One of the most significant steps toward modernism came with the dawning of the Age of Discovery. Europeans had long wanted a secure sea route to Asia, but now they had the ships and the navigational technology equal to the task.
The era of European voyages of exploration began early in the fifteenth century when the Portuguese ventured into the Atlantic. By 1433 they had discovered the Azores, colonized Madeira, and begun exploring the West African coast, slowly progressing southward until rounding the tip, whereupon Vasco da Gama sailed all the way to India in 1497. This was an extremely long voyage, but it produced immense wealth for the Portuguese, who gained complete control over the Indian Ocean and established colonial trading enclaves on the subcontinent.
Meanwhile, Columbus anticipated a short passage to the Indies by sailing west. To his dying day Columbus refused to admit that he had discovered a New World and that the Indies were many thousands of miles further on. Still unaware that Columbus had not reached the Indies, the Italian Giovanni Caboto—remembered as John Cabot—convinced merchants in England to fund a voyage, which in 1497 reached the shores of North America, probably Newfoundland or Labrador. Then, in 1500, Pedro Alvares Cabral claimed Brazil for Portugal. Soon thereafter, voyages to the New World became commonplace.
Europe’s Knowledge of Geography
The Greeks knew the earth was round, as did the Scholastics. The existence of climate zones also was well known. But over the centuries there was considerable disagreement as to the earth’s circumference and hence the distance from Europe’s Atlantic coast to the Indies. The actual circumference of the earth is 24,902 miles. Plato guessed that the distance was about 40,000 miles and Archimedes estimated it to be about 34,000 miles. Marinus of Tyre, another Greek, set the distance at about 18,000 miles. His estimate became extremely influential because in the second century the great Greek astronomer and cartographer Ptolemy based his maps on that figure. Roger Bacon repeated Ptolemy’s circumference figure, which misled Columbus into believing that his voyage to the Indies would need to cover only three or four thousand miles, instead of about fourteen thousand. It was not until the sixteenth century that the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator published a map giving the proper distance around the equator.
Asian Vistas
If there were doubts about the route westward to the Indies, Europeans were fully aware of the existence of Africa and the basic geography of the Eurasian landmass. European merchants had traveled east over the Silk Roads to China since the days of the ancient Greeks, and Alexander the Great had marched victoriously as far as the Indus River in modern Pakistan. The fabulously rich Roman elite offered a nearly insatiable market for luxury goods from the East—“spices, pearls, perfumes, gums, ivory and precious stones,” as one author put it.1 Roman traders used both the Silk Roads and a sea route to reach India. The latter involved following the coast from the Egyptian shores of the Red Sea to northern India. Apparently, Roman merchants did not go beyond India, even though Chinese silk was one of their most valued imports: Pliny the Elder (23–79), who objected to the drain on Roman wealth, complained in his famous Natural History that “toil [had] to be multiplied; so have the ends of the earth to be traversed; and all that a Roman dame may exhibit her charms in transparent gauze.”2
After the fall of Rome, the demand for Eastern luxury goods plummeted, as did trade with Asia. But by the time of the Carolingians a brisk commerce in silk and other Eastern products had resumed, mostly by land despite the impediment of Muslim settlements. Then, beginning in the thirteenth century, a series of Christian missionaries made the journey all the way to Mongolia and China and returned to write about their travels.
One of the first to go was Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, also known as Joannes de Plano (1182–1252), an original Franciscan and personal friend of St. Francis of Assisi.3 At the age of sixty-five, Giovanni was chosen by Pope Innocent IV to lead a mission to the Great Khan in Mongolia. The group left Lyon on Easter Day 1245 and rode to the Mongol camp on the Volga River. From there it was directed to proceed to the court of the Khan in Mongolia, about three thousand miles farther east. Upon arrival, Giovanni obtained an audience with the Khan and presented him with a letter from the pope—which, among other things, invited the Khan to become a Christian. In response, the Khan gave Giovanni a letter for the pope demanding that Innocent and all the kings of Europe come and swear allegiance to him. After Giovanni’s slow and dangerous journey home, the pope appointed his emissary archbishop of Antivari, a city on the Balkan Peninsula across the Adriatic from Bari, Italy. Giovanni’s careful account of his trip, known as the Tartar Relation—at that time Europeans mistakenly identified the Mongols as Tartars—offers an excellent description of the Mongols’ manners and customs and provides a fine assessment of Mongol military capacity and tactics, with suggestions of how to defeat them.
