Toward the Setting Sun

by David Boyle

  As far as is known, they never corresponded again, but the letter was arguably the most important Columbus ever received. It convinced him that there were serious scientific foundations to the enterprise, and that this was not simply a pipedream shared by himself, his brother, and a few enthusiastic contacts. It could be done, and if it could be done, then he and his colleagues would do it.

  3

  THE ENTERPRISE

  “Between the edge of Spain and the beginning of India, the sea is short and can be crossed in a matter of a few days.”

  —CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, marginal note

  in his own copy of Imago Mundi

  “Make no small plans, for they have no power to stir the soul.”

  —NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI

  EDWARD IV WAS on the throne of England, and the terrible civil war that had so bedeviled the English seemed finally to be at an end, with Edward’s Yorkist faction in the ascendancy. John Cabot was thirty-one; Columbus and Vespucci were still in their twenties. In Bristol, in July 1480, the handful of English sailors aboard the 360-ton caravel Trinity were hauling out the bowline to tighten the foresail, as they made their way under the cliffs along the Avon River and out to sea.

  The Trinity always attracted notice when it set sail, because it was one of the biggest ships that came to Bristol, too big to moor alongside the wharves. Its destination was Lisbon followed by Huelva, the port that served Seville in Spain, to deliver consignments of the woolen cloth that had become such a staple of the English economy, and to bring back wine. It was a voyage that Trinity undertook twice a year, on behalf of a consortium of the wealthiest merchants in the city, including the ship’s co-owners, the mighty Canynges family.

  What few on the quayside knew was that this trip had a hidden agenda. The previous year, three prominent Bristol merchants—all of them with a history of trading with Portugal—had linked up with the chief customs official of Bristol customs to search for new fishing grounds in the far West. The customs official, Thomas Croft, had finally organized the royal permission four weeks earlier, but he and the others knew that the search for fishing grounds was only part of the voyage: The departure of the Trinity was masking a parallel voyage by another smaller ship they had chartered to search for the legendary island of hy-Brasil.

  The years of civil war in England had put every royal official at risk. It was vital, not only for their livelihoods but also sometimes their lives, that they correctly anticipate which candidate for the throne would emerge victorious, and make their choice of allegiance neither too early nor too late. As chief customs official in England’s second biggest port, Thomas Croft was both powerful and vulnerable. He was an ally of the current king, but that could make him vulnerable in what was a climate of mistrust and suspicion. So it was with a familiar feeling of dread, in October 1481—more than a year after the first exploration voyage of the Trinity—that Croft received into his office near the dockside an armed deputation from the city’s constable with a warrant for his arrest. The charge was illegal trading.

  As a customs official, he was disbarred from trade. But a commission of inquiry sent to investigate claims that shipments were arriving in Bristol, which were failing to pay the required 5 percent in tax, had uncovered the fact that Croft had been sending ships abroad. It was the second legal disaster to befall the merchants who had hired the ship the previous year to search for hy-Brasil: one of the merchants, Robert Straunge, had ended up briefly in the Tower of London, accused of counterfeiting coins.

  The voyage that had set out in 1480 had been arduous. With the celebrated helmsman John Lloyd in command, the crew had been forced by bad weather to take shelter in Ireland, in the port of Kinsale. Then they had pursued their regular route across the Bay of Biscay and around the coast of Portugal to Lisbon and then Huelva for a four-week refit. While they were there, some of the senior members of the expedition spent some time at the Franciscan monastery of La Rábida, where the monks ran a kind of college for navigators, and left a donation to guarantee prayers for their venture ahead.

  Next there was a stop in Gibraltar, a voyage down the African coast to Oran, then on to the Saltes estuary for a refit, after which they would normally have set sail back to Bristol loaded with wine. But this time they swung far out into the Atlantic, buffeted by storms, spending as many as nine weeks at sea, unclear as to where they were. It was a frustrating voyage, the waves lashing their faces, the compass ambiguous, and no mythical island added to the map. In September 1480 they had limped exhausted into harbor in Ireland, and by October the Trinity was once again at her usual mooring in Bristol, being prepared for another voyage south.

  If this was the first deliberate exploration to the west, it was also the first to discover that the route westward from the latitude of Portugal was likely to be dangerously stormy and was probably impossible. But Croft and his friends remained undaunted. The following year, three months before his arrest, they had tried again. When the ships returned somebody was watching them unload, and the authorities were informed that they had been illegally landing fish. Croft’s arrest was the direct result.

  What Croft knew, but preferred not to discuss with the constable, the court, or its officials, was that this second voyage of exploration had in fact found land to the west. This time the route had been farther to the north, and the storms had been avoided, and now he and his colleagues believed they had at last seen not hy-Brasil but the Island of the Seven Cities. These are shadowy corners of history, and they are still controversial. But the evidence that an island believed to be Antillia was found is clear; maps showing a “Bristol influence” began portraying it not as one island, but as three.

  At his trial some months later, Croft stuck to one undisputable fact: He had a license from the king himself to search for new lands. He was not trading at all; the salt and the wine had been required for the voyage. The king’s involvement was critical, and Croft was acquitted. Even so, rumors of the discovery could not be entirely confined to Bristol. Croft’s arrest made his colleagues wary, and when they eventually resumed the voyages westward, the islands could not immediately be found again. But something was there, and the question was how to profit from it. The immediate answer looked to be the absolute profusion of cod in the waters they had found. It made sense to Croft and his colleagues, if and when they could find Antillia again, to set up some kind of small settlement there to catch and dry the cod as stockfish. But it was vital that this information did not leak out. The islands may have been Danish territory, and English merchants were forbidden from trading there. It was best to keep silent about the whole enterprise.

  Although the sedentary merchants of Bristol kept quiet, those who had been on the Trinity and their accompanying ships could not quite forget what they had seen rising out of the Atlantic mists. There were the amateur geographers in the bars by the Lisbon docks who overheard their conversation and the cosmographer monks of the monastery of La Rábida just over the border in Castile, who knew their objective. And among those to hear rumors of the new discovery was Columbus, on his daily wanderings down at the quayside. His own tentative maps of the world, incorporating Toscanelli’s view, would from now on depict Antillia as three separate islands.

  When an English double agent reported some of the details of Cabot’s historic voyage to his Spanish masters later, he described the plan as “according to the fancy of this Genoese.” There is the strong impression in the letter that both Cabot’s and Columbus’s voyages had been part of a joint endeavor, by mariners from Genoa. “Another Genoese like Columbus,” said another informant about Cabot. The implication is that at some stage, Cabot and the Columbus brothers had been working together to the same end, and if they were, their plan must have begun to take shape around now.

  There is other evidence too, none of it absolutely conclusive in itself, but taken together, the coincidences between the lives and plans of these two merchant adventurers are just too close to believe they were independent of each
other. Both were indeed Genoese, probably with connections to the Fregoso party and to the coastal port of Savona. They were almost exactly the same age. Their plans for the enterprise of the Indies were almost identical, though Columbus in the end demanded more in return.

  But that is not all. Research over the past few decades in the Venetian archives has also turned up some other connections that are hard to ignore. Both men were involved around the edges of the wool and silk trade from southern Europe to Bristol and London. Both used the same ports, Lisbon and Huelva for Seville, both ports frequented by sailors from Bristol with stories of the exploration. What is more, as it turns out, both ended up so heavily in debt in the mid-1480s that they had to leave their homes with their families and find somewhere else to live.

  Most history has at its heart some uncertainties, no matter how definitively it is written, and this one is certainly no exception. But what we know about Cabot and Columbus points confidently to a common position and common plans for the Indies that was more than simply a dream of crossing the Atlantic. Those joint plans included working together to raise the money they needed—through one risky but ambitious deal that linked Venice, Lisbon, and London that went horribly wrong. Indeed, this is probably the missing element of the tale of the race for America—a race where none of the participants had any conception of where they were actually going—and without it the full story is simply not coherent.

