Toward the Setting Sun

by David Boyle

  *The ghetto in Venice was the first district known as such, because it had previously been a copper foundry and il getto is Italian for “casting metal.”

  Chapter 4

  *Almost exactly a century later, the great grandson of this Duke of Medina Sidonia was the commander of the Spanish Armada, the disastrous expedition to invade England in 1588.

  *Cabot was probably aware on one of these nightly stopovers that they were at the town of Yanbu, the legendary birthplace of the great geographer Ptolemy, whose atlas he may have carried with him at the time.

  *Innocent’s problem, like so many corrupt leaders before and since, was a growing obsession with the enemy within. He goes down in history as the man who set out the principles of the Malleus Maleficarum, the notorious book that led to the burning of witches across Europe in the centuries that followed. Worse, he also appointed Tómas de Torquemada, the cruelest grand inquisitor of Spain.

  *When Córdoba had been in the hands of the Moors, they maintained deep flood channels, but since it fell to the Christians, these had been allowed to silt up.

  *The wedding never actually took place, because Alfonso was trampled to death by a horse in July 1491.

  *There is one theory that Bartholomew joined his brother in Lisbon at this time and used his access to official cartographers to secretly copy some of the most protected maps. He is supposed to have smuggled these out on pieces of paper and tried to reassemble them back in Spain. This is possible but unlikely.

  *He dressed his bodyguard of old soldiers in red with flat black caps. Their successors still wear something similar, and are known as the Yeomen of the Guard or Beefeaters.

  *The Royal House of Savoy are also the ancestors of what became the royal house of Italy, until 1946, when King Victor Emmanuel III abdicated and went into exile.

  *The definitive manual for bookkeeping was being written at that very moment by a friar called Luca Pacioli, later a friend of Leonardo in Milan. It was to stay widely in print for the next four centuries.

  *He is supposed to have been rescued by a stranger who took him all the way to the city gate at Florence, and left him, saying, “remember to do that for which God hath sent you.”

  *Talavera was appointed archbishop of Granada after the city fell, and aroused the fury of the Inquisition for his tolerance toward Muslims. When his protector, the queen, died, they imprisoned him.

  Chapter 5

  *Boabdil was given a title in Castile but moved soon afterward to Morocco where he lived until 1527. His former subjects rose against their Castilian masters in 1499 and the liberal surrender terms were abandoned. This was not yet the era for tolerance.

  *A ton originally meant the number of “tuns,” or pipes, of wine a ship was capable of carrying. It is impossible to say precisely what the equivalent of a maravedis was in modern money, but in terms of its ability to buy unskilled labor, a maravedi seemed to have power similar to a U.S. dollar today.

  *This was a habit shared by the extremely wealthy. Pope Julius II was fed molten gold in a vain attempt to stave off his inevitable end.

  *As he did so, one of the most prominent church spires was hit repeatedly by lightning and the city zoo’s two lions fought and mauled each other to death. All three incidents were thought to be auguries of disaster for Florence.

  *A few of the families were so certain they would return that they simply locked their homes and took the keys with them into exile, passing them down from generation to generation. When Franco died in 1975, nearly five centuries later, and these descendants returned to Madrid, some of the keys were found to still fit the locks.

  *The first iguana they found was seven feet long and on the island of Isabella. They killed it and kept its skin for the sovereigns. They were not impressed back home. Historian Andrés Bernáldez said it was “the most disgusting and nauseating thing which man ever saw.” Iguana later became a delicacy for the conquistadors.

  †This word was incorporated into the languages of Europe to imply something alien—as in Caribbean, cannibal, and even Shakespeare’s character Caliban in The Tempest.

  *He never went on the pilgrimage.

  *The vast cathedral in Seville was the brainchild of one of the clergy there: “Let us build a church which is so big,” he suggested, “that we shall be held insane.”

  *Boyle is variously described by historians as Irish and Catalan; his name is spelled a variety of different ways. I have used the Irish spelling, for obvious reasons. As someone who had taken a vow of chastity, Boyle is unlikely to have been an ancestor of mine but, then again, who knows.

