The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (18 page)

On Fra Mauro’s map a caption carried the remarkable news that, around the year 1420, a junk had rounded Africa and had continued on a southwesterly bearing for two thousand miles, a course that would have taken it deep into the icy South Atlantic. Mauro credited the information to a “trustworthy source” that was likely his fellow Venetian Niccolò de’ Conti. Yet Conti had set out on his travels only the year before the junk had supposedly made its
voyage, and if he got wind of the story, it must have been from hearsay. Fra Mauro had more: his informant, he added, was himself driven two thousand miles to the west-southwest of Africa by a great storm. Yet Conti’s own account of his travels merely mentions that he was blown off course while crossing to Africa in an Indian or Arab ship. Since Fra Mauro’s depiction of the southern tip of Africa bears a strong resemblance to features of the east African coast much farther to the north, the most likely explanation is that the mapmaker read into the new information he had at hand the facts to support his own hypothesis—and, perhaps, to please his Portuguese paymaster.

On such slender threads rested the growing belief that the Indian Ocean was, after all, connected to the Atlantic. It was not a new idea, but its time had come.

CHAPTER 6

THE RIVALS

I
N
1475
THE
forty-three-year-old King Afonso of Portugal married his thirteen-year-old niece, Joan of Castile. It was not a match kindled by true love.

Joan’s mother—Afonso’s sister—was married to King Henry IV of Castile. Henry was also known as the Impotent, and Joan’s real father was widely believed to be a nobleman named Beltrán de la Cueva, a scandal that saddled her for the rest of her life with the nickname La Beltraneja. A large part of the Castilian nobility revolted at the notion of the Beltraneja becoming their queen and threw their support behind Henry’s stepsister Isabella. Isabella had eloped at age seventeen with her cousin Ferdinand, heir to the crown of Aragon, but at least her blood was pure blue. When Henry died in 1474, rival factions proclaimed both Joan and Isabella queen. Joan’s backers hastily arranged her marriage with her uncle, and Afonso proclaimed himself the lawful king of Castile.

War broke out between the neighboring nations and quickly spread to the Atlantic. The Castilians sent their fleets to pillage the African coast, an activity they had anyway been surreptitiously engaged in for some years. Portugal’s warships made short shrift of them, but Afonso’s military maneuvers on land petered out amid an unusually cold Spanish winter, while Joan’s coalition fell apart when the pope, who had initially supported her claim, switched sides and annulled her marriage. Joan took herself to a nunnery; Afonso fell into a deep depression, wrote to his son John abdicating the throne to him, and began to plan a pilgrimage to the Holy
Land. John had been king for less than a week when his father, who had changed his mind, returned home, and his official ascension to the throne was postponed until Afonso died in 1481.

If Afonso had embodied one side of his uncle Henry’s character—his Crusading zeal and his love of chivalric tradition—King John II was the apotheosis of Henry’s other side. He was the very picture of a modern Machiavellian ruler: driven by grand ambitions beyond ordinary men’s ken, and not overly fussy about how to fulfill them. As intelligent as he was ruthless, he would become known as the Perfect Prince, though his victims termed him the Tyrant. Many of those victims were prominent aristocrats who had accrued broad powers at the crown’s expense. When the twenty-six-year-old king found his coffers virtually empty, he lost no time in hacking away at their privileges. The outraged nobles plotted to overthrow him, and one by one their heads rolled.

The year before hostilities had erupted with Castile, the crown had taken back control of the discoveries after its brief flirtation with free enterprise. The African trade now promised real profits, and the new king acted quickly to shore up his watery empire. Lisbon rang with the hammer blows of African slaves working forges to make anchors, arms, and ammunition. John ordered his engineers to improve the aim and firepower of the rudimentary cannon that were carried aboard ships, and larger, newfangled models were imported at great expense from Flanders and Germany. The king also set about solving a problem that had bedeviled the fleets since they had neared the equator: the disappearance of the Pole Star, the reference point by which Portugal’s navigators had learned to determine their latitude when out at sea. John immersed himself in the science of cosmography and gathered together a committee of experts. At its head were Joseph Vizinho and Abraham Zacuto, two Jewish mathematician-astronomers who set about redesigning the ships’ simple navigational instruments and preparing tables that allowed sailors to read their latitude from the sun.

Regular fleets set out from Lisbon for Africa, carrying the
materials and laborers to build forts along the coast—the first links in the backbone of an empire. Other ships pressed on south. In 1482 a sailor named Diogo Cão reached the delta of the Congo River and set up the first of the
padrões
—stone pillars topped with a cross bearing the arms of Portugal, the date, and the names of the king and the captain—that from now on would mark the boundaries of the Portuguese discoveries. “In the year 6681 from the Creation of the world and 1482 from the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” read the inscription on the second pillar he erected, “the most high, most excellent and powerful prince King John, second of Portugal, ordered this land to be discovered and these pillars to be put up by Diogo Cão, squire of his household.” Cão was ennobled on his return and he set out again. In 1486 he reached rocky Cape Cross in Namibia, desolate except for its vast breeding colony of Cape Fur seals, and perhaps Whale Bay, a deep harbor protected by a sand spit that would prove an important staging post on the journey farther south. Whale Bay was just five hundred miles from the southern tip of Africa, but Cão’s was not to be the name that history would remember: he died on his way home while trying to explore the Congo.

