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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'The Life of Christopher Columbus,' readers encounter a rich tapestry of narrative and analysis that dives deep into the expansive history of one of history's most controversial explorers. This collection melds first-person accounts with scholarly essays, spanning a wide array of styles from the descriptive to the critical. Thematic emphases include the exploration of cultural encounters, the impact of European colonialism, and the vast geopolitical changes instigated by Columbus's voyages. This anthology, standing as a multifaceted historical reflection, invites readers to scrutinize the legacy from multiple angles, shedding light on both the iconic and the infamous aspects of Columbus's life. The contributing authors, including noteworthy historians and specialists in colonial studies, provide a rounded examination of Columbus's voyages within the broader context of global exploration and European expansion. Their collective expertise enriches the anthology, offering insights into the Renaissance mindset and the Age of Discovery, and how these moments in history echo through modern narratives about identity and conquest. 'The Life of Christopher Columbus' is essential reading for those interested in the complexities of historical narratives. The anthology provides a nuanced perspective that challenges the reader to reconsider well-worn histories through a critical lens. It is an invaluable resource for scholars, students, and anyone eager to engage deeply with the many layers of Christopher Columbus's story and its enduring impact on today's world. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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The Life of Christopher Columbus
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Table of Contents
Introduction
This life of Columbus examines the uneasy meeting point between a visionary mariner’s ambition and the documentary record that both exalts and unsettles his legacy. Through the figure at its center, the book invites readers to watch ideas become itineraries, petitions turn into voyages, and aspirations encounter the resistant realities of ships, crews, and courts. The tension between imagination and administration is present on every page, as calculations about routes and risks meet the uncertainties of weather, funding, and authority. By foregrounding the drama of decision-making rather than merely the outcomes, the work illuminates how a world changed through incremental choices.
As a biographical history, The Life of Christopher Columbus is shaped and narrated by Edward Everett Hale, who assembles Columbus’s letters and journals alongside other documents from his time. The result, originating in the nineteenth century, combines archival excerpts with explanatory prose crafted for a broad audience. Its setting follows the itinerant path of maritime Europe into the Atlantic, from courts seeking advantage to coastlines newly charted by European navigators. Hale’s role is curatorial as well as interpretive, arranging materials so that a reader can trace a career while remaining aware of the sources through which that career is known.
The premise is straightforward and engaging: the book follows Columbus from formative experiences and seafaring work through the pursuit of patrons and the launch of a westward project. Readers encounter the administrative hurdles, negotiations, and practical preparations that precede any large expedition. The narrative voice is measured and instructive, designed to clarify terms, summarize context, and let documents speak when they can. The tone is steady rather than sensational, more concerned with reconstructing processes than staging surprises. As a reading experience, it alternates between close looks at particular moments and concise overviews that keep the momentum of the story.
Several themes recur with force. Hale attends to the relationship between belief and calculation in navigation, where conviction about geography had to coexist with provisional data and cautious seamanship. He considers how institutions shape innovation, as petitions, delays, and approvals become decisive actors in the story. The book also underscores the material culture of exploration—ships, instruments, victuals, and maps—and the learned traditions that informed guesses about the world. Throughout, the sea operates as a testing ground for character and method, a place where endurance, leadership, and luck intermingle with the technical arts of measuring distance, estimating position, and managing risk.
A distinctive feature is the interplay between myth and record. By presenting letters and journals alongside narrative, Hale shows both the intimacy and the limits of first-person testimony. Readers see how reputations are constructed from partial, translated, and sometimes contradictory evidence, and how editorial choices frame that evidence for posterity. The book models a nineteenth-century approach to synthesis, inviting modern audiences to ask how selection, emphasis, and language shape historical memory. In doing so, it highlights the historiographical lesson that discovery is also a story told, retold, and revised as archives yield, or withhold, details over time.
For contemporary readers, the work matters because it reveals the origins of narratives that still inform public debate about exploration, empire, and identity. It prompts scrutiny of the values embedded in older biographies and encourages attention to perspectives that earlier compilers did not center, including the communities affected by European expansion. The structure of the book, with its reliance on primary texts, equips readers to practice careful source evaluation rather than relying on inherited legend. Engaging it today supports informed conversation about commemoration, place names, and curriculum, while underscoring the responsibilities that accompany encounters across cultural and political boundaries.
