A
fter the nuptials, Columbus and Felipa moved into the house of his prominent in-laws. Felipa became all but invisible to posterity, and there is no evidence to suggest that theirs was an affair of the heart. But the other Perestrellos endowed Columbus, a rough-and-ready sailor from Genoa, with a new context in which to pursue his career, thanks to his mother-in-law, who, Las Casas recounted, “realized that Columbus had a passion for the sea and for cosmography, as men who are possessed of a passion for something talk about it night and day.” So she told him how “her husband Perestrello had a great passion for things of the sea and how he had voyaged, at the request of Prince Henry [the Navigator] and in the company of two other knights, to settle the island of Porto Santo, discovered but a few days previously.” Porto Santo became the founding of Perestrello’s fortune and renown: an object lesson for the newly married Columbus.
His mother-in-law gave her late husband’s “instruments, documents, and navigation charts” to Columbus as if passing a scepter from one generation to another, and eventually he found himself living on his father-in-law’s demesne, Porto Santo, where Columbus’s wife gave birth to their firstborn son, Diego.
On Porto Santo and its newly discovered neighbor, Madeira Island, “there were a great many vessels bringing settlers and much talk of fresh discoveries that were being made every day.” Las Casas relates that Columbus talked with seamen returning from the “western seas” who had “visited the Azores and Madeira and other islands.” One in particular, a man named Martin, “a pilot in the service of the Portuguese crown,” told an intriguing tale. When 450 leagues west of Cape Vincent, “he sighted a piece of wood floating near his ship, and, fishing it out of the sea, discovered it was ingeniously carved, though not, as far as he could judge, with iron implements. Since the wind had for several days been blowing from the west he supposed that the piece of wood originated from some island or islands that lay to the west.”
T
antalizing sightings of exotic lands abounded. A “one-eyed sailor” claimed that during a voyage to Ireland he had caught a glimpse of the “Tartary,” or central Asia, “as it curved around to the west, but foul weather prevented them from reaching it.” Whatever that one-eyed sailor thought he saw, it was probably not central Asia, but it did not yet exist on European maps. And then there was the “seaman from Galicia called Pedro de Velasco who, in a conversation he had with Christopher Columbus in Murcia”—a city in southern Spain—“mentioned a voyage to Ireland on which he had sailed and which went so far to the northwest that they came across land to the west of Ireland.” Perhaps Iceland, or Nova Scotia, or some imaginary continent that existed somewhere between geography and mythology. An expedition was needed to decide which it was. Columbus learned of a wealthy merchant of Genoa, Luca di Cazana, who was badgered by a Portuguese pilot, Vicente Dias, into backing three or four expeditions in search of a mysterious island, “sailing over a hundred leagues and finding nothing.” After such failures, both pilot and sponsor gave up hope of “finding the land in question.” And two other expeditions with the same avowed goal both disappeared, “leaving behind not a trace.”
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.
O
ne 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.”
C
olumbus 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.
L
iving in Portugal with his well-connected Portuguese wife, Columbus naturally presented his proposal to the Portuguese king. By this time, Columbus considered himself all but Portuguese, although the Portuguese themselves preferred to regard him as an upstart Genoese mariner who had settled in Lisbon, one of the largest expatriate colonies of Genoese to be found anywhere. They remained suspicious of the outsiders like him flourishing in their midst.
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.