  Life at the French court was an exhausting business for Amerigo Vespucci, but even more so for his cousin and mentor, Guido Antonio. The royal court rarely spent more than a month in any one place before it packed itself up and set off for the next royal palace. On the way, in the long procession of possibly four thousand courtiers, suppliers, butchers, huntsmen, together with all the food and the whole paraphernalia of royal life, they passed through burned and abandoned villages from the aftermath of the Hundred Years War. They rested occasionally in collapsed and crumbling churches and glimpsed the wolves in the distance in the ruined landscape. Only a generation earlier, Joan of Arc and the young dauphin, later Charles VII, had yanked the nation back from the brink of complete incorporation into England. The scars were still obvious.

  On the rare occasions that they were in Paris, Amerigo found that the contrast with renaissance Florence was extreme. Paris was still a medieval city. It had a narrow drawbridge by the city gate, guarded day and night, beyond which lay an enormous gibbet with the hanging corpses mummified by the weather. The wide, palatial streets of Florence bustled in their own way, but in northern cities like Paris, every street included a filthy stream of liquid manure running down the center in the winter, or a choking cloud of dust in the summer, as pedestrians had to battle past children, beggars, ducks, geese, dogs, and every other kind of creature known to domesticity.

  It was a different culture. “These things carved from marble and porphyry are beautiful; I have nothing against them,” says one of Rabelais’ characters about the Renaissance statues of Florence. “But the pastries of Amiens, the old roast shops with mouth-watering odours, and yes, even the girls there . . .” In short, Vespucci’s education was being broadened. In Florence, they imported spoons to grace their sophisticated tables; in France they slurped their soup using three fingers as a spoon.

  But now, after nearly two years following the Spider King and the French court, albeit in the amusing company of Philippe de Commines, Guido Antonio had been recalled. Together, the two Vespuccis made another grueling journey to Lyons and from there through the icy mountain passes. Guido Antonio had been appointed to be the Florentine ambassador to Rome, partly to seal the Italian peace treaty and partly to work for Lorenzo the Magnificent’s next dream: the nomination of his young son Giovanni as a cardinal. This task was to take up all Guido Antonio’s time for the next few years, but he pulled off the coup and Giovanni was appointed as a prince of the church at just thirteen years old.

  As part of the deal brokered with the Vatican, the Florentine artists Ghirlandaio and Botticelli—who had both just finished painting in the church of Ognissanti—were sent to Rome to start work painting the Sistine Chapel (named after Sixtus himself). Both artists included a picture of Guido Antonio in the finished picture. Amerigo must have looked forward to a period learning papal diplomacy, in the magnificent but unpredictable papacy of the Genoese Sixtus IV. But his career was to take a different path. On the way home, he heard the news that his father was ill, and Guido Antonio ordered him home to Florence.

  When he reached the familiar Arno River and the Vespucci family home in Ognissanti in April 1482, it was clear that his life was going to change. Now that old Nastagio was aging and infirm, there was nobody else who could shoulder the burden of the family business, with its varied collection of mills and its silk importing business. Amerigo’s brother Antonio was a trustee of the property confiscated after the attempted coup from the Pazzi family. Girolamo was in Rhodes, and although he was supposed to be representing his father’s business interests there, he had gone off to become a knight of St. John of Jerusalem. His younger brother Bernardo was in the wool business in Buda in Hungary. This was Amerigo’s destiny, by default: not to be a diplomat, after all, but a compiler of accounts, a business manager, a commissioner of cargoes.

