1492: The Year Our World Began (22 page)

The Sancho Panza syndrome, the pursuit of vainglory in imitation of chivalric fiction, resounds in these lines. Outrageous claims for noble status and lavish rewards accompanied his negotiations with potential princely patrons for leave and means to make an attempted Atlantic crossing.

Social ambition crowded out other objectives. There was little room for the motives biographers have traditionally assigned him—scientific curiosity and religious fervor. He did show—not much at first, and hardly at all before his first voyage, but increasingly as he got older—some pride in how experience acquainted him with facts inaccessible from books. This is hardly evidence that he prefigured the empirical values of modern science; rather, it shows the effects of his tussles with learned skeptics who dismissed his generally wild theories about geography. Religion grew on him. The extraordinary, grueling experiences of transatlantic exploration turned him—as traumas often do—toward God. And he found refuge from the embitterment and disillusionment that overcame him later in life in prophecy, mysticism, and such extremes of affected piety as appearing at court in chains and in the rough
habit of a friar. But the young Columbus evinced no particular religiosity. His head was hard and full of calculations.

He did come under the influence of the Franciscan friars who befriended him at their house in Palos, on Castile’s Atlantic coast. They belonged to the so-called spiritual wing of the order, valuing the spirit of St. Francis more than the order’s rules and regulations. Their eagerness to evangelize and their urgent belief, which drove their vocation, that the world would soon come to an end planted growing notions in Columbus’s mind. By the early 1490s, Columbus was beginning to incorporate one or two of their favorite images into his own rhetoric in support of his schemes. He began to advocate encounter with and conversion of pagan peoples as part of the purpose of Atlantic exploration. And—if his later recollections were right—he suggested to Ferdinand and Isabella that the profits of his proposed voyage could be diverted to the conquest of Jerusalem, which, according to the Franciscans’ prophecies, would be the work of the “Last World Emperor” and one of the events with which God would prepare the world for the apocalypse. The monarchs, he said, smiled when he said it. Historians have usually supposed that theirs was a smile of skepticism, but really it was a smile of pleasure. Ferdinand, as heir to the apocalyptic prophecies that had surrounded the kings of Aragon for centuries, rather fancied himself as the Last World Emperor.

Going to sea made a critical difference to Columbus’s religious life. To medieval people, the sea was God’s arena, where the winds were his breath and the storms were his bolts and arrows. In the midst of the ocean, Columbus was, like St. Francis in his poverty, utterly dependent on God. His references to religion then began to take on a solemnity and profundity they never had before. Until then, Columbus seems rather to have exploited other people’s religiosity than to have felt it himself.

In the late 1480s, his failure to attract patronage was not solely the result of his egregious demands. None of the objectives he advocated
seemed convincing to most experts. New Atlantic islands might well exist. So many had been found that it was reasonable to suppose that others might await discovery. But new islands remoter than the Canaries and Azores would be less profitable to exploit, even supposing that they were suitable for the cultivation of sugar or of some other product in high demand. The possibility of finding an unknown continent—the Antipodes, as geographers called it—seemed remote. The balance of antique geographical lore was against it. And even if it existed, it was hard to see what good could come of it, compared with explorations that opened a new route to the rich pickings of Asia and the eastern seas. Finally, the idea that ships could reach Asia by crossing the Atlantic seemed strictly impossible. The world was too large. Ever since Eratosthenes had worked out the math around the end of the third century
BC
, savants in the West had known roughly how big the world is. Asia was so far from Europe by the westward route that no ship of the day would be capable of making the journey. Supplies would be exhausted and drinking water would go foul while many thousands of miles remained to be traversed.

Yet during the 1470s and 1480s a minority of experts began to entertain the possibility that Eratosthenes was wrong and that the earth was a smaller planet than previously supposed. Readers will recall the story of Martin Behaim, the Nuremberg cosmographer who, in 1492, made the world’s oldest surviving globe to capture the smallness of the world. And among his circle of correspondents was Paolo Toscanelli, whose reputation as a cosmographer shone in his native Florence, and who wrote to the Portuguese court urging an attempt to reach China via the Atlantic. Antonio de Marchena, a Franciscan astronomer who was prominent at the Castilian court, and who became one of Columbus’s best friends and supporters, shared the opinion.

Under the influence of these theorists, Columbus began to turn from the fiction of chivalry to scour geographical books for evidence that the world is small. By misreading much of the data and misrepresenting the rest, he came up with a fantastically small estimate: at least
20 percent smaller than in reality. He also argued that the eastward extent of Asia had traditionally been underestimated. It would be possible, he concluded, to sail from Spain to the eastern rim of Asia “in a few days.”
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So, after many failures and shifts of pitch, the project he eventually succeeded in selling was for a westward voyage to China, possibly breaking the journey at Japan, or “Cipangu,” as people called it then, which Marco Polo had located, with exaggeration, some fifteen hundred miles into the ocean beyond China. According to his own account of the final negotiations with his patrons, he stressed historical evidence that long-past rulers of China—whom he called by the title of “Grand Khan” affected by a dynasty dethroned in 1368—had written to the popes expressing interest in Christianity. Piety cloaked the promise of the commercial and political advantages Columbus advertised at other times. Using “India” to mean “Asia,” according to the usage of the time, he went on:

Did Ferdinand and Isabella go along with this scheme? No document committed them to the goal Columbus set for himself. His commission referred only to “islands and mainlands in the Ocean Sea.” The monarchs gave him letters addressed vaguely to “the most Serene Prince our dearest friend,” which Columbus firmly intended to present to the ruler of China. The monarchs were, however, anxious about the gains Portugal was making as a result of Atlantic exploration. Portugal had access to gold from beyond the Sahara and was investigating routes into
the Indian Ocean. Castile had gained no new offshore resources beyond the Canary Islands. When it became apparent that Columbus’s project could be financed at no direct cost to the king and queen (the old nonsense about Isabella pawning her jewels to meet Columbus’s costs is another myth), there seemed no reason not to let Columbus sail and see what would happen.

The key investors in the voyage—a group of Italian bankers in Seville and court officials in Castile and Aragon—had already collaborated in financing a series of expeditions of conquest in the Canary Islands, and were in a position to monitor the improving yields of Atlantic enterprise. The three little ships and the men to crew them came from the port of Palos, thanks to the collaboration of the local fixer Martín Alonso Pinzón, who was, in effect, Columbus’s co-commander and potential rival on the voyage. Martín Alonso commanded the
Niña;
his brother, Vicente Yáñez, was captain of the
Pinta,
leaving the flagship,
Santa María,
to Columbus—who henceforth rather grandiloquently called himself “the Admiral.” By fitting the
Niña
with an all-square rig to match the other two vessels, the leaders of the expedition demonstrated their confidence that they would sail with following winds throughout the journey ahead.

They chose the Canaries as their point of departure. The reasons—though Columbus never explicitly declared them—are obvious. The archipelago included the port of San Sebastián de la Gomera, the most westerly harbor at the disposal of a Spanish fleet. The latitude matched what most cartographers estimated to be that of Guangzhou, the most famed port in the Chinese world. From Gomera, on September 6, they set their course due west. The plan was to keep going until they struck land.

It was more easily said than done. In the Northern Hemisphere, practiced navigators could maintain their course by celestial navigation with the naked eye, keeping the noon sun by day and the Pole Star by night at a constant angle of elevation. Columbus claimed to be able to do this himself—but he was routinely, mendaciously self-congratulatory, and it would be rash to believe any of his claims. A story that probably
originates in one of his own accounts of his exploits captures the way he used navigational instruments. On September 24, after a series of phony landfalls, malcontents among the crew murmured to each other that it was “great madness and self-inflicted death to risk their lives to further the crazy schemes of a foreigner who was ready to die in the hope of making a great lord of himself.”
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If crewmen did think that, they were right. “To be a great lord” was Columbus’s driving force. Some of them argued that “the best thing of all would be to throw him overboard one night and put it about that he had fallen while trying to take a reading of the Pole Star with his quadrant or astrolabe.” The story brilliantly evokes the outlandish boffin, practicing in ungainly isolation his newfangled techniques while struggling on a rolling deck with unmanageable astronomical gadgets.

