Chasing a Dream E-Book

John Dunmore

• Herausgeber: Upstart
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Early Europeans may have believed the world was flat, but by the Middle Ages there was widespread acceptance that it was, in fact, a globe. What remained a mystery, however, was what lay on the "other side". The belief in a vast southern continent went back centuries, and many expeditions set out to find it, sometimes in search of wealth, sometimes to convert its inhabitants to Christianity. This is the story of the voyages into this great unknown, by the Chinese and early Americans, the Dutch, Spanish, French and English, it recounts the exploits of pirates and scientists, and what lead to the debunking of many myths, from the sunken Great Southern Continent, to the idea that in the "antipodes", people walked upside down.

Leseprobe

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

ISBN 978-1-927262-84-9

An Upstart Press Book

Published in 2016 by Upstart Press Ltd

B3, 72 Apollo Drive, Rosedale

Auckland, New Zealand

Text © John Dunmore 2016

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Design and format © Upstart Press Ltd 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

E-book produced by CVD Limited

Contents  

Preface

1 Searching An Empty Ocean

2 Three Pioneers

3 A Spanish World

4 The Great Southern Continent

5 A Man with a Mission

6 The Dutch Interlude

7 Pirates and Their Ilk

8 The Novelists Join In

9 Cleaning Up the Map

10 The Great Navigator

11 The Northwest Passage

12 A Scattering of Islands

13 The Sunken Continent

14 An Ocean of Fiction

Notes

Preface

The history of navigation and exploration is full of mysteries and confusion. Man’s efforts to discover his own environment and what surrounds it have always been affected by his imagination. Throughout the centuries, the hardships of daily life, the fear of a bleak and dangerous future, the hope of survival, made him dream of a better world, a more fertile land, a more settled and peaceful society. As the song has it, “Somewhere over the rainbow . . . ” there must lie a happier and safer land.

Each generation necessarily builds its dreams on what the previous one achieved or failed to achieve. The explorer who sets out, whether by land or sea, takes with him in his slim baggage the knowledge that his elders have passed on. And naturally he also carries his own hopes.

Yet how reliable is that knowledge? Did Saint Brendan, the Irish monk, really discover America? Did he truly set off in a curragh into the North Atlantic, make his way around Iceland and sight the coast of North America? And why did he set out on this journey when he apparently was already in his sixties? He was, so tradition has it, looking for the Land of Promise of the Saints.

His voyage contains all the elements one finds in early exploration. There is a burning need to discover, whether it is for one’s own benefit, or for the good of others, including the moral salvation of unknown people, and for the general advancement of knowledge. The outcome is the discovery of strange places, filled with mysteries and legends, which later generations will come to believe in, yet will be unable to rediscover. In Brendan’s case, it was the Sargasso Sea and a handful of islands, including one that turned out to be a giant sleeping fish. And the whole was preserved – and well embroidered – in a major piece of writing, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani.

Narratives, the telling and retelling of voyages, the analysis and likely exaggeration of what was achieved, all play an important role in the history of navigation. They include accounts or myths of mysterious lands, mysterious islands now disappeared, of utopias where mankind has succeeded in creating an ideal society, or dystopias where mankind comes out in its more evil colours.

The mysterious world around the people of Europe, Africa and Asia, suddenly expanded when Christopher Columbus set out, firstly discovering a continent which he believed was part of Asia. But the Spanish Balboa crossed the isthmus of Panama, and discovered a vast ocean which later became known as the Pacific and was filled with so much promise, but so much danger, that world history was forever changed. No one could rest at ease until it was explored.

Numberless sailors would set out, suffer and agonise, mentally and physically, dying of scurvy or of other unpleasant diseases, sustained until the very end by their belief in the existence of some distant land. It could bring them fame and wealth, save their own souls as well as those of others, or enrich their sovereign’s empire. But most of the time, there was nothing but the endless ocean, their enigmatic, taunting enemy which at times burst out in a wild, angry and destructive series of storms.

