Conquering the Pacific

by Andrés Reséndez

  After three years of unremitting frustration and expenses, the ribcage of a vessel of more than five hundred tons burden and another one of more than four hundred tons became visible. In any major European port like London, Antwerp, Seville, or Lisbon, such wooden skeletons would have attracted residents’ attention. At Navidad they were downright incomprehensible, like two dinosaur eggs in a chicken coup. They were quite possibly the largest ships ever built in the Americas up to that time. Christopher Columbus’s flagship in the 1492–93 voyage of discovery, the Santa María, had weighed barely one hundred tons. Ferdinand Magellan’s largest circumnavigation vessel in 1519–1522, the San Antonio, had been about 120 tons. The two galleons at Navidad were four or five times larger. Still without masts or rigging, these two large hulls were eased into the water in 1563. They floated! The event was so momentous that the town staged a celebration. A special delivery of liquor had been necessary to mark the occasion. The people at Navidad had myriad questions, but the shipbuilders said only that the vessels would be used for coastal trade between Mexico and Peru, an explanation that fell somewhere on the spectrum between the extremely dubious and the absurd.3

  The fleet being assembled at Navidad, which would ultimately entail four vessels, was unusual in one final respect. Expedition leaders generally enlisted their men right on the spot, even for long-distance voyages. Recruiters often set up tables by the docks, within sight of the ships, and signed up passersby. Not in this case. Although some locals may have been offered contracts, the majority of the crew members came from distant corners of the Spanish possessions and even from beyond. The pilots hailed from Europe: three Spaniards, a mysterious Frenchman, a man possibly from Venice, and a Portuguese pilot passing as a Spaniard. A greater power was evidently coordinating the recruiting effort. Indeed, from Spain and France (around six thousand miles away from the coast of Mexico), the Spanish king had been monitoring the progress at Navidad closely. Philip II, the monarch after whom the Philippines were named, had been dispatching letters and requesting the participation of specific individuals. He was bent on assembling the best possible crew, a dream team of sorts equal to the enormity of the task at hand.

  One of these handpicked individuals was an Afro-Portuguese man named Lope Martín. He hailed from Portugal’s southern coast, the Algarve, the preeminent maritime region of the world at that time, where Black people performed the most menial and grueling jobs aboard Portuguese and Spanish ships of exploration. Lope Martín was a free mulatto and an immensely talented navigator who always seemed to know just what to do aboard a sailing vessel. Over the years, he had risen through the ranks until becoming a licensed pilot, the highest occupation to which someone like Lope Martín could ever aspire. After accepting a very high salary, he signed on to the secret mission at Navidad, one meant to give Spain ascendancy in a global competition with Portugal to establish regular contact with Asia. This all-out race had dragged on for seven decades, and during this time Portugal had built a seemingly insurmountable lead by rounding Africa and India to trade with the fabled “Orient.” Meanwhile, Spain had been held back by the immensity of the Pacific Ocean. The extraordinary navigator Martín and others met at Navidad to reverse Spain’s fate.4

  Like many other things in the history of the world, this global race had started with Columbus. After his 1492–93 voyage, the Spanish crown had wasted no time in claiming the Caribbean islands that the Admiral had visited. Just as quickly, however, the Portuguese objected to such claims. By then Portugal had been combing assiduously through the Atlantic for decades and naturally regarded Columbus’s venture as an intrusion. The two Iberian powers had been at war before, and Columbus’s discoveries opened a dangerous new rift. Spanish diplomats asked Pope Alexander VI (a Spaniard by birth) to intervene, and the pontiff’s breathtaking solution was to divvy up the Atlantic Ocean and its surrounding lands between the two rival monarchies. A line running from the Arctic to the Antarctic and passing 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands would separate their respective spheres of influence, according to a treaty signed by Portugal and Spain in the small town of Tordesillas in 1494. Portugal would be free to discover and claim any island or mainland “to the right of the line, going east from it, or north or south, as long as the ships belonging to the King of Portugal do not cross the line itself.” Meanwhile, Spain would be able to explore “to the left of the line, going north or south from it, and all those lands will belong to the King and Queen of Castile and Aragon and their successors forever.” All other nations and empires would have opposed such an unfair division of the world between only two powers, but alas, they had not been parties to the treaty. For Portugal and Spain, the Treaty of Tordesillas seemed a proverbial win-win arrangement.5

  This division worked well enough in the Atlantic Ocean. It gave Portugal a free hand in all of Africa plus a slice of Brazil, while Spain gained rights of exploration over the rest of the Americas. Beyond the Atlantic, however, this line of demarcation set the stage for an all-out race for the Far East and its immense riches in silk, ceramics, spices, and other wondrous products. The two upstart Iberian empires would eventually sail around the world in opposite directions. Always keeping “to the right of the line,” Portugal rounded Africa, then India, and eventually burst into Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, Spain kept “to the left of the line,” exploring the American continent, finding an opening between the oceans, and crossing the Pacific into Asia. This decades-long competition pitted against each other two neighboring nations that spoke mutually intelligible languages and were frequently ruled by monarchs related by blood or through marriage. Yet this familiarity did not make their rivalry any less ruthless. They poached each other’s pilots and mathematicians, did their best to keep their charts and geographic discoveries secret, and waged bloody war in remote parts of the world to deny each other bases of operation.6

  What made this contest all the more startling was the stark differences between the two competitors. To put it bluntly, it was a race between a dolphin and an elephant. With a population of barely one million by 1500, Portugal was just too small to take over the world. Lisbon was a very modest capital and base of exploration of around forty thousand people. As it expanded through western Africa, Brazil, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, and China—even if only to establish trading forts or feitorias—the Lusitanian nation became overstretched. Everyone at home was scrambling to keep things running or consumed by one of these ventures halfway around the world. Still, what Portugal lacked in population it more than made up for in experience, cutting-edge nautical technology, and clarity of purpose.7

  In contrast, the kingdoms that coalesced into Spain contained some five to seven million inhabitants, easily dwarfing Portugal in human and material resources. Yet this aggregation of kingdoms was difficult to manage. Some of them possessed significant maritime experience: elephants do swim. Yet the core of this composite monarchy, the Crown of Castile, was more terrestrial than Portugal. This land orientation is evident in the cities where the Spanish court tended to reside: Valladolid, Toledo, and finally Madrid, right in the middle of the Iberian Peninsula, as far as possible from any coast or sea.8

  There is no better way to get a sense of these two contenders and understand the nature of the race than by following in Columbus’s footsteps. He lived in Portugal for a decade before moving to Spain and setting the contest in motion by proposing to his new hosts “to reach the east by way of the west.” Columbus’s initial arrival in the Iberian kingdoms had been entirely unplanned. Pirates had attacked the ship on which he was traveling and a great fire had broken out, forcing everyone to jump into the water, “and Columbus, who was a strong swimmer,” a near-contemporary chronicler informs us, “swam for two leagues [seven miles] to the closest land, holding onto an oar to get some rest along the way.” The twenty-five-year-old Columbus washed up on Portugal’s southwestern tip in 1476. It was probably the farthest he had ever been from his native Genoa. Up to that time, Columbus had been trading
wools and textiles on behalf of his family, mostly within the Mediterranean.9

  The São Jorge Castle looms at the top of Lisbon’s highest hill. Farther down lies Lisbon Cathedral, a Romanesque structure dating back to the twelfth century. On the waterfront, one can see a broad beach area with many vessels being prepared before casting off.

  Once in Portugal, the future “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” remade his life. After drying off his clothes and resting his weary limbs, he made his way to Lisbon where he found a community of Italian financiers, merchants, and nautical experts deeply involved in Portugal’s ventures of exploration. This group included Columbus’s own brother, Bartholomew Columbus, who had moved out of the family household years earlier and relocated to Portugal. The two brothers formed a partnership and made a living by drawing nautical charts and selling books. A contemporary who met Columbus in those years described him as “a dealer in print books of great intelligence although little book learning, and very skilled in the art of cosmography.”10

  Lisbon, surrounded by massive walls except along the waterfront, was a town on the move at the time of Columbus’s arrival. Sitting on the highest hill was the Castle of São Jorge, a structure that looked ancient even in the fifteenth century. It had a commanding view of the Tagus River and the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1470s through 1490s, when Columbus lived in Lisbon, the castle remained the nerve center of Portugal’s exploration activities. A huge map of the world mounted on gold-plated wood in a cavernous room signaled Portugal’s grand design. Officials bustled around the premises, keeping accounts, levying taxes, and organizing sales of exotic goods coming from Africa as well as from Asia and America later on. Some of these items were on display, including two lions kept in a pen to impress visitors.11

  Venturing outside the castle, Columbus would have entered a grid of narrow streets, diminutive plazas, houses, churches, and synagogues—some of which can still be seen in Lisbon’s Alfama district. After wending his way down the hill for about ten minutes, past the cathedral and the shops farther down, he would have arrived at the Ribeira das Naus, or literally the “Riverbank of the Ships,” a jumbled collection of shipyards and warehouses. If the castle was where the monarch and his officials resided, the shipyards attracted hundreds of carpenters, caulkers, pilots, sailmakers, sailors, instrument providers, food suppliers, artillery experts, and many other artisans connected to the building and provisioning of the fleets. Space was scarce on the riverbank, as ships in various stages of completion crowded one another while workers swarmed about them to get them ready to depart at very specific dates to take advantage of the best sailing season depending on where they were going.12

  Columbus’s chart-making business gave him direct access to this vibrant maritime community, and so did his private life. He made a habit of hearing Mass at Todos-os-Santos (now the French embassy in Lisbon), a convent just north of the riverbank where daughters and widows of the knights of the Order of Santiago lived. Unlike regular nuns, these comendadeiras, as these privileged women were called, had a special dispensation to marry if they so wished. Always relying on his Italian connections, Columbus struck up a conversation with a woman named Dona Felipa Moniz Perestrelo. Felipa’s grandfather had been an Italian nobleman who had moved to Portugal early in the fifteenth century; and Felipa’s father had been an explorer on behalf of the Portuguese crown in the middle decades. A casual conversation blossomed into friendship and culminated at the altar. After the wedding, Columbus went to live with Felipa and her widowed mother. It did not take long for the older woman to recognize that her son-in-law “was inclined toward matters of the sea and cosmography” and told him at length about her late husband’s exploits on the islands of the Atlantic. “And seeing that her stories of these voyages gave the Admiral much pleasure,” Columbus’s son and first biographer would later explain, “she gave him the writings and sea-charts left by her husband. These things excited the Admiral still more.”13

  Columbus spent a decade in Portugal, developing his nautical knowledge and conceiving his audacious plan. His training proceeded along multiple avenues. On a practical level, he traveled in the company of Portuguese seamen and learned from them about voyaging in deep-blue water. In 1478, less than two years after his accidental arrival in Portugal, Columbus cast off into the open Atlantic to purchase sugar on the island of Madeira. In 1482, he boarded a ship that ranged even farther, following the African coast until reaching the coast of Ghana, close to the equator. The future Admiral drew many lessons from these Portuguese voyages: “Africa is twice as long as Europe,” he scribbled in the margins of Pierre d’Ailly’s Ymago mundi (1410), one of his favorite geography treatises, adding later that “the torrid zone of the world is habitable because the Portuguese sail in that region and it is thickly populated.”14

  Yet his most important nautical insight had to do with the gigantic wheel of winds and currents that circles the North Atlantic Ocean with regularity, now called the North Atlantic Gyre. Portuguese navigators had stumbled on this vast circular flow earlier in the century when they began exploring western Africa. At first they had merely followed the coast in a southerly direction along Western Sahara. But when they reached the bulge of Africa at Cape Bojador, they ran into a major problem: strong winds blew consistently from the continent toward the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and the currents ran in the same direction, reinforcing the effect of the wind. This made Cape Bojador a veritable point of no return. As one contemporary put it, “The currents are so terrible that no ship, having once passed the Cape, will ever be able to return.” For twelve years, the Portuguese persisted in this daunting passage but failed every time.15

  To go beyond Cape Bojador, fifteenth-century Portuguese navigators had to take a leap of faith, letting themselves go into the Atlantic Ocean very far from shore in search of more favorable conditions. Through trial and error, they perfected a maneuver that they called la volta do mar largo (the loop around the great sea), or la volta for short in Portuguese and la vuelta in Spanish. It consisted of sailing away from the African coast for hundreds of miles in a northwesterly direction before turning around in mid-ocean back to Portugal. Their growing awareness of this gigantic ring of currents and winds in the North Atlantic was both exhilarating and full of possibilities. In 1492–93, Columbus used the southern half of the North Atlantic Gyre to propel his fleet toward the Americas and the northern portion of it to return to Europe.16

  Apart from learning from working seamen, Columbus met a group of experts in the employ of King João, extraordinary mathematicians and cosmographers convened from time to time to advise the Portuguese monarchy on oceangoing ventures and to solve any problems related to them. During Columbus’s stay in Portugal, these experts devised a novel method of determining latitude (north-south distance) based on the altitude of the sun. Latitude was less difficult to establish than longitude (east-west distance), as is generally known. But it was hardly trivial or “child’s play,” as author Dava Sobel writes in her well-known book about the British clockmaker who solved the longitude problem by inventing a marine chronometer. In fact, measuring latitude reliably in the middle of the ocean was difficult and constituted a necessary step to venture successfully first into the Atlantic and then into the enormous Pacific.17

  To appreciate the breakthrough achieved by King João’s experts in the early 1480s, we need to begin with what existed before. Pilots of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries—right up to Columbus and well after him—navigated by a system generally known as dead reckoning. Starting from a known location or “fix” marked on a map, all early pilots needed to do was point their compasses toward their intended destination. By keeping track of only two variables—direction and distance—they were able to plot their progress on a chart and arrive safely most of the time. Small errors were tolerable in passages confined to comparatively small bodies of water such as the Mediterranean, the Baltic, or the coastal regions of the North Atlantic. As one of the foremost Portuguese
cosmographers of the sixteenth century explained, “No great errors arose [in the Mediterranean] since most days navigators had sight of land and knew where they were, and they did not need to carry astrolabes or other instruments to measure altitudes because they followed their sailing directions and thus kept track of their progress forward.”18

  Things were very different in the Ocean Sea. As the Portuguese ventured deeper into the Atlantic, they were forced to confront the limitations of dead reckoning navigation. After spending weeks far from coasts, islands, or any other identifiable geographic features, they had no way of confirming their position independently. We can only imagine the frustration of Portuguese pilots in the middle of the Atlantic attempting the volta and having to rely on a series of uncertain estimations originating in a very distant port. In theory, they could track their progress on a chart, but such plots could be utterly misleading, as small inaccuracies in direction and distance eventually built into significant and even colossal errors that could lead to complete disorientation and death.

  The only independent point of reference was the stars. At least since the 1460s, Portuguese navigators began noticing how the height of the North Star in the night sky provided a clear indication of how far north or south they were. To illustrate with the most extreme examples: a sailor near the Arctic Circle would see the North Star almost directly overhead, while a second navigator near the equator would find the same star barely above the horizon. Naturally, while sailing along western Africa, Portuguese pilots came to associate specific stretches of that coast with certain altitudes of the North Star. At first they used rough approximations such as “the height of a lance” or “the height of a man,” but eventually they resorted to cross-staffs and astrolabes to increase the accuracy of their north-south estimations.19