by David Boyle
Vespucci lost no time making the journey to Granada where the sovereigns were based, dealing with an uprising by Moorish insurgents. Along with the enormous pearls they had been given on Trinidad, he presented them with two large precious stones, one the color of amethysts and the other the color of emeralds. Ferdinand and Isabella were delighted and were fascinated by Vespucci’s cosmographical calculations. They were right to be. Vespucci had outlined to them more new coastline than anybody since 1492, although he still was unsure where it was in relation to his mental atlas. His method of measuring longitude was used for three centuries until the invention of reliable chronometers in the eighteenth century. He also promised to make a globe explaining his discoveries for the king and, in return, Ferdinand made him an unprecedented offer. There were three ships being fitted out for a new expedition and they would leave in September. Would Vespucci go with them? Not even Columbus had managed a response so immediate.
Basking in royal favor a few weeks later, Vespucci began to reach out to his various contacts. He had been suffering from malaria since his return and was not well, so he had time to write a full account. He decided to write to his old Popolano employer Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, now thirty-seven and steeped in the turbulent politics of Florence’s uneasy new republic, having played a leading role in the brutal overthrow of Savonarola. He promised that a map and globe were following, to be brought by a friend of his from Seville called Francesco Lotti, and described the journey in colorful detail, obviously intending it for a wider audience. He added that he hoped to go back soon and find Ceylon, and rather exaggerated his own importance on a voyage where he was simply representing the investors to one of the subcommanders but not a commander himself. Lorenzo had also had Giorgio Vespucci as a tutor, and as a result, understood something about geography.
The letter made it clear that Vespucci regarded the land he found as a “continent.” Columbus had written something similar in his letter to the sovereigns. They could not escape the evidence. But which continent? Both men in their conversations in Hispaniola leaned in the same direction. It had to be the Antipodes, the legendary continent in the far south, but stretching much farther north than anyone had realized. What else could it be?
The second, more sensitive, question was exactly how far west it was. As he repeated his calculations now, back in Spain, Vespucci realized there were inaccuracies in the Ferrara almanac he had used. He also realized he had miscalculated the length in miles of one degree of the size of the earth—most likely a consequence of spending too much time in the company of Columbus. He reworked the figures, based on his new calculation of the circumference of the earth—27,000 Roman miles, just 50 miles out—and there was one inevitable and rather shocking conclusion. When he had sailed down the coast of the new continent, he had clearly crossed to the Portuguese side of the line drawn under the Treaty of Tordesillas, and the treaty was clear: if anyone found land in the area of the other, they must report it immediately.
He did not know then that just three months before, Cabral, the leader of the Portuguese expedition to India, had landed there himself, more or less accidentally. At almost exactly the same time, his old colleague Marchionni was realizing through his contacts at the Castilian court that Vespucci held a vital clue to the identity and position of Brazil.
The hope of gold had been so elusive for Columbus, and he had so many faint moments of excitement, only to have them dashed. Back in December 1499, there had been the first sign of what might actually be major gold deposits on the north slopes of the Cordillera Central, fifty miles south of Isabella, in Hispaniola. Columbus had enough self-knowledge to realize that another report along these lines would not be helpful, at least without a ship full of gold to back it up. Now six months later, it was clear that this really was a major gold seam, and in fact it would soon be producing nearly a ton of gold every year. But for Columbus, it was too late.
Ojeda’s interview with Ferdinand and Isabella had disturbed them. He handed over a sheaf of complaints against Columbus, described an anarchic chaos on Hispaniola, with Castilian and Aragonite colonists subject to the tyrannical decisions of the foreign Columbus brothers. He hinted at duplicity over the pearl fields and dropped strong hints that the reason so little gold had been forthcoming was that Columbus was siphoning it off for himself. To make matters worse, the court was now being followed by sailors from Columbus’s first and second voyages, demanding to be paid. Whenever the sovereigns appeared in public, they would chant “Pay! Pay!” And when either of Columbus’s sons—still pages to Queen Isabella—made the mistake of being seen in public without her, there was an uproar. The demonstrators would point to them, shouting that they were the sons of the Admiral of the Mosquitos. It was all very embarrassing.
The sovereigns had appointed Bobadilla to investigate and take over responsibility for Hispaniola if necessary, and then had held back because of the crisis around Granada and unease about their original promises to Columbus. It was clearly now time to send him, and he could take back with him the Taino and Carib slaves who had been freed in Castile.
Back in Hispaniola there was another outbreak of disaffection, when Roldán’s old lieutenant Adrian de Múgica rose in rebellion. It was a complicated issue, which involved the defection of Roldán’s former mistress and the arrest of her Castilian lover (Múgica’s cousin) by Columbus. Since their humiliating compromises with Roldán, the Columbus brothers had veered in the opposite direction, keeping control with the utmost brutality. Those colonists caught stealing had noses and ears cut off and were sold in the town square of Santo Domingo as white slaves. One woman who mentioned that Columbus was a low-class son of a weaver was paraded naked on a donkey by Bartholomew and then had her tongue cut out. Christopher congratulated his brother for defending the family honor. Both also prevented the baptism of local Indians in case it kept them from being sold as slaves back home.
