by Hugh Thomas
In the next few years, most of western Africa was discovered by Portuguese captains: Mauretania, the River Senegal, the River Gambia, the Cape Verde Islands (in 1455), the Pepper, Ivory, Gold, and Slave Coasts, and then the kingdom of Benin, the mouth of the Niger, and the Cameroons had all been visited before Columbus arrived in Lisbon.
A second motive for these African adventures was both a strategic and a religious one: the Portuguese royal family, as good Christian soldiers, sought a way of attacking Islam from its rear.
By 1470, the pursuit of black slaves had also come to be an important part of these adventures, Lisbon becoming a center for the sale and further shipment of slaves to Mediterranean markets, both Christian and Muslim. Many Italians had again been engaged in these undertakings; there was, for example, a Genoese, Luca Cassano, who had set himself up as a slave trader in Terceira in the Azores, and the Venetian Alvise Ca’ da Mosto had brought back slaves from the River Gambia. The Lomellini family continued their wide-ranging banking activities in Lisbon. The Florentine Marchionni, from a family known in Genoese Crimea as slavers, was beginning in 1470 to establish his position as the master slave trader in that capital.
These Portuguese voyages have seemed, in the eye of history, less important than those of Columbus. But as a Dutch traveler remarked in the eighteenth century, the Portuguese served for “setting the dogs to spring the game” in the era of European expansion.27 The journeys initiated the age of discovery of which Columbus would become the supreme hero; and they have a wonderful innovative audacity, remarkable in a small nation that had never before made a mark on history.
For a time, Columbus and Felipa, his wife, lived in Lisbon in the house of her mother, Isabel Muñiz. They went, too, to Porto Santo and then to Funchal, in Madeira. When, in Funchal, Felipa died giving birth to a son, Diego Columbus returned to Lisbon and worked partly as a bookseller, partly as a cartographer. His devoted brother Bartolomeo joined him from Genoa. Columbus must then have met mariners and merchants who knew the Ocean Sea, as the Atlantic was then known, for it was still believed by most educated people, following the Greek geographer Ptolemy, that that great expanse of water surrounded a single global landmass.
There were many curious stories abroad in those years about sailing west to find more Atlantic islands, “Antilla” and “Brasil,” for example, or St. Ursula’s island or St. Brendan’s. The sea then seemed a magical place, full of extraordinary possibilities, while interest in the idea of the “Antipodes” had been excited by the publication in 1469 in Spanish of the geography of the Greek Strabo; that first-century geographer had even talked of the possibility of “sailing direct from Spain to the Indies.”28 About a dozen Portuguese voyages were dispatched westward between 1430 and 1490. Perhaps some sailors of that nation had heard of the medieval Norse expeditions to Greenland, Vinland, and North America. After all, the last Greenlander of Norse origin died only in the fifteenth century.29
That the earth was round had been realized for many generations. The Greek astronomers of Miletus had even thought, about 500 B.C., that the world was a sphere. That view had been advanced by the geometer Pythagoras. Though much of Greek learning was later lost, the Catholic Church had accepted this hypothesis by about A.D. 750, and in the fifteenth century, the “sphericity” of the planet was generally agreed. Only a few ignorant people still tried to maintain that it was flat.
