A Wind From the North (27 page)

Beyond the Senegal River, Cadamosto came into the territory of a chieftain called Budomel, who was known to be friendly to the Portuguese. Cadamosto gave him a present of seven horses, which were highly prized by the Africans, as well as linen and silk clothing. A hundred slaves were offered him in exchange for the horses, and as a small bonus for himself, a young Negro girl “to serve in his cabin.”

He was the first European ever to make a prolonged stay in this area, and to make a record of the customs and habits of the Senegambia natives. It was November when he arrived, and he spent a whole month in the area, visiting Budomel and being entertained by him and his followers. He noted the primitive conditions under which even a powerful chieftain lived, but saw also that the respect accorded him would have been considered excessive by even the greatest sovereigns of Europe. Seven courtyards separated the entrance of Budomel’s house from his private apartments, and his followers were distributed throughout the courts according to their rank. Petitioners from the people were allowed to approach the royal presence only under conditions of extreme humility. Stripped of all their garments except for a loincloth, they abased themselves by casting sand and earth over their heads, and “they feared him more than God himself.”

On the subject of religion Cadamosto had some of his most interesting conversations, for the chief was a Mohammedan, and Arabic priests were present in his court. The Venetian was not afraid to tell Budomel, in front of his Mohammedan advisers, that their religion was a false one and that Christianity was the only true faith. The Negro chieftain, however, was a man of tolerance, and not without a sense of humor. He answered Cadamosto’s arguments with irony. He was quite prepared to believe, he said, that the Christian faith was a good one, for the Europeans’ prosperity and knowledge had already convinced him that they lived under divine favor. But still, he pointed out, there were things to be said for the Mohammedan faith, and if God was both good and just, then Budomel was not afraid for the Negro people in the future life. They stood a better chance of salvation, he thought, than the Christians. For the Christians were so rich in worldly goods and the black men so poor, that a just God must surely compensate for this by granting the Negroes salvation in the world to come.

Cadamosto tasted their local palm wine and found it as good and as intoxicating as the wine of Europe. The palm oil, with which they seasoned their food, he described as having “the color of saffron, the taste of olives, and the scent of violets.” Everything in this strange land made a sharp impression on him: the snakes and the white ants, the lions, panthers, leopards, and wolves, and the brightly colored parrots. With a quick eye for business he managed to get hold of a number of parrots and took them back to Portugal where, he recorded with satisfaction, they sold “at half a ducat each.”

It is not difficult to imagine how exotic a sight the caravels must have been when they finally made fast again alongside the quays of Lagos—laden with Negroes, sacks full of unfamiliar tropical fruit, gold, parrots by the score in woven cages, scented with herbs and spices, and manned by tropical-tanned sailors who had seen all the wonders of Africa.

One of Cadamosto’s most charming stories concerns the bagpipes he had brought with him, and with which he entertained the natives. At first they thought the instrument was some kind of animal that had been trained to sing. Later, when he handed over the pipes and explained through his interpreter how they worked, the Africans maintained that only a divine skill could have made such a work of art. Equally fascinated by the eyes painted on the bows of Cadamosto’s caravel, they believed it was with these that the great bird saw its way over the sea.

The mention of interpreters is a further reminder of Prince Henry’s foresight, for each caravel going to Africa now carried one or more of these. They were Negroes who had been trained in the Prince’s court, taught Portuguese, and converted to Christianity. Some of them came to unhappy ends. After leaving Budomel, with a promise to return on his homeward voyage, Cadamosto went on south until he reached the mouth of another river (possibly the modem Djomboss). Here he sent his interpreter ashore to speak to some natives who had flocked to the beach, and to inquire who was the ruler of the country. The unfortunate interpreter was killed almost instantly by the natives. Cadamosto, deciding that men who treated a fellow Negro in such a way would hardly be friendly to Europeans, hastily sailed on down the coast.

By now two other caravels had joined up with him, and together they came to the River Gambia—to those vast tree-lined banks where no European had been since Nuno Tristao and his crew had been ambushed and killed. The smallest caravel, together with some rowing boats, was sent in over the bar, where at this time of the year there was only four feet of water. Sailing and rowing upstream, they surprised some natives, but bearing in mind the fate of Nuno Tristao and obeying Cadamosto’s orders, they retreated at once. Next day Cadamosto waited for the tide to lift him over the bar and took his own caravel upstream. The other two ships followed him. They had not gone far before there was a repetition of the previous attack. This time, however, the Portuguese were prepared, and took cover behind shields and the boats’ bulwarks from the flights of arrows. The discharge of their cannon and accurate fire from the crossbowmen demoralized the Africans and warded off the assault. The caravels then anchored together in the center of the river, lying alongside one another, and swinging to a single anchor in the steady flow of the current. They had weathered Atlantic gales and rounded many an uncharted headland. Now they proved that they could even sail up the unknown rivers of Africa.

Within a few days Cadamosto was able to talk with the natives through his interpreters, and to try to convince them that the Portuguese intended them no harm. He remembered the Prince’s orders that, whenever possible, transactions with the natives should be conducted on a friendly basis. He found out that the reason for the hostility of these Gambia tribes was that they had been told by the Mohammedans that Christians were cannibals. Finding himself unable to convince them of his peaceful intentions, Cadamosto took advantage of a fair wind and got his three vessels safely out to sea. The Portuguese captains were prepared to have another attempt at sailing even farther up the river, in the hope of establishing contact with some natives that might be more friendly. A near mutiny among their crews prevented them.

Cadamosto’s ship had now been away from Portugal for nearly a year, and she was due home for a clean and a refit. But the adventurous young man was determined to come back again the following year. He had been successful in his trading, and he had made many notes of geographical and human interest that were certain to please the Prince. He made one further discovery, which crowned his voyage. He had noticed, as they sailed farther and farther south toward the Gambia, that the night sky was changing. The captain had pointed out to him how low the Pole Star hung in the northern sky, and how to the south the sky seemed to be bringing up unknown constellations. One night, just before they turned north and began their long voyage back to Portugal, Cadamosto saw four stars grouped low on the horizon. They formed a diamond-shaped pattern, and their soft shine lay on the sea, due south of the caravel. He named them the “Southern Chariot.” So to Prince Henry’s protege the Venetian Cadamosto fell the honor of being the first European ever to record the Southern Cross.

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The discovery of America by Christopher Columbus stemmed from the pioneer w

ork of the Portuguese navigators. We know that during his residence in Porto Santo, Columbus was told by his mother-in-law, the widow of Bartolomew Perestrello, everything about her husband’s voyages in the service of Prince Henry. She also gave her son-in-law all his old charts, instruments, and log books. The Spanish Bishop Las Casas, who knew Columbus’s son Diego, tells us in his History of the Indies that the discoverer of America sailed several times with the Portuguese “as if he had been one of them,” in order to learn their navigational methods. Ferdinand Columbus, the Admiral’s other son and his biographer, also confirms the influence that the Portuguese voyages had on his father.

“… He learned from pilots who were experienced in the voyages to Madeira and the Azores facts and signs which convinced him that an unknown land lay to the west. Martim Vicente, a pilot of the King of Portugal, told him how he had taken from the water an artistically carved piece of wood, four hundred and fifty leagues from Cape St. Vincent. This wood had been driven across [the ocean] by the west wind—a fact which led the sailors to believe that there were certainly other islands in that direction which had not yet been discovered.”

Further evidence of land lying to the west had been found both in Madeira and in the Azores. Large canes, pines of unknown species, and other pieces of carved wood had been picked up on the beaches of the westernmost islands. A branch of the Gulf Stream known as the Azores current flows steadily across the Atlantic from the Gulf of Mexico toward these islands. In Flores, the westernmost of the islands, the bodies of two men were washed up one day, and the colonists reported that their broad faces showed they were not Christians. It is just conceivable that these could have been two Indians who had been carried out to sea in a canoe and finally, after dying from starvation and exposure, been cast up on the shore.

Since Prince Henry required regular reports from the governors of his colonies, it is most likely that he heard these rumors of land existing farther to the west. We know, in fact, that he suspected there were further islands or land masses in the Atlantic from the chronicle of Diogo Gomes, a ship’s captain who spent many of his years in Prince Henry’s service, and who was with him when he died. “The Prince wished to know,” he wrote, “about the western ocean, and whether there were islands or continents beyond those that Ptolemy described. [The Alexandrian astronomer’s Guide to Geography was a standard reference book of the period.] So he sent caravels to search for lands.”

