Such sweeping ambitions were not the full story, since requests to legitimise Portuguese expansion were as much about thwarting European rivals as they were about leading a charge against the Islamic world. And in fact Portugal’s lucky break came not from provoking discord with Muslim traders and disrupting traditional markets but from finding new ones. Of crucial importance were the island groups in the eastern Atlantic, which facilitated exploration, providing harbours and havens that could serve as bases for taking on provisions and fresh water and enabling ships to sail further from home with greater security.
From the middle of the fifteenth century, colonies were settled as part of a deliberate effort to extend Portugal’s tentacles and establish control over the most important sea lanes. Arguim, just off the west coast of modern Mauritania, and then São Jorge da Mina on the Atlantic seashore of modern Ghana, were built as fortresses that also had extensive warehousing facilities.17 These were designed to enable the accurate cataloguing of imports, something that was significant for the Portuguese crown which insisted that trade to Africa from the mid-fifteenth century was a royal monopoly.18 An administrative framework was established from the very start which formally set out how each of the latest points on the expanding Portuguese maritime network should be run. When new discoveries were made, such as the Cape Verde islands in the 1450s, there was a tried and tested template that could be applied.19
The Castilians did not sit idly by as this happened; they attempted to loosen the Portuguese grip on the newly founded points along the chain running south, using direct force against ships flying their rival’s flag. Tensions were soothed by the Treaty of Alcáçovas in 1479, which gave Castile control of the Canary Islands on the one hand, while conceding authority over the other island groups as well as control over trade with West Africa to Portugal on the other.20
However, it was not high politics, papal grants or royal competition over territorial possessions that opened up Africa and transformed the fortunes of western Europe. The real breakthrough came when entrepreneurial ships’ captains realised that in addition to trading oil and skins and looking for opportunities to buy gold, there were easier and better opportunities on offer. As had proved the case many times before in the history of Europe, the best money was to be had in the trafficking of people.
The African slave trade exploded in the fifteenth century: it proved highly lucrative from the outset. There was considerable demand for manpower to work on farms and plantations in Portugal – with slaves brought back in such numbers that the crown prince who sponsored the first expeditions was compared to no less a figure than Alexander the Great for having forged a new age of empire. It was not long before the houses of the wealthy were described as ‘being full to overflowing of male and female slaves’, allowing their owners to use their capital elsewhere and become even richer.21
Few showed any moral repugnance at enslaving people captured in western Africa, even if some sources suggest empathy. One Portuguese chronicler records the groans, wails and tears of a group of Africans who had been captured in one raid on the west coast and brought back to Lagos in 1444. As it dawned on the captives that it was now necessary ‘to part fathers from sons, husbands from wives, brothers from brothers’, the sorrows intensified – even for those watching: ‘what heart, however hard it might be, would not be pierced with piteous feeling to see that company?’ noted one onlooker.22
Such reactions were rare, with neither buyers nor sellers sparing a thought for those who were sold. Nor did the crown, which saw slaves not only as additional manpower but also as a source of income via the quinto – the tax of one-fifth of the profit on revenues of trade with Africa – and for which, therefore, the greater the numbers brought back and sold the better.23 And even the chronicler who claimed to have been moved by what he saw on the quayside in Lagos had no qualms when, two years later, he took part in a slaving raid in which a woman and her two-year-old son, spotted collecting shellfish on a beach, were captured along with a fourteen-year-old girl who struggled so furiously that it took three men to force her into the boat. At least, says the chronicler matter-of-factly, she ‘had a pleasurable presence for a Guinean’.24 Men, women and children were routinely rounded up in raids that resembled animal hunts. Some begged the crown prince for a licence to equip multiple vessels and head off in convoy. Not only did he approve, but he ‘at once commanded . . . banners to be made, with the Cross of the Order of Jesus Christ’ – one for each ship. Human trafficking was thus in league with the crown and with God.25