Columbus sailed with a Portuguese expedition down the coast of West Africa as far as the new fortress of El Mina, on the Gold Coast, touching at the Cape Verde Islands, which were even more of a plantation colony than Madeira, drawing heavily on slaves from mainland Africa nearby. Again, it seems evident that he was just a sailor, if perhaps now one with some authority. He apparently stopped on the Pepper (Malaguetta) Coast, where he later claimed to have seen sirens. That was either in 1481, when the trading fortress of El Mina was being built, or in 1485, when the cartographer José Vizinho was also there, having been sent by “the perfect prince,” King João, to calculate the height of the sun on the Equator. Columbus is said to have been accompanied by his brother Bartolomeo.30 On these journeys he must have become fully acquainted with the vessel that had already enabled the Portuguese to do so much, the caravel: a small, “lateen”-rigged ship with the speed, maneuverability, and shallow draft that allowed it to beat against contrary winds much better than older, square-rigged ships.31
Columbus read as well as traveled. He probably came across Seneca’s surprising statement that one could sail from Spain to the Indies in only a few days.32 He certainly examined Marco Polo’s summary of information that had been posted up on the Bridge of the Rialto in Venice for the benefit of other travelers to the East, and also his memoir, dictated to a fellow prisoner when in a Genoese jail. The latter book was full of engaging stories, including tales of Amazons and men with dog’s heads. Marco Polo had reported Cipangu (Japan) to be 1,500 miles east of China and that there were no less than 1,378 islands lying off Asia.33
Another work that Columbus read (at this time or later) was the Imago Mundi by Pierre d’Ailly, a cosmographer of the early fifteenth century who had been also Bishop of Cambrai, cardinal and confessor to the King of France. In this the clever Frenchman discussed not only astronomy but the size of the world. He suggested that the Atlantic was narrow, that Seneca had been right to say that with a favorable wind one could cross it in a few days, and that the Antipodes existed. Alongside the first of these propositions Columbus annotated in his copy: “There is no reason to believe that the ocean covers half the earth.”34 Columbus also studied The Description of Asia by the Sienese Pope Pius II (Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini), who had insisted that all seas were navigable and all lands habitable. That pontiff also believed that one could travel from Europe to Asia via the West.
Columbus naturally looked, too, at a new edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, the most famous book on the subject, known in a Latin translation from 1406, published in Vicenza in 1475, and later printed in edition after edition. This work had been written by an Alexandrine scholar about A.D. 150. It named eight thousand places and included maps and tables. The most important idea in it was that geography meant the accurate fixing of positions by latitude and longitude, astronomically determined. Much of the information in Ptolemy derived from gossip, but the book was believed at the time to have a scientific basis. Columbus probably saw the second edition, published in Bologna in 1477, which included twenty-six maps of Asia, Africa, and Europe. He read, too, the curious but successful work of the armchair traveler “Sir John Mandeville,” invented tales of adventures of which several editions were soon also available.35 He may have seen maps belonging to his father-in-law, for Perestrelli seems to have been one of Henry the Navigator’s advisers on oceanic exploration.36
Finally, Columbus was given several letters by an elderly, erudite, and humane Florentine, Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli, who had insisted in a letter of 1474 to a Portuguese canon, Fernão Martins, one of King Afonso V’s chaplains, that a western route to China was possible: “I sent to His Majesty this map which I have designed … and on which I have marked the coasts and islands which may serve as a starting point when you undertake this navigation in steering always westward.”37 Toscanelli, head of a family business in Florence dealing in skins and spices, also said that in letters he had discussed with the King of Portugal “the shortest route from here to the islands of the Indies where the spices grow, a route shorter than that via Guinea.” The journey might be broken in “Antilla” or Japan. Columbus transcribed this letter in his own copy of Pope Pius II’s book. Toscanelli added in another letter that the Emperor of China thought that this western route from Europe to his country might be about 3,900 nautical miles but that he himself considered that a sensible figure might be 6,500 miles. He sent Columbus a copy of this last letter, perhaps in 1481.38 Later still, he told Columbus: “I am persuaded that this voyage is not as difficult as is thought.”39
In consequence, Columbus drew his own conclu
sions. He accepted Pierre d’Ailly’s view that the Atlantic was not so broad as it seemed,40 and Toscanelli’s that it could be crossed. Fernando Colón wrote that his father also began to think that “just as some Portuguese were sailing so far to the south, in the same way one could navigate to the west, and it was logical that one would meet land in that direction.”41 He noted, Fernando Colón added, any useful ideas that sailors or merchants might have, becoming “convinced that to the west of the Canary and the Cape Verde Islands lay many islands and lands.”
Toscanelli was the decisive influence on Columbus, who mentions him again and again in his own letters. In his diary of his first voyage, he speaks of “Paolo Físico” more often than of his Spanish companions. Toscanelli was imaginative, however, and he was quite wrong in his estimate of the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan.42
From the fifteenth century onward there has been a story that Columbus was inspired to reach his conclusions by an “unknown pilot,” perhaps a Portuguese or an Andalusian, who on his deathbed said that he had been swept by a storm to the West Indies while on his way from Portugal to England. This pilot was said to have spoken of naked people living amiably in the sun of what seems to have been the Caribbean. Most historians of the sixteenth century (Fernández de Oviedo, López de Gómara, Fernando Colón, for example) dismissed this tale, which ran quite against the expectations of Columbus, who never anticipated finding primitive people in his New World. On the contrary, he expected to meet the sophisticated Ashikaga shogun of Japan or the Ming emperor of China. But the story has survived; and, in the twentieth century, several distinguished writers vehemently supported the theory of the “unknown pilot.”43 For example, one historian has written that Columbus learned “not only thereby the existence of oceanic lands in the West belonging, as he believed, to the East Indies, but the precise distance from the Old World, as well as their exact place in the immense sea.”44 But actually the “unknown pilot” is unnecessary to explain Columbus’s frame of mind; with the help of Pierre d’Ailly and Toscanelli alone, a Frenchman and a Florentine, his plan was virtually made.
In 1484, Columbus put a scheme of sailing west to Cipangu (Japan) and China to King João of Portugal, who had devoted more attention than any other monarch to the idea of discovery. Portuguese explorers had already discovered sophisticated principalities, such as Benin, and observed colossal African rivers, such as the Senegal, the Gambia, the Niger, even the Congo. In the early 1480s, Diogo Cão nearly reached the Cape of Good Hope. It was therefore difficult to interest the King in any plan for a western route to China. João, however, put Columbus’s scheme to a committee of inquiry—the first of several that the Genoese would encounter in the next ten years. It was standard practice in those days, as in our times, for governments to ask experts to give advice on anything untoward.
This committee in Lisbon, the Junta dos Matemáticos, included the cartographer José Vizinho, with whom Columbus had perhaps traveled to West Africa; the Bishop of Ceuta, Diogo Ortiz de Vilhegas (a Castilian from Calzadilla, near Coria, Cáceres);45 and the eccentric astronomer Maestre Rodrigo, with whom Columbus had already discussed the delicate matter of the height of the sun on the Equator.
The Junta decided that Cipangu must be much farther away than Columbus (and Toscanelli) thought—on which matter they were right—and that no expedition could be fitted out with food and water to travel across so enormous an expanse of sea. No crew could be disciplined for so long. But as soon as King João rejected Columbus, he is said, on Bishop Ortiz’s advice, to have sent a caravel west from the Cape Verde Islands to investigate the Atlantic; it returned after many days with no news.46
Rebuffed in Portugal, Columbus decided to approach the monarchs in Spain, to which he had not previously been. But that country, like Portugal, had her outposts in the Atlantic, in her case, the Canary Islands; and, in the colonization of those, Genoese were playing a part. Columbus would have been aware of that and would have realized from Toscanelli’s letter that the Canaries were the best place from which to embark upon any transatlantic journey.
The Canaries comprise many islands, a few large and many small, of which the closest was fifty miles off northwest Africa and 750 from southwest Spain, being then thirteen days’ normal sail from Cadiz. The archipelago, probably known to the ancients as “the Fortunate Islands,” was, as earlier shown, first visited in the fourteenth century by a Castilian fleet led by a Genoese, Lanzarotto Malocello. Another Castilian expedition in 1402 was that of French adventurers Jean de Béthencourt, Lord of Grainville in Normandy, and Gadifer de la Salle, of Poitou. Béthencourt eventually established a principality of his own on Lanzarote and two other smaller islands, Fuerteventura and Hierro, the indigenous opposition being less strong there than on Gran Canaria and Tenerife. He divided up the land that he seized among his followers, chiefly Castilians but also some Normans. Quarrels followed; the Portuguese made claims, and Henry the Navigator coveted the islands and fought unsuccessfully for them. Eventually, the dominant authorities became the Medina Sidonias, the noblemen of Seville, and the Peraza family, also Sevillano in origin. Missionaries sought to convert the indigenous population, including those on the unconquered islands, while sea captains captured others to be sold as slaves in Spain.47
The Portuguese in the end accepted Castilian control of the Canary Islands by the Treaty of Alcaçovas in 1479, as well as of a stretch of territory opposite, the modern territory of Sahara, so enclosing “the Little Sea” (El Mar Pequeño), one of the best fishing grounds. In return, Castile accepted the Portuguese possession of the Azores and Madeira, and her monopoly of trade with the rest of West Africa.48 Soon the Castilians, led by Pedro de Vera, from Jerez de la Frontera, managed after considerable fighting to master most of Gran Canaria in 1487. La Palma was also conquered early in the 1490s. That left only Tenerife in the hands of indigenous people.