  *Behaim’s famous globe can be seen to this day in the background of Holbein’s eerie picture The Ambassadors, in the National Gallery in London, with the strange foreshortened skull in the foreground in the shape of a dagger. He left Lisbon again at the end of 1493, claiming to be on a secret mission for the Portuguese king, but was actually debt collecting for his father-in-law, and was captured by the English and had to bribe his way to freedom.

  *Columbus did not stay at Dominica, but the Caribs there were said later to have eaten a friar and been so sick afterward that they never ate anyone else dressed as an ecclesiastic.

  *The site of La Navidad remained a mystery until 1977 when it was discovered at a remote site near Libe—now two miles inland—by the local Baptist missionary and doctor, William Hodges.

  *Something else that was picked up on this voyage seems to have been syphilis, which appeared for the first time in Europe as a recognizable disease in Barcelona later that year. Within months, it had spread to the Aragonese forces in Naples, who would shortly encounter the French troops of Charles VIII and from there it would spread throughout the continent.

  Chapter 6

  *Today they are extinct or entirely subsumed into the colonial population.

  *The Tainos may have died out as a result of the arrival of Columbus, but they have left some traces of culture behind and the word “hurricane” is one of them. It is their word meaning “sudden storm.”

  *The man in charge of the upkeep of London Bridge at this time was John More, whose son—Sir Thomas More, the writer, chancellor, and future martyr for his refusal to abandon Catherine of Aragon—was then seventeen years old.

  *Those disillusioned Franciscans who came back on this voyage found their order in chaos in Castile, where a new leadership was insisting on stricter lifestyles. Some friars were said to have gone to North Africa and converted to Islam so that they could keep their mistresses.

  †He claimed later that he was in fact shouting, “Keep the peace, keep the peace!”

  *We last met Marguerite as an eight-year-old, betrothed briefly to Charles VIII of France. “Here lies Margot, a proper little girl,/Who, despite two husbands, is still a virgin,” she wrote, as her own epitaph, at the height of a vicious storm at sea on her way to her own wedding.

  *It was said that Días had chosen the spot because he fell in love with the woman chief of the territory, the formidable Cathalina, but las Casas, writing only a few years later, said this was not true.

  *Westminster was then still all but separate from London and had a fearsome reputation for disorder: One in four buildings there were alehouses or brothels. Caxton had actually died in 1492, but his business continued under his colleague Wynkyn de Worde.

  *Where you can still see it today. Legend also has it that this was a rib from a monstrous dun cow that terrorized Bristol in the Middle Ages. The story that Cabot brought it back is far more likely, especially as there is evidence in an old accounts book of a 1497 bill to have it erected in the church (“Pd for settynge upp ye bone of ye bigge fyshe… brote over seas”).

  *Warbeck’s new wife refused to accept that he was not who he claimed to be. “Most noble lady,” Henry VII said to her, “I grieve too, and it pains me very much, second only to the slaughter of so many of my subjects, that you have been deceived by such a sorry fellow.”

  *Day’s letter came to light only in 1955, wh
en it was found filed under “Brazil” by a professor of romance languages, who happened to be friendly with the Columbus scholar Louis Vigneras. Vigneras immediately recognized that the Brazil referred to was actually the mythical island of hy-Brasil.

  Chapter 7

  * The Niña had experienced the most bizarre adventure in the meantime. Chartered for a voyage to Rome, it had been captured by corsairs outside the port of Cagliari and taken to Sardinia, where the crew was removed and taken to a pirate ship. Four of t hese crewmen managed to escape, steal a boat, row back to the Niña, cut her cables, and sail back out to sea and to Spain, just in time for the Niña to return to the Indies.

  * The Cape Verde Islands were a peculiar place. Already shorn of the greenness that gave them their name but known also for their turtles, they had attracted a large population of lepers, who bathed in the turtles’ blood in the belief that it cured leprosy.

  * For the next century, the Amazon was known as the River of Smoke.

  * Da Gama met his first Hindus, among the first ever encountered by Europeans, Malindi on the African coast, and immediately assumed they were Christians.

  * Leonardo is said to have scoured the streets of Milan to find the right models for each disciple, and to have threatened to use the convent’s prior as the model for Judas unless he was given more time to finish t he painting.

