Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  Christian Europe’s new control of the Mediterranean, the rise of shipping in the northern seas, and the linking of the two regions through the Strait of Gibraltar helped stimulate a series of breakthroughs in naval architecture, navigation, and rigging that transformed European shipping from the early fourteenth century. The advent of sturdy, maneuverable, large, oarless sailing ships created vessels that, for the first time, could carry their cargo year-round in all weather. They became the direct progenitors of the world-changing transoceanic Voyages of Discovery at the end of the fifteenth century.

  The adoption of the magnetic compass from China facilitated sailing in the thirteenth-century Mediterranean, which was too deep for navigation by feeling the way along the bottom as was common practice in the northern seas. From about 1280 to 1330, rigging and ship design underwent a fundamental advance. Two important ship designs emerged. Venetian shipyards began producing a large sailing ship with two, and later three, masts, and rigged with triangular, lateen sails that made it highly maneuverable against headwinds. Although the ship had oars like a traditional galley, they were used only to enter and leave port. Even larger and sturdier from about 1300 was a new model northern sea cog. Clinker-built with overlapping planks and a central sternpost rudder, the cog ultimately became the workhorse of the Atlantic coast trade. To overcome the cog’s clumsy maneuverability in the Mediterranean and its problem exiting against the westerlies that prevailed at the Strait of Gibraltar due to its possessing a single square sail, the cog was enhanced with a second, or mizzen, mast rigged with a lateen sail. The Genoese, in particular, adopted this new model cog. They increased the size of its hulls so that by 1400 it could carry cargoes of alum and other bulk commodities up to 600 tons, or two to three times more than the competitive carriers of the northern Hanseatic League. The new vessels, which debuted in the Mediterranean, had much smaller crews and relied upon crossbows for defense against the ramming and boarding tactics of traditional oared galleys.

  The combination of new ship design and improved navigation helped trigger a quantum leap in Mediterranean shipping volume and velocity—Italian round-trips made to the ports of Egypt, the Levant, and Asia Minor doubled from one to two per year. Instead of being forced to winter in foreign ports as had been customary for centuries, Italian fleets left for the eastern Mediterranean in February and returned in May, reloaded their holds, and departed again in early August for a Christmas return. All-weather shipping spread to the Atlantic and to the northern seas. For the first time, a coherent, price-integrated commercial network of markets served by Zaccaria’s alum ships, the Flanders Fleets, and others emerged along Europe’s three sea coastlines from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The enormous economic impetus helped European growth survive the multiple catastrophic setbacks of the mid-fourteenth century—colder climates, famines, peasant revolts, and finally the Black Death—which annihilated one-fourth to one-third of Europe’s inhabitants. Europe’s population did not return to its pre-bubonic-plague level until after 1480.

  Integration by sea transport recalibrated competitive market conditions throughout the region. Baltic populations suddenly were able to preserve herring and cabbage throughout the winter with salt imported from southern Europe. Salted herring became a major export to the Mediterranean. When the Baltic herring, in one of the great ecological mysteries of history, migrated in the fifteenth century to the North Sea and within reach of Dutch fishing nets, it contributed to the concentration of commercial power in the north in the Netherlands. Another of the many natural changes that altered the course of history occurred when Bruges’s harbor silted up around 1500, diverting the Atlantic coast fleets to nearby Antwerp, which happily took over as the northern center of the north-south trade. But all that paled in historical significance beside the momentous water breakthrough that lay on Europe’s immediate horizon.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Voyages of Discovery and the Launch of the Oceanic Era

  The seaborne fusion of Europe’s disparate northern and Mediterranean resources into a coherent, market-driven, maritime civilization comprised of many autonomous, competing states set the stage for one of history’s epochal turning points—the advent of transoceanic sailing. Europe’s Voyages of Discovery were highlighted by three breakthrough trips in the 1490s scarcely noticed at the time by the rest of the world—Christopher Columbus to Central America, Vasco da Gama around the coast of Africa to India, and John Cabot from England to Newfoundland in North America—that crowned a century of sea exploration by suddenly decrypting the secret code of trade winds and sea currents of the Atlantic Ocean to enable them to sail to and fro across Earth’s open oceans. In so doing they converted what had always been Europe’s impenetrable, storm-tossed water barrier into a dynamic navigational advantage that launched Western civilization on its historic path to global supremacy. Within only a quarter century of the Atlantic voyages, one of Ferdinand Magellan’s ships completed history’s first round-the-world trip. In his 1776 The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith heralded Columbus’s discovery of America and da Gama’s passage to India as no less than “the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.”

  The Atlantic opening ushered in the modern era in which sea power and control of the world’s sea-lanes eclipsed the importance of dominion over the land as the preeminent key to global power and wealth. The new sea-centered world system bound all the regions of the planet more closely together and created a web of international communication and maritime trade that has continually thickened and tightened in space and time into today’s integrated global economy. Although the new era started around 1500, its long-term trajectories did not become clear among the world’s leading civilizations for about two centuries. No civilization gained more than the West, whose maritime position on the Atlantic and superior naval power, often spurred by market economic forces, gave it access to the world’s choicest sea trade superhighways. Whenever land-centered civilizations had broken beyond their frontier boundaries across narrow bodies of water or open plains or deserts, their expansions generally had been regional. Likewise, changes in control of axial sea routes in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean mainly fomented realignments of regional power relations. But the global oceanic opening, by contrast, catapulted Europeans as an irresistible power that reordered world power balances for the next half millennium.

  The fitting symbol of Europe’s maritime fusion and its momentous Atlantic breakthrough was the caravel, a small Portuguese vessel that was first launched upon the seas in the first half of the fifteenth century. About 70 feet long, displacing only 50 tons, and manned by a small, 20-man crew with minimal supply needs, the caravel had been specially designed for exploration. It had an internal sternpost rudder and a sturdy, lap-jointed, rounded hull whose flatish bottom allowed it to put in at shallows and other perilous shores. The ship had three masts, often two with square sails for power and one lateen or triangular sail that facilitated nimble maneuvering through headwinds which crucially assured explorers that they had a reasonable chance of returning home as they ventured into the unknown currents and wind systems of the ocean. Both Columbus’s and da Gama’s fleets included caravels.

  The caravel married features of both northern and Mediterranean vessels and sailing traditions. Geographically, Portugal made a natural midwife. With its fabulous natural harbor of Lisbon on continental Europe’s westernmost point of land as well as other good Atlantic harbors linked to navigable rivers, Portugal had prospered as a port of call for the coast-hugging Flanders Fleet. Without a window on the Mediterranean, and constantly menaced by large neighbors on the Iberian Peninsula that were coalescing into Spain, moreover, Portugal’s survival and wealth hinged extraordinarily upon its ability to exploit the ocean. For two centuries from 1385, when its independence was secured with the help of an alliance with England, to 1580 when King Philip II successfully asserted Spanish hegemony over it, tiny Portugal had an outsized effect on world history through it
s pioneering of the Age of Discovery, and its ocean-crossing caravel.

  The caravel’s inspirational spirit was one of history’s intriguing, idiosyncratic individuals, Prince Henry the Navigator. The third son of the king of Portugal and his English queen, the tall, blond-haired Prince Henry, then in his mid-twenties, in 1418 set up what amounted to the world’s first scientific research institute. It was dedicated to pure discovery and sea exploration through uncharted Atlantic waters down the African coast to unknown lands. Until his death in 1460, his fortress atop the promontory at Sagres at Portugal’s southern tip was home to the age’s most knowledgeable assortment of sea captains, pilots, cartographers, astronomers, mathematicians, ship instrument makers, shipbuilders and other experts, all collaboratively guided by a scientific methodology unusual for the age and rare to that point in human history. Muslim astronomers and Jewish cartographers escaping religious persecution in Spain, master mariners from Genoa and Venice, German and Scandinavian merchants, visiting world travelers, and even African tribesmen, pooled their knowledge and observations. Henry’s experts systematically mapped what they learned of the Atlantic and its coasts, devised methods to measure latitudes, and in general accumulated as much concrete information about the known world as possible. Every year Henry’s ships were sent out on exploratory missions to bring back logbooks and charts filled with new data and observations, which were used to fill in the maps and help with planning new voyages.

  In the spirit of the dawning age of the Renaissance, Henry’s chief purpose was the quest for pure knowledge and discovery for its own sake. But Henry, who lived a monkish existence and is said to have died a virgin, also possessed the crusading zeal of the passing age to find the rumored lost Christian kingdoms of Prester John in East Africa. A third, initially lesser, motivation was the passion for commercial wealth stirring throughout Europe. Henry and his countrymen were tantalized by the prospect of finding the original sources of the gold, ivory and slaves that were brought by middlemen from Africa and the peppers, cloves, cinnamon, ginger and other luxuries from the Indian Ocean that might be reachable by circumnavigating Africa’s cape. Indeed, public support for Henry’s unorthodox enterprise at Sagres, as well as the pace of voyages, picked up dramatically after 1444, when one of Henry’s explorers returned with 200 African slaves—Europe’s first direct involvement in the African slave trade.

  The circumnavigation and coastal exploration of Africa had been attempted, in both directions, many times over the course of history. The most famous voyage, recounted by Herodotus, was commissioned by Egyptian King Neko around 600 BC after the oracle had warned him off completing his canal linking the Red Sea to the Nile and the Mediterranean. Neko outfitted a Phoenician crew that in a spectacular voyage sailed south through the Red Sea, around Africa, up the west coast, and returned through the Pillars of Hercules three years later. The only problem was that it probably never happened. Scholars believe that such a voyage was perfectly feasible—indeed, circumnavigating Africa from east to west is technically easier than the reverse—but there is no supporting evidence and most important, it left no historical legacy if it did happen. Other east African coast explorers included the Greek Ptolemies who succeeded Alexander the Great and got as far as the Horn of Africa and figured out that the source of the Blue Nile lay in the Abyssinian highlands of modern Ethiopia. Greek sailors in Roman times reached Pemba and Zanzibar, while Roman military explorers, sent inland along the Nile to do reconnaissance for a contemplated, deep African invasion, reached the Sudd swamps and Lake Victoria. Muslim dhows went all the way south to Mozambique, but never pushed on to the unknown lands beyond the much-feared sea passage between Madagascar and the mainland.

  Voyagers sailing south along the Atlantic likewise had limited success mastering Africa’s western coast. The most celebrated and well-recorded was the voyage of Carthage’s Hanno, who successfully established African coast colonies sometime in the fifth century BC. Precisely how far Hanno got is still a matter of dispute, but by most reckonings he reached the crocodile-infested waters of the Senegal River and beyond to Sierra Leone, and turned back before reaching the searing heat and stagnant currents of the Gulf of Guinea. Less successful was the Persian explorer Sataspes, who explained to an unsympathetic King Xerxes that he had been unable to complete his mandate to circumnavigate Africa because his ships had simply stopped while his men were attacked by hostile natives when they put in at shore: Xerxes, who had mandated Sataspes’ venture in reprieve of his death sentence for violating one of the court ladies, promptly had him impaled. A Greek explorer of the late second century BC managed to get only partway down the coast of Morocco. Nor did Muslim merchants a thousand years later risk the many hazards of west coast exploration while their camel caravans already enjoyed a trade monopoly with the sub-Saharan kingdoms of west Africa. Without question, sailing Africa’s Atlantic coast was dangerous, as the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa discovered in 1291 when they outfitted two galleys filled with merchant wares for trading, made it partway down the coast, and then disappeared without a trace.