Approached as both a story and a curated dossier, this biography rewards close, reflective reading. It helps readers perceive how plans are assembled from convictions, calculations, and compromises, and how official documents bear the traces of ambition and anxiety alike. Without foreclosing judgment, Hale’s method supplies the materials through which readers can form their own. That combination of narrative scaffolding and documentary texture gives the book enduring utility in classrooms and for general audiences. It remains significant not because it answers every question, but because it shows how questions are framed, evidence gathered, and lives written into history.
Synopsis
The Life of Christopher Columbus by Christopher Columbus, Edward Everett Hale presents a nineteenth‑century biographical study that lets Columbus’s own letters and journals structure the narrative. Hale selects, translates, and contextualizes documents to follow Columbus from his Genoese background through the habits of a working mariner in a world still synthesizing classical learning with new nautical practice. Without dramatization, the book frames the practical and intellectual conditions that made a westward project conceivable, emphasizing trade routes, shipcraft, and devotional motives. The opening chapters establish the method: a close reading of surviving papers to chart a life increasingly directed toward one strategic enterprise.
Early sections sketch Columbus’s formation in Mediterranean and Atlantic waters, where commerce, privateering, and coastal pilotage taught skills later applied to open‑ocean routes. Hale traces how contemporary charts, portolans, and learned speculation circulated among pilots and patrons, giving Columbus arguments for the scale of the Earth and the feasibility of sailing west to reach eastern markets. The biography emphasizes calculation, persistence, and the interplay of faith with practical seamanship. By placing each claim beside a letter or memorandum, Hale shows the plan evolving from aspiration to proposal, while acknowledging the uncertainties of measurement and the necessity of persuading rulers to risk ships, men, and money.
The narrative follows his petitions across courts, first meeting hesitation and delay, then sustained attention in Spain. Hale presents the rhythms of negotiation—examinations by counselors, promises deferred, and the gradual drafting of terms that set out privileges, titles, and obligations should the voyage succeed. Letters illuminate how Columbus balanced confidence with caution, preserving his project through years when war, finance, and rival claims repeatedly stalled action. By foregrounding paperwork and testimony, the book shows political as well as nautical labor, situating the enterprise within late fifteenth‑century administration, where exploration was an instrument of commerce, faith, and competition as much as an adventure on the sea.
When ships finally sail, Hale reconstructs preparations, crews, and provisions in careful sequence, guided by logs that record headings, soundings, and the steady work of keeping discipline. The westward crossing unfolds as a record of observations—currents, birds, floating vegetation—alongside the social fact of command, with a captain balancing hope and patience. Landfall is treated with documentary restraint: a recognition of new coasts reached by Atlantic route, initial encounters, and formal acts of possession carried out under royal authority. The account stresses navigation and reportage rather than legend, presenting the voyage as a practical demonstration of an argued probability realized by seamanship.
Columbus’s return delivers official reports, objects, and testimony to sponsors, and Hale marks the change from single expedition to planned enterprise. Subsequent voyages expand the scope from reconnaissance to settlement, and the book details how administration, provisioning, and law challenged a navigator’s original vision. The narrative juxtaposes high expectations with shortages, dissension among colonists, and the difficulty of governing distant communities. Through letters of instruction and complaint, it reveals negotiation with the crown, debates over authority, and the pressure to produce results. Exploration becomes repetitive routine and crisis management, a pivot from discovery to occupancy that strains personalities and institutions.
As the biography advances, it portrays setbacks that complicated reputation and livelihood: storms, shipwrecks, legal contention, and the scrutiny of officials charged with reviewing colonial conduct. Hale’s use of memoranda and defenses underscores how Columbus framed his case, insisting on contracted rights while adapting plans to new coastlines that did not match earlier hopes. Later journeys press farther along unfamiliar shores, continuing the search for profitable passages amid logistical hardship. Throughout, the documentary voice remains central, showing determination, calculation, and piety under pressure, and inviting readers to weigh the distance between an initial hypothesis and the evolving realities it helped to create.
In closing, The Life of Christopher Columbus frames its subject as a figure at the confluence of maritime craft, learned speculation, and royal policy, read chiefly through the papers he left and the records of his age. Hale’s approach resists myth by foregrounding logs, letters, and decrees, while acknowledging the limits and biases of such sources. The result is a study of intention meeting contingency: an argument tested at sea and transformed on shore. Beyond recounting voyages, the book’s enduring resonance lies in its documentary clarity, which encourages readers to examine exploration as a process rather than a legend, with consequences still debated.