The failure to discover was more often than not rationalised. If the land or the island a navigator sought could not be found, it might be because the earlier reports lacked precision, or because some cataclysm, an earthquake or some other disaster, had caused it to sink below the waves. The Pacific Ocean has its share, but so have other parts of the world. In Brittany, for instance, the town of Ys is said to have sunk below the waves, and according to old tales it can still be glimpsed once every seven years, at low tide, during the night of Christmas Eve. Some say that on a quiet night, again at low tide, the bells of its cathedral can be heard tolling faintly in the stillness. And it was so firmly anchored in local mythology that Breton nationalists have forged the dictum: “When Ys rises again, Paris will start to sink”.

Over time, these myths have been retold and analysed, as have been the voyages of the numerous travellers and explorers who have enabled us to know and try to understand the world we inhabit. The story of the vast Pacific came in the later years, because it was so distant from Europe, where philosophers, geographers and cartographers were trying to build a complete image of their world.

Myths were discovered along its coasts, in Asia and in America and in its many islands. They have been analysed and pieced together, interpreted as part of mankind’s struggle to discover a pattern in the formation of the world and of the many different civilisations which exist in the Pacific as elsewhere. The narratives, reports and journals of the navigators have been reprinted, footnoted and discussed. The characters of the explorers, the clash of cultures, the changes that have occurred in local cultures as the result of the irruption of Europeans, eventual colonisation and the changes brought about by the determination of native people to defend their culture, post-colonialism, the role of Christian missionaries and others in bringing about change, all these have been written about. These have created a vast literature, which is still growing as new areas of research develop.

This book offers an overview of the beliefs and the hopes that led some of the navigators to set off on that great ocean. It is not easy, in these times of advanced technology, radio transmission, sonar equipment, electronic devices of every kind, instant communication with every other part of the world, to realise what it was like to set out on a voyage of exploration two or three hundred years ago. The ships were small, crowded with men, animals and stores. The cramped cabins, many of them not much larger than a cupboard, were reserved for the officers and, when there were any, the scientists. The sailors slept in hammocks, mostly made of rope, which they hung on a couple of hooks and which they used in rotation, as one shift ended and the next one began. The atmosphere below decks was so oppressive, so constantly damp and smelling of rotting food and urine, that the men often preferred to sleep in a corner of the deck on a coil of ropes or some old pieces of sailcloth. The sick mouldered away below decks in their own stench on pallets of rotting cloth and filthy straw, dying of scurvy or gangrene.

Preserving food in days when sealed tins and refrigeration were unknown presented more problems. Live animals, such as cows and pigs, were kept in temporary enclosures on deck, and slaughtered one by one as the need arose, which indeed it soon did. Flour and dried vegetables stored in the hold became corrupted by worms, cockroaches, mice and rats, which multiplied and began to overrun the ship, until they too became part of the men’s diet, cooked into the swill which in time became the main part of any meal. Ports of call or mere inlets along a coast, when discovered, could provide fresh supplies and especially fresh drinking water. Scurvy, a dreaded disease brought about by a lack of vitamin C, was long believed to be caused by the putrid air breathed below deck (as bad as the air breathed by prisoners in their dungeon-like cells), and by a general lack of “land air”. Consequently, such calls, however brief, provided the opportunity for the men to go ashore and breathe an air that was refreshing and often fragrant with the scent of exotic plants and flowers. It was a great relief, and it contributed to the image that was growing of distant “exotic” lands.

These stops were always welcomed by the officers who could check their position by taking readings of the sun and moon. Uncertainty had dominated their navigation from the moment they left port and their point of departure began to vanish on the horizon. In order to find their way, they took readings several times a day, comparing each other’s work and recording it in the ship’s logs. But they worked on a constantly heaving deck, which made their task strenuous and irritating, especially when the sky clouded over or a storm broke out. In addition, sea currents, whose strength and force were hard to estimate, drove them off their course. Consequently, their calculations were often erroneous and the errors accumulated since each day’s work had to be based on the results of the previous day. Navigators were therefore glad when they could carry out their observations on land. At times, they even set up a makeshift observatory. They could then bring out their charts to estimate and try to check their course, and work out whether they had landed on some land that already featured, although roughly, on the maps, or whether they had made a new discovery. Unfortunately, most of the time, their estimates were too approximate because of earlier errors or inaccurate charts. So what they now recorded and later reported to their superiors, contained numerous inaccuracies and compounded the errors of their predecessors.

Geographers and cartographers would later pore over their work, and try to combine their reports with what little was known of the regions visited. But meanwhile, in their home ports, in taverns or in market places, the sailors would boast to any who would listen of the hardships they had overcome and the great discoveries they had made in distant places. Their descriptions of exotic islands, of the delights they had found, the riches such places possessed, grew more extravagant as time passed and their listeners refilled their glasses. Some of these reports were dismissed as nonsense by the geographers who might hear of them, but enough was accepted to distort the image they had formed. And among those towards whom these reports trickled, there were writers who would use them for some fanciful tale, or build up a narrative that readers took as true reports. They were the ancestors of modern reporters and of modern novelists. But they created a confusing world that led others to seek out non-existent places in a vast ocean. It took many years before true and reliable maps could be drawn up, a slow process that cost many lives and destroyed many hopes.

This work presents an overview of the search for non-existent or misplaced worlds in the Pacific Ocean. It broadly surveys some of the old myths and traditions that were resurrected and used by early explorers. These were combined with the beliefs that provided the impulse for voyages by, among others, the Spanish who were driven by the hope of Christianising or conquering the inhabitants of faraway places. And as the Pacific world became more widely known and talked about in Europe, those beliefs, those reports, those tales provided the driving force for resolute and meticulous explorers such as James Cook. In the background toiled unceasingly the scientists and mapmakers, as well as the writers who worked feverishly and at times exuberantly to satisfy the curiosity of the growing mass of readers back home.

In 1570 Abraham Ortelius published a world map, Theatris Orbis Terrarum, which showed a vast unknown southern continent. . .

Eighty years later, the French cartographer Nicolas Sanson still showed this great unknown land, with a vague coastline and, to the north, the suggestion of a Northwest Passage.

1 Searching An Empty Ocean

Day after day, day after day the same,

A weary waste of water.

Robert Southey,Madoc

From time immemorial, man has been driven by curiosity and the need to explore – what might lie over a hill, across a river, beyond the mountain ranges and over the sea. In many cases, the main incentive was a search for food or for new territory, at times the need to escape from some approaching foe. The same forces were at work in the animal kingdom, but pure curiosity, the need to know, became increasingly marked as human society developed. Exploration led to discovery – but discovery was of no value to mankind unless the discoverer returned to share his news with his fellow beings. Man wanted to know more about his world, and each discoverer, returning to his home base, made his contribution to the growing and exciting sum of human knowledge.

As John Beaglehole, the author of the seminal Exploration of the Pacific, once put it: “In every great discoverer there is a dual passion—the passion to see, and the passion to report.”1 As the centuries went by, the range of the discoverers extended further and further. There was much to explore in the great continents, but the sea presented the greatest challenge of all. It lay seemingly limitless in front of the observer. Those who ventured too far from the shore, either because they were caught up by their own rashness or trapped into a sudden storm, simply vanished. It is not surprising that one finds among all the people who live close to a sea numerous myths that are marked by fear and strangeness. Every sea has its gods and monsters. They can be friendly to those who respect them and pay homage to them, but they can fly into wild rages, pound the shore and destroy those who live along it. Gradually, but slowly, man began to tame them. The Mediterranean was the first to yield its secrets, entering the writings of the Greek, Roman and Arab geographers and philosophers. The North Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic came next, but the greatest challenge was the vastest ocean of all, the Pacific.

Its sheer size is awe-inspiring. On the world map, it gives the appearance of an enormous lake, bounded by the two Americas, the Asian continent, and the Arctic and Antarctic icefields. The distance from Malaya to Panama reaches 18,000 kilometres or 9,700 miles. North to south, from Bering Strait to the Ross Sea shelf, it attains 15,500 kilometres or 9,600 miles. One could fit into it the whole of Europe, from Ireland to the Urals, and still have space left to slot in most of North America. It looked frightening to those who lived along its shores, full of mysteries, the home of monstrous sea creatures and, inevitably, of strange people inhabiting remote islands.

But discoverers and settlers did venture out onto those waters, probably as early as 4000 B.C. Bold sailors, they made their way with their families from South-East Asia through what is now known as Indonesia, towards New Guinea and into Australia. Others sailed from the Philippines and Taiwan, settling in the more northern islands of Guam and the Marianas.

Settlement therefore came from the west, not the east. This view has been contested, but the prevailing winds and the presence of islands on the western side, which could be used as “stepping stones”, made it more likely that migration would occur from the Asian side rather than from America. Advancing slowly, the settlers went from island to island, establishing a few villages along the shores, and moving on when the population increased or clashes forced some families out. In time, they reached Hawaii and Easter Island and travelled down to New Zealand in the south. By around 1200 A.D., all the Pacific had been settled and new cultures had evolved. Roughly, the population can be divided between Polynesians, occupying a vast triangle across the central Pacific to the Hawaiian islands and down towards the far south, and the Melanesians, mostly occupying the southwestern parts. They created their own history and their own mythology. To the Polynesians, the ocean was the kingdom of Tangaroa, the sea god. Other gods had lifted islands out of the water, fishing up the North Island of New Zealand, for instance, which is still known as Maui’s Fish. And they set up their heaven in its mythological centre, the sacred land of Hawaiki from where men had migrated and to which all would one day return.

The first settlers could be described as discoverers, but not as explorers in the true sense. They were looking for new homes and accidentally coming across islands they hadn’t known existed, but they were not sailing and risking their lives simply to solve geographical mysteries. Very little precise information trickled back to the homes they had left or could be used to construct a picture of that vast ocean. Usually, mysteries were explained by mythology.

However, to the people who lived along the continental coast of Asia and America, the Pacific Ocean was the very edge of the world, into which it was foolish to ever venture. Those who did, or whom a sudden tempest or a dangerous current drove out of sight of land, never returned. Fishermen or traders were warned to stay close to the shore or risk destruction. The Chinese Chan Ju Kua, the author of Chu Fan Shi or “A Description of Barbarous People”, writing in the thirteenth century, reminded his readers that to the east lay “the Great Hole of Wei Lu” where the waters drain “into a world from which men do not return”. An oceanic plughole to be avoided at all costs.

Legends and myths, based no doubt on real events, whether planned expeditions or accidental voyages, abounded. The great mysterious world that lay just out of sight was both frightening and exciting in its strangeness. For instance, the ancient chronicle Hou Shan Shu, compiled around the fifth century, mentions the Land of Wa where could be found the kingdom of Queen Pimiko. She was a sorceress, unmarried, who had bewitched the local people and become their queen. A thousand female attendants saw to her needs and defended her palace from intruders. A thousand miles to the south lay the Land of Dwarfs, whose inhabitants were no more than three or four feet high. Even further on, so far that some said the voyage could take a year to complete, was the Land of the Naked People and, further still, the Land of the Black-Teethed Men.

These stories may sound like imaginary myths, but they also suggest some knowledge of Japan, and of the islands of Micronesia and Melanesia where clothing is certainly skimpy by comparison with Chinese dress, and therefore where people could be considered as almost naked. The practice of betelnut chewing, common in some of the islands, turns teeth a distinctive and to outsiders a startling and frightening black. The Land of the Dwarfs may suggest some awareness of the hill tribes of Taiwan.

More precise in its details is the story of Hsu Fu, or Xu Fu, a Buddhist monk and a navigator born around 250 B.C. The emperor of China at the time was the great Shi Huang Ti, the founder of the Qin (or Ch’in) dynasty. He built up the greatness of China and, among other achievements, completed the famous Great Wall. As he got older, he began to seek a way of avoiding death, a concern spurred by at least one assassination attempt. He had heard stories of wondrous islands in the mighty sea, where grew a magic herb that ensured eternal life, and decided to send Hsu Fu to look for it.

So around 219 B.C. Hsu Fu set off in search of the islands where immortal beings lived, with the mission of persuading them to share their wonderful herb in order to preserve the life of the great Chinese emperor. He returned, having found the island of Peng Li and a palace he called Chih Cheng, which was guarded by a fearsome dragon. Although he paid homage to the ruling magician and offered him gifts, he had not succeeded in getting the sacred plants. What the immortal wanted was young men of noble lineage and good education, with maidens of similar status and a range of skilled artisans.

