort fashioned from the flagship’s timbers and named La Navidad. Niña sailed on January 4, 1493, and fell in with the Pinta at Isla Cabra two days later.
The return to Europe was far more difficult than the voyage out. The ships were poorly provisioned and Columbus insisted that they sail back the way they had come, a curious recommendation given that their westward passage had been abetted by prevailing easterlies. Eventually he turned north and the Niña and Pinta caught the same band of westerlies that blow past the Azores toward Portugal. The midwinter departure left them so exposed to storms that at one point Columbus sealed a description of his discovery in a barrel and threw it overboard in hopes that it would survive even if he did not. Some idea of the inadequacies of fifteenth-century dead reckoning can be gleaned from the fact that when land was sighted on February 15, it was thought to be variously Madeira, Lisbon, Castile, or one of the Azores. In fact it was Santa Maria, in the Azores, where the Niña anchored three days later, having been separated from the Pinta shortly before. The Portuguese authorities detained a shore party for violating their territory, but the men were freed and Columbus sailed on. Again beset by vicious storms, a week later the Niña was off Lisbon, the last place the architect of an important new discovery for the king of Spain would want to find himself. Summoned to court, Columbus reluctantly presented him
self to João II, who, according to a later report, “hearing the news of the location where Columbus said the discovered land was, became very confused and believed really that the discovered land belonged to him” by the Treaty of Alcáçovas. Certainly João would have been piqued to learn that Columbus had found Asia more or less where he said he would, and it would be another five years before the Portuguese followed up on Dias’s rounding of southern Africa. In the meantime, it was essential that he clarify Portugal’s rights under the Treaty of Alcáçovas.
The Atlantic After 1492
Columbus and his shipmates may have been disappointed with their initial encounters to the west, but so far as they or anyone else was concerned, they had reached the outskirts of Cipangu and China. But the possibility that they were in violation of the terms of the Treaty of Alcáçovas, as João seems to have believed, was quite real. Columbus boldly claimed that the islands were in the same latitude as the Canaries—that they were in effect a remote extension of that archipelago—when patently they were not. Sharing his anxiety, the Spanish monarchs decided on a two-pronged strategy, raising funds for a follow-up expedition and lobbying Pope Alexander VI (one of only two Spaniards ever to be Bishop of Rome) for recognition of their claim. Between May and September 1493, Alexander issued four papal bulls asserting his view—which was that of Ferdinand and Isabella—of the Spanish claim. The Inter Caetera drew a north–south line a hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde, or approximately 31ºW. The first three bulls confirmed and clarified the limits of Portuguese and Spanish claims, but the fourth essentially denied Portugal rights to any lands “found or to be found … notwithstanding apostolic constitutions and ordinances … made by ourselves or our predecessors.” Rather than rely on the arbitration of a Spanish pope to reverse this, João negotiated a clarification of their kingdoms’ respective claims directly with the Catholic Monarchs. The result was the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, which moved the line of demarcation 370 leagues (1,110 nautical miles) west of the Cape Verde Islands. As was soon discovered, the line crossed the eastern bulge of South America near the mouth of the Amazon River—the line is first shown on the celebrated Cantino map of 1502—thus establishing the basis for Portugal’s claim to Brazil.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 55