All this new money did not impress everyone back home. One visitor from Poland in the late fifteenth century was struck by the lack of grace, elegance and sophistication of the country’s inhabitants. The men of Portugal, he wrote, were ‘coarse, poor, lacking in good manners and ignorant despite the pretence of wisdom’. As for the women, ‘few are beautiful; almost all look like men, though in general they have lovely black eyes’. They also had magnificent posteriors, he added, ‘so full that I say it in all truth in the whole world nothing finer is to be seen’. Nevertheless, it was only fair to note that the women were also lewd, greedy, fickle, mean and dissolute.26
Although the slave trade had considerable impact on the Portuguese domestic economy, the role it played in the exploration and discovery of the long African coastline in the fifteenth century was much more important. Portuguese vessels kept sailing ever southwards to seek their prey, finding time and again that the further they went, the less well-defended settlements proved to be. Curious village elders and chieftains who marched out to meet those arriving from Europe were routinely butchered on the spot, their shields and spears taken as trophies for the king or crown prince.27
Spurred onwards in search of rich and easy pickings, explorers pushed ever further along the African coast in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. In addition to slaving expeditions, ships bearing emissaries were dispatched by King João II of Portugal, who was keen to build close relations with powerful local rulers in order to protect his country’s position against the Spanish. One such representative was none other than Christopher Columbus, who was soon using his experiences to calculate what might be required to supply, service and maintain other long-distance voyages. He also tried to use this new information on the length of the African coast to estimate what the size of the earth might be, in anticipation of an ambitious journey of his own in the future.28
Other explorers lived in the present. In the 1480s, Diogo Cão discovered the mouth of the River Congo, paving the way for the formal exchange of embassies with the powerful king of the region, who agreed to be baptised. This delighted the Portuguese, who used it to burnish their credentials with the papacy in Rome, especially when the King of Kongo went to war with his enemies carrying a papal banner bearing the sign of the cross.29 In 1488, the southern tip of the continent was reached by the explorer Bartolomeu Dias; he christened it the Cape of Storms, before returning home after a highly perilous journey.
Portugal guarded its expansion jealously, to the point that when Columbus approached João II around the end of 1484 to fund an expedition to take him westwards across the Atlantic, his proposal fell on deaf ears. Although the Portuguese king’s interest was sufficiently roused to ‘send a caravel in secret to attempt what [Columbus] had offered to do’, the fact that even Dias’s dramatic discoveries were not followed up suggests that Portugal’s primary concern was to consolidate its expansion in the parts of the new world it had recently come into contact with, rather than to expand further still.30
Things changed when Columbus finally found the sponsorship he was looking for from Ferdinand and Isabella, the rulers of Castile and Aragon, and set sail in 1492. News of his discoveries across the Atlantic drove Europe wild with excitement. New lands and islands which were part of ‘India beyond the Ganges had been discovered’, he announced confidently in a letter sent to Ferdinand and Isabella on his way back to Spain. These new territories were ‘fertile to a limitless degree
. . . beyond comparison with others’; spices grew there in such large quantities that it did not bear reckoning; there were ‘great mines of gold and other metals’ waiting to be exploited, as well as extensive trade to be done ‘with the mainland . . . belonging to the Great Khan’. Cotton, mastic, aloe wood, rhubarb, spices, slaves and ‘a thousand other things of value’ were all to be found in abundance.31
The reality was that Columbus had been confused and mystified by what he found. In place of the cultured people he had been expecting to encounter, he came across local populations who went about naked and seemed, to his eyes, astonishingly primitive. While they were ‘very well formed, with handsome bodies and good faces’, he noted, they were also credulous, delighted by the gift of red caps, beads and even broken pieces of glass and pottery. They had no idea of weapons, taking swords by the blade when shown them, cutting themselves as a result ‘through ignorance’.32
In some respects, this seemed like good news: those he met ‘are very gentle and do not know what evil is’, he observed; they are ‘aware that there is a God in heaven and convinced that we come from the heavens; and they very quickly say any prayer that we tell them to say and they make the sign of the cross’. It was a matter of time before ‘a multitude of peoples’ would be converted ‘to our Holy Faith’.33
In fact, the letter which swaggeringly recounted his extraordinary discoveries – copies of which were disseminated so fast that versions were circulating in Basel, Paris, Antwerp and Rome almost before Columbus and his sailors had reached home waters – was a masterpiece of the dark arts, nothing more than what some historians have called ‘a tissue of exaggerations, misconceptions and outright lies’.34 He had not found gold mines, while plants identified as cinnamon, rhubarb and aloe were nothing of the sort. Nor was there the remotest sign of the Great Khan. The claim that there was so much treasure to be had that within seven years there would be sufficient funds to pay for 5,000 cavalry and 50,000 footsoldiers and effect the conquest of Jerusalem was nothing short of outright deception.35
It was a pattern that continued as Columbus made further voyages across the Atlantic. He again assured his patrons Ferdinand and Isabella that he had found gold mines, blaming illness and logistical problems for his failure to produce better hard evidence, sending parrots, cannibals and castrated males instead to try to conceal the truth. Just as he had been certain that he had been close to Japan on his first expedition, so he reported with complete confidence now that he was near the mines of Ophir, which had yielded the gold to build Solomon’s Temple, after finding a few impressively large nuggets on the island of Hispaniola. Later he claimed to have discovered the gates of paradise itself when he reached what was in fact the mouth of the Orinoco.36
Some of Columbus’ men, infuriated by the way he obsessively managed every detail of his expeditions, by how stingily he rationed provisions and by how easily he lost his temper when anyone disagreed with him, returned to Europe with information that poured cold water over the admiral’s reports, which were anyway becoming frankly tiring in their implausible optimism. Crossing the Atlantic was a farce, Pedro Margarit, a Spanish explorer, and Bernardo Buyl, a missionary monk, told the rulers of Spain: there was no gold, and they had found nothing to bring back other than naked Indians, fancy birds and a few trinkets; the costs of the expeditions would never be recovered.37 This utter failure to find treasures was perhaps one reason why attention shifted from material wealth to the erotic in these new territories. Accounts about the newly discovered lands written in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries increasingly focused on unusual sexual practices, intercourse in public and sodomy.38
But then fortunes changed. In 1498, while exploring the Paria peninsula in what is now northern Venezuela, Columbus came across locals wearing strings of pearls around their necks and shortly afterwards discovered a set of islands with astonishingly rich oyster beds. Explorers rushed to fill their ships with the prizes. Contemporary accounts record how sacks filled to bursting with pearls, ‘some as large as hazelnuts, very clear and beautiful’, were shipped back to Spain, generating fortunes for the captains and crews who brought them home.39 The sense of excitement was heightened by stories of the quantities of pearls waiting to be gathered, by their enormous sizes and above all by the reports of the prices at which they were sold by the locals – which were swiftly exaggerated as rumours swirled around Europe. One, ostensibly written by Amerigo Vespucci but either heavily embroidered or more likely a forgery, told how the Italian explorer had been able to acquire ‘a hundred and nineteen marks of pearls’ (around sixty pounds in weight), in exchange for ‘nothing other than bells, mirrors, glass beads and brass leaves. One [of the natives] traded all the pearls he had for one bell.’40
Some pearls were so large that they became famous in their own right – such as ‘La Peregrina’ (the ‘Pilgrim pearl’), which remains one of the largest single pearls ever found, and the similarly named ‘La Pelegrina’, famed for its unparalleled quality. Both held pride of place in royal and imperial treasuries across Europe for centuries, depicted in portraits of sovereigns by Velázquez, and more recently, as centrepieces of legendary modern collections, such as that of Elizabeth Taylor.