This pleased the Qin emperor, who gave him 3000 young men and women, the skilled workers he required, plus food and other supplies. According to some variants of the story, Hsu Fu returned once more to China, asking for archers to protect the shipment of magic herbs from sharks and other dangers. His request was granted, but he was never seen again. Anyhow, not long after this, Emperor Shi Huang Ti died and the Qin dynasty eventually collapsed in widespread disorders and plottings.

Hsu Fu seems to have been not only a skilled navigator, but a crafty negotiator – or fraudster – who got what he needed to set up his own kingdom in some islands or on land east of China, possibly in Taiwan, in the Philippines or in Japan, or even, as some believe, in America. An attempt to recreate Hsu Fu’s voyage was made in 1992 by Tim Severin. Boats were constructed of bamboo and tied with rope, in a faithful reproduction of the ancient craft the explorer would have used. Unfortunately, the ropes eventually rotted and the boats disintegrated.

In about 450 A.D., a Buddhist monk, Hui Shen, “The Wise One”, set off with a number of others to convert people believed to inhabit lands across the ocean. He sailed northeast, which suggests that he sailed past Japan and the Kamchatka peninsula. He eventually returned to China, saying that he had reached the land of Fu Sang, where he had seen many wonders, including silk worms that grew to extraordinary lengths and many new plants among which might be the yearned-for herb of eternal life. Some men he saw bore tattoos, large and wide for the upper classes and narrow and curly for those of a lesser social status. The length of his absence and the details he gave, however amplified and twisted over the centuries, suggest that he may well have reached the shores of north and central America. The Land of the Tattoed Men may well be a reference to Alaska, where tattoos were fairly common among certain tribes.

Even if some Chinese navigators did reach America – and arguments about this have been going on for years2 – the continent offered few prospects for trade and settlement. Getting there was bound to be a slow and dangerous process, especially now that Japan was an increasingly powerful empire, threatening the two kingdoms of Korea and beginning to establish a foothold on the Asian continent. The Japanese wanted no truck with foreigners, and they were likely to kill or enslave anyone unlucky enough to be driven onto their shore, or even sailing past it as any junk trying to reach America would be likely to do. As for North America, it was inhabited by a number of warlike tribes. Most of those who lived along the shores were trappers or fishermen, eking out a short and brutish living in harsh conditions. To them, the Pacific Ocean was not the abode of the immortals and magicians with marvellous talents, but of the dead and of ancestral gods. Any Chinese boat appearing along the shore would be regarded as fearsome and its sailors as monstrous ghosts. Running away from them or, if one was daring enough, killing them as they tried to land was the obvious thing to do.

Central and South America was where the Aztecs, the Maya and the Incas were building up great empires, but they were essentially inland people, dwellers of plains and mountains. Those who lived on the Pacific side of the great Andes mountain chain considered the ocean less fearsome and they interwove it in their myths. The Indians of Colombia believed in a sea god, Chibchacum, who at times shook the earth, causing deadly quakes and occasionally sending a mighty wave ashore, a tsunami, in an attempt to drown its people. Along the coast of Peru, the tribes admired and respected the great ocean as a supplier of food. It was, however, a world that should be respected, a place into which mere human beings should not venture. The Aymara Indians of Bolivia and Peru spoke of the god creator Viracocha who had left their land by walking east into the ocean and had never been seen again.

In spite of their mixed feelings about the great Pacific Ocean, it is probable that some of them did venture on it in search of new lands. They probably sailed out to Hawaii and, even more likely, to Easter Island, where some actually settled. In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl proved that a voyage in a large raft was possible from Peru to the eastern islands of Polynesia, although it was not an easy voyage and he failed to show that regular travel and migration were likely.

None of these reported voyages, whether from the Asian or the American continent, amounted to discovery in the full sense of a passion to explore and a passion to report. What we know of them is based on old tradition, local legends and a few unreliable histories. Supporters of the various theories point to cave drawings, inscriptions, monoliths and the like. But at the most these are footprints left by people who have disappeared. The rest of the world did not learn from their travels or these migrations. It would have to wait until more modern navigational techniques enabled sailors to report back. The pioneers of Pacific exploration were the Spanish and the Portuguese, men like Balboa and Magellan and, indirectly, the unfortunate Christopher Columbus who sailed from Europe intending to reach India and the East, and thought that he had done just that.

