By the medieval era, no educated person thought the world flat. As early as 205 BC, Eratosthenes, a Greek living in Alexandria, deduced that the earth was a sphere, and even calculated its size with an accuracy that would not be surpassed for nearly another two thousand years. Nor was Columbus the first to propose reaching the Indies by sailing west. The transatlantic route to India had been suggested as far back as the first century after Christ by the Roman geographer Strabo, and perhaps even by Aristotle before him. Some historians, in fact, believe that the Vivaldi brothers were attempting to reach the Spice Islands by acting on Strabo’s advice. By the late fifteenth century, it became apparent to even the hidebound Afonso V that his uncle Henrique’s dream of navigating to India around Africa might not be the best way to accomplish the deed.
Afonso went so far as to consult the canon of the cathedral of Lisbon about the possibility of a westward route. In turn, the canon passed the inquiry on to the famous Florentine physician and mapmaker Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, who wrote back from Florence that, yes, the sailing distance from Lisbon to China was only about five thousand miles—a gross underestimate.
From precisely which of the above legacies, if any, Columbus gathered the idea for the westward route may never be ascertained, but we do know that he corresponded with Toscanelli, who wrote back that he approved of his fellow Italian’s desire to “pass over to where the spices grow.” Columbus would later feature Toscanelli’s written endorsement prominently in his efforts to obtain funding for his enterprise.18
Like many single-minded men, Columbus deluded himself at almost every turn. The feasibility of the westward route depended on its being short. Although the westward distance from Europe to Asia had of course never been directly measured, it could be estimated by subtracting the approximately known eastbound distance from the estimated circumference of the earth. For example, today we know that the eastbound distance from Lisbon to Malacca, as the crow flies, is approximately 7,000 miles. Since the earth’s circumference is 25,000 miles, it follows that the westbound distance (at least along the equatorial route) must be approximately 18,000 miles.
Unfortunately for Columbus, geographers had already done such calculations, which invariably yielded a westbound distance so large as to be incompatible with survival at sea. For example, Ptolemy calculated that the Eurasian landmass stretched approximately halfway around the globe, in which case the westward route must stretch about the same distance as the eastward distance, about 12,500 miles. This proved an accurate estimate: if the Americas did not block the way, sailing the mid-latitudes from Lisbon to China would cover about 12,000 miles, with another 4,000 miles beyond that to India. Even at an optimistic four knots, the voyage to China would take about four months, but no vessel of the period could stock supplies adequate for so long a journey. Further, long before food and water would run out, most of the crew would have succumbed to scurvy. Had Columbus not collided with America in his quest for the Orient, he and his men would certainly have vanished like the Vivaldis.
Faced with inconvenient contrary data, Columbus behaved like all true believers from Saul of Tarsus to George Bush the Younger: he fudged.19 He did so in a plausible and straightforward manner, by using the lowest possible estimate of the earth’s circumference—about 17,000 miles—and the highest possible estimate of the east-west size of Eurasia. He was particularly drawn to Marco Polo’s description of Cipangu—Japan—as lying another thousand miles east of Cathay. So great, Columbus rationalized, was the eastward distance from Portugal to Japan and so small was the globe that the golden roofs of Cipangu must be just over the western horizon from his proposed starting point, the Azores, located almost a thousand miles southeast of Lisbon.