Next was William of Rubrouck (ca. 1215–ca. 1295).4 In 1248 William, also a Franciscan, accompanied the French king Louis IX (later to become Saint Louis) on the Seventh Crusade. Then, in 1253, as directed by the king, Rubrouck set out with several companions to convert the Mongols. Their journey covered thousands of miles before they arrived at the Khan’s court in Karakorum, Mongolia. The Khan received Rubrouck courteously but did not convert. During his stay, Rubrouck also encountered some Europeans, many of them Nestorian Christians. In July 1254 he began his journey back, taking a year to get home. Rubrouck was an acute observer and accurate reporter whose account of his journey was especially valuable as to geographical matters—for instance, that the Caspian was an inland sea rather than being an extension of the Arctic Ocean, as many in Europe had believed. An English translation of The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts was published in 1900.
John of Montecorvino (1247–1328), also a Franciscan missionary, was in China at about the same time as Marco Polo.5 Unlike Polo or his Franciscan predecessors, Montecorvino went by boat from India and reached Peking in 1294. Upon his arrival he discovered that the great Kublai Khan had just died. But that did not deter Montecorvino: he was not a messenger to the Khan but was committed to a serious effort of conversion. He built a number of churches, bought many young Chinese boys from their parents and raised them as Christians, is credited with making about six thousand converts, and served as the first Bishop of Peking. He also translated the New Testament into Uyghur (a Mongol language). When Montecorvino died in Peking in 1328, the Christian mission seemed bound for considerable success—centers had been established in three additional Chinese cities. But then, in 1368, the Chinese drove the Mongols out of China and the obsessively isolationist Ming Dynasty expelled or killed Christians.
But it was too late to close the door. Europeans had a good working knowledge of the geography as well as the riches of Asia.
The Western Hemisphere?
Controversy continues as to what fifteenth-century Europeans might have known about the existence of the Western Hemisphere. The English merchants who funded John Cabot’s voyage may have been aware that their local fishing fleet had been sailing to and from the Great Banks fishery off the coast of Newfoundland for many years. Of course, there is nothing to suggest that they thought this was anything more than a large island, like Iceland and Greenland. As for the latter two, the Danes surely knew of them, as did the Vatican—the pope had been appointing Bishops of Iceland since 1056, and in 1126 Greenland had become an official diocese. Even so, knowledge of these two islands offered no hint that beyond them lay two continents stretching nearly from pole to pole. As for the Viking knowledge of Vinland, there is a fascinating dispute over the authenticity of the so-called Vinland map. Found in 1957 bound in a fifteenth-century copy of Giovanni’s Tartar Relation, it is a map of the world that shows Iceland and Greenland and beyond them another substantial island identified as Vinilanda Insula. When Yale University published the map in 1965, along with an extensive set of studies affirming the map’s authenticity, a swarm of angry academics pounced, denouncing it as a modern forgery. In early days the critics seemed to carry the day with various pieces of evidence including chemical analysis. Since then, the supporters of the map’s authenticity have rallied,6 and there is no current consensus as to whether the map is genuine.
If the Vinland map is authentic, it is a charming historical artifact. But it is irrelevant to the larger historical picture in that it played no role in prompting voyages west. Even had Columbus seen it, he would not have taken Vinland for the Indies, let alone for a new continent—on the map it appears to be just another northern island.
