Toward the Setting Sun

by David Boyle

  The arrival of Fernandez in the city brought the battered merchants of Bristol, who had invested and lost money in Cabot’s 1498 voyage, around once more to thinking about the far west, and the New Founde Land. They did not yet have access to Juan de la Cosa’s map; nor did they yet understand that Cabot’s coastline actually led down the coast of a new continent, directly to the islands that Columbus had happened upon, though some may have suspected it.

  But even those who guessed the truth had no idea if this long coastline was a narrow strip of land or something more substantial. Asia and the spice trade were still the objectives and if there was land in the way, then the issue was how to get around it. Fernandez and his Azorean colleagues provided a glimmer of hope that had seemed dead when Cabot failed. Perhaps Mattea and Sebastian Cabot, still in Bristol, also hoped they might find or justify their husband and father. Either way, on March 18, 1501, Fernandez achieved his first objective. A royal patent was issued by Henry VII in West-minster, giving him and his colleagues a ten-year monopoly on any trade from lands they discovered that were “unknown to all Christians.”

  The patent went further, in an unusual passage missing from all the others: Fernandez and his partners were ordered to punish those “who rape or violate against their will or otherwise any women of the islands or countries aforesaid.” Rumors of what really happened when navigators went ashore had obviously reached as far as London.

  There were six people named in the patent apart from Fernandez himself. The others were his partners from the Azores, Francisco Fernandez and John Gonsalves, and three Bristol merchants, Richard Warde, Thomas Asshehurst, and John Thomas. The document gave them the right to import goods tax-free for the first four years, and to take one twentieth of the goods that anyone else imported from there for the first ten years. They would also be given the office of admiral—there was no way that the English would be outdone by Columbus.

  Fernandez knew what Corte Real was planning because the information was arriving every day down at the Bristol docks. They knew that their rival expedition had returned claiming to have seen land strangely similar to their own discoveries, and would return there. Once again, the race between navigators has been characterized as little more than that. But this was not so much a race to get somewhere first, it was a race to get there with the critical documentation that could secure a lucrative business monopoly—and that required sailing on behalf of a prince capable of enforcing it. That was the essence of the new struggle between Fernandez and Corte Real.

  As they battled against time at the Bristol docks to prepare a new expedition, the news arrived that Gaspar Corte Real had set sail again. They did not yet know it, but this voyage was to provide evidence of Cabot’s voyage as well as a brutal harbinger of the future.

  Corte Real’s small squadron sailed north to Greenland again, but then sheered off to the northwest, finding land and following the coast about six hundred miles southward, maybe as far as Maine, staggered at the size of the trees. Landing in Newfoundland on the way home, the expedition surrounded the first village of Beothuk Indians they came to and took the whole village captive, taking the inhabitants down to the boats and onto the ships. It was when they were on board the three ships that Corte Real’s men made their discovery of the Italian sword hilt and the Venetian earings. Cabot was already slipping from people’s consciousness. The existence of these trinkets could only mean one thing for Corte Real. The strip of land dividing them from Asia must be very thin, and these objects had been brought all around the world. Never mind the trees, the icebergs, and the bears. They must be near Asia after all.

  Two of his ships took the villagers immediately back across the Atlantic to Lisbon, where they were an object of fascination for the diplomatic community. “Their manners and gestures are most gentle,” wrote Alberto Cantino, a secret agent for the Duke of Ferrara. “They laugh considerably and manifest the greatest pleasure.”

  Cantino was posing as a horse dealer and was in the process of bribing Portuguese officials to allow him to copy the secret master map that hung on the wall of Manuel’s court. The copy was successfully smuggled out the following year.* It showed Cabral’s discoveries in Brazil, brought back by the Anunciada, and da Gama’s discoveries in India, but it showed no North American coastline, the information which Corte Real’s ships were bringing.

