“The caravels of Portugal being the best ships that travel the seas under sail,” Cadamosto wrote, “Prince Henry reckoned that, provided they were furnished with everything necessary, they could sail anywhere.”
Until a maritime passage to India was discovered, spices from the Orient came by caravan over the vast stretches of Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf. They were then shipped through the Red Sea, packed on camels over the Sinai, and eventually taken to the ports of Italy. By the time they reached Portugal, if they reached at all, these spices were outlandishly expensive. The lure of spices was more for their use as a food preserver than for their lively taste. To find a way to obtain spices for a reasonable price became a national goal.
Indeed, it was this concentration that set Portugal apart from every other European nation of the time. Not just the kings of Portugal but the entire nation was caught up in a strategic plan to find the passage around Africa to the Orient. It had become a national obsession.
The prowess of Portuguese navigation was renowned in Europe, and the fame of its favorite patron, Henry, spread far and wide. Centuries later, this led to the concoction of one of Portugal’s most enduring myths: that Henry founded a school of navigation on the promontory of Sagres, a fist of limestone protruding into the Atlantic on Portugal’s southwestern corner. The myth of the Sagres school was a product of eighteenth-century Portuguese romanticism. *1
A salon rather than a school might be a better word for Prince Henry’s gatherings, for the infante maintained his favorite residence at a place called Raposeira on the high bluffs halfway between Sagres and Lagos on the southern coast. There in the 1450s sea captains, geographers, astrologers, mathematicians, and shipbuilders beat a well-trodden path to his door to consult with and importune their prince.
Nevertheless, wherever they worked, in Lagos, Lisbon, or Oporto, Portuguese masters had labored for decades to improve the charts and instruments of the kingdom’s brave explorers. By 1485, most seagoing captains used the square charts called portolan charts, which located the lands of Africa by calculating their positions in relation to the sun and the polar star in conjunction with the landmarks of the coastline. The uses of the compass and astrolabe were studied to liberate the explorers from the coastline so they could navigate by the stars and penetrate deeper into the daunting “green sea of gloom.”
New designs had been crafted for narrower, three-masted, rudder-guided oceangoing vessels. After the Portuguese slave raids began in earnest in 1444, with a raid by six Lagos caravels on the islands off the Arguin Bank (in present-day Mauritania), the design of some caravels was modified to carry horses south for barter and replace them with slaves for the return journey (the standard rate: seven slaves for one horse). When transoceanic voyages began, a second generation of caravels called rounded caravels was designed, with square sails for the long runs downwind.
The royal archives in Lisbon boasted the best map collection in the whole world. Included in the collection were the ancient geographical speculations of Ptolemy, which Mozarabs had translated from the Arabic into Latin, and the travels of Herodotus across Asia Minor and Africa four hundred years before the birth of Christ. The work of Herodotus had only been translated from ancient Greek into Latin in 1450. There was also a 1433 map that purported to identify the fabulous kingdom of Prester John, an Oriental Christian monarch who reigned somewhere in northeast Africa or in India. “In this region,” read its caption, “there reigns the great emperor, Prester John, Lord of the Indies, who is black by nature.”
The myth of Prester John captivated the time and exerted a powerful influence even upon so sophisticated a leader as Henry the Navigator. Prester John was believed to be the most powerful leader in the world and richer than any other leader in gold, silver, and precious stones. He was said to command an army of over 1 million men, some of whom went into battle armored with crocodile skins while the rest were naked. It was reported that these black Christians burned the Cross of Christ into their foreheads as part of their baptismal ceremony. If only these “black Indians” could be found, it was believed, a Christian alliance might be forged, including a marriage, and from this would spring the most powerful empire in the world. Prince Henry had dispatched a mission to Egypt to gather information on Prester John’s whereabouts, since his dominion was supposed to lie somewhere to the south in Abyssynia, across a great inland African sea known as Sinus Aethiopicus.
Alfonso the African, the Portuguese king who had challenged the legitimacy of Ferdinand and Isabella in the 1470s during the War of Succession, had died in 1481 of the plague. He was succeeded by his energetic, roughhewn twenty-one-year-old son, João II. The nation rejoiced at this vigorous new monarch and proclaimed him to be the “perfect prince.” He was, the court chronicler proclaimed, “a good Catholic, anxious for the propagation of the faith, and a man of an inquiring spirit, desirous of investigating the secrets of nature.”
Dom João set out to reinvigorate the push south along the African coastline. In the Treaty of Alcáçovas in 1479 which ended the War of Succession, Spain had recognized Portugal’s exclusive rights to the discoveries along the African coast. In 1480, this treaty was strengthened further when the Spanish monarchs agreed to an amendment giving Portugal the right to throw any alien mariner into the sea, if he trespassed into Portugal’s exclusive African domain without permission. In 1481, Pope Sixtus IV had sanctioned and blessed Portugal’s southern explorations with his papal bull Aeterni regis. It granted sovereignty to Portugal “over whatever lands and islands shall be found and acquired south of the Canary Islands and of the vicinity of Guinea.” Guinea then designated the entire landmass of Africa.
