Toward the Setting Sun

by David Boyle

  The truth was that even the Columbus brothers were having their doubts about what they had found, though they dared not admit them to anyone but their closest allies like de Cuneo—and he was gone. Where was China? Like Cabot, they began to suspect that it was probably farther north—that they had misjudged the latitude of Cathay and had overshot it and were now lost in the islands south of Indonesia.

  The answer, they believed, was to plan a new voyage, with what supplies they could spare, using two ships, plus a small vessel they had constructed from spare parts at Isabella; Bartholomew would take it northward. The expedition was planned quietly, alongside the slave fleet, and was designed to find Cathay. For de Cuneo, explaining their thinking once he was back in Europe, this was the very last chance for the admiral: “If in that direction no more will be found than we had found in the above related [voyage to Cuba], I am very much afraid that he will have to abandon everything.”

  But it was not to be. The business of rounding up slaves had roused the Tainos across Hispaniola into action. The chief of all the chiefs, Guaniguana, united as many of the tribes as he could on the island in the early months of 1495 and advanced on Isabella to drive the Europeans into the sea. Putting aside Bartholomew’s expedition, the Columbus brothers and Ojeda hurriedly knit together an army of defense. They led two hundred soldiers out to meet Guaniguana, and a combined charge of lancers with dogs terrified the Tainos and put them to flight. Effective resistance was at an end, but Bartholomew’s voyage to the north had now been fatally delayed.

  When the ships had been prepared again, later in the summer, a hurricane swept across the Caribbean and smashed them to pieces.

  6

  HEADING NORTH

  “Of Yseland to wryte is lytill

  need save of Stockfische; yet for sooth in dede

  out of Bristow and costis many one

  men have praticised by needle and stone

  Thiderwardes wythine a lytel whylle

  Wythene xij yeres, and wythoute perille…”

  “The Libelle of Englysche Polycye,” 1436

  “I see that the world is not so large as the vulgar opinion thinks it is.”

  CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

  IN NEWS, POLITICS, and diplomacy, stories that people desperately want to be true can take on a life of their own, however unlikely they might be. The canny and parsimonious Henry VII of England had, it seemed, united the nation and ended the civil war, but he was never quite loved. There was also continuing speculation and nostalgia in England and beyond about the so-called Princes in the Tower—the young heirs to the Yorkist dynasty who had not been seen since they were sent under protective custody to the Tower of London in 1483. So when rumors spread across Europe in the early 1490s that one of the princes had been seen alive, people wanted to believe it.

  Henry was fated to be haunted by young men claiming to be one or the other of the missing princes, and it was frustrating to him that whether or not he knew of their fate, he couldn’t produce them as evidence that the pretenders were frauds. No sooner was Lambert Simnel safely imprisoned in his palace kitchens, than another, far more convincing, imposter emerged on the continent, claiming once again to be the missing Richard, Duke of York. Some time in 1489, just as Bartholomew Columbus was proposing the enterprise of the Indies to the English court, a fifteen-year-old apprentice to a Breton merchant, known to history as Perkin Warbeck, was asked by his master to model some of the silks they were selling in Cork harbor in Ireland. A passerby immediately recognized him as Edward, Earl of Warwick, a Yorkist claimant to the throne.

  Embarrassed and a little scared, Warbeck swore he was wrong. He was almost certainly from a converted Jewish family, actually the son of John Osbeck of Tournai. But later in the day, more visitors swore oaths that he looked like the bastard son of Richard III, John of Pontefract. But he couldn’t have been, they reasoned, because Pontefract was in prison in England. Yet what else could explain his extraordinary likeness to the family of York? He must be none other than the missing prince. It has never been quite clear how this misunderstanding, or practical joke, came to be taken so seriously—except that those who claimed to believe it, and Perkin Warbeck himself, seemed to want it to be true. So much so that Warbeck, a most extraordinary fantasist and confidence man, began to see the possibilities, and to act out the part until the role trapped him and there was no turning back.

