The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (75 page)

The exploratory activity on the Atlantic had attracted any number of ambitious mariners, one of whom, the Genoese-born Christopher Columbus, conceived a bold plan “
that he would sail south and west, discovering great stretches of highly fertile land, both islands and terra firma, all extremely rich in gold and
silver, pearls and precious stones and teeming peoples; and that, sailing in this direction, he would eventually come to the land of India, with the noble island of Cipangu [Japan] and the realms of the Grand Khan.” He was not the first to believe such a voyage was possible, and one can say with complete candor that
he failed: Columbus underestimated the size of the earth; he did not reach Asia; and he did not tap into the great spiceries of the Orient. None of this diminishes his epochal accomplishment in establishing an unbroken link between Eurasia and Africa in the east and the Americas in the west. If he excelled his contemporaries, it was not necessarily in navigational ability or intuition, but in his persistent vision and relentless pursuit of the financial and political support without which the honor of bridging the Atlantic would have fallen to another.

Born in the mid-fifteenth century,
Columbus served his apprenticeship in the Ligurian and
Tyrrhenian Seas and seems to have sailed into the Atlantic for the first time in his early twenties. By 1476 he was based in Lisbon, where he married
Filipa Moniz, whose father,
Bartolomeo Perestrello, was the son of
an Italian merchant in Lisbon and had been raised in the household of
Dom Henrique. A participant in the expedition sent to claim the
Madeiras, Perestrello was rewarded with the governorship of the island of
Porto Santo, where he settled in 1446. Although he died twenty years before his daughter’s marriage, Filipa’s dowry seems to have included his personal papers, including sailing instructions and
portolan charts for the Atlantic. According to Columbus’s biographer,
Bartolomé de Las Casas, in Perestrello’s day

Columbus gained practical experience of sailing between the Canaries, Madeira, and
Azores. He made at least two voyages along the Guinea coast and was part of the expedition charged with building the fort at São Jorge da Mina, while
northern voyages took him to
Galway, Ireland, and possibly
Iceland.

In addition to the documented discoveries of the time, there was a growing body of lore about lands to the west of the four archipelagoes. Medieval tradition, some of it embellishing more ancient stories, spoke of various islands to the west, notably St. Brendan’s Isle and
Antilia, the
Island of the Seven Cities supposedly founded by Iberian bishops fleeing the Muslim invasion in the eighth century. Voyages by accident and design also expanded sailors’ knowledge of the Atlantic,
especially its great size.
Shortly before the start of his voyage in 1492,
Columbus and his fellow officers met a man who forty years before had sailed west as far as the
Sargasso Sea—a vast stretch of ocean strewn with patches of sargassum seaweed, which he told Columbus not to fear—and had seen land birds flying west before fear of winter storms made the crew turn for home. In the Portuguese archipelagoes, reports circulated of flotsam drifting in from the west: unfamiliar trees and plants, canoes and boats, strangely carved pieces of wood, even people and corpses of neither European nor African origin. According to a marginal note written by
Columbus in one of his books,
“Men of Cathay came to the West. We have seen
many notable things and especially in Galway, in Ireland, a man and a woman with miraculous form, pushed along by the storm on two logs.” His son likewise related how “
On the island of Flores, which is one of the Azores, the sea flung ashore two dead bodies with broad faces and different in appearance from the Christians. Off
Cape Verga, and elsewhere in that region there once were seen covered boats or canoes [
kayaks, perhaps] which were believed to have been crossing from one island to another when a storm drove them off their course.”

Sebastiano del Piombo’s portrait of a man thought to be Christopher Columbus was painted in 1519, thirteen years after the navigator’s death at the age of about sixty. The inscription above his head reads “the Ligurian Colombo, the first to enter by ship into the world of the Antipodes 1519.” Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource, New York.

The possibility of a westward route to Asia also attracted the interest of cosmographers armed with Ptolemy’s second-century
Geography,
which circulated widely in a
Latin edition of 1476. Among the first to promote the
idea was
Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, a Florentine banker, geographer, and cartographer who wrote the king of Portugal that China was only five thousand miles west of Portugal and that a voyage there could be broken by stops on the islands of
Antilia and Cipangu (Japan). The suggestion was never acted upon, but Columbus seems to have seized upon the theory, and may have corresponded with Toscanelli. A major problem with both Toscanelli and Columbus was that their estimate of the length of a degree (Columbus’s is found in another marginal note) was too short by about a third. By his calculation, “
the perimeter of the earth on the equinoctial circle is 20,400 millas” of 4,810 to 4,860 feet. In fact a mile is 5,280 feet, and the
equator is 24,901 miles (40,075 kilometers) long. This error was compounded by his belief that Asia ended thirty degrees east of where it does and his reliance on
Marco Polo’s erroneous claim that Japan was fifteen hundred miles east of China. In sum, Columbus thought China lay about thirty-five hundred miles west of the Canary Islands; the actual distance is more than four times that. The possibility of an intervening continent was not even considered.

