by David Boyle
Armed with the sketchy maps he felt were safe to show the king, and accompanied by Bartholomew, Columbus made his way up the steep winding streets to the Moorish castle of St. George, towering over the two-towered cathedral. The brothers were ushered into the Palace of Alcaçovas inside the castle, where John held court. Paying court to medieval kings was a lengthy business of waiting in corridors and anterooms, patronized by courtiers, as hours—sometimes weeks—ticked by.
Finally Christopher was shown in to see the king and his advisers. His great opportunity had arrived. There was the goateed and somewhat flabbycheeked John. If Columbus was anything like other visitors encountering John of Portugal for the first time, he must have seen a man whose eyes shone with intelligence, but who rather undermined the effect by the way he talked through his nose.
It is not quite clear what deal Columbus suggested to the Portuguese. Accounts by contemporaries simply repeat the wording of the demands that he eventually secured with the Spanish, complete with Spanish nomenclature, so it seems likely that this was used simply to fill a gap in their authors’ understanding. There were no complaints about outrageous demands, as there were from the Spanish, so he may not actually have reached the stage of setting out to the court what he wanted.
He also failed to be entirely clear about the purpose of the expedition he hoped to mount. Cabot and Columbus planned to find an island off the coast of Cipangu, which they could use as a trading post with the Indies, and planned to use the royal warrant to give them rights over that trade. The demands for hereditary positions and the religious rhetoric belonged to a more obsessive and embittered Columbus, acting a few years later and alone. Whatever the deal he put to John and his court, he was careful not to reveal his secret store of maps and the knowledge they held about routes, wind patterns, and currents—too careful, in fact. He instead made the mistake of bringing up Marco Polo’s description of Cipangu and Cathay. The experts brought in by John to advise him on the Columbus brothers’ proposal, the so-called Junta dos Mathemáticos, exchanged glances. The committee, led by three of Lisbon’s authorities on nautical matters—Diego Ortiz de Vilhegas, the Bishop of Ceuta and Tangiers, to consider the theological aspects; the Jewish scientist José Vizinho; and the court physician Rodrigo—was sent away to consider the proposal.
There was one notable absentee: Columbus’s learned rival, the German globe maker Martin Behaim, was not included in the committee, even though he was known to have ideas similar to Columbus’s. Having made the strongest case he could, Columbus withdrew and hoped for the best.
History does not record how Columbus received the verdict of the experts at the Portuguese court toward the end of 1484, whether he was simply handed a disappointing message or whether he made the journey with his brother again up the hill to the castle of St. George. A Portuguese play written only a century later imagines Columbus once again confronted by King John, who dismisses him with the damning suggestion to “get your head examined!”
Actually there is reason to believe that John did receive them again and was friendly. He was intrigued by the encounter and the idea, but unfortunately for Columbus, the Portuguese explorer Diego Cão had just arrived back in Lisbon convinced that he had reached the southern tip of Africa. Whatever the experts reported, John had already decided to concentrate his efforts on the route to the Indies around Africa. But he was warm enough to welcome Columbus back four years later, and warm enough now to offer Bartholomew a role in one of the most secret projects of the Portuguese state, the construction of a master atlas, using Ptolemy’s basic outline but adding in every piece of intelligence acquired from the voyages south.
But though he was intrigued by Columbus, John was not impressed. “The king found this Columbus was very proud and boastful in presenting his talents, and more fanciful and full of imagination than accurate,” wrote one chronicler. Nor was the proposition that Columbus be given rights over his own discoveries very popular. Vasco da Gama and Bartholomew Dias, his great Portuguese contemporaries, sailed as royal agents. They were showered with honors, but were given no personal rights. The verdict of the Portuguese advisers was also damning. Their report to John described Columbus’s plans as “vain, simply founded in imagination.” They were particularly contemptuous of his reliance on the authority of Marco Polo.