  Perkin Warbeck

  Two years later in France, when rumors of the reappearance of one of the missing princes reached the ears of the king of France, Charles received Warbeck. It made diplomatic sense to him—because it was so inconvenient to the English—for him to officially recognize Warbeck as the Duke of York. He involved Margaret of Burgundy, Edward IV’s sister, who hailed him as a “white”—a member of the family of the white rose of York. She in turn funded and opened to him the doors to the royal rulers of Europe.

  Again, it has never been clear whether she did so out of malice toward the Tudors or the conviction that this was, indeed, her long-lost nephew. Whatever it was, in the autumn of 1493, as Columbus was setting out on his second voyage, Margaret of Burgundy introduced Warbeck to Maximilian, the Holy Roman emperor, who was equally taken with the youth. Between them, they encouraged his attempted landing in England in July 1495, and watched fascinated as he fled first to Ireland and then Scotland, and into the welcoming arms of the thoroughly convinced James IV, the romantic young king of Scots.

  Unknown to Columbus and Vespucci, and probably Cabot—and probably also unknown to Henry VII of England—a small clique of Bristol merchants were continuing their voyages of exploration westward, building on the voyages of the Trinity fourteen years earlier, in flagrant defiance of the new treaty that had carved up the world. Despite glimpsing an island in 1481 they believed was hy-Brasil, they seem to have been unable, after repeated attempts, to find the right winds and currents to take them back there, with only very basic navigation equipment at their disposal. In the summer of 1494, their efforts seemed to have been rewarded with another sighting of what they believed to be the lost isle. They followed its coastline southward, but heavy seas and a disaffected and frightened crew forced them to turn back. It was the perennial problem for explorers.

  But unlike Columbus, with his triumphal return only two years before, these scouts had to sneak up the Avon and swear their crew to secrecy. Since the original license for exploration had been allowed to lapse thirteen years earlier, after Thomas Croft was put on trial, these voyages had been clandestine. What is more, the small group of Bristol merchants who knew about them—now that Thomas Croft’s partners were mostly dead—kept the closely guarded secret to themselves for fear that any trading advantages they could gain would simply be lost to others. Yet without admitting the discoveries and making them legal, they were forced to explore in secret. It was precisely this dilemma that Columbus and Cabot had set out to resolve. The result was deep factions among the merchants of Bristol. The new chief customs official, Richard Amerike, appointed to replace Thomas Croft, suspected the voyages but could not prove them.

  One man who also watched carefully was their fellow merchant and English spy, John Day. He saw the return of the voyage and bided his time.

  We may only have the sketchiest details of the personalities of some of the key figures in the race for America, but it is possible to discern a great deal from the way people behaved toward them. Columbus clearly inspired a strange mixture of awe and exasperation—it is the contradictions here, not the lack of evidence, that make him hard to read. Vespucci seems to have consistently inspired both trust and affection among those more powerful than he, and irritation with his pomposity among people of lesser importance. Cabot’s confident bonhomie seems to have impressed those he came across with his abilities as a cartographer and globe maker, as a leader, navigator, and negotiator, but he seems to have turned others into immediate opponents. He impressed Ferdinand in Valencia, but inspired such suspicion among local officials that his je
tty plans were scrapped. Reading between the lines, this seems to have also been the pattern after his arrival in Bristol, sometime early in 1495.

  Whatever the merchants told the king, this was a good time to set up business in Bristol. After the loss of Gascony and Bordeaux to the French in 1453, the cloth and wine trade to Bristol had been cut in half. Many Bristol merchants had been forced to shift part or all of their business to London. But now the wine, cloth, and sugar trade between Bristol and Lisbon and Madeira—which Columbus and Cabot had both taken part in—was replacing it and then some. This was now a successful port, home to ten thousand people, perched at the confluence of the Avon and Frome rivers, which met in a great basin at the heart of the city, and where ships from France, Ireland, and the Spanish peninsula could be seen loading and unloading.

