Setting the Stage for Columbus
Portuguese mariners sail
down the coast of West Africa and find a way to return against foul winds.
In 1484 Columbus presented to King John II of Portugal his astonishing proposal
to reach the Indies by sailing westward. The idea had not come to him out of
the blue. Behind it lay several sources of
inspiration, not least the voyages of exploration that all during his lifetime
the Portuguese had been sending out to probe ever further down the west coast
of Africa.
Phoenician mariners were the first to venture into the waters along that
coast. Perhaps as early as the thirteenth century B.C. they mastered the
western Mediterranean, and then thrust through the Strait of Gibraltar, heading
both north and south. Tradition had it that, as early as the eleventh
century B.C., they founded the town of Lixus (modern Larache) on the Moroccan
coast about 60 miles down from the strait. They certainly founded it
before the seventh century B.C. because excavation of the site has uncovered
remains dating back that far; later levels show that the town was continuously
occupied right into the Roman period. Even more striking are the finds
from the islet of Mogador some 250 miles further down the coast. They
include sherds of pottery from Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Ionia that, like the
remains at Lixus, date to the seventh-sixth century B.C.
No walls of houses were uncovered, just floors of stone and pounded clay; it
looks as if the settlement was a seasonal stop for ships plying the coastal
waters. After half a century or so of such existence,
the place was abandoned. The next level of remains, rich and
varied, reveal that around the time of Augustus, the end of the first century
B.C. and the beginning of the first century A.D., a new town was established
there which flourished--it boasted even a seven-room Roman villa embellished
with mosaics--up to Byzantine times.
Was the settlement of Mogador the furthest point along the coast that the
ancients reached? Not according to a number of tales that have
survived. There is the story of Sataspes, for example, that Herodotus
tells. Sataspes, cousin of Xerxes, the celebrated king of Persia who
invaded Greece in 480 B.C., created a scandal at court. The punishment for
this was impaling, but the king let Sataspes' mother talk him into sending the
culprit off to circumnavigate Africa, no doubt assuming that the sea would
furnish as sure a death as the stake. Sataspes set sail from Egypt,
passed through the Strait of Gibraltar, "headed south, and after crossing
the open sea for many months, since there was always more to cross, turned
around and went back . He reported to Xerxes that, at
the furthest point reached, he sailed past little men who used palm leaves for
clothing." It sounds as if he got as far as tropical Africa, some
coastal area where bushmen or similar peoples were
living. Xerxes heard him out and then, more concerned with family
propriety than exotic exploration, since Sataspes hadn't completed his mission,
went ahead with his execution.
Another story offers more detail. The opening sentence reads:
"Report of the voyage of Hanno, King of the Carthaginians, along the part
of Libya [Africa] beyond the Pillars of Heracles [Strait of Gibraltar], which
he set up as a memorial in the temple of Kronos." He must have had
it inscribed on a bronze or stone plaque. The version we have is not in
Punic, Hanno's native language, but Greek; presumably it is a translation made
by some visitor to the temple. Hanno is generally dated around 500 B.C.,
so his expedition took place shortly before Sataspes' venture.
Commanding a fleet of sixty 50-oared galleys and no doubt other craft, Hanno
coasted along Morocco's Atlantic shore dropping off batches of colonists to
establish settlements. At some point, probably near the mouth of the Draa
River, he picked up a number of locals as interpreters and with these pressed
further.
After sailing for
more than ten days he came to a "deep and wide river which was infested
with crocodiles and hippopotami." The only possible candidate is the
Senegal River. Further on he took two days to pass an area marked by high
wooded mountains; this could well have been Cape Verde. After a week more
of sailing he arrived at a great gulf, which according to the interpreters was
called the Western Horn:
In it lay a large island, and in the island
a marine lake containing another island.
Landing on this, by day we could see only
forest, but by night
many fires being kindled, and we heard the noise of pipes and cymbals and
a din of tom-toms and the shouts of a multitude. Fear gripped us,
and our soothsayers ordered us to leave the island. We left in a hurry
and coasted along a country with a fragrant smoke of blazing timber, from which
streams of fire plunged into the sea. The land was unapproachable because
of the heat. So we sailed away in fear, and coasting along for four days
saw the land ablaze by night. In the center a leaping flame towered above
the others and appeared to reach the stars. By day it was revealed to be
a mountain of tremendous height; it was called the Chariot of the Gods. Sailing
by the rivers of fire for three further days, we reached a gulf named the
Souther Horn. In a recess lay an island
like the previous one: it had a lake and within this was another
island. This was full of savages, of whom by far the greater number were women with hairy bodies. Our interpreters
called them "gorillas." We gave chase tot he men but could not
catch any, for they scampered up the cliffs and held us off by throwing
stones. We did catch three of the women, who bit and scratched and
resisted as we led them off. However, we killed and flayed them and
brought the hides to Carthage. We sailed no further, owing to lack of
provisions.