After nearly a decade in Portuguese shipping, and with allies at court thanks to his wife’s family, Columbus approached
João II with his proposal for a westward voyage to the Indies. After consulting with his advisors, João declined to sponsor him but suggested that he might reconsider later. He may have withheld his support because his advisors told him Columbus’s theories were incorrect, because Columbus sought
excessive compensation, or because João did not want to divert resources from the encouraging progress in the newly revived African voyages. Regardless, in 1485, Columbus left Lisbon for Castile, where he hoped to interest
Isabella and Ferdinand in the same venture. Although he was ultimately successful, the outcome of his lobbying was by no means a foregone conclusion. The commission convened to examine his calculations judged him overly optimistic; but the Catholic Monarchs held out the possibility of considering his proposal after they had defeated Granada, the last Muslim kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula, and they backed their assurances with the occasional stipend of a few thousand maravedis. (Masters and pilots
normally earned two thousand maravedis a month, and seamen half that.)

These gifts notwithstanding, Columbus’s first loyalty remained to his dream, and in 1488 he returned to Lisbon at João’s invitation. His timing could not have been worse, as his arrival coincided with the return of Dias from his voyage beyond the Cape of Good Hope. With a sea road to the Indies beckoning, João lost interest in Columbus’s venture and the Genoese returned to Spain. Isabella and Ferdinand continued to string him along but after a further rebuff in 1492, again on the recommendation of experts, he decided to try his fortune
in France. (His brother Bartolomé had already floated the idea to England’s Henry VII and the French court.) He had just set out when he was summoned back to court, thanks to
Luis de Santángel, who was in effect Ferdinand’s business manager. Santángel reasoned that whatever emoluments Columbus sought for his venture, the crown’s outlay was modest and the profits that might accrue could be substantial, whereas the potential loss should he make a worthwhile discovery for someone else would be impossible to recoup. In the event, Columbus secured ample guarantees: the hereditary offices of admiral, viceroy, and governor-general in all lands and islands he might discover, with the right to name his own governors, and 10 percent of the profits from trade. While one can see in these demands the vanity of a social climber, whatever his mistakes and faults, Columbus cannot be accused of underachievement. No one ever accomplished more to earn ennoblement and its attendant perquisites. Moreover, it has to be acknowledged that lobbying played a crucial role in his success. Funds, honors, and profits were not low-lying fruit, and as the stories of Henrique, Columbus, and countless others demonstrate, in the history of
exploration persistence, flattery, and self-confidence are often as important as—if not more important than—being right.

Funding for Columbus’s first expedition, an estimated two million maravedis, came from a variety of sources. Santángel’s deft accounting enabled the crown to contribute little more than half the total, while Columbus put up about a quarter, probably borrowed from
Giannoto Berardi, a Florentine trader who had moved to
Seville in 1485 and was “
a central figure in the lobby that promoted Atlantic expansion as an objective of Spanish policy and raised Columbus to eminence” at court. To satisfy a debt owed the crown, the town of Palos de la Frontera paid for the
caravels
Niña
and
Pinta
(captained by the brothers Vicente Yáñez and Martín Alonso Pinzón, respectively) and their crews, and Columbus hired the
Santa María
, a Galician-built
nao,
as his
capitana,
or flagship. She was not an especially large vessel for her day, twenty-seven meters long and eight meters in beam at most; with only one deck and a year’s provisions, there were few creature comforts, and sleeping arrangements for the forty crew were fairly rude. (Crew accommodations in
European ships improved somewhat after Columbus’s crew adopted the hammocks used by Caribbean islanders.) The caravels were even smaller, the
Niña
measuring no more than twenty-one by six meters and the
Pinta
twenty-three by seven meters.

Sailing from Palos on August 3, 1492, the ships reached the Canaries nine days later. There the
Pinta
’s
rudder was repaired and the rig on the
Niña
was changed from a
caravela latina
to a
caravela redonda,
with square sails on the fore- and mainmasts, and a lateen on the mizzen. This made her much better
suited to capturing the northeast trades, and she became Columbus’s fastest and favorite ship. (The
Pinta
was rigged as a
caravela redonda
from the start.) The ships sailed again on September 6. They reached the seaweed-thick
Sargasso Sea after ten days, and three days later they were out of the trades and into a week of light and variable winds. Conditions improved considerably between October 2 and 6, when they sailed an estimated 710 miles, including their best day’s run of 182 miles. By this time they were close enough to land to follow the paths of birds heading southwest, but despite this and other tantalizing indications that land was near, by October 10 the crew of the
Santa María
were near mutiny and Columbus apparently agreed to put about if they did not sight land within a few days.

The next night they were in the
Bahamas archipelago and on October 12, after a voyage of about three thousand nautical miles in thirty-three days, they landed on the
Taíno island of
Guanahaní, which Columbus claimed for Spain and named
San Salvador. Sailing through the Bahamas for two weeks, they took aboard seven Taínos, who returned with Columbus to Spain, to be taught Castilian and Christianity so they could help with the work of conversion on their return. The Taínos also directed him to a place called Cuba, “
which I believe must be
Cipango according to the indications that these people give of its size and wealth.” Yet Cipangu and China would remain nothing more than shimmering mirages on an ever-receding horizon, and Columbus’s frustrated haste was already obvious in a diary entry (addressed to his king and queen) for October 19: