Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

20

The Mental Horizon of Christopher Columbus

‘To the end of his life Christopher Columbus maintained that he had reached the “Indies” he had set out to find. He had landed on islands close to Cipangu (Japan), and on the mainland of Cathay (China). He had skirted the coasts of Marco Polo’s Mangi [China as well] and been only leagues away from the domains of the Great Khan himself.’¹ A medieval league was the distance the average ship could sail in an hour, say somewhere between seven and twelve miles. We may smile now at Columbus’ dying delusion but that he should hold to his view tells us as much about his age as do his epic voyages of discovery. They show, in particular, that the man who discovered the New World was someone from medieval times rather than the modern age.

All manner of historical forces were represented by Columbus, whether he knew it or not. In the first place, his voyages were the culmination in a mammoth series of navigational triumphs that had begun centuries earlier. (These were surveyed and summarised by Bartolomé de las Casas in the sixteenth century.²) Some of these voyages had been much longer than his, and no less hazardous. In some ways, these journeys of discovery collectively represent man’s most astounding characteristic: intellectual curiosity. Man’s medieval ventures into the unknown are, save for space travel, simply impossible for us to share and therefore separate us from Columbus’ time in a fundamental way. Although desire for commercial gain was as often as not a motive for these travellers, their journeys most certainly represented intellectual curiosity in its most unadulterated form.

As was discussed earlier, there was a time when western Europe did not hold the lead in travel and exploration. The Greeks had discovered the Atlantic in the seventh century BC, when they had named the Straits of Gibraltar the Pillars of Hercules. According to Hecataeus, the world was essentially a circular flat dish, with its centre somewhere near Troy or what became Istanbul, with the Mediterranean opening on to the ocean which entirely surrounded the land.³ In the late sixth century BC a follower of Pythagoras in southern Italy put forward the idea that the earth was a sphere, one of ten such entities revolving around a central fire in space. These other entities included the sun, the moon, the fixed stars (heaven), the five planets, and a counter earth.⁴ We on earth could not see the central fire or indeed the counter earth because the populated side of our planet was always turned away from the central fire. To many people the earth was self-evidently flat, but both Socrates and Plato accepted the Pythagorean view, Socrates going so far as to say that the earth was apparently flat only because of its very great size.

The Greeks knew that there was land all the way from Spain eastward as far as India and there was rumoured to be more still farther east. Land in the north–south direction was less familiar though Aristotle believed that it extended about three-fifths of the east–west distance. More important, he took the view that Asia continued so far to the east that it extended all the way round the world and there was only a small body of water between Asia and the Pillars of Hercules. This was a powerful idea, which stuck, and was still relevant when Columbus set out centuries later.⁵

The first great traveller we know about was Pytheas, who lived at Massalia (the modern Marseilles). The inhabitants of Massalia knew from boatmen who had sailed up the Rhône and met other travellers that there was a great northern sea big enough to contain islands, which produced precious metals and a beautiful, brown, resinous substance, much prized and called amber. But the Rhône itself did not go as far as this north sea and no one really knew how far away it was. Then, about 330 BC, sailors returning to harbour from the western Mediterranean reported that for once the Pillars of Hercules were undefended. For the merchants of Massalia this was the chance they had been waiting for. The way was clear for them to go looking for this north sea. Pytheas was chosen for this voyage and equipped with a ship about 150 feet long (bigger than the one Columbus would use).⁶ Hugging the land, Pytheas eventually found his way to northern France, and then, through cold rain and fog, he sailed up between England and Ireland, reaching islands he called Orka (and we still call the Orkneys), then moving beyond the Shetland and Faeroe islands until he reached a land where, on the first day of summer, the sun remained above the horizon for twenty-four hours. He called this place Thule, and for centuries Ultima Thule was, in effect, the end of the world in that direction – it could have been Iceland, or Norway, the Shetlands or the Faeroes. Pytheas returned via Denmark and Sweden, found a broad sea that reached far inland, the Baltic, and began his search for the Land of Amber. He discovered the rivers that flow from south to north (such as the Oder and the Vistula) and realised that this is how news of the northern sea had reached the Mediterranean. When he returned home, however, many people refused to believe him. Then the Carthaginians took control of the Pillars of Hercules and the Atlantic was once more cut off.⁷

In the other direction, the Greeks also knew that beyond Persia there was somewhere called India. They had heard fabulous tales of a king who was so grand he could order a hundred thousand elephants into war; men who, it was said, had the heads of dogs, where there were huge worms that could drag an ox or a camel into the river and devour it.⁸ In 331 BC Alexander the Great began his series of conquests that took him beyond Persia into Afghanistan as far as the Indus river. And here he did encounter crocodiles – the giant worms of which legend told.⁹ He followed the Indus south until he came to a great ocean, the great southern ocean that had been rumoured. So it was now a ‘fact’ – the land really was surrounded by sea as the ancients had said.¹⁰

All these travel details began to be collected by scholars, especially at Alexandria, with its famous library (see Chapter 8).¹¹ One of its most distinguished librarians, Eratosthenes (276–196 BC), may be regarded as the world’s first mathematical geographer and he set about producing a more accurate map of the world. By the method already described in Chapter 8, he calculated the circumference of the earth as just under 25,000 miles. This was not wide of the mark. And this was not Eratosthenes’ only achievement. He also calculated the amount of habitable land, based on climate, and developed the concept of latitude, relating to the angle of the sun, which allowed for the more precise location of such cities as Alexandria itself, Massalia, Aswan and Meroë, which had been discovered by sailing up the Nile.¹² Eratosthenes’ work was built on by Hipparchus who, around 140 BC, adjusted the circumference of the earth to 25,200 miles (252,000 stades) so that he could divide it exactly into 360 degrees of seventy miles each. This enabled him to draw lines of latitude on maps one degree apart, which he called klimata and from which our word ‘climate’ is derived.¹³

In Roman times, knowledge was advanced mainly as a result of trade. The Roman demand for silk meant that both the overland Silk Road and the sea routes to China were discovered and expanded. How much so may be judged from a navigational guidebook written by an anonymous Greek merchant from Alexandria around AD 100. Known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, the text describes exploration of the east coast of Africa, as far south as Raphta (about 1,500 miles), then the northern shores of the Indian Ocean, from the Red Sea to the Indus, and then on to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) where, further east, the information becomes vague. But the anonymous Greek showed himself as aware of the Ganges and of Thinae, the land of silk (in other words, China), beyond. Silk, as was mentioned earlier, was responsible for much of the increased geographical knowledge of the world and this prompted constant updatings. The next, after Eratosthenes, was Claudius Ptolemy in AD 140.