Navigational Technology
Aside from the Vikings, until late in the fifteenth century sailors around the world had pretty much navigated by following coastlines or island hopping. This approach was sufficient for sailing the Mediterranean, which is densely packed with islands and has narrow north-south dimensions, putting most locations in sight of land.7 But technological developments from the twelfth century onward made sailing across empty oceans possible.
The first major achievement was the magnetic compass.8 Like so many other medieval inventions, the magnetic compass is generally attributed to the Chinese. The Chinese may have been the first to discover that a magnetized needle floating in liquid points north. But the Chinese found this phenomenon to be of interest primarily for performing magical rites; they may not have used this device aboard ships until long after Europeans were doing so. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that the knowledge that a floating magnetized needle points north reached Europe from China. The magnetic properties of naturally occurring lodestones were widely known in the ancient world—they were noted by the Greek philosopher Thales in the sixth century BC. In any event, a floating arrow pointing north is a far cry from a useful navigational instrument. The invention of the magnetic compass actually occurred when medieval Europeans added the compass card. That is, Europeans were the first to place a circular card directly beneath the magnetized compass needle, marked off into a thirty-two-point scale with north at zero. This not only allowed mariners to know which way was north but also enabled them to set an accurate course in any direction—expressed in points from north: “Helmsman, hold steady at 24 points.” Such a course could be followed even in the dark and without any need for landmarks. The first recorded use of a compass in the West was in 1187, but it probably had been used for some time before then.
Next came the astrolabe, a device for determining one’s latitude from the position of major heavenly bodies.9 The basic theory on which the astrolabe was based was well known to the ancient Greeks, who used crude devices for locating one’s latitude, though not at sea. The real breakthrough came in 1478, when a Spanish rabbi, Abraham Zacuto (1452–ca. 1514), combined a precise metal astrolabe with a set of astronomical tables showing the positions of the sun, the moon, and five planets at different dates. This combination allowed navigators to easily calculate their latitude with great accuracy. In addition to serving local Jewish congregations, Zacuto taught astronomy at the universities of Zaragoza and Cartagena.10 When the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, Zacuto went to Portugal, where he was appointed Royal Astronomer.11 Zacuto’s astrolabe and tables were quickly adopted—Vasco da Gama used them on his first trip to India.12
Even with a compass and an astrolabe, to follow a course it was necessary to know one’s speed. By the fifteenth century a ship’s speed was calculated by throwing overboard a slab of wood attached to a bridle of three lines connected to a single line. The single line was knotted at regular intervals. With tension on the line, the slab of wood remained (roughly) in place in the water, so the length of line—the number of knots—let out over a timed period (usually measured by an hourglass) could be translated into the distance traveled in the time period, and hence the boat’s speed. Eventually speed came to be expressed in terms of the number of knots per hour, which remains the nautical standard.13
Finally, given the ability to determine where a ship was and where it had been, navigators began to keep records to make a voyage easy to retrace. These records, which the French called “routiers” (the English corrupted the word to rutters), were simply a set of written directions for sailing from one particular place to another. For example, “Leaving this harbor, sail a course of [so many] points until reaching the [whatever] degree of latitude and then turn west and sail along this degree of latitude for three hundred nautical miles.” Sailing instructions were eventually replaced with charts that depicted a particular area, accurately oriented as to compass headings and having an accurate distance scale.
It was now feasible to go exploring.
Portugal is said to have been founded in 1128, when Dom Afonso Henriques proclaimed himself Prince of Portugal after defeating forces led by his mother in the Battle of São Mamede. Subsequent Portuguese princes slowly drove the Moors from the southern areas, completing the reconquest by 1250 (Moors remained in southern Spain until 1492). Nevertheless, a fully independent Portugal was not achieved until 1385, when John of Avis defeated the Castilians and became King John I.
