Toward the Setting Sun

by David Boyle

  ALSO BY DAVID BOYLE

  Troubadour’s Song:The Capture and Ransom of Richard the Lionheart

  TOWARD THE

  SETTING SUN

  Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci,

  and the Race for America

  DAVID BOYLE

  For my father

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Prologue: Setting Sail

  1. Paradise Lost

  2. Maps

  3. The Enterprise

  4. In Debt

  5. Triumph and Disaster

  6. Heading North

  7. Strange Meetings

  8. The Finish Line

  9. The New World

  10. The Meaning of the New World

  Postscript: Stars and Stripes

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Imprint

  “Heisa, heisa

  vorsa, vorsa

  wow, wow

  one long draft

  more might, more might

  young blood, young blood

  more mude, more mude

  false flesh, false flesh

  lie aback, lie aback

  long swack, long swack

  that, that, that, that

  there, there, there, there

  yellow hair, yellow hair

  hips bare, hips bare

  tell ’em all, tell ’em all

  gallowsbirds all, gallowsbirds all

  great and small, great and small

  one an’ all, one an’ all

  heist all, heist all.”

  English maritime hauling song sung by sailors in the mid-sixteenth century

  “One glass is gone

  and now the second flows.

  More shall run down

  if my God wills it.

  To my God let us pray

  to give us a good voyage,

  and, through his blessed mother our advocate,

  protect us from the waterspout and storm.”

  The prayer told at sea by the most junior officer of the watch, as he turned the half-hour glass, which told the time on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spanish ships

  “We sawe birds of all colors, some carnation, some crimson, orange tawny, purple, greene, watched, and all other sorts, both simple and mixt.”

  SIR WALTER RALEIGH, Guiana, 1596

  PROLOGUE

  SETTING SAIL

  “Lord, what a tangle of dangers are here for the wretched mariner! Rocks and eddies and overfalls and shooting tides; currents and…horrible great mists, vapours, malignant humours of the deep, mirages, false ground, where the anchor will not hold, and foul ground, where the anchor holds for ever, spills of wind off the irregular coast and monstrous gales coming out of the main west sea.”

  HILAIRE BELLOC, The Cruise of the Nona, in the Bristol Channel

  “That Venetian of ours who went with a small ship from Bristol to find new islands has come back and says he has discovered the mainland 700 leagues away, which is the country of the Grand Khan.”

  LORENZO PASQUALIGO, letter to his brother in Venice, August 23, 1497

  ON AUGUST 6, 1497, nearly five years to the day since Christopher Columbus had first set sail for the New World, his Venetian rival, John Cabot, navigated his tiny ship Matthew back up the Avon River to the English port of Bristol. Then he rode at speed to London to give the king the news of his extraordinary discovery on the other side of the Atlantic. Columbus had failed, he said. Despite what the intelligentsia of Europe believed, Columbus’s expeditions had actually lodged in some remote islands very far from the Chinese coast he claimed to have found. But Cabot claimed that his own expedition, one ship with a crew of less than twenty, had found the route to China in a very different place and that Bristol was set to be the new Venice and Alexandria, all rolled into one.

  We know today, of course, that Cabot was right about Columbus but wrong about himself. We know that his pioneering 1497 voyage was not really a voyage of “discovery.” Other races and civilizations occupied the “New Founde Land” he had claimed. We also know, with the benefit of history, that the voyage led not to spice routes but to a staggering exploitation of the cod trade, repeated and pointless exploration for the mythical Northwest Passage for the next three centuries, and the English claim to North America.

  What is less well known is that Cabot’s arrival in London, and his every move afterward, was being reported to Spain by agents of Columbus, who was then working closely with the first person to correctly interpret the geography of these adventures, Amerigo Vespucci, the man whose name would eventually grace the new continent that hardly anyone had yet imagined. Cabot knew them both, certainly by reputation, but where history has been quiet—if not silent—until now is about how much his voyages were bound up with theirs.

  All history involves leaps of imagination. The story of the race for America is no exception. In fact, the separate tales of Columbus, Cabot, and Vespucci have been almost unique in their susceptibility to bizarre theories, generation after generation, as critical maps or documents are alternately discredited and vindicated.

  Was Columbus Jewish? Was Cabot from the Channel Islands? Was Vespucci a fraud? Were they all double agents? All these claims have been made by serious researchers within living memory, and the answer in each case is almost certainly no. But in recent decades, a broad consensus has begun to emerge about the basic facts and documents, thanks to painstaking research and vital new discoveries. Cabot’s debts, Vespucci’s pretences, and Columbus’s religious obsessions have only recently become clear, and the three pioneers begin to emerge not so much as explorers, but first and foremost as merchants. Their primary motivation may have been glory, but most of all, the enterprise they shared was about the prospect of astonishing profits.

  The last few years have yielded quite unprecedented progress in our understanding of all three men—documented evidence of Columbus’s extraordinary cruelties to his followers, indications of the true achievements of Cabot’s mysterious final voyage, and insights into how Vespucci had reinvented his own story. All this new evidence has added to the consensus and provided us with more fully rounded pictures of each man. Taken together, it means that it is at last possible to end the artificial divisions, which have resulted because historians and nations have told their three stories independently. Their lives have always been separated by those whose self-appointed task it has been to fight their corner and discredit the work of their opponents.

