A History of the World (42 page)

Though Columbus is credited as the ‘discoverer’ for Europeans, the Vikings had already reached America’s northern Atlantic shore and had settled for a short time, while Basque sailors had long known the rich cod-fishing grounds off Newfoundland. After Columbus reached the south, the first northerly connections were French, Spanish, Dutch and, later, English fur-traders, followed by settlements many of which survived only thanks to native American food aid. But the impact of the Europeans resulted in a multi-faceted catastrophe, which is only recently being properly understood. From their first arrival in the 1520s up until 1900, it has been estimated that there were almost a hundred American epidemics, virtually wiping out entire peoples. Aside from those who died of disease, many died of hunger, the result of fields being left untended and crops unsown. The ‘virgin’ and empty paradise proclaimed by European settlers was in many areas, in fact, an open-air disaster zone.

The effect on native peoples did not stop with disease, of course. The desperate desire of Europeans for fur, particularly beaver pelts for hats, brought tribes into conflict as they hunted the animals to local extinction, and radically altered their traditional ways of living. The introduction of guns and alcohol had a similar impact. Further south, the Spanish had reintroduced horses, which had been wiped out by the first Americans. By the early 1700s escaped horses running wild, and others that had been bartered or stolen, underlay a huge change in the lifestyle of the Plains Indians, who had always hunted their bison on foot. Now, mounted, they became a much more effective – and warlike – nomadic people.

Finally, the invasive acts of colonization itself destroyed the native empires of Mesoamerica and the coastal cultures of North America, and caused waves of migration. Far from being ‘timeless’ and ‘untamed’, as was the claim, America had been a well populated
continent. The arrival of Europeans, from the viewpoint of its original inhabitants, was one of the greatest disasters in history.

Christopher Gets Lost

Christopher Columbus, or Cristóbal Colón (Spanish), or Cristoforo Colombo (Italian) or Christofferus de Colombo, or Colom, or whichever name we choose from the medley by which this red-faced, white-haired seadog was known, can be thought of as a scout, the advance party. All invasions have men riding on ahead, then reporting back; in this case, they were riding three small ships, known by their crew by slang words for ‘prostitute’. Columbus’s flagship, the
Santa Maria
, was known to her sailors as ‘the Dirty Mary’. When they left a little Spanish port village in 1492, these men had no fear of falling off the end of the world. They thought they would find Far Eastern lands, perhaps Japan, perhaps India, perhaps China with its ‘Great Khan’ (though that empire had gone a hundred years earlier – news travelled slowly). Columbus went to his deathbed convinced he had found ‘the Indies’, but his behaviour suggests that he was confused: he had claimed the Caribbean for the Spanish Crown, which he was hardly likely to do if he really thought this was part of the mighty Chinese empire.

Quite what he thought he was doing is a mystery. On his first voyage he carried nothing much to trade, just a few baubles, and no soldiers or priests, nor anybody to record in drawings what he would find. He cannot, of course, have had any idea that his little expedition would be the vanguard buzz before the huge swarm of European shipping going west – or the first few drops of water before the storm. His later explanations are so various and contradictory that it may well be that he did not know quite what he was looking for, though he wrote obsessively about gold. Columbus did carry great titles – Admiral of the Ocean and Viceroy – and the right to a tenth of everything he discovered. He had been granted all this by the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, who had just destroyed the last Muslim foothold in Europe, the little kingdom of Granada.

Columbus was a brave sailor, though he was perhaps an even better confidence-artist. He was certainly responsible for the most significant mistake in human history.

Perhaps we should say ‘self-confidence-artist’, for he had a formidable belief in his own destiny. His had been a long struggle to raise the funds for what was essentially a financial speculation. As we have seen, this was a time of intense competition in the western Mediterranean. The Portuguese, the real pioneer sailors, had reached the tip of Africa and were poised to establish reliable routes to India. They hoped to get to the African goldfields owned by Mali and Songhai, and to attack the Muslim bloc from the south. The Spanish had competed with them, and with French adventurers, for Europe’s first Atlantic colonies, the scatterings of islands off the African coast. Of these, the Portuguese had Madeira and the Cape Verde islands, while between 1404 and 1493 the Spanish had secured the Canary Islands.

What had happened in the Canaries was small in scale, but an almost perfect test-run for the colonization of America. The local people, possibly of Berber origin, were tall and not particularly dark-skinned. They lived in tribal groups, and though they fought back against the Spanish, they lacked the advantage of both horses and guns, of which they had no knowledge. They were also vulnerable to European diseases. Many were taken back to Europe as slaves. Their culture has now completely vanished. In their place, the Spanish established sugar plantations and dreamed of gold, in this case the African gold not so far away across the ocean.

But what
was
beyond the Canaries, further west? Columbus was not alone in assuming that Japan and China could be as little as four weeks’ sailing. Educated Europeans now accepted the world was round. As noted earlier, Christian sailors had Muslim astrolabes and Chinese compasses as well as classical maps. Among those who told Columbus that China was reachable was Paolo Toscanelli, a sage of Florence who knew Leonardo da Vinci and probably Amerigo Vespucci, who would later give his name to the continent.
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On the other hand, other eminent geographers disagreed. They thought the voyage must be far longer than Columbus hoped, and too far for the boats of the time, carrying limited fresh water, to survive. Columbus failed to get Portuguese backing for his venture because its king’s number-crunchers, the Junta dos Matematicos, did not agree with his distance calculations; and to start with, he had just the same trouble in Spain.

But Ferdinand and Isabella, swollen by their military triumph over
the Moors, did eventually help. Their motives were a mix of greed, pride, piety and fear. They were greedy for gold, and also for the Eastern spices which had made so many merchants and cities rich along the long land route. Their conquest of Granada had been glorious, but also expensive. They were proud of their great Christian triumph, however, which had echoed around Europe, and they clearly had a sense of destiny to which Columbus’s gamble appealed. Like other contemporary Christians, they believed Christ would return before long, and that their duty included finding as many souls as possible to bring into the Christian fold. Above all, they were afraid of being beaten to new discoveries. Columbus had already tried Portugal. He had sent a brother (who was delayed, after being caught by pirates) to talk to the English. And when the Spanish finally agreed to fund Columbus, he was on his way to sell his idea to the French.

Columbus was not Spanish himself, but Genoese. It was the aristocracy, Church and merchants of Spain, however, who stumped up, and they would do so again when he returned with enslaved natives, some interesting vegetables, parrots, and only a rather meagre tray of gold pieces – suggesting, in effect, that they play ‘double or quits’. He had said he could reach Japan in four weeks’ sailing from the Canary Islands, a journey he claimed was around 2,400 miles. But those Portuguese mathematicians were right: the real distance was about twelve thousand miles, and thus completely impossible for a ship of the time without landfall and fresh supplies en route.

He may well have known he was exaggerating, which makes the courage of simply setting off into the unknown even more remarkable. At least one other well organized exploratory fleet had sailed west and simply vanished. We should not forget, though, the sheer exhilaration and excitement that must also have been felt in just taking these new machines, ocean-going ships, and seeing how far they might go. Ferdinand and Isabella had offered a huge reward to the first sailor to sight land – a grant of ten thousand silver pieces a year for the rest of his life. With every man aboard the three tiny ships presumably fantasizing that ‘it could be me’, greed and optimism held out for weeks after they had left their final stepping-off point, the Canaries. But after many false sightings and with supplies running low, the mood changed.

Columbus, the Italian commander, begged and cajoled his Spanish crew to carry on. Some sailors pointed out that he was a mad foreigner,
and that they were risking their lives to make him rich – which was an entirely fair charge. Others talked of throwing him overboard if he persisted. After five weeks at sea Columbus called a meeting with the captains of the other two ships, the
Pinta
and the
Niña
, who agreed, grudgingly, to carry on, but only for another four days. Two days later, on 12 October 1492, one of the sailors, Rodrigo de Triana, finally saw land ahead – part of the island chain of what are now called the Bahamas. If Rodrigo had a pleasurable vision of a life of ease now ahead, he had mistaken his captain. Columbus claimed he had seen landfall already, and took the reward for himself. How he avoided being thrown overboard on the return voyage by his disappointed crew is yet another mystery. When they landed, Columbus claimed the island for the Spanish Crown, as San Salvador (its original native name was Guanahani).