The new Kingdom of Portugal became a major maritime power and the leader in oceanic explorations. The first step was the conquest of Ceuta, a major Muslim port city in North Africa directly across from Gibraltar. In 1415 a Portuguese force led by King John I and his sons, including Prince Henry (soon to be known as Henry the Navigator), attacked Ceuta from the sea and by nightfall had routed the Muslim defenders. Despite several attempts to retake the city over the years, Muslims did not regain control of Ceuta until Morocco was granted independence from Spain in 1956. With Ceuta in hand, the Portuguese turned their attention westward to the Atlantic.
Henry the Navigator
A thrilling romantic tale once surrounded Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460). For centuries historians credited him as “a precocious genius and innovator” who established and directed an advanced school of navigation, nautical astronomy, and mapmaking somewhere along the barren cliffs of Sagres, near Cape St. Vincent.14 There, it was said, a group of experts worked in secrecy to gather knowledge and direct expeditions of discovery. It was believed that these experts assembled a vast amount of information and developed a set of navigational techniques far ahead of anyone else but that it all was lost because of excessive secrecy at the time and later generations’ negligent destruction of the records. It is true that various European authorities and investors often kept navigational knowledge and voyages secret. But, alas, the rest of the story about Prince Henry’s school seems to have been made up by early biographers, each of whom kept adding to the legend.15
What Prince Henry did accomplish was to finance many voyages of exploration—his abundant funds coming from his being administrator of Ceuta and from his appointment by the pope as Governor of the Order of Christ, a rich Portuguese religious order that was an offshoot of the Knights Templar. In keeping with this position, although he did not take holy orders, Prince Henry is thought to have been a lifelong celibate and to have occasionally worn a hair shirt, as did many ascetics of that era.16
Exploring the “Atlantic Mediterranean”
The initial voyages Henry sent forth were short ones into the Atlantic. Portugal was ideally situated to explore the area that has been called the “Atlantic Mediterranean,” which stretches from the coasts of Portugal and West Africa to the Azores and the Canaries.17 As the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto observed, the name derives from the fact that “the area was a ‘middle sea’ surrounded by mainlands and archipelagoes which constituted, for a while, the practical limits of navigation.”18
Europeans had long had some awareness of Atlantic islands in this area. In the year 75 the Greek historian Plutarch claimed to have met a sailor just back from two Atlantic islands that probably were what are today known as Madeira and nearby Porto Santo.19 The Canary Islands also were known in ancient times; the Romans visited them, and Ptolemy included them quite accurately on one of his second-century maps. More recent knowledge of these islands probably stemmed from a mapping expedition Portugal’s King Afonso IV sent out in 1341. Reasonably placed representations of the Azores, Madeiras, and the Canaries appeared in the famous Medici Atlas published in 1351, probably in Genoa.20 Whether or not he had knowledge of this atlas, Prince Henry surely knew of the results of the expedition his ancestor Afonso had sent out. Thus it is no surprise that he was determined to claim these nearby islands.
First up were the Madeiras. A voyage sent by Prince Henry reached them in 1419, and settlers landed there in 1420. The settlers included members of the minor nobility as well as some convicts to serve as field workers. From the start, Madeira was a profitable venture, exporting a substantial amount of wheat to Portugal. Then came a bonanza based on raising sugarcane. By 1480 the Dutch had devoted more than seventy ships to transporting raw sugar from Madeira to Antwerp, where it was refined and distributed. Within ten years Madeira had become the major producer of Europe’s sugar.21
In 1427 the Portuguese captain Diogo de Silves reached the Azores. It is not known whether he was sent there or encountered them by accident. But in 1431 or 1432 Prince Henry had cattle and sheep placed on the Azores to resupply ships voyaging in the area, and in 1439 Portuguese settlers were landed. These were mainly convicts and other undesirables, since volunteers could not be found.22 Eventually the Azores proved especially valuable as a rest stop for ships returning from the Americas.
Finally, in the 1450s Portuguese explorers discovered the Cape Verde Islands, an archipelago lying nearly six hundred miles off the coast of Africa and much farther south than the Azores and Madeiras. Despite the name, the islands were not very green, nor were they very fertile. But this location proved of considerable use for the newly resurrected slave trade (see chapter 11).
