To this buzz, Colón could add a personal note. Not long after he settled in Porto Santo, he met a sea pilot in very sorry physical condition who told of being blown far off course by strong winds and powerful currents on a voyage along the African coast. He claimed to have seen strange lands, full of riches and treasure, far to the west. Eventually, his caravel had run aground, and most of the crew had perished. But somehow the pilot and three of his men had made it back to the Madeira archipelago. He gasped to Colón the approximate location of these western lands. Soon after he had unburdened himself, the pilot died. By all accounts, Colón kept this fascinating intelligence safely under his hat, and it would later be referred to as “Columbus’s secret.”
By the early 1480s, the elements of Colón’s grand plan were falling into place one by one. There were the rumors: the Oriental corpses of Galway, the Norse saga about Leif Eriksson’s discovery of a land of honey and grapevine far to the west called Vinland, the driftwood of the Azores, the tales of the far western islands of Antilia and Brasil, and now the pilot’s tale. To these were added Colón’s impressive professional credentials: his experience of the known world, his skill in mapmaking, his knowledge of oceanic currents and trade winds. Then there was the culture of Portugal, with its legacy of Henry the Navigator and its brassy young king, and his emphasis on pressing out the limits of the known world, for the glory both of Portugal and of Jesus Christ.
To all of this Colón could now add a measure of social standing. Yet, even though he had joined a family of explorers, his stature was not quite sufficient to gain him access to the parlors of lords and the chambers of bishops, much less of kings. He might don the role of a gentleman, the lord of a colonial estate, and seasoned merchant, but his social rank was a level below where he aspired to be.
His commanding physical appearance and his congenial, talkative ways served his social pretensions well. At age thirty his hair had turned white, which made his steel-blue eyes and ruddy, freckled complexion all the more striking in contrast. When he strode through the streets of Lisbon and the lanes of Porto Santo, pausing to chat with artisans, fishermen, and gentlemen, he cut an imposing figure with his broad shoulders and aquiline nose, his tanned, round face, and his air of sobriety and piety.
If he knew much, he had a healthy sense of what he did not know and what he could not accomplish. He had, as yet, no standing as an explorer. Portugal’s gaze was to the south along the African coast. For those productive expeditions, the Portuguese king had his coterie of indigenous favorites, especially Bartholomew Dias. In 1481, Dias had commanded a royal ship on an expedition to Africa’s Gold Coast, but it was merely a preliminary. Upon his return, discussions were under way for a far bolder mission: to take three ships and to press beyond the Tropic of Capricorn as far as the western coastline would take him. Was it really true, as Ptolemy suggested, that Africa stretched all the way to the end of the earth and there was no maritime passage around it?
As a foreigner, Colón could not hope to break into this elite club of African adventurers. But as he looked at the maps of the world and studied the speculations of Ptolemy, which remained the standard authority, he surmised that one third of the known world remained unexplored. The most unknown was the region due west across the great expanse of water where the mapmakers filled empty space with drawings of Neptunean monsters and imaginary islands. For these researches he learned Latin, the lingua franca of intelligent discourse and commercial contracts.
Somewhere along the way, he concluded that he would garner more respect and dignity among the grandees if he Latinized his Italian name to Christopher Columbus. He aimed to be a man of the world rather than merely a citizen of Italy or Portugal.
11
The Pilot of the Argonauts
By the mid-1480s curiosity and experience joined opportunity, as the newly minted Christopher Columbus began to delve into the work of Marco Polo, into the legends of Prester John, and the fabulous tales of the Orient. The most outrageous (and most entertaining) of these storytellers was one Sir John Mandeville, purportedly an English knight of the previous century, who wrote his remarkable book, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, around 1356. It described his imaginative travels to such astonishing places beyond the horizon as the islands of India; Cathay; Amazonia; and Tibet. On his travels he had encountered fantastic creatures: certain men with the skin of snakes who hissed like serpents, beasts with the body of a human and the head of a dog, and still other monsters whose human heads grew beneath their shoulders. He had seen dwarfs with a round hole for a mouth, and men with lips so large and flappable that they could be wrapped around the body like a cloak. He told of pygmies who married and produced children in six months and parrots who played chess with apes and spoke ancient Greek.
To this mind-traveler, the planet was round. Its circumference was exactly 20,435 miles. Africa was half the size of Europe. The earth’s center was Jerusalem, which was set in the midst of an earthly paradise. This comported with most medieval maps, in accordance with the biblical verse in the book of Ezekiel (5:5), “Thus saith the Lord God: This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nations and countries that are round about her.”
In the second part of Mandeville’s book, the kingdom of Prester John is described. The lore of an all-powerful Christian emperor in the Orient dates back to the twelfth century, when this fabulously wealthy kingdom was first mentioned in the chronicle of Otto of Freising. But Mandeville embroidered the legend with fantastic detail. The kingdom was dangerous to approach, for it was surrounded by the Gravelly Sea, which had no water, but whose sand and rock including precious stones rolled and moved like ocean waves. The approach to the Gravelly Sea was dotted with magnetic stones that sucked the nails out of unwelcome ships. Beyond the waterless sea the beaches were guarded by horned wild men, who grunted like pigs.
