The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (76 page)

The Spanish explored the northeast coast of Cuba for six weeks, and at the beginning of November Columbus dispatched an embassy to the inland village of Holguín in the hope that it would prove to be a major Asiatic capital. He was disappointed to learn that his interpreter, whose languages included
Hebrew,
Aramaic, and
Arabic, could make no headway with the local people. Despite being told that it took more than twenty days to circle Cuba in a canoe, Columbus defiantly maintained that it was not a large island but a peninsula of Asia. In late November, Martín Alonso Pinzón in
Pinta
split off from the others without authorization to explore on his own. On December 5,
Santa María
and
Niña
sailed east to Cape St. Nicholas, the northwestern tip of
Hispaniola in what is now
Haiti, and a week later they took possession of
the land in the name of Ferdinand and
Isabella. The presence of gold artifacts and the friendliness of the local chief were encouraging, but disaster struck shortly after midnight on Christmas Eve when the
Santa María
grounded on a reef. No one died but the ship was a total loss. It would have been virtually impossible to cross the Atlantic with more than sixty men in
Niña
—Pinzón was still absent with the
Pinta
—so thirty-nine men volunteered to remain in a fort fashioned from the flagship’s timbers and named
La Navidad.
Niña
sailed on January 4, 1493, and fell in with the
Pinta
at Isla Cabra two days later.

The return to Europe was far more difficult than the voyage out. The ships were poorly provisioned and Columbus insisted that they sail back the way they had come, a curious recommendation given that their westward passage had been abetted by prevailing easterlies. Eventually he turned north and the
Niña
and
Pinta
caught the same band of westerlies that blow past the
Azores toward Portugal. The midwinter departure left them so exposed to storms that at one point Columbus sealed a description of his discovery in a barrel and threw it overboard in hopes that it would survive even if he did not. Some idea of the inadequacies of fifteenth-century dead reckoning can be gleaned from the fact that when land was sighted on February 15, it was thought to be variously
Madeira, Lisbon, Castile, or one of the Azores. In fact it was Santa Maria, in the Azores, where the
Niña
anchored three days later, having been separated from the
Pinta
shortly before. The Portuguese authorities detained a shore party for violating their territory, but the men were freed and Columbus sailed on. Again beset by vicious storms, a week later the
Niña
was off Lisbon, the last place the architect of an important new discovery for the king of Spain would want to find himself. Summoned to court, Columbus reluctantly presented himself to
João II, who, according to a later report, “
hearing the news of the location where Columbus said the discovered land was, became very confused and believed really that the discovered land belonged to him” by the
Treaty of Alcáçovas. Certainly João would have been piqued to learn that Columbus had found Asia more or less where he said he would, and it would be another five years before the Portuguese followed up on Dias’s rounding of southern Africa. In the meantime, it was essential that he clarify Portugal’s rights under the Treaty of Alcáçovas.

Columbus and his shipmates may have been disappointed with their initial encounters to the west, but so far as they or anyone else was concerned, they had reached the outskirts of Cipangu and China. But the possibility that they
were in violation of the terms of the Treaty of Alcáçovas, as João seems to have believed, was quite real. Columbus boldly claimed that the islands were in the same latitude as the Canaries—that they were in effect a remote extension of that archipelago—when patently they were not. Sharing his anxiety, the Spanish monarchs decided on a two-pronged strategy, raising funds for a follow-up expedition and lobbying
Pope Alexander VI (one of only two Spaniards ever to be Bishop of Rome) for recognition of their claim. Between May and September 1493, Alexander issued four
papal bulls asserting his view—which was that of Ferdinand and Isabella—of the Spanish claim. The
Inter Caetera
drew a north–south line
a hundred leagues west of the Azores and
Cape Verde, or approximately 31ºW. The first three bulls confirmed and clarified the limits of
Portuguese and Spanish claims, but the fourth essentially denied Portugal rights to any lands “
found or to be found … notwithstanding apostolic constitutions and ordinances … made by ourselves or our predecessors.” Rather than rely on the arbitration of a Spanish pope to reverse this, João negotiated a clarification of their kingdoms’ respective claims directly with the Catholic Monarchs. The result was the
Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, which moved the line of demarcation 370 leagues (1,110 nautical miles) west of the
Cape Verde Islands. As was soon discovered, the line crossed the eastern bulge of South America near the mouth of the
Amazon River—the line is first shown on the celebrated
Cantino map of 1502—thus establishing the basis for Portugal’s claim to Brazil.

