Another seaman, Pedro Correa, married to the sister of Columbus’s wife, corroborated Martin the pilot’s story. He swore, says Las Casas, that “he also came across a piece of wood that had been carried there by the winds from the same quarter and that it, too, had been carved in a similar fashion.” Not only that, but he had seen “canes so thick that one joint of such a cane could hold over six liters of water or of wine.” Columbus said that he heard the same story from the king of Portugal. It seemed to Columbus that King João “was persuaded that these canes had come from some island or islands not far off to the west, or that they had been carried by the wind and the current all the way from India itself, for they were quite unlike anything that was known in Europe.” He also heard about pine trees washing ashore on islands in the Atlantic, “although no pine trees grow anymore throughout the Azores.” Still more tantalizing, there was a story in circulation about the bodies of two men washed up in the Azores, who had “very broad faces and features quite different from those of Christians.”
Add to that enticing tale reports of rafts, described as “Indian canoes with houses on board,” and the entire world seemed to invite discovery and speculation. These random floating objects were as strange and enigmatic as meteorites from distant worlds touching down to earth. Something strange was out there. “All such tales certainly fanned the flames of Christopher Columbus’s interest in the whole business,” Las Casas remarked, “and they show God nudging him along in the same direction.” It took one incident in particular, the “clinching factor,” as Las Casas put it, and forever after the subject of controversy, to crystallize in Columbus’s mind. It began with a vessel from Spain bound for Flanders or possibly England, being violently blown off course, as if in a fairy tale or in a nightmare, and discovering an island.
The crew barely survived the ordeal, only to perish on the way home to Spain. “Most of them died of hunger and disease brought on by overwork and the few that survived as far as the island of Madeira were ill when they arrived and all soon died there.” Columbus “got wind of the whole incident from the poor wretches who made it back to Madeira or from the pilot himself.” The story goes that he might have invited the pilot to stay with him, and be debriefed, until he expired within the walls of Columbus’s dwelling. Before the end, the pilot supposedly gave his host a “detailed account of everything that had happened and left him a written record of the bearings the vessel had followed, the route they had taken, the distances they had covered, the degrees of longitude and latitude involved, and the exact place they had found the island.” Given the impossibility of determining longitude at the time, the “exact place” of the island was highly questionable.
One of the most persuasive accounts of distant lands came from the pen of “Master Paolo,” a Florentine physician, who maintained an extensive network of correspondence with informed sources in the Portuguese court. Learning of these bulletins, Columbus cultivated the physician by sending a globe through a Florentine intermediary, Lorenzo Girardi, who lived in Lisbon. After passing along this tangible symbol of exploration, Columbus announced his own grand scheme for exploration and trade in precious items such as spices. Impressed, Master Paolo replied in Latin with a summary of his knowledge of China and its riches, which advanced Columbus’s understanding of the fabled land from an emerging global perspective. “Do not marvel at my characterizing the region as ‘the West,’” he counseled Columbus, “when these lands are commonly known as ‘the East,’ for any man who sails westward will always find these lands to the west, just as he who sets out overland to the east will find them in the east.” And he included a chart illustrating what he meant.
Master Paolo expounded on China and its numerous merchants. “There are as many ships, seamen, and merchants in the area as in any other part of the world.” In the city of “Zaiton,” by which he probably meant Hangzhou, the wealthy capital of southern China, “every year a hundred large ships load and unload their cargoes of pepper, not to mention the many others that carry spices of other lands.” He also informed Columbus of a “sovereign known as the Grand Khan, a name which in our own tongue”—Italian—“means king of kings.” The ancestors of this Khan, Paolo recounted, “greatly desired to have contact and dealings with Christians, and, some two hundred years ago, sent an embassy to the Holy Father asking him to send them a large number of learned and wise men who might instruct them in our faith, but those who were sent were forced to return home because of difficulties they encountered along the way.” As Paolo continued his tale, it became apparent that he relied heavily on Marco Polo’s popular account, which concerned the Venetian’s adventures in Asia from 1279 to 1295, and on the stories of a Chinese ambassador. In the physician’s telling, the events of two centuries before seemed to be happening in the present as he wove the two eras into a tapestry of royal palaces, rivers of great length and breadth, “vast numbers of cities” dotting their banks (in one case, two hundred cities along the length of a single river), “broad bridges made entirely of marble and adorned with marble pillars” over which flowed spices, precious stones, gold, silver, and many other “things of great value.”
How to get there? Simple, according to Master Paolo the physician: “From the city, in a line directly to the west, there are twenty-six spaces marked on the map, each representing two hundred and fifty miles, before you arrive at the most noble city of Quinsay”—Marco Polo’s distinctive name for the capital city of Hangzhou, and a dead giveaway of Master Paolo’s source—“which is a hundred miles in circumference,” and, in the same breath, of “Çipango,” Marco Polo’s name for Japan. “This island is most rich in gold and pearls and precious stones, and you should know that the temples and royal palaces are covered in solid gold.” Once again, getting there posed no problem to the initiated. “Because the route is unknown, all these things are hidden from us, even though one can voyage there without danger or difficulty.”
