At this time the Portuguese were still exploring Africa, and the brothers made their livings making charts that showed the latest findings. Christopher also sailed on voyages, including one that ventured northward to the Arctic Circle. It wasn’t long before he caught the exploration fever.
Soon he reached a remarkable conclusion: the shortest water route to Asia was not the around-Africa path the Portuguese were then exploring. (See the map, page 148) Instead, he thought, the shortest route was west, across the Atlantic Ocean. (In fact, he thought, this might turn out to be the only water route to the Indies. At this point, the Portuguese hadn’t proved that one could sail around Africa.) Columbus was assuming, by the way, what every educated European knew: that the earth is round.
He was wrong, of course, in thinking that the shortest ocean route to Asia lay westward, across the Atlantic. He didn’t know that two big continents sprawled right across that route. Also, he believed that Asia is bigger than it is and earth is smaller. He therefore pictured a bigger Asia stretching way around a smaller earth, leaving room for only a narrow, easily crossed Atlantic Ocean. That slender ocean, so he thought, was all that lay between Europe and Africa on one side of it and Asia on the other. He reckoned that the distance from Africa to Japan was roughly 2,500 nautical miles. In fact, it’s more than four times that long.
Columbus asked the king of Portugal to fund an exploration voyage across the Atlantic, but the king turned him down. Columbus then turned to Ferdinand and Isabella, king and queen of Spain. A year went by before they saw him, but after they did they named a committee of “learned men and mariners” to advise them. The committee tried for four years to get clear information from Columbus, and then they advised against the project.
The queen, however, leaned in favor of it. She liked Columbus, so it seems, and realized that an easy route to Asia might be profitable for Spain. It also might provide a chance to save the souls of millions of benighted pagans. That opportunity appealed to Isabella and Columbus, who were both intensely pious. The queen decided to back the voyage.
Columbus’s expedition left from Spain in three small ships in August 1492. (On the same tide other ships were hauling off from Spain the last of several thousand Jews whom Ferdinand and Isabella were driving out. Expulsion was their way of thanking God for victory over the remaining Muslims in the south of Spain.)
Columbus and his crewmen journeyed down the coast of Africa to the Canary Islands. They stayed there for a month and then headed west, across the Atlantic. The voyage was easy, since a trade wind pushed them steadily along, and the weather, Columbus wrote, was “like April in Andalusia…. All that wanted was to hear the song of the nightingale.” True, his sailors grumbled some. Some feared to go so far in unknown waters and worried that they’d never find the west wind that they’d need to blow them back to Spain. Columbus lied a little, telling them that they were sailing shorter distances each day than he knew they were.
Early in October they were cheered by seeing land birds flying southwest. They peered at the horizon, every sailor hoping he would win the cash reward promised to the first who spotted land. On October 12, before the dawn, a lookout saw what seemed to be a cliff gleaming in the moonlight. He yelled, “Tierra! Tierra!” After sailing little more than a month, Columbus and his men had crossed the ocean.
What they came to was a coral island in the Caribbean Sea, east of the isthmus linking North and South America. As the ships approached the land, the sailors saw a sparkling shoreline, lofty trees, and nearly naked people. The islanders feared the monsters nearing shore, and they vanished in the forest. Columbus and his captains went ashore, and there they kneeled and thanked God for their safe arrival, and Columbus formally named the isle San Salvador (Holy Savior).
The islanders returned, and timidly they offered gifts. Columbus, thinking he was in the “Indies,” called them Indians, and he wrote that they were “poor in everything.” However, some were wearing little golden pendants hanging from their noses. The Spaniards focused keenly on these pendants, and were sorry to learn that the gold had come from some other island. The Indians prepared them food that Europeans hadn’t ever tasted, such as maize (or corn) and cassava bread. (The roots of cassava plants are a staple food in many tropical countries.) Columbus noted “how easy it would be to convert these people — and to make them work for us.” The natives, meanwhile, must have viewed the dirty, woman-hungry, white intruders with distaste and fear.