Though Ptolemy had much more information at his fingertips than Eratosthenes, not all of it was accurate and he too was responsible for some of the misconceptions that Columbus took with him on his voyages. It was Ptolemy who introduced the idea of longitude, even though there was no real way at that time of calculating where the lines should go. His idea was to divide the world into equal squares that would aid exact location. In addition to China in his maps he also included more information about the Atlantic, where the Fortunate Islands were rumoured to be located off the coast of Africa.¹⁴

After Ptolemy, geography suffered a decline, as did many areas of thought during the era of Christian fundamentalism. In the sixth century Cosmas, a seafaring merchant and monk, argued that the earth was a rectangle. He did this on the basis of the book of Exodus in which God called Moses up to Mount Sinai and revealed to him many secrets. Instructing Moses to build a tabernacle, he said it should be a copy of the figure of the world, which to Cosmas implied that the world was tabernacle-shaped.¹⁵ This in time led to a ‘Christian topography’ where earth was joined to heaven at its rim, with Paradise in the east, across the sea, on a ‘sunburst’ island near heaven.¹⁶ In fact, said Cosmas, the earth, though flat, was slanting, which explained the mountains, and why the sun disappeared at night (the earth, he said, was only forty-two miles across). He said it also explained why rivers running north flowed more slowly than those running south (they were going uphill). Cosmas said the earth must be flat because if it were round people on the other side would be living upside down, a self-evident impossibility. But he didn’t find it impossible that, under his system, the Nile was actually flowing uphill.

To early Christians – the Church Fathers in particular – the location of Paradise was of major importance. Since, according to Christian belief, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers originated in Paradise, the location and layout of the two rivers had to be accommodated to the early belief that Paradise was itself situated at the eastern end of the world. One solution was to argue that the rivers of Eden flowed under the earth for some way before surfacing. But this was no real help because it meant that man could not follow the rivers to Paradise.¹⁷ Another problem was the whereabouts of the monstrous races described in the scriptures, in particular the races of Gog and Magog who had invaded the ancient world from the north and, according to tradition, would reappear. Where exactly were they? Yet another difficulty was the centre of the earth. Two psalms and two references in the book of Ezekiel identified Jerusalem as that centre and this is how the city is portrayed in many medieval maps.¹⁸ It soon became clear that the centrality of Jerusalem was difficult to maintain.

The first major adventurer of the Atlantic, after Pytheas, and the first Christian explorer in history, was the Irish monk known as St Brendan the Navigator. Born about 484 near Tralee and ordained priest in 512, Brendan grew up with the tradition that many Irish fishermen had been blown out to sea and returned with stories about islands off to the west in the ocean.¹⁹ Brendan, we are told, was more deliberate. Seeking the ‘Land Promised of the Saints’, he and sixteen fellow monks embarked in 539 or thereabouts on an epic voyage of voyages. ‘The story of his travels was not written down for another four hundred years, during which time many other voyages were made into the Atlantic by other monks. Yet Brendan’s reputation was such that the voyages of the others were attributed to him . . . [He and his companions] had no compass but knew the stars and watched the birds on migration. They sailed west for fifty-two days when they came to an island where they disembarked. There was only a dog to welcome them but it led them to a building where they rested. As they were leaving, an islander appeared who gave them food. They were blown about in all directions before coming to an island with herds of pure white sheep and streams full of fish. They decided to winter there and were made welcome at a monastery. They moved on to a small barren island but as they cooked their meal the island shook and, as they scrambled for their boat, sank. As Brendan explained, it was a whale.’²⁰

Over the next seven years Brendan visited many other islands in the Atlantic. There was the Island of Strong Men, covered with a carpet of white and purple flowers; they sailed around a great crystal column floating in the sea; and passed a nearby island peopled with ‘gigantic smiths’ who hurled lumps of burning slag at them. (This, they decided, was the outer boundary of Hell.) On one of their northern trips they caught sight of a mountain that shot flames and smoke into the sky.²¹ But nowhere could they find the Land of Promise that was the object of their voyages. At length, the procurator on the Island of Sheep agreed to take them to the Land of Promise. It took forty days, through a bank of dense fog or cloud. They went ashore and explored the land for another forty days before coming to a river that was too deep to cross. Returning to their boats, they voyaged back through the cloud bank, and then on home.

There has been much speculation about these ‘discoveries’. The Faeroes derive their name from a Danish word for sheep.²² The Island of Strong Men with its purple and white flowers appears to have been the Canaries, or maybe the West Indies. The crystal column can only have been an iceberg, the nearby Land of Giant Smiths could have been Iceland, while the flame-spouting island in the north fits with tiny Jan Mayen island. And the Land of Promise? Given the cloud banks, it could just have been North America. In any event, this story was told and retold till the Land of Promise became St Brendan’s Isle, which in turn became a persistent feature of maps of the Atlantic down to 1650, though its exact position was never settled.²³

In the tenth century the Norwegians had a different perspective. If you draw a line west of the Norwegian mainland you find the Shetlands, the Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland, and Baffin island. Iceland had been discovered early on, and not just by Irish monks – it was the Norwegian practice to banish recalcitrants to Iceland as exiles. Anyone blown off course on their way to Iceland had a chance of seeing Greenland, which was settled around 986. There they raised cattle and sheep and hunted walrus and polar bears. They also explored some lands to the south, though ‘explore’ is perhaps too deliberate a word for Bjarni Herjolfsson, a young Icelandic merchant, who was blown off course on his way back from Greenland and driven south, through a dense fog. He came to a hilly land, green with forests, that was nothing like Greenland or Iceland. After Bjarni had made it back to Greenland, and excited others with what he had seen, a young man called Leif Eiriksson set out to emulate him in 1001.

He came first to barren lands – what he called Helluland, Flatstone Land, or Slab-Land. Farther south he rediscovered the forest landscape Bjarni had seen – this he called Markland, or Forest Land. And further south still he came to a grape- or berry-bearing land, which he called Vinland, where he wintered. Others followed Leif, but they all found the natives, which they called Skraelings, hostile and were eventually either killed or driven back. Adam of Bremen’s account of Vinland, written in 1070, is regarded as authentic and, in 1117, a papal legate from Greenland visited Vinland, which implies that a community of souls existed there, at least for a time (in 1960 buildings were excavated in Newfoundland that resembled those in Greenland and were dated by C¹⁴ to the eleventh century). Papal records at Rome indicate the memory of Greenland existed there at the end of the fifteenth century.²⁴

In the other direction Asia was being fleshed out. ‘The most popular notion about Asia was that somewhere in this great continent there was a powerful Christian ruler named Prester John, who was believed to be so great that kings waited upon him at table.’ But he was never found, despite many epic voyagers of explorers and travellers (some think this was a corrupted legend originating with Alexander the Great). The first of the three great travelogues of the Middle Ages was by John of Plano Carpini, whose History of the Mongols begins in 1245, at Easter. Setting out from Lyons, John travelled on behalf of the pope. As far as Kiev he travelled in a steady, even stately way – he was overweight and riding wasn’t easy. From Kiev, however, he found that the Mongols had established a highly efficient communications system, with post stations along the road that enabled them to change horses five or six times a day.²⁵ In this fashion he travelled by way of the Crimea, the Don, Volga and Ural rivers, north of the Aral Sea and then across Siberia to Karakorum, south of lake Baikal, where the Great Khan held his court. John was well received, had an audience with the Khan, and was presented with a fox-skin coat by the Khan’s mother, very useful on his return journey, since the roads were often covered in deep snow and they had to sleep in the open air. When he arrived home, his book based on his travels was a great success though, as he was at pains to point out, he had found no mention anywhere of Prester John.

Nonetheless, his journey added a great deal to knowledge about the East and the History of the Mongols was circulated throughout Europe (the English word ‘horde’, often used in connection with the Mongols, derives from the Turkish ordu, meaning ‘camp’). For his part, the pope decided to send a preacher to Karakorum, in the hope of converting the Great Khan. The man chosen, William of Rusbruck, set out in 1253 and was disappointed to find that the Khan had no interest whatsoever in being converted.²⁶ However, while he was in Karakorum he observed several other Europeans, including a goldsmith from Paris, a French woman who had been abducted from Hungary and an Englishman, plus several Russians and some travellers from Damascus and Jerusalem. John of Plano Carpini had stimulated an interest in Asia among Europeans.

That interest was greatest in Venice, for its merchants had traditionally maintained good links with Arab/Muslim traders, who received goods from further east. This is why the Polo brothers, Nicolo and Maffeo, decided to make their way across Asia in 1260. This first trip was a great success because the Mongol ruler of the time, the great Kublai Khan, was as interested in Europe as they were in Asia and sent them back as his ambassadors. When they returned east, in 1271, they took with them Marco, the seventeen-year-old son of Nicolo. This journey turned into one of the great epic voyages of all time. They followed the old Silk Road – fifty-two days of travel – until they reached Kashgar and Yarkand on the edges of China. There they crossed the desert and finally reached Kanbalu (the modern Beijing), where the Khan’s capital had moved to, from Karakorum. Marco Polo was entranced by Kanbalu; he described the city as ‘greater than the mind can comprehend . . . no fewer than a thousand carriages and pack horses, loaded with raw silk, make their entry daily; and gold tissues and silks of various kinds are manufactured to an immense extent.’²⁷

Like his father before him, Marco was an astute trader, with a keen market sensibility, and like his father he became a favourite of the Khan ruler. For fifteen years he was sent as an ambassador all over China and the East.²⁸ In fact, the Polos only returned home when a marriage contract was arranged between Kublai Khan and the ruler of Persia under the terms of which a young bride was to be sent west. A convoy of fourteen ships was made ready and the Polos were part of the bride’s protective party. The ships left from Zaiton (modern Amoy) on the Pacific coast (which the Polos thought extended around the world to Europe) but first they travelled via Kinsai, modern Hangchow, which was another fantastic experience – a hundred miles in circumference, with ten major markets and twelve thousand bridges. ‘Every day forty-three loads of pepper, each weighing 243 pounds, moved through the markets of Kinsai.’²⁹ From the sailors on the ships of the convoy, Marco heard about Zipangu (Japan), which, he was told, was about 1,500 miles off the mainland (in fact it is 600 miles from Shanghai and 200 miles from Korea). When the Polos finally reached home, their friends were astonished, imagining that they had been long dead. After Marco wrote up his account of his travels, The Description of the World, no one at first believed him, and he was given the nickname Il Milione, because of the ‘tall tales’ he had fallen into the habit of telling (in fact he had a ghost writer, Rustichello of Pisa). And yet, the limits of Asia had been reached by the Polos, and they had seen a vast new ocean.

The third great traveller of the Middle Ages was the Arab, Ibn Battuta. He left his home in Tangier in 1325 aiming, in the first instance, to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Once there, however, he decided to keep going. He travelled down the coast of east Africa, then up into Asia Minor, before cutting through central Asia to Afghanistan and India. Well received in India (as a qadi, a kind of judge, he was an educated man), Ibn Battuta lived there for seven years and, like Marco Polo before him, was appointed as an ambassador, in his case to the sultan of Delhi. On his behalf Ibn Battuta undertook a trip to China. He had many adventures along the way, including being attacked, robbed and left for dead, but he arrived in China in either 1346 or 1347, where he found many Muslims in the port cities, who were not at all surprised to see him. Returning home, he next travelled in Spain, then took off into west Africa, as far as the Niger river, where again he was well received by the Muslim Negroes. His travels became the basis for geographical, astronomical and navigational studies taught in the Muslim centres of learning in Cordova and Toledo. These traditions played a big role in shaping the ideas of Columbus.³⁰

Columbus’ mental horizon was thus determined at least in part by these experiences of early travellers. Travel was arduous, and frequently dangerous, but long – very long – journeys were made, and knowledge about the world was expanding sufficiently to whet the appetite of people like the Genoese general. However, there were many other influences on Columbus’ mind besides the voyages of his predecessors. Foremost among them were the mappae mundi, or Christian maps of the world. In Columbus’ entry in his journal for 24 October 1492, he writes of Cuba: ‘The Indians of these islands and those whom I carry with me in the ships give me to understand by signs, for I do not know their language, it is the island of Cipangu, of which marvellous things are recounted; and in the spheres which I have seen and in the drawing of mappemondes, it is this region.’³¹

These mappae mundi arrived with Christianity – indeed, they were one of the agents in the spread of the religion. In the gospel of St Matthew, for example, the Apostles were commanded to preach ‘to all the nations’ and so geography was given a religious importance. As Valerie Flint says, mappae mundi were, ‘for the greater part, less geographical descriptions than religious polemics; less maps than a species of morality’.³² These maps took passages from Revelation, the gospels, the Psalter and other books of the Bible as their principal guides. ‘Thus says the Lord God,’ in the book of Ezekiel, ‘This is Jerusalem; I have set her in the centre of the nations, with countries round about her.’ Jerusalem was therefore placed at the physical centre of the world. In the same way, east was placed at the top of the map because that privileged position contained Paradise which, according to Genesis, was in the east, with the four rivers of Eden pouring out of it.³³ The habitable world was divided into three continents, in accordance with God’s ‘delivery’ of the dry land to Noah three days after the Flood.³⁴ These lands were often drawn as a circle, surrounded by ocean, in which the main inland waterways were in the form of a capital T. Leonardo Dati (1360–1425) was the first to describe these as ‘T-O’ maps, in his poem, La Sfera.³⁵ Other matters that needed to be included in the mappae mundi were the Magi, who came from somewhere in the east, Prester John, and the monstrous races, which were to become extremely popular among mapmakers. India, in particular, was seen as home to many monsters. There could be found people with the heads of dogs, whose feet faced backwards, whose eyes, noses and mouths were in their chests, or who had three rows of teeth. India was also renowned for having ‘a great pepper forest’. As time went by, mapmakers appear to have shown some awareness of the discoveries of travellers. The Caspian Sea, for example, no longer opens into a great northern ocean but is completely surrounded by land. The number of islands off the mainland of China also increased, in deference to the report of Marco Polo. The so-called Catalan Atlas, drawn up in 1375, pictured the islands of the Atlantic – Madeira and the Azores – with tolerable accuracy, India is clearly a peninsula, and some of the larger islands in the Indian Ocean are marked. China is in the extreme east, with some of its cities shown.

No less Christian in intent were the ‘zone and climate’ maps which, by tradition, divided the earth into five climatic zones – a northern extremely cold zone, a temperate, habitable band further south, a central, uninhabitable ‘torrid zone’ around the equator, and two further zones to the south, a temperate one, and a frozen one, echoing those in the north.³⁶ The idea of an impassable torrid zone, in particular an impossibly hot sea, seems to have been a Greek idea originally, taken up by the Christians. The effect of this was to suggest that a northern sea passage was impossibly cold, whereas a southern one was impossibly hot. This implied that the only way to travel the earth was by going west.

Early in the fifteenth century, the Geography of Ptolemy, the second-century geographer, was rediscovered. The Greek text was brought to the West by Chrysoloras and made generally available through a Latin version prepared around 1409 by Jacopo Angelo de Scarperia.³⁷ This work was supplied with maps, thanks to Cardinal Guillaume Fillastre, and the so-called ‘new geography’ became immensely popular (though there was some doubt about the very great size Ptolemy attributed to Asia).³⁸ Gatherings of scholars, in particular for the 1450 Papal Jubilee in Rome, encouraged more and more maps that made use of Ptolemy’s ideas. One effect of these maps, which has provoked great interest among scholars concerned with the mind-set of Columbus, was to minimise the size of the globe. Though Columbus didn’t accept the shortest estimates available, Samuel Morison, in his great life of the explorer, shows how, from a reconstruction of a chart by Paolo Toscanelli, a Florentine physician who was in correspondence with Columbus, fifteenth-century mapmakers had taken on board Marco Polo’s observations, namely that Cipangu (Japan) was about 1,500–1,600 miles off the coast of China, with many islands in between. On this reckoning, Polo’s Zaiton (the port he left from, when he journeyed home) might lie ‘a little to the east of present day San Diego, California’.³⁹

Valerie Flint’s reconstruction of Columbus’ known reading shows that, in addition to Italian, he was adept at Latin, Castilian and Portuguese and that his books – many heavily annotated to the point of defacement – fell into two broad areas. He was, as the remarks at the beginning of this chapter underline, fascinated by Asia, by the exotic people and treasures to be found there, which all reinforced his conviction that he would one day find a new route to the East. The less copious aspect of his reading was given over to how new countries might be governed and administered. This was against a general background that you would expect for an explorer – a grounding in astronomy, arithmetic, geography, geometry, as well as history and philosophy.⁴⁰ It would appear that Columbus did not read widely, but he did read deeply. There survive five books heavily annotated by the admiral. These include the Imago Mundi of Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1420, bishop of Cambrai, then cardinal) which was printed in the early 1480s and claimed that in parts of the world it was day for six months followed by night for six months.⁴¹ Columbus’ copy contains 898 postille, or annotations. A second book, the Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum, by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pius II, pope 1458–1464), had 862 annotations, and a third, De Consuetudinibus et Conditionibus Orientalium Regionum, produced by the Dominican friar Pipino of Bologna, in the early fourteenth century, had 366 annotations. A lot of Columbus’ mental horizon can be reconstructed from these annotations. For example, we can observe Columbus as he settles on certain aspects of these books. He is very interested in the treasures they describe, in the effects of climate on human nature – he believes, for instance, that the peoples of the East, where the sun rises over them, are quicker by nature than other peoples, and ‘inclined to high enterprise and to astrology’.⁴² Columbus is particularly interested in any abnormalities of nature. He believes that extremes of climate may produce deformities in people, in particular cannibalism, an interest which pervades his writings. Among the monstrous and marvellous peoples, he seems to have had an abiding interest in Amazons, societies where the traditional gender and sexual roles are reversed, and where women are the leading lights.⁴³ He shared the feelings of many people of his age that the wearing of silk led to moral turpitude but he was fascinated by China because he believed it lay opposite Spain, across the Atlantic, with the northern part opposite Ireland.

