THE CAPE HORN ROAD, PART
VII
Portugal Opens the Ocean Doorway to a Wider World by Peter Stanford
T
he evening light, filtering through sullen cloud banks to the west, reached across the sea. It touched the whitewashed faces of the buildings ashore with a faint blush. Watching the play of light across the dark intervening water from the decks of the cutter Iolaire, one had a strong feeling of the many ships which had come this way and of the varied scenes the houses of the fishing village of Lagos had looked out on. Once the ships of Prince Henry the Navigator had sailed from here! And before his time, unnamed others, brave seamen all. The moment passed, and standing in along the coast, close-hauled against the vagrant light airs in the lee of the tall hills to the north, the Iolaire took a tack to the southward, to clear Cape Saint Vincent before standing out into the night ocean before us. Passing the cape a little before midnight in continuing light airs, we heard the deep-throated roar of the ocean swell crashing against the rocky headland as though it were alive with the sea monsters the ancients so persistently filled it with in their picture of the world. As the expected north wind came up at daybreak, the Iolaire picked up her pace and went on to complete her passage home to Portsmouth, on England's south coast, in fourteen days. We met no sea monsters but a series of gales, leading the Spanish deckhand Jose Cerda to comment "Mucho viento!" (lots of wind!) in urging us to take in sail. One took a more understanding attitude about this after learning that he had been in a trading schooner that capsized in a Caribbean squall. Jose was an able sailorman and sewed beautiful patches in the aged cutter' s weathered canvas sails, but he took some time to appreciate the power of the deep ballast keel that kept the vessel on her feet in dusty going. The indomitable Iolaire still sails deepwater today, nearing her hundredth birthday.
"The Monster-filled Ocean" Sailors had been rounding this outermost comer of Europe for three thousand years or so when lolaire came by this way in the spring of 195 l. The first such intrepid souls we know of were the Phoenicians, pressing forward from their settlement at Cadiz, around the comer from the Straits of Gibraltar, entrance to the Mediterranean world they came from. They would have come this way to track down, in southwest England, the source of the tin they needed. But as we've seen in a previous installment, even when they'd found the source, these Mediterranean seamen apparently relied on an Atlantic breed of ships and men to bring the tin into Cadiz, which remained their main Atlantic base. Cape St. Vincent kept its role as a gatepost to the stormlashed North Atlantic, as though planted at Europe's most seaward comer to warn navigators they were entering upon a new oceanic realm, one wider and harsher than the landlocked Mediterranean world. Long after the Phoenicians came by this way, the Romans , who controlled the Atlantic shores of both Europe and North Africa, still thought of the cape as the end of the world. Writing in 350 AD , the geographer Avienus wrote of St. Vincent as "Europe's last outpost, losing itself in the salty waters of the monster-filled ocean." As Europe regained lost energies and organization in the High Middle Ages , the awakening Germanic kingdoms of the north came by St. Vincent the other way, to crash into the Mediterranean in the Crusades. This extraordinary series of military campaigns, beginning just before 1100, gathered up men and, on one lamentable occasion, boys, to fight the Muslim power in the Middle East and win Jerusalem and the 14
Holy Land for Christianity. The promise of conquest and the refinements of life in the Muslim Middle East added their own appeal to the call of the Christian cause, and men were spurred on by the knightly wish to prove themselves in battle and come home rich and famous. The popes in Rome, leading the Western Christian Church, were the prime organizers of the Crusades. The Italian maritime republics, led by Genoa, eagerly got into the act by transporting the crusader armies that came by land from Italy to the eastern end of the Mediterranean. There Christian nobles succeeded in setting up small Crusader kingdoms, though they soon lost Jerusalem, which they had seized in the first rush. Venice diverted the Fourth Crusade in 1204 to wrest control of Constantinople from the Eastern Orthodox Christian state of Byzantium, establishing a puppet Western regime which didn ' t last long-but the venture, which gained Venice exclusive trading rights in Europe's richest city, did weaken Byzantium as a bulwark against the Muslim East, leading to the eventual fall of Constantinople and also much of southeastern Europe. Later the Muslim Turks were driven back, as Greece regained its independence, in the 1800s, along with the rest of the Balkan States. But the religious divisions which resulted have brought terrible violence to the region in our own time. As the Crusaders came south by sea, the Italian republics began to sail their ships out of the Mediterranean and up the coast to the English Channel. Ultimately, they developed for these long voyages a new breed of ship called "great galleys," more sailing ship than rowing galley and far better suited to encounter the surge of the Atlantic swell. Ships of the Italian maritime republic of Genoa are reported in the English Channel in the later 1200s, and soon after they began periodic sailings to the wool market in southern England and the far bigger markets across the way in Bruges and Antwerp in the Low Countries. There they met the iron grip of the German Hanse merchants, who barred southern venturers from the North Sea and Baltic, so that trade with these regions began and ended in the Hanse-dominated entrepots. The southerners, for all their fine wares and sophisticated ways, got no farther into Northern Europe. This did not hold back the enterprising Genoese. Naval operations in the Black Sea were mounted in support of the Khan of Persia. This effort was followed by an abortive attempt to set up a naval squadron in the Red Sea to blockade Egyptian seaborne trade with the Far East and force that highvalue commerce into the Persian Gulf. And Marco Polo, citizen of Genoa's great rival Venice, came upon Genoese ships in the 1270s traversing the landlocked Caspian Sea in Central Asia, providing an inland maritime link on the age-old caravan route to China. And as early as 129 l they actually sent the brothers Vivaldi out into the Atlantic to find the sea route to India. The Vivaldis never returned from this voyage, and a long-lived tradition maintained that they settled in Africa. Indeed, by the early 1300s, one of the Canary Islands, 100-odd miles off the bulge of West Africa, had acquired the name Allegranza, after one of the ships in the Vivaldi voyage. Genoese merchants went on to set up trading posts south along the African shore as their Phoenician predecessors had done more than two thousand years before them. Genoese maritime activity, carried out at first in oared vessels closely dependent on the shore (as the Phoenician SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996