Columbus responded that he could find this extraordinary realm by sailing along a route indicated on a map supplied by Master Paolo, who was, it bears repeating, no navigator. Elated by the endorsement, he replied, “I am gratified to find my map so well understood and to learn that such a voyage is not only theoretically possible but will now become a fact and a source of honor and estimable gain and the greatest fame among all Christian men.” As if he were dispatching Columbus himself, he promised a voyage of “powerful kingdoms and noble cities and the richest of provinces abounding in all manner of goods that are much in demand,” not to mention spices and gems, rulers even more eager to have contact with the West than the West was to have contact with them, to exchange wisdom, knowledge, and religion. “I do not wonder that you, as a man of great courage,” Master Paolo wrote to Columbus, “should find your heart inflamed with the desire to put this enterprise into effect.”
Columbus enlarged upon these clues of undiscovered western islands with scholarly efforts of his own. He studied Ptolemy’s influential Geography, which had reached Europe from Constantinople in about AD 1400. In 1406–1409, Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia translated the text into Latin. It became the first book to be printed with engraved illustrations, in an edition published in Bologna dating from 1477, and was subsequently translated into several European languages. Ptolemy’s cartography was both inspiring and greatly misleading. Ptolemy, who lived in the second century AD, underestimated the size of the world by one-sixth. He did not know of the existence of the American continent, or of the Pacific Ocean, the largest body of water on the planet. The problem of determining longitude had yet to be solved, and would not be until the late eighteenth century. For all these reasons, relying on Ptolemy’s Geography proved as deceptive as it was inspirational.
Somewhere, at the confluence of Ptolemy’s flawed cartography, the legends of antiquity, Marco Polo’s account, and sailors’ anecdotes lay clues of a great prize waiting to be discovered. Columbus had his plan, and now he needed the backing of a powerful royal sponsor, and money.
Heedless of these considerations, and fired by the accounts he had gathered, Columbus pressed on, requesting that the king equip three caravels for the voyage, including chests filled with goods for barter such as cloth from Flanders, hawk’s bells, brass basins, sheet brass, strings of glass beads of several different colors, small mirrors, scissors, knives, needles, pins, canvas shirts, coarse-colored cloth, red caps—tools and trinkets for conquering the lands and peoples hiding in plain sight somewhere in the Western Sea.
These practical matters were easily accomplished. The personal demands that Columbus made of King João were far more onerous, and unrealistic. He wanted a title, preferably “Knight of the Golden Spurs,” that would permit him and his descendants to style themselves “Don.” He also wished for himself the grandest title he could think of: Admiral of the Ocean Sea, “with all the privileges of rank, prerogatives, rights, revenue, and immunities enjoyed by the admirals of Castile.”
Even to Portuguese ears, accustomed to overstatement, this description verged on the absurd. A tireless conversationalist and self-promoter, Columbus never knew when to stop, and he demanded appointment as “viceroy and governor in perpetuity of all the islands and terra firma discovered either personally by him or as a result of his voyage.” And he planned to award himself one-tenth of “all the moneys accruing to the crown in respect of gold, silver, pearls, gems, metals, spices, and all other articles of value and merchandise of whatever kind, nature, or variety, that should be purchased, bartered, discovered, or won in battle throughout the length and breadth of the lands under his jurisdiction.” It was clear that Columbus considered himself a partner of the crown’s exploration program, and potential ruler of a kingdom—moreover, a kingdom larger and wealthier than Portugal itself.
His megalomania did not go over well in the small, gossip-ridden Portuguese court. João de Barros, a court historian, portrayed the would-be Admiral of the Ocean Sea “as a big talker and boastful, full of fancy and imagination,” and so, “the king lent little credit to what he had to say.” Yet João II subsequently consulted three experts about Columbus’s claims: Dr. Calzadilla, Master Rodrigo, and Master Josepe, “the latter a Jew,” in Las Casas’s words. “The king placed great trust in these men when it came to questions of exploration and cosmography and they, according to our writer, regarded Columbus’s words as sheer vanity.” It would seem that an automatic refusal was inevitable. Instead, the king appeared to hesitate, and caused Columbus to wait for an answer.
The three experts consulted by the Portuguese king spent days questioning the navigator about his plan. Eager to impress, Columbus told all, and when they finished with him, João II proved to be as duplicitous as he was daring: he commissioned a clandestine expedition based on the information extracted from the Genoese mariner.
The deception continued. João II strung along Columbus while dispatching a supply caravel supposedly bound for Cape Verde and other islands, all the while delaying his official reply to Columbus. When the caravel limped home to Lisbon in appalling condition—with ripped sails and broken masts—the residents questioned the exhausted crew members. The survivors complained of the tempests they had endured at sea and declared it was impossible to reach land over a sea route. Once the voyage’s true purpose was exposed, King João’s subterfuge was apparent to all.
