The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (74 page)

At the same time that the
nao
was emerging as the standard cargo carrier of the day, and also a formidable warship, the narrower, more versatile caravel had evolved from the
qarib,
a smaller general-purpose vessel associated especially with North
Africa and the
Iberian Peninsula. The oldest mention of a
caravela
dates from about the thirteenth century, although there is no clue to its rig or dimensions and the evidence for its subsequent development is
sketchy. At the start of the fifteenth century, caravels seem to have been generally two-masted, lateen-rigged vessels (
caravela latina
), but by midcentury, when they were in widespread use in
Portugal and southern
Spain, they were also being built with three masts. Rigged with square sails on the fore- and mainmasts and a lateen mizzen, the
caravela redonda
was more efficient running before the wind, while its comparatively high length-to-beam ratio made it more maneuverable than the
nao
. Not surprisingly, the heyday of the caravel and
nao
coincides with the period of Atlantic exploration that began under the au
spices of
Dom Henrique of Portugal and reached its apogee with Columbus, and they were the forerunners of the square-rigged ships of the classic age of European sail that followed.

Dom Henrique—Prince Henry, “
the Navigator”—was one of the earliest and most vigorous promoters of the commercial potential of the Atlantic Ocean. The third son of
João I and the English Philippa of Lancaster, he is often credited with founding a school of navigation at
Sagres in southwest Portugal. In point of fact Henrique was not a mariner—he probably never sailed farther than northern Morocco—and he had no school at Sagres or anywhere else. Henrique was motivated by an abiding belief in the medieval concept of just war, and an obligation to preach the true faith to heathens and crusade against heretics and Muslims. A strong advocate of the Church militant, as a teenager he cajoled his father to embark on a crusade against Morocco, and he took part in the
capture of Ceuta in 1415. The victory proved something of a white elephant, for the city was of little economic or strategic significance to Portugal but costly to maintain and impossible to surrender without losing face. A subsequent Portuguese attack on
Tangier, thirty miles to the west, failed, and Henrique eventually turned to more commercial pursuits.

Under his sponsorship, Portuguese caravels reached the archipelagoes of the eastern Atlantic and opened the coast of
Guinea, as West Africa was called, which was a source of gold, slaves, and malagueta pepper, a spice of the ginger family used as a substitute for black pepper. His interest in the coast of Africa derived partly from his failed efforts to establish Portuguese control of the Canaries, which
Castile had claimed in the early fifteenth century. Ever alert to the possibility of commercial advantage, in the 1420s Henrique sponsored a series of voyages down the coast of Africa in the apparent hope of establishing a kingdom of his own, rich in slaves, gold, and the produce of the untapped coastal fisheries. In the 1430s, he organized the colonization and
exploitation
of the
Madeira Islands for lumber, wine, and, from the 1450s, sugar. (Originally cultivated in New
Guinea, sugar had been introduced to the Mediterranean by Muslim traders.) By the end of the century, Madeira was the largest exporter of sugar in the world, shipping more than 1,200 tons per year to Europe. Henrique initiated the settlement of the Azores in 1439, and judging from the rapid rise in their population and industrial and agricultural output, navigation between Portugal and the two island groups was considerable from the start.

By 1434, the Portuguese knew the coast of Africa as far as
Cape Bojador—the Bulging Cape—south of the Canaries in what is now Western Sahara and until then widely believed to be the southern limit of safe navigation. In that year,
Gil Eanes passed the cape.
Antão Gonçalves and
Nuno Tristão reached
Rio de Oro (Dakhla, Western Sahara), the site of a few Moorish villages whose inhabitants were captured and enslaved in 1441, and in that year or the next Tristão reached Cabo Bianco (Nouadhibou,
Mauritania). In 1445, an expedition reportedly numbering twenty-six ships sailed for Rio de Oro, and a few vessels continued on to the
Senegal River and
Cape Verde. Three years later the Portuguese built a trading post near Rio de Oro on the small island of Arguin in the Mauritanian gulf of the same name. Thanks to its supplies of freshwater, this became the center of a lucrative trade in ivory, gold, and slaves, and of a coastal fishery.

