Competition between the Italians for this lucrative traffic was fierce. Even if only one out of five dhows survived a three-year voyage, the trader owning the fleet was enriched; a sack of pepper, cinnamon, ginger, or nutmeg was worth more than a seaman’s life, and a shipment from Araby would include fragrant ambergris, musk, attar of roses, silks, damasks, gold, Indian diamonds, Ceylonese pearls, and, very likely, hallucinogenic opiates. Shrewd merchants greased palms at every stage of a journey. In Middle Eastern wars they chose sides, knowing they would be rewarded by the winners. The Venetians were granted trading privileges during the fifty-seven-year Latin occupation of Constantinople, but they lost these after 1261, when the city fell to Greek troops led by Michael Palaeologus—henceforth the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII. Enterprising Genoese then replaced the Venetians by strengthening their ties with the Palaeologi. Using Constantinople as a base, they penetrated northern Persia, the Crimea, and distant reaches of the Black and Caspian seas; so ingenious were they, and so vigorous, that their central Asian contacts survived the breakup of the Mongol Empire. In Africa they sailed up the Nile as far as Dongola, in the Sudan; thrusting out from Tunis, they explored the Sahara and the Niger basin. Meantime the Venetians had established a monopoly in the Egyptian trade. Their cargoes came from South Asia—from the Moluccas, Malaya, and India’s Malabar Coast. Then, in the fifteenth century, such Venetians as Niccolò de’ Conti and John Cabot (he was born Giovanni Caboto) began penetrating the Orient directly from the west.
Yet even then the Atlantic beckoned. The traditional arteries of trade were cumbersome. Indian spices had to pass through at least twelve hands before they reached the consumer. The farther merchants were from the Middle Eastern scene, the greater their handicap. Spain and Portugal were particularly ill situated, but the Italians also suffered. Men groped toward a more direct route. In 1291 Genoese vessels had become the first to sail through the Straits of Gibraltar, bypassing Iberian ports and proceeding through the English Channel to Dutch anchorages. If the Portuguese and Spaniards were to harvest profits from seaborne commerce, they would have to find a new route to Asia. It was a challenge, and not for the fainthearted. In the same year that Gibraltar lost its virginity, two Genoese brothers, Ugolino and Guido Vivaldo, vowed to reach India by finding and doubling Africa’s southern tip. Bravely sailing out through the straits, they headed south—and were never heard from again. Another century would pass before the riddle of the Cape of Good Hope was solved, and by then Italy would have lost the baton of leadership.
AT THIS POINT in the history of exploration an eminent fourteenth-century Englishman appears in an unexpected role. He is Geoffrey Chaucer (1342–1400). Like most writers in all ages, Chaucer remained solvent by finding other employment from time to time. In 1368 he became an esquire of the royal household; later he was appointed clerk of the King’s Works. One of his royal admirers was Philippa, daughter of John of Gaunt and granddaughter of King Edward III. Chaucer’s avocation was the study of navigation. He modestly described himself as an “unlearned compiler of the labors of old astrologiens,” and in fact much of his Treatise on the Astrolabe was adapted from a Latin translation of the Composito et operato astrolabii of Messahala, an eighth-century Arabian astronomer. Nevertheless Chaucer was an enthusiast, and his enthusiasm was infectious. Young Philippa caught it. She became intrigued by his lessons in navigation. Later, as queen of Portugal, she taught them to one of her sons, Henry, who, sharing her enthusiasm, grew up to act upon it. He is remembered in history as Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460). Although the prince himself did little navigating, he sponsored voyages of discovery, encouraged seaborne commerce, developed the sailing vessel known as the Portuguese caravel, and designed a grand strategy to outflank Islamic power by establishing contact, first with Africa south of the Sahara, and then with the Orient. Islam survived his challenge, but in the process seamen inspired by Henry established the Portuguese overseas empire, which subsequently became the most extensive in the world, dominating European trade with India and the East Indies for 150 years.