After he had explored San Salvador for a couple of days, Columbus headed south. He came upon a larger island, which was really Cuba, but he took it to be part of China, the kingdom of the Gran Khan (Great Khan), whom he had read about in Marco Polo’s Travels. He misunderstood an Indian word (Cubanacan) to mean “El Gran Khan,” and tried in vain to find the ruler. The Spaniards also met some Indians who were carrying, Columbus wrote, “a firebrand in the hand, and herbs to drink the smoke thereof.” The herbs were huge cigars, which they passed around so each could take a drag. The sailors, meanwhile, found many of the women friendly and obliging.
From Cuba Columbus journeyed east, and came upon the northern coast of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). From its position, east of what he thought was China, he decided this must be Japan. Marco Polo had recorded that Japan was rich in gold, and, sure enough, the Spaniards found a little gold in the riverbeds. This matter clearly needed following up, so when one of his ships was wrecked, Columbus founded a colony with the surplus men. Leaving them to hunt for gold, he sailed back to Spain.
When he reached the Spanish court, Columbus was an instant wonder. He claimed, wrongly but sincerely, to have reached “the Indies” (specifically China and Japan) and found them rich in spices, cotton, timber, gold, and slaves. Those whom he convinced overlooked a crucial fact. His only proof of New World wealth was golden baubles and some shrubs and roots he wrongly thought were spices. He had also brought some Indians, dressed in plumes and holding parrots, and they intrigued the Spaniards. No one guessed that what Columbus had explored was not the wealthy Indies but some islands on the fringe of two as yet undreamed-of continents. Two impressive civilizations flourished on those continents, but Columbus wouldn’t live to see them.
He would make three other voyages to the New World, but all were failures since he never found an Asian sea route, though he thought he had. A host of things went wrong. One time sea worms tunneled so many holes in his ships that for a year Columbus and his men were stranded on an island. Another time a Spanish enemy seized him and sent him back to Spain in chains. He found no gold that was worth the effort of collecting. The Indians on Hispaniola, goaded by the Spaniards’ cruelty, murdered nearly all the men he left there. When he shipped some Indians back to Spain, they proved to be no use as laborers. He suffered badly from arthritis and at one point from malaria. Worst of all, the Spanish court began to doubt that he’d found anything of value. The queen stood by him, but her husband found Columbus and his fruitless trips a bore.
On all his voyages, however, Columbus kept on adding to the Old World’s knowledge of the New (and the New World’s tragic knowledge of the Old). Voyage number three produced a startling find. Columbus headed farther south than he had done before, and he came upon an island and a fair-sized bay beyond it. From the land beyond the bay, a giant river (the Orinoco) flowed so strongly that the water in the bay was wholly fresh.
For such a mighty river Columbus could only imagine one explanation: it issued from a mighty land. “I believe this is a very great continent, unknown until today,” Columbus wrote in his journal. “[And] if this be a continent, it is a marvelous thing, and will be so among all the wise, since so great a river flows that it makes a freshwater sea of forty-eight leagues.” (A league equals three miles.) He was right. He had found the continent that would later be named South America.
AFTER COLUMBUS FOUND the New World, others started to explore it, and other finds resulted. Only five years after Columbus’s first voyage, John Cabot he
aded west from England in a ship so small that eighteen men could sail it. Although Italian (his real name was Caboto) he was sailing for the king of England, Henry VII. The king had authorized a voyage to “all parts, countries and seas…unknown to Christians.” Cabot probably was looking for a northern route to the Indies, around the lands Columbus had discovered. He made a landing on the eastern coast of Canada, or on Newfoundland Island, and noticed signs that humans lived there. No doubt the local Indians had seen the pale-skinned strangers and the monster that they lived in, and stayed away.