Although they tried several times, the Portuguese were never able to annex the Canary Islands, which remained in the control of their natives until the Spanish finally overcame their resistance in 1495. Whereas the Azores, Madeiras, and Cape Verdes were uninhabited, the Canaries were inhabited by a Neolithic culture of white, blue-eyed people, many of them having blond hair, who may have shared a common origin with the Berbers of North Africa. These natives grew wheat and raised goats, sheep, and pigs. No one knows when they arrived. The Spanish attempted to enslave them, but the pope prohibited those efforts.23 Eventually these indigenous peoples were assimilated. The Canaries became a major stopover for Spanish fleets crossing the Atlantic.
The long-term value of the islands of the “Atlantic Mediterranean” was substantial, but in the short term the passage around Africa was far more lucrative.
Down the Coast of Africa
The most surprising feature of the Medici Atlas was its depiction of Africa. A century before the Portuguese began their slow and careful probes down the African West Coast, the Medici map showed the sharp eastward bend of the Gulf of Guinea. It also showed that the Atlantic and Indian Oceans joined below the tip of the continent and therefore that it would be possible to sail around Africa and on to India. Historians now regard all this as a lucky guess, but one can’t help but wonder about unknown voyages. Whatever the case, Prince Henry seems to have been certain that Africa could be sailed around, based on his belief in legends concerning Prester John and on the Bible’s implication that all the great oceans are connected. But Henry did not send out ships to trace this supposed route; he only sent his captains on a series of small incremental voyages along the coast.
Initially, neither Portuguese nor Castilian voyagers sailed south of Morocco’s Cape Juby because of treacherous currents that could smash a ship against the shore. Moreover, the coastline from the Strait of Gibraltar down to the Senegal River was forbidding, being largely a rocky desert inhabited only by small bands of nomads. As the historian Ronald Fritze noted, before 1433 Prince Henry sent fifteen different ventures to round Cape Juby, but each time his captains lost their nerve and turned back.24 Finally, in 1434 Gil Eannes, a member of the prince’s household, made it around Cape Juby safely by staying farther out to sea, and he returned to tell about it.25 Asked by Prince Henry to repeat his feat, Eannes did so. Exploration down the African coast was now on. But it went very slowly, more attention being given to initiating a slave trade than to explorations, although Diogo Gomes did explore the Gambia River in 1457. Explorations were further delayed by the disastrous Portuguese attempt to conquer Morocco in 1458–59.
The last voyage Prince Henry commissioned left early in 1460 and sailed at least five hundred miles south of the Gambia River, charting the coast. Henry died before it returned, but the prince’s dream of sailing around Africa to India did not die with him. A major next step was taken in 1488, when Bartolomeu Dias sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and several hundred miles up the East Coast of Africa.
To India
The same year Prince Henry died,26 Vasco da Gama was born in a small seaport on the southwest coast of Portugal.
Little is known of da Gama’s early life or education, although he was well versed in astronomy and might have been a student of the rabbi-astronomer Abraham Zacuto.27 In 1492 King John of Portugal placed da Gama in command of a force that seized all the merchandise aboard French ships in Portuguese harbors in retaliation for the French seizure of a Portuguese ship loaded with gold. Da Gama did this so well that the king of France quickly returned the Portuguese ship and all its gold cargo. Da Gama may have been entrusted with other missions by the king, possibly some of them secret. What is known is that in 1497 da Gama was selected to lead a long-planned expedition around Africa to India.
On July 8, 1497, da Gama sailed with a fleet of four ships and a total crew of 170 men. Two of the ships were large carracks (see chapter 9), the São Gabriel and the São Rafael, each being 89 feet long and displacing about 170 tons. A third was a slightly smaller caravel, Berrio, and the fourth was a supply boat, name unknown, and lost at sea. Both carracks had large deck cannons—perhaps ten on each ship, making them very powerful fighting ships for their time. This made it possible for da Gama to loot Arab merchant ships encountered along the East Coast of Africa, this being a Muslim-controlled area. Da Gama regarded all Muslims as the enemy because the Portuguese were still at war with Muslims in North Africa and on the Mediterranean.28
After nearly a year at sea, on May 20, 1498, da Gama landed near Calicut, India. He was not well received by the king. Although a Hindu, the king was influenced by Muslim merchants, who may have regarded da Gama as a rival (little did they know!). Still, Da Gama had gained valuable cargo by plundering Muslim ships along the way: when he sailed for home on August 29, his cargo was worth sixty times the cost of the expedition, including the construction of his ships.
Da Gama’s return voyage was far more difficult than the trip out. Because of prevailing westerly winds, his trip from Malindi on the African coast to India had taken only 23 days. It took 132 days in the other direction. In the end, only 60 of da Gama’s original crew of 170 lived to return to Portugal.
Upon his homecoming in September 1499, da Gama received both wealth and honors—the king gave him the title Admiral of the Indian Seas. He made a second voyage in 1502 with a fleet of eighteen ships and more than eight hundred men. This allowed him to overawe the Indian king and establish a fort and trade center at Cochin, south of Calicut.
After da Gama’s second voyage, new Portuguese fleets were sent to India. They quickly took command of the Indian Ocean, and hence of trade with India, by sinking several Muslim fleets and defeating attempts to drive them from Cochin.29 In 1510 Portuguese forces seized the kingdom of Goa, well to the north of Calicut, and they held it as a trade center and colony until ousted by the Indian army in 1961.
In 1524 Vasco da Gama was named Viceroy of India and made his third voyage, landing in Goa and then sailing to Cochin. There, on Christmas Eve 1524, he died of malaria and was buried in St. Francis Church. In 1539 his body was returned to Portugal and reburied in a coffin decorated with gold and jewels.
While the Portuguese explored Africa and India, amazing things were happening on the Atlantic.
In 1485 Cristóbal Colón (as Christopher Columbus was known and as he signed his name) asked King John II of Portugal to finance his plan to sail west to the Indies. Supported by his advisers, the king turned him down.The Portuguese did so not because they thought the world was flat (as all the textbooks used to claim)30 but because they correctly believed that Columbus was badly underestimating the circumference of the globe. They believed the voyage would be impossible without stops to resupply.
Despite misjudging the distance, Columbus had done a great deal of research in preparation for a voyage west. Having taught himself Latin, he read many great works on astronomy and geography, including Ptolemy’s Almagest and Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly’s Image of the World. We know this because, as the historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote, “fortunately we have his own copies of these works, amply underlined, and their margins filled with his [commentaries].”31 Columbus had also gained invaluable knowledge by voyaging down the West Coast of Africa with Portuguese traders. In 1476 he sailed with a Genoese convoy that visited Bristol, England; Galway, Ireland; and possibly Iceland. Somewhere along the line he seems to have learned about the trade winds—the somewhat circular prevailing wind system over the Atlantic. On his first voyage to America he sailed along southern latitudes, where winds blowing from the east propelled him in five weeks from the Canaries to the Bahamas. For his return voyage, instead of clawing his way back against these easterlies, he sailed up to northern latitudes and was propelled home by prevailing winds from the west, which, as they approach Europe, bend south toward Portugal and Spain.
Having been rejected by the Portuguese, Columbus unsuccessfully approached both Genoa and Venice. Then, in May 1486, he presented his plan for sailing to “the land of spices” to Queen Isabella of Castile. She referred it to a group of experts, who, like those in Portugal, recommended against funding on grounds that Columbus was badly underestimating the distance involved. Eventually, Columbus had his brother Bartolomé present his plan to Henry VII of England. After long hesitation, Henry expressed his willingness, but by then Columbus had received a commitment from the new kingdom of Spain, created by the marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, who had together driven the last Moors from the peninsula.
