The Road to There

by Val Ross

  The appearance of another qilin convinced the Emperor that the omens were good for his other grand project, moving Chinas capital to Beijing. Just as China’s Treasure Fleet was dazzling the world, so her new Forbidden City would command awe from all the lesser nations.

  But the cost of building the new court at the Forbidden City, and of mounting the voyages of the Treasure Fleet, was seriously straining China’s finances. Cheng Ho’s sixth voyage consisted of a mere forty-one ships. They left Nanjing in 1421, mostly to carry foreign dignitaries back to their native lands. Cheng Ho probably didn’t even go the whole way, because court records show that he attended the celebrations for the new Forbidden City. Perhaps he wanted to be close to his master to protect him from impending disaster.

  The Emperor’s projects were costing China dearly at a time of epidemics, famines in the north, and rebellions in the south. In the spring of 1421 Zhu Di was thrown from his horse. Then lightning struck three gold-roofed halls of the new palace, and they collapsed in flames. These were very bad omens. Yet, against the advice of his counselors, Zhu Di launched a costly military campaign against the northern Mongols and sent Cheng Ho south to Sumatra to solve a local dispute there.

  Today’s map of Cheng Ho’s world.

  Cheng Ho was away when the Emperor died in the summer of 1424, and he returned to find Zhu Di’s extremely Confucian son on the throne. Just a month after Zhu Di’s death, in September 1424, the new Emperor issued an edict: “All voyages of the Treasure Ships are to be stopped.” The welfare of the new emperor’s starving subjects was more important than showing off in front of barbarians.

  But this emperor reigned for only a short time and was succeeded by Zhu Di’s grandson, Zhu Zhanji, who seemed to be more like Cheng Ho’s old master. In 1430, concerned by the way Chinas trade and payments from overseas were drying up, Zhu Zhanji began to talk of another voyage, and sent for retired admiral Cheng Ho. The old man must have encouraged him, for Zhu Zhanji ordered the biggest fleet ever — 300 ships and 27,500 men.

  Once more, in 1431, a mighty red-sailed fleet journeyed into the China Sea. Ma Huan tells us that the fleet stopped in Vietnam, Java, and Sumatra. Other reports hint that the ships sailed all the way to Australia. On the voyage home, Cheng Ho died at age sixty-two.

  When the ships reached home, they unloaded many treasures, including another giraffe/qilin. This one failed to impress Emperor Zhu Zhanji, who was turning out to be a proper Confucian after all. To the relief of his people, he announced, “I do not care for foreign things.”

  CHENG HO IN AUSTRALIA?

  In 1879, road crews working near Darwin, Australia, made a strange discovery. A small statuette from the Ming period was found tangled in the roots of a great banyan tree, which over centuries had grown around it. The statue is of Shu Lao, a Taoist immortal, seated on a deer and holding a peach (a symbol of long life). Of the many pieces of Chinese porcelain found along Australia’s north coast, this was one of the oldest and most intact; it was probably placed there, rather than washed ashore from a shipwreck. Was the statue dropped by traders? Or did Cheng Ho’s sailors reach Australia centuries before Europeans? We don’t know.

  And so in the year 1433, a generation before the birth of Christopher Columbus, the Emperor of China shut the door on the outside world. By 1500, when greedy European eyes were lighting up at the prospect of gold-rich kingdoms in the Americas, China passed a law forbidding the construction of sea-going ships on pain of death. In 1551, thirty years after Ferdinand Magellan’s ships crossed the Pacific, the Ming dynasty rulers made it a crime of “espionage” to even go to sea in a boat with more than one mast.

  THE MAO K’UN CHART

  The Beijing bureaucrats didn’t burn all of Cheng Ho’s charts. One survives in the Wu Pei Chi, or “Records for Military Preparations,” a manual written in 1621.

  Known as the Mao K’un chart, it is painted on a scroll 508 cm (200 inches) long and 20 cm (8 inches) wide, but it may have been cut down from an even longer scroll. It doesn’t show a bird’s-eye view of a coastline, but instead depicts an irregular line of mountains along the horizon, like the view from a passing ship. Its scale varies, showing densely populated cities on a larger scale than long stretches of countryside.