Back in England, Cabot told King Henry he had found a part of Asia, and the thrifty king rewarded him with ten pounds. Cabot made another journey west, this time with four ships, but the expedition vanished and was never seen again. In time the experts realized that on his first voyage Cabot had found another continent, North America.
Not long after Cabot’s second voyage, Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian ship captain and geographer, voyaged down the coast of the continent that Columbus had discovered. Later, someone published forged accounts of Amerigo’s travels, based partly on his letters, and these were widely read in Europe. As a result, a German scholar honored Amerigo (and slighted Columbus) by naming the newfound southern continent for him: America. Later it was renamed South America, and the other continent, the one that Cabot found, became North America.
Now the question rose, what lay beyond these continents? A Spaniard, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, found the answer. Spain had planted a colony in what we know today as Central America, the corridor of land that links the two Americas, and Balboa was its governor. An Indian told him that this land, which the Spanish hadn’t yet explored, was just a slender isthmus, and beyond it lay an ocean. Guided by some Indians, Balboa led an expedition through the swamps and jungles and across the mountains. Twice they had to fight their way past hostile Indians. Balboa climbed the final hill alone, and when he reached the top he saw, still far away, a vast expanse of water. He called his men, and they knelt, gave thanks, and built an altar out of stones. They trekked down from the mountains to the shore of the Pacific, where Balboa ceremonially claimed for Spain “all that sea and the countries bordering on it.” Like many a discoverer, however, Balboa met a dismal end. Six years after he had crossed the isthmus, the governor who succeeded him tried Balboa on a phony charge of treason and beheaded him.
IT NOW WAS clear that the discoverers (including some we haven’t mentioned) had found two continents that were linked by an isthmus and were not the Indies. Beyond these continents and isthmus was more water but perhaps, the Europeans thought, not too much of it. Beyond that water, so they hoped, lay the longed-for Indies. To reach them, people wondered, could one sail far north, and pass around the northern continent? Considering the fog and ice and bitter cold, that seemed unlikely. Somewhere up there Cabot’s ships had vanished. It might be wiser, so they thought, to journey south and hope to get around the southern continent, or better yet, find a strait that led right through it.
A Portuguese named Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão Magalhães) was certain that the southwest route to the Indies was feasible. A battle-seasoned officer, who limped from an old wound, Magellan had fought for Portugal in its African-Asian empire. So he was familiar with the far-off “Indies” that he wanted to sail to by a western, not an eastern, route.
The expedition needed royal backing, so Magellan went to see the teenaged king of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella’s grandson. He told King Charles that he could find a route to the Indies around the southern continent and across the ocean that Balboa had already claimed for Spain. Earlier, at the request of Portugal and Spain, the pope had drawn an imaginary line around the earth, so that each country could claim whatever lands it found within its half. They had stuck to this agreement, although often they were hostile to each other.
Magellan told the king that the Spice Islands in Indonesia — or some of them at least — lay within the Spanish half of earth, not the Portuguese one. A short, safe route to the Spice Islands (shorter and safer, so he claimed, than the Portuguese route around Africa) would clearly be a boon to Spain. He won the young king’s backing for an expedition, just as Columbus, a quarter century before, had won the backing of Charles’s grandmother, Isabella. The Portuguese tried to stop the expedition but they failed.
Magellan and a fleet of five ships sailed from Spain in 1519. (The route is indicated on the map, page 148.) They sailed to Africa and part way down its coast, and then they crossed the South Atlantic Ocean and began a journey down the coast of South America. The trip was full of wonders. In Brazil they marveled at the ways of Indians, so different from anything they knew. Either they went naked and painted their bodies or they dressed fantastically in parrot feathers. They ate pineapples and sweet potatoes, slept in hammocks, and hacked canoes from logs, using axes made of stone. When the Europeans anchored off their shores, Indians swarmed aboard the ships and pilfered what they wanted. The startled Spaniards saw a woman coolly seize a nail a little larger than a finger and stash it in her vagina. She jumped the rail and swam to shore.