This time, Columbus decided, there would be none of the compromise that he believed had made him ridiculous over Roldán. When the rebel leaders were captured, Columbus insisted that Múgica and his comrades should be hanged. The sentence was delayed because they could not find a confessor, but when the priest finally arrived, Múgica refused to confess, claiming that he had forgotten all his sins. In a rage, Columbus had him thrown into the sea from the top of a tower. As luck would have it, as soon as the sentence had been carried out, and Múgica’s battered corpse hung by the neck down by the dock, there were once more sails on the horizon visible from Santo Domingo. Some hours later, who should walk down onto the same dock but Francisco de Bobadilla, bearing letters from the sovereigns addressing Columbus simply as “our admiral of the ocean sea” and omitting his other titles.
For Bobadilla, the gruesome sight that met him at the dockside seemed to confirm every rumor in court about the tyrannical Genoese who had taken power over this island. He eyed the seven copses hanging there with shock and distaste. When he was greeted by Columbus’s brother Diego, now a priest, he asked what this meant. Tactlessly Diego told him with some enthusiasm that five more were due to be hanged the following day. Bobadilla showed him his warrant from the sovereigns, asked for the evidence against the men—reminding Diego that they were supposed to be sent home for punishment—and announced that the executions would not go ahead as planned. Diego replied that he took orders only from his brother, and something about the combination of his tone and the extreme situation, and no doubt Bobadilla’s exhaustion from a month at sea, catapulted the normally restrained and careful administrator into decisive action.
With fury and determination, he sent his soldiers to seize the fort. Then he ordered the whole population of Santo Domingo to gather in the church—the cathedral was not yet built—and in front of all of them, he asked Diego in the sovereign’s name to obey his orders. Having forced the city to witness this, he then moved straight to Christopher Columbus’s own house, impounded all his papers and possessions, jailed Diego, and awaited his
brothers’ return.
Columbus was appalled and infuriated by this latest interruption but convinced that he could fight or talk his way out of the impasse if he had support. Briefly, he planned to enter Santo Domingo with a thousand Indians at his side, prepared to treat Bobadilla as a traitor. But time was running out. He counted on support from the friars because of his known commitment to the Franciscan cause, but even they deserted him. Bartholomew returned from his latest punitive expedition some days later, urging Christopher to fight, but it was too late and the brothers handed themselves over to the sovereigns’ representative. None of his former officials were prepared to put their admiral in chains as ordered. In the end, it was the cook who put the iron fetters on Columbus, but then made sure secretly that he was fed some scraps to keep him alive. In the meantime, Bobadilla’s officials defined the charges against him: his poor treatment of the Castilian colonists, his refusal to let the Indians be baptized, and his original intention to resist Bobadilla’s authority.
For weeks, he suffered hungrily in the stifling heat, cooped up in his own jail. When Columbus was taken out of prison in Santo Domingo at the beginning of October and heard the mob yelling for his blood, he believed he was going to be executed. Instead he was taken, still in chains, aboard the caravel La Gorda. Once out at sea, the captain offered to remove the manacles and chains, but Columbus refused. Like the Franciscan habit he had worn on his last return, they were a powerful message that communicated something about how wronged he had been. And so weighed down, he shuffled onto the dockside in Cadiz at the end of the month to begin the battle to clear his name.
8
THE FINISH LINE
“The crew was so worn down, shaken, ill and overcome by such bitterness that they wanted to die rather than live, seeing how the four elements working against them were cruelly torturing them. They feared fire for its flames…so furious and with such wrath—the water and the sea swallowing them up and that of the heavens drowning them.”
BARTHOLOMÉ DE LAS CASES, after his stormy
crossing to Hispaniola, 1502
“All great men make mistakes.”
WINSTON CHURCHILL
WHERE WAS CABOT? Nobody knew. His pension had not been paid since March 25, 1499. Mattea was being treated like a widow, even if she had not quite accepted that she was one. The Portuguese diplomatic mission to London that same year, inspired by fears that Cabot was trespassing on Portuguese ocean, was an awkward reminder that he had last been seen disappearing over the horizon from Ireland eighteen months before, and there was still no news. Sadly, London and Bristol had to conclude that he and his fleet were lost, together perhaps with the English dream of making London the new Alexandria. If there was going to be a new Alexandria, it looked as if it was going to be Lisbon.
Henry VII’s historian Polydore Vergil—the man who took over from Carbonariis as deputy papal collector—writing twelve years later, summed up the situation: “He is believed to have found the new lands nowhere but on the very bottom of the ocean, to which he is thought to have descended together with his boat, the victim himself of that self-same ocean, since after that voyage he was never seen again anywhere.” The full tragedy of Cabot is even clearer because, only those few short years later, Vergil had forgotten his name, left it blank in the manuscript, and had to fill it in later.
History has assumed until recently that Cabot disappeared and, in the absence of firm evidence to the contrary, that he did so without making any more significant discoveries in America. Research in recent decades has questioned both those assumptions, sometimes as part of long-running campaigns against the reputation of Columbus but, more recently, by painstakingly putting together the handful of clues that might reconstruct his final voyage.