The people there were related to the Taíno of the Caribbean, whose deadly enemies were the hunter-cannibals, the Caribs. There were probably no more than two hundred thousand people living in the Caribbean at the time, doing some basic farming, fishing and weaving – and greatly enjoying smoking the dried leaves of tobacco plants, rolled into cigars. Columbus described the Taíno (he called them ‘Indians’) as peace-loving, gentle people, and told King Ferdinand they could be forced to work, farm, build and wear clothes. Moving on to claim larger islands too, he also kidnapped some natives to show off back in Spain. Within eighteen years of the first Spanish colonizers arriving – on Columbus’s second, much longer, visit a year after his first – 99 per cent of the locals would be dead. Most of these deaths were caused by disease.

On the first visit, because his largest ship had been wrecked, Columbus had had to leave thirty-nine men behind to build a settlement and shake some more gold out of the locals. But the Spanish lust for gold and conquest drove even the Taíno to fight back. When he returned, the thirty-nine were all dead. There would always be more settlers, but the Taíno and other peoples of the area were doomed. They passed syphilis on to Columbus’s sailors, and thus by stages to all fornicating Europeans; but they virtually disappeared from history, leaving behind only a few of their words, including ‘hammock’, ‘canoe’ and ‘barbecue’.
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That second expedition brought with it around twelve hundred people, including some women, along with some of those
terrifying newcomers, horses, with mounted soldiers and plenty of guns. To native Americans the odd combination of a gleaming half-man with four long legs, able to spit fire, must have seemed like some monstrous dragon. The second voyage also brought mules, chickens and pigs: this was the moment at which exploration slid into takeover.

The ‘Indians’, often (in self-justification) libelled as ‘cannibals’ when some particularly harsh treatment was to be dealt out to them, were considered the property of the new Spanish empire. Their land was to be its land. Did the Spanish Catholic propensity for seeing all non-Catholics as heretics, who either could be converted or would burn for ever, lead them to disregard any notion of native rights? Northern Protestants would behave very similarly; religion was probably simply the excuse. For the new Spanish monarchy the real threat, anyway, was not in the New World, but in the Old.

It came from the rival Portuguese, with whom the Spanish were in competition all over the western ocean. In 1494 the two nations had come to an extraordinary agreement, ratified as the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided half the world longitudinally between them. The line ran through the two poles and west of the Cape Verde islands off Africa, which were already Portuguese, giving the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola, claimed by Columbus, to Spain. A revision of the first agreement would give the Portuguese most of Brazil; later, in 1529, the Iberian carve-up was extended to the other side of the world, with another line being drawn through the Far East in the Treaty of Zaragoza.

Columbus’s third and fourth voyages culminated in landfall in South America proper, and in the discovery of pearls. By then the colonists were squabbling amongst themselves and falling out badly with the tolerant Taíno. Ferdinand and Isabella would trim the too generous deal Columbus had got for himself and begin the long project of turning what had been in effect a private gamble into a state- and Church-sponsored imperium.

The Christian Frontier

To understand why Columbus did what he did, and the apparent absurdity of two countries dividing up between them much of the
world (with papal blessing), we have to look more closely at the Iberian politics of his time. If Christian Europe was cut off from the East by the long and expensive Silk Road, then Spain and Portugal must have felt more isolated still. These were states on the edge of Europe, just cleared of Muslims, littered with castles, lines of defence and encampments. Ferdinand and Isabella were frontier monarchs, passionate in their belief in Catholic Christendom. The experience of their subjects had been that, to feel secure, they had to keep pressing on, expanding their land. This was a restless frontier, policed by sailing-boats, a frontier familiar with war.