by David Boyle
But the story described here is primarily about business. Columbus, Cabot, and Vespucci were all in their own ways ambitious but rather unsuccessful merchants, determined to find a mixture of fame and wealth, but primarily wealth, and armed with a method—at least Cabot and Columbus—to profit by their discoveries that their rivals lacked. It was this insight that made Columbus a true pioneer. Other people had gone to America before, blown off course, glimpsing it through the mist, maybe even settling there like the Vikings, but it was a business idea that made it possible for Columbus to go there and to profit by it, and that made the risk worthwhile.
That the model was flawed—Asia was not on the other side of the Atlantic—does not take away from the fact that it was a business plan that took him there in the first place. Of all the many ways in which Columbus and Vasco da Gama shifted the course of history, even if such a shift was inevitable, the changes in the geography of business were probably the longest lasting.
The discoveries of the 1490s meant that Europe was able to bypass the great markets of the Middle East, the vast selling spaces of Alexandria, Beirut, and Mecca where the people of East and West met through intermediaries to exchange their produce. By 1504 there were no spices available in Alexandria. Just as Amsterdam replaced Venice as the center of the sugar and spice trades, so the Middle East lost its defining economic role. The new Ottoman empire was expanding over a beach from where the economic tide had receded. And apart from the discovery of oil there in the twentieth century, the Middle East has never recovered from this devastating blow. The political consequences of their impoverishment, and the consequent economic marginalization of the heart of the Islamic world, are still being worked out today.
After business, the most immediate effect of Columbus and his contemporaries was the growth of empire. By accidents of birth, death, and dynasty, Spain had become a powerful European empire. The addition to this of the New World made it temporarily vastly wealthy and powerful, though that wealth began to seep eastward and northward. While Spain was seizing the new American continent, Portugal was tightening its grip on the East, capturing Malacca in 1511 and Goa in 1512, and placating the Medici pope Leo X by the timely donation of a performing elephant from India. For the first time, the economic interests of the Christian and Muslim world were wholly opposed, and it was important to the Portuguese that the pope not intervene in defense of the threatened Christian outposts in the Middle East.
But the Portuguese empire was to be even more short-lived than the Spanish, and was in decline by 1550. Portugal was too small a country to maintain an empire in Brazil as well as the East, and to provide the inspirational leaders they needed when only one in ten of those who went to administer and trade there ever returned home. The English did not immediately grasp the possibilities of empire until Sebastian Cabot was an old man, though the benefits of gold-earning cod were becoming clearer.
The third shift caused by the encounter with the New World was intellectual. The first interpretations of what was there came from an inevitably imperial mindset, which limited the understanding of Columbus and Cabot about what it was they were finding in the New World. Everything from the animals and plants to the people there had to be filed according to the existing European categories, though so much of it demanded new ones. But the possibility of a New World, a place where humanity could start afresh, began to filter through the intelligentsia, to emerge again through the centuries, especially in North America, with new ways of thinking and organizing. The New World implied that other ways were possible.
There is no doubt that the sudden discovery that a large part of the earth’s landmass had lain beyond their knowledge all that time did shift the way people thought. Before Columbus and his contemporaries, arguments about the shape of the world were theological. After Columbus, they were based on experience. When four centuries later, after the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the adventurer Joshua Slocum sailed solo around the world, he was approached by three Boers in Durban who asked for his help to prove the world was flat. “They seemed annoyed when I told them they could not prove it by my experience,” he wrote later. That was the shift that happened: from henceforward, with some hiccups along the way, humanity would progress their knowledge according to what their senses told them, and would make the traditions of the ancients subservient to that.
These major effects on the lives of the generations that followed Columbus, Cabot, and Vespucci continue to reverberate today. But telling this story has been a historical experiment in its own right, weaving these disparate tales together as they were originally lived. Doing so has cast light on different aspects that perhaps have not been emphasized enough before—the international nature of the journeys of exploration, the business idea at the heart of them, and of course the continuing uncertainties about the details of what happened. But there are other conclusions we might draw as well.