What drove Columbus on his journey into the great unknown over the western horizon? Was he really looking for new worlds, or “merely” a faster way to China, India, and Japan? Was he propelled by a hunger for gold and spices? Was he motivated by the desire for respectability that suffuses the personalities of those of great ability and ambition but humble birth? Or was he looking for souls to save? For hundreds of years scholars have debated the provenance and meaning of the documents and marginalia he left behind, and the truth will probably never be known.20 Perhaps projecting his own motives onto the settlers he carried on his subsequent journeys, he later complained that none of them
came save in the belief that the gold and spices could be gathered in by the shovelful, and they did not reflect that, though there was gold, it would be buried in mines, and the spices would be on the treetops and that the gold would have to be mined and the spices harvested and cured.21
Columbus, with his newly acquired connections at court, began to lobby João II. Initially, the monarch was friendly to the ambitious proposal of the young Genovese, and acted as any enlightened ruler would in such circumstances—he referred Columbus’s idea to a committee of eminent astronomers, mathematicians, and geographers, the Junta dos Mathemáticos. Although we have no record of its deliberations, it must have found Columbus’s estimate of the westward distance from Portugal to Japan ludicrous.
Worse, with his scheme came demands: generous underwriting of the voyage, including the use of a royal vessel, a hereditary title, and a huge cut of the profits from the Indies trade. These provisos did little to enhance Columbus’s credibility. Despite the fact that Columbus was the son-in-law of one of the realm’s most prosperous merchants, no backing was forthcoming from the Portuguese crown.
With no immediate prospect of funding from João II, Columbus decamped to Cordova in 1484. There, he pitched his scheme to Isabella and Ferdinand, who had united their respective kingdoms of Aragon and Castile into the modern nation of Spain just sixteen years previously. A nearly identical sequence of events played out at the Spanish court as had at Lisbon. Columbus, who came from the same ethnic stock as the Spanish queen, made a favorable initial impression, but once again he had to face a rather more hardheaded committee of experts, this time organized by the queen’s confessor, Hernando de Talavera. Even before the committee reached a verdict, Ferdinand and Isabella cut off his modest stipend, and he returned to Portugal.
While Columbus licked his wounds in Lisbon, his luck turned from bad to worse. There, he personally witnessed the tiny vessels of Bartholomew Diaz, who had doubled the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, straggle up the Tagus River. As he did so, he must have realized that the rounding of southern Africa eliminated Portugal’s need for a western route. He returned to Spain, where he glumly awaited the final verdict of Talavera’s committee. In 1490, that ax fell too. The committee reported to the crown that it “judged his promises and offers were impossible and vain and worthy of rejection.” Columbus tenaciously appealed to the queen, who granted an examination by a second committee. Again, his proposal was rejected.22
At the same time, Bartholomew Columbus probably traveled to England and presented his brother’s proposal to the court of Henry VII. There is more solid documentation that Bartholomew arrived in France in 1490 and approached Charles VIII. Rejected in both courts, he remained in France until well after his brother returned from his first voyage.
In early 1492, the Spanish court informed Columbus that his mere presence in the kingdom was no longer welcome. Then, just before he disappeared over the horizon with his worldly belongings and donkey, a messenger commanded him to return. At the last minute, one of his staunchest supporters in Ferdinand’s retinue, Luis de Santangel, convinced the queen that funding the voyage west was a low-cost proposition and that it carried the possibility of enormous gain. Further, Santangel offered to underwrite the voyage himself. It appears that Isabella did indeed proffer her jewels as collateral, but Santangel reassured her that this sacrifice would not be required.
As with any great enterprise, mere vision, courage, intelligence, attention to detail, and dogged hard work—Columbus was said to have inspected every timber on his three ships before embarking in 1492—do not suffice. Luck, too, is required: had João II accep
ted his proposal, then Columbus would have staged his expedition from the Portuguese Azores, which he knew well, and he probably would have foundered and perished in the unfavorable winds at that latitude. As fortune would have it, all four of his journeys were mounted from the more southerly Spanish Canaries, freshened with easterly trade winds blowing straight toward the Caribbean.
Columbus, Santangel, and Isabella had all been right, but for all the wrong reasons. Contrariwise, the scholarly advisers to the crowns of Portugal, England, France, and Spain were far better informed than Columbus about geography, and must have been astounded when Columbus returned after his momentous first voyage from “the Indies.”23 None could imagine that a vast new world, whose outlines had been dimly and fleetingly perceived by Norse explorers, and perhaps by others from Europe and Asia centuries before, now lay within their grasp.24
So single-mindedly did Columbus pursue the westerly route that he failed to take along on his journeys the specialists instinctively sought by later, and far more competent, conquistadors: Arabic translators to tell him that the primitive Carib “Indians” he encountered and brought back with him to Spain were certainly not residents of India; jewelers to ascertain that the massive quantity of yellow metal weighing down his holds was iron pyrite, fool’s gold; or apothecaries like Tomé Pires to warn him that the “cinnamon” and “pepper” he presented to Ferdinand and Isabella on his return were, respectively, a nondescript bark and chilies of a sort never before seen in the Old World. Even had he brought such experts along, he would not have believed them. So thick-skulled was the discoverer of the New World that not until his third voyage would it slowly dawn on him that he had not reached Asia after all.
That the discovery of the New World would excite the avarice of little, greedy men should have come as no surprise to the ambitious son of a wool weaver. The path to “easy” riches he had supposedly found was no less admirable than the rent stream of the aristocrat, and the social upheaval caused by his return from the New World was considerable. As the poet, dramatist, and biographer Stefan Zweig put it:
Everyone in Europe who was discontented with his means and his position, everyone who felt himself thrust into the background and was too impatient to wait; younger sons, unemployed officers, bastards of the nobles, fugitives from justice—one and all wanted to go to the New World.25
In the train of Columbus’s voyages came ethnic cleansing and genocide, both deliberate and unintentional, and the extraction of every available ounce of silver and gold, first from the Amerindian ruling elite, and then from the ground. Modern economic historians have described a striking correlation between the economic development of the native peoples, their initial population densities, disease rates among white settlers, and subsequent economic development.26 In those lands with relatively low initial native economic development and population densities, and a healthy climate for Europeans—the New World, Australia, and New Zealand—the white invaders were able to survive, settle, and subdue or kill off the indigenous peoples. The conquerors then went on to produce unimaginable wealth. Although much of the prosperity was due to trade, such as that from the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, the primary work of the settlers was mining, agriculture, and, later, manufacturing.
This sequence of events was impossible in those lands with high initial native populations, high disease rates among Europeans, and relatively prosperous native trading and manufacturing economies—that is, almost all the shores touched by the Indian Ocean. In such places, white men could not hope to survive and conquer vast numbers of advanced, relatively wealthy, and highly organized natives. Here, at least at first, trade would be the order of the day for Europeans.
Put more simply, the Portuguese and Dutch sent hundreds of thousands of Europeans to their deaths during and after the seven- or eight-month journey to the populous and disease-ridden lowlands of Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Malaya, and Indonesia. For example, during the seventeenth century alone, approximately 25,000 European soldiers died within the squalid confines of the Royal Hospital at Goa from malaria, dengue, typhoid, and cholera.27 By contrast, European settlers sailed for only five or six weeks and then faced better odds in the less populated and far healthier highlands of Mexico and Peru, and later in North America.
Of more immediate import to the story at hand was the ongoing duel between the two great seafaring nations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—Portugal and Spain. This competition was in full swing by the time Columbus’s tiny fleet left the harbor at Palos de la Frontera in the wee hours of August 3, 1492.
We can better understand these two Iberian brethren as the favorite offspring of doting parents—in this case the mother church, which adored their Iberian extremist theological purity and fervor; and the Holy Father, for whom keeping peace between the two squabbling progeny amounted to a full-time job. Like children, they derived much of their legitimacy from parental authority, in this case the papal imprimatur, to which even the mightiest European monarchs were theoretically vassals, their crowns leased back to them in return for a not inconsiderable regular tribute to the Vatican.