Most commentators
are convinced that Hanno succeeded in making his way a considerable distance
down the coast. They point to phenomena he records that today are
commonplace in nineteenth-century explorers' accounts of journeys to
Africa: the jungle, the beating of tom-toms, the enormous grass fires
that natives kindle to burn off stubble and help the following year's crop, the
ubiquitous monkeys. What his interpreters called "gorillas"
must be some kind of large ape, but hardly what we know by that name; his men
were tough but not up to going after gorillas barehanded, even females.
Chimpanzees or baboons have been suggested. (It was an
American missionary, Thomas Savage, who in 1847 applied Hanno's term to the
mighty apes that now bear it.)
Exactly how far did he get? Conservative commentators think that he
stopped short of the calms and heat of the Gulf of Guinea and pushed no further
than Sierra Leone, that the Western Horn is Bissagos Bay, that the Chariot of
the Gods is Mount Kakulima in French Guinea that, although relatively low (ca.
3,000 feet), stands out in the midst of low-lying ground, and that the Southern
Horn is Sherboro Sound. Others, more bold, take
him as far as the Cameroons, arguing that the Chariot of the Gods is better
identified with Mount Cameroon, the tallest peak in West Africa (13,370 feet)
and a volcano to boot.
Finally, there are the skeptics who feel that Hanno actually got only a short
way down the coast and that the part of the voyage during which his dramatic
experiences took place - the river full of crocodiles, the Western Horn with a
fiery zone that extended all the way to the Southern Horn, the flame that
seemed to reach the stars - was added by armchair geographers writing centuries
later who attributed to Hanno their own fantasies about the shape and nature of
Africa incognita.
One reason for skepticism is the problem Hanno - or any sailor who ventured
down the west coast of Africa - would have had in getting back. Wind and
current are both favorable for the outbound voyage--which means they are foul
for the return: Hanno would have been able to raise sail and speed along
on his way out but, heading home, he would have had to douse sail, run out the
oars, and keep his rowers straining at them for days on end in scorching
heat. They would have had a particularly difficult ime pulling against
the strong current that runs down the channel between the Canaries and the
continent.
But if not they, at least some ancient mariners got as far as the
Canaries. Juba, the learned monarch of Morocco from ca. 25 B.C. to 25
A.D., in connection with his geographical studies investigated reports that a
group of islands called "the Fortunate Isles" lay off the coast of
his kingdom. He was supplied with enough information to draw up a
description that fits the Canaries perfectly. And recent discoveries have
further proof positive: off the coast of Lanzarote, northernmost of the
Canaries, divers have found at least two amphoras - big shipping jars - that
date to the third century A.D. Did they come from a vessel that had been
accidentally blown there? Or from one that regularly called there?
In any event, for the next thousand years the islands were lost to geographical
knowledge; a Genoese
expedition under
Lancilotto Malocello rediscovered them in 1270.
Now, if the ancients knew the Canaries, could they have gotten back home the
way the Portuguese in later times did, by making two long tacks, the first from
the Canaries to the Azores, the second from the Azores to home? Only if
they knew the Azores, and that is still an open
question despite some provocative recent research.
In 1749, a Swedish savant claimed to have discovered a hoard of Carthaginian
coins in the ruins of an abandoned building on the island of Corvo in the
Azores. He published a description of them along with good
illustrations--and then the coins somehow disappeared. Ever since,
controversy has raged: can the story be believed? Were the coins
left by some ancient inhabitant of Corvo? There was another tantalizing
clue: in a book published in 1567, a Portuguese historian told of a stone
statue of a horseman that the Portuguese had found on the island. The
Carthaginians often represented gods as horsemen; could the statue - inevitably
now lost - have been set up by Carthaginians living on Corvo?
All this was so intriguing that, in June 1983, B. Isserlin of the University of
Leeds mounted an archaeological expedition to see whether amy
ancient remains could be found on Corvo. The first three sites he tried
produced nothing. He moved to a fourth, and here his hopes rose: it
yielded a batch of pottery fragments, of which some, judging by their looks,
could well have been ancient. But, after subjecting them to all sorts of
tests, he was left hanging. In every case there was a margin of
uncertainty: they could have been Carthaginian, but they could also
be of much later
times. Until the archaeologists have better luck, we must continue to
assume that the Azores unknown up to 1418, when one of Henry the Navigator's
ships, blown off course, landed there.