  * Only three weeks later, Cabral’s fleet nearly met disaster rounding the Cape of Good Hope in an unprecedented storm. Four of his ships capsized and their entire crews were lost. The commander of one of them was the man who had first rounded the Cape for Portugal, Bartholomew Dias.

  Chapter 8

  * There is a place that used to be called Carbonear on the east coast of Newfoundland. We know Cabot was in the habit of naming places after his friends on board, and this one may refer to Giovanni de Carbonariis.

  * These are all rather confusing stories. It could also have been Giuliano di Bartolomeo de Giocondo, whose relative Francesco—another silk merchant—was married to the lady who would be immortalized by Leonardo da Vinci as the Mona Lisa. Or was this the Mona Lisa’s husband himself who visited?

  * Although there had been European settlements on Greenland within living memory, the knowledge of Greenland was beginning to die out, even among navigators. A century later, it had been forgotten completely. When Martin Frobisher “discovered” it in 1578, he tried to call it West England.

  * It is still in Modena in Italy, though it was thrown out of the window during a riot in the nineteenth century, after which it was used for some time as a screen in a butcher’s shop.

  * The “popinjays” are thought to have been Carolina parakeets, the last of which was killed in Florida in 1904. As for the bobcats, they were seen regularly by early settlers in New York State and even as far north as Maine. Even so, these trophies are evidence that the explorers were venturing farther down the American coast.

  * Guido Antonio had died the previous year, after a stormy session of Florence’s council, where his speech had been drowned out by stamping and whistling. To the new generation, he represented the old guard of supplicants to the Medici.

  * The Vizcaína may be the remains of the ship rediscovered in the area in 2001, now the subject of a series of legal actions in Panama. If so, it is the only one of Columbus’s ships to come to light.

  * It was said in London that no jury would acquit a priest brought before them, no matter how innocent he was.

  * Scholars have doubted the Méndez story, on the grounds that he told most of it himself. But when he died he asked that a canoe be carved on his tombstone.

  Chapter 9

  *There is not much of Saint-Dié left. It was burned down in a great fire in 1757, bombarded in World War I, and destroyed by retreating German forces in November 1944.

  *Only one copy of the original map has ever been found. It came to light in Wolfegg Castle in Germany in 1901, where it had been used centuries earlier to reinforce the binding of a book.

  *It was this unplanned and unexpected visit that is supposed to have given rise to the nursery rhyme “I had a little nut tree,” which explains that “The king of Spain’s daughter came to visit me/And all for the sake of my little nut tree.”

  *These waters were fatal for the early navigators. Sebastian Cabot faced mutiny in 1509, but Henry Hudson himself was murdered by his crew, set adrift in Hudson Bay in 1611.

  *Solís lasted less than four years. Landing in what is now Uruguay in February 1516 with seven men, he was killed by locals and cut into tiny pieces. Survivors of his expedition were still being rescued by Sebastian Cabot’s expedition a decade later.

  *This became one of the biggest libraries in Europe at the time, now the Biblioteca Colombina, still based in Seville, where Ferdinand died in 1539.

  *Boleyn’s younger daughter, Anne, was just then beginning a flirtation with Henry VIII that would end in their disastrous marriage.

  *They were repaired for the 1912 silent film The Coming of Columbus, which also used the log of Columbus as a prop.

  *A similar project was launched in the United States concerning Antonio Meucci, the Italian candidate for inventor of the telephone.

  Chapter 10

  *That same year, Queen Elizabeth I’s chef is supposed to have cooked the potato leaves for her and thrown away the actual potato.

  Copyright © 2008 by David Boyle

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner

  whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief

  quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Walker &

  Company, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010.

  Published by Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Boyle, David, 1958–

  Toward the setting sun : Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci, and the race for America / David

  Boyle.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8027-1651-4 (alk. paper)

  1. America—Discovery and exploration—European. 2. Columbus, Chirstopher. 3.

  Vespucci, Amerigo, 1451–1512. 4. Cabot, John, d. 1498? 5. Explorers— America—History.

  6. Explorers—America—Biography. 7. Explorers—Europe— History. 8. Explorers—Europe—

  Biography. I. Title.

  First published in the U.S. by Walker Publishing Company in 2008

  This e-book edition published in 2011

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-8027-7978-6

  Visit Walker & Company’s Web site at www.walkerbooks.com