When the five ships reached what now is Argentina, far below the Equator, the air was cooler. They traveled up the River Plata, hoping it would prove to be a strait that reached the sea Balboa had discovered. No such luck. They journeyed farther south and reached the cold and treeless coast of Patagonia. Fearing that it might be even colder farther south, they spent the winter here.
Troubles rose. Magellan’s officers were mostly Spanish, and some of them now mutinied against Magellan, in part because he was a Portuguese. Although they took him by surprise, Magellan quickly won control. He pardoned all the mutineers but three, beheaded one of these, and marooned the others in this dismal place. But mutiny was not his only problem. While reconnoitering, the vessel Santiago hit a reef and broke apart.
When the winter ended, the four remaining ships sailed on. They reached a waterway that seemed to be a strait, and Magellan decided to try it. The ships began to thread their way among a baffling maze of islands, and up and down the many channels that often proved to be dead ends. The crew of San Antonio mutinied and returned to Spain.
The three remaining vessels inched their way along the strait, short of food and water, battling the tides and cold and fog. At night they saw the lights of Indian campfires, but the Indians kept out of sight.
After nearly forty days of wandering they reached the western end. Joyfully they fired their cannons. Even iron-willed Magellan wept as they sailed into the open water of the ocean they had searched for. They headed north, and up the hilly coast of what today is Chile. Then Magellan left the coast and headed west across the ocean. Now, he must have thought, he couldn’t be so far from the Spice Islands. He didn’t know that he was sailing on a sea so big it swathes a third of the earth. From where he was, the distance to the islands was 12,600 miles.
Even when they started sailing west their food supplies were low, and now they wouldn’t set foot on land for ninety-nine days. The only land they came upon was barren islands. They ate what little rat-fouled biscuit they still had, and the maggots in it. Now starving, they scraped up crumbs in biscuit barrels, ate the rats, chewed on sawdust, boiled and gnawed the leather of the yardarms. Their drinking water turned yellow and stank. Many of them died of hunger, thirst, and scurvy.
At last they reached Guam Island. The islanders came out in boats, climbed aboard, and dashed around the ships, stealing what they could. Weakened though they were, the Spaniards pushed them off. They followed them to a village, where they stole their fruit and other food.
Then they reached the islands that were later named the Philippines (for Spain’s King Philip II). Magellan had brought with him an interpreter from the Malay-language region of southeast Asia. When this man spoke to the islanders, it was clear they understood his words. For Magellan, this conversation must have been a thrilling moment, for now he knew he had succeeded. By sailing west from Europe he had nearly reached the waters of southeast Asia that the
Portuguese had reached a decade earlier by sailing east. Since he had himself been one of those Portuguese, he had now been almost around the earth.
Then he made a bad mistake. When an island chieftain, Lapu-Lapu, converted to Christianity, Magellan joined him in a war against the chieftain of another island. (One of his Spanish captains later explained the reason. With forty men, he said sarcastically, Magellan “went to fight and burn the houses of the town of Mactan to make the King of Mactan kiss the hands of the King of Cebu, because he did not send him as tribute a bushel of rice and a goat.”) Magellan trusted in his European fighting skills, but the Mactan islanders drove the Europeans back. As his men retreated to their boats, Magellan, with his sword, fought to shield them. Pierced by a poisoned arrow, slashed by scimitars, and speared in the face, he fell upon the sand. A dozen warriors leaped upon him and killed him.
Lapu-Lapu now had second thoughts about his new religion and his European allies. He invited twenty-seven of them to a feast and slaughtered them. The others quickly sailed away. But they were short of men, so they burned the ship Concepción.
Two ships out of five were left. In these they sailed for many weeks among the islands, pirating. But at last they journeyed to the Spice Islands, which had been their destination all along. Here they bought and loaded cargos of cloves.
The Human Story Page 17