In retrospect, their accomplishments seem almost miraculous, for despite the efforts of men like Chaucer and Prince Henry, navigation remained a highly inexact science. The prince is said to have improved the instruments used by navigators. One can only wonder what they were like before him. To be sure, latitude could be measured with any one of several versions of the astrolabe, chiefly the English cross-staff, a forestaff, or, in Magellan’s case, a calibrated backstaff. All, like their Egyptian forerunner, were primitive quadrants that measured the angle between the sun and the horizon. First-rate astronomers could also make an educated guess at longitude—if they were on land. But there was no way a man at sea could determine the longitude of his ship. To do that, he needed to read the position of the stars, which required knowledge of the precise time —an impossibility, since accurate clocks, with balance wheels and hairsprings, would not be invented until the middle of the next century. Of course, every captain had a compass, and all could compute dead reckoning. None, however, knew the difference between magnetic north and true north, or realized that dead reckoning suffered from disastrous errors arising from the drift of the water.
In the days of al-Idrisi, the twelfth-century geographer, Arabs had taught Sicilians how to sail boats, and Sicilians had passed the knowledge along to the Genoese, who had taught the Spaniards and Portuguese. But although the shores washed by the Mediterranean had been mapped, few captains had ventured beyond it. Even where coastlines could be found on charts, water depths were rarely shown. This massive lack of information, together with the abundance of misinformation, put a premium on the experience of seamen who, venturing into unknown waters, hoped to make it home.
Pilots on exploratory voyages carefully documented the progress of each expedition. When the leaders’ hopes were justified —when they reached strange lands and returned—these records, or rutters, became invaluable. Each was a detailed, step-by-step chronicle of the journey out and the journey back. Specific information included tides, reefs, channels, magnetic compass bearings between ports and headlands, the strength and direction of winds, the number of days a master kept his vessel on each tack, when he heeled it over for repairs, where he found fresh water, soundings measured in fathoms and speed in knots, measured by comparing the time required for a sandglass to empty with the progress of knots which were tied, at intervals, on a rope attached to a small log that was thrown overboard and paid out. Everything went in, everything—even the changing color of the sea—which might conceivably be useful to another pilot trying to reach the same destination.
Rutters were copied by hand and translated under supervision, but those opening new trade routes never reached the hands of printers. They were too precious. Some were sold. Others were declared to be state secrets; divulging their contents was punishable by death, for a rival captain with a rutter in his cabin could exploit another’s dearly bought knowledge. Once a way had been found, dangers were minimal, but the perils of the original explorers can scarcely be exaggerated.
It is a remarkable fact that virtually all of them came from one corner of Europe. Portugal and Spain had contributed little to Western civilization before then. In the five centuries since then they have produced several brilliant artists; apart from that, their achievements have been less than awesome. But this, incontestably, was Iberia’s hour. Within thirty years —a single generation—a few hundred small ships weighing anchor in Lisbon, Palos, and Sanlúcar discovered more of the world than had all mankind in all the millennia since the beginning of time.
THE FIRST probing voyages were cautious, even hesitant, and in perspective their accomplishments seem slight. In 1460, when Prince Henry died, Portuguese mariners had made only six unimpressive discoveries: three small archipelagoes off their own coast —the Azores, Madeiras, and Canaries—and, in northern Africa, Cape Verde’s fertile promontory, the Senegal River, and the port of Ceuta. The prince had been in his grave ele
ven years when João de Santarém became the first European to cross the equator and return unscathed. Another eleven years passed before Diogo Cão found the mouth of the Congo River. Finally, in 1486, a half-century after the prince’s first expedition, Bartolomeu Dias made a major discovery. Struggling through a mighty storm, he rounded the southern tip of Africa. He was anxious to sail on, convinced that India lay ahead, but his exhausted men forced him to return home. There King John II, after congratulating him, named the tip the Cape of Good Hope. To Dias’s dismay, however, his countrymen were indifferent to the implications of his rutter—an all-water route to India, outflanking the Middle Eastern merchants dealing in spices, perfumes, silks, drugs, gold, and gems.
Six years later the initiative passed to Spain, whose Castilian adventurers, having completed their conquest of the Moors’ last stronghold, were ready for new challenges. Because Arab traders had passed along fragments of Asian geography, Europeans had a general idea of the continent’s chief coastal features: India, China, Japan, the East Indies. Paolo Toscanelli, a Florentine scholar, had concluded that the Orient lay only 3,000 nautical miles west of Lisbon. Toscanelli strengthened the confidence of Genoa’s Christopher Columbus. Columbus had raised 500,000 maravedis for an expedition. He won over Louis de Santangel, Spain’s royal treasurer, and Santangel persuaded the crown to invest another 1 million maravedis—roughly $14,000—in a Columbian attempt to reach the East by crossing the Atlantic.