The destruction of the Tainos, and other Indian peoples later, derives from a misunderstanding about wealth and value—a common misunderstanding that remains the besetting sin of the business world. Columbus’s fixation on gold, and the fixation of those who followed him about financial profit, blinded them to the value of what they found in the New World. They saw a land that could be exploited only in terms of plantations or extraction, and did not see what they could have learned. It was immediately an unequal encounter, where the charm of the natives gave way quickly to irritation that they were not faster in their extraction of gold. Columbus believed they were ignorant about the real value of things, and wrote about the “trifles” he exchanged with them; he was actually deluding himself about real worth.
We do not know Cabot’s attitude, but Vespucci’s betrayed some of the same naiveté. “As soon as he got the hawk’s bell,” he wrote about one innocent native who handed over a thousand ducats worth of pearls in return, “he put it in his mouth and was off into the wood, and I did not see him again.” It was almost as if the failure of the natives to grasp what was, in fact, a mistake about value, was a justification for enslaving them.
This is not just pious rhetoric about learning from the ways of the noble savage. The failure of the early settlements in the New World, and the struggles of those that survived, demonstrated just how much the settlers needed to understand about local agriculture. Indian plant breeding also seems to have been more sophisticated than that of Europeans at this time. They had a better understanding of practical obstetrics and pharmacology. Only in the late twentieth century have we come to understand the cornucopia of medical knowledge and pharmacological possibility hidden in the rain forest species that are fast disappearing as we study them day after day. Ironically, pharmaceuticals were emerging in Europe at exactly the same time, but as an underground movement in opposition to the medical profession, calling for a “chemical revolution” that would give medical knowledge to ordinary people.
It is true that as well as the new plants, Columbus brought back the idea of the hammock, which simply emphasizes how little he and his contemporaries learned, compared to what they could have.
One other business lesson, perhaps, is the power of international regulation. The eight negotiators of the Treaty of Tordesillas, who decided the ownership of the planet in a small Castilian village in the summer of 1494, drew a line down the middle of the Atlantic, which drove the competing powers to develop their knowledge about their own designated slice of ocean. They succeeded in keeping the peace by doing this, but it also drove forward the pace of discovery. A major motivation for Columbus’s later voyages and for Vespucci’s was to ascertain exactly what the line meant in practice.
Yet because it took no account of any nation except Castile and Portugal, it also inadvertently encouraged the growth of piracy, first by the French and then the English in the West, and by the Dutch in the East, as they challenged the Spanish and Portuguese empires respectively. The regulations protected the original innovators but drove a kind of terrorism two generations la
ter, which saw Drake burning the settler city of Cartagena. It is no coincidence that Drake’s bloodiest outrages coincided with the temporary merger between Spain and Portugal. There were virtually no alternative options open to other nations when all the rights to the world had been vested by the pope in one rival.
There is another, more disturbing, lesson about regulation. What the authorities were not able to do was to prevent the cruelty and the bloodshed, and there is no doubt the Spanish authorities tried, and that for all their complaints about Spanish barbarism, the English barely did. (Though it was the British who took the lead to end the slave trade three centuries later.) Las Casas persuaded the Spanish rulers to act against slavery in the New World, but again and again, they were too far away to do so and were defeated by the intransigence of the colonists. As early as 1514, the Medici pope Leo X argued that both nature and the Christian religion cried out against slavery. Yet the slavery continued, along with the most brutal cruelties.
European rulers in the next generation were about to develop the concept of “religious freedom,” which meant the right to impose their religion on their subjects. In the same way, the first concept of freedom in America—the one that led in the end to the overthrow of the Spanish empire—derived from the right to treat “our” Indians as we see fit.