Historical Context
The biography opens onto the late fifteenth-century Atlantic world, where Mediterranean commercial cities and Iberian monarchies converged with new maritime technologies. The Republic of Genoa, widely recognized as Christopher Columbus’s birthplace, supplied shipmasters to expanding trade networks. Castile and Aragon, newly consolidated under Ferdinand II and Isabella I, sought access to Asian luxuries by sea. Institutions of church and crown sanctioned exploration, while ports such as Palos, Seville, and Cádiz outfitted expeditions. Mariners relied on the compass, celestial navigation with the astrolabe and quadrant, portolan charts, and caravels suited to ocean sailing. Printing presses spread nautical knowledge and travel accounts through courts and countinghouses.
Portuguese initiatives had already pressed down the West African coast, establishing trading posts and charting winds and currents under royal auspices. By 1488 Bartolomeu Dias had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, promising an eastern sea route to Asia. Columbus, an experienced mariner in Atlantic circuits linking Iberia and island colonies, proposed reaching Asia by sailing west. After approaches in Portugal, he presented his case in Castile, framing the distance as navigable and the rewards as great. His plan entered a competitive field shaped by monopolies, royal patronage, and evolving cosmography, where practical seamanship and learned estimates sometimes diverged on distances and risks.
In Spain, dynastic union and the conclusion of the Granada campaign in January 1492 strengthened the crown’s capacity to sponsor ventures. At the royal camp of Santa Fe, Columbus secured the Capitulations of Santa Fe, granting him the title Admiral of the Ocean Sea and viceroyal privileges contingent on success. Financing drew on court officials and lenders, notably Luis de Santángel of the Aragonese treasury. A royal order compelled the port of Palos to furnish ships, and the Pinzón brothers brought local expertise and men. These arrangements reveal intertwined institutions—royal councils, municipal obligations, and private capital—that structured early transatlantic expeditions.
The first voyage of 1492 departed from Palos with the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María, paused at the Canaries, and crossed west using Atlantic wind patterns. Landfall occurred in the Bahamas, with further reconnaissance of islands and northern Hispaniola. A small garrison at Navidad failed, and Columbus returned to Iberia with news summarized in his 1493 printed letter, quickly circulated across Europe. Papal bulls, including Inter caetera (1493), and the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) attempted to divide spheres of navigation between Castile and Portugal. These instruments framed subsequent expeditions and helped assert legal authority over discoveries, settlement, and trade.
Follow-up voyages carried settlers, livestock, and administrators, turning reconnaissance into colonization centered on Hispaniola. The second voyage founded La Isabela and faced shortages, disease, and disputes over labor and governance. Royal oversight intensified; Francisco de Bobadilla investigated complaints, arrested Columbus in 1500, and relieved him of authority. Nicolás de Ovando followed with a larger settlement program. Columbus’s third and fourth voyages extended European knowledge of the Caribbean and Central American coasts while he petitioned the crown to uphold contracted privileges. After his death in 1506, heirs pressed claims in the pleitos colombinos, protracted litigation that preserved crucial administrative and navigational records.
Hale’s narrative draws on a documentary record increasingly accessible in print by the nineteenth century. Key sources include Columbus’s 1493 letter announcing discoveries; the abstract of his first-voyage journal preserved by Bartolomé de las Casas; royal capitulations and letters; papal bulls; and chronicles by Peter Martyr and other contemporaries. A biography traditionally attributed to his son, Ferdinand (Hernando) Columbus, and judicial papers from the pleitos colombinos supply further detail. Many texts survive in copies or early editions rather than original autographs, a condition that shapes quotation and translation. By foregrounding such materials, the work exemplifies a source-centered approach to early Atlantic history.
In the English-speaking world, Washington Irving’s 1828 Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus popularized a romantic image that later scholars amended with stricter documentation. Martín Fernández de Navarrete’s Colección de los viajes (1825–1837) and other editorial projects broadened access to Spanish archives. Late nineteenth-century bibliographers such as Henry Harrisse cataloged Columbus imprints, and the Hakluyt Society promoted careful editions of travel narratives. The 1892–1893 quadricentennial spurred commemorations, school texts, and exhibitions, including the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Hale’s book participates in this climate, presenting Columbus through translated or summarized primary texts to reach an expanding American readership.