2 Three Pioneers

O my America! My new-found land.

John Donne, “Elegy XIX”

Christopher Columbus brought fame to Spain, but he was really an Italian, born in Genoa. He began life as a weaver, working for his father, but he soon gave this up for a sailor’s life, travelling around the Mediterranean and in 1476 sailed with a Genoese convoy bound for England. However, his ship was sunk by pirates off the coast of Portugal; he managed to swim ashore and in time settled in Lisbon, where his brother Bartholomew had already settled, working as a cartographer.

It was an exciting time for mapmakers. Europe was relatively settled with the end of the Hundred Years War between England and France and with relative peace between Spain and Portugal. On the other hand, Constantinople had recently fallen to the Turks, threatening the now increasingly dangerous trade with the Middle East that had been the foundation of Venice’s greatness. With the possibility of Venice’s former power waning, her rivals started to look for new ways of trading with the East. Portugal began to explore the west coast of Africa, suspecting that there lay a likely route to the Indies. Navigators sailed to Madeira in 1418–19 and discovered the Azores in 1427. These soon became important centres of sugar production. The new light sailing ship known as the caravel enabled further exploration down to Cape Verde in 1444 and to Sierra Leone a few years later. It would take a while before Portuguese suspicions that it might be possible to sail to the Indies by the southern tip of Africa were proved right. Bartolomeo Dias would provide the evidence in 1488 and Vasco da Gama finally rounded the Cape and reached India ten years later. All these events, added to the information provided over the years by Arab and other cartographers, were changing the maps of the known world. As his brother pointed out to Columbus, it seemed as if every year one had to add a new island or a new coastal feature to the old charts.

Christopher Columbus looked in another direction. To reach the Indies and beyond, travellers like Marco Polo and traders like the Venetians had always looked east, but now that no one doubted that the world was round, it was obvious one could reach India and China by sailing west. He drew up a proposal for a voyage to test out his theory and submitted it to the King of Portugal. It was promptly rejected: now that the Portuguese were blazing a trail to the Indies by way of southern Africa, there was no point in wasting time and money on looking for another route.

But Columbus was persuaded that the Atlantic route would be shorter than the Indian Ocean one. According to his calculations, the globe was smaller than many believed, and the Asian continent far larger than was shown on most maps. The ocean that separated Europe from Asia was much less than the 10,000 kilometres some thought, so that it could be crossed in three weeks, possibly four, but no more. He and his brother had a go at persuading the King of England, with no success, and the King of France with even less – he did not even reply. So Columbus moved to Spain and put his proposal to the king who, as rulers tend to do, referred it to a committee, which turned it down. Queen Isabella, however, was tempted by the idea: it was time to challenge the Portuguese who were so clearly trying to establish a monopoly over the African route. Humouring their queen, the Spanish eventually agreed to back the risky and costly undertaking and, in September 1492, Columbus set off with one ship and two caravels.

Three weeks went by with no sign of land. Then a fourth. Unrest was spreading among the crew, who feared Columbus was a crackpot leading them to their doom. But in mid-October, land was sighted. Amid shouts and cheers, the Spanish royal standard was raised, as were the special green banners made for the voyage, embroidered with the initials of the king and queen. Columbus reckoned that the island they landed on must be an outlier of the East Indies and that the Asian continent could not be far away. He had in fact reached a small island in the Bahamas. During the following weeks, he sailed to what was Cuba and Hispaniola, welcomed or watched by friendly natives whom, quite naturally, he called Indians, a name that was eventually adopted for most of the indigenous people of America, later modified to Red Indians and in time to Amerindians.

