Toward the Setting Sun

by David Boyle

  Through the winter and early spring of 1486, Columbus found lodgings in the Genoese district of Córdoba, near the Hierro Gate on the left bank of the Guadalquivir. Meanwhile, he looked for a source of income and prepared his case. Finally, on May Day, the waiting was over. Laden down with his usual piles of books and charts and with Gianotto Berardi at his side for moral support, Columbus made his way over the Guadalquivir by the stone Moorish bridge that linked the sides of the city, passed the magnificent mosque, which was now part of the cathedral complex, and was finally shown into the great hall of the Alcazar for his famous meeting with Isabella of Castile and her royal husband.

  The meeting with Isabella and Ferdinand was not as conclusive as Columbus had hoped. Ferdinand was a striking figure, tall and good-looking, with the air of the incessant seducer he was. The problem was that Ferdinand was as obsessive about Mediterranean diplomacy as any prince alive, and saw no reason why anyone should look westward. He boasted later that he had deceived the acknowledged diplomatic master—the Spider King of France, Louis XI—as many as ten times. Ferdinand had brought with him a copy of Ptolemy’s Geography, and turned theatrically to the relevant pages as Columbus spoke, only to find they did not support what he said.

  But Isabella was a different matter. Auburn-haired and blue-eyed, Isabella was the great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt and almost exactly the same age as Columbus. She also shared some of his visionary sense of destiny. Ferdinand was a pragmatist, and she loved him, but Isabella was a romantic. If she had not been, history might have been different. When Columbus unveiled the map that he and Bartholomew had prepared, and spoke of carrying the gospel to the Indies, he struck a chord.

  Ptolemy as portrayed in a fifteenth-century edition of his Geography

  By the end of the meeting, there were some signs of progress. Isabella had prevailed upon one of her courtiers to accommodate Columbus in his house and to introduce him to key decision-makers in the court. She had also promised to ask her own confessor, Hernando de Talavera, to organize an expert commission to advise her on the enterprise. Columbus had persuaded a sovereign to take him seriously for the first time. But in the next few weeks, hanging around the court for the commission to collect itself, he caught a glimpse of what his life would be like in the next few years. Cynicism about his mission was palpable, as new projects tend to be viewed around most courts. His enterprise was at best a distraction from the far more urgent business of prosecuting the war against the Moors, and, at worst, it was a joke. “My proposition was a thing of mockery,” he wrote later, a familiar figure among the assorted beggars, plaintiffs, and scholars who hung around the vicinity of the monarchs. “All who learned of my plan made merry at my expense.”

  It may be that Columbus’s intensity and his combination of prematurely white hair and bright red features invited this kind of mockery, when more urbane meddlers of the same broad idea, like Behaim or Cabot, managed to escape it. But Columbus also saw everything in very personal terms: This was “his” proposition. His partners, coconspirators, and friends were forgotten. In the hothouse of a Spanish court focused on another enterprise altogether, he seemed to beg for ridicule. To make matters worse, the Talavera Commission had barely met in the summer before it adjourned again to follow the court to Salamanca, where it was going to spend the rest of the year.

  While Columbus struggled with the Spanish court, his brother Bartholomew lay in his place of captivity, maybe a cell, maybe just a dank room, staring out at the Atlantic. He had no news of his brother or the enterprise. For all he knew, he had been given up for dead. Christopher may even have persuaded the Spanish to back his enterprise and he and Cabot might even then be on their way across the Atlantic to the Indies. He explained to his captors that he could raise no ransom, yet they seem almost to have forgotten him as well.

  We can only imagine his captivity, but it was almost certainly debilitating and sapping of his strength. If he stayed there much longer, there was no doubt that he would die. Perhaps there was the very slim chance that he could tell them about the enterprise he was planning and coax them to release him in return for a lucrative share.

  As Christopher Columbus waited for the decision of the commission, providing them with information as they requested it, rumors began to reach him about the aftermath of his appearance before the king in Lisbon. The Bishop of Ceuta’s advice had been taken. Earlier that year, John had granted permission to a Flemish adventurer called Ferdinand van Olmen to look for the Island of the Seven Cities. Unlike the proposal of Columbus and Cabot, this was going to have to be at his own expense. If van Olmen found the island, he could have it.

  Just as Columbus realized he would need a partner, van Olmen realized the same. Three months later, he found one who was able to procure and prepare two ships. They were due to set sail shortly from the Azores. Among those who had applied to join the expedition was Columbus’s rival Martin Behaim.

  It was agonizing news. If the Talavera Commission did not hurry up and make a decision, the route to the Indies would already be discovered and it would be too late. But before receiving the news about the move to Salamanca, Columbus had begun to enjoy Córdoba. It was one of the wonder cities of Europe, in Christian hands for two and a half centuries, but still keeping its advanced Moorish sense of luxury, with its narrow streets, high white walls, and tree-lined piazzas. The cathedral was built in what had been the biggest mosque in the world outside Mecca, and had patios of orange trees and distinctive green and purple marble columns. It was said that you could walk for ten miles through the city at night, lit by the lamps of its libraries and bathhouses.