Maybe if the Spanish had wanted to enforce humanitarianism enough, or if the English had wanted to enforce it at all, they could have done so. But it was probably beyond their power. We have become accustomed in our own century to believe we can prevent any abuse across the world. But this story is evidence of just how difficult that can be.
Despite this, there is still a hopeful message here. It is the extraordinary achievements of which human ingenuity is capable. In 1492, when Columbus set sail from Palos, Europe worked with a geography of the world that assumed Jerusalem was the center of an amorphous landmass surrounded by ocean—where the spherical nature of the earth was a generally accepted truism that nobody had actually tested. Just two decades later, with the return of Magellan’s ship Victoria from his circumnavigation, the basic shape of the globe was finally clear. There were landmasses that remained shadowy on the atlas, but America, the Pacific, Africa, and India now all took their correct shape, and all because of the temerity of a handful of pioneers who had traveled those sea routes themselves.
It was done with few resources and originally by a handful of adventurers on the margins of mainstream business and navigation. What is more, the foreign and trade policies of the nations involved adapted over and over again in that short space of time to meet the new challenges of new discoveries and new questions. New institutions were created and tested to drive forward more knowledge. Europe and its governments and institutions—and of course its mariners—were able to make gigantic intellectual and scientific leaps in the space of a generation. Those doubters today, who wonder whether humanity can adapt fast enough to meet the challenges it faces, might look back on Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci, and the others, and those that made their voyages possible, and realize that if the will is there, and if our leaders agree at least to let it happen, then massive and peaceful intellectual and practical revolutions are possible.
So when we tell the story of these three merchant venturers, we see not just blindness and cruelty, but also courage and determination. That is what the story says about human beings and particularly about Europe—because this is a story primarily about Europe: that all these qualities exist and we need to work with them. We have to make sure that our courage includes the presence of mind and self-knowledge to look into the unknown future and to see things as clearly as we can. In many ways, Columbus, Cabot, and Vespucci, for all their flaws and vanities, created the modern world, and we need to learn from their mistakes and borrow from their courage, so that we can push forward into the unknown ourselves.
POSTSCRIPT
STARS AND STRIPES
“If that Americo Vespusio who discovered those western Indies which the geographers deem to be a fourth part of the world became so famous in the doing, that all that land is called America after him…how much more reason could this part of Asia which this valiant captain of ours discovered be called Gama.”
DIOGO DO COUTO, speech to Goa municipal council, around 1600
“Then came a great shout from the flag…I am whatever you make me, nothing more.”
SPEECH BY FRANKLIN LANE, U.S. secretary of the interior, Flag Day 1914
B Y THE YEAR 1908, four centuries after these discoveries, the Spanish empire was a half-forgotten memory. The British empire, which succeeded it, was at its most-pompous zenith, its characteristic pink on its atlases marking a quarter of the world, including India, Canada, and parts of the Caribbean. On May 21 that year, in the polite Bristol suburb of Clifton, a genteel outpost above the great gorge through which Cabot sailed to America, a local architect and church restorer named Alfred Hudd rose to address the local antiquarian society with a discovery he believed would turn the history of Columbus and Cabot upside down.
Hudd was an enthusiast for the emerging history of medieval Bristol, and it was his detailed research into the marks medieval merchants used to distinguish their shipments that had led him to the theory on which he was about to expound. The merchant mark belonging to the Bristol trader and former customs officer Richard Amerike, or ap-Meric, had made him wonder whether the prevailing theory about the origins of the word “America” was correct.
If Amerike had backed Cabot’s voyage, was it not reasonable to suppose Cabot had returned the favor by naming the new continent after him? Maybe hidden on that furtive map of Cabot’s 1497 voyage, copied by John Day and sent to Columbus in Seville, was that very word, which filtered eventually through to Waldseemüller and his famous map. Maybe Waldseemüller’s explanation about taking the name from Amerigo Vespucci was an ambiguous translation, and that what he meant was that he believed that “Amerigo” was the origin of a word he had already seen on other maps. This is the heart of what might be described as the English conspiracy theory.