Columbus returned to Spain, having lost one ship and been forced to leave some of his men behind. He was greeted like a hero and given new ships and supplies for a new voyage. This brought him back to the Antilles – the West Indies, as future generations would call them – which he still considered to be part of Asia and which he started to explore in greater detail. In April 1494, he set off from his base of Isabella with three ships, in an effort to find the mainland of China, which he reckoned must be nearby. There was no sign of China, so he convinced himself that Cuba was really Japan – a massive case of mislabelling – and furthermore that there was some truth in the endless rumours he heard about some nearby islands that were fabulously rich in gold. The Indians were by now tired of their visitors, many of whom were ill-treating them, stealing their belongings and their women. They made these feelings known, but this hardly worried the Spanish who had profitable conquests in mind. Columbus sailed back to Spain in 1496.

He found that confidence in him and in his reports was waning. He had spent years and drained the royal treasury in a hunt for an increasingly elusive Asian continent. He was allowed to go back in 1498 to the small Spanish settlement he had set up in his “Indies”, but it was a badly organised and pretty chaotic one. He sailed to seek China or some similar land, and discovered a stretch of coastline along what is now Venezuela, on what was indeed a continent, but not one that had any points of similarity with the yearned-for Chinese or Indian mainland. The Spanish, however, were now looking for riches and possible colonies rather than geographical fame, but Columbus was far from gifted as an administrator. When he returned to Spain in 1499, he found that he was no longer being listened to. He sailed for a final voyage in 1502 that took him along the coast of Central America, but when he went home again, he was forced to spend his last few years struggling to recover his shredded reputation. His efforts were fruitless. When he died in May 1506, his reputation was in tatters. Not a single representative of the royal court attended his funeral. The great continent he had discovered while looking for a route to Asia was not named after him, but after a later navigator, Amerigo Vespucci. Columbus had confused both the geographers and the cartographers, and Martin Waldseemüller who had read Vespucci’s narrative enshrined that name instead of his in his great world map of 1507. Columbus would have to be satisfied with being immortalised by one South America country, Colombia, and a few cities to the north.

Explorers or discoverers seldom end their lives in a blaze of glory. Vasco Nuñez de Balboa was no luckier than Columbus. He travelled to the New World in 1500, lived for a time on the island of Hispaniola, then went on to found the settlement of Darien in present-day Panama. He heard persistent rumours that the sun, which had risen from the Atlantic Ocean in the east, sank each night into an ocean in the west, and he decided to investigate. He led a group of Spanish troops into the mountainous jungle, persuading by more or less brutal means the local chiefs or caciques to let him pass through their territories or even to join him, until they reached a mountain top from which a distant ocean could be seen. It was September 1513. Balboa made his way to the shore, stepped into the water and plunged his sword into it, claiming it on behalf of Spain. Because of the way the land was trending – he was actually in the Gulf of Panama – he named the ocean the South Sea.

There was time for a little exploration of the shore, the Spanish setting off in a small canoe led by one Alonso Marin, who thus became the first European to sail into the South Sea. Balboa and his men, however, were more interested in treasure, looting some from the local tribes, but also naming one small island Rica – “The Rich One”, now known as Isla del Rey – and a small group, the Pearl Archipelago. Eager to tell the world, and especially the King of Spain, of his discoveries and of the riches that could be found in the South Sea, Balboa started back for Darien. Rivalries, squabbles and constant civil disorders – the results of greed and jealousy – marked the next few years, until Balboa was accused of treason and sentenced to death. He was beheaded, rather messily by an incompetent axeman, in 1519. His enemies tried to downplay his discoveries and obliterate his name, but in time his reputation was restored and his contribution to the discovery of the Pacific recognised. But this took time, and literature dealt his memory a severe blow in 1817 when the English poet John Keats, overlooking Balboa altogether, wrote lines that have become immortal:

. . . like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.3

If 1519 marked the demise of Balboa, it also heralded the rise of Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese national whose name is in fact Ferdinando de Magalhães. Of noble birth, he had good contacts at the court and a solid record of military service in the East Indies and in Morocco. He felt that if Vasco da Gama had discovered a route to the east by way of southern Africa, there should be a similar route around southern America, but the King of Portugal turned a deaf ear to his proposals. Portugal’s route to the east was the African one, a shorter and quite satisfactory one, and there was no point in wasting money on an expedition across the Atlantic. So, like Columbus before him, he turned to Spain, even giving up his Portuguese nationality. King Carlos V of Spain was most sympathetic towards his plans, and provided him with five ships to test out his ideas.