Among João II’s first acts upon gaining the throne was to order the construction of a mighty fortress on Africa’s gold coast called St. George of the Mine, not far from a native gold mine. This bastion was to become an emporium not only for real gold but also for “black gold,” slaves from West Africa, who were destined for the slave markets of Lisbon and Lagos in southern Portugal. By the time of João II, the rationale for slavery used by Prince Henry—that the practice was a noble effort to save the souls of pagans and savages—had been dropped. Slavery had become pure commerce.
The young king cultivated an atmosphere that encouraged visionary men to propose bold, exploratory missions. In 1484, the king appointed a Junta of mathematicians to advise him on exploration and navigation. Important in this advisory council was a Jewish physician and mathematician, Master José Vizinho. In 1485, the king’s Jewish master was ordered to travel on a voyage down the coast of Africa to determine the latitude of landmarks of Africa. Master José hung an astrolabe from a tree limb in the Los Idolos Islands, the Islands of the Idols, just offshore from Conakry, Guinea. He calculated its position as five degrees above the equator and only several degrees off its precise location. Master José presented these findings to great acclaim.
In the audience was a young Genovese sailor named Cristoforo Colombo.
The Portugal of the late fifteenth century beckoned to the dreamers of Europe. Among them was a ruddy-faced, red-headed, blue-eyed, broad-shouldered, tall, and loquacious Genovese charmer named Cristoforo Colombo. The eldest of four children, Colombo hailed modestly from a family of woolcombers. Though in his teens he had been briefly at the University of Pavia, where he dabbled in geometry, geography, astronomy, and navigation, his education was limited. But his mind was lively. His curiosities were deep. And his religious faith was genuine. Like so many of his compatriots, the sea beckoned him. In later life, in a letter to the Spanish monarchs, he would assert that his bent for the sailor’s life was divinely guided, as preparation for great and pious endeavors.
At the age of fourteen he shipped out on his first voyage as a common seaman. By the time he reached his twenties, he had seen a considerable part of the known world. “I have seen all the east and west,” he would later boast, prematurely. Twice he had sailed on African expeditions. At least once, in February 1477, he
had voyaged to Iceland. That voyage to Iceland has been identified as a joint expedition of both King Alfonso the African of Portugal and King Christian I of Denmark. Its purpose was to explore the North Atlantic, and perhaps to find a mythical island called Brasil that was rumored to exist far to the west of the north Atlantic. Patriotic Portuguese historians would later claim that this voyage may have reached as far west as Newfoundland.
Importantly, it was on that voyage that Colombo learned of two strange corpses which had washed up in Galway in the west of Ireland. Their skin was light brown, and their flat faces bore unusual aboriginal features very different from any race then known. Colombo would later think of these exotic creatures as “men of Cathay,” for in a note in his own hand, written many years later in the margin of his copy of Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi, he would write: “Men of Cathay have come from the west. Of this we have seen many signs. And especially in Galway in Ireland, a man and a woman, of extraordinary appearance, have come to land on two tree trunks.”
If this story is true, they were probably Inuit Indians, whose kayak was swamped in the Davis Strait and whose bodies were swept rapidly east to Ireland by the frigid North Atlantic current. Their Oriental looks would become one more piece of important evidence to contribute to the evolution of Colombo’s grand vision of what lay across the western horizon.
Colombo’s most fateful voyage took place in the summer of 1476, when he was twenty-five years old. In Genoa, he had signed on to a commercial venture consisting of five caravels that were hired to transport a cargo of gum mastic (the essence of wood varnish) from the Greek island of Chios, off the coast of Turkey, bound for Flanders and England. Chios was Homer’s island; more menacing, it was also a transfer depot for the Genovese traffic in white slaves from the Black Sea.
After a routine passage across the Mediterranean and through the Straits of Gibraltar, the convoy of small ships was attacked off the southern coast of Portugal by a combined French-Portuguese force made up of massive Venetian warships. Most of the Italian vessels sank, including Colombo’s ship, called the Bechalla. Though he was wounded, Colombo grabbed onto an oar and swam some six miles to the shoreline near the Portuguese town of Lagos.
His unceremonious arrival in Lagos put him at another spot that was associated with slavery. Lagos was the major port of the southern Portuguese province called the Algarve and the first port of call for the caravels coming north from Africa with their black booty. Here, thirty years earlier, Prince Henry the Navigator himself had been present, watching proudly from his horse as the first cargo of one hundred slaves was offloaded and then divided into lots of five, regardless of family ties. After the process was completed, Henry collected his royal fifth of the value of the treasure as well as one twentieth that would go to the Order of Christ. Uppermost on his mind, we are asked by his chronicler to believe, were the souls that had been saved that day from eternal damnation. “When you saw the captives displayed before you, so great was the pleasure the sight of them gave you that you reckoned as nothing the expenses you had laid out on the enterprise. But a greater happiness still was the one that was reserved for them, for, though their bodies might be in a state of servitude, that was a small matter when compared with the fact that their souls would now enjoy true freedom for all eternity.”