In 1454, when the Venetian merchant
Alvise da Cadamosto stopped in Portugal en route to
Flanders, Henrique offered him three-quarters of the proceeds of any expedition to Guinea he fitted out himself, or half if he used one of Henrique’s ships. The following year he sailed south. Cadamosto’s account is one of the liveliest of the era to survive, for he has an eye as much for the people and their customs as for their trade. He offers enticing details of the founding and prosperity of the Madeiras, the Canaries, and Arguin, where “
Portuguese caravels are coming and going all the year” and where merchants licensed by Henrique traded “cloaks, carpets, and similar articles and above all, corn [grain], for they are always short of food,” for the raw wealth of Guinea—“every year … a thousand slaves” and gold dust. South of the Senegal River he reached the territory of
Lord Budomel, a Wolof king who traded a hundred slaves for seven horses and invited Cadamosto to his house about forty kilometers from the coast. “My journey inland was indeed more to see interesting sights and obtain information, than to receive my dues.” After a month as the Budomel’s guest, he sailed farther south, to a place where the
North Star was visible “only when the weather was very clear … about a third of a lance above the horizon. We also had sight of six stars low down over the sea, clear, bright, and large.” This was the constellation Crux, or the
Southern
Cross, a constellation that would come to serve much the same navigational function in the southern hemisphere that
Polaris did in the north. Cadamosto was also one of the first people to sight the
Cape Verde Islands, which lie about four hundred miles west of Africa and are first mentioned in official documents in 1460. By this, the year of Henrique’s death, the Portuguese had explored about two thousand miles of coastal West Africa, including expeditions up the Senegal, Gambia, and other
rivers. Turning the corner into the
Gulf of Guinea would take another decade.

Regardless of the geographical achievements, Henrique’s sponsorship of these voyages was predicated on financial returns, and he set clear objectives for his captains, regulating the distances to be covered and ensuring that details about the navigation and geography of the coast, trade goods, and prices, and local languages were collected systematically. Once south of the zone of Islamic influence and
Arabic speakers, acquisition of this information was hampered not only by the difficulty of the navigation, but by the
inability to communicate through interpreters. This would remain a problem until the Portuguese rounded Africa and reached the arabophone coast of East Africa in 1498. The challenges of language and the lack of an indigenous tradition of coastal navigation to draw upon help explain why the pace of Portuguese exploration in the last half of the fifteenth century appears so slow, and why their progress once they reached the Indian Ocean was so swift.

While one result of the Portuguese voyages down the west coast of Africa was the discovery of a route to India, there is no indication that Henrique had any broader program in mind than crusading against heathens and infidels, and his own aggrandizement. At the time,
no one considered the possibility of sailing around southern Africa or of finding a shortcut to the Indies, the goal that had animated the
Vivaldi brothers 150 years earlier. Government support for further exploration of the African coast died with Henrique, as Afonso V, his nephew, focused on territorial gains in infidel Morocco.
These brutal campaigns proved a hard school for Portuguese soldiers, some of whom later took their fight against Muslims to Asia.

European expansion ushered in a new era in world history not simply because it catapulted Eurasia’s comparatively backward west-enders from their obscure peninsula onto the world stage, but because the Europeans introduced to the world a variety of cultural and legal novelties that we now take for granted. Two are particularly indelible. One was the evolving symbiosis between rulers
and merchants so characteristic of the Italian city-states like Venice, Genoa, and
Florence, through whose influence this dynamic spread to
Iberia and northern Europe. The other was the notion that political control could be exercised not only over lands across the ocean but over the oceans themselves. While many had used their navies to extend their authority overseas—to seize islands, or to control strategic passages and choke points—no one had ever presumed to divide the sea preemptively and to treat it as a political space analogous to territory on land. The Romans had called the Mediterranean
Mare Nostrum,
“Our Sea,” but that was simply a statement of fact, and classical jurisprudence regarded the sea as the property of all people, a global commons. By the thirteenth century, both
Venice and Genoa were asserting their jurisdiction over the northern Adriatic and
Ligurian Seas, respectively, in an effort to ensure that all goods passed through their ports, where taxes and other fees were collected. According to
contemporary legal interpretation, they had earned such jurisdiction by custom, specifically by virtue of having held it for a century or more. Others argued that the city-states could receive a “use” of the sea as a gift from the
Holy Roman Emperor, and deny others the freedom of navigation.