Columbus’s first voyage had lasted seven months and was one of exploration. Over the next eleven years he would make three more, each of which lasted longer than two years and combined exploration with the more mundane tasks of colonial administration. Columbus’s shortcomings as a leader ashore emerged on the second voyage (1493–96). Departing from the Canaries, his fleet of seventeen ships made landfall on
Dominica. Sailing north they had several encounters, some violent, with the
Caribs, a cannibal tribe who frequently enslaved
Arawaks such as the Spanish had met the year before. Yet Columbus’s return to La Navidad left no doubt that the Arawaks were less peaceful and submissive than he had claimed, for not one settler survived, most if not all having been killed, possibly for
stealing gold and women although the actual reason remains a mystery.

Chief among Columbus’s responsibilities was to establish a viable colony, but from April to September 1494 he explored Cuba and
Jamaica and forced his crew to swear that Cuba was part of mainland Asia. Back at
Hispaniola he ignored a royal summons to return home, but he managed to remain in the monarchs’ good graces and they appointed him to lead a new expedition. The fleet was divided into two groups, Columbus commanding three ships to
explore the southern Caribbean and the coast of South America. The conclusions he drew from this voyage reflect an intensifying spirituality more than a maturing sense of geography. Cruising the coast of
Venezuela, he came across pearl fisheries in the vicinity of the Orinoco but took the freshwater discharge of the vast river as evidence not of a vast continental watershed but of the “
earthly paradise … from which flow four of the chief rivers of this world,” the Ganga, Tigris,
Euphrates, and Nile, as described in
Genesis. Returning to Hispaniola, Columbus found that the situation there had turned from bad to worse. Ferdinand and Isabella had received a steady stream of negative reports and had launched an investigation into his and his brother’s governance, an uprising against their administration by European settlers on Hispaniola, and their refusal to stop enslaving Indians. An official from court arrived in August 1500 to address these problems and the brothers returned to Spain
in chains.

Eventually released, Columbus undertook his fourth voyage in 1502, but not before a fleet of thirty-two ships had sailed with enough of a lead to allow a new administrator to establish his authority. The objects of Columbus’s final expedition were to find a strait to the west and to claim and settle territory on the coast of
Central America between
Honduras and
Panama. He achieved neither goal. Two ships had to be abandoned in Panama, and the other two were so heavily damaged in a collision that they had to be run aground on Jamaica. Six of their company eventually reached Hispaniola in Indian canoes and returned to rescue their shipmates eight months later. Columbus returned to Spain in November 1504 and spent
the last two years of his life wealthy but resentful of being stripped of some of his honors and grants, and bitter that licenses were now being issued to others to sail to Hispaniola.

Several of these voyages were made by former shipmates of Columbus, to whom probably all explorers of this generation can be related by fewer than six degrees of separation. In 1499,
Alonso de Hojeda, a veteran of Columbus’s second voyage, returned to the pearl fisheries of Venezuela. Among those sailing with him was the chameleonesque
Amerigo Vespucci—banker, ship’s chandler, explorer, confidant of Columbus’s, and, by accident rather than by design, namesake of the Americas. It is unclear how much expertise Vespucci had before joining Hojeda, but
his writings implausibly suggest that he commanded the expedition. He subsequently entered Portuguese service and in 1501 returned to South America in search of a westward passage through the continent. Vespucci’s fame stemmed from the attribution to him of several accounts of New World
exploration and the false claim that he was the discoverer of South America. Readers of these included the German cartographer
Martin Waldseemüller, who applied the name Ameriga to the southern continent in a 1507 edition of Ptolemy’s
Geography
. Six years later—when both
Columbus and Vespucci were dead—Waldseemüller labeled
South America Terra Nova; but by that time the name America had stuck and was being applied to North America as well.