  The arguments have raged across the centuries. Americans have traditionally sidelined Vespucci—”a thief…the pickle dealer at Seville,” according to Emerson—saying that he “stole” Columbus’s achievement by using his name Amerigo for their continent. Italians have pressed the claims of Vespucci, including his mythical “first voyage”—widely agreed to have been based on later forged documents—because of his apparent claim to have discovered the continent himself. The British have pressed the claims of Cabot on the grounds that the name Amerigo was part of a Roman Catholic plot to discredit a soon-to-be Protestant nation’s achievement.

  It is time to string the story together as one narrative, not as three rival mythologies peddled by different nationalities, but as the single tale it originally was—of three young men born within a few years and a few hundred miles of each other, who struggled against indifference, fear, and bitter rivalry to be the first to cross the western ocean. And who by doing so ushered in the end of the medieval age.

  The truth is that the three men knew each other. Columbus and Vespucci worked closely together, and Cabot and Vespucci had common acquaintances interested in the possibilities of Western trade. They collaborated, knew of each
other’s ambitions, and followed each other’s progress. Columbus and Cabot were also both born around the same time in Genoa and probably knew each other from their earliest lives. All three were admirers, and two were acquaintances, of the sage of Florence, Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, who first urged explorers to sail west in order to find the East.

  Writing the story of all three as one narrative has been in itself a kind of research. When you link them and put the stories in context, it becomes suddenly obvious why Cabot went to Mecca or why Vespucci abandoned his career to go to Spain. The business of profit becomes even more central to the tale than it was before, and the race for America was as much about business as it was diplomacy. Reconstructing the historical events as one story reveals aspects that were not always obvious before, and it gives an energy and thrust to that story that wasn’t always apparent.

  The key relationship at the heart of this tale, and the one that still remains least clear to historians, is the one between Cabot and Columbus. But the whole thrust of the story implies that the enterprise of the Indies—the plan to find a western route to China that lay behind Columbus’s and Cabot’s discoveries—was not originally a separate, almost identical, undertaking happening by coincidence, but rather a joint project between Cabot and the Columbus brothers, Christopher and Bartholomew, that unraveled.

  The most likely interpretation seems to be an original collaboration, but it is hard for academic historians to break out of the safety of certainty—to shift from closely argued detail—and to fill in the remaining gaps in the story. It also seems that a partnership between Cabot and Columbus is the clear implication of telling the three stories together. But anyone who tries to tell it as one story, as I have, needs to be as honest as they can be about where they have to go beyond the undisputed evidence, and to explain—either in the text or in the notes—what evidence lies behind the assumptions they have made. This is the story, based on the best available evidence as it stands today. There remain gaps and uncertainties but writing a narrative sometimes depends on going a little further than a strictly academic approach would allow—and I have tried to make clear where I have done this.

  The stories most of us now understand about Cabot, Columbus, and Vespucci and their race across the Atlantic are inaccurate simply because they have been told separately, as if in a vacuum, or amid such controversy and detailed argument that the main thrust of the narrative has been lost. But because those events of so long ago have had a profound impact on how we live now, it seemed right to tell the tale as it really happened.

  And the tale begins not in Genoa or Florence, where the three central figures came into the world, but in the far eastern frontier of Europe in 1453, when the great city of Constantinople watched in silence as the Ottoman armies gathered outside its walls.

  1

  PARADISE LOST

  “There will come a time in the later years when ocean shall loosen the bonds by which we have been confined, when an immense land shall be revealed and Tiphys shall disclose new worlds, and Thule will no longer be the most remote of countries.”

  SENECA, Medea

  “The world is fair to look at, white and green and red, But inside it is dark and black, and dismal as the dead.”

  WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE

  IN THE EARLY hours of Tuesday morning, May 29, 1453, Constantine IX Palaeologus, the last Christian emperor of Constantinople, stood on the extreme corner of the city’s triple defensive walls in the drizzling rain, looking down across the Golden Horn from the Caligarian Gate. Constantine was forty-nine years old and utterly exhausted. His closest advisers stood around him and peered through the gloom at the campfires of the enormous army of the twenty-one-year-old sultan Mehmet II, drawn from all over the Muslim world and stretched out along the Bosphorus. They could see, silently in the dark, Mehmet’s brand new fortress that dominated the city and the straits that led to the Black Sea. The long-awaited attack, inevitable since they had been isolated by Ottoman forces a few months before, could not be far off now.

  Behind them waited the great city, the magnificent capital of the Orthodox Christian world, too frightened to sleep. The lights in the distance stretched back to the opposite walls five miles away and flickered around the churches, where people had been gathering to pray since the evening. There they had been embracing each other, saying good-bye, and asking for forgiveness if they had ever given offense. There were still a few torchlight processions, hymns being sung in the far distance, blessing the vulnerable points in the city’s fourteen miles of walls; walls that were in some places 350 feet high.