  The chart is covered with useful bits of sailing advice. To navigate Singapore Strait, for example, the text advises, “From Little Karimun Island at 103 degrees, 24 minutes east, sail for 5 watches. …” Each day was divided into ten “watches” of 2.4 hours, and sailors kept track of the length of a watch by noting how long it took to burn specially marked sticks of incense. For nighttime navigation, the chart contained instructions for sailing by the stars, including notes on how many “fingers” above the horizon each star should be. In all, the Mao K’un chart lists about 300 places outside China and is the first Chinese map to try to represent southeast Asia.

  Although Cheng Ho died an honored man, after his death his accomplishments were hushed up. One court adviser said that Zhu Di’s Treasure Fleet was an example of bad government. Another official burned most of Cheng Ho’s documents, calling them exaggerations. By the mid-15th century, there was nobody left in China capable of constructing giant, seaworthy ships. China went to sleep just as Europe was awakening and feeling hungry.

  So what did Cheng Ho accomplish? He didn’t “discover” anywhere new; he visited places already known to Arab and Chinese traders. Although Chinese mapmaking was highly sophisticated, Cheng Ho’s charts are not a breakthrough in terms of cartography. You make the maps you need, and Cheng Ho’s were about making safe but impressive entrances in front of new people.

  Cheng Ho is one of history’s great might-have-beens. When he sailed between 1405 and 1433, it was more likely that the world would be mapped by China than by a handful of puny, primitive European kingdoms. Had Chinas rulers used the skills and information Cheng Ho brought back from his great voyages, the people who colonized the world would have come not from Europe but from China. And you wouldn’t be reading this book in English but in Mandarin Chinese.

  Cheng Ho’s tragedy is that he was cut off by the Ming rulers in two ways. Not only could he have no children, his work was inherited by no one — because Ming laws forbade it.

  But he is not completely forgotten. There are islands off Africa where the people’s skin is more golden than that of other Africans, and where the local legends speak of ancestors arriving in huge ships. Chinese communities in Indonesia still honor the legendary figure of San Bao. There is a temple to him in Malacca. And some say that “San Bao the sailor” sounds like “Sinbad the Sailor” from the Arabian Nights. Sinbad’s story begins, “I have seen oceans where the sun rises” and continues, “I have traded fabric for ginger and camphor … ivory and pearls.”

  If Cheng Ho is Sinbad the Sailor, his story is more than a fairytale. It is an inspiring record of accomplishment and diplomacy. But it is also a terrible lesson of loss. No matter how far you go, no matter how brave and skilled you are, you still need to come home to people who care about your stories and your maps.

  THE MAPMAKER’S BROTHERS

  Henry the Navigator

  IT IS EARLY morning, August 8, 1444, and people are gathering in a field outside Lagos, a town in Portugal in southern Europe, to see something they have never seen before. Sailors are dragging dark-skinned men, women, and children from Africa into the field. This terrible morning is the first slave market, the beginning of the European slave trade.

  The 15th-century chronicler Gomes Eannes de Zurara writes about that day. Some of the captives stare down at the earth, he reports, while others, “faces bathed in tears,” look towards the sky for help. As the Portuguese begin to separate the captives so that they can be sold, “Mothers clasped their infants in their arms and threw themselves on the ground to cover them with their bodies … so that they could prevent their children from being separated from them.”

  Watching this scene is a man dressed in dark clothes astride a powerful horse. He is Do
m Enrique, third son of Joao, King of Portugal, but he is known in history books as Prince Henry the Navigator. He is a strict Christian and, in his twisted logic, he is doing the Africans a favor. If they had been captured by Muslim slave traders, they would have been converted to Islam. But as captives of the Portuguese, they will become Christians. Zurara says that Prince Henry finds it very satisfying “to contemplate the salvation of those souls.”

  The obsessive curiosity that turns people into explorers and map-makers can open new horizons — or lead them to exploit and betray. Probably Prince Henry doesn’t feel shame about introducing the slave trade to Europe. He will die proud of his accomplishments: the expansion of Portugal’s glory, the conversion of Africans to be his brothers in Christ, the discovery and mapping of new lands. Perhaps he does not even think about his own royal brothers, two of whom he will leave to die early deaths.

