by David Boyle
The crews said prayers on deck for their safe arrival and anchored offshore, and Vespucci’s large balding head descended over the side of the ship and into one of the exploring boats. According to his calculations, they were about five degrees south of Columbus’s landfall the previous year.
“We launched the boats and with sixteen men went ashore, to a land we found so full of trees and verdure too, for they never shed their foliage, and the sweet scent emanating from them (for all are aromatic) was so soothing to our nostrils that it had quite restorative effect on us,” he wrote later. But when they reached the shore, the vegetation was so thick, with the roots of the mangrove trees so deep in the mud flats and sand below the waterline, that there was nowhere to beach the boats. For the rest of the day, until it grew too dark to continue, Vespucci and the two boats searched for a way inland through the trees. They went back to the ships bitterly disappointed.
The following day, they turned east along the coast. It was a matter of basic precaution to follow the coast some way off but just in sight, in case of shoals and unexpected rocks. Noticing the peculiar behavior of the waters around them as they proceeded some distance offshore, they hauled a bucket of water onto the deck, tasted it, and to their astonishment found—just like Columbus had farther west—that it was freshwater, and they filled their casks with it.
The forest wall continued for days, but on July 2 they turned into a great gulf, about 150 miles across as it later turned out. Vespucci called it the Gulf of Santa Maria, the feast of whose visitation it happened to be that day, returning to conventional methods of naming new places: in practice, all three of the explorers named their discoveries after dates in the church’s calendar, with the name of the saint celebrated that day. To celebrate their arrival, as they moved nearer to the mouth of what looked like a gigantic river, there was a spectacular electrical storm, with lightning flashing in the rigging and masthead with St. Elmo’s Fire, the bright electrical glow from the masts when there is high voltage in the atmosphere. It was beautiful and terrifying.
This could not be Catigara because that was a sea-lane and therefore saltwater. The obvious explanation, as Columbus’s sailors had insisted in the mouth of the Orinoco, was that this was the mouth of some vast river. Vespucci turned the ships in toward the shore and soon found himself in an archipelago of islands at the river’s mouth, far bigger even than the one Columbus had stumbled across. Neither Vespucci nor his captains could have known that pouring out onto the coast, there were two rivers, which we know as the Tocantins and the Amazon, carrying one fifth of the world’s freshwater out to sea.
There was still no letup in the wall of mangrove roots that prevented them getting ashore. Vespucci chose the most northerly channel and the ships battled against the current and sailed into a river so broad that you could not see across it. The two tiny caravels, dwarfed by this vast freshwater torrent, made their way slowly upstream. Vespucci and his pilots feared reefs, so he anchored the ships and took nineteen men in two boats farther along the river, keeping away from the dangerous banks.
For two days, and by the light of the moon at night, they rowed continuously in teams. There was still no space to land, but Vespucci and his men marveled at the extraordinary colors of the parrots, only too aware—like Cabot in Nova Scotia—that they were being observed. Although there was no sign of people or buildings of any kind, there were lines of smoke rising from the trees which made it obvious that this vast forest was populated.*
It took less than two days to sail with the current back to the ships that were anchored near the mouth of the river. Vespucci hauled up the anchors and carried on along the coast to the south, where it became clear at night that the North Star had disappeared below the horizon. They had crossed the equator. It was a relief for those new to exploration, having heard all the stories about ships combusting at the equator or the air disappearing completely, to have survived with no more ill-effects than a bit of sunburn. “Rationally, let it be said in a whisper,” wrote Vespucci later, “experience is certainly worth more than theory.”
The next morning, the crew gathered on deck and Vespucci explained to them the significance of where they were. They were on the line that marked the hottest part of the world, where the sun was directly overhead at midday, and the stars—well, what were the stars in the southern hemisphere? Nobody, as far as he knew, had ever mapped them. He asked for volunteers among his crew to stay up through the night and help him draw the southern heavens for the first time. Nobody volunteered, so night after night he watched alone, searching with fascination for some heavenly body the equivalent of the polestar in the north.
They were still too close to the equator to work out which star this was but, after some nights, four stars that moved against one another in the same part of the sky were visible. In an intuitive leap, Vespucci realized this might be what he was looking for, pinpointing the constellation that mariners in future generations would know as the Southern Cross. Vespucci was not the first European to glimpse the Southern Cross, but it was an experience that changed him forever. Before reaching the equator, he retained at least one foot in the world of merchants, accountants, and profits. Afterward, it was knowledge he craved: He would give his allegiance and his labor to whichever employer allowed him to pursue knowledge for its own sake.
Alone at night, listening to the faint lap of waves against the ship’s hull and with the night breeze on his face, Vespucci stared at the new stars and lines from Dante’s Purgatory leaped into his mind. He recited them quietly to himself on the quarterdeck, and set them down again in his description of that moment in his letter to his Popolano mentor Lorenzo di Pier-francesco:
I turned to the right hand, and gave heed
to the other pole, and saw four stars
never seen save by our first parents.
The heavens appeared to rejoice in their rays.
O widowed northern region,
Since thou art deprived of beholding these.
While Vespucci was sailing southward along the coast, the most extraordinary news was finally reaching Lisbon. The fleet under Vasco da Gama, to which they had waved farewell two years before, had rounded the Cape of Good Hope successfully, made their way up the east coast of Africa, and linked up with traders in India itself.* Europe had finally achieved the trading dream of a direct link with the East, and it had been done by the Portuguese sailing eastward, not the Italians sailing west.
Vasco da Gama had run into immediate difficulties in Calicut, aware that there were divisions within the local population, some of whom were determined that this first European mission should not be encouraged to return. By August 1498, only three months after Cabot and Columbus had set sail, da Gama had decided he would leave and return with a much larger fleet.
It had taken da Gama’s ships another three months to sail back across the Indian Ocean, and by early in the new year 1499, they were so short of men that the São Gabriel was beached and set on fire to concentrate the crews in the remaining ships. On March 20, they had rounded the cape going the other way, and da Gama had sent his fastest ship on ahead, reaching Lisbon with the news on July 10, personally taking his sick brother Paolo from the Cape Verde Islands to the Azores, where Paolo died. When da Gama finally arrived in Lisbon on September 8, he was welcomed as a hero and given a triumphal homecoming into the city.
The Portuguese were keenly aware of the significance of Vasco da Gama’s achievement. But there were also those in Bristol and London who had been listening quietly to news of Cabot’s preparation for his small fleet of discovery to the Indies. Like Ferdinand and Columbus, the Portuguese king Manuel and his advisers had been struggling with the implications of the Treaty of Tordesillas for a round globe. It was all very well to divide the world between Portugal and Spain down the Atlantic, but what about the other side of the world? It was hardly surprising that the first reaction from Castile about Vasco da Gama’s return was to lodge a formal protest that he had been on t
heir side of the line laid down by the treaty.
Vespucci was sailing as fast as he could down the coast of what is now Brazil, the first European to do so. His ship (we don’t know its name) had managed about eight hundred miles since the equator, but Vespucci was certain this was not far enough to be anywhere near the Cape of Catigara, and the currents were getting stronger in the opposite direction.
“We encountered an ocean current which ran from south east to north west, and was so great and ran so furiously that we were terribly frightened and hastened away out of this great danger,” he wrote. “The current was such that the waters of the Strait of Gibraltar and around the lighthouse of Messina were those of a pool by comparison. It was such that when it struck our bows, we could not make any headway, even though we had a brisk fair wind.”
It is hard to work out exactly where they were, because there is no obvious current that Vespucci could have encountered in this part of the south Atlantic, unless it was the one that eventually becomes the Gulf Stream. Whatever it was, Vespucci’s captains sailed the two ships in a great arc out into the Atlantic, and turned south again. Still the going was no easier. On the first day away from the coast, they managed to make only twenty miles. The following day it was even less. Time and supplies were also running out and, even if there had been gaps in the thick forests, there was really no time to land. Marco Polo had not recorded this difficulty when he passed through the Cape of Catigara.
Clearly they could not continue. Bitterly disappointed that he had failed to identify the sea-lanes to India, there was no option for Vespucci but to turn around and sail back north.
The first people Vespucci had seen since sighting the coast of Guyana in July were back in Trinidad, where his ships had arrived about a month behind Ojeda and the rest of the expedition.
While Vespucci had been sailing down the coast of South America, Ojeda and Juan de la Cosa and the other two ships had been taking a more leisurely journey in the opposite direction, along the coast that later became known as the Spanish Main. Ojeda’s expeditions were never short on bloodthirstiness. He had no sense of negotiation and was inherently suspicious of almost any situation. Landing at bay after bay, his sailors left dead locals and burned villages behind them. When they reached Capo de la Vela in Venezuela, they turned north—as Columbus had done almost exactly a year before—toward the Lesser Antilles, and headed for Hispaniola, for rest and repairs.
By then, Vespucci was following along behind and was much more impressed with the locals than Ojeda. They had, he said, “the skin of tawny lions.” The people of Trinidad welcomed him and his crews, treated him and his men to breakfast, and gave him eleven large pearls and some colored parrots. “They all go naked as they were born, without having any shame,” he wrote later, in some amazement. “If all were related of how little modesty they have, it would be entering upon obscenity. It is better to keep silence.”
His two ships had made their way back up the coast, more than twenty miles apart, but still in sight of each other, until on August 4 they reached a point just north of their original landfall. Vespucci persuaded himself that it was still possible that Catigara was farther to the west along the coast, but after six hundred miles it was quite clear that this could not be the extreme tip of Asia in the west. The rivers were undeniable evidence that this was a vast continent.
They met more locals in the Gulf of Paria, following the map sketched out by Columbus the previous year, where they were entertained again with fruits, wine, and juice and presented with exotic birds and the most enormous pearls, and—if the implication is correct—they enjoyed the local women, with or without their consent. Vespucci was particularly fascinated by the local languages, and claimed largely as a result of this voyage that there were at least a thousand languages on the planet, at a time when most scholars believed there were only twenty-six.
Around the Paria Peninsula, and along the coast of what is now Venezuela, mapping as closely as he could, and going without sleep to map the sky at night, he found that the locals were less welcoming. Often their trips ashore encountered armed parties waiting to ambush them. It is hard to escape the impression that since they were now sailing about three weeks behind Ojeda and company, the “welcoming” committees were largely a reaction to Ojeda’s bloody raids. Normally the crew was able to anticipate these attacks and escape back to the boats before there was any confrontation. But on one occasion around August 16, Vespucci’s men were taken by surprise while they were still on the beach and had to fight for their lives.
The weapons at their disposal were considerably more powerful than those of their attackers. They had guns and swords, but they had little defense against poison arrows or a well-aimed machete. Vespucci’s men fled back to the boats, when the boatswain, the oldest member of the crew, urged them to stand their ground so that God could give them a victory. Vespucci described later how the boatswain emphasized the point by falling to his knees on the beach, praying aloud, then running ahead of the rest into the melée. The attackers were soon overwhelmed, and the crew turned into a raiding party, moving quickly inland to the nearest village and burning 180 huts to the ground, before following the wounded back to the ships.
There were so many wounded after this run ashore that Vespucci set sail immediately to find a quiet bay where they could recover. They did so for a week, near what is known today as Puerto Cabello. One of the crewmen died there from his wounds, and Vespucci dubbed the place the Bay of Arrows. A week’s recuperation meant that Vespucci could look more intensively at his new maps and consider the evidence that this was indeed an enormous continent. From the ship they had seen lions, pumas, deer, and boars, and it was believed at the time that you did not find large animals on islands. On one expedition into the bush, they also came across an anaconda nearly twenty-five-feet long and as thick as a man’s waist. Terrified, the crew dashed back to the ship.
Hanging back for fear of too close an association with Ojeda, or perhaps because he did not yet want to relinquish his temporary command, Vespucci turned north somewhere near the island of Curaçao, which he called Brazilwood Island. There occurred one of the most bizarre encounters between civilizations. Vespucci took eleven men ashore in a boat and followed an obvious human path for seven miles or so inland, where he found a village of large huts. Around the huts, to their surprise and delight, were a number of huge women, none of them less than ten inches taller than he was. The women entertained these outlandish visitors in their huts, where the sailors caught sight of two beautiful teenage girls, both also enormously tall. During this meal, one of the sailors suggested quietly to Vespucci and his colleagues, in an outrageous flouting of the laws of hospitality, that these girls might make a wonderful gift for the king of Spain.
Vespucci and the natives, from a later engraving
They were just discussing how they could steal them away when there was a rattle of voices outside the huts, and a large number of well-armed men arrived back from hunting. They were even bigger than the women. The men questioned their visitors closely using sign language. Where were they from? What did they want? Outnumbered by giants, Vespucci’s sign language—and the few words he had picked up from the Taino slaves in Seville—conveyed that they were journeying around the world and had no hostile intentions. The idea of kidnapping the two girls was quietly dropped, and the men escorted Vespucci and the crewmen politely and firmly back to their boats.
Back at the coast of the mainland, on Cape de la Vela, Vespucci was delighted to see a conjunction of the moon with Jupiter, which would help in his calculations later. The following day, on September 16, they finally turned northward toward Hispaniola. They were now only two and a half weeks behind Ojeda’s ships in their tumultuous journey in the same direction.
But the Curaçao story is revealing, partly because of what it says about Vespucci himself. Of the three explorers, he is by far the most modern: even-tempered, civilized, learned, and tolerant, even if he wasn’t wholly trustw
orthy. Yet he still takes us by surprise, although we do know him as a man steeped in the slave trade in Seville, and reveals himself as a potential kidnapper and looter after all. But it is revealing also because this is one of the very few stories of discovery in the new world where the locals emerge with power and dignity. Perhaps this was the pattern of an alternative relationship between the new arrivals and those they had discovered. Perhaps, if things had been only a little different, this could have been a vision of a more equal relationship between the Old World and the New.
Once Columbus had arrived back on Hispaniola, the most obvious problem that required attention was Roldán’s revolt. A quick review of the resources at his disposal made him think twice about a direct confrontation. He had only about seventy soldiers available, and he was unsure of the loyalty of at least half of them. The rest—about a third of the forces theoretically available to him—were now too ill with syphilis to be able to fight. Roldán was a former friend and he seemed contented with his fiefdom in the west, so it made sense to come to terms. Columbus initially sent him a placatory message, addressing him as “my dear friend.” The negotiations that followed kept them both busy for nearly a year. Roldán set out his terms: He wanted to be appointed magistrate of the island as a whole. He also wanted his supporters to be given what they longed for: the chance to go home, and take with them what gold they had managed to extract, their concubines, and their slaves.