  Between Cabot, Corte Real, and Juan de la Cosa, the truth about the American coastline was at last becoming clear, less than a decade since Columbus’s first landfall, though the breadth of the continent was still a mystery. But neither Cabot nor Corte Real were there to reap the glory. Corte Real’s own ship continued the journey south along the coast and was never seen again. Hundreds of mariners searching the ice for the Northwest Passage would share his fate in the centuries to come.

  In Lisbon, Vespucci found that the Portuguese caravels were bigger than their Spanish equivalents. He stood on the deck, greeting the commander of his expedition, Gonzalo Coelho, who would lead a series of expeditions to Brazil. It had only been weeks since his fateful decision to escape from Seville, and he was already formulating in his mind a way to be so scrupulously fair to both nations that he could remain on good terms with both. In Lisbon he had also met and spent some time with Gaspar Corte Real, who set out two days after Vespucci sailed, heading north via the Azores. On May 13, 1501, Vespucci was rowed out to the ships anchored off the tower of Belen outside Lisbon harbor. Slipping their moorings, they made their way down the Tagus and out to sea. It was broader than the river at Cadiz, which had become so familiar to him.

  Vespucci would become contemptuous of Coelho’s navigation, but for now, at least, he had no status to complain about it. Coelho set a course directly south along the African coast, heading for Cape Verde—not the islands, but the Portuguese garrison and harbor at Bezebeghe, near Dakar, in mainland Africa—to stock up on the remaining stores they needed and to make some small repairs. Once within the small harbor, they realized that they were not alone. Two battered caravels shared the wharf, and as soon as Vespucci was ashore, he knew where they had come from. These were stragglers from Cabral’s expedition to India, which had headed via the coast of Brazil on the way out in case there was anything there. They had lost contact with the main fleet on the way back from India and were now on their way home. Vespucci stayed eleven days talking to them and quickly gained the trust of two of the most extraordinary men he had ever met.

  One was the commander of one of the ships, Bartholomew Dias’s brother Diogo, who had been carried far out into the Indian Ocean by the storm that had drowned his brother around the Cape of Good Hope, and had made his way back around Africa by himself to Cape Verde. The other was Gaspar da Gama, no relation of the great navigator, but baptized by Cabral as a Christian. He was Jewish, from a Polish family, born in Alexandria, who had fled in his youth to Palestine and thence in various excursions down the Red Sea to India. On one of these, he had encountered Cabral’s expedition, offered to act as a navigator and interpreter, and been baptized a Christian, taking this name.

  One of their discussions had been about the route that Cabral had used to get to “Terra Santa Cruz” and whether the land he had found was continuous with the coast. Gaspar da Gama had discussed this very point with Cabral because he had advised him widely about geography. But Vespucci had already been to the land that would be named Brazil, back in 1499. There was a great deal to talk about. Vespucci and his new friend spent hours comparing maps and place names, finding that those used by Gaspar da Gama did not correspond with the ancient names used by Ptolemy and the medieval mapmakers. Nonetheless, Vespucci was given access to geographical information for places Gaspar da Gama had only heard about—the spice islands in the furthest reaches of the East, beyond India. He also realized the full significance of the new spice route that could bypass the Mediterranean altogether. The future of Alexandria and Venice as the great markets of the known world were under threat.

  If Cabral’s discovery of Bra
zil had made him a hero, his expedition to India was less of a success. It had ended with the bombardment of Calicut and the sworn enmity of the Muslim traders there. Vasco da Gama would be asked to replace him as commander of the next expedition. These were all vital nuggets of information for Mediterranean traders, and Vespucci’s first thought was for his home city of Florence. In the remaining days before his expedition set sail from Africa, he wrote to his correspondent Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, tipping him off about Cabral’s progress in India and warning him of what lay ahead.

  Vespucci also warned Lorenzo about the journey he was about to begin: “This voyage which I am now making is perilous, to the limit of human courage. Nevertheless I am doing it with bold resolution to serve God and the world.” Vespucci knew that if, like Cabot, he never returned, this letter would be taken as his final words.

