Conquerors

by Roger Crowley

  This pillar marked the terminal point of Diogo Cãos voyages down the coast of West Africa. It was erected at Cape Cross in Namibia in January 1486 and subsequently removed to Berlin in 1893.

  Like an Apollo space mission, this moment represented decades of effort. In the aftermath of Ceuta, Prince Henrique, who has passed into the bloodstream of history as Henry the Navigator, began to sponsor expeditions down the coast of Africa in search of slaves, gold, and spices. Year by year, headland by headland, Portuguese ships worked their way down the southwestward-sloping bulge of West Africa, cautiously sounding with plumb lines as they went, forever wary of shoals and reefs, over which the sea broke in pounding surf. In the process they began to delineate the shape of a continent: the desert coasts of Mauretania, the lush tropical shores of the region they called Guinea, the “Land of the Blacks,” and the great rivers of equatorial Africa: the Senegal and the Gambia. Under Henrique’s direction, exploration, raiding, and trading went hand in hand with ethnographical curiosity and mapping. Each successive cape and bay was pinned to a chart with the name of a Christian saint or a visible feature or an event.

  These expeditions were modest affairs: two or three vessels, under the direction of a squire of Henrique’s household, though the navigation and ship management were the responsibility of an experienced and, usually, anonymous pilot. Each carried a few soldiers, crossbows at the ready as they approached an unknown shore. The ships themselves, caravels, were a Portuguese development possibly of Arab origin. Their triangular lateen sails allowed them to sail close to the wind, invaluable for battling back from the Guinea coast, and their shallow draft made them ideal for nosing up estuaries. They were well suited for exploration, even if their small size—hardly eighty feet long, twenty wide—limited their space for supplies and rendered long sea voyages a trial.

  Henrique’s motivations were mixed. Portugal was small and impoverished, marginal to European affairs, and hemmed in by its powerful neighbor Castile. At Ceuta the Portuguese had glimpsed another world. Henrique and his successors hoped to access the sources of African gold, to snatch slaves and spices. He was influenced by medieval maps produced in Majorca by Jewish cartographers that showed glittering rivers leading to the kingdom of the legendary Mansa Musa, “king of kings” who had ruled the kingdom of Mali early in the fourteenth century and controlled the fabled gold mines of the Senegal River. The maps suggested that some rivers crossed the whole continent and linked into the Nile. They nourished the hope that Africa might be traversed via internal waterways.

  The royal household projected these voyages to the pope as crusades—continuations of the war with Islam. The Portuguese had expelled the Arabs from their territory far earlier than their neighbors in Castile and established a precocious sense of national identity, but the appetite for holy war remained undimmed. As Catholic monarchs, those in the royal house of Aviz sought legitimacy and parity on the European stage as warriors for Christ. In a Europe that felt itself increasingly threatened by militant Islam, particularly after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, they obtained from the papacy spiritual and financial concessions and territorial rights over explored lands in the name of Christ. The crusading remit from Rome was “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ…and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

  They were impelled, too, by a desire to do great deeds. Henrique and his brothers were half English—their mother was Philippa of Lancaster, granddaughter of Edward III; their cousin was Henry V, the victor at Agincourt. An atmosphere of knightly chivalry, fueled by their Anglo-Norman ancestry and medieval romances, hung heavily around the royal court and infused its restless nobility with a high-octane mixture of prickly pride, reckless courage, and a desire for glory, linked to crusading fever. This noble group, in Portuguese the fidalgos, literally “the sons of someone,” lived, fought, and died by an honor code that would accompany the Portuguese across the world.

  Behind the Africa initiative lay a very old dream of militant Christendom: that of outflanking Islam, which blocked the way to Jerusalem and the wealth of the East. Some of the maps portrayed a regal figure dressed in a red robe with a bishop’s miter on his head, his throne glowing with burnished gold. This was the legendary Christian king Prester John—John the Priest. The myth of Prester John reached far back into the Middle Ages. It constituted a belief in the existence of a mighty Christian monarch who resided somewhere beyond the barrier of the Islamic world, and with whom Western Christendom might link up to destroy the infidel. It had been conjured out of travelers’ tales, literary forgery—in the shape of a famous letter purporting to come from the great king himself in the twelfth century—and a blurred knowledge that there were actual Christian communities beyond Europe: Nestorians in Central Asia, followers of St. Thomas in the Indies, and an ancient Christian kingdom in the highlands of Ethiopia. Prester was held to command vast armies, and he was immensely wealthy, “more powerful than any other man in the world and richer than any in gold, and in silver and in precious stones,” according to a fourteenth-century account. The roofs and interiors of the houses in his country were said to be tiled with gold, and the weapons of his army were forged in it. By the fifteenth century the Prester figure had been superimposed onto the actual Christian kings of Ethiopia, and the maps suggested that his kingdom could be reached by river through the heart of Africa. For more than a century, this dazzling mirage would maintain a powerful hold over the imagination and strategies of the Portuguese.

  Detail from the Catalan Atlas of 1375, produced in Majorca, showing Mansa Musa holding up a gold nugget. To the north, the mythical River of Gold, the coast of North Africa, and southern Spain.

  The maps, the travelers’ tales, confused images of great rivers that could penetrate to the heart of Africa, fabulous rumors of gold, word of mighty Christian rulers with whom an alliance might be forged against the Islamic world—this swirl of half-truths, wishful thinking, and mistaken geography leached into the worldview of the Portuguese. It was what lured them ever farther south down the African coast, hunting for the River of Gold or the river that would take them to Prester John. Each gulf, each river mouth seemed promising to their inquisitive ships, but the push down the coast was hard-won. The pounding surf made landings treacherous; the reception from the local people was always edgy. The sailors encountered vast lagoons and tortuous mangrove swamps at the mouths of the rivers, dense fogs and calms and violent equatorial rainstorms. The fever zone struck the sailors heavily. Within the Gulf of Guinea, the contradictory local winds and a strong current from east to west hampered forward progress, but they were for a long time spurred on by the eastward trend of the coast. Slowly they evolved a belief that they were inching toward the southern tip of Africa and that the riches of India might be reached by sea rather than by river, but the shape and sheer size of the continent, fifty times as big as the Iberian Peninsula, would baffle and confound their preconceptions for almost eighty years.

  The idea of outflanking Islam’s grip on Europe was both economic and ideological. To trade directly with the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, to source gold and possibly spices—spurred on by the image of the gold nugget in the hand of the Malian king—was an enormously powerful attraction; to link up with Prester John and his mythical army and attack Islam from the rear was equally persuasive. When Henrique died, the initiative faltered for a while, until pushed forward again in the 1470s by his grandnephew Prince João. It was when João became king, in 1481, that the Africa project received a whole new impetus.

  Black-bearded and long-faced, well-built, and somewhat melancholy in expression, with “an air of such gravity and authority that everyone recognized him as king,” João was “a man who commanded others and who was commanded by no one.” He was perhaps the most remarkable European monarch of the early modern age. To the Portuguese people he would pass into history as the Perfect Prince. His rival Isabella, queen of Castile a
nd then the unified kingdom of Spain, gave him the ultimate accolade. She simply referred to him as “the Man.” João was preoccupied with “the deep desire to do great things,” and the first of the great things to which he stretched out his hand was the exploration of Africa. On his accession he embarked on an intense five-year period of state-funded exploration in which he hoped to fulfill two objectives: find a route to the Indies and reach the fabled kingdom of Prester John. It was Diogo Cão, erecting pillars along the west coast of Africa, to whom he had entrusted this task.

  João II: “The Perfect Prince”

  However, by the 1480s other theories about a possible route to the Indies were circulating along the Lisbon waterfront. The city was the frontier of exploration, a laboratory for testing ideas about the world. Across Europe, astronomers, scientists, mapmakers, and merchants looked to Portugal for the latest information about the shape of Africa. Jewish mathematicians, Genoese merchants, and German cartographers were being attracted to the hubbub of its streets, its vistas of boundless ocean beyond the mouth of the River Tejo (or Tagus), from where Portuguese caravels returned with black slaves, brilliantly colored parrots, pepper, and handmade maps. João’s interest in navigation led to the formation of a scientific committee drawing on these intellectual resources. This included José Vizinho, a pupil of the great Jewish astronomer and mathematician of the age, Abraham Zacuto, and the German Martin Behaim, later the creator of a prototype terrestrial globe. In the interests of scientific inquiry, both men made voyages on Portuguese ships to undertake solar observations.

