The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  Columbus’s first voyage had lasted seven months and was one of exploration. Over the next eleven years he would make three more, each of which lasted longer than two years and combined exploration with the more mundane tasks of colonial administration. Columbus’s shortcomings as a leader ashore emerged on the second voyage (1493–96). Departing from the Canaries, his fleet of seventeen ships made landfall on Dominica. Sailing north they had several encounters, some violent, with the Caribs, a cannibal tribe who frequently enslaved Arawaks such as the Spanish had met the year before. Yet Columbus’s return to La Navidad left no doubt that the Arawaks were less peaceful and submissive than he had claimed, for not one settler survived, most if not all having been killed, possibly for stealing gold and women although the actual reason remains a mystery.

  Chief among Columbus’s responsibilities was to establish a viable colony, but from April to September 1494 he explored Cuba and Jamaica and forced his crew to swear that Cuba was part of mainland Asia. Back at Hispaniola he ignored a royal summons to return home, but he managed to remain in the monarchs’ good graces and they appointed him to lead a new expedition. The fleet was divided into two groups, Columbus commanding three ships to explore the southern Caribbean and the coast of South America. The conclusions he drew from this voyage reflect an intensifying spirituality more than a maturing sense of geography. Cruising the coast of Venezuela, he came across pearl fisheries in the vicinity of the Orinoco but took the freshwater discharge of the vast river as evidence not of a vast continental watershed but of the “earthly paradise … from which flow four of the chief rivers of this world,” the Ganga, Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile, as described in Genesis. Returning to Hispaniola, Columbus found that the situation there had turned from bad to worse. Ferdinand and Isabella had received a steady stream of negative reports and had launched an investigation into his and his brother’s governance, an uprising against their administration by European settlers on Hispaniola, and their refusal to stop enslaving Indians. An official from court arrived in August 1500 to address these problems and the brothers returned to Spain in chains.

  Eventually released, Columbus undertook his fourth voyage in 1502, but not before a fleet of thirty-two ships had sailed with enough of a lead to allow a new administrator to establish his authority. The objects of Columbus’s final expedition were to find a strait to the west and to claim and settle territory on the coast of Central America between Honduras and Panama. He achieved neither goal. Two ships had to be abandoned in Panama, and the other two were so heavily damaged in a collision that they had to be run aground on Jamaica. Six of their company eventually reached Hispaniola in Indian canoes and returned to rescue their shipmates eight months later. Columbus returned to Spain in November 1504 and spent the last two years of his life wealthy but resentful of being stripped of some of his honors and grants, and bitter that licenses were now being issued to others to sail to Hispaniola.

  Several of these voyages were made by former shipmates of Columbus, to whom probably all explorers of this generation can be related by fewer than six degrees of separation. In 1499, Alonso de Hojeda, a veteran of Columbus’s second voyage, returned to the pearl fisheries of Venezuela. Among those sailing with him was the chameleonesque Amerigo Vespucci—banker, ship’s chandler, explorer, confidant of Columbus’s, and, by accident rather than by design, namesake of the Americas. It is unclear how much expertise Vespucci had before joining Hojeda, but his writings implausibly suggest that he commanded the expedition. He subsequently entered Portuguese service and in 1501 returned to South America in search of a westward passage through the continent. Vespucci’s fame stemmed from the attribution to him of several accounts of New World exploration and the false claim that he was the discoverer of South America. Readers of these included the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, who applied the name Ameriga to the southern continent in a 1507 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography. Six years later—when both Columbus and Vespucci were dead—Waldseemüller labeled South America Terra Nova; but by that time the name America had stuck and was being applied to North America as well.

  Vasco da Gama and the First Atlantic–Indian Ocean Voyage

  By this time, Spanish claims to the Americas had been eclipsed by the Portuguese opening of an enormously lucrative sea trade between Europe and Asia, just as João II had confidently predicted. A succession crisis had prevented an immediate follow-up to Dias’s voyage of 1488, but Manoel I, “the Fortunate,” continued his predecessor’s drive to the Indies. Opponents of his plan argued that India was too far away, the cost in men and matériel would leave the kingdom exposed to its enemies, and a profitable commerce would excite rivals. Manoel prevailed and in 1497 “named Vasco da Gama, fidalgo [nobleman] of his household, as Captain-Major of the sails that he was to send there”—two nãos, a caravel, and a storeship. Provisioned for three years, the ships had a total complement of 140 to 170 crew, including pilots, interpreters, and 10 degredados, criminal exiles. The latter were convicts who were left in unfamiliar places until their ship returned. In the meantime, they were expected to learn about the region’s people and their customs, trade, and language. If they survived, they won their freedom and the opportunity to benefit as a translator and intermediary.

  Gama’s fleet departed Lisbon in June 1497 and after watering in the Cape Verde Islands sailed in a broad westward arc before turning southeast. They reached the coast of what is now South Africa in early November. After a week of rest and repairs, they sailed again, doubling the Cape of Good Hope on November 18 and, bucking contrary winds, reached Mossel Bay a week later. Their encounters with local inhabitants were characterized by mutual suspicion, but in January 1498 they had better luck at a place they called Terra da Boa-Gente (“land of good people”) in southern Mozambique. At the Zambezi delta they met “a youth who … was from another land a good distance from there and who said that he had seen ships as large as those that we had brought, at which signs we rejoiced greatly for it really seemed to us that we were coming closer to where we wanted to go.” Their next stop was the island of Mozambique where friction with Muslims erupted into violence, as it would again at Mombasa, much of it instigated by the Portuguese. They had more cordial relations with the king of Malindi, a rival to Mombasa, and here they hired a pilot to guide them to Calicut. After four months of almost daily contact with Arab traders in East Africa, the Portuguese departed Malindi on April 24 and crossed to Calicut in twenty-two days. At long last, the Portuguese had opened the sea route from Europe to the Indies.

  The samorin of the largest and most cosmopolitan trading center on the Malabar Coast was initially well disposed toward the Portuguese, but his opinion was tempered by their overbearing manner and the antagonism of the sophisticated Muslim traders who disdained their second-rate offerings of cotton, beads, tin ornaments, trousers, and hats.c Gama attempted to leave in early August, but the samorin insisted that they pay duties for the cinnamon, cloves, and precious stones they had purchased. When the unsold Portuguese goods were seized and members of the crew detained ashore, Gama took eighteen hostages. The crisis was resolved a week later although the Portuguese kept a number of hostages, five of whom returned to India in 1500. Departing before the end of the southwest monsoon, the Portuguese took three months to cross the Arabian Sea and thirty of the crew died before they reached Malindi. Down to two ships, they reached Lisbon in July 1499. Gama’s voyage was the culmination of the Portuguese age of discovery, and in one stroke it altered the pattern of Eurasian trade forever.

  With the Arab-Venetian monopoly of the spice trade broken, Lisbon became, briefly, the most important entrepôt in Europe, and Manoel styled himself “Lord of the Conquest, Navigation, and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and of India.” To follow up on Gama’s extraordinary achievement, he entrusted a second fleet of thirteen ships to Pedro Álvares Cabral, who landed at Porto Seguro, Brazil, in April 1500 and dispatched one ship home to report on the discovery. (Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, a ve
teran of Columbus’s first voyage, had reached the coast south of Recife three months before, but the Portuguese Cabral is popularly credited as the European discoverer of Brazil.) Cabral’s expedition had otherwise mixed results; only six ships reached Calicut, where the Portuguese managed to antagonize the samorin and local traders even more than Gama had. They established a factory (a trading station manned by factors, or commercial agents) in the city, but a riot by Muslim traders left forty Portuguese dead. Thinking that the samorin was behind this, Cabral bombarded the city, killing four or five hundred people and sinking between ten and fifteen trading ships. Although this made it impossible for the Portuguese to trade at Calicut, they were able to establish a factory about a hundred miles south at Cochin (Kochi), whose ruler viewed the Portuguese as an ally against the samorin, his overlord and rival. Moreover, Cochin was found to be the home of a community of Christians whose bishop was appointed in Syria, and Cabral learned that Saint Thomas the Apostle was buried in Mylapore, on the Coromandel Coast. The Portuguese settled in São Thomé de Meliapur in 1523 and it became the headquarters of Portuguese trade in the Bay of Bengal.