They were wrong about Marco Polo. But the generations to come would dismiss the Portuguese advisers, and the Castilian advisers who followed them, as backward-looking medievals. In fact, their analysis of the case Columbus put forward was largely correct. He had hopelessly underestimated the distances involved. His assumptions about the globe were manifestly inaccurate. They said he had failed completely to prove his case, and they were right. What neither side knew was that another continent, not completely unknown, but uncomprehended, lay in the way. Columbus was right that the Atlantic could be crossed using existing technology, but absolutely wrong that he could reach the Indies by that route.
While Columbus was struggling with the Portuguese committee, John Cabot’s home city of Venice was experiencing an economic revival thanks to the peace treaty with their neighboring cities. The only signatory still holding out when the draft treaty was ready in August 1484 had been the elderly and ailing Pope Sixtus, but he was suffering from such a swollen tongue that he could barely speak. In a rage at the prospect of peace with Venice, he made a gesture to his closest advisers from his sickbed. They were unsure if this was an instruction for their dismissal or a papal blessing. They never found out, because the next morning he was dead.
So the peace treaty had been signed, and Venice celebrated with three days of church bells, fireworks, and jousting on St. Mark’s Square. But for Cabot, it all came too late. His debts hung like a millstone around his neck, and he faced imprisonment unless he could pay back his creditors. He had done what he could to wrest back some of his position. Wandering down to the ghetto before the curfew, he had tried to raise money from financiers.* He had even tried to raise the money from his wife’s family. (It is not clear why he could not do so from his father’s business, but perhaps he had already borrowed as much as he could.)
Cabot also tried to dig his way out of debt by permanently disposing of some of his wife’s dowry. There were powerful laws in Venice about dowries. Husbands were allowed to invest them, and enjoy the interest on the fruits of those investments, but they had to be returned to their wives upon the husband’s death. So Cabot made an agreement with his wife’s family to sign over the rights to all his property in Venice—the results of his precious few years in property refurbishment. The agreement stipulated that this would be returned to his heirs if and when the dowry was ever repaid. It was clearly not enough.
It was no longer safe to leave his pregnant wife and young son, Ludovicus, alone in Venice since his most lucrative contacts in the city were embarking on an attempt to have him arrested and jailed for his debts. There was no choice but to take them with him on his trading voyages, eking out a living between Southampton and the Mediterranean, forced increasingly to shift to Bristol to avoid all the Italians in Southampton. In the final month of Mattea’s pregnancy, his ship crossed the Bay of Biscay once again and sailed down the Avon River and into Bristol harbor. While it was being refitted, and with the family in lodgings, Mattea gave birth to their second son, Sebastian.
The Columbus brothers had been experiencing similar problems. Bartholomew Columbus was at least employed on secret work in government service in Lisbon, but suspected the motives of the appointment and was being urged by his brother to leave and take the proposal to England. Christopher was also in debt, and now outside the protection of the king, and therefore liable to be arrested himself.
Christopher was also afraid that in his enthusiasm to convince the Portuguese experts, he had given away too much. Not only had he revealed enough details of his plans that any half-informed Portuguese mariner could attempt implementing them, but he had shown how much he knew. He had said enough for an intellig
ent listener to realize that he had access to the most secret Portuguese maps, and was prepared to use them to better himself.
Columbus needed to leave Lisbon if he was to avoid his creditors—who were also those Genoese families who had up until then provided him with an income—but he might be refused permission to leave by the agents of the state. He knew only too well that the penalty for sending a chart abroad was death. If he was known to be planning to leave that might be enough to make him suspect. He had lived in Portugal, or Portuguese territories, since his shipwreck eight years earlier, and so much had happened since then—his marriage, his son, his plans—so leaving must have seemed an enormous wrench. But he no longer had a wife, and his plans could not be realized where he was. He needed go—but ever so quietly.
4
IN DEBT
“It was an intuition. The intuition became an idea, the idea a plan, the plan an obsession; after his wife’s death, it became the only aim of his life.”