Nearly every European nation has its own conspiracy theory about the discovery of America. The Portuguese theory talks about evidence that John of Portugal knew of Brazil before 1492 and that Columbus was a double agent in his pay. The Danish conspiracy theory invokes the voyages of John Scolvus, and the secrets of the Vikings that Columbus heard in Iceland. There are Spanish conspiracy theories (Alonso Sanchez, the mysterious pilot who gave Columbus a map before dying). There are Basque conspiracy theories and even Jewish conspiracy theories. Many of them have added considerably to the knowledge about the period and contain more than an element of truth. When Hudd was at work the English conspiracy theory was already emerging around the Bristol voyages from 1480. There was considerable evidence, set out most recently by the historian David Quinn, that Bristol merchants and fishermen had indeed secretly been to the American coast before Columbus. But the Amerike connection added an extra frisson: the possibility that the continent itself might have been named after a Welshman.
Amerike himself died in 1505 and his estate above the gorge was inherited by his daughters, one of whom—Johanna Broke—is buried in St. Mary Redcliffe church in Bristol, just near the tomb of the owner of the Trinity, John Jay, and the shipping magnate William Canynges. The difficulty about the Amerike theory is that it is reasonably clear how Waldseemüller developed the name America, because he explains how he did so. This does not rule out a slightly different translation of Waldseemüller’s explanation but, even so, the idea that it was called after Amerike is a more complicated theory than the one we have. For the time being, at least, without further evidence, we have to assume that the continent was indeed named after Amerigo Vespucci, and probably without his knowledge.
The Amerike coat of arms
But then there was a peculiar twist to the whole story. The Amerike coat of arms is available in descriptions of his daughter’s tomb and is also in the Lord Mayor’s Chapel, just across from what is now
Bristol Cathedral, but which in Cabot’s day was the abbey. His coat of arms was, bizarrely, the stars and stripes. The stripes were yellow and blue and the stars were white on a red background, but even so it is a peculiar coincidence.
That is almost certainly all it is, though it is a coincidence that has fed the English conspiracy theory over the years. Every citizen of the United States of America knows the story of how Betsy Ross was commissioned to design their new revolutionary flag in 1777. But in fact, although Amerike’s stars and stripes must be a synchronistic twist of history, there is in fact a link between the famous Stars and Stripes of today and the days of Columbus and Cabot, and it reveals a central truth about the whole story.
On the morning of December 3, 1775, moored on the Delaware River in Philadelphia harbor, Lieutenant John Paul Jones raised for the first time the naval flag of the revolutionary states on the quarterdeck of his ship the Alfred. It was known as the Grand Union Flag, and contained thirteen horizontal red and white stripes, with a Union Jack in the top corner. Alfred had been the merchant ship Black Prince, which had already plied a brief career between America, Bristol, and London, and was one of the five ships in the new United States Navy. The first ship was called Columbus and the second Cabot “after Sebastian Cabot,” said a contemporary newspaper, rather inaccurately, “who completed the discoveries of America made by Columbus.” The flag had been commissioned by Jones from a local milliner named Margaret Manny, with cloth charged to the account of the Alfred. The question is: where did Jones and Manny get the design?
The answer is, almost certainly, that the horizontal red stripes came from the flag of the British East India Company, known as “John Company’s Gridiron,” which was identical. Exactly how Jones came to choose this flag has never been verified, but he was an experienced sailor himself, who had trained as a midshipman and mate on voyages to the West Indies. The Alfred must also have had a full complement of flags of convenience, for visiting foreign ports, and he may have had something similar on board already. The East India Company had been banned from using their red and white striped ensign outside Indian waters, but they continued to use it when they were attacking or resisting pirates. Many English merchant ships had used red and white striped flags in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and a century or so later were only allowed to do so in those specific circumstances. My suggestion is that Jones knew the implications of the flag—it implied an aggressive challenge—and he chose it for that very reason.