The pearl bonanza was followed by the discovery of gold and silver as the Spanish investigations of Central and southern America brought them into contact with sophisticated and complex societies such as the Aztecs and, soon afterwards, the Inca. Inevitably, exploration turned to conquest. Columbus had noted on his very first expedition that the Europeans enjoyed a major technological advantage over the people he had come into contact with. ‘The Indians’, as he wrongly called them, ‘do not have arms and are all naked, and of no skill in arms, and so cowardly that a thousand would not stand against three.’41 They had watched with wonder at one banquet as Columbus showed them the accuracy of a Turkish bow, and then demonstrated the power of a small Lombard cannon and of a spingard – a heavy gun capable of piercing armour. The new arrivals might have admired the idyllic and naive characteristics of the people they encountered, but they were also proud of their instruments of death, which had evolved from centuries of near-incessant fighting against both Muslims and neighbouring Christian kingdoms in Europe.42
Columbus had already advised on the passivity and naivety of those he encountered on his first crossing. ‘They are fit to be ordered about and made to work, plant and do everything else that may be needed, and build towns and be taught our customs,’ he wrote.43 From the very outset, the local populations were identified as potential slaves. Violence quickly became standard. On the island of Cuba in 1513, villagers who arrived to present the Spanish with gifts of food, fish and bread ‘to the limit of their larder’ were massacred ‘without the slightest provocation’, in the words of one dismayed observer. This was just one atrocity among many. ‘I saw . . . cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen or expects to see,’ wrote the Spanish friar Bartolomé de las Casas of his experiences in the earliest days of European settlement, in a horrified report designed to inform those back home of what was happening in the New World.44 What he saw was just the beginning, as he reported in his coruscating account of the treatment of the ‘Indians’ in his Historia de las Indias.
The native populations in the Caribbean and the Americas were devastated. Within a few short decades of Columbus’ first voyage, the numbers of the indigenous Taíno people fell from half a million to little more than 2,000. This was in part due to ferocious treatment at the hands of those who began to style themselves as ‘conquistadors’ – or conquerors – such as Hernán Cortés, whose bloodthirsty expedition to explore and secure Central America resulted in the death of the Aztec ruler, Moctezuma, and the collapse of the Aztec Empire. Cortés stopped at nothing to enrich himself. ‘I and my companions’, he told the Aztecs, ‘suffer from a disease of the heart that can be cured only with gold.’45 Rest assured, he purportedly promised Moctezuma, ‘have no fear. We love you greatly. Today our hearts are a
t peace.’46
Cortés exploited the situation perfectly – although stories that his successes stemmed from the Aztecs’ belief that he was the manifestation of the god Quetzalcoatl were later inventions.47 Striking an alliance with Xicoténcatl, leader of the Tlaxcalan, who was keen to profit from the demise of the Aztecs, the Spanish set about dismantling a highly sophisticated state.48 As became standard in other locations in the Americas, the locals were treated with contempt. The native population, wrote one commentator in the mid-sixteenth century, ‘are such cowards and so fearful that the sight of our men alone strikes them down with fear . . . causing them to flee like women simply because of a small number of Spaniards’. In judgement, wisdom and virtue, he wrote, ‘they are as inferior as children are to adults’. Indeed, he went on, they were more like monkeys than men – that is to say, they could hardly be considered to be human.49
Through a combination of ruthlessness that stands comparison with the great Mongol invasions across Asia, Cortés and his men seized the Aztec treasures, pillaging ‘like little beasts . . . each man utterly possessed by greed’, according to an account compiled in the sixteenth century from eyewitness testimonies. Exquisite items were looted, including ‘necklaces of heavy gems, anklets of beautiful workmanship, wristbands, ankle rings with little golden bells and the turquoise diadem that is the insignia of the ruler, reserved only for his use’. Gold was stripped from shields and mountings and melted into bars; emeralds and jade were looted. ‘They took everything.’50
That alone was not enough. In one of the great atrocities of the early modern period, the nobility and priesthood of Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, were massacred during a religious festival. The small Spanish force went berserk, chopping off the hands of drummers before attacking the crowds with spears and swords. ‘The blood . . . ran like water, like slimy water; the stench of blood filled the air,’ as the Europeans went from door to door looking for new victims.51
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