This lost Christian kingdom comprised fifty-two provinces, which stretched across three Indias and included the Tower of Babel. “In the land of Prester John are great plenty of precious stones of diverse kinds, some of them so great and so large that they make of them vessels, as dishes, goblets, and cups…” The gates of the emperor’s palace were fashioned from precious stone, bordered with ivory. Its windows were crystal. The tables where the court ate were made of emeralds and gold, while the palace steps were onyx and burnished coral. Its pillars were gold and precious stone, while the emperor’s bed sparkled with sapphire. Atop the main tower of the kingdom’s chief city were two balls of gold, which shone brightly in the night.
The fantasy of a fabulously wealthy Christian kingdom somewhere in the African hinterland held a special sway over the imagination of the Portuguese explorers and Portuguese kings. Portugal was a small and isolated nation, forever threatened by its much stronger neighbor to the east, at the hands of which Portugal had just suffered a humiliating defeat. To survive, Portugal needed powerful friends, and the thought of allying itself with a fabulous African king with an army of 1 million set the Portuguese to dreaming. Finding this paradise and its Christian emperor became the chief motivation for the Portuguese expeditions, more important than the spices of the Orient. If their explorers could round the southern tip of Africa, they would turn north along the eastern coast of the continent, north as far as Ethiopia where Prester John’s kingdom was thought to reside.
King João II gave enough credence to this story that he commissioned an explorer to travel to Egypt and thence south to Ethiopia to look for this lost Christian empire. If the traveler missed Prester John’s kingdom, he might just stumble upon the dominion of the Queen of Sheba or the gold-soaked island of Ophir, which was mentioned in the Bible’s book of Kings, or even King Solomon’s mines, supposed to be twenty miles long. *2
The lore of Prester John was forever linked with the Great Khan of Tartary. For this potentate, Columbus had a much more reliable source. The travels of Marco Polo to the Orient in the mid-thirteenth century, his three years in the court of Kubla Khan, and his descript
ions of Cathay and the island of Cipangu (Japan) held a powerful sway over the medieval mind. A copy of Polo’s book, with its descriptions of the Great Khan’s luminous court and the golden roofs and marble bridges of Cipangu, and lords wearing golden armor and eating upon golden tablecloths, graced the archives of the Portuguese court. Columbus was to acquire his own copy, into whose margins he appended copious notes.
But Marco Polo’s descriptions remained controversial two hundred years after they were written. Medieval geographers could find no place for so vast a continent and such a grand island as Cipangu in Ptolemy’s geography. Columbus did not doubt their existence, however, nor, more importantly, their wealth. And in his acceptance of Marco Polo’s discoveries, he had an additional reference.
Into his possession had come a letter written by one of the fifteenth century’s most distinguished scientists. Paolo Toscanelli was a Florentine mathematician, astronomer, and cosmographer, a brilliant figure in the luminous society of Florence that included Brunelleschi, the architect of the famous Duomo. For decades Toscanelli had studied the heavens and plied his craft of theoretical mathematics.
Among his prodigious scientific preoccupations was a great interest in Marco Polo’s book. Toscanelli had talked extensively to Italian merchants and seamen who traded European wool for the exotic goods from China and India in the teeming markets of the Middle East (although the number of these Italian traders was greatly reduced by the demise of the Mongol Empire in Central Asia and the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea). From these investigations, he concluded that the landmass of Europe and Asia comprised 230 degrees of latitude, and from this he inferred that the trip across the Atlantic Ocean comprised only 130 degrees, or about 2,000 miles. The Florentine scientist was convinced that the kingdom of the Great Khan of Cathay could be reached quickly by sailing due west.
Toscanelli’s certainty about a western route to the Orient was widely discussed in Florentine circles, and in 1474 these speculations had reached the ear of the Portuguese king Alfonso the African, who asked Toscanelli to communicate his theory in writing. In a letter written in Latin and dated June 25, 1474, with which he included a map, the Florentine master laid out his theory.
“It is good,” he wrote, “that many others have talked of the short road that there is from here to the Indies, where the spices are borne, by way of the sea, shorter than that way which you have for Guinea [Africa].” The distance between Lisbon and the “great and noble city of Quinsay” in China was 6,500 miles, but in between were the islands of Antilia and Cipangu. In the latter, the temples and royal houses were covered with pure gold. And in Cathay, “one can find not only large profits and many things but even gold, silver, precious rocks and all manner of spices… and it’s true that sages, doctors, philosophers, astrologers and other great wise men in the arts govern the magnificent province.”
Toscanelli’s letter was a compelling final piece of evidence informing Columbus’s obsession, for it lent the imprimatur of respectable science to his inspiration. The map attached to the letter was more important than the letter itself, since it showed that the continents of Europe and Asia faced one another in close proximity, with the noble island of Cipangu in between.
