Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (11 page)

Accustomed to the rigors of Genoa and the hazards of the Mediterranean, Columbus could have been excused for believing he had arrived in a kind of exploration heaven. Unlike the relatively confined ports to which he was accustomed, Lisbon was located at the mouth of the river Tagus, where it emptied into the Atlantic. A favorable wind carried ships over a sandbar and into the vastness of the open ocean. To the north, Iceland and England; to the south, the Azores and Africa. No one knew what lay to the west, but across Europe, theories promoted by kings and clergy and cosmologists argued that a fleet sailing west would eventually reach the distant lands visited by Marco Polo two centuries before: China, Asia, India. The first European country to do so would have an enormous strategic and economic advantage over all its rivals.

 

B
y the time he ascended to the Portuguese throne in 1481, King João was twenty-six years old (four years younger than Columbus), and prepared to rule. His father had bequeathed to him a consolidated but virtually bankrupt state, which the young king proposed to expand into an empire. Even before he came to power, he had worked alongside his father, familiarizing himself with the throne’s expanding interests in Africa, and leading the rapidly expanding Junta dos Mathemáticos, charged with coordinating the kingdom’s exploration on land and sea. He reformed taxation, restored solvency to the Portuguese crown, and, emulating his great-uncle Prince Henry the Navigator, revived the expansion of the Portuguese empire.

He is remembered as the “Perfect Prince” by historians and students of the Portuguese monarchy, after Niccolò Machiavelli’s ruthless prescription for the exercise of power. More tellingly, João II earned the sobriquet “The Tyrant,” a violent despot who was despised and envied by his nobles. To cite but a few instances of his arbitrary exercise of power, he ordered all those with castles to submit their titles to the crown for confirmation, which could be granted or withheld. He dispatched representatives of the crown to supervise the nobles’ administration of their estates. And he presided over the abolition of bureaucratic offices that gave the nobility jurisdiction over the legal affairs of their districts. That was just the beginning. He gutted two of the most powerful Portuguese dynasties, the house of Viseu and the house of Braganza. The Braganzas were the largest landowners in all of Portugal, and Fernando II, the Duke of Braganza, controlled a private army of ten thousand men and three thousand horses. The Duke of Viseu was, among his many other titles, estates, and offices, the lord of Portugal’s newly established offshore outposts of Madeira Island and the Azores, and as such posed an obstacle to the crown’s imperial aspirations.

In the first instance, João II rocked his kingdom by executing a potential rival for the throne, Fernando II of Braganza. In this case, letters had come to light showing a subversive liaison between Fernando II and the sovereigns of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella. The Duke of Braganza was quickly seized, put on trial for treason, and after the inevitable guilty verdict, beheaded. Later, the Braganza estates were confiscated, and the surviving members of the dynasty fled to the kingdom of Castile for safety. Soon after, João II turned his attention to another perceived enemy, concluding that his cousin, Infante Diogo, Duke of Viseu, planned to overthrow him. In this case, he dispensed with a trial and personally stabbed him to death. What made the death all the more shocking was that their families were related; João II’s wife was Leonor of Viseu.

 

T
his was the lethal milieu into which Columbus stumbled. Although he had begun to master the sea, and proved himself fearless in command of a ship, he had a lot to learn about people, power, and politics. He could plot a course with ease, but lacked the ability to flatter a king. The title of a chapter chosen by his son Ferdinand for a biography of the Admiral reflected Columbus’s self-centered approach: “How the Admiral Grew Angry with the King of Portugal, to Whom He Had Offered to Discover the Indies.” To anyone familiar with the Portuguese court, to say nothing of navigation, this statement was outrageous. One did not dare to grow angry with this king, who was prone to sudden violence. Nor did one offer to “discover the Indies,” as if that were a straightforward demand. One humbly petitioned for backing to attempt a voyage of exploration in the king’s name. And of course Columbus never did fulfill his proposed objective. As deft and decisive on the water as he was clumsy and awkward on land, he urged the king to see things his way, to approve a sea route to Asia, but João stubbornly looked to other explorers and to the east rather than the west. Diogo Cáo won his backing to explore central Africa in 1482, and five years later, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in the name of Portugal.

 

C
olumbus spent eight years in Lisbon trying to make his vision of exploration a reality, and records of his time there are sketchy, when they exist at all. The Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755, destroyed records and other priceless artifacts pertaining both to him and to much of Lisbon’s history. A few particulars survive, however. The first was his allusion—in the pages of the diary of the first voyage—to his participation in the thriving Portuguese slave trade. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive on Africa’s west coast, Guinea, and the explorer Antão Gonçalves became the first Portuguese to buy slaves there. The Portuguese considered themselves entitled to own slaves by papal decree. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V authorized the Portuguese king, Alfonso V, to enslave “Saracens”—that is, Muslims—“pagans and any other unbelievers,” an entitlement he confirmed in a papal bull three years later, in case there was any lingering question about his intentions.

The early Portuguese slave trade assumed several forms, from inherited slavery to indentured servitude: forced labor for a fixed period of time, occasionally with modest wages. This was the form of slavery with which Columbus was familiar. He briefly wrote about his experimenting with importing entire families from Guinea to Portugal, not just men, and his disappointment that the experiment did not ensure greater loyalty or cooperation among the slaves. The problem, as Columbus saw it, was the Babel of tongues spoken in Guinea. His experience with the Portuguese slave trade prepared him to look on the Indians he encountered as potential slaves. Were they energetic? Cooperative? Strong enough to endure crossing the Atlantic and colder climates? Were they more valuable as slaves or as Christian converts?

During his years in Lisbon, Columbus was joined by his brother Bartholomew, ten years his junior. An acquaintance, Andrés Bernáldez, formerly of Seville, characterized Bartholomew at this time as a “hawker of printed books, who carried on his trade in this land of Andalusia,” as well as a “man of great intelligence though with little book learning, very skilled in the art of cosmography and the mapping of the world.”

A knowledgeable dealer in maps, Bartholomew set up business in Lisbon and made Christopher a partner. It is likely that conversations between the two helped him to refine his theories about sailing to China, without clearing up the fundamental misconceptions bequeathed to Renaissance Europe by Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, whose map, lacking both the Pacific Ocean and the Americas, gained credibility partly because it portrayed the world as Europeans of the time—not just Columbus—wanted to see it, smaller and more manageable than it actually was, with India, its spices, and the Grand Khan all within reach. Had Columbus, along with the rest of western Europe, known of the true dimensions of the globe, it is doubtful that he would have proposed sailing halfway around it to India, or that any monarch would have backed the enterprise.

In partnership with Bartholomew, Christopher moved among Lisbon’s small but influential Genoese colony, regarded as tough and capable in business. Genoese expatriates and opportunists had long exploited routes into other societies. They intermarried, they changed their names, they learned the local languages, they served local authorities—whatever it took to gain status and respect.

 

O
ne Sunday, Columbus attended Mass at Lisbon’s Convento dos Santos, the Convent of All Saints, where he noticed a young woman of about nineteen—or, as it is recorded in more sentimental accounts of their meeting, she noticed
his
devotion. Her name was Felipa Moñiz, the daughter of a wellborn Italian, Bartolomeo Perestrello, who had been active in the colonization of Madeira Island, and his wife Caterina Visconti. Circumstances suggest that Columbus was in search of a wellborn wife at the time. The Convento dos Santos was maintained by nuns charged with providing for the wives and daughters of those fighting in distant lands. Here he might have a chance to meet a woman who answered to his ambition in one of the few approved places for bachelors to encounter eligible young women. Scant details of the courtship survive, and his son Ferdinand offers only conventional reassurances about his father’s conduct: “Inasmuch as he behaved very honorably, and was a man of such fine presence, and withal so honest, that she held such conversation with him and enjoyed such friendship with him that she became his wife.”