  Constantine knew that Orthodox and Catholic alike had put aside their differences to worship together in the ancient cathedral of Santa Sophia—he and his predecessor had in fact negotiated a reunion between the two churches in the hope that it would encourage western Europe to stir itself in their defense. Constantine was patient and well respected and had taken the lead in the collection of gold and silver from the churches to melt down to pay their foreign defenders. He had overseen the desperate repairs at night, by men and women alike, of the damaged walls, and he had personally organized the latest collection of food for the most desperate in the besieged city. Now, physically drained, the emperor had fainted on his way to the city walls.

  The rumblings made by the Turkish troops dragging their gun up hill, which had been heard since sunset, were still only too audible. There was no sign of the strange lights that Constantine had been warned about, but there could be no doubt that the attack must be imminent. There was no bombardment, though in the previous days they had suffered bombardment from a great twenty-six-foot cannon, which required sixty oxen just to move it into position. The cannon had been firing from ten miles up the coast and was now completely invisible in the darkness. As the remaining citizens peered through the dark toward the west, their faces wet from the rain, there was still no sign of the promised Venetian fleet. It was such a small hope, but in such terrible times anyone would clutch at straws.

  Cross section of the Santa Sophia

  The legendary city, the glory that had been Byzantium, with its vast libraries—the greatest repositories of knowledge in the known world—was locked and barred, waiting for the worst. Its great stone streets, down which the first Constantine—the Roman emperor who converted to Christianity—had once traveled, were silent and prayerful. There were only seven thousand people left to defend the city. There had been an ancient prophesy that Constantinople could not be taken during a waxing moon. But the moon had been full a week earlier and it was now waning. Worse, when the hopeless citizens had paraded around the city with the holiest of icons, the Virgin Mary, it had accidentally toppled into a gutter.

  The attack finally began at half past one in the morning. As the sultan dispatched his bashi-bazouks, his ill-disciplined mercenary irregulars, a ball from the great cannon burst through one of the defensive stockades. At first, the forces of defenders and attackers seemed equally matched, with inspirational defense by the Genoese forces between the inner and outer walls. But when some hours later Turkish troops slipped through a small gate in the outer defenses, which accidentally had been left unlocked after a raid by the defending Genoese troops, their military strategy began to unravel.

  Two contingents kept the defense alive. The Cretans in charge of three key towers, and the Genoese under Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, who had been put in command of the whole military operation. But when Longo was badly wounded and his followers insisted that he should be taken through to the inner walls, the elite Ottoman Janissaries—originally Christian children abducted by pirates—believed the Genoese were in full retreat and rushed the gate. When they succeeded in forcing their way through, Constantine realized that the battle was hopeless. He flung off his imperial insignia, led his closest advisers into the middle of the fiercest fighting, and was never seen again.*

  Mehmet had promised his army three days of unrestricted looting, and they fanned out across the city, killing any
one they found, burning the libraries and the books inside them, and the great icons. Even the great Hodigitria, a portrait of the Virgin said to have been painted by St. Luke himself, disappeared in the conflagration. Thousands of women and children had barricaded themselves into Santa Sophia, but the doors were battered down and they were carried off to the soldiers’ tents and eventually into slavery. It was widely regarded as the great retribution for the Greeks—Constantinople being the greatest Greek city on earth—for their legendary sack of the city of Troy, which had been in what is now Turkey. Only a few of the city’s leaders escaped. One of them, Cardinal Isidore, a former leader of the Orthodox church in Kiev, managed to swap clothes with a beggar—who was beheaded in his place—and get himself sold at a bargain price as a slave. He was eventually able to purchase his own release. Few of his colleagues were so lucky.

  But the sultan began to have qualms as the slaughter continued. Tradition suggests that he was horrified by the plunder and destruction of such a magnificent city and called a halt, protecting Santa Sophia and converting it immediately into a mosque. He even appointed one of the captured Orthodox scholars, also sold into slavery, as his own Christian patriarch. But it was too late. The libraries had largely been lost; the seat of Orthodox Christianity for the past eleven centuries was in Muslim hands; and the trade routes that had taken the merchants of Venice, Florence, and Genoa up the Dardanelles through the Sea of Marmara and into the Black Sea were under the control of hostile forces. The whole axis of the Mediterranean world had shifted.

  The sack of Constantinople

  The axis had been shifted, but this was only the completion of a long-term trend. The truth was that Constantinople had long since been sidelined by the rest of Christian Europe. It was part of an old feudal world that was being elbowed aside by the new merchants and bankers. The Byzantines had forgone the massive expansion in trade over the past four centuries and found themselves without resources. As early as 1347 Emperor John VI had been disconcerted to notice at his coronation that the diadems with which he was being crowned were made of glass, rather than the gems he had expected. The population of the city had also shrunk steadily from more than 1 million three centuries earlier to only 100,000. The leaders of Italy’s great cities had grown accustomed to visits from importunate Byzantine emperors begging for both military support and the means with which to pay for it.