At the beginning of the new decade, Columbus, restless and anxious that his secret would be discovered by others, moved back to Lisbon. There, courtesy of the lofty if sketchy connections of his wife’s family to important prelates and explorers, he was welcomed into Lisbon’s high society. Still, his domestic responsibilities weighed upon him, like an anchor, for his wife’s health was deteriorating. In 1482, he broke free nonetheless and undertook another voyage to Africa, this time taking his brother, Bartholomew, along as a shipmate. Each voyage seemed to raise his bona fides, moving him into the higher ranks of commercial pilots in a country where sea captains were supreme.
In the coming few years as he waited for his chance, a wide variety of sources stoked the fire of Columbus’s obsession still further. With his newfound mastery of Latin, he absorbed literary and scientific rationales for sailing west to reach the spice-rich east. Besides the lore of Prester John and the Grand Khan and the kingdom of Ophir, beyond Marco Polo’s descriptions and Toscanelli’s encouragement, he consulted the work by Pierre d’Ailly called Imago Mundi. It was a richly imagined geography of the world, written in 1410, and mariners seventy years later still accorded it great respect. In the margins of his copy Columbus would, over time, pen copious notes, which he wrote carefully in tiny packed script in his newly acquired Latin.
“The end of Spain and the beginning of India are not far distant but close,” d’Ailly had written, “and it is evident that this sea is navigable in a few days with a fair wind.” Spain and India were close, the philosopher contended, because each possessed elephants.
Columbus paid special attention to d’Ailly’s measurement for the circumference of the earth, where a degree of longitude was measured at 56 2⁄3 miles. The world, he believed with ever greater certainty, was smaller than most people supposed. He embraced these deductions with the single-mindedness and determination of a visionary.
Moreover, in a world where bishops and inquisitors were all-powerful, he appended a biblical reference to his list of arguments. For in the book of II Esdras (5:42) in the Apocrypha, it is written that on the third day, God commanded that the waters of the earth occupy one seventh of the world, while land comprised six sevenths of the surface. “Six parts hast thou dried up…” read the text. To the medieval mind it was inconceivable that their God would make a world where only one seventh of its surface was habitable.
And then there was the encouragement of poets. In Seneca’s Medea, Columbus latched onto a choral strophe and made it his refrain:
There wil come an age in the far-off years
When the Ocean will lose its chains
And the whole broad earth shall be revealed.
When a pilot of the argonauts shall discover new worlds
And Greenland will no longer be the farthest point on earth.
Christopher Columbus meant to be that pilot of the argonauts.
In late 1484, only months after the death of his wife, Filipa, Christopher Columbus obtained an audience with the energetic young King of Portugal. By now, the lines of Columbus’s vision were sharp and mature. He was a man possessed. To the eager fascination of Dom João, Columbus proposed to sail due west in search of the fabulous island of Cipangu. For his mission, he asked for three caravels, a year’s supply of food, and the latest navigational instruments and charts, as well as chestsful of trinkets and notions that might be bartered with natives.
He was not modest about the rewards and honors he expected for himself in return, if his mission was successful. Like the discoverer of the Congo River, Diogo Cão, and like his father-in-law, he wished to be knighted, so that for life he would be referred to with the honorific “Dom.” This honor was not merely for himself. He demanded that the title be hereditary, distinguishing his family and their heirs. Moreover, he required the official title of “Chief Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” thus surpassing the stature of Diogo Cão and Bartholomew Dias, and joining the company of the legendary admirals of Castile. For all the islands and lands he might discover, he required the standing of a viceroy, which would enable him to rake in a tenth of all the gold and profits that came of the venture. But this was not enough. He also demanded an eighth of all profits that might accrue from subsequent trading missions to his discovered lands.
This was a brassy set of demands, especially from a foreigner and the son of a wool carder. But Dom João did not seem overly surprised or put off, for the king was excited by the boldness of his expansive Italian visitor. Given the precedent of Diogo Cão, the titles were the easy part. The gold and profits were matters of pure speculation, and dividing spoils between the king and the sea captain was accepted practice.
If the king was not shocked, Columbus’s demands set off a furor when they were pu
t before the king’s Junta of Mathematicians. This distinguished group of experts had among them some sixty-five years of superior Portuguese seamanship, and they were not easily swept away. Joining these experts in navigation was the bishop of Ceuta. Already the bishop had qualms about the expense and the diversion of Portugal’s African program, for those ventures, he believed, divided a nation already stretched thin by foreign entanglements and domestic plague. Columbus’s proposal was “wild” and “chimerical,” the bishop cautioned, just as Columbus himself came off as a vainglorious, facile braggart.
“The greatness of monarchs does not arise so much from the extent of their dominions, as from the wisdom and ability with which they govern,” the bishop said. “If the king wishes employment for the active valor of the nation, the war in which he is engaged against the Moors of Barbary is sufficient.”
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