  Cabot had been drawn back to the city once again, because of the cloth trade, which had dominated his life before his debts banished him from Venice. His proposal for the Indies had been rejected in Lisbon, and the Bristol ships at the quays brought to mind not just the sight of Columbus and his so-called Indians, but also the notion that the English might be candidates for an alternative approach.

  Cabot had probably always known sketchy details of the western voyages by the Bristol merchants. When the Trinity had returned in 1481, there were Venetian galleys docked in Southampton and London, and they included crew members from his Scuole Grandi confraternity. He had also spent enough time around Seville and Lisbon, since catching the glimpse of Columbus in Valencia, to work out precisely what mistakes he believed Columbus had made. If there was land to the west of Ireland—and there seemed to be evidence that there was—and if it wasn’t an island, then the way to the Indies was to follow the coast southwest all the way to China.

  Cabot now believed Columbus had marooned himself on some midocean archipelago. That meant the enterprise of the Indies was still alive, and the great advantage for anyone sailing from Bristol was that the latitude was that much shorter than it would be sailing from the Canary Islands or the Azores. Cabot was a globe maker. He understood all too well the implications of shorter latitudes farther north. The key for Cabot was what kind of land had been found by the Bristol merchants. If it was an island, as they clearly believed, then he was no better off. But if it was the mainland, or near the mainland, then he would claim it under the authority of whatever ruler backed him, and follow the coast down to the spice trade. This was not welcome news for the close-knit coterie of Bristol merchants protecting their secret. Since the Trinity voyages, they had been thinking in terms of an island; Cabot was saying that it was actually an eastern continent.

  Because of the furtive westward voyages since 1480, Bristol was also a somewhat secretive city. The old alliance that had first sent the Trinity on expeditions to the west had ended. Croft died in 1488, Spencer that very year (1495), and de la Founte would die within months. Those who protected their secret, the island of hy-Brasil, were naturally suspicious of this Venetian seeking support for a westerly voyage. Cabot kept quiet about his Genoese origins: Genoa had been deeply unpopular in Bristol since the local merchant Robert Sturmy and 128 Bristol crewmen had been killed in a naval engagement with pirates employed by the Genoese in 1458. But Bristol was already divided in its loyalties. Croft had been chief customs official, loyal to the Yorkist dynasty, and had been sacked by the new king. His successor, Richard Amerike, was a successful merchant and ferocious moneylender in his own right, but a distant relative of Henry VII, and therefore the object of suspicion among those privy to the secret of hy-Brasil.

  Enter Cabot, almost penniless and armed only with contacts in the Thorne family of merchants, one of whom he had met in Castile. As a foreign merchant, he would normally have lodged in another merchant’s home. As a penniless adventurer, he may have been forced to live with his family outside the city walls, in the crowded foreign community known ironically as Cathay, but within hailing distance of the wealthiest merchants’ homes around St. Mary Redcliffe, the great church on the outskirts of Bristol. From there, at least before the nine p.m. curfew when the city gates were closed, those lodged outside the walls could watch the ships arriving from Venice, Lisbon, or Seville, next to the great bay windows of the customs house in front of the docks, with the bearded crews staggering ashore, the women selling bread and ale in the streets, the prostitutes in their striped hoods, and the colorful cargoes of Gascon woad for dying cloth blue and the Spanish lice used for dying the famous Bristol Broadmead cloth scarlet.

  But his lack of money made Cabot’s enterprise urgent. He was given an introduction to Richard Amerike, and convinced him that the enterprise was worth the risk. For Amerike, it was the same calculation as it was for Isabella of Castile. If Cabot failed, then he lost little. But if he did what he said he would do, then, at the very least, the near monopoly of the Mediterranean spice trade enjoyed by Southampton would shift to Bristol, and that would make Bristol very rich.

  As Cabot was making his home in Bristol, the eyes of Europe remained focused on the momentous events in Italy, where the continuing French invasion had lost momentum behind long supply chains stretching back along the Italian coast.

