But João was undeterred, daunted by neither the obdurate rapids of the Gambia and the Congo nor the ever receding coastline of Africa nor the uncertain location of a semimythical Christian king. The scope, coherence, and persistence of his India project were astonishing. In 1486, with his committee of geographers in Lisbon poring ever more intently over misshapen maps of the world and Columbus now lobbying the monarchs of Spain for his western route, the king simply intensified his efforts. The same year the noun descobrimento, “discovery,” is recorded in written Portuguese for the first time.
2
The Race
1486–1495
THE CASTLE OF ST. George in Lisbon, situated on a rocky promontory with far-reaching views over the Tejo River, contained among its treasures a sumptuous world map. It had been commissioned thirty years earlier by King João’s father, Afonso, from a cartographer monk in Venice with the brief to summarize the best geographical knowledge of the day.
Fra Mauro produced an extraordinary work of art, microscopically detailed and brilliant with gold leaf, wavy seas of vivid blue, and the images of castellated cities. Like an enormous circular shield, ten feet across and oriented to the south, in the Arab tradition, it showed something that no European map had before: it portrayed Africa as a freestanding continent with a southern cape, which he called Cape Diab. Although Africa is seriously distorted and many details had already been outdated by Portuguese discoveries in João’s time, Fra Mauro had attempted to apply an evidence-based approach. Venice, with its deep trading contacts with the Orient, was the clearinghouse for information and travelers’ tales about the world beyond Europe.
The picture is peppered with hundreds of textual commentaries in red and blue ink, drawn principally from the eyewitness accounts of Marco Polo and a fifteenth-century traveler called Niccolò de’ Conti, as well as “information of all new discoveries made or projected by the Portuguese.” “Many have thought, and many have written, that the sea does not encompass our habitable and temperate zone on the south,” Mauro notes on his map, “but there is much evidence to support a contrary opinion, and particularly that of the Portuguese, whom the king of Portugal has sent on board his caravels to verify the fact by ocular inspection.” Special attention is drawn to the spice islands and ports of the Indian Ocean—of particular interest to the Portuguese—and he tackles head-on a key assertion of Ptolemaic geography: that the Indian Ocean was a closed sea. The particular evidence he produces for an all-water route to the Indies includes the ancient geographer Strabo’s account of such a voyage, as well as a tale, probably from Conti, of the journey of a Chinese junk that was said to have sailed round Africa.
Fra Mauro’s map crystallized, in visual form, the Portuguese ambition to find a sea route to the Indies. It also highlighted how little Europeans knew. Never had the world been more divided. The Europeans of the Middle Ages had less contact with the Orient than had the Roman Empire. Marco Polo had walked and ridden there down silk roads controlled by the Mongols and returned across the Indian Ocean in a Chinese junk. His account remained hugely influential, because by the fifteenth century almost all direct links with the East had been severed. The Mongol Empire had collapsed, destroying the long-range land routes; in China, its successor, the Ming dynasty, after the spectacular voyages of the star rafts, had been seized by xenophobia and closed its frontiers. With the exception of Conti’s reports, almost all European knowledge was nearly two hundred years old. Islam hemmed Christian Europe in. The Ottomans had crossed into Europe and barricaded the land routes. The Mamluk dynasty, in Cairo, controlled the desirable wealth of the East and traded it through Alexandria and Damascus at monopoly prices. Of the exact sources of the spices, silks, and pearls sold to the Venetians and Genoese, there were only muffled rumors.
Undeterred by Cão’s failure to round Africa, João persisted. The scope of his inquiry became increasingly wide-ranging. Nothing was ruled out. At his command, two monks set out across the Mediterranean to seek information about Prester John in the East. About Columbus’s proposed western route, João hedged his bets. He licensed a Flemish adventurer called Fernão de Ulmo with the concession to sail west for forty days with two caravels at his own expense and the right to whatever land he discovered, at a 10 percent payment of all revenues to the crown. The king effectively leased out to private enterprise a venture that he deemed speculative but could not definitively dismiss. Nothing came of these initiatives. It seems Ulmo was unable to raise the funds; the monks were turned back at Jerusalem by their inability to speak Arabic. Nothing daunted, João tried again.
The king had gathered around him a loyal generation of highly talented pilots, seamen, and adventurers, chosen for their talents rather than their social status, on whom he now called for a final push. In 1486 he energetically planned a triple-pronged approach to solving the India problem and locating Prester John. He would tackle the problem at both ends. A more focused expedition would sail on past Cão’s pillars and attempt to round Africa; along the way it would drop Portuguese-speaking native Africans to seek information about the legendary Christian king in the interior of the continent; and João would rectify the failure of his overland initiative to the East by recruiting Arabic speakers who could penetrate the heartlands of the Indies to learn about spices, Christian kings, and the possibility of sailing routes to the Indian Ocean.
In October 1486, soon after Cão’s return—or the return of his ships—João appointed a knight of his household, Bartolomeu Dias, to command the next expedition down the African coast. At about the same time, he chose replacements for an overland expedition to the Indian Ocean.