Off the Genoese seaman went, navigating by dead reckoning and, legend has it, crying to his men, “Adelante! Adelante!” (“Forward! Forward!”). Returning early in 1493, he electrified Christendom by reporting complete success. In Barcelona Isabella and Ferdinand held a grand reception for him. Honoring him with the titles Viceroy of the Indies and Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Almirante del Mar Océano), they told him to organize more expeditions to the Orient. Actually he couldn’t. He had found, not Asia, but the Bahama island of San Salvador. He refused to abandon his claim to the discovery of Cathay, however, and although he returned to the New World three times, he never changed his mind. He called the natives he encountered Indians, which is why the Caribbean Islands have been known as the West Indies ever since. In 1496, he was unable to sail around Cuba. His officers explained that they were thwarted by bad weather, but Columbus rejected the explanation. The real reason, he said, was that they were lying off an Oriental peninsula. He thought it was probably Malaya.
His claims continued to be accepted. In Lisbon King Manuel, ascending the throne in 1495, assumed that the Spaniards had stolen a march on him. Jealous, and aware of the pleas of Bartolomeu Dias, he gave Vasco da Gama four vessels and instructions to reach India via the Cape of Good Hope. Da Gama is not among the attractive figures of the age, although in many ways he was typical of it. Brawny, brutal, cruel, and vindictive, he sought to dominate strange lands by terrifying the inhabitants. Once he deliberately set fire to an Arab ship, burning alive some three hundred passengers, including women and children. Nevertheless he earned the rank of almirante, bestowed upon him by his grateful sovereign, for Portugal’s rise as a world power owed much to him. On November 22, 1497, he rounded the cape Dias had found. Equipped with an Arab map and accompanied by an Arab navigator, he pushed on, first reaching Mozambique and Kenya on Africa’s east coast, and then, after a twenty-three-day run across the Indian Ocean, Calicut on the southwest shore of India.
THE PORTUGUESE had finally found a new passage to India, one free of the costly transshipment and tolls exacted by the old routes from Egypt, Arabia, and Persia via Italy. For more than a century the economic consequences of this commercial revolution—for that is what it amounted to—were more spectacular than the discoveries of Columbus and his successors in what was coming to be known as the New World. While Spanish navigators were floundering about in the Caribbean “Indies,” the vaults of Lisbon’s banks were filling up with profits from the new trade. Indeed, until the turn of the sixteenth century the Portuguese scarcely thought of the possibilities lying on the far side of the Atlantic and even then Manuel’s ministers were preoccupied with the markets created by vessels doubling the Cape of Good Hope.
Afonso de Albuquerque took office as governor of Portuguese India in 1509. His duties were more military than civil; fighting Hindus and Muslims, he captured and fortified both Goa and, on the Arabian coast, Aden; then he landed on Ceylon and moved on to seize Malacca on the Malayan Peninsula, the center of the East Indian spice trade. From Malacca alone he sent home $25 million in loot. His Excelência roamed all over the underbelly of Asia. He dispatched twenty ships to the Red Sea, and, in 1512, planted Manuel’s colors in Celebes and the Moluccas. The Portuguese expansion continued to pick up momentum; in 1516
Duarte Coelho opened Thailand and southern Vietnam to Portuguese commerce, and the following year Fernão Peres de Andrade reached trade agreements on the Chinese mainland with both Peking and Canton.
Half a world away, Columbus had continued to make one landing after another in the New World, sending back reports on his increasing knowledge of the Orient. However, there was a growing suspicion among the mariners who had followed in his wake that they were not in Asia at all. By the late 1490s landings had been made in Honduras, Venezuela, Newfoundland, and on the North American mainland. In 1500 Gaspar Côrte-Real reached Labrador, and that same year Pedro Cabral, storm-driven from a course he had set for the Cape of Good Hope, stumbled upon Brazil. Cabral hoisted Portugal’s colors over Brazil; Vicente Yáñez Pinzón claimed it for Spain.
