Chapter One
Westward the Course (1492-1607)
America comes into view slowly for Europeans, just beyond the western horizon. Led by Christopher Columbus, a series of brave and ruthless explorers race to make new discoveries and lay claim to vast regions. Spain seeks empire, as does Portugal. Having freed the Iberian Peninsula from seven hundred years of Muslim rule, they nonetheless retain a dread practice of the Moors-human slavery. France and England come later, settling respectively in Canada and along the Atlantic seaboard. These latecomers, the English, challenge Spain's far-flung empire, eventually seizing control of the seas from their former Iberian masters. Despite fears of the unknown-disease, privations, wild animals, and sometimes hostile natives-the Europeans are irresistibly drawn to the possibilities of new life in the New World.
I. Columbus: "The Christ Bearer"
Bartholomeu Dias's two sailing ships limped back into Lisbon harbor in December 1488, bringing startling news: he had succeeded in rounding the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. The sea route to the riches of India and the Spice Islands of Asia lay open to the seafaring Portuguese. Among those waiting in Lisbon for Dias to bring his report to his king, John II, was a tall, red-haired sea captain from Genoa, Italy, named Christopher Columbus. Dias's triumph would mean more years of disappointment for the Italian mariner. If India could be reached by going east, the king would have little interest in financing Columbus's great enterprise-a westward voyage to the Indies.
The Portuguese had been inching along the coast of Africa for a century. Unlike their neighbors in Spain, who spent most of the fifteenth century fighting to rid their country of the Muslim Moors, Portugal had been united, seeking. Prince Henry the Navigator had established a world famous school at Sagres to bring together all the elements of seamanship, mapmaking, piloting, and navigation. Prince Henry sent out as many as fifteen expeditions to Africa's Cape Bojador, just south of the Canary Islands. His captains all returned claiming that the shallow waters and fierce currents made that point impassable. Finally, Prince Henry ordered Gil Eannes to sail beyond the cape. Eannes did so in 1434 by sailing west into the Atlantic before heading back to Africa's coast. He had at last passed the dreaded cape. This same Eannes ten years later would bring back the first shipload of two hundred African slaves. Gomes Eanes de Zurara, a Portuguese contemporary of Eannes, writes that desperate African mothers would "clasp their infants in their arms, and throw themselves on the ground to cover them with their bodies, disregarding any injury to their own persons so that they could prevent their children from being separated from them." Zurara tried to lessen the horror of these scenes by assuring readers that the slaves were "treated with kindness and no difference was made between them and free-born servants of Portugal." He said they were taught trades, converted to Christianity, and intermarried with the Portuguese. Still, he gives us insight when he writes: "What heart could be so hard as not to be pierced by piteous feeling to see that company?" And the presence of light-skinned Africans among them suggested that some, at least, had been bought in markets from "the ubiquitous Muslim salesmen."
Slavery was an inescapable part of African life. Mansa Musa, a devout Muslim, was the king of Mali (currently part of Niger). He sold fourteen thousand female slaves to finance his journey to Cairo in 1324. The Arabs were always "seizing our people as merchandise," complained the black king of Bornu (in present-day Nigeria) to the sultan of Egypt in the 1390s. With the extension of Islam into West Africa's "Gold Coast" came an increasingly vigorous trade in black slaves. The Christian Portuguese emulated this practice. Three hundred years before adoption of the U.S. Constitution, decisions made in Europe and Africa would have great and terrible consequences for a nation as yet unimagined and a people still unnamed.
Portugal's efforts gained momentum when the Muslim Ottoman Turks finally conquered Constantinople in 1453. This meant that city-states like Genoa and Venice would have to deal with the Turks for such prized goods as pepper, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. And it would drive the Atlantic kingdoms outward.
Columbus had had to plead for King John II to give him a safe passage to Lisbon because he feared arrest for his debts. Columbus was surely capable of directing such a venture as he proposed. He had traveled as far away as Iceland and Britain and throughout the Mediterranean at a time when most mariners never ventured outside the sight of land. Still, Columbus spent years unsuccessfully appealing for support for his great project.
One thing Columbus did not have to contend with was any notion that the earth was flat. Although a popular misconception, in truth all scholars at that time knew the earth was a sphere. What they did not know was the circumference of the earth. Here, Columbus radically miscalculated. He thought that Japan lay only 2,400 to 2,500 miles west of the Canary Islands.
Columbus heard Dias make his report to Portugal's king and returned, empty-handed, to Spain. These were years of great frustration for Columbus as Spain's monarchs-Ferdinand and Isabella-concentrated their attention on driving the Moors out of the Iberian peninsula. Finally, in 1492, the Spanish rulers succeeded in freeing their country of seven hundred years of Moorish domination. Ferdinand and Isabella saw their victory as a gift from God. They styled themselves "their most Catholic majesties." Columbus's devout religious faith clearly helped him in his appeals to them for aid. He took seriously his first name, which means "bearer of Christ." He pleaded for the chance to carry Christianity to the lands beyond the sea.