Those “Canarians” are mysterious. Were they Berber, African, or even European in origin? Probably the first, though no one can say for certain, or even what they looked like. Columbus reported them, unhelpfully, to be neither light nor dark, and the records of the sales of slaves speak of them as both.49 The French in the early fifteenth century thought them “tall and formidable.” The Canary Islanders do not seem to have known anything of navigation (or had forgotten it) and so never left their archipelago, and did not even travel from one island to another. They knew nothing of bread. They had no horses, and Castilian cavalry terrified them. They had many languages and were ruled by numerous independent kinglets. They fought well with stones and sticks, but their numbers were already falling because of contact with European diseases. The Spaniards had been able to conduct themselves much as they wished in these islands since the native population was so few, perhaps 14,000 in Tenerife, 6,000 in Gran Canaria, and 1,500 elsewhere.50
The Canary Islands became a source of wealth for Castile. Numerous Canary Islanders had been kidnapped since the 1450s and sold as slaves in Andalusia. Since they had been untouched by Islam, they were considered more reliable than Berbers (Muslims were notoriously troublesome, being usually faithful to their religion). Several influential men at the Spanish court, such as the senior adviser Gutierre de Cárdenas, drew good incomes from the sale of products from the islands such as orchil, of which Cárdenas had a monopoly. His colleague Alonso de Quintanilla had gained the help of Genoese Sevillanos to assist in financing these conquests. Ludovico Centurión built a sugar mill in 1484 on Gran Canaria, even though the subjugation of the island was still incomplete; and a bishop, of Rubicon, had been appointed (Juan de Frías). These conquests by Castile in the fifteenth century constituted a step toward the New World, even though it was not known then to exist.
Columbus does not seem to have visited the Canaries before he went to Spain. He would have mentioned it had that been so. The fact that Columbus was believed to have had a love affair with a later governor of La Gomera, Beatriz de Bobadilla, implies nothing since he met her in Córdoba. Bu
t, as suggested earlier, he knew before going to Spain that any Castilian captain sailing to the West would do well to use the Canaries as a base; as Toscanelli had said, such a journey should start from as far south as possible in order to take advantage of the prevailing winds. The winds of the Atlantic drive clockwise in what seems to be a large wheel. The latitudinal character of the system was to be the key to sailing to the New World for generations, and Columbus would have known it from talking to sailors in Lisbon.
Columbus arrived in Andalusia in the second half of 1485 and made his way to the Franciscan monastery of La Rábida, near where the mud-red Rio Tinto enters the Atlantic. The monks at the convento were not only interested in the needs of sailors but could offer information. They knew useful things—that, for example, the sight of a flock of birds must suggest that land was close. Among those at La Rábida were Fray Francisco (Alfonso) de Bolaños, who had been concerned in the evangelization of the Canary Islands and of Guinea, and had even secured a benign papal statement in favor of slaves and a criticism of the slave trade.51 Fray Juan Pérez talked of astronomy to Columbus, who also established a friendship with Fray Antonio de Marchena.
La Rábida was then a kind of maritime university.52 A lay brother there, Pedro de Velasco, had been, in his youth, pilot to Diogo de Teive, who had served Prince Henry the Navigator and had been among the first to plant sugar in Madeira. Velasco himself had looked for Atlantis as a young man, and still might be persuaded to talk of the banks of clouds at sea in the evening that suggested to mariners that they might be about to reach land, for the sea, like the desert, had its mirages. Even now “so often a capricious cloud covers everything and frequently one is confused by low clouds which seem to have the shape of mountains, hills, and valleys.”53