by David Boyle
Cabot had married in Venice. Though nothing is known about his wife, Mattea, it seems to have been a love match: He named his ship after her in 1497. Unlike Columbus, who married for political connections, he loved not wisely but too well. The time would come when he would badly need money and protection, and Mattea’s family could provide little of either.
Like Columbus before him, his visits to England brought him into contact with strange stories of secret fishing grounds and shadowy expeditions to the far West. He was also passing more frequently through Lisbon, and his conversations with Columbus started to mature. What had started as enjoyable romps through cosmographical lore were now becoming concrete plans. To make the voyage westward to the Indies, they would each require a partner.
Although the two men had a great deal in common, they were also very different. While Columbus was becoming increasingly devout, Cabot was the type of man who would offer to name the lands he discovered after his barber. While Columbus appears to have been loquacious rather than eloquent—one recent biographer says that “he gives the impression of having wearied his enemies into opposition and bored friends into assent”—Cabot seems to have exercised his influence more effortlessly. Where Columbus was intense, Cabot was charming. Columbus needed Cabot’s personality and contacts.
Cabot also needed partners outside Venice. This was more than just the perennial difficulty that Venice faced East and any Venetian expedition across the Atlantic would have to use some friendly port outside the Mediterranean. The problem was that, since the Venetian peace treaty with the Turks and the Ottoman assault on Otranto, it had been increasingly difficult to conduct business as a Venetian with the other Italian city-states. “If you knew how universally hated you are, your hair would stand on end,” Galeazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan, told the secretary of the Venetian republic in 1467. “Know then that your enemies do not sleep. Take good counsel, for, by God, you need it.” Two decades on, Italy loved the Venetians even less.
Pope Sixtus had even laid Venice under an interdict, which forbade them the basic services of the church, but it was kept secret from the Venetians themselves. Their representative in Rome refused to forward the announcement to his home city, and when the pope sent a special messenger to the patriarch of Venice, he claimed to be too ill to pass it on to the senate.
The deep unpopularity of Venice had led to a ruinous though largely uneventful war on three separate fronts, with Florence, Naples, and Milan, in the early 1480s. Surrounded by enemies, their treasury exhausted, and their trade routes threatened on every side, the Venetians took the fateful step of appealing to the king of France for help. Louis the Spider King was now dead and his place was taken by his thirteen-year-old son Charles VIII, and it was he who received the letter from the doge urging him to invade Italy and assert his ancestral claims over Naples and Milan. It was a momentous step and one they would bitterly regret in the decades to come.
This clearly was not a good time to organize a Venetian expedition across the Atlantic. Nor was it a sensible moment to expand a trade in skins and cloth across Europe, since most of those items were coming across the Alps and via Milan. That was why Cabot had begun to develop his own shipments of spices bound for England in exchange for English cloth or wool, not across the Alps, but the long way around by sea, via Lisbon and via his increasingly practical conversations with Columbus.
I
“Lay the wood, bone, or horn in a glass jar, and pour vinegar thereon which has verdigris mixed in it so that it is quite thick and not too thin. Cover it well and let it sit seven days under warm horse manure. If it is not green enough, let it stand longer.”
Instructions for dyeing cloth green, from the Allerley
Mackel, Mainz, 1532
If someone wanted an education in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, they would have had to find a teacher, sit at that teacher’s feet, and occasionally consult the great manuscripts attached by chains to lectionaries in the libraries. Thanks, however, to the invention of the printing press, even a poor man could find a Greek dictionary and learn languages, and could set about the process of imbibing knowledge by the light of spluttering, smoky candle flames. This was the process that Columbus had been putting himself through in his long nights on Madeira and Porto Santo. He could now read Latin, and was already involved in the book trade, and he scoured everything he read for evidence—not to prove that the Indies were on the other side of the Atlantic, but to have a credible argument that the journey to find them was not suicidal.
He was also showing signs of a growing obsession. His marginal notes in his books at this time were often about wholly esoteric and mildly erotic issues, like tracking down the lost land of the Amazons, the fearsome warrior women of legend. But he had returned from the Gold Coast filled with self-confidence and convinced that he was right about the route to the Indies outlined to him by Toscanelli. Even so, conviction was by no means enough, and as he watched educated men like Behaim wandering confidently in and out of the councils of state to discuss the next phase of Portuguese exploration, he knew he needed something else. He would need to be able to gather some evidence about the distance from Lisbon to Japan, or Cipangu as he knew it.
If you divided the globe into 360 degrees, the key question was how much of that was land and how much sea. Columbus managed to get hold of a book by the Greek philosopher Marinus of Tyre which estimated that 225 degrees was taken up by land. Columbus scoured the Bible for geographical references, and laid great emphasis on the obscure verse 2 Esdras 6.42 in the Apocrypha: “Six parts has thou dried up.” This was the evidence he felt he needed, that actually only 15 percent of the earth’s surface was sea. That meant 135 degrees around the equator was ocean, which was too far to sail with existing technology and resources.