  John Fernandez’s expedition of three ships set sail from Bristol later in the summer of 1501. The hopes of the local merchants went with him, though a handful of them stayed aloof from the general celebration: those who had invested in Cabot’s last voyage and who shared in Cabot’s patent. The phrase “unknown to all Christians” in Fernandez’s patent was carefully chosen. It meant that he could claim no rights over the New Founde Land that Cabot had discovered. That remained theirs, with the eighteen-year-old Sebastian Cabot—now training as a cartographer—as the leader of the hopes of the patent holders.

  Fernandez himself does not seem to have survived the journey. Nor did Richard Warde, the Bristol merchant on the same ship. But the other four partners returned to Bristol in triumph later in the year, having discovered another island—possibly Baffin Island—and were rewarded in the new year by a grant of twenty pounds from the king. There is a proviso here that is that the main evidence for Fernandez’s 1501 voyage was the reward paid to “men of Bristoll that found the isle” in January 1502. But if Alwyn Ruddock was right, and Cabot had returned safely in 1500, this may actually have been a reward to Elyot and Thorne, who were in London that same week, in which case it was a belated honoring of the achievements of Cabot and Carbonariis.

  John Cabot and sons from a later painting

  Elyot and Thorne, and Thorne’s son William, were also given a grant to buy a large ship from Normandy: the 120-ton Gabriel, which brought back a cargo of salt-cured fish from Terra Nova later in the summer. At the same time, in the summer of 1502, their rivals in the Fernandez syndicate were also sailing westward. One of the expeditions—it is not clear which—was recorded as bringing back bows and arrows, “popinjays,” and hawks, and later a number of animals described as “cats of the mountain,” probably bobcats.*

  More important than that was the Fernandez syndicate’s mapping of a clear passage through to the East. Fernandez, or those leaders of the expedition that remained alive, charted one end of the Davis Strait, before being pushed back by ice. They also brought back with them some hawks and three Inuit people, who were “clothid in Beestes skynne, and ete Raw flessh, and Rude in their demeanure as Beestes,” and displayed them in Westminster, where they excited a great deal of interest. The idea that they ate raw meat and spoke an incomprehensible language particularly appealed to the world-weary diplomats in Henry’s court. Two years later, the chronicler Robert Fabyan saw them again at Westminster Palace, dressed as courtiers, and said they were almost indistinguishable from Englishmen.

  When the remains of the Fernandez syndicate’s second expedition was back in England, the royal court was able to show some interest in exotic “eastern” discoveries. The Bristol consortium needed high-level support if they were going to secure England’s claim to the New Founde Land, especially as it was soon clear that the Corte Real family had put to sea again. On January 15, 1502, Gaspar Corte Real’s older brother Miguel set sail with two ships to search for his missing brother. This would have seemed a threat to the English court when they heard the news, except that their attention was now consumed by other events. The royal wedding between Arthur and Catherine of Aragon had taken place the previous November, and after only five months, the royal marriage was suddenly and tragically over. In April 1502, Arthur died unexpectedly in Ludlow Castle. He and Catherine had been there to preside over the Council of Wales but, after some weeks, both became ill with the sweating sickness, the mysterious and fatal disease (now extinct) that appeared first in 1485 within days of Henry VII’s triumphal entry into London, and spread briefly across Europe. Catherine nearly died herself, and when she did manage to recover, she found she was a widow.

  There then followed an agonizing period of uncertainty, which would be raked over by lawyers in England and Spain in a generation’s time. Catherine gave evidence that, because they were so young, the marriage had never been consummated—something only she could know—and on the strength of that, the pope gave a dispensation that she could be engaged to marry Arthur’s younger brother, Prince Henry. While these delicate negotiations were going on, the king refused to let Catherine go home and kept what had been paid of her dowry. Ferdinand and Isabella refused to pay the rest of it. The standoff was enough to sour the relationship between England and Castile.