  Columbus must have felt some sense of belonging, not just because of the Genoese, but because Córdoba was overwhelmingly a wool town. People were involved in the trade at all levels of society and kept their sheep on grazing land outside the city between the market gardens. Even so, he could generate little enthusiasm for the profits in cloth anymore. In Lisbon, he had hung around on the waterfront, and now he sought out anyone with an interest in cosmography. In those days, apothecary shops had become informal meeting places for people to talk about medicine or science, and in one Genoese apothecary near his home, he met someone who was later to become a right-hand man on his first voyage, Diego de Harana. Having talked a few times, Harana took Columbus home to meet his father, and there he also met Harana’s cousin Beatriz and they became lovers.

  Beatriz de Harana was twenty-one and had been born in the mountains above the city, but both her parents had died when she was a child. Presumably it was his intensity and seriousness that attracted her to Columbus. Very little is known about Beatriz. Columbus never married her. He did, however, urge his sons to look after her. She was no lady of rank, as Felipa had been, and a man in his position needed his status as a widower who might possibly attract important people.

  One of these was a friend of the queen, the Marquise de Moya, whom he met at court in Córdoba and with whom he also began an intense relationship. Historians have speculated that they were also lovers. But now that he was forced to follow the Talavera Commission to Salamanca, he had to leave both of them behind. This was particularly difficult because, sometime at the end of 1486, when Columbus was spending large amounts of his time in Salamanca, it became clear that Beatriz de Harana was also pregnant. Nine months later, she gave birth to a son, Ferdinand, his father’s future biographer.

  Salamanca in the late 1400s was a university of residential colleges, a little like Oxford and Cambridge, and there in St. Stephen’s College—where its head became a close friend of Columbus—the commission finally met over Christmas 1486, and to his great relief Columbus was put briefly on the royal payroll. His appearances before the Talavera Commission have gone down in history as tremendous clashes between enlightenment and superstition. There is one story, probably mythical, that Columbus asked the commission how it was possible to make an egg stand on its end. When they were unable to answer him, he produced an egg and smashed in its end.
“You see,” he said. “You can do anything if you know how.” But as in Lisbon, the argument was not that straightforward. Columbus was actually mistaken in his theory, as the experts correctly recognized. He was completely wrong about the size of the globe and the distance from Spain to China, and his stubbornness began to irritate the commission members.

  But what infuriated Columbus—and would infuriate anyone blessed with a practical mind—was the way the commission preferred to concentrate on the theoretical aspects of his proposal rather than the practical ones. It irritated him that one of the leading members of the commission was a lawyer, not a navigator. Constantly hearing the phrase “St. Augustine doubts . . .” began to grate on his nerves.

  It was true that St. Augustine, and other authorities, had doubted the existence of the Antipodes—how could the people who lived there be descended from Adam and Eve? Augustine and others had also argued that the equator was uninhabitable and so scorchingly hot that ships would simply combust. With growing irritation, Columbus retorted that the Portuguese had already ventured as far as the equator and had come back with nothing worse than a little sunburn. But the education of the commission members compared to his own unnerved him. He began to play up his own sense of divine calling, or switched suddenly to cracking inappropriate jokes. It was not a compelling mix.

  Spain was the last attic of the last palace, said Peter Martyr, the historian, lecturing in Salamanca in 1488. But if it was the last attic, he said, then Italy was its main salon, the emporium of the world. Italy was the economic powerhouse that was driving the flow of goods, spices, and luxuries across Europe, and Vespucci was in charge of one of the engines. But Spain (Castile and Aragon) was more than that. The peninsula was on the very edge of the known world, and—slowly but surely—it was becoming involved in a trade at the very edges of morality. The Castilians, in particular, were also becoming drawn into a great evil, which would eventually overwhelm everything it touched.

  In the Christian world it was the Genoese who started dealing in slaves, although the Muslim world had done so for centuries. Seeking out new markets after the closure of their Black Sea trading posts, the Genoese had anchored this speciality in their business colonies in Castile. None of the three merchant venturers at the heart of this story was free of the taint of slavery.

  The reason slave trading was taking root in Spain was war. Slavery had always been bound up with piracy, and that was indistinguishable from the clash between East and West, between Christian and Muslim. Christian pirates lurked in the eastern Mediterranean waiting for Muslim galleys. Turkish slavers had been known to lie in wait in the Bristol Channel, ready to pounce on the regular pilgrim ships that sailed from Bristol to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and to sell them into slavery. The Portuguese trade with Africa had begun to organize slavery into major businesses. The Genoese were controlling a huge flow of black slaves and had taken the trouble to get papal dispensation for slavery as early as 1452.

  Cabot became involved before Columbus or Vespucci, during his trips to Egypt, but in Lisbon, the key organizer was a Florentine named Bartholomew Marchionni—a business associate of Lorenzo Berardi—who was rapidly emerging as the most important slave trader in the city, dominating the consignments of Africans that found themselves blinking on the quayside in the strange European light. In Castile the new slave trade city was Seville, which was close enough to the sea for the Guadalquivir to flow in both directions during the same day with the incoming and outgoing tides. Like Córdoba, it was decorated like a Moorish city, but it was fast becoming a Christian manufacturing city too. It was the center of Spanish soap production, a by-product of the olive groves all around the city, and there was a burgeoning ceramics industry using clay from the riverbanks. More dangerously, it was the headquarters of the Spanish Inquisition, its torture chambers filled with miserable Jewish tax collectors rotting in its cells, refusing to name the names of colleagues in fantastical conspiracies.