With the discovery of Panama, Colombia, and the mouth of the Amazon, a very long coastline had begun to take shape. It remained for Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine merchant in the service of the Medicis, to define the emerging truth. In Spain on business, Vespucci had caught the exploration fever and sailed westward under the Portuguese flag. Later, in a letter to Italian friends, he wrote that on June 16, 1497, during one of his four expeditions to what he called the novo mondo, he had touched the mainland of a new continent. Although doubt was later cast on this claim, both Columbus and the Spanish government, which awarded Vespucci a lifetime appointment as piloto mayor—chief of Spain’s pilots—believed him reliable. In April 1507 Martin Waldseemüller, professor of cosmography at the University of Saint-Dié, produced the first map showing the Western Hemisphere. He called it “America,” and thirty years later Gerardus Mercator followed Waldseemüller’s precedent, though by then it was clear that the New World comprised more than one continent.
By the second decade of the new century—the 1510s—Europe’s developing image of the Americas resembled an enormous jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were rapidly falling into place. Commissioned by the English crown, John Cabot had explored the St. Lawrence River. Others were mapping the east coast of North America from the Savannah River north to what is now Charleston. On April 2, 1513, Juan Ponce de León, pursuing the medieval dream of eternal youth, landed four hundred miles to the south. Naming his discovery Florida (from Pascua Florida, Easter), he declared it to be Spanish territory. Other Spaniards claimed Argentina and explored the Gulf of Mexico, planting their flag in the Yucatán Peninsula. Toward the end of the decade, Montezuma II made the capital error of cordially welcoming Hernando Cortés, thereby sealing his fate as Mexico’s last Aztec emperor.
Although patriotic ardor burned in all these adventurers, their overarching goal had not changed. They were still looking for the mysterious East. The unexpected appearance of the New World had merely whetted appetites. Columbus had been thoroughly discredited by now, but the riddle remained: If the Americas were where the Orient was supposed to be, where was the Orient? And what, exactly, lay beyond the newly found landmass? Their logs reveal that early in the century several of them had stumbled close to the answer. In 1501 Rodrigo de Bastidas had explored Panama’s Atlantic coast. Late in the following year Columbus himself, making his final Atlantic voyage, had been blown ashore on Panama’s isthmus. It was the worst storm in his experience; his men, he wrote in his j
ournal, “were so worn out that they longed for death to end their dreadful suffering.” Unaware that the Pacific Ocean lay only forty miles away, he and his exhausted crews celebrated Christmas and the New Year in a harbor near the eastern end of what later became the Panama Canal. Seven years later Spanish conquistadores actually founded a colony at Darién. But they, too, failed to cross the narrow strip of land.
Vasco Núñez de Balboa did it. On September 25, 1513, the thirty-eight-year-old Balboa, a member of a Spanish expedition led by Rodrigo de Bastidas, climbed his celebrated peak and beheld the vast Pacific below. Clambering down, he reached the shore of the ocean four days later, christened it the South Sea (El Mar del Sur), and claimed it “and all its shores” for his sovereign. This was both extravagant and, in a way, impious; it defied the Vatican policy set forth by Alexander VI after Columbus’s first voyage. The Borgia pope was partial to Spain, being Spanish himself, but Portugal could not be denied her new empire; the Portuguese role in the explorations had been too great.
The pontiff therefore awarded the Portuguese all non-Christian lands east, and Spain all those west, of an imaginary north-south line drawn 100 leagues west of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. This had infuriated England’s Henry VII, who, refusing to recognize papal jurisdiction, vowed to build his own empire and designated Cabot as its first builder. For various reasons Lisbon and Valladolid * had also been dissatisfied. War between them appeared imminent. Then they negotiated the Treaty of Tordesillas, redrawing the line 270 leagues farther west. The pope’s decision was accepted as valid for discoveries until then, but in the future the Spaniards could claim whatever they could reach by sailing westward and the Portuguese what they could find sailing to the east. But this, too, was unsatisfactory. The negotiators had overlooked the fact that the world was round. Eventually explorers from the two countries would meet. Thus the Moluccas—the Spice Islands—fell in a gray area. Portugal had occupied them and claimed them, but Spain sulked. And everyone wanted them. To Ferdinand Magellan, the dilemma represented opportunity.
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