  It was a frustrating time for the Bristol consortium. Fearful that the Corte Real family would get there first, they wanted royal support for a proper voyage to find the Northwest Passage to Asia, but could attract no interest. What they did not know was that by then the Corte Real family had been consumed by a second tragedy. The two ships of their new expedition decided to search in different directions along the American coast to maximize their chance of finding Gaspar and agreed to rendezvous on August 20, 1502. One ship found nothing and waited at the point as arranged, but Miguel Corte Real’s own ship never appeared. The only clue about his fate was in an ambiguous carving in rock in Narragansatt Bay on the coast of Massachusetts, which appears to be dated 1511—almost a decade after his disappearance—signed Miguel Corte Real, and claiming to have been written by the leader of an Indian tribe.

  Gaspar’s other elder brother asked Manuel for permission to continue the search, but he refused. The king decided it would be too much for the family to lose all three brothers.

  I

  “Sometimes I was so wonder-struck by the fragrant smells of the herbs and flowers and the savor of the fruits and roots that I fancied myself near the Terrestrial Paradise.”

  AMERIGO VESPUCCI, letter to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco

  de’ Medici, 1502

  Vespucci’s crossing with three large Portuguese caravels was very different than his first westward voyage. Coelho followed what Vespucci understood from Diogo Dias and Gaspar da Gama to have been Cabral’s route to the Indies, a circuitous circle out into the Atlantic. The fleet was battered by storms and lost for periods in the mid-Atlantic. The winds were against them and the sky was overcast, both day and night, which meant observations from the stars were impossible. But on August 15, 1501, three months after they left Lisbon, they made landfall somewhere near the modern city of Recife, and close to the point where Vespucci had been forced to turn back in 1499. Coelho sent one ship on a more southerly course, to see if they could identify the secure harbor that Cabral had found, and told them to turn north again later to meet up. Vespucci himself made for Cape St. Augustine to take some astronomical measurements to calculate the longitude, and set off southward at a more leisurely pace.

  Vespucci had long since realized that this landmass he was sailing along was enormous: “a new land,” he called it, “which we observed to be a continent.” Cabral had been wrong about finding an island. Columbus had also believed that this was a continent, but thought it was just south of China. Vespucci’s determination to find a southwest passage implies that, while he may have basically agreed with Columbus, he was beginning to realize that this coastline—which blocked the way to China—ran from the far north to the far south.

  This time there was no difficulty getting ashore, and Vespucci and Coelho were determined that they would take the time to understand the continent. T
he first thing they noticed were the myriad colors. “What shall we say of the number of birds, and their plumage, colors and songs, the manifold species, and their beauty?” Vespucci wrote later. There were also large snakes and wild cats, in fact so many species that he doubted they could all have fit into Noah’s Ark. It was fated to be Latin America—Darwin’s voyage more than three centuries later—that would finally overturn the literal understanding of Genesis.

  Vespucci noted also the aromas and fruits, “many of which are good to taste and conducive to bodily health.” There was also dyewood and the brazilwood that would give this whole region its name. But it was the people that fascinated him most. They were entirely naked and lived a simple life that, in many ways, he admired:

  Having no laws and no religious faith, they live according to nature. They understand nothing of the immortality of the soul. There is no possession of private property among them, for everything is in common. They have no boundaries of kingdom or province. They have no king, nor do they obey anyone. Each one is his own master…Their marriages are not with one woman only, but they mate with whom they desire and without much ceremony. I know a man who had ten women… When their children, that is the females, are of age to procreate, the first who seduces one has to act as her father in place of the nearest relative. After they are thus violated, they marry.

  He was confused, given this, and with no private property, why the natives still managed to fight such bitter wars with one another. It was a fascinating passage in the literature of the “noble savage,” influenced by Columbus’s own writings. All early writing about America described it in much the same way, discovering a people who were part innocent, part corrupt. But it also had a pompous air, which was temptingly easy to lampoon. Vespucci was trying to create an aura of navigatory wisdom around himself, even though this was only his second voyage. It was also not a wholly accurate description: we now know the people he saw did have private gardens. Vespucci could not help borrowing from idealistic and fictional reports of travels that were in circulation at the time. He was to run into trouble for this later. But what seems to be the first European description of cocaine has the ring of accuracy: