by David Boyle
In the weeks that followed, he became a familiar figure around Westminster and in the streets of London farther up the Thames. London was then a city of riotous apprentices, of hot pies sold in the street, heavy bar-room drinking, and the ghoulish sight of traitors’ heads on poles at the southern end of the extraordinary—and crumbling—London Bridge, with its houses, chapel, and drawbridge.* London Bridge was also one of only two ways over the river. The pavements were often unpaved and the footpaths muddy, and it made sense to climb down the river steps and shout “oars” if you wanted to get around.
This was also a city in the grip of one of its periodic crazes. Playing cards, with the famous representation of Elizabeth of York—Henry VII’s wife—as the queen, had just arrived in London and could be found in nearly every inn and tavern. So popular had they become that the king himself had banned servants and apprentices from using them that very Christmas, though he regularly gambled with cards himself. Cabot undoubtedly came across them on this visit.
Cabot was keeping to the original plan that he and Columbus had outlined. His voyage was to be explicitly about trade, and he would enforce his own claim to any lands that were discovered with a royal warrant. There would be no simple fee and dismissal with honor as there was for the Portuguese commanders, and there would be no secrecy forced on them as there had been for the Bristol explorers.
An official voyage to the Indies was a tricky affair diplomatically. For one thing, it would fly in the face of the pope’s decision to divide the world between Castile and Portugal. But it also required careful thought, and most English diplomats were engaged at the time in intricate negotiations with the Holy League, which were taking place in Nordlingen near Augsburg. It was there that Italian diplomats were hammering away at the emperor Maximilian to persuade him to drop his support for Perkin Warbeck so that England would join. The main player in the league was by then Ferdinand of Aragon. At the beginning of 1496, just as Cabot was becoming entrenched in his own negotiations in London, Ferdinand sent his emissary Rodrigo Gonzales de Puebla to negotiate a marriage between the young Prince of Wales, Henry’s nine-year-old son Arthur, and his own daughter Catherine of Aragon—as long as Henry sealed the deal by joining the league.
Only one thing seemed likely to defer the plan: Warbeck was now in Scotland as a guest of James IV of Scots, and they were planning a joint attack over the border into England. James had taken an instant liking to Warbeck, installed him in a magnificent suite in Stirling Castle, and married him rapidly to one of his cousins. Ferdinand was kept fully informed about this by his spies in Edinburgh, and he was determined that the attack should not happen. He therefore launched a sophisticated intelligence scam to persuade the Scottish king—a bachelor—that he had another available, unmarried daughter. If James dropped Warbeck and his invasion plans he could marry her. As part of the same intelligence plot, Warbeck would be lured to Castile and quietly disappear.
As Cabot and his advisers sat in the corridors and antechambers of Westminster, they heard rumors of the negotiations with the Holy League and they realized one aspect was playing firmly into their hands: As long as Ferdinand and Isabella were desperate for Henry to join their league against France, they would not quibble about minor infractions of their monopoly on what Columbus called the Indies. What is more, a rumor had reached Henry’s ears that Warbeck was in fact in Castile and being sheltered by Ferdinand himself, in which case he would hardly care what Ferdinand thought. But of course Cabot also emphasized the economic benefits to England of having a handle on the spice trade, and having met Bartholomew Columbus, Henry was familiar with the basic idea of sailing west to go east.
Even so, waiting on the will of kings was a difficult and expensive business. Even if Cabot managed to get to see Henry at this tense moment in diplomatic intrigue, there were still detailed negotiations with the royal lawyers, and almost everyone involved—even the man who warmed the sealing wax for the final document—had to be paid. Cabot and his investors sat for days, even weeks, in the drafty corridors of Westminster, unsure which lawyers they could trust and which superior courtiers could really give them access, paying out money and talking. Like Columbus in a similar situation a decade earlier, Cabot’s main weapon was his powers of persuasion.
Cabot’s exertions in Westminster had not gone unnoticed by Ferdinand’s network of spies, who were particularly vigilant about any threat to their unexpected foothold on the Indies. On January 21, 1496, de Puebla—now Ferdinand’s ambassador in London—wrote home to warn that “one like Columbus” had arrived there and was trying to persuade King Henry to mount his own enterprise of the Indies. He reassured Ferdinand that, in fact, Henry was not listening to this proposal, which was in any case (he said) a plot by the French to undermine Anglo-Spanish relations at this crucial diplomatic moment.
De Puebla was a shabby figure around Westminster, who had become so close to the English king, on this and previous visits, that he attracted some suspicion from his compatriots. He was short in stature and came from humble origins, and his father was rumored to be a tailor and a converted Jew. He supplemented his income by representing the pope and the emperor in London as well, but he was paid so badly by Ferdinand, and so irregularly, that he was forced to spend much more time hanging around the court than he wanted.
“Why does he come to court?” Henry asked one of his courtiers, according to the Tudor chroniclers, wondering why this somewhat poorly dressed visitor was always at Westminster Palace.
“To eat,” they said. Henry roared with laughter.
To make matters worse, once Ferdinand’s other ambassador Pedro de Ayala had finished his work in Edinburgh—and James had discovered with disgust that there was no other unmarried Spanish princess—de Ayala was sent to London to reinforce de Puebla. But the two diplomats loathed each other, and the English court thoroughly enjoyed watching them fight it out in public.
In fact, de Puebla was wrong: Cabot had managed to wangle at least one meeting with the king himself, spreading out his maps and, like Columbus, faced the prospect of the whole project being referred to a committee. But he had won over both king and committee as well as the royal lawyers. When de Puebla was writing to Ferdinand, the patent that would give Cabot the right to explore with the king’s authority was already being negotiated. It was finalized on March 5, 1496, addressed to “John Cabotto, Citizen of Venice, Lewes, Sebastyan and Soncio, his sonnys,” and finally signed by the king.
The documents gave the Cabots the right—and their heirs and those merchants to whom they had assigned some of those rights—to send five ships to “the eastern, western and northern seas” to discover “whatever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians.” The document was carefully written to give some grounds for defense if Ferdinand and Isabella complained. The southern seas were not included, and Cabot’s patent extended only to undiscovered lands “unknown to all Christians.” If Columbus knew about a place, they must not go there.
The patent also set out that these lands would be occupied in the king’s name, and that all goods that came from there would come through Bristol, and, as in Castile and Aragon, the king would take 20 percent of the profit. Other merchants could go there and trade, under the same conditions, but they needed to have the permission of Cabot and his deputies. It was very similar to the deal done with Columbus, and further evidence that he and Cabot had hammered out the original plan between them.
As soon as the deal was done, and Cabot and his advisers were on their way back to Bristol, the English diplomat Sir John Egrement arrived in London with the news that Maximilian had agreed to drop all reference to Perkin Warbeck, and there was now no barrier to England joining the Holy League—as long as the Scots stayed within their borders.
By late May or June 1496, Cabot’s small expedition was already at sea. Historians do not know exactly when or where, but he was in
stormy weather in a tiny caravel, somewhere southwest of Iceland, and in serious trouble. Bad weather, poor charts, and disease were the continuing threats to all voyages of discovery. But the real challenge in those days, when sailing anywhere except along a coast meant sailing into the unknown, was in managing the fears of the crews. Bartholomew Dias had been forced to turn back as soon as he had navigated the Cape of Good Hope. Columbus was nearly thrown overboard by terrified crewmen. And now, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, with gales laying the tiny ship Matthew almost on its side in the turbulent ocean, its crow’s nest touching the waves, Cabot’s crew decided they had gone too far.