PAOLO EMILIO TAVIANI, Christopher Columbus: The
Grand Design
“It is difficult for us to realize the extent to which the men of the Middle Ages rested on venerable authorities. This is one of the things which differentiates the period almost equally from savagery and from our modern civilization.”
C. S. LEWIS, The Discarded Image
THERE WERE MANY legends going around in fifteenth-century Portugal about crew members of lost ships who arrived back in Lisbon claiming to have glimpsed Antillia, the Island of the Seven Cities. One of these was so extraordinary that nobody who heard it could quite forget it. It was about an adventurer called Fernando de Alma, who tried to repeat the journey and asked the king for permission to charter two caravels to go to Antillia himself.
After surviving a series of tumultuous storms, de Alma found himself becalmed at the mouth of a great river. The grand chamberlain of the city on this new land rowed out and welcomed the crew, and when he was about to leave, Fernando leaped into his boat and went ashore. There he feasted and saw wonderful buildings. While he was being rowed back to his caravels, which proved hard to find, he fell asleep . . . and awoke, centuries later, on a Portuguese ship in the mid-Atlantic bound for home. The sailors told him they had found him drifting in the ocean, clinging to wreckage. Puzzling over his fate, and that of his crew’s, he landed in Lisbon and rushed to his house and then to the home of his fiancée, Seraphina. A man he did not recognize opened the door and tried to prevent him from coming inside, but he pushed past, dashed upstairs, and burst in on his fiancée in the arms of another man.
“What does this mean, Seraphina?” shouted Fernando.
“What are you talking about?” she answered, clinging to her lover. “My name is Maria.”
“How can that be? There’s your portrait on the wall.”
“Holy Virgin!” exclaimed Maria. “He is talking of my great-grandmother.”
Columbus, and maybe Cabot as well, probably had heard this legend. They might have identified a little with Fernando de Alma, washed up a century in the future with nothing. Their debts had made it imperative that they should leave behind everything they had come to know as home. Both had lost the powerful business contacts they had relied on for their income. Cabot had his family by his side, but all Columbus had left was his five-year-old son, for whom he was solely responsible.
As the winter of 1484 turned to the spring of 1485, some months after the rejection of his plans by the Portuguese government, Columbus had also set himself adrift. Rumors had reached him that the Bishop of Ceuta, one of John of Portugal’s panel of experts, had urged the king to test out Columbus’s ideas for himself, and that an expedition had been organized that was planning to leave from the Azores. A furious Columbus realized this was a signal to leave. He was no longer trusted by the Portuguese court—if indeed he ever had been—which meant no prospect of either extra income or protection from his creditors.
If the authorities discovered he was planning to leave, knowing what he knew—and the access he had to maps—they might try to stop him. So very quietly, and traveling with Diego, he boarded a small vessel in Lisbon and sailed around the coast past the border and into Castile, into the great delta of lakes and bogs, the home of boars and wolves, that marked the mouth of the Odiel River.
The voyage could be risky. From their lairs on this coast, stretching up past Huelva, and the Guadalquivir River to Seville and beyond, Castilian pirates ventured out occasionally to prey on Portuguese shipping. As their ship rounded the promontory of Rio Tinto to anchor in the small port of Palos, Columbus looked up to the cliffs and saw the white shape of the Franciscan friary of La Rábida. One plan was to go to Huelva, where Felipa’s sister Violante lived, and to leave Diego with her. Instead, once he had landed with Diego, with almost no money, he climbed the hill from Palos up to the friary, knowing that he had in his pocket a letter of introduction from the Berardi family.
There he knocked on the door and asked for some bread and water. The door was opened by one of the friars, the astronomer Antonio de Marchena. By chance, Columbus had stumbled into the one place on the peninsula that would believe in him and help him. La Rábida doubled as a kind of college for navigators, as well as a school, where he could enroll Diego. The monks there were knowledgeable enthusiasts about the latest developments in geography. They had strong links with explorers around the world and kept their ears to the ground. They had even played host to the Bristol pioneers on the Trinity when they stopped at Huelva on their way to seek out new lands to the west in 1480 and 1481. If Columbus had not yet heard of those voyages, he learned about them now.
