Coming of Age in the Milky Way (7 page)

The investment paid off, and by the end of the century the Portuguese annually were importing seven hundred kilograms of gold and ten thousand slaves from Africa. They traded wheat for the gold; the slaves generally could be obtained for free. Recalled one of Henry’s men who took part in a raiding party:

In all, over one million slaves were captured and brought to Europe by the Portuguese.

Unknown to the Europeans, the Chinese, rulers of the greatest land in the fabled East, were trading along Africa’s east coast while the Portuguese were exploring its west coast. Theirs was a more venerable and less violent campaign. They mounted expeditions of thousands of men in fleets of junks each five times or more the size of the Portuguese caravels, conducted peaceful trade backed by this show of force, and are recorded to have resorted to violence on only three occasions in a century of exploration. But the Chinese furled
their sails following the death of the adventurous emperor Yung Lo. By the time Da Gama reached India the Chinese antiexploration faction had made it a crime to build an oceangoing junk and had burned the ships’ logbooks—some of which are thought to have contained accounts of voyages extending across the Pacific as far as to the Americas—on grounds that they contained “deceitful exaggerations of bizarre things.”
⁸
(Which, by the way, was just what Western critics said of Marco Polo’s account of China.)

Henry the Navigator’s reconnaissance of Africa,
A.D.
1455–1498.

The Portuguese, in contrast, were smaller in number but fierce with the torch and the sword. The first colonist in Portugal’s first colony, Joad Goncalves of Madeira, set the island afire. Da Gama and his successor Pedro Cabral “tortured helpless fishermen,” writes R. S. Whiteway in his
The Rise of Portuguese Power in India, 1497–1550
. He adds that

Columbus was a fighting man, shaped, as we might expect, more in the Portuguese than in the Chinese mold. His destiny, he felt, had been sealed on August 13, 1476, when he floated to shore just up the coast from Prince Henry’s institute at Sagres, clutching an oar and leaving behind the burning wreck of the ship in which he had been fighting in the battle of Cape St. Vincent (on the Portuguese side, against his native Genoa). To be wringing the salt water out of his shirt on the beach near Sagres was just the sort of thing Columbus expected from a life he believed to be directed by the hand of God. He took his first name seriously, thought of himself as
Christophoros
, the “Christ carrier,” whose mission it was to discover “a new heaven and a new earth.”

He was already something of an anachronism—a dead-reckoning navigator in an epoch of ever improving charts and navigational instruments, a sometime pirate in an age when violence at sea was busily being turned into a state monopoly, an amateur
scholar in an era of growing professionalism. “Neither reason nor mathematics nor maps were any use to me,” he wrote of his discovery of America, which he died believing was Asia. “Fully accomplished were the words of Isaiah.”
¹⁰
He had in mind Isaiah 11:11: “And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyr’-i-a, and from E’-gypt, and from Path’-ros, and from Cush, and from E’-lam, and from Shi’-nar, and from Ha’-math”—and here came the part that spoke most vividly to Columbus—“and from the islands of the sea.” The “islands of the sea” were the Indies. To “recover the remnant of his people” was what the Portuguese slavers had been doing in Africa, reclaiming lost souls for Christ. Cruel work in the short term, it was thought to be worth it in the end. The chronicler Gomez Eannes de Azurara observed that when Prince Henry, “mounted upon a powerful steed,” picked out 46 slaves for himself from a cargo of 223 men, women, and children huddled wretchedly in a field in Lagos, Portugal, an act that required that he “part fathers from sons, husbands from wives, brothers from brothers,” he “reflected with great pleasure upon the salvation of those souls that before were lost. And certainly his expectation was not in vain, since … as soon as they understood our language, they turned Christians with very little ado.”
¹¹

Columbus was to carry on a similar crusade in the New World. He longed to reach the East for the usual reasons: Out there was a rich continent, the conquest of which could bring a man wealth and glory and (if Toscanelli could be believed) even wisdom. The brave and irresponsible argument by which he persuaded Queen Isabella of Spain to finance his expedition was not that the world was round—every educated person knew that—but that it was small.
^*
“I have made it my business to read all that has been written on geography, history, philosophy, and other sciences,”
¹²
Columbus said, but the lamp of his learning cast its narrow beam only on those maps and old geographies that most severely underestimated the dimensions of the terrestrial globe. By marshaling a total of eight different geographical arguments, all tending to make the globe smaller and Asia larger than they really are, Columbus arrived
at the extraordinary conclusion that the distance from the Canary Islands to the Indies was only 3,550 nautical miles—less than one third the actual figure. “Thus Our Lord revealed to me that it was feasible to sail from here to the Indies, and placed in me a burning desire to carry out this plan,” Columbus wrote.
¹³
His position was simple: God was right and the professional geographers were wrong.