With three small ships, called caravels, Columbus set sail from the port of Palos on 2 August 1492. Favored by fair winds and clear skies, the Nia, the Pinta, and his flagship, the Santa Maria, made excellent time. Even under such favorable conditions, Columbus's Spanish sailors soon began to grumble. With steady winds carrying them west, how would they return to Spain? And when the little flotilla entered a dense patch of sargassum (gulf weed), the men fretted about getting stuck in the thickening growths. Most troubling of all, perhaps, was the fact that they were Spaniards and the Capitn General was not. Columbus was Genoese, and centuries of foreign occupation had led these sons of Spain to be deeply suspicious of outsiders. Columbus had to deceive his sailors by keeping double logs of the ships' daily distance covered. Even by his false account, however, the men could tell that they had gone farther west than anyone had ever gone before, and farther west than they had been led to believe they would have to go in order to make a landfall.
Threatened with mutiny by his crew, Columbus was forced to promise his captains on October 9 that if they failed to sight land within three days, they would all turn about and head back to Spain. The captains were Martin Alonso Pinzon, commander of the Pinta, and his brother, Vicente Yanez Pinzon, who led the Nia. They were Spaniards, from a Palos shipping family, and gave Columbus help without which he could never have succeeded. Fortunately for Columbus, stiff breezes sped his ships' way and his crew began to see clear signs of land ahead. Flights of migrating birds covered the moon. Tree branches with still-green leaves floated by, giving assurances of land just over the horizon.
Suddenly, gale winds and rough seas confronted the expectant mariners on the night of October 11. Determined, Columbus refused to shorten sail. Early in the morning of the twelfth, the cry came from Rodrigo de Triana, the lookout on the Pinta-"Tierra! Tierra!" Columbus gave orders to stand off the shore to avoid reefs and shoals and, finally, to shorten sail. At dawn, they began their search for a safe place to land.
Columbus, the "admiral" as he was now called, put out in a longboat from the Santa Maria and headed into shore. It carried the royal flag of Castile (a great province of Spain) and the banner of the expedition, which was a cross of green surmounted by a crown, all on a white field. The brothers Pinzon joined the shore party in their own ships' boats. The men knelt in the sand, prayed, and gave thanks to God for their safe passage. Then Columbus named the island-a part of today's Bahamas-San Salvador, Holy Savior.
Soon, Columbus and his men were exploring-and naming and claiming-other islands in the Caribbean. When natives appeared, docile, nearly naked, and eager to trade with the Europeans, Columbus named them Indians. If not India proper, he was certain he had landed somewhere in Asia-though the language and manners of the people did not correspond with anything travelers since Marco Polo had reported of the Orient.
Significantly, many of the Indians wore small, gold nose rings. Columbus had had to assure his seamen that the voyage would be worth their while. They were not the ones who would receive the glory, they knew. Nor would they achieve high office or status for the great discovery. Gold would have to suffice, and Columbus soon felt the pressure to find suitable quantities of the precious metal.
Equally significant, natives also introduced Columbus's men to tobacco and taught them to inhale its smoke. Tobacco use was ubiquitous throughout the Americas, and the Spaniards found smoking pleasurable. Here, in the earliest hours of the encounter between Europeans and native peoples, the exotic leaf loomed large. It would eventually become the cash crop for a number of American states and a major financial interest for more than five hundred years.
On an island he would name La Isla Espaola-The Spanish Island (or Hispaniola), Columbus found more Indians eager to trade. Importantly, these Indians seemed to have plenty of gold.
So willing, so easily plied with cheap trinkets-like little brass hawk's bells worth only pennies in Spain-these Indians were vulnerable to the Spaniards in many ways. They could be dominated as slaves and put to work mining gold. What's more, the native women seemed sexually open. To sailors who had had no contact with the opposite sex for months at a time and who had little fear of venereal disease, the sensual enticements proved irresistible. Syphilis has been traced to this first encounter of Columbus's men and the aboriginal peoples of the Caribbean. A contemporary of Columbus, Bishop Las Casas, thinks Indians who came back to Barcelona from the first voyage gave the disease to "women of the town," a euphemism for prostitutes, who then gave it to Spanish soldiers. From there, it spread throughout Europe and the world. The Indians, on the other hand, contracted smallpox and measles from the Spaniards; these diseases devastated populations with no previous exposure and built-up immunity.