She beheld, according to a description written much later by his son Ferdinand, a “well built man of more than medium stature, long visaged with cheeks somewhat high, but neither fat nor thin. He had an aquiline nose and his eyes were light in color; his complexion too was light, but kindling to a vivid red. In his youth his hair was blond”—or, in some accounts, reddish in hue—“but when it came to his thirtieth year it all turned white. In eating and drinking and the adornment of his person he was always continent and modest. Among strangers his conversation was affable, and with members of his household very pleasant, but with modest and pleasing dignity.”

He was, as his son took pains to note, extremely pious. “In matters of religion he was so strict that for fasting and saying all the canonical offices he might have been taken for a member of a religious order. And he was so great an enemy to cursing and swearing, that I never heard him utter any other oath than, ‘By San Fernando!’” If true, Columbus’s aversion to foul language made him an absolute rarity among men of the sea. “When he was angry with anyone, his reprimand was to say, ‘May God take you!’ for doing or saying that. And when he had to write anything, he would not try the pen without first writing these words,
Jesus cum Maria sit nobis in via
, and in such fair letters that he might have gained his bread by them alone.” This is one of the most detailed and accurate physical descriptions of Columbus to survive, idealized by filial piety, yet perceptive.

It was, for Columbus, a strikingly advantageous match. The son of a weaver, tavern keeper, and local politician allied with the losing faction in Genoese politics suddenly enjoyed promising connections and standing in the exclusive world of Portuguese nobility and exploration. Although Genoa was known for being antiroyalist, he let stand the mistaken impression that he was somehow allied with Genoese nobility. (Eventually his air of mystery would lead to speculative fantasies about his origins: Portuguese, or Jewish, or Catalan. It would be left to his son Ferdinand—his earliest biographer—to offer corrections, later confirmed by historians.)

Felipa had more authentic connections to nobility. On her mother’s side, she traced a relationship to the Portuguese royal family from the twelfth century. Her grandfather Gil Ayres Moñiz had ruled a wealthy estate in the Algarve region of Portugal, a prize wrested with difficulty from Arabs who had controlled it, and he had fought alongside Prince Henry the Navigator in the Battle of Ceuta in 1415. The Genoese navigator with the red or blond hair appeared capable of taking his place in their midst, bold and capable of bringing new wealth from somewhere—Greece? Asia? Africa?—to the family and taking his place beside his wife’s distinguished ancestors. With royal patronage assured by his marriage into the Portuguese elite, Columbus could be forgiven for thinking that the way was clear: discovery, acquiring distant lands and glorious titles, and the dutiful creation of a large family to inherit them and perpetuate his name.

On her father’s side, Felipa brought even more interesting, if complex, credentials. The Perestrellos were known as much for their indiscretions and illegitimate children as they were for their political and ecclesiastic connections. Bartolomeo married several times, and Felipa was the product of his second or, according to some accounts, third union. Her siblings consisted of Bartolomeo junior and a sister, Violante, with whom Columbus was said to have enjoyed cordial relations. According to well-established legend, Columbus’s father-in-law had been granted rights to tiny Porto Santo, lying thirty miles northeast of Madeira Island, by Prince Henry the Navigator. Bartolomé de Las Casas, who was personally acquainted with—and deeply conflicted about—the subject of his scholarly inquiries, surmises that Perestrello possessed instruments, maps, and charts of his realm that eventually came into Columbus’s possession, and “from seeing and reading which, he received much pleasure.” Perestrello was not known to have any experience or ability with seafaring, and even if this account is highly embellished, it does appear that Prince Henry gave Perestrello hereditary control of tiny Porto Santo as a result of manipulation rather than bold exploration. It is possible that Columbus considered Porto Santo a staging area from which to launch his own expedition when the time was right. Here was a paradigm in miniature for his own, more grandiose ambitions: find an island, claim it for king and country, and exploit it for personal and dynastic benefit.