  Columbus arrived in Seville while the Talavera Commission was considering its verdict, and found the city packed with foreigners, rubbing shoulders in the narrow streets and in the bars over their glasses of sweet Malaga wine. There was a German colony, which had set up a successful new printing press, and a major Jewish community, involved mainly in financial services. But the reason he went there was partly because Seville was now home to as many as one hundred Genoese merchants, filling the gaps left by the expulsion of Jews from the city in 1483, and partly because as a paid official in Queen Isabella’s service he had some role in the sale of war booty for the Spanish. And war booty included slaves, which knitted him further into the business network of the slave-trader Gianotto Berardi.

  The new king of England, the parsimonious Henry VII, made his first visit to the port of Bristol in the summer of 1496. He was greeted at the city gates by a colorful procession led by a man dressed as King Brennius, the mythical Trojan who had founded the city, even before Rome, or so its citizens believed. As he rode through Bristol’s narrow streets, with its citizens wearing their best examples of the famous “Bristowe red,” past the confluence of the rivers Avon and Frome, an enthusiastic housewife flung a sheaf of wheat down into the street in front of him, shouting, “Welcome and good luck!” After a generation of civil war, Henry had chosen a royal crest that included both the rival red and white roses of Lancaster and York. He carried about him a welcome whiff of stability, and commercial centers like Bristol were overjoyed about it.

  The city fathers took him down to the docks, across the great bridge with its four huge arches and its sought-after houses and apartments built along it. He was intended to see the dilapidated, rotting hulks at the wharves, and was told about the increasing difficulties they pose to the business of importing and exporting. Later in the day, Henry met the leading merchants on the city council, including many of the wealthy magnates behind the shadowy voyages of exploration to the west. The merchants had agreed between themselves that this was a vital opportunity to broach the tricky subject of trade with Iceland, which was still forbidden thanks to the agreement that Edward IV had made with the Hanseatic League and the Danish court. They also wanted to convey some idea of their financial difficulties, given the run of recent losses and wrecks. It was a convincing display, but Henry—who was famously suspicious of everybody’s economic motives—was not won over. A little later in the visit, he pointed out that the main thing he had noticed was the fine display of jewelry around the necks of the merchants’ wives. Despite what they claimed, Henry told them, they were earning money somewhere.

  This was surely an unwelcome remark to the merchants, not only because of their frustration about the lost Icelandic profits, but also because they worried about how much Henry knew. It has been suggested by some historians that by then the explorations of the Trinity had born fruit, and that the Bristol merchants had in fact set up a small summer cod fishery somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic, maybe in Greenland. If this was so, they were realizing exactly what Columbus and Cabot had worked out for themselves—that simply discovering new lands was not enough. They needed some way of protecting their discovery so they could profit from it openly, and for that they needed a royal warrant, which is precisely what the Bristol merchants now lacked: Their 1480 license had expired, and they had not approached the new regime to renew it.

  Henry took care of one other piece of business while he was in Bristol. He sacked Thomas Croft, the old friend of Edward IV, as customs officer for the port—the man who had done more than anyone to prepare the secretive voyages of exploration. He replaced him with a Welshman, like himself, a younger merchant based in the city, named Richard Amerike, a man who had built up his wealth and his collection of fine houses by pursuing other people’s debts. He was not popular among those who ran the city.

  When Henry returned to Bristol in 1490, the merchants changed their approach. They paved some of the main streets by the docks, where the rivers of Bristol converge, but they made sure there wa
s no attempt to convince Henry that they were somehow suffering financially. In fact, there was a studious silence on the subject of trade with Iceland, despite the news that the Danes were now prepared once more to let Bristol traders do business there. Something was happening quietly among the divided merchants, though historians will probably never know exactly what.

  Amerike was too close to the new Tudor dynasty for those behind the exploration westward to completely trust him. Whatever was really going on in Bristol, it was a closely guarded secret among the small cabal of merchants who had originally sent the Trinity on voyages of exploration. But there is one tantalizing clue. Some years later, when the dispatches of the Spanish ambassador in London were discovered, informing Columbus about what his former friend John Cabot was doing, Columbus was reminded of something they clearly both knew: that Bristol merchants had sent regular annual expeditions across the Atlantic for seven years—starting, in other words, in 1490—with the search for hy-Brasil and the Island of the Seven Cities. Somehow and somewhere, those who had dominated the stockfish trade from Iceland had quietly discovered a new source.

  The great secret the Bristol elite was trying to protect from the king was that there was now an alternative plan to trade with Iceland. But, for now, they were only exploring. The first few voyages may have been unable to re-discover the enticing coastline of the islands that the Trinity had glimpsed in 1481 before Thomas Croft’s arrest had undermined the whole project.