  Some of these Christians returned to Portugal, together with two Italian merchants who had lived in India for decades. The intelligence gained from these men, together with that gleaned from captured charts and other documents, increased Portuguese knowledge of the Indian Ocean trade tremendously and helped them to identify the most strategic ports. After consolidating their position in India, between 1510 and 1515 they captured and fortified Goa, Melaka, Hormuz, and Colombo. Only Aden and the Red Sea proved impregnable. They also established innumerable factories around the Indian Ocean and farther east.

  From Magellan to the Treaty of Zaragoza

  Despite the initial lack of commercial promise in the Americas, the Spanish continued to exploit their foothold in this new world while the Portuguese reaped the benefits of their ever-increasing trade in the Indian Ocean and the Spice Islands, which Francisco Serrão reached in 1511. There remained, however, the question of whether the latter lay within the Spanish or Portuguese sphere of influence as defined at Tordesillas, and whether a western route would be shorter than that via the Cape of Good Hope. The first person to attempt to answer these questions was the Portuguese Fernão de Magalhães, or Ferdinand Magellan, who sailed for Spain. A veteran of seven years in the east, including the capture of Melaka, Magellan was encouraged in this plan by his correspondence with Serrão, who was a trusted advisor to the local sultan. Magellan fell out with Manoel I when the king refused to support his proposed itinerary and, like Columbus before him, he submitted his proposal to the king of Spain. Charles I (soon to be Emperor Charles V) offered Magellan a ten-year monopoly on the route and two years later Magellan sailed from Sanlúcar de Barrameda with 237 men in five ships provisioned for two years.

  Magellan’s position was difficult because the Castilians resented sailing under a Portuguese commander and the Portuguese considered him a traitor. As one of Manoel’s agents wrote: “Please God the Almighty, that they may make such a voyage as the Cortereals”—that is, be lost at sea—“and that your Highness may be at rest, and for ever be envied, as you are, by all princes.” After reaching the coast of Brazil near Rio de Janeiro, they headed for the Río Plata and then put into Puerto San Julian, Argentina, for the winter. On April 1, 1520, a simmering conspiracy led by two captains and Juan Sebastian de Elcano, master of the Concepción, came to a head. Magellan moved quickly and the mutineers surrendered. One captain was decapitated, drawn, and quartered, and when the fleet sailed the other captain and a priest were marooned. After wintering at Santa Cruz, the ships reached the entrance to the Strait of Magellan between Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego on October 21. Down to three ships (one had wrecked and another turned back to Spain), the Spanish spent five weeks defying the winds and currents of the rockbound strait.

  Their route across the Pacific is unknown. Leaving the strait at about 52°S, the Spanish would have been in the teeth of the prevailing westerlies that nineteenth-century sailors called the “Furious Fifties.” Given the time of year, the ships probably sailed north across the equator to about 10°N where they picked up the northeast trades for their westward passage. Whatever the case, they saw no land for fourteen weeks, during which twenty-one of the crew died. Antonio Pigafetta’s memoir depicts the sufferings of the starving, scurvy-ridden crew and their desperate sorceries to create food—horrific scenes that would be repeated countless times in the age of sail.

  We ate biscuit, which was no longer biscuit, but powder of biscuits swarming with worms, for they had eaten the good. It stank strongly of the urine of rats. We drank yellow water that had been putrid for many days. We also ate some ox hides that covered the top of the mainyard to prevent the yard from chafing the shrouds, and which had become exceedingly hard because of the sun, rain, and wind. We left them in the sea for four or five days, and then placed them for a few moments on top of the embers, and so ate them; and often we ate sawdust from boards. Rats were sold for one-half ducado apiece, and even then we could not get them. But above all the other misfortunes the following was the worst. The gums of both the lower and upper teeth of some of our men swelled, so that they could not eat under any circumstances and therefore died.