But he rationalized that he only actually had to reach Cipangu, which he estimated as 30 degrees away from China. And the journey could be shortened at the other end by calculating the distance from the Azores instead of the mainland. By similar calculations, Columbus managed to whittle crossing the Atlantic down to a journey of just 60 degrees. Then he had to translate degrees into actual miles, and that depended on how close you were to the equator. Aristotle argued that, when you were at the broadest point of the earth, each degree represented about 60 nautical miles, but Columbus discovered a book translated from the Arabic about celestial movements that reduced that figure to 45 miles. Forgetting, or deliberately ignoring, the fact that Arabic miles were considerably shorter than Roman miles, he finally cut down the crucial distance of his voyage to something that might just be conceivable. He adopted a figure of just under 3,000 miles, and very much less than the 10,800 nautical miles that the ancient Greeks correctly believed was the distance from Europe to China, and which was far beyond the practical distance that could then be sailed.
In effect, Columbus’s amateur calculations had shrunk the earth’s actual circumference by a quarter. Even the wildly optimistic Toscanelli had told him that it was at least 5,000 miles.
It was at this point, in Madeira, that the story that has come to be known as “the missing pilot” is supposed to have taken place. A small ship sailed into the harbor there with only five of the crew still alive, and in the final stages of hunger. Columbus cared for the helmsman, a Castilian from Huelva called Alonso Sanchez, in his own home, and he heard that they had been heading for England when they were driven westward by an enormous storm that lasted for twenty-eight days. When the storm lifted, they had seen islands and had landed on them to find water, only to be driven away again by naked natives. The helmsman was too weak to recover, but before he died he sketched out a map of where he had been, with estimates of the winds and currents.
Biographers of Columbus have doubted the story from the beginning, though it was widely told about him in the generations that followed. It may still have happened in some form or another and been attributed to him. That is not unlikely, because the late 1470s and early 1480s were the years
when Europe woke up to the possibilities of the Atlantic. There was little argument at the time among mariners that there was land on the other side of the ocean, though neither Columbus nor his contemporaries had much of a concept of a New World. The issue was whether it was possible to sail there, and for Cabot and the Columbus brothers, there was also the question of how to make the venture profitable if they did so.
Most European nations have some story about how they reached America before Columbus, and some of them may actually have done so, whether by accident or design. It could have been the Bristol expeditions. The Danish pilot John Scolvus, who led the expedition to Greenland, may have gone there, though the story that he was sent by Alfonso of Portugal is very unlikely. The Portuguese mariner John Vaz Corte Real may have run across Newfoundland as early as 1472. The Poles have a candidate, the adventurer Jan of Kolvo. And even the Basques, whose whalers regularly charged between the Bay of Biscay and the waters around Greenland, have stories about strange encounters with islands in the far West.* Columbus also would have heard about the Vikings and their settlements on Greenland as well as the legends of the Irishman St. Brendan and the Welsh prince Madoc who was supposed to have landed in Mobile Bay in 1170.†
The truth was that, although these people may not have formally discovered America, they and others seem to have happened upon it over and over again in the generation before Columbus, or happened upon something. The issue was not discovery; it was designing a method of staking a claim to the resulting trade to the Indies, if that was indeed the land on the other side.
Columbus was returning to the African fortress at El-Mina, this time as the commander of a caravel on an expedition to relieve the garrison. Cabot was buying spices and dyes in the territory of the sultan of Egypt and was selling the occasional slave in ones or twos, stopping off in Crete to sell them on the way home. They were gifts from the merchants he had been trading with, and of the trio—Cabot, Columbus, and Vespucci—Cabot was probably the first to be involved in the trade in slaves that would play such a large part in all their lives and achievements.
He was also supplementing his income by building a reputation as a contractor that would stand him in good stead later. Those he was doing business with in Venice were usually in the small circle of geographers and dreamers he had met through his confraternity. There are records of him selling a house that he had rebuilt for the sons of Taddeo da Pozzo, who was close friends with the explorer and cartographer Alvise da Mosto.
But with every sale and every new contact, Cabot’s plans for his own enterprise of the Indies were taking greater shape. If the Indies could be reached by sailing westward, as his friend Columbus claimed—and everything he had learned from the Florentine humanists suggested he was right—it came back to the same question: How was it possible to profit from such a voyage? Here was the problem that Cabot and the Columbus brothers seem to have discussed. If they raised the money for a voyage and brought back the news that the Indies lay on the other side of the Atlantic, then every trader in Europe would follow them there—and cut them out. If, on the other hand, they sailed as the agent of a monarch—as the great Portuguese explorers had done—then they would provide an enforceable claim for their patron, but only a promise of further commissions for themselves. They would get fame, of course, but nothing tangible.
Fame was very nice, but they were merchants. The purpose of the enterprise, the whole challenge, was primarily about profit. So, by the beginning of 1483, their plan included three elements, each vital to this financial success.
1. A scheme whereby they could reap a financial reward from the route they had discovered. They would persuade either the Portuguese or the English monarchs to license their discoveries—and to enforce their national rights to whatever territory was found—but in return would be granted a percentage of the profits made from their exploitation.
