How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (35 page)

What Prince Henry did accomplish was to finance many voyages of exploration—his abundant funds coming from his being administrator of Ceuta and from his appointment by the pope as Governor of the Order
of Christ, a rich Portuguese religious order that was an offshoot of the Knights Templar. In keeping with this position, although he did not take holy orders, Prince Henry is thought to have been a lifelong celibate and to have occasionally worn a hair shirt, as did many ascetics of that era.
¹⁶

Exploring the “Atlantic Mediterranean”

The initial voyages Henry sent forth were short ones into the Atlantic. Portugal was ideally situated to explore the area that has been called the “Atlantic Mediterranean,” which stretches from the coasts of Portugal and West Africa to the Azores and the Canaries.
¹⁷
As the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto observed, the name derives from the fact that “the area was a ‘middle sea’ surrounded by mainlands and archipelagoes which constituted, for a while, the practical limits of navigation.”
¹⁸

Europeans had long had some awareness of Atlantic islands in this area. In the year 75 the Greek historian Plutarch claimed to have met a sailor just back from two Atlantic islands that probably were what are today known as Madeira and nearby Porto Santo.
¹⁹
The Canary Islands also were known in ancient times; the Romans visited them, and Ptolemy included them quite accurately on one of his second-century maps. More recent knowledge of these islands probably stemmed from a mapping expedition Portugal’s King Afonso IV sent out in 1341. Reasonably placed representations of the Azores, Madeiras, and the Canaries appeared in the famous
Medici Atlas
published in 1351, probably in Genoa.
²⁰
Whether or not he had knowledge of this atlas, Prince Henry surely knew of the results of the expedition his ancestor Afonso had sent out. Thus it is no surprise that he was determined to claim these nearby islands.

First up were the Madeiras. A voyage sent by Prince Henry reached them in 1419, and settlers landed there in 1420. The settlers included members of the minor nobility as well as some convicts to serve as field workers. From the start, Madeira was a profitable venture, exporting a substantial amount of wheat to Portugal. Then came a bonanza based on raising sugarcane. By 1480 the Dutch had devoted more than seventy ships to transporting raw sugar from Madeira to Antwerp, where it was refined and distributed. Within ten years Madeira had become the major producer of Europe’s sugar.
²¹

In 1427 the Portuguese captain Diogo de Silves reached the Azores. It is not known whether he was sent there or encountered them by accident. But in 1431 or 1432 Prince Henry had cattle and sheep placed on
the Azores to resupply ships voyaging in the area, and in 1439 Portuguese settlers were landed. These were mainly convicts and other undesirables, since volunteers could not be found.
²²
Eventually the Azores proved especially valuable as a rest stop for ships returning from the Americas.

Finally, in the 1450s Portuguese explorers discovered the Cape Verde Islands, an archipelago lying nearly six hundred miles off the coast of Africa and much farther south than the Azores and Madeiras. Despite the name, the islands were not very green, nor were they very fertile. But this location proved of considerable use for the newly resurrected slave trade (see chapter 11).

Although they tried several times, the Portuguese were never able to annex the Canary Islands, which remained in the control of their natives until the Spanish finally overcame their resistance in 1495. Whereas the Azores, Madeiras, and Cape Verdes were uninhabited, the Canaries were inhabited by a Neolithic culture of white, blue-eyed people, many of them having blond hair, who may have shared a common origin with the Berbers of North Africa. These natives grew wheat and raised goats, sheep, and pigs. No one knows when they arrived. The Spanish attempted to enslave them, but the pope prohibited those efforts.
²³
Eventually these indigenous peoples were assimilated. The Canaries became a major stopover for Spanish fleets crossing the Atlantic.

The long-term value of the islands of the “Atlantic Mediterranean” was substantial, but in the short term the passage around Africa was far more lucrative.