  While Cão was inching down the coast in the summer of 1483, the Genoese adventurer Cristoforo Colombo—known to the Spanish as Cristóbal Colón and in English as Christopher Columbus—was at the royal court in Lisbon proposing a counterstrategy for reaching the Indies. It was one that João already knew. A decade earlier, he had prompted a letter and a map on the subject from the famed Florentine mathematician and cosmographer Paolo Toscanelli. Toscanelli had proposed “a sea route from here to India, the land of spices; a route which is shorter than that via Guinea.” His reasoning was that because the world was spherical, it was possible to reach the Indies by sailing in either direction, and that it was a shorter voyage to sail west. Apart from the as yet invisible barrier of the Americas, Toscanelli had made a fundamental error: he had under-calculated the circumference of the earth. But the letter and the map were destined to become a potent ingredient in the accelerating race for the world that gripped the Iberian Peninsula in the final decades of the century. Columbus knew, or had a copy of, Toscanelli’s letter, and he now boldly approached João for the resources to make the attempt. The king was prepared to keep an open mind. He turned the formidably self-confident Columbus’s proposition over to his committee of savants and mathematicians for consideration, and waited for Cão’s return.

  Cão was back in Lisbon by early April the following year, 1484, with his reports of the eastward-inclining coast. João closely questioned his explorer and was sufficiently pleased with the results to award him a large annual pension and elevation to the nobility, with his own coat of arms. Cão chose the emblem of two pillars crested by crosses for his device. For João, the Indies were just around the corner. It seemed that one more expedition must decide it.

  Cão’s report was the immediate end of Columbus’s hopes. Both the manner and the mathematics of the Genoese were considered faulty. João’s committee judged that Columbus had compounded Toscanelli’s error about the size of the world: he had shrunk the globe by 25 percent in his estimation of the distance to the Indies, and his certainty was found insufferable—as, probably, were his demands for recompense. “The king, because he saw this Cristóvão Colombo to be boastful and pushy in talking up his abilities, and deluded and fanciful about the [position of] the island of Japan, gave him little credence,” recorded the Portuguese historian João de Barros, “and with this disappointment he left the king and took himself off to Spain, where he also went hawking his petition.” Columbus set to work there lobbying Isabella and Ferdinand, taking advantage of the rivalry between the two kingdoms to leverage his project.

  Meanwhile João was confident of success. In May or June 1485, Cão, accompanied by Martin Behaim, was sent out again with more pillars to plant on the extremity of Africa. A few months later, the Portuguese king was trumpeting to the world that his seamen were close to the final breakthrough. In November, his orator, Vasco Fernandes de Lucena, was making the king’s submission to the new pope, Innocent VIII, in a ringing statement of nationalist PR and holy crusade. He spoke of Prester John and

  the well-founded hope of exploring the Arabian Sea where the kingdoms and nations of those who inhabit Asia, only obscurely known to us, practice with great devotion the holy faith of the savior, in relation to whom, if it’s true what the most learned geographers propound, Portuguese navigation is within a few days’ reach. In fact, having explored the greater part of the African coast, our men came close to the Prassus Promontory [the end of Africa] only last year, where the Arabian sea begins; having explored all the rivers, coasts and ports for a distance of more than 4,500 miles from Lisbon, from the most rigorous observation of the sea, the land and the stars. Once this region is explored, we will see an enormous accumulation of wealth and honor for all the Christian people and especially you, most Holy Father.

  Lucena went on to quote Psalm 72: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.” The river was the Jordan; it might just as well have stood for the Tejo in João’s increasingly global vision.

  However, even as Lucena was speaking, the king’s hopes were again being baffled. Thousands of miles away, Cão discovered that the eastward trend of the land was illusory, just a large bay that quickly turned south yet again in an apparently unending coastline. That autumn he placed a farther pillar, on a headland 160 miles south; the coast gradually shifted from equatorial forest to low-lying barren sand hills, sparse vegetation, and semidesert. Cão reached the farthest limit of endurance in January 1486 at a place he called Cape Cross, in modern Namibia, where he planted his last pillar, among a colony of seals basking on the black rocks. It seemed that Africa would continue forever, and Cão himself slips through the cracks of history at this point and vanishes. Either he died on the return journey or he made it back to Lisbon and João, furious and embarrassed by the failure of this publicly touted mission, condemned him to disgrace and obscurity.

  Whatever his fate, Cão had added another 1,450 miles of coast to the mapmakers’ lexicon. The Portuguese seemed indefatigable in their endurance and their willingness to push themselves over the edge of the known world, riding the rough seas in their agile caravels or probing the enormous rivers of West Africa in pursuit of the elusive kingdom of Prester John and an inland route to the Nile. Many perished in the attempt. They died in foundering ships, of malaria and poisoned arrows and isolation, leaving their small markers as talismans against oblivion.

  No more poignant memorial to Cão’s attempts exists than that at the Yellala Falls, up the Congo River. Whoever came here sailed or rowed a hundred miles upstream from the sea, past mangrove swamps and densely forested riverbanks. As they progressed, the current increased in ferocity until they reached a rocky gorge and thunderous waterfalls, a colossal torrent of water pouring out of the heart of Africa. When they could sail no farther, they abandoned their ships and scrambled ten miles over the rocks in the hope of finding navigable water upstream, but the succession of rapids defeated them. On the face of an overhanging cliff high above the crashing torrent, they left a carving, a monument of a different sort. The coat of arms of King João, a cross, and some words: “Here arrived the ships of the illustrious monarch Dom João the Second of Portugal, Diogo Cão, Pedro Anes, Pedro da Costa, Álvaro Pyris, Pêro Escolar A…” To the lower right and carved by a different hand, other names: “João de Samtyago, Diogo Pinheiro, Gonçalo Alvares, of sickness João Alvares…”; elsewhere, just a Chris
tian name: “Antam” (Anthony).

  The main inscription carved on the rocks at the Yellala Falls

  All these inscriptions are broken off, their circumstances as ambiguous as a last entry in the diary of a polar explorer. They give us the names of the men who captained the ships—Diogo Cão and the others carved by the cross—but the commanders were probably not present. It is likely that Cão ordered a side trip to probe the navigability of the Congo; it is these men who form the second group of names. Both sets of inscriptions are incomplete, as if interrupted at the same moment. Evidently, men were ill or dead—probably of malaria. Were they too weak to continue? Were they surprised or attacked as they scratched away at the rock? Unusually, there is no date; nor is there any contemporary record of this exploit, which was unknown until European explorers stumbled on the inscription in 1911.

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  The Portuguese notion of a river or land route across Africa, fueled by the suppositions of ancient geographers and the enticing gold-leaved pages of medieval cartographers, died hard. The belief that the great rivers of West Africa linked to the Nile, that the kingdom of Prester John was just out of reach across a continent whose width they had miscalculated, doomed the Portuguese to decades of enduring, baffled effort. João dispatched multiple overland missions for information, gold, and prestige. The probe up the Congo was mirrored repeatedly. Caravels sailed five hundred miles up the Senegal River but were halted by the Felu rapids; when a similar expedition was thwarted at the Barrakunda Falls, on the Gambia, João sent engineers to break up the rocks on the riverbed, but the scale of the task defeated them. At the same time, servants and squires of the royal household set off into the interior on foot. Small teams of men crossed the Mauretanian desert to Wadan and to Timbuktu; to the realms of Jolof and Tokolor; to the Mandinka king they knew as Mandi Mansa, on the upper Niger. Some returned with reports of kingdoms and trade routes; others vanished.