But Henry’s principal interest was always the search for a sea route round Africa, and consequently his voyages of exploration were directed to the south. Ferdinand Columbus confirms this: “… it was in Portugal that the admiral [Christopher Columbus] began to surmise that, if the Portuguese sailed so far to the south, it might equally be possible to sail westward and find lands in that direction.”

Some of Prince Henry’s ships did sail to the west. In fact, they narrowly missed discovering Newfoundland, nearly fifty years before John Cabot. (Cabot sailed from Bristol in 1497, landed at Bonavista, and claimed the land for Henry VII.) It is possible that Portuguese fishermen had been going to the Newfoundland banks from the Azores even in the lifetime of Henry the Navigator.

It was early in the 1450’s, shortly before Cadamosto’s voyage to Gambia, that Diogo de Teive, one of Prince Henry’s squires, sailed into the Atlantic northwest from Corvo and Flores. Along this southern edge of the Azores current, where Sargasso weed drifts in the warm water, the winds often blow from a southwesterly direction, and this would have given Diogo de Teive an easy beam wind for his caravel. For day after day he kept on standing to the northwest. Then, to his surprise, he suddenly found that the warm humid air had turned cold. He seemed to have sailed into a different world. Strong westerly winds now prevailed, and there was a feeling of ice in the air. If we had no other record of his voyage than this, we could be sure that Diogo de Teive had sailed right across the Gulf Stream and come out where the cold Newfoundland current whirls down from the north. (Along the edge of the stream, where these two conflicting ocean currents meet, the division is so marked that it is possible for a large modern liner to have one side of the hull in the Newfoundland current and one in the Gulf Stream.)

Diogo de Teive and his men were not seamen and fishermen for nothing. They soon realized that they were sailing into shoal water. This was not the deep ocean, but the sea over a continental shelf. Unable to pursue his voyage any further, he returned to Portugal and recorded his view that there was land to the northwest. There are no other records of Portuguese voyages in this direction, but the rumor has persisted that Portuguese fishermen were lining for cod off the Newfoundland banks long before the official discovery of Newfoundland and North America. In view of the secretive nature of fishermen in regard to rich fishing grounds, these stories seem perfectly feasible.

Antilia, the mysterious island that appears in a number of old charts, always to the west of the Azores, has sometimes been claimed as a Portuguese discovery of the West Indies before Columbus. There is no evidence to support this theory, but it is just possible that Portuguese seamen, driving before the northeast trade winds, did manage to reach one of the Windward Islands of the West Indies. Again, there is a puzzling coastline shown on a chart made twelve years before Prince Henry’s death, which seems to suggest that the chartmaker, an Italian who had worked at Lisbon, had heard of Brazil. Yet Brazil, according to known records, was not sighted until 1499. It is doubtful, however, if any land or islands west of the Azores were discovered during the lifetime of Prince Henry. What certainly seems to be true is that after the voyage of Diogo de Teive in the 1440’s, it was known that there was land lying a long way to the northwest of Flores and Corvo.

It is not to disparage Columbus’s achievement to say that he based his great Atlantic voyage on rumors that had long been current in the court of Sagres. Prince Henry’s belief— that the route to the East lay round Africa—was, in fact, more accurate than that of Columbus. But neither he nor the great Genoese was aware that a whole continent lay between Europe and the Far East across the western ocean.

Whatever mysteries were still concealed by the Atlantic, every year results were pouring in from Africa. The belief that before very long the Portuguese would manage to round the continent was strengthened by a bull of Pope Nicholas V in 1454, in which he granted Prince Henry the monopoly of all exploration as far east as India. It was at about this time, between 1450 and 1456, that the Cape Verde Islands were discovered. It may have been Cadamosto on his second voyage to Africa, or a Genoese, Uso di Mare, who accompanied him in another caravel, or it may have been the Portuguese Diogo Gomes who first sighted them. Certainly, both Gomes and Cadamosto claim to have been the discoverer of these bleak volcanic islands, the outriders of Africa—and the nearest point to the American continent definitely discovered by Prince Henry’s caravels.