Atlantic (12 page)

The problem with Bojador was created by a unique combination of circumstances—topographic, climatic, and marine. No hint of impending difficulty would be apparent to a southbound sailor, who would perhaps leave from an Iberian port, head past the Strait of Gibraltar with light winds still favorably on his starboard quarter, and dip steadily along the African coast at a comfortable five or six knots. He would mark his passage each day by the sight of the three obvious Moroccan capes: Rhir, Draa, and Juby. He would see the twinkling fires of the settlements of Casablanca, Essaouira, and El Ayoun, taking comfort from their proximity—for like most in those early days he was probably a nervous sailor, and would always be most reluctant to leave the sight of shore, finding a degree of security in his crabwise progress along the edge of land.

And then he would come to Bojador—and in an instant his illusion of comfort would evaporate. An unseen sandbar, stretching twenty miles out from the low cape and reducing the depth under his keel to a mere couple of fathoms, would first compel him to turn to starboard and, against his better judgment, head out into the deep ocean. At the same time the telltales on his mainmast would show that the slow winds off Morocco had suddenly changed to full easterly, and may well have picked up to a steady half gale. (For most of the year the winds veer east just at this point, and modern satellite pictures will show trails of desert sand being wafted each summer out across the Atlantic.
²⁰
) And third, once clear of the submerged point, a current—the North Equatorial Current—would catch his vessel in its powerful maw and begin to drag it westward, too, for possibly as much as six hundred miles.

The perils of the cape are actually even more conspiratorial than this. For most of the voyage down along the coast a persistent southbound current, called by the Portuguese mariners the Guinea Current (modern mariners call it the Canary Current), helped sailors of old to scurry along the shore, providing only that they kept close to land. This was important, because one characteristic of the Guinea Current was that it became steadily weaker the farther offshore. This then gave a ship’s master two equally unpalatable options: remain close inshore and risk being swept into the irresistible arms of the westbound equatorial stream, or sail well away from land and encounter only a fading current and weak winds, and remain motionless at sea, with food and water running out, the vessel trapped in doldrums of your own making.

Small wonder not a single seaman managed to get past the cape—until a seminal moment, seventy years before Vespucci, in 1434. It was the growing intelligent acquaintance with the complexities of the sea that eventually allowed the Bojador problem to be solved—as the early phase of exploration of the Atlantic steadily gave way to a period of rigorous ocean education.
To know the sea
became the working phrase, for only by knowing it could its dangers be avoided and its treasures exploited. The Cape Bojador story is a classic example of this shift in attitude.

It was a young Portuguese navigator named Gil Eannes who is commonly credited with having the maritime intelligence and
feel for the sea
so necessary for blazing a southbound trail. Though most of the papers relating to his voyage were lost in the Lisbon earthquake three centuries later, sufficient anecdotal evidence remains to hint at just how he did it. It was entirely a matter of intelligence: of using such intellectual techniques as observation, forethought, timing, planning, and calculation.

Prior to Eannes, sailors merely set themselves a goal (or had it set it for them by their financial sponsors), victualed their ship, and set off—and in the case of their West African ventures, all were forced to turn back after little more than a thousand miles. These sailors employed the rituals of old—they followed the currents, they sailed before the winds, they followed the paths of seabirds. But what Gil Eannes did next involved an immense amount of planning, and it invoked the growing science of celestial navigation, already known to the Arab merchants after diffusing slowly from the East, where it had already evolved to a fine degree under the Chinese.

Eannes believed it would be possible now to move through the Atlantic and reach places unfavored by winds and currents and migrating birds if a mariner used the new tools fast becoming available: astronomy, timekeeping, a sophisticated knowledge of weather and climatic history, and the geography of the sea. To get around Cape Bojador specifically, or to
double
it, in seamen’s jargon, involved the scrupulous measuring of the water speeds and directions, and the measuring in detail of the average directions and strengths of the winds. It involved the development of a technique now known as
current sailing.
Eannes also drew
current triangles
onto his crude but ever-improving charts sets, and used vectors, intelligent tacking, and careful, hour-by-hour timing. Once he knew the currents and the winds, their directions and their speeds, it remained a matter of simple trigonometry to plot a course that would take advantage of them both. However, his planning also involved choosing a season when the winds of one kind would be blowing while those of another would not.

Only after all that information had been digested and calculated and factored in could Eannes set his rudder and trim his sails and point his bowsprit in a direction that might have seemed to his unsuccessful predecessors eccentric—but eccentric in the way that modern Great Circle routes seem oddly counterintuitive when compared with the apparent directional simplicity of a voyage made along a straight line of constant bearing, in other words a rhumb line or loxodrome.

The precise details of his famous voyage remain unclear—there was no surviving diary, no ship’s log, not even the name of the ship is recorded. All we know is that Eannes went south on the explicit orders of Henry the Navigator, the princely architect of Portugal’s imperial ambitions. Henry had drily remarked that fourteen previous attempts to double the cape had failed. Eannes, who was no more than one of the personal servants in Henry’s court, might just as well make an attempt, too.

He did precisely as he was ordered—he sailed southwest to Madeira and the Canaries, then performed all his complicated arithmetical elaborations. He initiated a deep-sea twisting-and-turning voyage that has been known for many years since as the Portuguese
volta,
and by doing so succeeded finally in rounding the dreaded cape. He was then blown by the gusts of a harmattan wind onto the African desert coast some thirty miles south of Bojador and picked a sample of the woody desert plant known as St. Mary’s flower or the rose of Jericho to bring back as proof. It didn’t work: none of this convinced the skeptical prince Henry, who promptly ordered Gil Eannes to go out to sea once again.

So back he went the following year, 1435, this time with a companion—a man who was also a household servant, though a spare-time sailor—and they took their puny fishing
barca
on almost the exact same plotted route, with its wide westerly diversion south of the Canary Islands. The men landed at almost the same African coastal spot, they named a river, they saw the footprints of men and the hoofprints of camels, and thus realized that the Torrid Zone was peopled, and they came back to a finally credulous Henry the Navigator, and in consequence to a brief period of court rapture followed by a lengthy period of public obscurity.
²¹

And the two ventures did the necessary trick. Within months other expeditions had set out from the Portuguese harbors, and they fanned out along the at-long-last-accessible coast of Africa to explore it, round it, and then eventually to head off east beyond the continent of Africa, to the great treasure grounds of the Indies.

The ships grew steadily in size—from the tiny
barcas
used by Eannes, to the three- and four-masted caravels, and the gigantic
naos
employed on the spice runs of the sixteenth century. The equipment carried on the ships’ bridges became more sophisticated: the astrolabe was soon to be invented, the compass to be employed, sounding wires to be made long enough to deal with exceedingly deep waters, and tide tables and sight reduction tables to be published.

The mariners became ever more adventurous, and history is littered with their names: Bartholomew Diaz, who first rounded the Cape of Storms; Vasco da Gama, who first went to India; Pedro Cabral, the first to land in Brazil; Alfonso d’Albuquerque, first in Malabar, Ceylon, and Malacca; and all those other sailors whose names—Fernando Póo, Tristan da Cunha, Luis vaz de Torres—are memorialized in islands or straits (or as these three are remembered, for a slaving colony off Africa, a dangerous volcano in the far South Atlantic, and a narrow passage between New Guinea and the northern tip of Australia). Perhaps greatest of them all, though claimed by others, was Fernão de Magalhães, the would-be circumnavigator who was born in Portugal but sailed for Spain, and died as Ferdinand Magellan in the Philippines in 1521. All of these indefatigable sailors and a score more—who mostly came from a Portugal of which it used to be said
such a tiny land to live in, but the whole world to die in
—came to be legatees of the pioneering sailing techniques of Gil Eannes. They followed in his wake, both literally and figuratively, to begin the organized acquisition of knowledge about the Atlantic and all the other oceans besides.

Atlantic Ocean: Routes of Explorers and Settlers

3. MOVING THE WATERS

It has to be remembered that until Amerigo Vespucci, there was no knowledge—nor even a suspicion or a hint—that the Atlantic was a separate sea. Culturally, this was an ocean that until the end of the fifteenth century was not known to exist. Then, and at a stroke, with Vespucci’s voyage, the Atlantic Ocean was born; suddenly it was
there.

With this realization of a brand-new sea, anchors were weighed and sails unfurled, brass clocks were wound and heaving lines leaded. Scientists were appointed and chartmakers assigned, and bold and fearless skippers in their legions took their little ships out of port and headed off to measure and to mark this new body of water.

At the edges of a sea, it is the daily tides that prove the most obvious features to measure and record. Out in the deeps beyond, beyond the influence of tides, the seaman must look for other things: for the size of waves and the direction of swells, the tenor of storms, the press of fish and birds, the depths beneath the bow. And most important, the unexpected and initially mysterious ways that the waters appear to move.

Since these motions are among the most clearly influential on the passage of any ship—as Gil Eannes experienced off Cape Bojador and then made use of—they were noticed very early on in the exploration of the Atlantic. They seemed like great underwater rivers, or torrents. Currents—from the French,
things that run
—were the first of the ocean’s many unseen features to become properly known. And perhaps no stream was more famously so than that immense rushing extension of the North Equatorial Current known, from Florida, where it begins, to the west of Scotland, where it ends (with palm trees growing beside the waters that it so conveniently warms), as the Gulf Stream.

Like many mariners around the world, Columbus noticed the currents—and here the exceptionally strong currents that seemed to him so unusually prevalent in Caribbean Atlantic waters. “I found the sea ran so strangely to the westward,” he wrote in the log of his third voyage, describing his passing through the notorious Dragon’s Mouth, between Trinidad and the Venezuelan mainland, “that between the hour of Mass, when I weighed anchor, and the hour of Complines, I made sixty-five leagues of four miles each with gentle winds. . . .” There are also accounts by Peter Martyr, the Spanish court historian who, coincidentally, was among the first to recognize the huge potential importance of the Gulf Stream, of a vain attempt by Columbus to take a sounding off the coast of Honduras, only to have the “contrary violence of the waters” force his lead upward and never once allow it to touch bottom.

But Columbus was too far south to experience the power of the Gulf Stream. That happy discovery was left to his successor, Ponce de León,
²²
who found it in 1513 while on his quest for the fountain of youth—a search that eventually won him the ironic substitute of being the first European to find Florida. He was charting the topography of this new coast—thinking it to be a large island,
the flowered one.

Ponce made rendezvous with two other ships coming north from Puerto Rico, and the three vessels set themselves to sailing farther south, keeping Florida just in sight on their starboard side. One afternoon, when they were perhaps thirty miles from shore, Ponce de León and his fellow sailors suddenly found themselves swept into and caught up in “a current such that, although they had a great wind, they could not proceed forward, but backward, and it seems that they were proceeding well; at the end it was known that the current was more powerful than the wind.” Whatever was the cause, this wide river of water, which he soon found swept northward and in time turned toward the east, had huge and unstoppable power. The Spaniard became swiftly aware of its commercial implications: that however difficult it might be for ships to beat their way westward across the middle reaches of the Atlantic, the power of this submarine river offered the guarantee that anyone who floated onto it would be taken home, in style and with considerable speed. Empty galleons might find the outbound passage a trial, but treasure-laden and stately, they could dip home from the Isthmus of Panama, pushed along by this newfound current, with a very welcome dispatch.