  Prince Henry came from a family that was a medieval nightmare. His grandfather, Prince Pedro, had fallen in love with a lady-in-waiting, Ines de Castro. Pedro’s father, the king, disapproved and had Ines executed. When Pedro became king, he ordered that Ines’s executioners should have their hearts ripped out. Then he had Ines’s corpse dug up, and forced his courtiers to kiss her cold, dead hand.

  When you marry into a family that is so haunted by bad memories, you try hard to bring up your children to be extra good. King Pedro’s son Joao married a very proper English lady, Philippa of Lancaster, who took religion very seriously. Queen Philippa “found the court a sink of immorality; she left it chaste as a nunnery” wrote one Portuguese historian. In 1415, on her deathbed, the Queen summoned her sons to her side. Little Prince Fernando was too young, but Duarte (Edward), Pedro (Peter), and Enrique (Henry) came and were given specially forged swords with hilts of gold and pearls. Philippa made her boys swear to be chivalrous knights, and stay loyal to each other. Each brother promised — and Henry promised himself that he would make his mother proud by never marrying, and by being particularly religious.

  The Queen had one more request. She told her princes to cleanse their hands of the Christian blood that had been shed in Portugal’s civil wars by “washing in the blood of the infidel” — the Muslims of North Africa. As she closed her eyes, they told her they were preparing to launch a secret attack on the Muslim city of Ceuta just across the Straits of Gibraltar. If they won Ceuta, they would also gain trade with countries all over the Mediterranean, an opportunity to seize the riches of Africa and maybe find a route to India.

  On August 20, 1415, as darkness fell, the Portuguese attacked Ceuta, hometown of the great Arab mapmaker al-Idrisi. Henry was among those leading the charge. The invaders soon breached the walls, and — under cover from English archers — took the city by the next day. The capture of Ceuta was the start of Henry’s crusade to bring Africa under the sign of the Christian cross and to get rich by doing so. He did not realize that, in fulfilling his project, he would help replace the old Christian view of the world with more scientific knowledge of navigation and geography.

  As Prince Henry explored Ceuta and its markets, where he saw traders offering gold and spices from lands across the Sahara Desert, he wondered about that huge continent to the south. Over the next few months he also wondered about how to reopen trade, because as news spread that Ceuta was in Christian hands, ships and caravans stopped arriving from Libya, Mali, and Timbuktu, and Ceuta’s markets fell silent.

  Henry had to find other ways to open up Africa to trade and exploration. So he set up headquarters at the bleak southern tip of Portugal, where cliffs jut out into the Atlantic. Here, in 1418, from Sagres, he sent out ships to explore Africa’s Atlantic coast.

  Cape Bojador was 1,600 km (1,000 miles) down that coast, and it was the outer limit of European knowledge. It was an alarming place, where waves appeared to boil over rocky shoals, and chunks of red cliff fell into the sea in a blood-colored spray. Sailors said it was the end of the world.

  Today’s map of Henry the Navigator’s world.

  But like a child who can’t stay away from a locked door, Prince Henry had to know what lay beyond Cape Bojador. Between 1424 and 1434, he sent fifteen expeditions to find out.

  Pacing the stone walls of Sagres looking over the Atlantic, Henry waited for news. Over the next decade, his sailors added Madeira and the Azores islands to the Portuguese map of the known world. But he kept pressing them to go beyond Cape Bojador.

  This was very un-medieval of him. Most Europeans at the time believed that, as you got closer to the equator, the sea would begin to boil. They thought that Africa was populated by dog-headed people and ants as big as pigs. Medieval Christian faith discouraged investigation of the physical world and told people to concentrate on the afterworld. But a strange transformation had begun in the mind of the Christian prince of Portugal. His curiosity was starting to override his beliefs.

  Finally, in 1435, a brave captain named Gil Eannes took a ship beyond Cape Bojador. The sea did not boil. And when sailors went ashore they found not dog-headed people but normal human footprints in the sand.

