The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (72 page)

We are considerably better informed about
Chinese shipbuilding. Polo’s description of the Chinese ships in which he sailed offers familiar details but still manages to impress, just as it did his contemporaries. He does not give linear dimensions, but notes that the largest vessels “
carry a much bigger cargo than ours. One ship will take as much as five or six thousand baskets of pepper.” Bulkheads divided the hulls into as many as thirteen compartments, and the ships stepped between four and six masts and carried up to “ten smaller boats lashed to their sides outboard.” The largest ships were manned by 250 to 300 crew and the accommodations included sixty cabins for merchants. Polo’s account is borne out by a number of other sources and the evidence gleaned from the excavation of two ships, the
Quanzhou wreck, which sank in the harbor no earlier than 1273, and the
Sinan (Shinan) wreck, which sank in the waters of Sinan Province, South
Korea, fifty years later.

The “spices and pepper ship” at Quanzhou measured about thirty-five meters long by ten meters in beam, with a loaded draft of three meters. The remains of the cargo included 2,300 kilograms of laka-wood, sandalwood, and black pepper from Java, garu-wood from
Cambodia, betel nuts from Indonesia, frankincense from central Arabia, ambergris from
Somalia, and tortoiseshell. The Quanzhou ship probably did not sail all the way to Africa, but these finds confirm Marco Polo’s description of the port, which he visited within a
few years of the ship’s sinking. Somewhat smaller (thirty-two meters long by ten meters broad) and of roughly similar construction, the two-masted Sinan wreck was built of red
fir and red
pine. The cargo included more than twelve thousand pieces of
Chinese ceramics—celadon vases, plates, and bowls, stoneware, incense burners, and porcelain pieces—one of China’s most important exports, substantial quantities of which have been found around the western Indian Ocean as far away as the
Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the coast of East Africa. Other objects of trade were twenty thousand Chinese copper
cash
and more than a thousand pieces of red sandalwood up to three meters long. When found, many of these items were still packed in shipping containers marked with the year—1323 in the Gregorian calendar.

By coincidence this is only two years before Ibn Battuta began his travels, and the Sinan ship is likely similar to one of the thirteen Chinese ships he encountered at
Calicut:

Had Ibn Battuta measured the ships he saw at Calicut, it might have helped historians determine the size of the ships in
Zheng He’s fleets, one of the most contentious issues surrounding the expeditions. Much of the debate turns on how to interpret the units of measurement given in the surviving sources and the theoretical limits on the size of wooden hulls. On the basis of a strict translation of the units of length, the actual size of which differed from place to place around China, the largest ships were between 117 and 135 meters long and 48 to 55 meters broad. Based on what is known of wooden ship construction, however,
60 meters seems a more reasonable if possibly conservative estimate for the largest ships, which carried as many as nine masts setting fore-and-aft sails.
Less contested are the numbers of ships and people involved. Zheng He’s first expedition comprised 317 ships, including 62 “treasure ships” (
baochuan
) with a total complement of 27,870 people. The second expedition sailed with 249 ships. The third carried 30,000 people in 48 ships, most of which must have been of the largest size. The fourth fleet comprised 63 ships and 28,560 crew; the sixth, 41 ships; and the last expedition sailed with more than 100 ships. (Figures for the fifth fleet do not survive.) All the expeditions sailed with a variety of specialized vessels, the most important of which were the
treasure ships, so-called because they carried treasure “of untold quantities.” In addition, there were supply ships, water carriers, troop transports, at least three classes of warships, and purpose-built horse carriers.

The trading networks of the Monsoon Seas between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries were the most dynamic of any in the world, with the longest routes, the busiest ports, and the most diverse selection of goods in circulation. As a result, there were many centers of maritime vitality along the southern and eastern littoral of Asia, whose merchants were in regular communication with each other and facilitated the exchange of ideas, manufactures, and raw products over vast distances and incidentally fostered the formation of distinctive hybrid communities whose members mediated between indigenous populations and traveling merchants. In rumor and fact, the vitality of maritime Asia attracted ever more merchants and travelers from the Mediterranean basin and Europe, whose reports added to the region’s allure and helped set in train the events that would culminate in the discovery of a direct sea route to Asia and, incidentally, Europe’s discovery of the Americas.

Columbus’s
crossing of the Atlantic; Gama’s opening of an all-sea route between Europe and the Indian Ocean; Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, from east to west; and Urdaneta’s first west-to-east crossing of the Pacific—these were the navigational triumphs of the age, indeed of any age. They made possible the forging of new links between formerly unconnected regions of the globe, and laid the foundation of Europe’s gradual ascendancy on the world stage. Singular though these accomplishments were they must be seen as the result of deliberate processes of purposeful exploration, as incidents rather than accidents of history. They were the result of long experience through which mariners, shipwrights, and cartographers steadily improved the capabilities of their ships and the art of navigation, expanded their knowledge of
oceanic currents and winds, and refined the methods by which to profit from the commercial exploitation of newly encountered lands and people. While we celebrate these milestones, we must bear in mind that such progress was hard won. Hundreds of Spanish sailors died just in the four-decade search for the winds that would carry ships across the Pacific from Asia to the Americas, and the search for the Northwest and
Northeast Passages from the Atlantic to the Orient in the sixteenth century were costly failures because these routes were impassable with the technology, experience, and climate of the time. Above all it has to be acknowledged that the introduction of Eurasian and African diseases in susceptible populations of the Americas led to catastrophic and wholly unanticipated loss of life—more than 80 percent (some estimates put the figure at 95 percent) of the population—and the consequent eradication of entire states and cultures.