  So difficult was the circumnavigation feat that by late antiquity Greek writers had concluded that doing so was simply impossible—the heat was too great, the waters of the Atlantic too windless, muddy, shallow, and choked with seaweed to be sailed. Thus little was known of the western shores of Africa when Henry the Navigator, enthused by the budding European revival of Greek knowledge, Herodotus’ story about the Phoenicians’ circumnavigation of Africa for Pharaoh Neko, and the rediscovery of treatises like Ptolemy’s, determined to undertake his explorations to open an Atlantic sea route to India. Yet the revival of classical knowledge also reconjured Greek terrors of the Atlantic, including the belief that at a certain point the waters coagulated so that ships became stuck and sailors could never return home.

  Overcoming these Greek-inspired fears posed at least as daunting a challenge to fulfillment of Henry’s dream as the physical challenge itself. Among the gargantuan psychological barriers in the minds of Henry’s mariners was Cape Bojador, just south of the Canary Islands on the northwest coast of Africa. Henry’s explorers believed that the waters beyond this small cape, a barely noticeable bump on today’s map of Africa, were so shallow and rife with treacherous currents and winds that no ship could return from it. To conquer Cape Bojador, Henry sent out 15 expeditions between 1424 and 1434, enticing captains with the promise of great rewards to push ever farther. Always they returned before passing the dreaded cape, until one finally veered boldly westward into the open ocean and then south, to find that he had successfully rounded the cape. Once the psychological barrier of Bojador was overcome, it was merely a matter of time before the rest of the African coast yielded to Prince Henry’s systematic scientific methodology and explorations. By the time of Henry’s death in 1460, Portuguese ships had passed Cape Verde near the mouths of the rich Senegal and Gambia rivers and reached as far as modern Sierra Leone. Fittingly, that was the year of the birth of Vasco da Gama, the man who would fulfill Henry’s dream of circumnavigating Africa and in the process crack the Atlantic’s final enigmas and inaugurate the great age of cross-ocean sailing.

  In contrast to the navigationally simpler, reversing seasonal monsoons that governed sailing back and forth across the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic’s predominant feature was three large trade wind systems that blew in the same direction all year round. The central trade wind system blew west toward the Caribbean from northwest Africa and in the summertime, to the great natural advantage of Portugal and Spain, as far north as the Iberian Peninsula where Henry’s mariners easily gained access to it. Farther south, after passing through nearly windless latitudes called the Doldrums, was a second trade wind system that blew steadily from Africa toward South America. In the far north was a third belt of trades blowing west toward the New World, that in spring offered a brief, easterly moving wind that enabled an easy return sail home at the latitude of Britain. Beyond the trade wind systems, at extreme latitudes in bo
th the Southern and Northern Hemispheres, were countervailing west-to-east wind systems; in the far south at the 40 degree latitudes they led around the African coast into the Indian Ocean with such strength that mariners called them the “Roaring Forties.” Cutting across and interlinking the trade wind system were several strong sea currents, notably the warm Gulf Stream flowing from the Caribbean to northwestern Europe, and in South America, the southerly flowing Brazil Current. “Considered as a whole,” writes historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “the wind system resembles a code of interlocking ciphers. Once part of it was cracked…the solution of the rest followed rapidly.”

  The three breakthrough voyages of the 1490s finally unraveled the interlocking Atlantic codes that Prince Henry and his successors had been trying to decipher for decades. Genoese captain Columbus’s second Atlantic crossing for Spain in 1493 established viable routes outbound and home across the central Atlantic. Sailing for England, fellow Italian John Cabot’s 1497 round-trip between Bristol, England and Newfoundland, Canada utilized the briefly available spring westerly later much exploited by the British colonizers of North America. Finally, and most important, Portuguese da Gama’s 1497–1499 round-trip from Lisbon around the Cape of Africa to India revealed the secrets of the wind and current system of the South Atlantic, which ultimately girdled the globe. Once European sailors had broken the navigation codes of the storm-tossed Atlantic, all the world’s seas suddenly became penetrable by their sturdy ships. With it came monopoly access to the wealth of the New World and an alternative, cheaper, and faster all-water route to India and the Spice Islands. The Voyages of Discovery crowned Europe’s transformation into history’s first, world-straddling maritime civilization.