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5

VISIONS OF A NEW WORLD

Sometime just before October 1451, Cristoffa Combo was born in the Republic of Genoa, now part of modern Italy. In Italian, he was known as Cristoforo Colombo, the son of Domenico Colombo and Susanna Fontanarossa, weavers and people of the middling sort. They also had a cheese stand where young Cristoffa helped out. In 1473, Cristoffa was placed as an apprentice business agent for trading families in the port of Genoa. From there he made various voyages around Genoese holdings on the Mediterranean, which may have included a journey to Chios, a major Aegean island and trade centre, then under the control of the Republic of Genoa.

Three years later, in the spring of 1476, he served on a ship that formed part of a major Genoese convoy carrying valuable cargo to northern Europe. His particular ship was known to have docked in England, at Bristol, and also visited Galway, in Ireland. It is rumoured that in 1477, he reached Iceland. No doubt while in Iceland he would have heard rumours of Christian communities in Greenland and, indeed, of lands further to the west. In the late 1440s, the Pope had written to the Icelandic Christians concerning the welfare of their fellow believers further to the west in Greenland.

By the end of 1477, Cristoffa was known to have been on a Portuguese ship that sailed from Galway to Lisbon, Portugal. There, he met up with his brother, Bartolomeo, and together they continued trading on behalf of notable local families. Bartolomeo also worked in a cartographic workshop, which was another source of information for Cristoffa, now styled as Cristóbal Colón, who worked out of Lisbon from 1477 until mid-1485.

In 1479, Cristóbal married Filipa Moniz Perestrelo, a woman from a notable Portuguese family, and lived on Porto Santo Island in the Madeira group of islands. While Cristóbal was climbing the social ladder and somehow finding the time to learn his trade as a captain and navigator, events on the other side of the Mediterranean had changed the view of the world as seen from Lisbon. In 1453, the expanding Ottoman Empire had taken Constantinople and moved across the land route to Asia, making it much less accessible, especially for the Christian West. Meanwhile, Portugal and Spain were in the final phase of driving out the Moors from Granada, the last Islamic outpost on the Iberian Peninsula. This made the development of a new sea route around Africa to Asia much more important. Around 1470, Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, a Florentine astronomer, proposed to King Alfonso V of Portugal a new route west from Portugal, which he said would be a quicker and more direct route to reach China, Japan and the Spice Islands (the Moluccas, a group of islands in what is now Indonesia), rather than the circuitous route around Africa. Alfonso rejected the idea and later King John II continued to develop the Portuguese route around Africa.

Meanwhile, Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli had been in correspondence with Cristóbal in 1474, proposing his westward route to the Indies. By this time, Cristóbal himself had amassed a considerable amount of his own information, including a number of maps, as well as practical experience of the Atlantic sea routes west of Portugal down to the Canaries, the Cape Verde islands and the nearby coastline of Africa. In his own studies, Cristóbal had learned from works by Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir al-Farghani, also known as Alfraganus, who estimated that a degree of latitude around the equator represented 56.66 miles. However, Cristóbal did not realise that this was expressed in Arabic miles rather than the Roman miles that he regularly used in his navigations. Therefore, he created an error in his calculations, estimating the circumference of the earth at about 30,200 kilometres (18,765 miles), whereas the correct value should have been 40,000 kilometres (24,855 miles). He also compounded his error by following the perceived wisdom of the day that stated Eurasia – that is, from the western coast of Europe to the eastern coast of Asia – to be 180 degrees of longitude. Cristóbal went one better by following the estimate for Eurasia at 225 degrees of longitude, an estimate calculated by Greek geographer Marinus of Tyre sometime around 100 CE. This left in Cristóbal’s calculations just 135 degrees of ocean between Portugal, heading due west, and the coasts of Cathay (China). Furthermore, off the coast of China lay Cipangu (Japan), which he believed lay far from its actual position, along with other smaller islands, including the mythical island of Antillia, which was believed to lie some 900 miles southwest of the Azores (which had recently been settled by Portugal in 1432).

Based on these assumptions, the great ocean to the west did not seem so empty after all. The distance from the Canary Islands – Cristóbal’s jumping-off point to Japan – would be 3,700 kilometres with islands in between. It was the trade winds, becoming known as the Easterlies, that filled the sails of his small fleet, driving them across the Atlantic to his first landfall – more on that later.