Henry, Prince of Portugal, was dedicated to discovering a way for his county's
traders to get to the Indies by sailing
around Africa.
From about 1430 on he tirelessly promoted voyages down the west coast, pressing
his captains to go past the Canaries, furthest point that had been reached by
that time. To do so, Henry had to overcome two obstacles. The first
was their conviction that, once they neared the Equator, they would run into
boiling water, a marine hazard they wanted no part of. The other was the
same that must have confronted the ancients: how were they to return home
in the face of northern winds and adverse currents? The problem was even
more acute in their case than in Hanno's since their ships, unlike his, had no
oarsmen and depended on sail alone.
Portuguese shipwrights came up with an answer to the second obstacle: a
new type of vessel. The sail that was standard on all seagoing craft, and
had been from ancient times right up to the period that we are discussing, was
the squaresail. It operated poorly when the wind was foul but splendidly
when it was fair, and in those unhurried days skippers about to set off on a
long crossing simply waited until the wind turned fair. Another kind of
sail was also available, a triangular type called the lateen. This
produced much better results than a squaresail against a foul wind, although it
was not as good when the wind was fair. It was favored for small boats
since seamen generally used these for short runs in all directions and needed a
sail that could produce headway no matter where the wind was blowing
from.
The craft that the Portuguese developed for their voyages along the west coast
of Africa was called the caravel. It was relatively small and light and
hence fast. But its key feature was its rig: it had three masts,
each carrying a lateen sail; the caravel was thus equipped to make the best
possible headway against a foul wind. Two of Columbus's ships - the Pinta
and his favorite, the Nina - were caravels, and they give us an idea of the
modest size of these vessels; the Pinta was about 69 feet long and the Nina 55,
no bigger than the yachts many a wealthy sportsman today maintains for cruising
or fishing forays. Using caravels, Portuguese seamen were able to sail
down to the Canaries with the wind and work their way back against it. In
1434 one of Henry's captains, Gil Eanes, commanding a caravel, dared to enter
the hitherto untried waters past Cape Bojador; he not only disposed of the
boiling water myth but was able to demonstrate that a sailing ship could get
back by the volta do mar largo "turn on the open sea," a long
slant from the Canaries to the Azores and a second long slant from there to
Lisbon, both against the wind. Once Eanes had shown the way, progress was
swift. Two years after his pioneering voyage, Alfonso Gonsalves reached
the Rio del Oro on the Tropic of Cancer. By the time of Henry's death
around 1460, his ships had passed Cape Verde and were within ten degrees of the
Equator.
In 1469, Alfonso V of Portugal granted a Lisbon merchant a monopoly on trade
with the Guinea coast on condition that he explore one
hundred leagues further every year. By 1474 Portuguese ships had managed
to cross the Gulf of Guinea, despite its heat and calms, and land on the island
of Fernando Po, where the coast again runs southward. By 1484 Diogo Cao
had gotten as far as the mouth of the Congo; we can follow his progress for, at
given intervals along the coast, he set up stone pillars, which have survived,
and on a rock face some 100 miles up the Congo he carved an inscription
announcing that "thus far did the ships of the illustrious King John of
Portugal come." Then, in the winter
of 1487-88,
Bartolomeu Dias doubled the Cape of Good Hope. The west coast of Africa,
all of it, was finally added to the map of the world - and a new sea route to
India, south to the tip of Africa and then northeast across the Indian Ocean,
lay open.
In 1484, Christopher Columbus was granted a hearing by Portugal's King John
II. Armed with charts and calculations about the circumference of the
earth, he put before the king a daring plan - "to go and discover the Isle
Cypango [Japan] by this Western Ocean," i.e., by sailing due west across
the Atlantic to come upon Japan and the lands that lay beyond it: China,
the Indies, and India. The plan was referred to the royal maritime
advisory committee and was rejected. Columbus turned to Queen Isabella of
Spain; she too referred it to a committee, which unhurriedly debated it while
they years passed, years that Columbus spent on tenterhooks. Finally, in
early 1488, he wrote to King John asking for another hearing; he received a
cordial reply with an invitation to come - and arrived in Lisbon in time
to see Dias's three
caravels sail into port after monumental voyage. That was the end of Portugal's
interest in Columbus's enterprise. He had one hope left - the Queen of
Spain.
by
Lionel
Casson in "Archaeology" (May/June 1990, pp. 50-55)