Down the Coast of Africa

The most surprising feature of the
Medici Atlas
was its depiction of Africa. A century before the Portuguese began their slow and careful probes down the African West Coast, the Medici map showed the sharp eastward bend of the Gulf of Guinea. It also showed that the Atlantic and Indian Oceans joined below the tip of the continent and therefore that it would be possible to sail around Africa and on to India. Historians now regard all this as a lucky guess, but one can’t help but wonder about unknown voyages. Whatever the case, Prince Henry seems to have been certain that Africa could be sailed around, based on his belief in legends concerning Prester John and on the Bible’s implication that all the great oceans are connected. But Henry did not send out ships to trace this
supposed route; he only sent his captains on a series of small incremental voyages along the coast.

Initially, neither Portuguese nor Castilian voyagers sailed south of Morocco’s Cape Juby because of treacherous currents that could smash a ship against the shore. Moreover, the coastline from the Strait of Gibraltar down to the Senegal River was forbidding, being largely a rocky desert inhabited only by small bands of nomads. As the historian Ronald Fritze noted, before 1433 Prince Henry sent fifteen different ventures to round Cape Juby, but each time his captains lost their nerve and turned back.
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Finally, in 1434 Gil Eannes, a member of the prince’s household, made it around Cape Juby safely by staying farther out to sea, and he returned to tell about it.
²⁵
Asked by Prince Henry to repeat his feat, Eannes did so. Exploration down the African coast was now on. But it went very slowly, more attention being given to initiating a slave trade than to explorations, although Diogo Gomes did explore the Gambia River in 1457. Explorations were further delayed by the disastrous Portuguese attempt to conquer Morocco in 1458–59.

The last voyage Prince Henry commissioned left early in 1460 and sailed at least five hundred miles south of the Gambia River, charting the coast. Henry died before it returned, but the prince’s dream of sailing around Africa to India did not die with him. A major next step was taken in 1488, when Bartolomeu Dias sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and several hundred miles up the East Coast of Africa.

To India

The same year Prince Henry died,
²⁶
Vasco da Gama was born in a small seaport on the southwest coast of Portugal.

Little is known of da Gama’s early life or education, although he was well versed in astronomy and might have been a student of the rabbi-astronomer Abraham Zacuto.
²⁷
In 1492 King John of Portugal placed da Gama in command of a force that seized all the merchandise aboard French ships in Portuguese harbors in retaliation for the French seizure of a Portuguese ship loaded with gold. Da Gama did this so well that the king of France quickly returned the Portuguese ship and all its gold cargo. Da Gama may have been entrusted with other missions by the king, possibly some of them secret. What is known is that in 1497 da Gama was selected to lead a long-planned expedition around Africa to India.

On July 8, 1497, da Gama sailed with a fleet of four ships and a total
crew of 170 men. Two of the ships were large carracks (see chapter 9), the
São Gabriel
and the
São Rafael
, each being 89 feet long and displacing about 170 tons. A third was a slightly smaller caravel,
Berrio
, and the fourth was a supply boat, name unknown, and lost at sea. Both carracks had large deck cannons—perhaps ten on each ship, making them very powerful fighting ships for their time. This made it possible for da Gama to loot Arab merchant ships encountered along the East Coast of Africa, this being a Muslim-controlled area. Da Gama regarded all Muslims as the enemy because the Portuguese were still at war with Muslims in North Africa and on the Mediterranean.
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After nearly a year at sea, on May 20, 1498, da Gama landed near Calicut, India. He was not well received by the king. Although a Hindu, the king was influenced by Muslim merchants, who may have regarded da Gama as a rival (little did they know!). Still, Da Gama had gained valuable cargo by plundering Muslim ships along the way: when he sailed for home on August 29, his cargo was worth sixty times the cost of the expedition, including the construction of his ships.

Da Gama’s return voyage was far more difficult than the trip out. Because of prevailing westerly winds, his trip from Malindi on the African coast to India had taken only 23 days. It took 132 days in the other direction. In the end, only 60 of da Gama’s original crew of 170 lived to return to Portugal.

Upon his homecoming in September 1499, da Gama received both wealth and honors—the king gave him the title Admiral of the Indian Seas. He made a second voyage in 1502 with a fleet of eighteen ships and more than eight hundred men. This allowed him to overawe the Indian king and establish a fort and trade center at Cochin, south of Calicut.

After da Gama’s second voyage, new Portuguese fleets were sent to India. They quickly took command of the Indian Ocean, and hence of trade with India, by sinking several Muslim fleets and defeating attempts to drive them from Cochin.
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In 1510 Portuguese forces seized the kingdom of Goa, well to the north of Calicut, and they held it as a trade center and colony until ousted by the Indian army in 1961.

In 1524 Vasco da Gama was named Viceroy of India and made his third voyage, landing in Goa and then sailing to Cochin. There, on Christmas Eve 1524, he died of malaria and was buried in St. Francis Church. In 1539 his body was returned to Portugal and reburied in a coffin decorated with gold and jewels.

Columbus Sails

While the Portuguese explored Africa and India, amazing things were happening on the Atlantic.

In 1485 Cristóbal Colón (as Christopher Columbus was known and as he signed his name) asked King John II of Portugal to finance his plan to sail west to the Indies. Supported by his advisers, the king turned him down.The Portuguese did so not because they thought the world was flat (as all the textbooks used to claim)
³⁰
but because they correctly believed that Columbus was badly underestimating the circumference of the globe. They believed the voyage would be impossible without stops to resupply.

Despite misjudging the distance, Columbus had done a great deal of research in preparation for a voyage west. Having taught himself Latin, he read many great works on astronomy and geography, including Ptolemy’s
Almagest
and Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly’s
Image of the World
. We know this because, as the historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote, “fortunately we have his own copies of these works, amply underlined, and their margins filled with his [commentaries].”
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Columbus had also gained invaluable knowledge by voyaging down the West Coast of Africa with Portuguese traders. In 1476 he sailed with a Genoese convoy that visited Bristol, England; Galway, Ireland; and possibly Iceland. Somewhere along the line he seems to have learned about the trade winds—the somewhat circular prevailing wind system over the Atlantic. On his first voyage to America he sailed along southern latitudes, where winds blowing from the east propelled him in five weeks from the Canaries to the Bahamas. For his return voyage, instead of clawing his way back against these easterlies, he sailed up to northern latitudes and was propelled home by prevailing winds from the west, which, as they approach Europe, bend south toward Portugal and Spain.

Having been rejected by the Portuguese, Columbus unsuccessfully approached both Genoa and Venice. Then, in May 1486, he presented his plan for sailing to “the land of spices” to Queen Isabella of Castile. She referred it to a group of experts, who, like those in Portugal, recommended against funding on grounds that Columbus was badly underestimating the distance involved. Eventually, Columbus had his brother Bartolomé present his plan to Henry VII of England. After long hesitation, Henry expressed his willingness, but by then Columbus had received a commitment from the new kingdom of Spain, created by the marriage of
Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, who had together driven the last Moors from the peninsula.

It had taken two years of negotiations and the commitment of some private Italian investors to foot half the costs to gain the approval of the Spanish monarchs. The terms under which Columbus launched his voyage were very generous—according to his son, that was because the king and queen didn’t really expect him to return.

So, finally, on August 3, 1492, Columbus sailed west in three ships. The largest was the carrack
Santa María
, which was about 85 feet long. Second largest was the caravel
Pinta
, about 69 feet, and the third was the caravel
Niña
, about 55 feet.
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Columbus’s crew amounted to ninety men and boys. He sailed first to the Canaries, where he stocked up on provisions and made some minor repairs. Then, on September 6, he headed west. Five weeks later, a lookout on the
Pinta
spotted land. Columbus had reached the Bahamas. It is unknown on which of these islands he first landed. Because he was convinced that he had reached the Indies, he identified the inhabitants—“they go naked as when their mothers bore them,” Columbus recorded
³³
—as “Indians.” As do most historians, I shall use that term to identify members of the indigenous population of the New World.