By this time, Spanish claims to the Americas had been eclipsed by the Portuguese opening of an enormously lucrative sea trade between Europe and Asia, just as
João II had confidently predicted. A succession crisis had prevented an immediate follow-up to Dias’s voyage of 1488, but
Manoel I, “the Fortunate,” continued his predecessor’s drive to the Indies. Opponents of his plan argued that India was too far away, the cost in men and matériel would leave the kingdom exposed to its enemies, and a profitable commerce would excite rivals. Manoel prevailed and in 1497 “
named Vasco da Gama,
fidalgo
[nobleman] of his household, as Captain-Major of the sails that he was to send there”—two
nãos,
a
caravel, and a storeship. Provisioned for three years, the ships had a total complement of 140 to 170 crew, including
pilots, interpreters, and 10
degredados,
criminal exiles. The latter were convicts who were left in unfamiliar places until their ship returned. In the meantime, they were expected to learn about the region’s people and their customs, trade, and language. If they survived, they won their freedom and the opportunity to benefit as a translator and intermediary.

Gama’s fleet departed Lisbon in June 1497 and after watering in the Cape Verde Islands sailed in a broad westward arc before turning southeast. They reached the coast of what is now
South Africa in early November. After a week of rest and repairs, they sailed again, doubling the Cape of Good Hope on November 18 and, bucking contrary winds, reached Mossel Bay a week later. Their encounters with local inhabitants were characterized by mutual suspicion, but in January 1498 they had better luck at a place they called Terra da Boa-Gente (“land of good people”) in southern
Mozambique. At the Zambezi delta they met “
a youth who … was from another land a good distance from there and who said that he had seen ships as large as those that we had brought, at which signs we rejoiced greatly for it really seemed to us that we were coming closer to where we wanted to go.” Their next stop was the island of Mozambique where friction with Muslims erupted into violence, as it would again at
Mombasa, much of it instigated by the Portuguese. They had more cordial relations with the king of
Malindi, a rival to Mombasa, and here they
hired a pilot to guide them to Calicut. After four months of almost daily contact with Arab traders
in East Africa, the Portuguese departed Malindi on
April 24 and crossed to Calicut in twenty-two days. At long last, the Portuguese had opened the sea route from Europe to the Indies.

The samorin of the largest and most cosmopolitan trading center on the Malabar Coast was initially well disposed toward the Portuguese, but his opinion was tempered by their overbearing manner and the antagonism of the sophisticated Muslim traders who disdained their
second-rate offerings of cotton, beads, tin ornaments, trousers, and hats.
^c
Gama attempted to leave in early August, but the samorin insisted that they pay duties for the cinnamon, cloves, and precious stones they had purchased. When the unsold Portuguese goods were seized and members of the crew detained ashore, Gama took eighteen hostages. The crisis was resolved a week later although the Portuguese kept a number of hostages, five of whom returned to India in 1500. Departing before the end of the southwest monsoon, the Portuguese took three months to cross the Arabian Sea and thirty of the crew died before they reached Malindi. Down to two ships, they reached Lisbon in July 1499. Gama’s voyage was the culmination of the Portuguese age of discovery, and in one stroke it altered the pattern of Eurasian trade forever.

With the Arab-Venetian monopoly of the spice trade broken, Lisbon became, briefly, the most important entrepôt in Europe, and Manoel styled himself “
Lord of the Conquest, Navigation, and Commerce of
Ethiopia, Arabia,
Persia, and of India.” To follow up on Gama’s extraordinary achievement, he entrusted a second fleet of thirteen ships to
Pedro Álvares Cabral, who landed at Porto Seguro, Brazil, in April 1500 and dispatched one ship home to report on the discovery. (Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, a veteran of Columbus’s first voyage, had reached the coast south of
Recife three months before, but the Portuguese Cabral is popularly credited as the European discoverer of Brazil.) Cabral’s expedition had otherwise mixed results; only six ships reached Calicut, where the Portuguese managed to antagonize the samorin and local traders even more than Gama had. They established a factory (a trading station manned by factors, or commercial agents) in the city, but a riot by Muslim traders left forty Portuguese dead. Thinking that the samorin was behind this,
Cabral bombarded the city, killing four or five hundred people and sinking between ten and fifteen trading ships. Although this made it impossible for the Portuguese to trade at Calicut, they were able to establish a factory about a hundred miles south at
Cochin (Kochi), whose ruler viewed the Portuguese as an ally against the samorin, his overlord and rival. Moreover, Cochin was found to be the home of a community of Christians whose bishop was appointed in Syria, and Cabral learned that Saint Thomas the Apostle was
buried in Mylapore, on the
Coromandel Coast. The Portuguese settled in
São Thomé de Meliapur in 1523 and it became the headquarters of Portuguese trade in the
Bay of Bengal.