THE CAPE HORN ROAD Columbus got on with the mission of the voyage: to find a passage through the Americas to the Indies. Thinking still of Cuba as a promontory of China, he steered west and south , fetching up on the north coast of Honduras . To avoid missing any through passage, he spent a month short-tacking to windward along the coast, making good no better than six miles a day . Tempests smote them at sea- more than once Columbus, a veteran seaman, believed his flotill a was about to be wiped out-and di sease and hordes of flies afflicted them ashore. Hitherto friendly Indians, noting the Spaniards' distinctly un-godlike distress and grasping for food, gathered to massacre the troubled expedition. Eventually, reaching the point where the neck of Central America joins the main body of South America, Columbus had to acknowledge failure. He turned north with his three surviving leaky , worm-ridden ships. Well short of Haiti and the main Spanish port at Santo Domingo, he was forced to abandon one of hi s ships, and he ran hi s two remaining ships, Capitano and Bermuda, ashore in sinking condition on the north coast of Jamaica. There, in utter misery and degradation, the crews awaited rescue for over a year. Emissaries sent out in two native canoes reached Santo Domingo, but they moved the governor only to send out a vessel after some months to see if any of this troublesome party were still alive . Ultimately the emissaries succeeded in chartering a vessel to pick up the most famous explorer of the modern age, and bring him home. Queen Isabella died in 1504 shortly after Columbus regained Spain. Broken in health but still fiery of spirit, Columbus died two years later, having consigned his unmet claims for money to finance further voyages. His overambitious financial claims were never met, but legend en-s in having him end up impoverished; he died a wea lthy man and left considerable fortunes to his two sons, with generous bequests to the church and to his native Genoa, " that noble and powerful city by the sea." Columbus died virtually forgotten by the world. People had other things on their minds , notably the fast-breaking scene in the Americas . Knowing the Americas were indeed on Europe's mind, the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci, who worked for the famous Medici family as a ship chandler in Seville, signed on three voyages to the New World . These he wrote up in a selfcentered style, gaining such a name for himself that a German mapmaker printed hi s name on the Americas, where it has stuck ever since. As Mori son reminds us, however, Columbus had given him a good reference-as an honest ship chandler. The traffic to the Americas kept growing as more islands were settled by the Spanish. In 1506, two ships a month sailed for the Caribbean. By the 1530s, this figure had doubl ed, and in 1549, IOI ships, or two a week, sailed from Spain for the islands and the growing settlements in mainland South and Central America. Thi s heavy traffic across an ocean was unprecedented in the history of the world. By mid-century the French and English had begun to nibble at the frin ges of the Spanish sea hegemony and its attendant monopoly on trade. With the initial findings of go ld in central America, and later the tremendous output of silver from South American mines, the sea route to the Americas became a major factor in European politics as the new Hapsburg monarch of Spain used hi s funds to buy votes to become Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. This gave him over lordship over a loose grouping of central European states. More to the point, he was able to set up and maintain a large standing army , which made Spain the dominant power in Europe.
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The Spanish conquests in the Americas swept aside the oppress ive Aztec Empire in Mexico and the Inca Empire on South America's West Coast. Both fea ts of arms owed much to the determined and ruthl ess leadership of Cortes in Mexico and Pi zarro in Peru, but still more perhaps to the eager flocking of subject peoples to join the conquerors from overseas in overthrowing the native imperial power. This phenomenon , one might note, echoes what we have come at length to understand of other incursions by small bands aided by local revolt, notabl y the Dori ans in ancient Greece and the Israelites in Canaan.
Hunting for a Way Through the Americas The lure of the Indies continued to burn bright, as shown in Columbus 's search for a passage on hi s last voyage. And on 25 September 1513 , seven years after the death of Columbus , a Spanish adventurer, Yasco Nunez de Balboa, leading an expedition out of Darien, in the Isthmus of Panama, with Indian guides, saw the Pacific Ocean sparkling before him to the southward . Four days later he claimed "the Great South Sea," as he called it, for the King of Spain, and ventured out into the ocean in a native canoe. A few years later Balboa was brutally executed in one of the power struggles that broke out among the conquistadorsbut his grandiloquent claim of the world 's largest ocean for his faraway king came cl ose to achievement in com ing decades. And the name "South Sea" was to stick to thi s westwardlying ocean. Hundreds of years later, the schooners in the island trade from America's West Coast to Hawaii, Tahiti, Fiji and beyond were to be known as Southseamen. The hunt for a passage through the Americas was pursued with vigor. In 1506, the year of Co lumbus's death, an expedition was sent by Ferdinand of Spain for thi s purpose, which merely covered again the ground Columbus had been over with such painstaking care in his last voyage. Other voyagers kept press ing southward along the South American coast, and in 1511- 12 a couple of traders in brazil wood or logwood-a timber in great demand in Europe for dying woolens-got as far south as the majestic estuary of the River Plate, which at first was thought to be a passage through to the Pacific. A few years later in 1515 , the Piloto Major or Chief Pilot of Spain, Juan de Solis, charted the whole area . The river was at first named for Solis, but was later named Rio de la Plata thanks to the immense quantities of silver (pl ata) that came down it from the mines of Peru. But by that time a navigator had taken a fleet through the one strait that did exist, far to the southward, just short of Cape Hom at the very tip of South America.
Magellan Leads the Way to the Pacific Sooner or later it had to happen. With the Iberian kingdoms of Portugal and Spain surging out into the ocean world they had opened to navigation , one of their adventurous captains was bound to get far enough south along the South American coast to come on what we now know as the Strait of Magellan. The person who did thi s, however, Ferdinand Magellan, not only found the passage but sailed right on through it, leading a fleet out into the Pacific-a fleet of which one survi ving ship went on to sail ri ght around the world. Magellan, who Jived from about 1480 to 1521-when he was killed leading an attack on a native settlement in the Philippines-stands out in the flow of hi story like a rocky promontory beset by breaking seas. His whole life, up to hi s last moments on earth , echoes with the clash of egos and the din of constant conflict, through which his steadfast purposes and robust, pugnacious sense of attack SEA HISTORY 79, AUTUMN 1996