WE SAILED PAST the island in the bay of Las Palmas and tied up at the dockside. This new settlement of Castile was a loose arrangement of streets and alleys, with a small church, an army barracks, some official-looking buildings and market stalls surrounded by more substantial houses and trading units.
Christopher Columbus had letters of introduction to the governor of the island, and on presenting these he was given an apartment. He offered me hospitality until such time as the ships were ready to leave and we might gain passage back to Spain.
‘A renowned cartographer and cosmographer has made his home here and I intend to seek him out. I suspect the sea is in your blood, Saulo, so you might want to come with me when I visit him. It would benefit you to acquire more knowledge of the stars and shipping lore.’
The first thing I had to sort out was how to acquire some Spanish identity papers. This proved remarkably easy. Christopher Columbus vouchsafed that I’d been on a ship flying the Spanish flag, and that it had been wrecked by an act of enemy aggression and my possessions lost. The governor ordered new documents drawn up for me, and because I had some goods belonging to the freeman rower who’d befriended me, I could pass myself off as a member of his family. Thus I became Saulo de Lomas. When the governor’s clerk paused at the section marked ‘occupation’, Columbus leaned forward and said, ‘Write down Master Mariner.’
As I gathered up my papers and left the offices, Columbus slapped my back and said cheerfully, ‘With me as your patron, Saulo, a master mariner is what you will be.’
And so I spent the next seven months or so under the tutelage of Christopher Columbus. He taught me the rudiments of Latin and Greek and Arabic that I might better understand ancient and modern texts on celestial information. I read extensively: both through the books in the governor’s library but also Columbus’s collections – a huge variety of materials relating to exploration and the sea. He’d studied the works of the English traveller Sir John Mandeville, who wrote of the existence of monsters, and also the less fanciful tales of Marco Polo. He had a multitude of charts and maps, garnered mainly during his time spent in Portugal. He showed me letters of encouragement from respected professors and mapmakers in different countries, such as the famous Florentine doctor, Toscanelli. These bolstered his self-belief and enthusiasm. I began to realize that Christopher Columbus was not the madman or dreamer that Captain Cosimo and others thought him. He had a vision, but his ideas for its practical application were grounded in accrued facts and learned skills.
When we’d been on board the Spanish ship, Columbus had made notes on the currents of both water and air, perfecting his calculations about the gyre of winds that blow westwards on the latitude of the Canary Islands and return eastwards to Europe above the Azores. Now he hired a dhow, and we spent the summer and autumn sailing offshore around the northern waters of Gran Canaria, testing the tides and wind velocity. He showed how it was possible to know the position of your ship upon the ocean by measuring the height in degrees of the Sun by day and the North Star at night.
‘We use a quadrant, but the ancient Arabs learned to navigate using a kamal – a piece of wood and a length of knotted string.’
It wasn’t Columbus’s first visit to the Canaries. He told me he’d already travelled as far west as had ever been charted, to the Azores and Cape Verde islands. The inhabitants there had shown him seed pods that they’d collected from their beaches. Columbus was convinced they were from plants not known to the western world. The islanders described to him the facial features of bodies washed ashore: the men were not similar to any race on this side of the Ocean Sea.
As our friendship developed, he trusted me enough to let me look at the secret maps he intended to use for crossing the Ocean Sea. These were unlike anything I’d ever seen. The known world and the projected world were combined, with both land and sea drawn upon a grid-like pattern with lines of longitude and latitude. He referred to latitude as the ‘altura’, and had notebooks with lists of these reckonings made for the ports in all discovered territories.
‘If we go far enough south, the North Star will disappear below the horizon, so it becomes essential to find your position by using the Sun. Then it’s necessary to make adjustments to accommodate the Sun’s varying position in the sky during the changing seasons.’
As if a sea mist was rolling back, I saw that in this way one didn’t need to hug the coastline to navigate accurately. It could also be done with a reasonable level of certainty in open uncharted waters. Even without the best navigational instruments, an aptitude in using dead reckoning would mean that you could return to a previous position with some degree of accuracy.
Columbus was watching my face as I made this discovery.
‘The Portuguese have known about this for years,’ he said. ‘And now, not only do I have this functional knowledge . . .’ He tapped his head. ‘Inside here I have the learning of the ancients and the wisdom of the best minds of our day!’
Late one night he took me to visit the cartographer he’d already conferred with. The man was an Arab, and his shop was in a back street near the docks. As we entered, Columbus murmured a greeting in Arabic and the old man replied equally quietly. They made a sign to each other as I wandered among the shelves and peered at ancient parchments, old scrolls and leather-bound books with hinged and locked corded bindings. The shopkeeper went outside and looked up and down the street, then shuttered the window, re-entered the shop, and closed and locked the door.
‘Come this way,’ he said. Drawing aside a heavy curtain threaded with red and green, he ushered us through to his private room.
The Arab opened a chest and lifted out an object wrapped in a velvet cloth. When he removed the covering, it was revealed to be a large ball made of wood with the outline of the lands and seas of the known world painted on it. Columbus took it in his hands and examined it carefully.
‘Look, Saulo,’ he said, his voice reverberating in excitement. ‘The first depiction ever made of the world as a globe!’
I followed the direction of his finger as it traced a line from the Canary Islands, where we now were, all the way across the Atlantic to where the Arab cartographer had begun to sketch the unknown dreamed-of coastline of far Cathay.
‘Yes,’ Columbus breathed. ‘This is exactly what I want. With this I will convince the King and Queen of Spain and their many advisers that my plan is feasible.’