Of course, he was interested in seafaring too, as may be imagined, and in particular ailments that might be encountered at sea. Remedies for kidney stones consist of a sea scorpion soaked in wine, or water-snakes’ livers, or sea nettles also soaked in wine. Perhaps the most unexpected aspect of Columbus’ reading was Plutarch’s Lives, which was translated fully into Latin only in 1470.⁴⁴ As well as showing an interest in history, and historical biography, it seems that Columbus was looking for models of government that might be needed if he did indeed find new countries.⁴⁵ He noted instances of liberality and openness, the arrangements that induce fellow-feeling among citizens, and the amount of public display of wealth that is permissible.

So much was general background for Columbus. But there was a more immediate set of influences on his knowledge and thinking, and the first key figure here is Prince Henrique of Portugal, better known to history as Henry the Navigator. Henry’s interest in navigation is said to have been stimulated by the war which Portugal waged against Morocco in 1412 when, after the Portuguese victory, Henrique was more taken by Ceuta market than anything else. ‘There he saw goods that had travelled over desert routes reaching far south toward Timbuktu, in the heart of Africa, and eastward to the Red Sea. Henry came back to Portugal wondering if the ocean might not be a better highway to the south and east than the desert.’ He settled down in the little town of Reposeira to study geography, astronomy and navigation, and to interview sailors from ships that anchored in the shadow of Cape St Vincent, the south-west corner of Europe.⁴⁶ It was a spot that could hardly be bettered, for he could learn from both the Mediterranean and Atlantic traditions of seamanship.⁴⁷

From the Mediterranean navigators came knowledge of the compass. This had been invented in China, thanks to the practice of the Chinese of always wanting to be buried lying in the most propitious direction. (Since we are alive on earth for only a short time, but lie in the ground for centuries, graves were regarded as much more important than, say, houses.) One of the ways a correct burial was achieved was by means of a special board, on which a spoon was spun. (Spoons were possibly used because their shape roughly conformed to the Great Bear in the sky, the constellation which fixes the Pole.) As the practice developed, so more precious materials were used for the sacred spoons – jade, rock crystal, lodestone. It was noticed that whereas all other materials produced variable results, lodestone spoons always ended up by pointing south. This was the basis of the compass, which was conceived around the sixth century AD, and spread gradually to the West. It replaced the very earliest method of navigation (across open sea, that is), which was to take birds on board and release them at intervals. They instinctively knew where land was and so the sailors followed them. Among other things, this was the method used to discover Iceland.⁴⁸ The great age of discovery would not have been possible without the compass.

Mediterranean ships also carried marine charts on which the course was plotted through daily records of sailing, known as dead-reckoning. These charts included a great deal of hard information, based on the conduct of regular trade. But the requirements of oceanic travel were somewhat different and this only emerged gradually. The plain fact was that the oceans were so large that the curvature of the earth became an important factor in navigation. It took time for men to realise this and it took time for them to find a solution.

The term portolano originally meant written sailing instructions but it was adapted to describe the Mediterranean marine charts. These portolano charts were hand-drawn, showing principal harbours, major landmarks and the intervening towns and ports, filled in according to experience. Their appearance hardly varies. Drawn on a single strip of parchment, three to five feet long and eighteen to thirty inches deep, the coastlines are in black, towns are in black, written perpendicular to the shoreline, with major features in red. There is little inland detail, save for rivers and mountain ranges.⁴⁹ Off-shore navigational hazards are marked, as dots or crosses, but no currents, depths, or tide races are given. The main aim of the cartographers at this point was to achieve accuracy in terms of distances and no account was taken of the sphericity of the earth. This did not cause much error in the Mediterranean, because it was a relatively narrow east–west sea, where the range of latitude was small.

Beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century, however, as Portuguese explorers extended their knowledge of the west African coast, and the islands of the Atlantic, there developed a demand for charts showing these parts of the globe. (The earliest Atlantic charts were produced between 1448 and 1468.) The first technical innovation of these new charts was the introduction of a single meridian, usually that of Cape St Vincent, stretching right down the chart from top to bottom, indicating degrees of latitude. Though this was an advance, the problem here was that the portolan tradition used magnetic north rather than true north and, as exploration proceeded, this variation began to matter more and more. Some charts therefore contained a second meridian, drawn obliquely on the charts, at an angle relative to the central meridian, corresponding to the variation.⁵⁰ Maps of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries show the progressive discoveries that had been made: for example, the Indonesian islands and the Moluccas – the long-sought Spice Islands – were more accurately rendered.

The earliest world chart to include both the Old World and the New is Spanish, bearing the date 1500, which was drawn up by the Biscayan cartographer and pilot Juan de la Cosa, who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage. It has no latitude marker and the two halves are drawn to a different scale. In a slightly later chart, known to historians as the Cantino chart, because it was smuggled out of Portugal by a man of that name, the outline shows the whole of west Africa and even the west coast of India, based on accounts of Vasco da Gama’s discoveries, where a coastline of the New World, to the north-west of the Antilles, is clearly marked as ‘Parte de Assia’. The whole chart is headed: ‘Chart for the navigation of the islands lately discovered in the parts of India.’

But the most important charts of the period were the Spanish Padrón Real, the official record of discoveries, first produced under royal command in 1508 and kept in the Casa de la Contratación in Seville, and continuously updated as discoveries proliferated.⁵¹ Though none of these maps survives, some based on them, produced by Diogo Ribeiro and now in the Vatican, show that the proportions of the world were being progressively better understood. The dimensions of the Mediterranean shrink to something like their true layout, and Africa and India are more accurately represented. There is still one major error: the east–west extent of Asia, which was much elongated. People still felt that Asia was not so very far to the west of Spain.⁵²

The medieval mappae mundi, biblically inspired, with Jerusalem at the centre and a terrestrial Paradise in the east, were becoming unrecognisable by the middle of the fifteenth century. What may be called a half-way map, which shows the evolution (rather than the revolution) of ideas, is the famous world map drawn up in Venice in 1459 by Fra Mauro. This is portolan in style; Jerusalem is central, latitudinally, but displaced to the west longitudinally, so that Europe and Asia are shown in more or less their proper proportions. Parts of Africa (Ifriqiya) bear Arabic place names, and Asia is shown with a number of features first described by Marco Polo. There is a continuous ocean to the south of both Africa and Asia. The monstrous races and the terrestrial Paradise have gone.

As more of the globe was discovered, so the portolan tradition began to fail navigators in more important ways. This was mixed up with the discovery of Ptolemy’s Geography, which had attempted to cope with the curvature of the earth but at the same time posited a vast terra incognita in the south, beyond the torrid zone. It was now realised that there was no torrid zone, not in the ancient sense, and no terra incognita, at least in the sense of a whole continent connected to Africa or Asia.

The first printed map to show America, that produced by Giovanni Matteo Contarini in 1506, does show the curvature of the earth, while at the same time displaying the new world in three parts – the north joined to Cathay, the West Indies as a group of islands not far from Japan, and Terra Crucis, South America, as an entirely separate (and huge) continent in the south. A year later Martin Waldseemüller produced his famous world map, twelve sheets drawn on a single cordiform projection, with its title describing it as ‘according to the tradition of Ptolemy and the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci and others’ (this is the first map to use the word America to describe the New World). It shows the Old World landmass as occupying 230° of longitude, but Waldseemüller later abandoned Ptolemy and produced maps which showed Asia in its more or less proper proportions.⁵³

But Ptolemy’s influence lived on in the inspiration he provided for those who sought to improve navigational techniques as the curvature of the earth came to be better understood. The first man to explore this problem was Pedro Nunes, a Portuguese mathematician and cosmographer. Though he never reached the point of actually projecting a chart, others did, in particular the Fleming Gerhard Kremer, or Mercator. Mercator was a land surveyor, and engraver, a maker of mathematical and astronomical instruments, as well as a cartographer. He was the most learned geographer of his day (he made an edition of Ptolemy, among other works), but his fame rests on his world map, which was very large, made up of twenty-four sheets.⁵⁴ It was drawn up to his new projection which, though modified many times since, still bears his name. The basic principle of the map is a graticule (or grid) of latitudes and longitudes, drawn as parallel straight lines. But Mercator overcame the effect of the curvature of the earth by increasing the length of the degree of latitude on his map progressively towards the poles in the same proportion that, on a curved surface, the meridians converge. In the phrasing of the time this meant that his maps had ‘waxing latitudes’. In this way the correct relationship of angles between one place and another was preserved, and meant that navigators could plot courses as straight lines on their charts. Mercator’s projection was, in a sense, a theoretical breakthrough, in that it introduced stability into navigation without, as it were, corresponding increases in the quality of the maps on which it was used. Longitude was still an impossibility at sea and, for the most part, throughout the sixteenth century the world was being discovered by sailors and explorers who did not know how to plot their discoveries on a chart. Mercator’s map perpetrated one outlandish mistake, as John Noble Wilford puts it – the Greek concept of a great southern continent, Terra Australis, which covered the pole and extended north as far as South America and South Africa.⁵⁵

None of this was made any easier by the fact that, once at sea, time-keeping was difficult and troublesome. Ships generally operated a two-watch system, each of four hours. The passage of time was measured by sandglasses, turned every half-hour and marked by a chant sung by the boy of the watch. (Made chiefly in Venice, these sandglasses were very fragile and numerous spares were carried – Magellan’s ship had eighteen of them, just in case.) Noon was established by means of a compass card which produced a shadow that shortened, and then lengthened.⁵⁶

Steering presented a problem, at least until the eighteenth century. There was a long tiller, mortised to the head of the rudder. The helmsman could usually not see where the ship was going and the course was called out to him by the officer of the watch. Rudders were of little use in a following sea, or even one that was beam-on, and in storms as many as fourteen men might be needed to hold the tiller steady. In the seventeenth century a whipstaff was introduced – this was a long lever working with a fulcrum set in the quarter-deck, and attached to the tiller by a ring. This allowed the helmsman to watch the sails and gave him some extra leverage, but again it was less than perfect in rough weather. Eventually a yoke was fitted to the head of the rudder and lines were led through a series of blocks to a horizontal drum on the quarter-deck, which could be rotated by a wheel. But the ship’s wheel did not appear until the eighteenth century.⁵⁷

In addition to the compass (first used in Europe, by tradition, at Amalfi) there was the lead and line. By using a deep-sea lead and line the seaman could get an early indication of land – it was known that the sea descended to a depth of about 100 fathoms (600 feet) off Europe, then dropped precipitously to much, much deeper levels. Seamen learned that, off Portugal for instance, the continental shelf extended for about twenty miles, while further north, off Britain say, it extended for about a hundred miles. The lead weighed about fourteen pounds and was attached to a 200-fathom line, marked at twenty, then every ten, fathoms with knots indicating the marks. Off a familiar coast, soundings also aided position – seamen learned to remember patterns of the sea bottom. The lead was sometimes hollow and the detritus picked up also helped knowledgeable captains work out where they were.⁵⁸ Other aids included the Compasso da Navigare, a comprehensive pilot book, covering the whole of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, which had been compiled by the late thirteenth century. These types of book came into use in the north much later, where they were known as routiers or, in English, ‘rutters’. By the sixteenth century they gave detailed records of soundings.⁵⁹

As ships ventured into the open sea, pilotage was replaced by navigation proper and one of the early problems here was that there was no way of measuring speed. The earliest method was a piece of wood tied to a rope that was knotted at intervals. When the ‘log’ was released the speed at which the knots ran out over the stern of the ship was timed with a sandglass. This was not very accurate and many sailors – Columbus included – regularly overestimated their speed. Calculation was not made any easier by ignorance of ocean currents but there were tables in place, from the late thirteenth century, which enabled navigators to work out how their position was affected when they tacked before the wind. Rudimentary knowledge of speed helped navigation by dead reckoning but the longer an ocean voyage went on, without knowledge of currents and tides, the greater the inaccuracies that could be expected. The only alternative was navigation by the heavens. The most prominent feature in the night sky was the Pole Star, whose height above the horizon grew less the further south one sailed. This is where the quadrant came in, to provide a reading of latitude. In Columbus’ lifetime, a degree of latitude was reckoned to be 162/3 leagues (roughly fifty miles), a considerable error, traceable to Ptolemy. After about 9° N the Pole Star was lost sight of altogether but other stars, whose angular distance from the Pole Star was known, could then be used. The disappearance of the Pole Star of course confirmed (for those who didn’t accept other evidence) that the earth was round.

One final factor was that, with navigation by the heavens, and latitude sailing, the variation between true north and magnetic north became more important, requiring the navigator to relate his course to the true, not the magnetic, north. It was at first assumed that the variation was consistent and systematic (and that a meridian without variation ran through the Azores). As time went by, however, experience in the great oceans of the world – the Indian and the Atlantic – showed that the picture was much more complex than that. Only the combined experience of sailors throughout the sixteenth century eventually produced the true picture, which required local knowledge recorded in almanacs. Longitude remained an even more intractable problem, because it was bound up with speed and time. The problem is that, with the curvature of the earth, the distance of longitude varies: at the poles it is zero, at the equator it is nearly equal to a degree of latitude. If one knew one’s latitude, therefore, one could in theory work out a degree of longitude, but again it was useful only if one could measure one’s speed accurately, and that required accurate timekeeping. Essentially, as J. H. Parry has remarked, throughout the fifteenth and for most of the sixteenth century, navigation in the open ocean was a matter of dead-reckoning ‘checked and supplemented by observed latitude’.⁶⁰

In the short space of about twenty years, in the middle of the fifteenth century, a major revolution took place in shipping.⁶¹ This was a marriage between the lateen-rigged Mediterranean ships and the square-rigged north Europe–Atlantic ships. ‘The marriage produced the basic barque, the direct ancestor of all the square-riggers of the [age of] Reconnaissance and the later great age of sail.’⁶²

The principal warship of the Mediterranean was the oared galley, which remained a component of Mediterranean navies until the seventeenth century.⁶³ Its main drawback was the large crew it required, making it unsuitable for long voyages out of sight of land. The other main idea in Mediterranean sailing had been taken from the Arabs – this was the lateen sail. The only type of sail seen on Arab ships, the lateen sail is essentially triangular, laced to a forward-leaning mast and a long yard. Whether or not the Arabs invented it, the lateen was spread through them, both in the Indian Ocean and in the Mediterranean. Its shape made the most of whatever wind was going and as a form of rig it was very versatile and made ships more manoeuvrable.⁶⁴

The other tradition, that of the Atlantic seaboard nations of northern Europe, produced sturdier, tubbier more buoyant ships, with a single, massive, square sail. Known as ‘cogs’, they were clumsy and slow, to begin with at least, but had capacious holds and required far fewer men to man them. One calculation has it that fifty men were required in lateen-rigged ships to do the work done by twenty men in square-rigged northern cogs.

Fifteenth-century ships made use of both rigs – square forward and lateen aft. There were other changes, to the shape of the keels and to the superstructure, but the rigging and crewing requirements would prove the most important factors in the great discoveries of the world. The two most important forms of this ‘marriage’ were the carrack and the caravel. Carracks were huge by the standards of the day – 600 and even 1,000 tons. Caravels were much smaller – sixty or seventy tons – and faster. They were lateen-rigged, more convenient for exploring estuaries and islands, and they turned out to be very safe, despite their small size. Columbus took two caravels with him on the first voyage, of which one, the Niña, was lateen-rigged. She never gave any trouble and was used on the second voyage as well.

As well as helping to bring together the work of astronomers, sailors and geographers, Henry the Navigator and his brother, Prince Pedro, placed gentlemen from their households in personal command of their ships and instructed them to be more ambitious in their aims, demanding longer voyages, more detailed reporting, greater effort all round in pushing expeditions as far and as fast as they could go. Under Henry’s patronage Portuguese ships rounded Cape Bojador in 1434, Cape Branco in 1442, and the mouth of the Senegal river in 1444. In the same year Cape Verde was reached and two years later the mouth of the Gambia. Sierra Leone was discovered in 1460. Muslims and naked pagans were found on these shores, together with markets, where ostrich eggs and the skins of baboons were sold. The explorers saw elephants, hippopotamus and monkeys. Benin produced slaves and strong pepper.

The death of Henry, in 1460, temporarily halted exploration, though there was the added reason that, by the time Sierra Leone had been reached, the Pole Star was so low in the sky that sailors feared for their navigating abilities if it disappeared altogether. In 1469, however, the Crown leased Guinea to a private individual, Fernão Magalhães, who undertook to explore a hundred leagues of coastline annually for the five years of his lease. In those five years the Portuguese got as far as Cape St Catherine (in what is now Gabon), sited at 2° S. In a way, these discoveries were disappointing, because they showed that Africa extended much further south than many had hoped, which meant that an easy passage to India was less and less likely. King John II was not deterred, however, and he sponsored a series of further expeditions down the African coast. Bartolomeu Dias left Lisbon in 1487, and reached 40° S (the Cape of Good Hope is 34° S) before turning east, and then north, and making landfall in Mossel bay, between what is now Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. He had reached the cape without sighting it and Dias’ people, tired and worried about their lack of provisions, persuaded him to turn back. On his way home he sighted the great cape and surmised that, without realising it, he had discovered the route to India. He got back to Lisbon in December 1488. He called the cape the Cape of Storms but it was the king, according to tradition, who changed its name to the Cape of Good Hope.⁶⁵

Vasco da Gama’s epic voyage did not leave Lisbon until July 1497, nearly eight years after Dias’ return. J. H. Parry argues that during the interval many voyages, whose records have since been lost, must have been made in the south Atlantic during this time, and that da Gama’s expedition made use of the knowledge amassed on these journeys. Parry maintains this because da Gama’s expedition was at sea in the Atlantic for thirteen weeks without sighting land, ‘by far the longest passage made until then by European seamen’.⁶⁶ Da Gama rounded the cape, provisioned from the store ship he had with him in Mossel bay, and then pushed on north. He gave the name Natal to the coast they passed at Christmas time, and eventually reached Mozambique and the area of Muslim influence. He was forced to use gunfire to repel boarders at Mombasa but found a better welcome at Malindi on what is now the Kenyan coast, at about 3° S. By great good fortune, da Gama secured the services of Ahmad ibn Majid, the best-known Arab navigator of his day, and the author of a collection of rutters and nautical instructions known as Al Mahet, who took the Portuguese across the Indian Ocean, to Calicut, which was reached in May 1498. Wherever da Gama went in the East he was disappointed to find that the Muslims had beaten him to it. In addition, he found that the goods he was travelling with – cloth and hardware that were popular on the coast of west Africa – were not at all suitable in the East. It was only with great difficulty that he managed to put together a return cargo of pepper and cinnamon. His journey back across the Indian Ocean met ferocious storms but once in the Atlantic he made good time and reached Lisbon in September 1499. He had been at sea for three hundred days and lost more than half his company. The great church and monastery of Jerónimos at Belem was built in his honour.⁶⁷

Columbus, the son of a weaver in Genoa, had sailed in Portuguese ships as far as Guinea, but he was less a professional seaman than an ‘extremely persuasive geographical theorist’.⁶⁸ The agreement which sanctioned his voyage in 1492 stipulated that he was to ‘discover and acquire islands and mainland in the ocean sea’. India had not yet been reached by way of the Cape and this was understood to mean Cipangu and Cathay. Such an expectation was by no means extraordinary: the earth was known to be round and there was no suspicion of intervening continents. Columbus had first made his proposal to the Portuguese Crown in 1484. He was turned down, and by the French and the English. He tried a second time with the Portuguese, and on this occasion, in 1488, he might have been successful but for the coincidence of Dias’ triumphant return, which diverted all energies and attention. Columbus turned, therefore, to Castile. Here he was at last successful, finding support from the Crown and from wealthy individuals. He set sail on the ‘Sea of Shadows’ from Palos in August 1492.⁶⁹

Modern scholarship has it that Columbus was not a very up-to-date navigator, but he was careful and meticulous. His course took him due west of the Canaries (27° N), though his later voyages were further south, where the winds were more reliable. But on that first voyage he was fortunate and, after thirty-three days of sailing, seeing nothing but weeds and birds, he sighted the outer cays of the Bahamas (San Salvador is 24° N). There is no question but that Columbus thought these cays were the outlying islands of an archipelago of which Japan formed a part. (This is exactly what Martin Behaim’s 1492 globe depicts.) It was a combination of Marco Polo’s errors (the east–west extent of Asia), the same man’s mistaken report that Japan was 1,500–1,600 miles from China, and Ptolemy’s underestimate of the size of the earth (25 per cent smaller than reality). Thus Columbus thought that Europe to Japan was about 3,000 miles, when in fact it is 10,600 nautical miles.¹¹

The next step, therefore, was to find Japan itself. Columbus pressed on, found Cuba, and Hispaniola (the modern Haiti and Dominican Republic). The latter yielded a little alluvial gold, while gold nose-plugs and bracelets were obtained by barter from the ‘natives’. After losing his flagship, wrecked by grounding, he decided to return home, leaving a few men behind with instructions to build a base and look for gold mines. On this return journey Columbus found that he needed to travel further north, near the latitude of Bermuda (32° N), to pick up the westerly wind. Approaching Europe, Columbus encountered heavy storms and was eventually forced to seek refuge in Lisbon harbour. The Portuguese interrogated him but remained sceptical about his story, having encountered Italian exaggeration before.⁷⁰ Still, they laid claim to his discoveries just in case.

The Spanish were no less careful. They instructed him to make a second voyage as quickly as possible, and to forestall the Portuguese claims they sought papal recognition for a monopoly of settlement and navigation. Since the pope of the time was himself Spanish, this support was not difficult to obtain. On his second voyage, begun in September 1493, Columbus discovered Dominica, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Jamaica. The third, in 1498, was made without volunteers – instead, men had to be pressed, or released from prison. He went further south this time, and discovered Trinidad and the mouth of the Orinoco. The river was much larger than any other known to Europeans and the amount of fresh water it brought down showed how big the continent of which it was a part must be. And he toyed with the idea that it was too far south to form part of Asia. Columbus then turned north but at Hispaniola he found the men he had left there in open revolt. He was never as good a governor as he was an explorer and was himself sent home in irons. He was allowed one more voyage, in 1502, when he discovered the mainland at Honduras and Costa Rica. He died in 1506.⁷¹

By now it was beginning to dawn on people that the many islands that had been discovered were not part of the archipelago off Cathay, which was much further away. The discovery of the Orinoco was the first inkling that there was a whole continent in between. As early as 1494 Peter Martyr wrote, ‘when treating of this new country one must speak of a new world, so distant is it and so devoid of civilisation and religion’.⁷²

In the years ahead the English and Portuguese would discover North America (no silk or spices) and, gradually, the immense extent of South America was unveiled. Interest in the East began to wane as pearls were discovered off Venezuela, a valuable red dye in brazilwood, and cod off Newfoundland. Eventually, in September 1519 Fernão Magalhães, or Magellan, sailed from Seville with a fleet of five ships laden with goods the Portuguese had found useful for trading in the East. He shared with Columbus the fact that he was a foreigner in command of awkward Spaniards.⁷³ Following a mutiny in Patagonia, which required Magellan to hang the ringleaders, and after losing two ships in the strait that bears his name, he arrived in the Pacific. The crossing of this vast ocean seemed as if it would never end and the men were reduced to eating rats and raw leather. They made landfall at Cebu in the Philippines, where they were involved in a local war. Forty men, including Magellan himself, were killed.

Magellan shares with Columbus and Vasco da Gama the title of greatest explorer but we should never forget that his own journey ended when he was only half-way round the world. It was completed by Sebastián del Cano, who avoided the Portuguese men-of-war in the area, crossed the Indian Ocean, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and arrived back in Spain with one ship, the Victoria, and fifteen men, out of five ships that had left. It was, arguably, the greatest voyage of all time. And it changed the way men thought about their world.