At this critical juncture, Columbus’s young wife, Felipa, died from unknown causes, or disappeared from view forever. A more skeptical tradition hinted that Columbus abandoned Felipa in Portugal, where her family connections had been useful, to try his luck in Spain, where they were not. Although the circumstances of her death, and even the year, remain unclear, his abrupt departure does not necessarily mean he deserted his wife; it is possible that he planned to send for her if he succeeded elsewhere. But it is even more likely that she did not survive, if only because she was never spoken of again.
He had devoted eight years to the great enterprise, with nothing to show for it but rejection and embarrassment. His youth had fled; he was turning forty—advanced middle age for a sea captain—with little to show for his years of wandering beyond unfulfilled ambition. He was a widower in a foreign land with deteriorating prospects and a young son in his care. His long, flowing hair turned white. There seemed to be little for which he could be grateful. But, given the dangers of the Portuguese court, and of the sea, he was fortunate to be alive.
Reluctantly he directed his ambition toward the other patrons of exploration, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, even as part of him wished he could one day return to Portugal in triumph. For now, he would seek his fortune in Castile.
Demoralized, he assigned responsibility for the expedition to his brother Bartholomew, and displaying a bit of guile himself, dispatched him to England, to plead with King Henry VII (the father of Henry VIII) for the backing denied by the enigmatic and recalcitrant Portuguese monarch.
To those who knew the Columbus brothers, the sudden transfer of power had a certain logic. Bartholomew’s reputation was that of a “very shrewd and courageous man, well versed in the ways of the world and most astute, more full of guile,” Las Casas judged, “than Christopher Columbus himself.” Bartholomew knew Latin, and “had much more experience in the ways of men.” He was reputed to be almost as skillful a navigator as Christopher, and more adept at fashioning charts and nautical instruments.
Overshadowed by his more celebrated son and successor, Henry VIII, Henry Tudor had won his throne by defeating Richard III on the field of battle, and founded the durable Tudor dynasty. He was, for a monarch of the epoch, prudent and responsible. Bartholomew Columbus flattered and cajoled his way into an audience with the king, and to win the sovereign’s favor he presented him with a mappa mundi, a Latin term indicating a sheet, or map, of the world, and on it were the lands that his brother Christopher planned to claim. The map contained a brief identification of its bearer in Latin: “He whose birthplace is Genoa and whose name is Bartolome Colon of Terrarubia, completed this work in London on the thirteenth day of the month of February in the year of our Lord one thousand four hundred and eighty-eight. Praise abounding be unto the Lord.”
Columbus, meanwhile, obtained a copy of a letter composed by the Florentine mapmaker and mathematician Toscanelli, dated June 24, 1474. Toscanelli spoke of a “shorter way of going by sea to the lands of spices, than that which you”—the Portuguese—“are making to Guinea.” A ship sailing due west from Lisbon, he claimed, would, after covering five thousand nautical miles, reach Quinsay, the opulent capital of China described by Marco Polo. There was more. Another sea route would take a ship to “the noble island of Çipango,” Marco Polo’s Japan, which, as readers of the Venetian’s enthusiastic account knew, was “most fertile in gold, pearls and precious stones, and they cover the temples and royal residences with solid gold.” If true, and that was an immense if, Portugal could forge an alliance with a country of unimaginable wealth. Even better, Toscanelli claimed, “By the unknown ways there are no great spaces of the sea to be passed.” This simple observation derived from a profound misunderstanding of the globe (and everyone knew it was a globe; there was little dispute about that point). Like Ptolemy before him, Toscanelli omitted the American continent and the Pacific Ocean—features that made such a voyage to Asia impossible.
Even more than Ptolemy, Toscanelli led Columbus to believe that the Caribbean was the doorstep to China. Sooner or later some country, and some monarch, was bound to succumb to the Columbus brothers’ siren song of empire.
As Bartholomew was appealing to King Henry, Christopher, re
vived by his studies, made his way to Spain to interest Ferdinand and Isabella in the same enterprise. But his initial reception in Spain proved so disappointing that late in 1487 he wrote to King João, who had spurned and humiliated him, to ask permission to return to Portugal.
Against all expectations, the Portuguese monarch replied on March 20, 1488, in conciliatory tones, thanking Columbus for his “good will and affection,” and, astonishingly, saying, “we will have great need of your ability and fine talent,” words certain to inflame Columbus’s ambition. The offer came with an assurance that “you will not be arrested, detained, accused, summoned, or prosecuted, for any reason whatsoever, under the civil and criminal code. Therefore, we beg you and urge you to come soon and not to be reluctant to do so for any reason whatsoever.”
Columbus arrived in Lisbon in 1488, at the same time Bartolomeu Dias, King João’s favored navigator of the moment, returned from his exploration of the coast of Africa. So Columbus endured the humiliation of watching his competitor surpass him in accomplishment and in the affections of King João. Had Columbus been set up? More likely the king summoned him as a substitute in case Dias never returned from his voyage, and Columbus, led by his ambition, his naiveté, and his vanity, had walked into the trap. He left Portugal again in 1488, bound for Spain, where he would make a determined effort to win backing for his enterprise. Humiliated and disappointed, he hoped never to see Portugal again.
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