The parent also played favorites. The pontiffs of the mid-fifteenth century were particularly fond of Dom Henrique’s piety and crusading zeal against the Moors of North Africa. Pope Nicholas V, for example, issued a bull, Romanus Pontifex, just before his death in 1455. Called the “charter of Portuguese imperialism,” it praised Henrique, authorized him to conquer and convert all the pagans between Morocco and the Indies, and, most importantly, awarded Portugal a trading monopoly in all territories between Africa and the Indies.28
Then, in August 1492, just eight days after Columbus slipped his moorage at Palos, a Spaniard ascended to the papacy as Alexander VI, owing his vestments to the financial backing and good efforts of Ferdinand and Isabella. In 1493, with Columbus’s feet barely dry on his return from the first voyage, Alexander issued the first of several bulls awarding Spain possession of all territories newly discovered by its subjects. Later that same year, Alexander issued yet another bull drawing a demarcation line one hundred leagues (about 350 miles) west of the Cape Verde Islands, beyond which all terra firma, discovered or not, belonged to Ferdinand and Isabella. A final bull seemed to extend Spain’s ambit south and east all the way to India. This infuriated the Portuguese, since it ignored three generations of their pioneering down the African coast, contradicted Romanus Pontifex, and made no mention of the doubling of the Cape by Diaz just five years earlier.
João II, disgusted with the corrupt Spanish pope, decided to deal directly with Ferdinand and Isabella. For their part, the Spanish monarchs, fearing the ruthless Portuguese and busy enough digesting the New World, were more than happy to seek a reasonable compromise. On June 7, 1494, a momentous treaty, known to history by the town in central Spain in which it was negotiated, was inked at Tordesillas.
The Treaty of Tordesillas divided the world into two hemispheres along a longitudinal (north-south) line placed 370 leagues, or about 1,270 miles, west of the Cape Verdes. This demarcation line was located at about forty-five degrees west of Greenwich, giving Asia to the Portuguese and the New World to the Spanish.29
In normal times, nations will expend blood and treasure over minuscule scraps of territory. These, however, were not normal times; Portugal had just achieved a goal sought by Westerners since the death of the Prophet—access to the Indian Ocean—and the Spanish had just discovered two new continents. Such was the excitement of this era that these bitter rivals could partition the entire planet between them as easily as two schoolchildren swapping marbles at recess.
What must have been going through the minds of João II’s envoys that hot June day in the sleepy town of Tordesillas? All of Africa and all of Asia now supposedly belonged to Portugal, but at the time the treaty was signed, only the vessels of Bartholomew Diaz had, fleetingly, attained the extreme southwest corner of the Indian Ocean. Did the Portuguese have any inkling that they, just emerging from the Black Death wit
h a population of barely more than one million, a few thousand able-bodied sailors, and a few hundred blue-water ships, were about to confront the world’s largest and most sophisticated trading apparatus? So thinly stretched were the Portuguese that on their largest merchantmen, often only a few European officers and soldiers commanded crews consisting of hundreds of Asians or African slaves.30 Portugal was truly the dog who had caught the car. This particular canine was fast and vicious and would leave many a fang mark, but was ultimately doomed to be left in the roadside dust.
The Tordesillas Line in the West
João II could not have chosen a better man to make the first lunge at the two impossible quests: Asian spices and the still elusive Prester John. Vasco da Gama’s voyage of 1497–1499 was simply the most remarkable maritime accomplishment of its time, a round trip across 28,000 miles of open ocean to attain its goal—India. Columbus, in spite of his blandishments, had done no such thing. Further, Columbus’s definition of his target, the “Indies,” left much to be desired in terms of geographical precision. Did he mean Japan, Cathay, India proper, or the realm of Prester John?
Unlike Columbus, da Gama gathered painstaking nautical intelligence before weighing anchor. He identified Calicut on India’s southwestern Malabar Coast as the richest entrepôt on the subcontinent—almost precisely where the southwest monsoon deposited his ships after they departed the coast of East Africa. Da Gama accomplished his staggering nautical feat with the aid of two innovations.
Splendid Exchange, A Page 20