The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (66 page)

135
“very strangely attyred”:
The sixteenth-century English traveler Ralph Fitch, quoted in Hart,
Sea Road to the Indies
, 71.

135
“the dirtiest, most disagreeable, and most stinking town”:
Quoted in Ross E. Dunn,
The Adventures of Ibn Battuta
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 122. The Somali town is mostly known today as Seylac.

137
He wrote a long dispatch to the king:
The question of whether Covilhã’s letter ever reached Lisbon has long fascinated historians. The sixteenth-century chronicler Fernão Lopes de Castanheda first said it did and then, in a later edition, suggested it didn’t. His contemporaries Gaspar Correia and Garcia de Resende say it did, but only after John II’s death; Resende adds that it arrived after Vasco da Gama had left. Ramusio says it did, and it contained the news that Portugal’s ships could easily reach the Indian Ocean. James Bruce, an eighteenth-century Scottish explorer of Ethiopia, was adamant that it did and added an imaginative account of its contents, including detailed maps, to boot. Vasco da Gama certainly knew where to head for when he reached India, though he was undoubtedly ignorant of what he would find when he got there. It seems most likely that at least one of the two Jewish travelers made it home with news, if not written proof, of Covilhã’s discoveries, but the truth, alas, will almost certainly never be known.

138
Muhammad’s burial place:
According to tradition, Muhammad was buried in the apartment of his favorite wife, Aisha, the site of which was later covered by repeated rebuildings of the adjoining mosque, including a total reconstruction after a fire in 1481. Medieval Christians spread the rumor that the iron tomb was suspended in the air and then ridiculed the supposed miracle by explaining that it was held up by magnets.

138
the court of Alexander:
The name Alexander is the Westernized version of Eskender. At its height around the third century CE, Ethiopia was an important power whose lands stretched south to Sudan and east to Arabia. The Solomonid Dynasty, of which Alexander was a member, survived from 1270 to 1974.

139
he was Christian:
Ethiopia officially adopted Christianity in the early fourth century, after its ruler was converted by a Greek courtier who as a boy had been kidnapped by pirates from a passing ship. Isolated from much of Christendom by the Islamic conquests, it had preserved its own traditions, including polygamy.

139
“with much pleasure and joy”:
Alvares,
Portuguese Embassy
, 270.

139
“he was not in a position to grant it”:
Ramusio, quoted in Hart,
Sea Road to the Indies
, 76. To his surprise, Covilhã discovered he was not the only European in Ethiopia. An Italian friar turned
artist claimed to have lived there for forty years; Alvares noted that “he was a very honorable person, and a great gentleman, although a painter.” Another European, a throwback to the ascetic masochism of the desert fathers, lived in a cavern in a ravine; after twenty years he bricked up the entrance from the inside and presumably died soon after. Other Europeans intermittently showed up; some came voluntarily, some were cast ashore by pirates, and almost none were permitted to leave.

139
fat, rich, happy:
The Portuguese embassy arrived around May 1520, and Covilhã, now seventy-three or seventy-four, regaled Francisco Alvares with his adventures. He was, the friar wrote with nice understatement, a man “who did everything he was ordered to do, and gave an account of it all.”

140
August 1487:
The record is unusually silent on Dias’s voyage. No official report, log, journal, or chart survives; not all the chroniclers mention it even in passing. Barros, who gives a brief summary, says Dias left in August 1486 and returned in December 1487. The few contemporary witnesses—including Duarte Pacheco Pereira, whose fever-stricken and shipwrecked crew was rescued by Dias on his way home—say he discovered the Cape of Good Hope in early 1488 and returned that December, and a departure date of August 1487 has become accepted.

140
herders were tending their cattle:
Dias seems to have named the bay the Bahia dos Vaqueiros, or Bay of Cowherds, and the protected cove where he landed the Aguada de São Bras, or Watering-Place of St. Blaise, after a spring he found there on the saint’s feast day. The Portuguese later named the bay after St. Blaise, and it was subsequently renamed Mossel Bay by the Dutch.