After he recovered from his wounds, Colombo made his way from Lagos to Lisbon to find his younger brother, Bartholomew, who was by now well established along the Street of the Genovese as a chartmaker. He stayed for several years in Lisbon, where he was known as Cristóbal Colón. Alternately he worked in his brother’s mapmaking shop and shipped out on the occasional commercial voyage, becoming an experienced merchant and widely traveled seaman. By the standards of the time, his reach was global, from the far North Atlantic to the African coastlands to the Azores. And he was expert in the use of the portolan charts.
If his reach was global, his experience vast, his bravery proven, and his curiosities intense, he remained a foreigner and a commoner. But in 1478 he made a decent marriage. Filipa Perestrello e Moniz may have been no beauty, but she belonged to a prominent family in the second rank of Portuguese society. On her mother’s side, the Moniz family had been close to the royal families of Portugal for over three hundred years. Filipa’s maternal grandfather had fought alongside Prince Henry in the great Portuguese victory at Ceuta, the African Gibraltar, in 1415. Her father, Bartholomew Perestrello, had been an important explorer and colonist who was third in command in the settlement of the Madeira archipelago after its islands were discovered in 1419.
As a reward, in 1446, Prince Henry made a donation of land to Perestrello, not on the glorious, timbered paradise of Madeira itself (which he divided between his first two colonists) but on its northern sister island of Porto Santo. The gift was somewhat ironic, more of a punishment than a gift, for Porto Santo, apart from its glorious six-mile beach, possessed very little drinkable water, had none of Madeira’s soaring mountains or thick forests, and no lush fertile soil. Perestrello made the place worse by introducing rabbits, which proliferated exponentially and devoured nearly every plant that was cultivated. Nevertheless, on his windswept, rabbit-infested wasteland, the colonist was knighted as Dom Perestrello.
About the Perestrello family there hovered the whiff of delicious scandal. Filipa’s father had two sisters, Isabel and Branca, and together, jointly, they had been the mistresses of the archbishop of Lisbon, Dom Pedro Noronhã. The lusty archbishop, a close relative of King João II, had sired a son by Isabel and three children by Branca, and later had them all legitimized. A son of the archbishop by Branca would become the mayor of Obidos and then the Portuguese ambassador to the Roman Curia. Thus, through his wife’s naughty aunts, Colón would find entry into high ecclesiastical as well as royal circles.
In the family of Colón’s bride, Italian blood ran thick. Her father’s family had roots in Piacenza, just north of Genoa, and was said to have been minor royalty. The Italian connection must have smoothed conversation when Colón and Filipa first met at a mass at the Convent of Dos Santos. (The nuns of this convent belonged to the Order of Santiago, whose purpose was to provide for the families of knights away at holy war against African Muslims.) No doubt, in their brief courtship, Filipa fired Colón’s imagination by showing him her father’s dog-eared charts and the journals of his pioneering voyages fifty years earlier.
Not long after their marriage, the couple moved to the Perestrello estate in Porto Santo. Filipa’s brother was the governor, and the island supported itself by its export of sugar and “dragon’s blood,” the red resin from the rare dragon tree that was used in dyeing. In this outpost the newlyweds lived quietly for several years, during which time their first son, Diego, was born.
Porto Santo and Madeira were way stations for the Portuguese explorers moving down the African coast and for Portuguese slavers who used the Madeiras as their base and supply point. The watering holes of the island teemed with adventuresome seamen and buccaneers including a sizable contingent of Italians. Colón was caught up in the excitement of the new discoveries. As he was able, he basked in the reflective glory of his father-in-law’s expeditions.
As the Portuguese navigators pressed farther and farther south along the African coast, they left in their wake prominent stone markers called padrãos. On headlands and prominent rivermouths and peninsulas, these markers, along with names and dates cut into dragon trees, were meant to establish Portuguese sovereignty. By 1485, the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão had discovered the great Congo River and had sailed as far down the African coastline as modern-day Angola. The marker that Cão placed just north of the Tropic of Capricorn read:
“It was 6,685 years after the creation of the world and 1,485 years after Christ that the excellent and illustrious King João the Second of Portugal ordered this land to be discovered and this stone marker to be placed by Diogo Cão, esquire of his house.” For his accomplishments, Diogo Cão was knighted and given his own coat of arms, as we
ll as an annuity of 10,000 Portuguese reals. It could not have escaped Colón’s attention that discoveries conferred wealth and title on the explorers.
The air of Porto Santo was also full of delicious rumor. One told of a piece of driftwood that had washed up on shore and that bore exotic primitive designs. Mariners gossiped about trunks of huge pine trees, strange sea beans, and immense reeds that were found on the beach in the Azores to the north, and whose species did not exist in Europe or Africa or the Madeira archipelago. Colón immediately assumed these reeds to be the bamboo from India that Ptolemy had described. Sea captains from the Canaries claimed to have seen a large island to the west which some believed to be the island of Antilia, mentioned by Aristotle, and which appeared in the portolan charts as early as 1424. This magical island, where reportedly silver mixed with beach sand, was located far west beyond the grasp of the known world, on the latitude of the Iberian peninsula. In Portuguese lore it was celebrated as the Island of Seven Cities, where seven Christian bishops from the Moorish invasion of Portugal in A.D. 734 had fled and established seven fabulous cities.
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