Edward Everett Hale, a Boston-based Unitarian minister and prolific author, wrote for a broad American readership. His Life of Columbus assembles letters, journal extracts, and legal instruments to reconstruct motives, navigation, and court politics, while noting administrative turmoil in early settlements. The work necessarily relies on European clerical and royal sources, so Indigenous voices appear indirectly, through reports and chronicles. In tone and method it reflects late nineteenth-century commemoration of “discovery,” yet it also advances a shift toward source-based biography by foregrounding verifiable texts and citation over anecdote. The result is both a period document and a conduit for primary evidence.
The Life of Christopher Columbus
PREFACE
This book contains a life of Columbus, written with the hope of interesting all classes of readers.
His life has often been written, and it has sometimes been well written. The great book of our countryman, Washington Irving, is a noble model of diligent work given to a very difficult subject. And I think every person who has dealt with the life of Columbus since Irving’s time, has expressed his gratitude and respect for the author.
According to the custom of biographers, in that time and since, he includes in those volumes the whole history of the West India islands, for the period after Columbus discovered them till his death. He also thinks it his duty to include much of the history of Spain and of the Spanish court. I do not myself believe that it is wise to attempt, in a book of biography, so considerable a study of the history of the time. Whether it be wise or not, I have not attempted it in this book. I have rather attempted to follow closely the personal fortunes of Christopher Columbus, and, to the history around him, I have given only such space as seemed absolutely necessary for the illustration of those fortunes.
I have followed on the lines of his own personal narrative wherever we have it. And where this is lost I have used the absolutely contemporary authorities. I have also consulted the later writers, those of the next generation and the generation which followed it. But the more one studies the life of Columbus the more one feels sure that, after the greatness of his discovery was really known, the accounts of the time were overlaid by what modern criticism calls myths, which had grown up in the enthusiasm of those who honored him, and which form no part of real history. If then the reader fails to find some stories with which he is quite familiar in the history, he must not suppose that they are omitted by accident, but must give to the author of the book the credit of having used some discretion in the choice of his authorities.
When I visited Spain in 1882, I was favored by the officers of the Spanish government with every facility for carrying my inquiry as far as a short visit would permit. Since that time Mr. Harrisse has published his invaluable volumes on the life of Columbus. It certainly seems as if every document now existing, which bears upon the history, had been collated by him. The reader will see that I have made full use of this treasure-house.
The Congress of Americanistas, which meets every year, brings forward many curious studies on the history of the continent, but it can scarcely be said to have done much to advance our knowledge of the personal life of Columbus.
The determination of the people of the United States to celebrate fitly the great discovery which has advanced civilization and changed the face of the world, makes it certain that a new interest has arisen in the life of the great man to whom, in the providence of God, that discovery was due. The author and publishers of this book offer it as their contribution in the great celebration, with the hope that it may be of use, especially in the direction of the studies of the young.
EDWARD E. HALE.
ROXBURY, MASS., June 1st, 1891.
CHAPTER I — EARLY LIFE OF COLUMBUS
Christopher Columbus was born in the Republic of Genoa[1]. The honor of his birth-place has been claimed by many villages in that Republic, and the house in which he was born cannot be now pointed out with certainty. But the best authorities agree that the children and the grown people of the world have never been mistaken when they have said: “America was discovered in 1492 by Christopher Columbus, a native of Genoa.”
His name, and that of his family, is always written Colombo, in the Italian papers which refer to them, for more than one hundred years before his time. In Spain it was always written Colon; in France it is written as Colomb; while in England it has always kept its Latin form, Columbus. It has frequently been said that he himself assumed this form, because Columba is the Latin word for “Dove,” with a fanciful feeling that, in carrying Christian light to the West, he had taken the mission of the dove. Thus, he had first found land where men thought there was ocean, and he was the messenger of the Holy Spirit to those who sat in darkness. It has also been assumed that he took the name of Christopher, “the Christ-bearer,” for similar reasons. But there is no doubt that he was baptized “Christopher,” and that the family name had long been Columbo. The coincidences of name are but two more in a calendar in which poetry delights, and of which history is full.
Christopher Columbus was the oldest son of Dominico Colombo and Suzanna Fontanarossa. This name means Red-fountain. He bad two brothers, Bartholomew and Diego, whom we shall meet again. Diego is the Spanish way of writing the name which we call James.
It seems probable that Christopher was born in the year 1436, though some writers have said that he was older than this, and some that he was younger. The record of his birth and that of his baptism have not been found.
His father was not a rich man, but he was able to send Christopher, as a boy, to the University of Pavia, and here he studied grammar, geometry, geography and navigation, astronomy and the Latin language. But this was as a boy studies, for in his fourteenth year he left the university and entered, in hard work, on “the larger college of the world.” If the date given above, of his birth, is correct, this was in the year 1450, a few years before the Turks took Constantinople, and, in their invasion of Europe, affected the daily life of everyone, young or old, who lived in the Mediterranean countries. From this time, for fifteen years, it is hard to trace along the life of Columbus. It was the life of an intelligent young seaman, going wherever there was a voyage for him. He says himself, “I passed twenty-three years on the sea. I have seen all the Levant, all the western coasts, and the North. I have seen England; I have often made the voyage from Lisbon to the Guinea coast.” This he wrote in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella. Again he says, “I went to sea from the most tender age and have continued in a sea life to this day. Whoever gives himself up to this art wants to know the secrets of Nature here below. It is more than forty years that I have been thus engaged. Wherever any one has sailed, there I have sailed.”
Whoever goes into the detail of the history of that century will come upon the names of two relatives of his — Colon el Mozo (the Boy, or the Younger) and his uncle, Francesco Colon, both celebrated sailors. The latter of the two was a captain in the fleets of Louis XI of France, and imaginative students may represent him as meeting Quentin Durward at court. Christopher Columbus seems to have made several voyages under the command of the younger of these relatives. He commanded the Genoese galleys near Cyprus in a war which the Genoese had with the Venetians. Between the years 1461 and 1463 the Genoese were acting as allies with King John of Calabria, and Columbus had a command as captain in their navy at that time.
“In 1477,” he says, in one of his letters, “in the month of February, I sailed more than a hundred leagues beyond Tile.” By this he means Thule, or Iceland. “Of this island the southern part is seventy-three degrees from the equator, not sixty-three degrees, as some geographers pretend.” But here he was wrong. The Southern part of Iceland is in the latitude of sixty-three and a half degrees. “The English, chiefly those of Bristol, carry their merchandise, to this island, which is as large as England. When I was there the sea was not frozen, but the tides there are so strong that they rise and fall twenty-six cubits.”
The order of his life, after his visit to Iceland, is better known. He was no longer an adventurous sailor-boy, glad of any voyage which offered; he was a man thirty years of age or more. He married in the city of Lisbon and settled himself there. His wife was named Philippa. She was the daughter of an Italian gentleman named Bartolomeo Muniz de Perestrello, who was, like Columbus, a sailor, and was alive to all the new interests which geography then presented to all inquiring minds. This was in the year 1477, and the King of Portugal was pressing the expeditions which, before the end of the century, resulted in the discovery of the route to the Indies by the Cape of Good Hope.
The young couple had to live. Neither the bride nor her husband had any fortune, and Columbus occupied himself as a draftsman, illustrating books, making terrestrial globes, which must have been curiously inaccurate, since they had no Cape of Good Hope and no American Continent, drawing charts for sale, and collecting, where he could, the material for such study. Such charts and maps were beginning to assume new importance in those days of geographical discovery. The value attached to them may be judged from the statement that Vespucius paid one hundred and thirty ducats for one map. This sum would be more than five hundred dollars of our time.
Columbus did not give up his maritime enterprises. He made voyages to the coast of Guinea and in other directions.
It is said that he was in command of one of the vessels of his relative Colon el Mozo, when, in the Portuguese seas, this admiral, with his squadron, engaged four Venetian galleys returning from Flanders. A bloody battle followed. The ship which Christopher Columbus commanded was engaged with a Venetian vessel, to which it set fire. There was danger of an explosion, and Columbus himself, seeing this danger, flung himself into the sea, seized a floating oar, and thus gained the shore. He was not far from Lisbon, and from this time made Lisbon his home for many years.1
It seems clear that, from the time when he arrived in Lisbon, for more than twenty years, he was at work trying to interest people in his “great design,” of western discovery. He says himself, “I was constantly corresponding with learned men, some ecclesiastics and some laymen, some Latin and some Greek, some Jews and some Moors.” The astronomer Toscanelli[2] was one of these correspondents.
We must not suppose that the idea of the roundness of the earth was invented by Columbus. Although there were other theories about its shape, many intelligent men well understood that the earth was a globe, and that the Indies, though they were always reached from Europe by going to the East, must be on the west of Europe also. There is a very funny story in the travels of Mandeville, in which a traveler is represented as having gone, mostly on foot, through all the countries of Asia, but finally determines to return to Norway, his home. In his farthest eastern investigation, he hears some people calling their cattle by a peculiar cry, which he had never heard before. After he returned home, it was necessary for him to take a day’s journey westward to look after some cattle he had lost. Finding these cattle, he also heard the same cry of people calling cattle, which he had heard in the extreme East, and now learned, for the first time, that he had gone round the world on foot, to turn and come back by the same route, when he was only a day’s journey from home, Columbus was acquainted with such stories as this, and also had the astronomical knowledge which almost made him know that the world was round, “and, like a ball, goes spinning in the air.” The difficulty was to persuade other people that, because of this roundness, it would be possible to attain Asia by sailing to the West.
Now all the geographers of repute supposed that there was not nearly so large a distance as there proved to be, in truth, between Europe and Asia. Thus, in the geography of Ptolemy, which was the standard book at that time, one hundred and thirty-five degrees, a little more than one-third of the earth’s circumference, is given to the space between the extreme eastern part of the Indies and the Canary Islands. In fact, as we now know, the distance is one hundred and eighty degrees, half the world’s circumference. Had Columbus believed there was any such immense distance, he would never have undertaken his voyage.
Almost all the detailed knowledge of the Indies which the people of his time had, was given by the explorations of Marco Polo, a Venetian traveler of the thirteenth century, whose book had long been in the possession of European readers. It is a very entertaining book now, and may well be recommended to young people who like stories of adventure. Marco Polo had visited the court of the Great Khan of Tartary at Pekin, the prince who brought the Chinese Empire into very much the condition in which it now is. He had, also, given accounts of Japan or Cipango, which he had himself never visited. Columbus knew, therefore, that, well east of the Indies, was the island of Cipango, and he aimed at that island, because he supposed that that was the nearest point to Europe, as in fact it is. And when finally he arrived at Cuba, as the reader will see, he thought he was in Japan.
Columbus’s father-in-law had himself been the Portuguese governor of the island of Porto Santo, where he had founded a colony. He, therefore, was interested in western explorations, and probably from him Columbus collected some of the statements which are known to have influenced him, with regard to floating matters from the West, which are constantly borne upon that island by the great currents of the sea.
The historians are fond of bringing together all the intimations which are given in the Greek and Latin classics, and in later authors, with regard to a land beyond Asia. Perhaps the most famous of them is that of Seneca, “In the later years there shall come days in which Ocean shall loose his chains, and a great land shall appear . . . and Thule shall not be the last of the worlds.”
In a letter which Toscanelli wrote to Columbus in 1474, he inclosed a copy of a letter which he had already sent to an officer of Alphonso V, the King of Portugal. In writing to Columbus, he says, “I see that you have a great and noble desire to go into that country (of the East) where the spices come from, and in reply to your letter I send you a copy of that which I addressed some years ago to my attached friend in the service of the most serene King of Portugal. He had an order from his Highness to write me on this subject. . . . If I had a globe in my hand, I could show you what is needed. But I prefer to mark out the route on a chart like a marine chart, which will be an assistance to your intelligence and enterprise. On this chart I have myself drawn the whole extremity of our western shore from Ireland as far down as the coast of Guinea toward the South, with all the islands which are to be found on this route. Opposite this [that is, the shores of Ireland and Africa] I have placed directly at the West the beginning of the Indies with the islands and places where you will land. You will see for yourself how many miles you must keep from the arctic pole toward the equator, and at what distance you will arrive at these regions so fertile and productive of spices and precious stones.” In Toscanelli’s letter, he not only indicates Japan, but, in the middle of the ocean, he places the island of Antilia. This old name afterwards gave the name by which the French still call the West Indies, Les Antilles. Toscanelli gives the exact distance which Columbus will have to sail: “From Lisbon to the famous city of Quisay [Hang-tcheou-fou, then the capital of China] if you take the direct route toward the West, the distance will be thirty-nine hundred miles. And from Antilia to Japan it will be two hundred and twenty-five leagues.” Toscanelli says again, “You see that the voyage that you wish to attempt is much legs difficult than would be thought. You would be sure of this if you met as many people as I do who have been in the country of spices.”
While there were so many suggestions made that it would be possible to cross the Atlantic, there was one man who determined to do this. This man was Christopher Columbus[1q]. But he knew well that he could not do it alone. He must have money enough for an expedition, he must have authority to enlist crews for that expedition, and he must have power to govern those crews when they should arrive in the Indies. In our times such adventures have been conducted by mercantile corporations, but in those times no one thought of doing any such thing without the direct assistance and support of some monarch.
It is easy now to see and to say that Columbus himself was singularly well fitted to take the charge of the expedition of discovery. He was an excellent sailor and at the same time he was a learned geographer and a good mathematician. He was living in Portugal, the kings of which country had, for many years, fostered the exploration of the coast of Africa, and were pushing expeditions farther and farther South.
In doing this, they were, in a fashion, making new discoveries. For Europe was wholly ignorant of the western coast of Africa, beyond the Canaries, when their expeditions began. But all men of learning knew that, five hundred years before the Christian era, Hanno, a Carthaginian, had sailed round Africa under the direction of the senate of Carthage. The efforts of the King of Portugal were to repeat the voyage made by Hanno. In 1441, Gonzales and Tristam sailed as far as Sierra Leone. They brought back some blacks as slaves, and this was the beginning of the slave trade.
In 1446 the Portuguese took possession of the Azores, the most western points of the Old World. Step by step they advanced southward, and became familiar with the African coast. Bold navigators were eager to find the East, and at last success came. Under the king’s orders, in August, 1477, three caravels sailed from the Tagus, under Bartolomeo Diaz, for southern discovery. Diaz was himself brave enough to be willing to go on to the Red Sea, after he made the great discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, but his crews mutinied, after he had gone much farther than his predecessors, and compelled him to return. He passed the southern cape of Africa and went forty miles farther. He called it the Cape of Torments, “Cabo Tormentoso,” so terrible were the storms he met there. But when King John heard his report he gave it that name of good omen which it has borne ever since, the name of the “Cape of Good Hope.”
In the midst of such endeavors to reach the East Indies by the long voyage down the coast of Africa and across an unknown ocean, Columbus was urging all people who cared, to try the route directly west. If the world was round, as the sun and moon were, and as so many men of learning believed, India or the Indies must be to the west of Portugal. The value of direct trade with the Indies would be enormous. Europe had already acquired a taste for the spices of India and had confidence in the drugs of India. The silks and other articles of clothing made in India, and the carpets of India, were well known and prized. Marco Polo and others had given an impression that there was much gold in India; and the pearls and precious stones of India excited the imagination of all who read his travels.
The immense value of such a commerce may be estimated from one fact. When, a generation after this time, one ship only of all the squadron of Magellan returned to Cadiz, after the first voyage round the world, she was loaded with spices from the Moluccas. These spices were sold by the Spanish government for so large a sum of money that the king was remunerated for the whole cost of the expedition, and even made a very large profit from a transaction which had cost a great deal in its outfit.
Columbus was able, therefore, to offer mercantile adventurers the promise of great profit in case of success; and at this time kings were willing to take their share of such profits as might accrue.
The letter of Toscanelli, the Italian geographer, which has been spoken of, was addressed to Alphonso V, the King of Portugal. To him and his successor, John the Second, Columbus explained the probability of success, and each of them, as it would seem, had confidence in it. But King John made the great mistake of intrusting Columbus’s plan to another person for experiment. He was selfish enough, and mean enough, to fit out a ship privately and intrust its command to another seaman, bidding him sail west in search of the Indies, while he pretended that he was on a voyage to the Cape de Verde Islands. He was, in fact, to follow the route indicated by Columbus. The vessel sailed. But, fortunately for the fame of Columbus, she met a terrible storm, and her officers, in terror, turned from the unknown ocean and returned to Lisbon. Columbus himself tells this story. It was in disgust with the bad faith the king showed in this transaction that he left Lisbon to offer his great project to the King and Queen of Spain.
In a similar way, a generation afterward, Magellan, who was in the service of the King of Portugal, was disgusted by insults which he received at his court, and exiled himself to Spain. He offered to the Spanish king his plan for sailing round the world and it was accepted. He sailed in a Spanish fleet, and to his discoveries Spain owes the possession of the Philippine Islands. Twice, therefore, did kings of Portugal lose for themselves, their children and their kingdom, the fame and the recompense which belong to such great discoveries.