141
The storeship had been left far behind:
When the rest of the company returned to it, they discovered that six of the nine men who had been left on board had been killed. A seventh, a clerk, was so overjoyed at seeing his companions that he reportedly expired on the spot.

141
Cape of Storms:
According to Barros; Duarte Pacheco says Dias himself named it the Cape of Good Hope.

141
Europe’s maps were hastily redrawn:
In 1489 Henry Martellus published a world map that was originally intended to show Africa extending to the bottom of the page. He had already engraved it
when news of Dias’s discovery reached him, and rather than start over he added the Cape of Good Hope on top of the border.

142
married a nobleman’s daughter:
For Columbus, Filipa was connected in all the right ways. She was the daughter of Bartolomeu Perestrello, who was of Genoese origins and was one of the captains sent by Henry the Navigator to claim Madeira for Portugal; her maternal grandfather had fought at Ceuta.

142
“a shorter way”:
The Journal of Christopher Columbus (During His 1st Voyage, 1492–93)
,
and Documents Relating to the Voyages of John Cabot and Gaspar Corte Real
, trans. Clements R. Markham (London: Hakluyt Society, 1893), 4–5. Toscanelli’s letter to Columbus is reproduced in the same volume: “I perceive your magnificent and grand desire to navigate from the parts of the east to the west,” he wrote, and added: “The said voyage is not only possible, but it is true, and certain to be very honorable and to yield incalculable profit, and very great fame among all Christians.” The kings and princes of the East, he confidently declared, were even keener to meet Europeans than Europeans were to meet them, “because a great part of them are Christians. . . . On account of all these things, and of many others that might be mentioned, I do not wonder that you, who have great courage, and all the Portuguese people who have always been men eager for all great undertakings, should be with a burning heart and feel a great desire to undertake the said voyage” (10–11).

143
Columbus stretched Asia:
The Catalan Atlas of 1375 represented Eurasia as measuring 116 degrees from east to west; on his 1492 globe Martin Behaim famously stretched its breadth to 234 degrees, an increase even on Marinus of Tyre. The correct figure is 131 degrees. All things taken together, Columbus underestimated the distance from the Canaries to Japan by a factor of more than four.

144
against the consensus of his age:
Columbus’s ideas evolved over time, and his first recorded references to some of his sources and calculations postdate his first voyage. Even so, the doggedness with which he presented his case suggests that he had early on found sufficient grounds to support his grand scheme.

144
“promises and offers were impossible”:
Quoted in Samuel Eliot Morison,
Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), 97.

145
“It pleased our Lord”:
Quoted in Joseph F. Callaghan,
Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 214.

146
“You call Ferdinand a wise ruler”:
Quoted in David F. Altabé,
Spanish and Portuguese Jewry Before and After 1492
(Brooklyn, NY: Sepher-Hermon, 1983), 45.

146
Columbus’s wealthy rescuer:
The minister, Luis de Santangel, did fund much of the voyage himself, and he raised additional funds to keep Isabella from having to pawn her jewels. It was to Santangel that Columbus sent his letter describing the first voyage.

147
“IN THE NAME OF OUR LORD”:
The excerpts are quoted in Morison,
Admiral of the Ocean Sea
, 152–55. Clearly Columbus did not have time to construct an elaborate address at the start of his voyage; the Prologue was written piecemeal and was appended later.

150
Rodrigo Borgia:
In one of the brighter spots of his papacy, Alexander VI refused to condone Ferdinand and Isabella’s edict of expulsion against the Jews. He received some of the refugees from Spain—and later from Portugal—in Rome, an act that earned him many Spanish enemies but was hardly, as his bitter rival Giuliano della Rovere alleged, proof that he was a secret Jew himself.

150
a hundred leagues:
A league was originally the distance the average ship could sail in average conditions in an hour, or around three modern nautical miles.