Map 18. In 1474, Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli created a map showing the coastline of Europe and Africa, which he mistakenly believed offered a direct route to China and the Indies.

In 1485, with this potential route in mind, he approached King John II of Portugal and requested the title ‘Great Admiral of the Ocean’, asking to be appointed governor of any lands discovered and a tenth of all revenue received from those lands in return for his modest efforts in finding a new route to Asia. Certainly, this was a step up from boy cheesemonger. King John consulted a panel of experts who looked carefully over Cristóbal’s master plan and, after due consideration, recommended that the king reject the idea. Most disagreed with the calculations in degrees of distance. Cristóbal tried again in 1488 with the same plan and was rejected once more. The court was soon in a spin with the news of Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias’s rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and voyage into the Indian Ocean. Cristóbal was lost in the chatter and he decided to look elsewhere.

Cristóbal first travelled to the land of his birth, the Republic of Genoa, in search of backing. He was received with a kind of polite indifference; the Genoese were focused on improving their existing trade network in the Mediterranean and Black Seas. He then moved to Genoa’s great rival, Venice, where once again his representations received little sympathy. Perhaps his Genoese origins did him little service. Meanwhile his brother, Bartolomeo, had sailed north from Portugal to the court of King Henry VII of England, but this effort to gain backing was also unsuccessful.

In 1486, the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula had been unified by the marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile who, incidentally, were reasonably close cousins who had been granted permission to marry by the Pope. It was to this royal couple that Cristóbal presented his plans on 1 May 1486. Once again, they referred to a specialist committee, which considered that the distance to Asia was vastly underestimated and stressed the impracticability of the plan to their royal highnesses, recommending against the expedition. However, in 1489, instead of outright refusing to organise an expedition, they granted Cristóbal an allowance of 12,000 maravedis per annum. To give some idea of value, this grant was equivalent to the wage of an experienced seaman. It would have paid the rent of a small cottage, with enough left over to get drunk most weekends and, if particularly frugal, pay for the occasional tattoo. Cristóbal, of course, also maintained his trading network and, at this time, is recorded as selling printed books across southern Spain, a growth industry of the period. With this grant, the monarchs at least kept their options open. They also added an order, issued to the cities and towns of their domain, to provide Cristóbal with accommodation and food at no cost.

Cristóbal continued to lobby the Spanish court, during which time he made the acquaintance of Friar Juan Pérez. The good friar had long experience as a clerk in Queen Isabella’s Treasury Office. Pérez sent a letter directly to the queen informing her of Cristóbal’s arrival and asking her to accept himself as Cristóbal’s agent within the royal court. After two years of further negotiations, Cristóbal was eventually successful in January 1492. Ferdinand and Isabella had just completed the conquest of the last Moorish state in the Iberian Peninsula, Granada. It seems that Cristóbal may have witnessed this scene, probably after receiving comfortable accommodation and a free lunch:

After Your Highnesses ended the wars of the Moors who reigned in Europe, and finished the war of the great city of Granada where, in this present year of 1492 on 2 January, I saw the royal banners of Your Highnesses planted by a force of arms on the towers of the Alhambra.

Columbus’s journal, 1492

At a meeting in the Alcázar Castle in Córdoba, Isabella had rejected his plans once again and a downcast Cristóbal was riding his mule out of town in a state of despair. However, Ferdinand intervened on hearing Isabella’s description of the meeting, and immediately sent a royal official to find him and bring him back. In the second interview, Cristóbal’s request was finally accepted and, in what’s known as the ‘Capitulations of Santa Fé’, an agreement was made between Cristóbal Colón and their Catholic Majesties, and was signed on 17 April 1492, granting Cristóbal the titles of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the Viceroy and Governor General of all new lands taken under the flag of Spain. This also included a tenth of all riches obtained from his intended voyage. Cristóbal was nothing if not persistent in his requests for such an agreement, and the elevation to Admiral would represent a considerable increase in pay from his original 12,000 maravedis. Throughout the preparations and negotiations, Ferdinand and Isabella imposed a regime of strict security, issuing a few sketchy orders to the communities and individuals involved.

Cristóbal, together with his friend and agent Friar Juan Pérez, began preparations to equip and man his small fleet in Palos de la Frontera. In order to fulfil their share of the contract, Ferdinand and Isabella issued orders instructing the town of Palos to provide Cristóbal with two ships for a period of one year, which turned out to be two caravel sailing ships named Nina and Pinta, owned by members of the Pinzón family. Cristóbal, for his part, put together his fleet of three ships and at his own cost chartered a cargo carrier named Santa Maria, which was owned by Juan de la Cosa, who would accompany his ship on the voyage. The total cost of Cristóbal’s fleet was some 4 million maravedis, of which Cristóbal and his financial partner, the Florentine merchant Juanoto Berardi, provided 500,000 maravedis. Cristóbal persuaded members of the Pinzón family to provide captains for the fleet, and the languages spoken within the fleet were Portuguese, several dialects of southern Spain, Basque (mainly spoken by the men from the Santa Maria), north Italian and Latin. To this mixture Cristóbal added two translators of Arab origin, assuming that in sailing westwards he would reach the eastern lands of the Indies and Cathay. Instead, he actually bumped into an entirely new world.

Cristóbal’s small fleet slipped their moorings on 3 August 1492. They headed southwest towards the Canary Islands, the westernmost Spanish possession. He dropped anchor off Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where he was delayed for some four weeks by the need for a refit and by calm winds. He eventually left the island of La Gomera on 6 September 1492. However, his ships were becalmed again within sight of the western island of El Hierro until 8 September when, once again, they could make headway. Cristóbal had calculated that the voyage should take about four weeks; however, that estimate came and went without the sighting of any land. The crews of all the ships became restless as the onboard water and food supplies ran down to the halfway point. Some of the more nervous souls argued for a return to Spain, so Cristóbal made a deal with his crews on 10 October that if no land was sighted within the next three days they would turn back for Spain.

On 12 October, just two hours past midnight, land was sighted from aboard the Pinta by a sailor called Rodrigo de Triana. The captain signalled the sighting by a cannon shot to Cristóbal on the Santa Maria, who claimed to have spotted a light on this possible landfall two hours previously. We should note here, however, that the thoughtful king had provided a small pension for the first man to sight land across the ocean; no doubt thinking of the amount of money he had borrowed from various backers, Cristóbal claimed the pension for himself and the hawk-eyed Rodrigo de Triana got nothing.

The next morning the fleet dropped anchor off the island and Cristóbal went ashore with a small landing party. He named the island San Salvador, though the natives knew it as Guanahami. The exact identity of this island is still in dispute, but the most likely candidate is one of the Plana Cays in the Bahamas. While on the island, Cristóbal met, and traded with, Native Americans belonging to the Lucayan tribe, alas now extinct. He took several members of this tribe prisoner to act as guides. After taking on water and such provisions as he could obtain, he set sail two days later. Over the next two weeks he explored a number of nearby islands, which he named Santa Maria de la Concepción, Fernandina and Isabella. These are known today as the Crooked and Acklins Islands, Long Island and Fortune Island. Before leaving the Bahamas, he visited the Ragged Islands, which he named Islas de Arena. Acting on the directions given by his native guides, he eventually arrived at Bariay Bay, Cuba, on 28 October, which he named Juana.

Thinking that he had possibly arrived on the coast of Cathay (China), Cristóbal spent many weeks in search of the Chinese civilisation familiar to him from the works of Marco Polo. He coasted as far west as Cayo Cruz by 31 October. Here, north winds, together with a sense of utter frustration, instigated a change of plan. He had learned from his kidnapped native guides that gold might be found on another island further to the east. Therefore, he reversed course, sailing back along the north coast of Cuba. On 22 November, the Pinta, under the command of Martín Alonso Pinzón, left the fleet without permission, setting off on a search under the direction of his own native guide, looking for an island, possibly called Babeque, where he had been told that large amounts of gold could be found.

Map 19. Columbus always believed he had found a way to the East Indies and that China lay just beyond.

Meanwhile, Cristóbal continued his explorations with the Santa Maria and Nina, eventually arriving at the island of Hispaniola (which today comprises the two states of Haiti and the Dominican Republic), which he called Española, on 5 December. However, the flagship Santa Maria ran aground on a reef near Cap-Haïtien on Christmas Eve, sinking the next day. Cristóbal got his crew ashore without loss, and used the remains of his ship to build a fort on the nearby shore, which he named La Navidad (Christmas). It immediately became clear that the small caravel, Nina, would be unable to hold all the combined crews of the two ships. This forced a difficult decision to leave behind around 40 men to await Cristóbal’s return from Spain. These men stood on the beach on 2 January 1493 and watched as the Nina