  This is one of the earliest descriptions of scurvy, a disease that results from a lack of vitamin C. Because it usually manifests after about a month without fresh vegetables, it became a significant problem for sailors only with the long-distance voyages of the age of European expansion. Its cure was not definitively ascertained until the nineteenth century.

  On March 6, the three ships reached Guam (about 13°N) in the Mariana Islands, which the Spanish called the Ladrones (“thieves”) because the islanders stole from them; in retaliation the Spanish burned forty or fifty houses and killed seven islanders. A week later they reached the island of Samar in the Philippine archipelago. On Limasawa, Magellan’s Malay slave, called Enrique, could make himself understood in his native language, and thus was one of the first people to circumnavigate the globe. In April the Spanish reached the island of Cebu where Magellan converted the local rajah and several thousand of his subjects to Christianity. To impress his new ally with the might of Christian arms, Magellan led an expedition against one of the rajah’s reluctant vassals on the island of Mactan where on April 27, 1521, he was killed along with a dozen of his men. After the loss of twenty-four more crew, the survivors burned the Concepción and distributed the remaining crew and provisions between the Trinidad and Victoria. After several aimless months in the Philippines, Juan Sebastian de Elcano and Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa took charge of the expedition.

  Upon reaching the Spice Island of Tidore, the Spanish learned that Francisco Serrão had died around the same time as Magellan, but they were warmly received by the local ruler, with whom they traded red cloth, hatchets, cups, linen, and other items for cloves, mace, nutmeg, cinnamon, and sandalwood. On December 21, Victoria sailed with forty-seven European and thirteen Malay crew. After stopping on the island of Timor they set out across the Indian Ocean, doubled the Cape of Good Hope twelve weeks out, and reached the Cape Verde Islands on July 8 after twenty-one weeks at sea. Twenty-one of the crew had died and they had lost their foremast. A watering party of thirteen men was arrested by the Portuguese, but Elcano pressed on with his reduced and enfeebled crew. On September 6, 1522, eighteen Europeans and three Malays limped ashore at Sanlúcar. The first circumnavigation of the globe had taken two years, eleven months, and two weeks. The disastrous loss of life notwithstanding, the Magellan expedition was a milestone in the history of navigation. Magellan had proved that the Americas were not attached to Terra Australis—a hypothetical southern continent that explorers would search for until the nineteenth century—and that the Pacific could be crossed, if only by brute determination. Such was Magellan’s accomplishment that Luis Vaz de Camões appropriated it for Portugal in the Lusiads, his epic about the Portuguese age of exploration, cla
iming Magellan as “a true Portuguese in the undertaking if not in allegiance.”

  Awful though their ordeal had been, Elcano’s men fared far better than the crew of the Trinidad, who had attempted to sail east across the Pacific. Contrary winds forced the Trinidad back to Tidore, where the Portuguese arrested the crew, only four of whom would return to Spain. Charles V dispatched two fleets to rescue the Trinidad’s men in 1525 and 1526. Only a quarter of the 450 men of the first expedition reached the Spice Islands, where the Portuguese held them until 1536. The second lost its flagship and returned to Spain before it reached the Pacific.

  The return of the Victoria invested the issue of the line of demarcation between Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence with new urgency. A panel of Portuguese and Spanish experts convened in 1524, its members including Elcano and Columbus’s son Ferdinand for Spain, and Juan Vespucci (Amerigo’s nephew) for Portugal. Debates over where to draw the line in the Atlantic and how to determine longitude ensured that little progress was made, and the Pacific boundary was only settled by the Treaty of Zaragoza of 1529, by which Charles paid 350,000 ducats to Portugal in exchange for fixing the line about three hundred leagues (nine hundred miles) east of the Spice Islands. Despite the treaty, thirteen years later a Spanish fleet sailed from Mexico to the Philippines (named for the future Philip II) on a mission for the “discovery, conquest and colonization of the islands and provinces of the South Sea towards the west.” The expedition ended badly and again the survivors returned to Europe in Portuguese ships.