150
“discover islands or mainlands”:
Dudum Siquidem
, dated September 26, 1493. The original text and English translation are in Davenport,
European Treaties
, 79–83. The earlier bull was
Inter Caetera
, dated May 4, 1493, which is reproduced at pp. 71–78; it was itself the third of three bulls, issued in quick succession, which progressively ratcheted up the pope’s favoritism toward Spain.

151
The Spanish set about pillaging and slaughtering:
Bartolemé de las Casas, an early settler who later took his vows and became a bishop, reported that the colonists, many of whom were convicted felons, “made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow; or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babes from their mother’s breast by their feet, and dashed their heads against the rocks. . . . They spitted the bodies of other babies,
together with their mothers and all who were before them, on their swords.” Prisoners were hung on the gallows “just high enough for their feet to nearly touch the ground, and by thirteens, in honour and reverence for our Redeemer and the twelve Apostles, they put wood underneath and, with fire, they burned the Indians alive.” Quoted in Kirkpatrick Sale,
The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy
(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), 157. The quarterly tribute system was soon replaced by institutionalized slavery; disease, of course, annihilated far more of the indigenous population than even the most wanton cruelty could accomplish.

Chapter 7: The Commander

155
A high forecastle and an even taller sterncastle:
The castles were the legacy of the cogs of northwest Europe, merchant and fighting ships that carried battlemented towers fore and aft from which archers could fire at enemies. By the fifteenth century the sterncastle had morphed into cabin accommodation topped by a poop deck and the forecastle into a high triangular platform that projected forward, resting on the knee of the stem.

157
he would not even see them leave Lisbon:
There is no clear answer to the question of why the discoveries paused for nearly a decade between the voyages of Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama. Probably John II was waiting for news from his spies and for the treaty with Spain to be settled; no doubt he was mourning his dead son, and there was the flood of Jewish refugees from across the border to deal with. Manuel I, who was reported by the Venetian spy Leonardo da Ca’ Masser to be spineless, capricious, and hopelessly indecisive, was preoccupied for the first two years of his reign with negotiations for his marriage and was faced with concerted domestic opposition to the explorations. The theory beloved of some Portuguese historians that numerous fleets set out to reach India between 1488 and 1497—and even discovered the Americas before Columbus—has never been proven. It rests on the apparent confidence with which Gama pursued a new route to the Cape of Good Hope; John II’s determination to move the demarcation line
with Spain 270 leagues farther west, which put Brazil on the Portuguese side; an apparent reference by the celebrated Arab navigator Ahmad ibn Majid to “Frankish” vessels that visited Mozambique in 1495; and the order book of a Lisbon bakery, which did a roaring trade in sea biscuit between 1490 and 1497. There are reasonable explanations for all these particulars that do not assume the remarkable discretion of hundreds of hypothetical sailors, never mind the unlikely reluctance of the Portuguese king to trumpet his besting of Columbus.

157
“for I am only a sack of earth and worms”:
Quoted in Edgar Prestage,
The Portuguese Pioneers
(London: A. & C. Black, 1933), 246.

158
heir to Castile:
Isabella’s brother John had married six months before he died on his way to the wedding; his widow was pregnant but their daughter was stillborn, leaving Isabella as heiress of Castile. Manuel’s hopes of ruling both kingdoms were dashed when Isabella died in childbirth in 1498; their son, who was also briefly heir to both thrones, died aged two.

158
every Jew in Portugal was ordered to leave:
In a ceremony held in 2008, Portugal’s Justice Minister José Vera Jardim called the expulsion of Portugal’s Jews a black piece of the nation’s history; the state, he declared, owed Jews moral reparation for centuries of brutal persecution.

159
A maze of streets:
The Lisbon district is known as the Alfama, from the Arabic
al-Hamma
, “the fountain” or “the bath.” In the fifteenth century only one mosque remained, though so long as they kept their heads down, its worshippers were permitted to meet there to regulate the affairs of the neighborhood.