All this changed with a series of
papal bulls that asserted Portuguese claims to lands not yet ruled by Christian princes. Confirming the advances made under
Dom Henrique’s sponsorship, the bull
Romanus Pontifex
of 1455 stated that Portugal’s Afonso V “
justly and lawfully has acquired and possessed … these islands, lands, harbors, and seas” in
Guinea, and that no one was allowed to interfere with his or his successors’ efforts to convert the inhabitants to Christianity. The bull applied not only to Ceuta and Guinea, but “to all those provinces, islands, harbors, and seas whatsoever, which hereafter … can be acquired from the hands of infidels or pagans” in the name of Afonso and his heirs. This was hardly the first instance of the Church’s intervention in secular affairs, but Pope
Callixtus III was anxious to settle disputes among western leaders in order to free them to crusade against the Ottomans, who had just captured Constantinople.

A quarter century later, the
Treaty of Alcáçovas between
Portugal and Castile included two provisions of especially far-reaching significance.
Isabella’s right to the throne of Castile was acknowledged, and the dispute over the Canary Islands was resolved in favor of Castile. The Portuguese retained ownership of
Madeira, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands, and they were given free rein in the exploration of the Atlantic. Moreover, the treaty enjoined Isabella and Ferdinand of Aragon, her husband, to forbid their subjects or anyone “
equipped or provisioned in their ports” to sail to the Portuguese islands or the “lands of Guinea discovered or to be discovered.” Alcáçovas thus gave
Portugal the lion’s share of the territorial gains, and it was clear that should the Spanish seek out new lands via the Atlantic, they would have to go north or west. As it happened, the Canary Islands, which they retained, proved the ideal point of departure for ships sailing westward to the Americas, as Christopher Columbus and his followers would soon learn.

With the threat of Castilian interlopers removed, the Portuguese were free again to pursue their Atlantic trade. The possibility that a round-Africa sea route to the Indies might exist began to take hold after the Portuguese turned into the
Gulf of Guinea in 1471. Credit for acting on this possibility goes to Henrique’s grand-nephew,
João II, who fostered a program of maritime expansion with a view specifically to
circumnavigating Africa. He began by sending six hundred soldiers and craftsmen to build a fortress at São Jorge da Mina (
Elmina,
Ghana), which became the focal point of Portugal’s
West African trade in slaves and gold and the base of operations for voyages farther south. The Portuguese crossed the
equator around 1473, and in 1482
Diogo Cão reached the mouth of the
Zaire (Congo) River, “
which enters the sea with such a rush that 20 leagues [sixty miles] from the coast its waters are sweet.” A few years later Cão got as far as Walvis Bay,
Namibia. In addition to extending Portuguese knowledge of the physical geography of Africa, these voyages introduced the Portuguese to the
kingdom of Congo, which would become among the largest suppliers of African slaves to the Americas, as the Portuguese would be the most important carriers.

At this point, the possibility that the Portuguese might actually reach the Indian Ocean by sea was so real that João dispatched four expeditions to the east in one year, two by sea, and two overland through the Levant. He had two distinct objects in view: to reach the Christian king of
Ethiopia and to ascertain the likelihood of reaching the Indian Ocean by sea and assess the commercial conditions there should that be achieved. The emissary to Ethiopia died, but
Pêro da Covilhã spent five years visiting Aden, Cannanore, Calicut,
Goa, and the coast of East Africa before returning to Egypt. Learning of his fellow emissary’s death, Covilhã may have sent home an account that stressed the trade of Calicut and mentioned that it was possible to reach there from “
the Guinea Sea,” though it is unlikely that any report reached Portugal before the late 1490s. He then went to Ethiopia, where he remained until his death.

The most fruitful of the four expeditions was that of
Bartolomeu Dias, who in 1487 sailed with three ships on a voyage that brought European ships into the Indian Ocean for the first time, to land, on February 3, 1488, at Mossel Bay, 160 miles east of the southern tip of Africa, and 600 miles shy of the southernmost community of Muslim traders in Africa. On his return, Dias saw what he called the Cape of Storms, an apt name given the conditions
that prevail at the junction of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, but when he returned to Portugal in December 1488, João dubbed it the Cape of Good Hope, the hope being that the trade of the Indies was finally within reach.
^b
Domestic problems prevented the Portuguese from following up immediately on Dias’s monumental achievement. Moreover, many nobles still tied to the land resisted overseas ventures while even among those who supported commercial undertakings there was considerable debate about the wisdom of actually breaking into the Indian Ocean trade, about which they knew almost nothing. It is against this complex background of intra-Iberian and interfaith rivalry, coupled with the increased opportunities for trade in coastal Africa and the expanding knowledge of the ocean world and the technologies required to work profitably within it, that we must assess the most celebrated accomplishments of the age and the people who brought them to pass.