The great contemporary Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus told a story, which he said was true, about four wealthy friends enjoying one another’s company around the dinner table. As a drunken boast, one of them vowed to go on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. The next vowed to go all the way to Rome. All four drank to the promise and felt obliged to carry it out. One of them died in Spain, one died in Italy, and a third was left dying in Florence by the fourth, who came home prematurely gray and completely penniless.
Such were the perils of travel in the late fifteenth century, as Bartholomew Columbus was about to find out the hard way, having succumbed finally to his brother’s demands. This was no time to be bound to the Portuguese state, however secret and exciting the charts he was involved with might be. They must fulfill their side of the deal with Cabot. If Portugal had turned them down, Christopher would make a presentation to the Castilian court. But at the same time, it made sense for Bartholomew to approach the English.
Desiderius Erasmus by Matsys
There are no details in the histories about how Bartholomew made his journey. He would have had to close his mapmaking business, or put it in the hands of trusted partners, without making it too obvious that he was planning to leave. Having done that, he must have boarded a ship—perhaps not in Lisbon, where he might attract too much attention, but farther up the coast. The journey was disastrous. Somewhere along the way, and probably quite early on, along the war-ravaged coast of Gascony as they hugged the shore in the Bay of Biscay, Bartholomew’s ship had an encounter with pirates.
Pirates were a perennial problem for ocean-going trade. Privateers were nominally tolerated because they went after Turkish or other Muslim shipping, just as the Muslim corsairs on the Barbary coast sought out Christian shipping. But in practice, they could prey on anyone unlucky enough to get in their way. They would plunder the cargoes, taking into slavery anyone young and vigorous enough to fetch a high price or anyone rich enough to fetch a ransom, and hide the plundered goods on the same coast where they moored their ships, often with the tacit agreement of the local lord. The pirates that Bartholomew came upon may have been English mercenaries left behind after fighting in Gascony. The ship was attacked and boarded and he was captured along with the other travelers and crew. His baggage was seized and taken from him, but there was enough of value in his bags—sophisticated books he had
brought along to sell, and sea charts—that Bartholomew fell into the ransomable category. He was taken inland and, most likely, locked in a damp cell. There with the rats and lice, his health declined rapidly. He was only too aware that because he had left secretly, only his brother Christopher knew where he was going.
In the months that followed, when he should have been set up in business in London with the help of other members of the Genoese community, Christopher received no letters. As Columbus set out on his own quest for financial support in Castile, with his letters of introduction from the monks, his brother’s disappearance must have preyed horribly on his mind.
Christopher Columbus was by then in Cadiz, a port farther down the coast of Castile, near the mouth of the Guadalquivir, pulling the few strings he had been given access to since his arrival. Cadiz was the traditional stopping point for Genoese ships from Chios on their way into the Atlantic. It made sense to hang around his compatriots, but there were other reasons too.
This was a brand new country, not yet transmuted into Spain, but created out of the marriage between Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, the monarchs of two peninsular nations. Both partners had been forced to struggle as teenagers for their right to succeed to the throne and had flung themselves immediately into a vastly expensive war to expel the last few Muslim outposts on Spanish soil. These clustered around the continuing Moorish kingdom of Granada, whose deposed king Boabdil was now sheltering in exile with Ferdinand. No European monarchs can have been so abstemious as Isabella and Ferdinand. Always on the move, living in tents, rarely in their Alcazar in Córdoba—where they had some vestiges of comfort—Isabella is known to have made and embroidered Ferdinand’s shirts. Other ways of paying for this tumultuous war included the creation of an elite new tier of aristocrats, the most recent of which was Luis de la Cerda, who had been named the Duke of Medina Celi five years earlier. They were on the front line with the Moors, these new dukes, recognizable by their gold or silver spurs in the hubbub around Ferdinand’s fortified encampment outside Granada, known as Santa Fé.