  Henry realized that, to go beyond Cape Bojador, his sailors would need better boats. So the Christian Prince turned to infidels for help. He ordered ship designers and builders, some of them Arab, to work in secret on a new boat. The caravel proved to be fast and easy to handle; it permitted the Portuguese to sail farther down the African coast than ever before. Soon the sailors started bringing back captives, first as proof of where they had been, and then as slaves, whose sale helped pay for more voyages.

  THE CARAVEL

  The problem with the Portuguese boats was their square-rigged sails — they could sail down the coast of Africa easily enough, but to get back against the wind they had to take huge zigzags. This meant longer voyages — too long for supplies to last. So Sagres ship designers copied the lateen rigging — with triangular sails — from Arab caravos. This enabled the new “caravels” to sail closer to the wind, making the return trip much faster.

  Above all, the caravels were easy to handle. A child could do it, and some did. In 1446, the crew of one of Henry’s ships was ambushed at the River Gambia in Africa. Africans determined to fight off slave-raiding parties killed more than 20 Portuguese sailors with poisoned arrows. The only people left to sail the ship the 2,400 kilometers (1,500 miles) home were an African lad, two Portuguese cabin boys, and a teenager with some nautical training, named Aires Tinoco, who became the captain.

  For two months, always in fear that they would be spotted by Muslim traders, the teenagers sailed onward, keeping the African coast on their right and the Pole Star straight ahead. Finally they saw another ship. To their joy, it was a Spanish corsair, which led them home to Portugal. The young sailors were taken straight to Prince Henry. Their story became one of Portugal’s great heroic tales.

  Prince Henry also needed more information, and that meant more maps. He may have seen the maps of al-Idrisi, or the writings of the pilgrim Ibn Battuta who crossed the Sahara to Mali and Timbuktu. We know that Henry ordered Muslim merchants to visit him at Sagres. He consulted Jewish cartographers from the island of Majorca who had better communications with Muslim traders, pilgrims, and sailors than Christians did.

  Majorca’s most famous mapmaking family was named Cresques. In 1375, Abraham Cresques produced a set of maps (now known as the Catalan Atlas) for the king of Aragon to present to the king of France. The panel showing Africa would have been especially intriguing to someone like Prince Henry: Cresques has painted the King of Mali, a black man dressed as a European king, holding a huge nugget of gold. Prince Henry persuaded Abraham’s son, Jafuda Cresques — known as the Master Mapmaker of Majorca — to train a new generation of mapmakers at Sagres.

  Henry wasn’t the only member of the royal family who was interested in maps. His brother Prince Pedro had spent years traveling, looking at maps in the great courts of Europe. Portuguese rulers had come to realize that maps were important in conquering the world and dominating trade — es
pecially the profitable slave trade. So they passed a royal charter, or law, forbidding anyone to make maps or globes of new African discoveries without official permission. But by the 1430s, Prince Pedro had no more time for researching maps in foreign countries. Matters in Portugal were becoming too complicated.

  King Joao died in 1433. At first his sons kept their promise and stuck together. In fact, Duarte, Pedro, Henry, and the youngest, Fernando, decided to repeat their conquest of Ceuta by capturing the North African Muslim city of Tangier. This time it was a disaster. Three Portuguese assaults were beaten back and Henry’s horse was killed right from under him. The enemy forced the Portuguese princes to negotiate a humiliating peace. Until his brothers returned Ceuta, the Muslims would keep Prince Fernando as hostage.

  This panel from the Catalan Atlas, made by Abraham Cresques around 1375, shows the Mediterranean coast, a portion of West Africa, and a camel caravan crossing the Sahara Desert.

  So Duarte, Henry, and Pedro left their brother in enemy hands, and for years, Prince Fernando waited confidently to be freed. Unfortunately, it turned out that Fernando’s brothers valued Ceuta too highly. Betraying their promise to their mother, the brothers stalled in order to keep the city they’d won in their glorious youth. Five years of negotiations dragged on while their youngest brother waited in a stinking prison cell. He died of dysentery — fever and diarrhea — in 1443.

  THE CATALAN ATLAS

  The Catalan Atlas is probably Europe’s greatest medieval map. Abraham Cresques (and probably his son Jafuda) hand-painted its brilliant colors and gold leaf onto twelve sheets of sheepskin around 1375.