Columbus’s plan appeared foolhardy to anyone who possessed a realistic sense of the dimensions of the earth. To sail westward to Asia, as the geographers of the court at Castile took pains to inform Columbus, would require a voyage lasting approximately three years, by which time he and his men would surely be dead from starvation or scurvy.
^*
The voyage had been attempted twice before, by Moorish explorers out of Lisbon and by the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa in the thirteenth century; none had been heard from since. Columbus endured ten years of rejection on such grounds by the geographers of the leading courts of Europe. “All who knew of my enterprise rejected it with laughter and mockery,” he recalled, but the pilot light of his destiny shone on undimmed. He replied to the scorn of the experts with his collection of shrunken-earth maps, Aristotle’s assertion “that there is continuity between the parts about the pillars of Hercules and the parts about India,”
¹⁵
and Seneca’s prophecy that “an immense land” lay beyond Ultima Thule. All this Columbus delivered up with thundering certitude; one searches his writings in vain for any trace of the skeptical, empirical temper of the scientist. He would be admiral of the ocean sea, the man who opened, to the west, a shorter route to the wealth of Asia than the Portuguese had managed to eke out by sailing south and east.
^†

The queen decided to give him a shot at it, arid Columbus sailed in 1492, a pillar of unblinking zeal. He set his hourglass (inaccurately) by observing transits of the sun and noting the position of the Little Dipper. He navigated (accurately) by watching the compass. He corrected for variations in magnetic north by sighting the north star at both its easternmost and westernmost excursions—this a precaution that Columbus himself had developed, and one more important in 1492, when Polaris stood 3.3 degrees from the pole, than today, when the precession of the earth’s axis has brought it to within 1 degree of true north.

Once embarked on the path of his destiny, Columbus was unshakable in his resolve to persevere. When his crewmen threatened to mutiny after a month at sea, he told them, as his son Ferdinand recorded his words, “that it was useless to complain, he had come [to go] to the Indies, and so had to continue until he found them, with the help of Our Lord.”
¹⁷
Had America not intervened, he would certainly have led them to their deaths. Instead, at 2:00
A.M
. on the night of October 12, 1492, Rodrigo de Triana, lookout aboard the
Pinta
, squinting westward toward where the bright star Deneb was setting, saw in the moonlight a distant spit of land, cried out,
“Tierra! Tierra!
,” and claimed his reward as the first to sight India. The natives who beheld Columbus’s three ships by the first light of dawn ran from hut to hut, shouting, “Come see the people from the sky!”

“They bear no arms, nor know thereof,” Columbus noted, “for I showed them swords and they grasped them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance.”
¹⁸
He insisted that the natives be treated “lovingly,” but business was business, and soon many were on their way to the Old World in chains.

Columbus on his subsequent voyages wandered from paradise to hell, laying eyes on some of the most beautiful islands on Earth but also suffering from thirst, starvation, and attacks by the “Indians.” As the years passed and evidence for the true dimensions of the earth mounted, he took refuge in the unique hypothesis that the earth was small toward the north, where he had rounded it, and large elsewhere: Perhaps, he wrote, the world “is not round as it is described, but is shaped like a pear, which is round everywhere except near the stalk where it projects strongly; or it is like a very round ball with something like a woman’s nipple in one place, and this projecting part is highest and the one nearest heaven”—the
breast being where other navigators measured the circumference of the globe, and the “nipple … nearest heaven” being where Columbus sailed.
¹⁹

Toward the end Columbus roamed the coasts of the New World in a state of gathering madness. He kept a gibbet mounted on the taffrail of his ship from which to hang mutineers, and made use of it so frequently that at one point he had to be recalled to Cadiz in chains. Crewmen on his final voyage watched warily as their captain hobbled around the deck, his body twisted by arthritis, his wild eyes peering out from under an aurora of tangled hair, searching endless coastlines for the mouth of the River Ganges. He threatened to hang anyone who denied they were in India. He sent back shiploads of slaves, which alarmed his queen, and cargos of gold, which delighted them both. “O, most excellent gold!” Columbus wrote. “Who has gold has a treasure with which he gets what he wants, imposes his will in the world, and even helps souls to paradise.”
²⁰
He died poor.

Gold outweighed the stars in the balance sheets of the exploratory enterprise. Montezuma II, emperor of the Aztecs, sent Cortez a gold disk the size of a cartwheel representing the sun, and another of silver representing the moon; soon he was Cortez’s prisoner, and soon thereafter dead. Atahualpa of Peru sued for his freedom by filling his cell with gold higher than a man could reach, but Pizarra had him strangled nevertheless; he would have burned him had Atahualpa not agreed to accept baptism.

The New World’s loss was the Old World’s gain. As the traders and explorers had hoped, Portugal and Spain—and, through Spain, Holland and Britain—prospered at the expense of Africa and America. The greatest profits, however, came not in coin but in knowledge, tools, and dreams; Toscanelli, in a skewed way, had been right. Blue-water sailing called for improved navigational instruments and better charts of the earth, sea, and sky, all of which promoted the development of geography and astronomy. Schools of navigation were established in Portugal, Spain, England, Holland, and France, and their graduates joined a growing professional class adept at applied mathematics and steering by the stars. The independent, self-reliant spirit of the explorers touched those on land as well, eroding medieval confidence in ancient authority; wrote one of Prince Henry’s captains, “With all due respect to the
renowned Ptolemy, we found everything the opposite of what he said.”
²¹