It had taken two years of negotiations and the commitment of some private Italian investors to foot half the costs to gain the approval of the Spanish monarchs. The terms under which Columbus launched his voyage were very generous—according to his son, that was because the king and queen didn’t really expect him to return.
So, finally, on August 3, 1492, Columbus sailed west in three ships. The largest was the carrack Santa María, which was about 85 feet long. Second largest was the caravel Pinta, about 69 feet, and the third was the caravel Niña, about 55 feet.32 Columbus’s crew amounted to ninety men and boys. He sailed first to the Canaries, where he stocked up on provisions and made some minor repairs. Then, on September 6, he headed west. Five weeks later, a lookout on the Pinta spotted land. Columbus had reached the Bahamas. It is unknown on which of these islands he first landed. Because he was convinced that he had reached the Indies, he identified the inhabitants—“they go naked as when their mothers bore them,” Columbus recorded33—as “Indians.” As do most historians, I shall use that term to identify members of the indigenous population of the New World.
Next, Columbus explored the coast of Cuba and then the north coast of Hispaniola (“New Spain,” now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Here, too, the inhabitants went naked. Columbus also was surprised that the Indians he encountered lacked metal weapons, and anything else made of metal except for golden trinkets. He wrote in his journal: “A thousand would not stand before three of our men.… I believe that with the force I have with me I could subjugate the whole island, which I believe to be larger than Portugal, and the population double.”34
The Santa María ran aground off the coast of Hispaniola and had to be abandoned. With an unneeded crew, Columbus reached an agreement with the local chief and left behind thirty-nine men to form a settlement he named La Navidad (Christmas—the day the ship ran aground). After kidnapping about a dozen natives, Columbus headed back for Spain. Seven or eight of the captured Indians survived the voyage and became a local sensation—they were baptized and then accompanied Columbus back on his second voyage.
On October 12, 1493, Columbus sailed again, this time with seventeen ships and 1,200 men, including crew members, some soldiers (including a cavalry troop of twenty lancers), and a large company of colonists. His fleet soon arrived in what we now know as the Lesser Antilles. After touching shore at Dominica, Columbus turned northwest to Guadeloupe, where he made a shocking discovery. As Samuel Eliot Morison described it, “In the course of their wanderings, the searching Spaniards learned a good deal about the manners and customs of the Caribs, the tribe from which the word ‘cannibal’ is derived [as is the word Caribbean]. In huts deserted by the natives they found human limbs and cuts of human flesh partly consumed, as well as emasculated boys who were being fattened to provide the main dish for a feast.”35
In these politically correct times, many deny that the Caribs (or any other native people) were cannibals, claiming that Columbus and his companions made it all up.36 I will refute this nonsense in detail at the end of the chapter 11. Here it is sufficient to note that the Caribs themselves were colonialists, having invaded the islands from the Orinoco River area of South America in the thirteenth century; they dined not on one another but on the less ferocious tribes over whom they ruled.
Columbus and his men sailed to St. Croix, where they had a brief skirmish with Caribs, and then on to Hispaniola. There Columbus discovered the fate of his colony, La Navidad. After he had left, the Spaniards at La Navidad became a marauding gang roaming the island in search of gold and women. The local natives (not Caribs) soon had had enough and ambushed Columbus’s men, killing them all—these Spanish colonists were sailors, not soldiers. Since what little building had been done at La Navidad lay in ruins, Columbus founded a new settlement a few miles away, naming it Isabela (with only one l even though the queen’s name had two). Soon after that, he returned to Spain.
Columbus made two more voyages to the New World, steadfastly denying, of course, that it was other than the Indies. The last voyage was a disaster. Columbus and his men were shipwrecked and marooned on Jamaica for nearly a year—the new Spanish governor of Hispaniola hated Columbus and refused to come to his aid. Help eventually arrived and Columbus was able to return to Spain. There he died on May 20, 1506. By then Spanish fleets were making regular voyages to the Caribbean. Little more than a decade later, Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico. Colonization of the New World was well under way.