Cabot’s dash to sea after signing the royal documents was precipitous, perhaps because he wanted to guarantee better weather by sailing in the spring or because he feared the diplomatic window that allowed the English to ignore the pope’s division of the world might close. Bristol’s merchant community seems to have closed ranks against him, except for Amerike and two of his business associates—Robert Thorne and Hugh Elyot. The king was famously frugal and was not investing in the voyage, and there was clearly little chance of raising enough money for the fleet of five ships that had been agreed to in the documents. In fact, Cabot would have been forced to assign a large proportion of the rights in his royal patent to Amerike and his associates. The patent had specified that all trade from his discoveries would have to go through Bristol, which meant that, initially at least, only Bristol financiers would have been prepared to invest, and they were fatally divided between those who were party to the secret of the earlier discoveries and those who were not.
It seems likely that the lease agreement on the fifty-ton Matthew had been arranged while Cabot was still in London. Matthew is an unusual name for a ship and probably was a nickname used after Cabot renamed the ship after his wife, Mattea. But then Matthew was also the name of a tax collector in the Bible, and the apostolic equivalent of a chief customs official, so it may also have been a tribute to Amerike, the expedition’s main investor.
In the stormy North Atlantic, the whole enterprise was now threatened. It has been suggested that the crew was particularly worried about ice building up in the rigging. This was not a problem Cabot had ever faced before, and it was hard to pretend that he knew what to do. Columbus seemed to have been a master of navigating by dead reckoning, but we know nothing about Cabot’s preferred methods of navigation, though he would have had a quadrant for measuring latitude by the stars. Both methods were all but impossible in bad weather. Previous experience, as Cabot must have known, suggested that three thousand miles was probably the limit before most crews would mutiny. The Matthew had actually sailed only two-thirds of that, but in such bad weather under such exhausting conditions, buffeted from one anonymous area of unknown ocean to the next, it might well have seemed like the full three thousand miles. Added to that, they were by then short of food. If there was to be no landfall to stock up, and no freshwater, they would have to return. They had tried—God knows they had nearly given their lives—but there was no sign of land, let alone of the Indies. It was time to turn around.
It is impossible not to wonder whether Cabot was also a victim of the coterie of Bristol merchants who knew what was on the other side of the Atlantic. There were crewmen aboard, perhaps, who had been paid to make sure the Matthew never stumbled upon their islands, of hy-Brasil or their newly discovered fishing grounds. Cabot also had no choice. The ship’s marshal would normally punish sailors who threatened extreme actions of this kind, which might include ducking or even keelhauling, dragging the man underneath the ship, his skin torn off by barnacles. But if the ship’s marshal and the crew were united, there really was no alternative but to consent to their demands. Historians have no idea how long they were battered at sea—there is no record of the date Cabot left England—but if the crew of twenty decided unanimously that they must turn around, they would have. The crew, even in medieval times, had maritime law on their side—the so-called Laws of Oléron—which gave crews in these circumstances the right to vote on whether to go home.
Bitterly disappointed, Cabot stood on the quarterdeck of the Matthew as they sailed back down the familiar parallel coastlines of the Bristol Channel, and waited for the tide to sweep them back up the Avon to the ignominious encounter with his critics and an embarrassing confrontation with Amerike.
He returned to Bristol, sometime in August 1496. Henry himself was in the city on August 12, and it is tempting to suppose that he took the opportunity to meet the king and retain his support for another attempt. This time Cabot was determined that there would be no mistakes. Advised by Amerike and his other backers, he handpicked his crew of eighteen for the Matthew and made sure that there would be allies aboard to support him. He would take his two merchant backers, Elyot and Thorne, plus two friends of his: an unnamed Burgundian and a Genoese barber from Castiglione who Cabot had persuaded to accompany them as the ship’s surgeon. It may be that his fifteen-year-old son Sebastian joined them as well.
Autumn and winter 1496 to 1497 was a peculiar and sometimes alarming period in Britain. Ferdinand’s plot to neutralize Perkin Warbeck unraveled and, in September, he and his new ally James IV of Scotland, led a disastrous raid over the border into England. James was nearly captured in Berwick and returned home chastened and fed up with Warbeck, who slipped away to Ireland on the Cuckoo, the only ship James could spare. It was then that Ferdinand’s emissary Pedro de Ayala came to London and clinched the long-awaited deal to have England join the Holy League. When the news was announced in November 1496, every street in London from London Bridge to St. Paul’s Cathedral was decorated with the banners of the great livery companies that presided over London’s traders. The church bells rang through the morning and bonfires were lit across the city. Similar celebrations were held in Bristol, where Cabot was working.