2. A scheme to pay for the venture. They would organize a major deal through their contacts in Portugal, Venice, and England, the profits from which would pay for some or all of their enterprise. They had to share the risk of the voyage if their sponsoring prince was going to give them the concessions they needed to ask for.
3. A scheme to find suppliers in the East. There was no point in simply arriving in Cathay without some information about the original sources of the spice trade. By the time they had tracked them down, the merchant fleets of Europe would have converged there. They needed contacts in advance if they were to cut out all those middlemen—who laboriously traded spices all the way to the Mediterranean—and before their rivals arrived.
This plan goes to the heart of the basic problem, and it is the only one that fully explains their predicament and their actions later, once the whole project began to unravel. There is no record of the plan that has survived, if indeed it was ever written down, but it can be inferred from what happened next. It also explains why Cabot and Columbus ended up so disastrously in debt at the end of that year, why they needed to approach the crowned heads of Europe, and why Cabot made such a dangerous journey to Mecca two years later to investigate the sources of the spice trade in the Far East.
It also goes some way to explaining the ambiguity at the heart of the story of exploration and discovery: If mariners had traveled regularly, if accidentally, to lands on the other side of the Atlantic before, then what was special about Columbus and Cabot? The answer is that they had cracked the basic problem: how to profit from their enterprise. And that is what it was—not a voyage of discovery, but an enterprise of enormous ambition. This was a plan with the dream of fame at its heart, but it was also one that underlines their joint ambition. It was a scheme which, if it had worked, would have made them the richest men in the world.
The big deal that would finance the joint Cabot and Columbus expedition to the Indies was complete. The money was borrowed, the consignment of spices or wine was at sea and on its way to Southampton, which is where most Italian traders landed. Their backers in Venice, London, and Lisbon were committed. It was bold, but to win the kind of concession they needed, they would have to finance—or at least partly finance—the enterprise of the Indies themselves. But at that crucial moment, in the early spring of 1483, some most disturbing news arrived in Lisbon: The affable and capable king of England was dead.
Edward IV had begun to feel ill at Easter, but the disease remained a mystery to his advisers and doctors. He lingered on for some weeks, adding codicils to his will—including naming his brother Richard of Gloucester as the regent for the kingdom in the event of his death—and on April 9 he died. The cause of death remains a mystery, but recent theories have suggested he died of a burst appendix. He was just a few days short of his forty-second birthday.
By the time the rumors reached Cabot and Columbus, the news was even worse. England was paralyzed by indecision, the unexpected death of a man in his prime seemed likely to spark their disastrous dynastic struggle once again. The rightful king, the twelve-year-old Edward V, had been taken into protective custody wearing blue velvet by the regent, his uncle Richard, who had promptly seized power himself and proclaimed himself Richard III, rightly or wrongly about to go down in history as the most notorious tyrant ever to wear the English crown. Disturbing rumors about the legitimacy of Edward IV’s marriage—and therefore the legitimacy of the young princes—were being circulated. Worse, they were being held in the Tower of London and had not been seen for some time. There were arrests and accusations of sorcery, and a fearful atmosphere of skullduggery and conspiracy had descended on the kingdom. Most depressing of all, the nervous merchant financiers of London and Bristol were withdrawing their promises of credit and avoiding ambitious projects, and consignments of forgotten cargoes were lying unclaimed and unsold on the wharves.
There are no records suggesting that the deal between Columbus and Cabot was undermined by the death of Edward IV, and the coup in England by his brother, but the timing suggests something along these lines. Either way, by the middle of the decade, b
oth seem to have been forced to leave their adoptive countries, and the most likely date for the unraveling of their plans was probably 1483. Edward was unusual among English monarchs because he had mercantile interests in his own right, along with his mother, though he sold his rights to Italian managers. Through those agents, he was linked to most of the highly profitable wool and cloth trade with Italy, managed through a network of Italian merchants and using Venetian ships.
Both the partners had accepted large sums of investment money—Columbus from the Centurione family perhaps, and Cabot from the Capello, Dragan, and Mocenigo families. We know about Cabot’s creditors because they were named on the letters sent after him later around Europe, and they all had strong commercial links with England. Columbus’s backers are more shadowy, but before he died, Columbus asked his son to pay thirty thousand Portuguese reales to the heirs of Luigi Centurione. It is usually suggested that this was to assuage his guilt over the sugar deal that went wrong in 1479, but it could just as well have been a settlement of the debt left over from his 1483 catastrophe.
The unexpected death of one link in the chain of this deal, which connected financiers in Venice with merchants in Lisbon, Crete, and London, had torpedoed the whole enterprise. The investors were asking difficult questions. Southampton, where most Venetian shipments landed, was worryingly silent. Creditors were beginning to press. It was increasingly clear that the profits Columbus and Cabot were relying on to launch their expedition were not going to be forthcoming. Worse, they might in fact lose everything they had already amassed. Maybe the money had not been transferred to London. Maybe the goods were not going to be available. Maybe some key link lost his nerve, fearful that Edward’s death had undermined the whole plan. Cabot was a master mariner used to plying the Bay of Biscay route, and it would then have been he who was forced to set sail empty-handed from England, and bring the despairing news to the Columbus brothers in Lisbon.