It is worth noting that the Columbus story illustrates the importance of political disunity for European progress. Had all of Europe been ruled by an emperor, one rejection would have meant that Columbus would never have sailed west37—just as the Emperor of China beached Zheng He’s fleet and halted all further voyaging only fifty years before Columbus set sail (as seen in chapter 2). Instead, Columbus was able to make his case to several courts, and competition among them seems to have influenced Queen Isabella to change her mind. Clearly, too, competition continued to play a major role in sustaining Europe’s Atlantic explorations.
Cabot’s “Rediscovery”
Giovanni Caboto (1450–1499) was an Italian with a checkered past, whose voyages were of little significance until they were used as the basis for English claims to North America. A native of Venice, he probably engaged in maritime trade with the Muslims and also seems to have been involved in construction. He fled Venice in 1488 as a debtor and settled in Valencia, where he appears to have bid on a project to improve the harbor. From there he went to Seville and began a construction project involving a stone bridge, but it was canceled. It was then that Caboto began seeking support for an Atlantic voyage. Refused funding, he went to England in 1495.
It is uncertain whether John Cabot, as he now was known, based his plans on Columbus’s voyages or had arrived at them independently before Columbus sailed. In any event, he found King Henry VII, who had too late offered to back Columbus, willing to listen to his scheme to sail a more northern (and therefore shorter) route to the Indies. But the king gave him only a letter of patent. Financial support came from merchants in Bristol. In 1496 Cabot set sail in one small ship but, it is believed, soon turned back. The next year he sailed again with one ship and a crew of about eighteen. Almost nothing is known of the voyage except that Cabot seems to have reached the New World somewhere around Newfoundland—in effect rediscovering the Viking Vinland. Cabot went ashore once, going inland only about two hundred yards. He seems to have followed the coast south for a few hundred miles before turning back to England. Going to see the king, Cabot was awarded £10 and a lifetime pension of £20 per year.38
In 1498 Cabot finally had enough backing for a substantial effort and set forth with five ships. The fate of this fleet is in doubt. Many believe it simply disappeared, probably sunk in a storm. We do know that in that year, payment of Cabot’s pension ceased, suggesting official acknowledgment of his having been lost at sea.39 But a few historians have accepted claims made by the late Alwyn Ruddock of the University of London, who said she had found several obscure documents suggesting that Cabot returned to England in 1500 after two years of explorations down the North American coast that went as far south as the Caribbean. For many years Ruddock was believed to be working on a book based on her discovery, but she died in 2005 with it still unpublished, leaving instructions that all her files be destroyed.40 Even if Ruddock’s claims were valid, Cabot’s voyages mattered little except as evidence that once launched, voyages to the New World rapidly escalated.
America
As the sixteenth century began, Europeans continued to believe that the voyages to the West had reached the Indies, even if they had not yet found a mainland resembling China. Then came voyages by the superb navigator and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci. During two (or possibly four) voyages from about 1499 through, perhaps, 1504, Vespucci sailed so far down the coast of South America that he realized this was no group of islands off the coast of China but a huge new continent. After his last voyage, King Ferdinand appointed Vespucci as chief navigator of Spain, responsible for authorizing and planning voyages to the New World. Vespucci also publicized his conclusions about a new continent and sketches of the coast he had sailed along, which led the great mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller to name this new continent America on the world map he published in 1507. Had Columbus hit either of the continents rather than arriving in the Caribbean, and had he been willing to draw the proper conclusion, the New World might have been named Columbia.
Hinge Point
The three decades from 1490 through 1520 changed the world. In 1490 no one knew there were two huge continents located only about 3,500 miles west of Europe. By the end of 1520, Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition, financed by Charles V of Spain, had reached the Pacific on its voyage around the globe.
The Age of Discovery ushered in conquest and colonization—and the dawn of modernity.