In the new year, news arrived that the Anglo-Spanish alliance was agreed to. The treaty to marry Prince Arthur to the baby Catherine of Aragon had been signed. Henry VII had sent Catherine a wedding ring in gold and silver. This had implications for Cabot’s voyage, though, as suddenly it was important that the English not upset Ferdinand and Isabella by trespassing on their islands. Cabot crossed his fingers in the hope that his patent would hold until his departure date in May.
Juan Aguardo’s aggressive arrival at Isabella in October 1495, when Cabot was first in London, and his brandishing of what amounted to a royal warrant, was evidence of a shift of loyalty at Isabella and Ferdinand’s court. It was imperative that Columbus should return to Spain before Aguardo had the chance to make his report. The last thing he wanted to do was to leave Hispaniola at this crucial moment in the unpopular, though capable, hands of Bartholomew, but it had to be done. To that end, Columbus and his remaining loyal followers—and the crews of Aguardo’s ruined fleet—struggled through the winter to assemble something from the wreckage of the hurricane. From the larger pieces of the wrecked caravels, they managed to construct one sea-worthy vessel, which they christened India. From the end of January 1496, Columbus shut himself away, fully aware that he had not obeyed the queen on the question of sending evidence home against his settler malefactors. For six hard weeks, he constructed evidence against everyone who had been hanged or mutilated. He may not have sent them home for punishment, but at least he would have some evidence that they had been dealt with properly.
On March 10, five days after Cabot’s negotiations were concluded in London, Columbus and Aguardo squeezed into the India and the Niña with 30 slaves and 225 disillusioned Spanish colonists. The Niña’s original crew numbered only 25, so this meant desperate overcrowding on the decks and below. Among those on board was “rebel” leader Chief Caonabo, who, like many of the other Tainos on board, died on the voyage back. Food ran so low over the next six weeks that the crew even suggested eating the slaves or at least throwing them overboard.
Apart from the desperate crowding and shortage of food and water, Columbus was able to recover some of h
is physical health during the weeks at sea. But his mental health was still under severe strain. He could not accept, let alone admit, that his judgment had been wrong. All the evidence, and it mounted week by week, was that his islands were not the outlying borders of China and Japan. But why then had God guided him there? It had to make sense. Instead of cerebral rest, Columbus sat in his cabin at the stern of the small ship, writing feverish letters of self-justification to the queen, trying to counter the influence of Boyle, Margarit, and Aguardo. “The more I said,” he complained, “the more these calumnies they uttered were redoubled and abhorrence shown.”
When his inspiration for letter writing had temporarily been expiated, he sat hunched over his Bible, searching for clues. He became particularly obsessed with Isaiah 60:9:
Why, the coasts and islands put their hopes in me,
And the vessels if Tarshish take the lead
In bringing your children from far away,
And their silver and gold with them,
For the sake of the name of the Lord your God.
Sometime during his long second journey to Hispaniola, Columbus began signing his name with a mysterious cryptic set of symbols, which no historian has quite been able to decipher. The signature referred to him as Christo Ferens, like his namesake St. Christopher, the Christ bearer, carrying Christ on his back across the Atlantic. Since Tarshish was usually identified with Spain, the verse from Isaiah seemed to be self-referential. He was God’s chosen instrument. But if so, then surely the suffering he had undoubtedly caused could not have been what God intended. Making steady progress in the mid-Atlantic, the spring sunshine and the occasional sea spray on his face, he remembered the delight with which he had first encountered the innocent Tainos. When he landed in Spain, he would arrive not as a conquering hero this time, but wearing the garb of a penitent. And if God was not appeased by this show of humility, it might at least help his cause with Isabella.*