In principle, quadrant and astrolabe are easy to use to establish latitude. You fix on the Pole Star through a narrow sighting on a rod linked to an armature and read your latitude from the corresponding point on the attached scale. In practice, the technique is maddeningly unreliable on an unstable surface. Defeated—like everyone else at the time who tried to use navigational instruments—by the pitch and roll of the ship, Columbus never used his precious technology accurately. Instead, he relied on a less glamorous and more traditional way of keeping his course. He had a copy of a common navigator’s almanac, which tabulated latitude according to hours of daylight. He kept track of time at night by a traditional method, observing the passage around the Pole Star of the Guard Stars in the constellation of the Little Bear. On September 30, for instance, he counted nine hours for the duration of the night, which gave him a figure of fifteen hours of daylight. He then plucked the corresponding latitude from his table. Over the voyage as a whole, the errors he recorded exactly matched misprints in the table. The instruments were mere flummery, wielded like a conjurer’s wands, to distract his audience from what was really going on.

An engraving illustrating one of the earliest editions of the first printed report of Columbus’s voyage captures the image he wanted to
convey: he appears alone on his ship, manipulating the rigging, as if there were no one else there to share his burden; he represents the epitome of solitary, friendless heroism, and a triumph of self-generated resource. Columbus was prey to anxieties about isolation, and fears—verging on paranoia—of the perfidy of those around him. He was an outsider in all company, a foreigner excluded from the almost ethnic loyalties that divided his crews: the Basques, who rioted together; and the men of Palos, who owed allegiance to the Pinzón clan.

Four further themes dominated Columbus’s later memories of the voyage: phony landfalls, which undermined the men’s morale; fear, as the winds carried them westward, that they would never find a wind to take them home; increasing tension between co-commanders and between commanders and crew; and Columbus’s own barely perceptible doubts, which afflicted him increasingly as the expedition spent longer and longer out of sight of land.

He searched for signs—the swirl and fall of songbirds—and began implicitly to liken the journey to the voyage of Noah’s ark, recording or perhaps imagining visits of “singing landbirds” to his ship. The biblical allusions multiplied. On September 23 he reported “a high sea, the like of which was never seen before except in the time of the Jews when they fled from Egypt behind Moses.”
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Columbus’s growing conviction that he had a sort of personal covenant with God was beginning to emerge; by the time he got back to Spain he had become a visionary, subject to periodic delusions in which a divine voice addressed him directly.

Columbus soon half-revealed to himself his own doubts of the distance to the Indies: a few days out from Gomera, he began to falsify the log, undercutting the number of miles in the figures he passed on to his men. Since his approximations of distance tended to be overestimates, the false log was more accurate than the one he kept for himself. His weakness for wishful thinking and his assumption that the ocean must be strewn with islands constantly excited hopes of land in the offing. The slightest indication—a chance shower, a passing bird, a supposed
river—aroused expectations doomed to be dashed. On September 25 he declared himself certain he was passing between islands. He did not feel confident enough to turn aside to look for them, but he inscribed them on his chart. Meanwhile, he grew so alarmed at the crew’s anxieties that he was glad of an adverse wind. “I needed such a wind,” he wrote, “because the crew now believed that there were winds in those seas by which we might return to Spain.”
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By the end of the first week in October, when patience must have been at a premium throughout the fleet, Columbus and Pinzón met for an acrimonious interview. They ought to have found land by now, if Columbus’s calculations were right. Martín Alonso demanded a change of course to the southwest, where he expected Japan to lie. At first, Columbus refused on the grounds that it was “better to go first to the mainland.” But his resistance was short-lived. On October 7, attracted by those standbys of lost sailors—the flight of birds and the forms of clouds—or deflected, perhaps, by fear of mutiny, he altered course for the southwest. By October 10, the men “could endure no more.” That very night the crisis passed. The following day sightings of flotsam multiplied, and as night fell everyone seems to have been excitedly anticipating land. During the night, Columbus later claimed, he “had it for certain that they were next to land. He said that to the first man to call that he had sighted land he would give a coat of silk without counting the other rewards that the king and queen had promised.”
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