The man he recruited for this task was Pêro da Covilhã. Covilhã was about forty years old, a quick-witted, multitalented adventurer of lowly birth, an adept swordsman, a loyal servant of the Portuguese kings, and a spy. As well as Portuguese, he spoke Castilian fluently and, more valuably, Arabic, which he had probably learned from the Arab population of Spain. He had performed undercover operations for João there, and undertaken secret negotiations in Morocco with the king of Fez. It was Covilhã and another Arabic speaker, Afonso de Paiva, to whom the king now entrusted a daring operation.
In the spring of 1487, while Dias was preparing his ships, the two men were being briefed by the bishop of Tangiers and two Jewish mathematicians, members of the commission that had turned down Columbus. The adventurers were presented with a navigational map of the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, presumably the best guess available within Europe as to the world beyond the Mediterranean, probably drawing heavily on Fra Mauro’s work. On May 7 they had a last secret audience with the king at his palace at Santarém, outside Lisbon, where they were given letters of credit to pay their way on the sea voyage to Alexandria. Among those privy to this audience was the eighteen-year-old duke of Beja, Dom Manuel, the king’s cousin, for whom the memory of this expedition was to have a special importance. Over the summer they took a ship from Barcelona to the Christian island of Rhodes, where they acquired a stock of honey to enable them to pass themselves off in the Arab world as merchants. From there they caught another vessel to Alexandria, portal to the Islamic world.
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Back in Lisbon, Dias was putting the finishing touches to his matching expedition down the west coast of Africa. He was given two caravels belonging to the crown and also, because of the long-range nature of the voyage and the limited hold size of the caravels, a square-rigged store ship, “to carry extra provisions, because on many occasions the [lack of them] weakened the ships that were exploring on their return journey.” Following Cão’s expedition, the ships also carried a number of carved stone pillars, to mark the stages of the voyage. Dias himself was a highly experienced seaman, and he took with him the best pilots of the day, among them Pêro de Alenquer, destined to play a key role in the India ventures. Alenquer was evidently highly regarded by King João, who called him “a man who by his experience and navigating skill deserved to be honored, favored and well
rewarded.” The supply ship’s pilot was João de Santiago, recorded on the inscription at the Yellala Falls, who would be invaluable in retracing Cão’s voyage back to its terminal point.
This little flotilla sailed out of the Tejo sometime in late July or early August 1487. It was to prove one of the most significant expeditions in the history of exploration, but also one of the most mysterious. It went almost unnoticed in contemporary records, as if Portuguese chroniclers were looking the other way. There is just a scattering of marginal notes on maps and books and casual mentions in the chronicles. Otherwise its details, its scope, and its achievement would wait sixty years to be recorded, by the sixteenth-century historian João de Barros. If the exact details of Dias’s sailing instructions are lost, their substance can be reconstructed: first, to push south beyond Cão’s last marker in pursuit of the elusive Prassus Promontory, the definitive end of Africa. Second, to land people along the coast to seek further information about an inland or river route to the kingdom of Prester John. This, in conjunction with the journeys of Paiva and Covilhã, constituted a determined and coherent strategy for solving the mystery of Asia.
To this end, Dias carried with him six Africans, two men and four women, who had been kidnapped by Cão on one of his journeys and taught Portuguese, because, according to João de Barros, “the king ordered that they were to be dropped all the way down this coast, finely dressed and supplied with displays of silver, gold, and spices.” The intention was “that going into the villages, they would be able to tell the people about the grandeur of his kingdom, and the wealth that he had there, and how his ships were sailing all along this coast, and that he sought the discovery of India, and especially of a king called Prester John.” Women were particularly chosen, as they would not be killed in tribal disputes.
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In Alexandria, the two spies, Covilhã and Paiva, were dying of fever.
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Dias sailed down the west coast of Africa, past Cão’s last pillar, naming the capes and bays after the saints’ days as he went, from which the expedition’s progress can be dated: successively the Gulf of St. Marta (December 8), St. Tomé (December 21), and St. Victoria (December 23); by Christmas Day they had reached a bay they called the Gulf of St. Christopher. They had been at sea for four months, zigzagging against a southwest wind blowing along the shore, with a current setting to north. At various places along the way they must have landed their unfortunate ambassadors, though one had already died on the voyage; of the others, nothing further is recorded. It was at this point that they decided to leave their supply ship with nine men on board, to be collected on their return, on the shores of Namibia.
For several more days the two caravels plugged past a desolate coast of low hills. Then the pilots took a startling decision. At about twenty-nine degrees south, they gave up the attritional battle with the adverse winds and currents. Instead they turned their ships away from the shore, lowered their sails to half-mast, and flung themselves out into the void of the westerly ocean with the counterintuitive aim of sailing east. No one knows exactly why this happened; it may have been a maneuver worked out in advance, or it may have been a moment of genius, an intuition about the Atlantic winds based on previous experience of sailing home from the Guinea coast. This involved a tack to the west away from the African coast, taking the ships out in a wide loop into the central Atlantic, where they picked up westerly winds that carried them east back to Portugal. Maybe, they reasoned, the same rhythm applied in the southern Atlantic. Whatever the logic, this was a decisive moment in the history of the world.
The caravel: ideal for exploration but cramped for long voyages
For thirteen days, and nearly a thousand miles, the half-masted caravels plowed out into nothingness. As they entered the Antarctic latitudes, it became very cold. Men died. At about thirty-eight degrees south, the intuition paid off. The winds became more variable. They turned their ships to the east with the hope and expectation of hitting an infinitely elongated African coast they imagined to still run north–south. They sailed on for several days. No land blurred the horizon. It was decided to turn the ships north again in the hope of finding land. Sometime toward the end of January, they spied high mountains; on February 3, 1488, they came ashore at a point they christened the Bay of the Cowherds. They had been on the open sea for nearly four weeks; their great loop had carried them past both the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Agulhas—the Cape of the Needles—Africa’s southernmost point, where the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans meet.
Landfall was fraught. They saw a large herd of cows guarded by people “with woolly hair, like those of Guinea.” They were unable to communicate with these pastoralists. Nine years later, the pilot Pêro de Alenquer was there again and remembered what happened. When the Portuguese placed gifts on the beach, the natives just ran away. The place was evidently provided with a spring, but “when Dias was taking in water, close to the beach, they sought to prevent him, and when they pelted him with stones from a hill, he killed one of them with the arrow of a cross-bow.”
After this skirmish they sailed on another two hundred miles, and the coast unmistakably turned to the northeast. It was now apparent for the first time that they must have rounded the tip of Africa; the water was getting warmer, but the battering of the seas had taken its toll. On March 12, they reached a bay, where they planted their last pillar; at this moment the exhausted crews “with one voice began to murmur, and asked that they should not proceed further, saying that the supplies were being exhausted [and] that they needed to get back to the store ship, which they left behind with provisions, which was now so distant they would all be dead by the time they got there.” Dias wanted to go on but was bound by his sailing instructions to consult with the other officers on matters of importance. They agreed to continue for just three more days; when they came to a river, which they christened the Rio Infante, they turned about. It seems clear that Dias was disappointed, but he abided by the democratic decision. The historian João de Barros, writing sixty years later, accords Dias a backward glance as he retraced his steps: “when [he] departed from the pillar which he had erected there, he was overcome by great sadness and deep emotion, as if he was saying goodbye to a son banished forever; he remembered the great danger faced by him and all his men, how long they had journeyed to come only to this point, then that God had not granted him the main prize.” “He saw the land of India,” said another chronicler, “but could not enter it, like Moses in the Promised Land.” But these were retrospective imaginings.
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Back in Lisbon, King João, while waiting for news from Dias or Covilhã, was still hedging his bets. He could not definitively rule out the advantages of the westerly route, and he was acutely aware of the growing rivalry with Spain. On March 20, he granted Columbus a safe-conduct to return to Lisbon, where he was subject to a warrant for debt. Meanwhile Covilhã and Paiva had made a miraculous recovery from the fever that had struck them down in Alexandria. They took a boat down the Nile to Cairo, a caravan across the desert to the Red Sea, and then sailed to Aden, at its mouth. Here the two men parted, Paiva to make his way to Ethiopia, to what he believed to be the kingdom of Prester John, Covilhã to voyage on to India.
Turning his ships east now to sail home, Dias caught sight of the Cape of Good Hope for the first time. It was a historic moment: this definitive proof of the end of Africa demolished forever a tenet of Ptolemy’s geography. According to Barros, Dias and his companions named it the Stormy Cape, which King João changed to the Cape of Good Hope, “because it promised the discovery of India, so long desired and sought for over so many years.” Dias left the Cape with a good stern wind.
The men on the supply ship had been marooned on the desert shores of Namibia for nine months, waiting forlornly for a sight of the caravels that might never return. By the time these arrived on July 24, 1488, of the nine men, only three were still alive. The others had been killed by the local people in a squabble over the trading
of goods. Among the dead may well have been Bartolomeu’s own brother, Pêro. For one of the survivors, Fernão Colaço, the ship’s clerk, weak with illness, the sight of the caravels proved too much. He is said to have died “from the joy of seeing his companions.” The supply ship was rotten with worms; after transferring its contents, they burned it on the beach and headed for home. The battered caravels reentered the Tejo in December 1488. Dias had been away sixteen months, discovered 1,260 miles of new coast, and rounded Africa for the first time.
We know of his return only because of a famous marginal note written in a book by Christopher Columbus, still in Lisbon under safe-conduct. He was evidently a witness to the complete debriefing Dias gave to the king:
Note, that in December of this year, 1488, there landed at Lisbon Bartolomeu Didacus [Dias], the commander of three [sic] caravels, whom the King of Portugal had sent to Guinea to seek out the land, and who reported that he had sailed 600 leagues beyond the furthest reached hitherto, that is, 450 leagues to the south and then 150 leagues to the north, as far as a cape named by him the Cape of Good Hope, which cape we judge to be in Agisimba, its latitude, as determined by the astrolabe, being 45° S., and its distance from Lisbon 3100 leagues. This voyage he [Dias] had depicted and described from league to league upon a chart, so that he might show it to the king; at all of which I was present.
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