  Columbus was living mainly in Lisbon now, only occasionally with his wife, Felipa, and his baby son, Diego, earning a living as an agent for the Spinola and Centurione families when he had the chance, taking their cargoes north to England and Flanders, and filling in the gaps in his income by selling books and helping Bartholomew in the mapmaking business. Change was in the air in Lisbon. The final peace treaty between Castile and Portugal meant the wharves of Lisbon were once again receiving consignments of Ashanti gold dust, elephant tusks, pepper, and some of the first black slaves brought to Europe on a commercial basis.

  The new Portuguese king, John II, was only twenty-five but exuded respect by conjuring up a profound sense of sacrifice. He had abandoned his mistress when he was crowned king, and chose an emblem for himself of a pelican piercing her own breast to feed her chicks with her blood. Not for nothing was he known as the “Perfect Prince.” He looked down from his palace windows high above the harbor, with the odor of spices and the sounds of money-lending wafting up from the dockside, determined to invigorate Portuguese maritime exploration again.

  Intriguing news for the amateur geographers of Lisbon was emerging already. The king of Benin had sent a messenger to Lisbon describing a great king who lived twenty moons eastward and sat screened behind curtains. It sounded tantalizingly like Prester John. The Portuguese dropped six messengers for him along the coast of Africa with instructions to go eastward. Drawn to this expectation, scholars, cartographers, and navigators from all over Europe began to arrive in Lisbon again hoping for preferment. There they were in their foreign-looking clothes and with their intellectual airs, wandering awkwardly around the docks on the Tagus River, their papers under their arms. Among them was the brilliant young cosmographer Martin Behaim from Nuremberg.

  Behaim was exactly the kind of adventurer that the new king hoped to attract. He had an advanced understanding of navigation, practical theories about new kinds of rigging for ships, and was immediately appointed to the advisory council, which the king set up to take the place of his great uncle’s academy at Sagres. Behaim set to work drawing up new navigation tables and building his own case for westward exploration. If he and Columbus met, and they must have, they seem not to have liked each other. Behaim, with his scholastic background and uncompromising ambition, probably did not take the wild talk of this merchant’s agent from Genoa entirely seriously.

  But using what influence he possessed, Columbus did manage to enter the service of the new king, and in December 1481 he was appointed to join a caravel, accompanied by Bartholomew, to sail south down Africa and secure Portugal’s possessions on the Gold Coast. The fleet of eleven ships set sail from Lisbon, arrived early in 1482 at El-Mina, and began to unload the tons of stone an
d prefabricated timber walls required to build the fortress of St. George of the Mine near a village called Aldeia das Duas Partes that was becoming central to their trading activities there.*

  Remembering the competition from Behaim, Columbus realized that if and when he reached Lisbon harbor safely again, it was time for him to start making concrete plans for the Indies.

  Five thousand miles from El-Mina, in Venice, Cabot was constructing a similar life, drawing maps, and making globes in his spare time, while working as a merchant’s agent for his father—and as a merchant on his own account—sometimes on the route via Lisbon to England, sometimes more ambitiously in the spice trade to Egypt. His own links to Toscanelli, via the fellow members of his confraternity, had convinced him that westward exploration was the most exciting geographical frontier. He was full of plans to exploit that route, but was also involving himself in property development in Venice and venturing farther afield. Cabot was now in his early thirties and seems to have taken advantage of the treaty between Venice and the Turks to sail past the captured city of Constantinople as far as the Black Sea, in search of skins.

  Cabot’s involvement in cloth and skins—linked to his father’s spice trade with Egypt—implies a wider business ambition: color. The spices he sought in the East—aloewood, camphor, cinnamon, nutmeg, sandalwood, ginger—were valuable for medicine and food preservation, a critical element in a burgeoning trade. But many of them were also crucial to the dyeing industry, and there was a clear opportunity here to square the circle, and use the dyestuffs his father’s business was importing to prepare the cloth and skins he was bringing in himself, using saffron for yellow, madder for red, woad from the Netherlands for blues, and of course the expensive kermes lice for Venetian scarlet.