  For the first time in living memory, the fractious Italian city-states were beginning to work together to face this unprecedented threat. Even Venice and Milan, which had both initially welcomed the French, had been persuaded by the pope that—if Charles were allowed to wander unchallenged around Italy—they would all soon become French possessions in a burgeoning French empire. It was time to act, and a Holy League—holy because Pope Alexander proclaimed it as such—was created in April 1495 to resist the French army. It included the emperor Maximilian and Castile and Aragon. In fact, Ferdinand was one of the main architects of the alliance. Together, they persuaded the veteran mercenary, the Duke of Mantua, to lead an army against Charles.

  The treaty was signed beside the Grand Canal in Venice, and the sultan’s ambassador was allowed to watch from behind a hanging carpet, having been reassured that, despite the rhetoric, the league had no designs on Constantinople. When Charles heard about it, he flew into a rage and threatened the Venetian ambassador with a rival alliance, realizing as he did so the danger he was now in. By the following month, the league was threatening his communication routes and Charles realized it was time to withdraw—if he could. He set out with half his army, plus twenty thousand mules carrying the spoils of victory, each cannon lashed to a hundred men to get them through the Apennine passes. For a second time, the cardinals cleared out of Rome to make way and, this time, Pope Alexander went with them.

  On July 4 the main French army reached a village south of Parma called Fornovo and found their way blocked by the combined forces of the Holy League. Charles faced the coming battle on an enormous black horse called Savoy, his long nose poking out of a full suit of armor. In the ensuing battle, he lost his valuable wagons and most of his artillery when the league’s ill-disciplined cavalry left the battlefield to chase them. But, as a result, he was able to fight the league to a standstill and negotiate a truce, allowing the remains of the French army to pass unmolested back across the Alps.

  Naples was retaken by an Aragonese army later in the month. The gains from the greatest French army ever to cross the Alps were precisely nil, though the knowledge of the Renaissance was taken back home by the retreating soldiers when they dispersed at Lyons. They also left behind the so-called French disease, the syphilis brought to Europe by Columbus’s crewmen, and caught in Naples from the Aragonese defenders. Within seven years, it had reached Canton in China.

  The league now knew how vulnerable Italy was to a renewed French attack and were desperate to widen the alliance. Would England join? Diplomatic messages crisscrossed the continent in the weeks before Christmas, 1495, and in London King Henry realized he was in a strong negotiating position. He told Ferdinand’s emissary that his price would be the marriage of his son Arthur to a Spanish princess. It was also made clear that Maximilian would have t
o drop his support for Perkin Warbeck, and this he refused to do.

  It is one of those peculiar ironies of history that, as preparations were being made for the most extraordinary year of navigation and exploration in history, the minds of the rulers were very much on other things.

  In Portugal, minds were not concentrating on the fate of the Holy League in Italy. The wily King John, the perfect prince, had not been well since the accidental death of his son and heir, Alfonso, in 1491, thrown from his horse within sight of his father, who always suspected he was the victim of one of Ferdinand’s spies. In the years since, John had consistently made the case that he should be succeeded by his illegitimate son, George, but this was against the bitter opposition of the queen. So bitter, in fact, that when John’s health spiraled into sudden decline in October 1495, just as Cabot was arriving in Bristol, it was rumored that the queen had poisoned him. After all, had not John personally assassinated her brother for his plot to overthrow the throne?

  Whether this was so or not, a few hours before he died on October 25, at the age of only thirty-nine, John had apparently changed his mind. He named his wife’s younger brother, Manuel, as his heir. Manuel was vain, fair, and slight, with a love of luxury and music, and slightly indolent. Negotiations were accelerated for him to marry the widow of Alfonso, Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter Isabella.

  This alliance proved to be a disaster for Lisbon’s Jewish community, 120,000 of whom had taken shelter there when they were expelled from Aragon and Castile in 1492. Now, to win the favor of the Spanish court, the new king Manuel I decided he must toughen up his policy. So in the new year, Portugal copied Isabella’s policy in Castile and Aragon, setting a deadline of December 1496 for all Jews to either convert or leave the country.