John II was as keen as his forebears to graft Christianity onto Guinea, not least because baptism made for more reliable allies. Gradually a trickle of Africans volunteered for conversion—or were brought back as hostages, instructed in the faith, and sent home as ambassadors—and they were treated as celebrities for both domestic and international consumption. One deposed Senegalese prince named Bemoi made a great stir by arriving in Lisbon to redeem the king’s promise that he would help restore him to his rightful position if he converted. Bemoi was forty years old, tall, strong, and handsome, with a patriarchal beard and a majestic manner of speaking, and the king and court received him with full honors. He and twenty-four of his companions were baptized amid prolonged festivities that included, on the Portuguese side, tournaments, bullfights, farces, and evening fetes, and on the visitors’ side, spectacular
horse-riding stunts. Twenty warships and a large contingent of soldiers, builders, and priests escorted them home, but to John’s fury the commander of the fleet became paranoid that the African was planning treason and stabbed him to death en route.

Even without such rash acts, the pace of proselytization was painfully slow. Then, as Portuguese agents pressed farther into the interior of Guinea, an electrifying piece of intelligence suddenly emerged from deepest Africa.

News had arrived of Prester John.

In 1486 an envoy returned to Lisbon accompanied by an ambassador from the king of Benin. Twenty moons’ march from the coast, he declared, there lived a monarch named Ogané who was revered by his subjects much as the pope was by Catholics. Many African kings visited him to be crowned with a brass helmet, a staff, and a cross, but all anyone had seen of him was his foot, which he graciously proffered to be kissed from behind a silk curtain.

The royal experts pored over their maps and decided it took exactly twenty moons to march from Benin to Ethiopia. The legend beckoned, and the discoveries leaped forward.

John decided on a two-pronged approach to locate Prester John and join forces with him to reach India. He would push ahead with the sea voyages, and at the same time he would step up his search for reliable information by land.

The only way to sort fact from hearsay was to send his own secret agents into the heart of the East.

K
ING
J
OHN
’
S FIRST
attempt to send spies in search of Prester John was not encouraging. The two men got as far as Jerusalem, where they were warned they would not last long without speaking Arabic, and turned back for home.

The king sought advice and summoned a more promising pair. Pêro da Covilhã, who was about forty and was the senior of the two, had grown up among the granite crags and ravines of the Serra da Estrela in central Portugal. As a streetwise kid he had bluffed his
way into the service of a Castilian nobleman—not least by naming himself, in the patrician manner, after his birthplace—and he had proved a useful swordsman in the endless cloak-and-dagger brawls between Spanish cavaliers. On his return from Castile he had insinuated himself into the service of King Afonso, first as a valet and later as a squire. King John had taken him on after his father’s death and had sent him to spy on the Portuguese nobles who had fled his executioners to Castile; his information cost at least two lordly rebels their necks. John had subsequently reposted Pêro to Morocco and Algeria to negotiate peace treaties with the Berber kings of Fez and Tlemcen, and the dependable envoy had soon learned Arabic and familiarized himself with Muslim customs. Quick-witted and courageous, possessed of a phenomenal memory, and adept at appearing what he was not, he was an inspired choice for the treacherous mission. The companion chosen for him was Afonso de Paiva, the son of a respectable family from the same hardy mountain stock as Pêro. Afonso was a squire of the royal household, he had proved his loyalty in the Spanish wars, and he also spoke some Arabic.

Amid the utmost secrecy, the two men met in the Lisbon house of John’s clerk of works. Also present were three of the king’s closest advisers: his personal chaplain, who doubled as the bishop of Tangier and was a keen cosmographer; his physician Rodrigo, who was also an astronomer; and the Jewish mathematician Joseph Vizinho. The three men began analyzing maps and plotting the spies’ route.

With the preparations complete, on May 7, 1487, the two men rode out to the palace at Santarém, forty-five miles outside the capital and safely away from the prying eyes of the spies who infested every European court.

Like most grand designs formed in ignorance of the practicalities, John’s orders were simple to state and fiendishly difficult to carry out. The two men were to reach India and learn about the spice trade. They were to find Prester John and forge an alliance with him. They were to discover whether it was really possible to sail around Africa and into the Indian Ocean, and how to
navigate once there. Only then were they to come home and make a full report.

The sheer audacity of the task briefly overwhelmed the irrepressible Covilhã, who expressed regret that “his capacity was not greater, so great was his desire to serve His Highness.” He should be more confident, the king told him: fortune had shone on him, and he had proved himself a good and faithful servant.

John’s future heir was also present at the meeting. Manuel was a moon-faced, delicate-looking young man with chestnut hair, greenish eyes, and fleshy arms “which were so long that the fingers of the hands reached below his knees.” The young duke, a few weeks shy of his eighteenth birthday, handed the two spies the final map drawn up by the three wise men. The king gave them a bag filled with four hundred gold cruzados, purloined from a chest meant for the expenses of the crown estates, and a letter of credentials “for all the countries and provinces in the world.” Before they left they knelt and received the royal blessing.

Carrying around so much money was an invitation to be robbed, or worse. The two men pocketed a handful of coins for their expenses and hastily returned to Lisbon, where they swapped their sack of gold for a letter of credit issued by a powerful Florentine banker.

That done, the two secret agents mounted their horses and rode across Portugal. They crossed the Spanish border and made their way to Valencia, where they cashed in their letter at a branch of the Florentine’s bank, sold their horses, and took a boat along the coast to Barcelona. The bustling port had regular departures to North Africa, France, Italy, and the eastern Mediterranean, and after exchanging their gold for another credit note the pair booked a passage to Naples. After an easy ten-day voyage, they arrived in the sweeping bay at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. There were no banks that would welcome their business where they were headed, and they cashed in their check for the last time. Keeping their heavy pouches well hidden, they sailed down the Amalfi Coast, through
the Strait of Messina, and across the Aegean Sea to the island of Rhodes, just off the coast of Turkey.