The Portuguese and Spanish have received the lion’s share of credit for
inaugurating the age of European expansion, but nationalist assignments of credit obscure a more complex reality. The Genoese and Venetians pioneered the first commercially successful long-distance sea trade between the Mediterranean and Flanders and
England toward the end of the thirteenth century, but theirs were not the only long-distance voyages taking place on the Atlantic at that time. Muslim and Christian navigators alike had long been involved in the coastal trade between the Iberian Peninsula and southern Morocco, as far south as
Salé, while Iberian and French navigators plied their coastal waters to Flanders and England, and English and Danish fishermen and traders routinely sailed to Iceland. Though largely undocumented, these voyages contributed to the collective knowledge mariners brought to the Atlantic enterprise.

The discovery and occupation of the four major archipelagoes between the latitudes of Lisbon and
Cape Verde, the southwestern tip of
West Africa, presaged the European advances down the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and Asia and across the Atlantic to the Americas. In
terms of opening new vistas, the seminal discovery of the age was that of the Canary Islands, an archipelago of twelve islands the easternmost of which lies less than fifty miles from Morocco.
Some of the islands were settled by
Berber-speaking people in antiquity—certainly before Islam reached northwest Africa—and Renaissance Europeans knew that a Numidian king had dispatched an expedition to the islands in the first century
BCE
. According to
Pliny the Elder, the
Numidians found no living people, although one island held
evidence of human habitation and wild animals including large dogs—in Latin
canes,
hence Canary Islands. Ten centuries later, the Sicilian geographer al-Idrisi hinted at an
Almoravid expedition to the islands. Their fourteenth-century rediscovery is attributed to the Genoese Lanzarotto Malocello, sailing in the service of the Portuguese king. The island of
Lanzarote appears on a chart drawn by the Majorcan cartographer
Angelino Dulcert in 1339. According to
Boccaccio, a Portuguese expedition sailed to the Canaries two years later; but in 1344, the pope assigned temporal jurisdiction of the islands to
Luis de España, a Spaniard who had sailed as admiral of France. Although the Portuguese objected on the grounds of prior discovery, in a decision with far-reaching consequences they made no effort to pursue their claim. Later in the decade, a Castilian expedition returned to the Canaries with a group of natives who had learned Catalan in an effort to evangelize their fellow islanders. It was not until 1370 that the Portuguese
king granted two islands to
Lansarote da Framqua—possibly the same person as
Lanzarotto de Malocello—who was later
ousted by Castilian rivals.

Although the Canaries are farther south than
Madeira, they were the first to be reached due to their proximity to Africa and because the
prevailing northeast winds gave the Europeans’ square-rigged ships an easy run to the southwest. Madeira is favored by the same winds, but because it lies three hundred miles offshore (and nearly five hundred miles southwest of Lisbon), sailors needed great confidence in their ability to return from so far out at sea—or to have been blown off course—before they encountered it. Sailors returning from the Canaries could have encountered Madeira and its smaller neighbor
Porto Santo when sailing north in search of favorable westerlies to carry them home to Portugal. Whatever the circumstances of their discovery, Madeira appears in the
Medicean Atlas of 1351, where it is identified as
Isola de Legname, “island of wood.” (The Portuguese name, Madeira, or wood, was current by 1408, when the island is so named on a map.)

That those responsible for the discovery of the Canaries and, perhaps, Madeira were Italians is due to the fact that in the fourteenth century
Genoese mariners increasingly found themselves in foreign and especially Portuguese employment. The Portuguese had long encouraged foreign merchants to settle in Portugal, and in 1317 King Dinis appointed the Genoese Manuele Pessagno (or Peçanha) admiral of the fleet and stipulated that
Pessagno and his heirs should retain twenty experienced Genoese officers—Malocello may have been one—to command the ships and crews, most of whom were Portuguese.
Lanzarote Pessagno, the fourth admiral of the family, is credited with finding the Azores, an archipelago of nine islands between seven and nine hundred miles west, and upwind, of Lisbon. Islands that can be plausibly identified as the Azores first appear in sketchy form on the celebrated
Catalan Atlas of 1375 drawn by the
Majorcan cartographer
Abraham Cresques. An independent maritime power from 1276 to 1343, Majorca was a repository for much of the geographic knowledge amassed by sailors and merchants pushing the boundaries of the known world farther into the Atlantic, and
Angelino Dulcert and Abraham Cresques were among the finest mapmakers of the day. The islands were probably first encountered by homeward-bound navigators in search of prevailing westerlies. Uninhabited and therefore difficult to exploit, the islands went unnamed in surviving sources until the fifteenth century. The association of Italian names with the Atlantic islands newly claimed by Portugal and
Castile and the flourishing practice of cartography on Majorca testify to the multinational character of exploration in this period.

The
European exploration and exploitation of the eastern
Atlantic was due to any number of causes, and it is impossible to distinguish any one of them as of paramount importance. Newly discovered and translated classical geographies excited people’s curiosity about the world. Literacy was expanding beyond the traditional confines of the church and ecclesiastical universities, which led to the growing secularization of vernacular literature like that of Dante,
Boccaccio, and Chaucer. The latter two were especially drawn to, and drew from, the commercial life of their times. Boccaccio’s father represented the
Bardi bank of
Florence and merchants throng the stories of the
Decameron;
Chaucer was the son of a wine merchant and his
Canterbury Tales
reveal a more than passing knowledge of business and trade. His description of the Shipman invites us to consider the mental map of the fourteenth-century English mariner, which spanned from North Africa to the Baltic: