THE CAPE HORN ROAD: COLUMBUS OPENS THE AMERICAS TO THE WORLD these maps show the islands he discovered where he placed them- and where they are today-along with the shoulder of South America. On 25 March 1524, Giovanni da Verrazzano, a sagacious navigator sailing the North American coast a generation after Columbus came on the Americas, looked across the Outer Banks-the long sandy isthmus which, with occasional gaps, connects Cape Hatteras to mainland North Carolina-and seeing the expansive reaches of Pamlico Sound glittering in the early spring sunshine, declared that this was the Pacific Ocean. He was quite unaware of the 3,000-odd miles of the land mass of the North American continent which stood between him and the Pacific at this point! And this, bear in mind, is the same continent Columbus is fashionably mocked for not having found and recognized in his trips far to the south. Magellan had crossed the Pacific by the time ofVerrazzano' s voyage, as Verrazzano knew; and one of Magellan 's ships had gone on right around the world. But still there was no clear picture of the Americas. The truth is that these early explorers took a long time to connect up the dots in the world they were opening to human comprehension and traffics. Viewed in the context of the age he sailed in and the developing picture of the world which was unfolding before people's eyes, Columbus stands clearly revealed as the most fully informed explorer of the ocean world of his time. How did he achieve this, and for what purpose--0r as people say today, where was he coming from? Born in Genoa in 1451, Columbus was part of that remarkable city's seaborne renaissance. His father Domenic worked as a weaver, and was connected with the wool trade with Flanders, in which the enterprising Genoese republic had been active for over 150 years by the time Columbus came along. Genoese traders and warriors had also sailed their ships in the Black Sea, the inland Caspian, and the Red Sea, for long an exclusively Moslem domain; and they had led in the Portuguese expeditions which opened the Canaries and the Madeira group off Africa to settlement and trade, as well as the Azores, over 500 miles to the seaward west of Portugal-as we've seen in previous chapters of our story. Columbus in his personal career practically tracked the expansion of Genoese seafaring, sailing first to Chios off Turkey, then to the Mahgreb in North Africa, and then out of the Mediterranean into the broad Atlantic. On one Atlantic trip, his ship, bound to Flanders on Europe's north coast, was sunk in a sea battle off Lagos in southern Portugal. Our story might well have ended right there, since Columbus was left swimming in the sea wounded, without a boat. He grabbed an oar, probably a big rowing sweep used aboard his ship, rather than a small boat oar. Using this to support himself, he swam ashore and made his way to Lisbon, a center of Atlantic trade. Sailing from that port, he went on to Bristol in western England, another great center of Atlantic seafaring. Possibly he went further on, to Ireland and Iceland. But I believe he picked up his stories of those places, outside the normal orbit of southern seafarers, on the waterfront in Bristol, a principal port of call for ships from those islands; that would explain where he got the extreme tides he reported from Iceland, which are a dominant feature of Bristol, not Iceland. This bit of his story comes to us from his admiring son Fernando, who may have elided facts gleaned from his father's notes by omitting the role of intermediate reporters. Bristol, in any event, was a splendid spot to gather informa10
tion about the Atlantic world. In this time the city was a hive of maritime activity, sending out swarms of ships carrying quantities of wool from sheep grown on the lush Cotswold hills in its hinterland, and importing wine from France, Spain and Portugal-that's why you can order Spanish sherry as "Bristol Cream" at your neighborhood pub today. Bristol also reached out northward to bring in dried codfish from Iceland, a product not much valued today, but then an invaluable staple of the European diet and an important form of wealth in the form of stored energy which people would always pay for. In Bristol, thus, one could learn a lot in waterfront taverns and in visiting friendly ship captains, perhaps with a bottle or two of Bristol Cream underone 's arm. People seeking to build up the Viking role and put down Columbus's achievement have suggested that here or in Iceland, if he got there, Columbus learned about America. I believe Columbus probably did learn of the northern Viking voyages; after all, the Pope in Rome had maintained a bishopric in Greenland through the 1400s, so the lay of the northern lands had to be known in the Mediterranean world. And Columbus, foolish in some things, was not the kind of fool to neglect any opportunity to learn more about the ocean world he sought to master. But the Viking achievement did nothing to get one to the Indies, which was Columbus's purpose and, indeed, the overriding purpose of all those who sought to get around Africa or cross the Western Ocean (the Atlantic) to get to the Far East. Columbus 's seafaring took him south as well, to the sea lanes where the Portuguese, with their Genoese admirals and sea venturers, as we've seen in earlier chapters of this tale, had been pushing south along the coast of Africa, and more important, planting colonies on the island groups that they came on in their extensive voyaging through what had been known to their Muslim predecessors as the "Dark Ocean," the still-uncrossed middle regions of the Atlantic. These colonies included settlements in the Azores, 800 miles to sea off Portugal, the Madeira group, 500 miles off the Strait of Gibraltar, and farther south, close to West Africa, the Canaries, where the Trade Wind belt begins. Portugal, locked in struggle with Spain, had given up the Canaries, however, as the price of a peace that preserved Portuguese independence, kept the other islands, and confirmed Portuguese monopoly of the African trade, from which Spanish ships were barred.
Lighting the Sea Lanes of the Dark Ocean Henry the Navigator, organizer of these seaward colonies, had given the fiefdom of Porto Santo, a small island in the Madeira group, to his loyal captain Bartolomeu Perestrello. The captain's daughter Dona Felipa de Perestrello e Moniz, according to an agreeable legend, caught young Columbus's eye in the church they both attended in Lisbon, capital city of Portugal's budding sea empire, where the Perestrellos presumably repaired from time to time to catch up on life at court and in the great world. And at age 28, Columbus, a shipmaster by this time, married this daughter of the minor nobility-a good step up for him, and a step deeper into the rich and burgeoning heritage of Portuguese seafaring. Columbus's father-in-law had died before Columbus joined the Perestrello family scene, but family legend has it that the captain's widow passed on to the young shipmaster her husband 's charts and writings, including rumors of lands to the westward. Nothing could very well come by sea from the westward, against prevailing winds and ocean currents, but it is possible that one of the ships on the long "Guinea tack," SEA HISTORY 78, SUMMER 1996