When the Santa Maria wrecked on a coral reef off Hispaniola on Christmas Day 1492, Columbus's men offloaded supplies, trading truck and food. A local chieftain, or cacique, named Guacanagari ordered his people to help retrieve the cargo of the stricken flagship. Columbus noted in his journal that the Indians guarded his supplies, taking not so much as "a lace point." From the timbers of the wrecked vessel, Columbus built a fortress he named La Navidad-Christmas-that became the first European habitation in America. And when he prepared to return to Spain, he had little trouble recruiting volunteers to stay behind. The prospect of gold proved a powerful incentive.
The Nia and the Pinta departed 18 January 1493 from Samana Bay for the return trip. Columbus was not what we would call a capable navigator. The sextant and accurate chronometers were still centuries away. But he was an extraordinarily good mariner, with a keen sense of water and wind. He knew how to recognize currents and signs of land. His early calculations had placed Cuba at the same latitude as Cape Cod. Fortunately, he knew enough to correct that. Most of the return voyage passed uneventfully until, on February 12, the two ships sailed into a fierce winter gale. The admiral and Vicente Pinzon took turns guiding the Nia's helmsman. Each wave threatened to capsize the little vessel. There was no hope of rescue in such seas. Columbus's men vowed to make a pilgrimage to the nearest shrine of the Virgin Mary if they survived the storm.
When they sighted land in the Portuguese Azores, it took three days before Columbus could come to a safe anchorage near a village called Nossa Senhora dos Anjos (Our Lady of the Angels). True to their vow, Columbus's men hurried to the local church, but while praying at the altar in their nightshirts as a sign of penitence, they were arrested! Portuguese authorities suspected the Spanish seamen had been sailing to prohibited parts of the African coast. With his crewmen in jail, Columbus-still aboard ship-threatened to bombard the town if they were not freed. Fortunately, the captain of the port finally arrived after being delayed by yet another storm and was sufficiently persuaded that Columbus and his men had indeed come back from the otro mundo-the other world-and had not been poaching on Portugal's rich African preserves. He generously provided them with supplies before their departure. The incident-almost a farce-nonetheless shows the extreme lengths to which the Portuguese were willing to go to protect their monopoly on the growing slave trade.
Setting out for the mainland in the Nia, Columbus again encountered severe storms. When he finally saw land again, it was at the mouth of Portugal's Tagus River. Menaced by a Portuguese warship, he applied for permission from the king to land. King Joo II-who had twice refused to support Columbus's great enterprise-not only granted the permission and ordered the ship's resupply, but he summoned the admiral to report to him at a monastery thirty miles away. Some of the king's jealous courtiers, realizing at last what Spain would gain from this amazing discovery, secretly advised him to have Columbus assassinated. When the Indians who had joined the crew showed the king a crude map of their islands made from beans, Joo cried out, "Why did I let slip such a wonderful chance?" Despite the king's disappointment, no attempt was made on Columbus's life.
Even on leaving Portugal, Columbus's claim to be the discoverer of the New World was not secure. Martin Alonso Pinzon, captain of the Pinta, had missed most of the storms west of the Azores and thus the delays they caused in Columbus's return. Having arrived first, he sent word across Spain of his coming and asked Ferdinand and Isabella for permission to report directly to them. But the monarchs replied that they would hear the news first from their Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Meanwhile, Columbus made up for lost time and docked in Palos harbor shortly before the Pinta arrived. Columbus would not be robbed of the credit by his Spanish sea captain. Within a month, a broken Pinzon died at his country house near Palos.
In April 1493, Columbus came to the Alcazar, the royal palace, to formally make his report to Ferdinand and Isabella. He knelt before the king and queen, but they arose and gave him the honor of a seat at Isabella's side. The Indians were presented and the assembly was awed not only by gold jewelry, but also by such oddities as the parrots that had never been seen in Europe. Less impressive were the "spices" Columbus presented, for the fabled riches of the Indies were not to be seen in his collection of common American plants. Then the company adjourned for a Te Deum at the chapel royal. The last line-O Lord, in Thee have I trusted, let me never be confounded-moved the brave mariner to tears.
If only Columbus had stopped there, at that chapel! Nothing that would happen in the remaining thirteen years of his life would add to his fame. Much that he did detracted from it. He proceeded to lead a second, third, and fourth voyage to the New World. The second voyage-the largest-proceeded with seventeen ships. Although he would continue to explore and claim rich islands in the Caribbean, and to range as far as modern-day Panama on the North American mainland, his record as an administrator was a dismal one. After the third voyage, he had even been arrested and returned to Spain in chains! Columbus added immeasurably to mankind's store of knowledge. Yet he never quite realized that his otro mundo was not, in fact, a part of Asia, but an entirely new continent.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from AMERICAby William J. Bennett Copyright © 2007 by William J. Bennett. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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