Browsing in a Parisian curio shop by the Seine in 1832, the Dutch ambassador Baron Charles Walckenaer came across an ancient map. It was damaged and crumbling, painted on ox hide in a strange irregular shape. It was also enormous: six feet long when it was unrolled. Examining it more closely, and with mounting excitement, he discovered an inscription on the bottom. It said it had been made by Juan de la Cosa at Puerto de Santa Maria in 1500.
It transpired that the map had been in the Vatican archives when they were raided by Napoleon in 1810 for a new library in Paris. Most of the booty was returned to Rome later, but this map was mislaid. Walckenaer took it home, and it was bought by the Spanish government when he died in 1853 and is now in the Maritime Museum in Madrid. The map is generally accepted as genuine and the very map that was drawn by Juan de la Cosa, using sketches he had put together on his voyage from 1499 to 1500 with Alonso de Ojeda. It remains controversial not because many academics seriously doubt its authenticity—though some wonder whether it was finished at a later time—but because of whether it sheds any light on the mysterious disappearance of John Cabot and his sons. Because although Cabot’s fate remains a mystery half a millennium later, there are some obscure clues: a map, a letter, a lost inscription, and a broken sword—and now possibly also a whole new series of undiscovered archives.
Juan de la Cosa’s 1500 map
The reason the map is usually accepted as genuine is because, although it is the first of its kind to show the entire American coastline—minus Central America, which is obscured by a picture of St. Christopher—it does not yet incorporate information brought back from Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India. But it is the details that are interesting. The most accurate part of the coastline is undoubtedly that of Venezuela. This is hardly surprising because it incorporated information from two voyages—de la Cosa’s and Vespucci’s. But it remains accurate beyond Cape de la Vela where both Ojeda and Vespucci turned north. So where did de la Cosa get this information?
Some way up the North American coast—it is hard to figure out quite how far, because Florida isn’t depicted—there are two sets of English flags with the legend “mar descubierto por inglese” (sea discovered by the English). The place names along the North American coast also include names like Cape de Inynglaterra and St. Nicholas—the patron saint of Bristol’s mariner’s church. These all imply some connection with Cabot, though they are hard to decipher.*
By itself the map is no proof, but it shows signs that de la Cosa seems at some point to have exchanged information with Cabot or his companions. This may have been information on the maps sent out by the spy John Day to Columbus, or by Castilian diplomats at the English court, but some of the coastline of North America could probably only have been described at that stage by members of Cabot’s 1498 voyage. If that is so, there must have been direct contact with him.
The second clue is the letter, in this case a patent given by Ferdinand and Isabella in their gratitude to Ojeda for his achievements, setting out his privileges and duties for his next voyage, and granted in June 1501. These included the following:
“That you go and follow that coast which you have discovered, which runs east and west, as it appears, because it goes towards the region where it has been learned that the English were making discoveries; and that you go setting up marks with the arms of their Majesties. . .in order that it be known that you have discovered that land, so that you may stop the English in that direction . . . Likewise their majesties make you a gift in the island of Hispaniola of six leagues of land …for what you shall discover on the coast of the mainland for the stopping of the English…”
The question arises: How did they know the English had been making discoveries along the coast? Was it perhaps that Ojeda met them somewhere before turning north to Hispaniola? If so, it could only have been Cabot’s expedition. The Spanish historian Martin Fernández de Navarette confirms this with a tantalizing passage: “It is certain,” he wrote in 1829, “that Ojeda on his first voyage (1499) encountered certain Englishmen in the vicinity of Coquibaçoa.” But Navarette never revealed where he found the information.
The third clue is the sword. When Gaspar Corte Real and his Portuguese expedition went ashore on Newfoundland in 1501
, they took fifty Beothuk Indians captive. On examination, one had with them a broken sword of Italian design. One of them was also wearing earrings of a type normally worn by boys, and which seemed to have come from Venice. At the time, when the scale of America was still unknown, it was assumed that these artifacts had traveled all the way from the East. But that simply isn’t possible, and the only previous expedition, or certainly one carrying anything Venetian, was Cabot’s.
The fourth clue is the inscription on a rock in Grates Cove, Newfoundland, now disappeared, but readable by a traveler in 1822. The inscription said io CABOTO SANCIUS SAINMALIA, which seems to imply a connection with John Cabot and his youngest son, Sancius. The rock itself is variously said to have been taken to Newfoundland Museum or to have fallen into the sea. Either way, it no longer exists for verification.
None of these clues are definitive pieces of evidence. Each one is open to other interpretations. The sword could potentially have been put there on a previous voyage by John Fernandez. The letter could be referring to coasts much farther toward the north, and the map is open to any kind of interpretation, and does not include Florida, which it should have if someone had sailed all the way along the coast. The rock no longer exists. Taken together they may even be contradictory: They imply both a fate at the hands of Ojeda and a wreck off Newfoundland. But, with those important provisos, they do allow us to present a very tentative picture of what might have happened to Cabot and his fleet after his remaining four ships left Ireland heading west in the summer of 1498.