Critical Essay on the Sources of Information

It would appear, from documents printed by Navarrete, that in 1470 Columbus was brooding on the idea of land to the west. It is not at all probable that he would himself have been able to trace from germ to flower the conception which finally possessed his mind. The age was ripened for it; and the finding of Brazil in 1500 by Cabral showed how by an accident the theory might have become a practical result at any time after the sailors of Europe had dared to take long ocean voyages. Columbus grew to imagine that he had been independent of the influences of his time; and in a manuscript in his own hand, preserved in the Colombina Library at Seville, he shows the weak, almost irresponsible, side of his mind, and flouts at the grounds of reasonable progress which many others besides himself had been making to a belief in the feasibility of a western passage. In this unfortunate writing he declares that under inspiration he simply accomplished the prophecy of Isaiah. This assertion has not prevented saner and later writers from surveying the evidences of the growth of the belief in the mind, not of Columbus only, but of others whom he may have impressed, and by whom he may have been influenced. The new intuition was but the result of intellectual reciprocity. It needed a daring exponent, and found one.

The geographical ideas which bear on this question depend, of course, upon the sphericity of the earth. This was entertained by the leading cosmographical thinkers of that age,—who were far however from being in accord in respect to the size of the globe. Going back to antiquity, Aristotle and Strabo had both taught in their respective times the spherical theory; but they too were widely divergent upon the question of size,—Aristotle’s ball being but mean in comparison with that of Strabo, who was not far wrong when he contended that the world then known was something more than one third of the actual circumference of the whole, or one hundred and twenty-nine degrees, as he put it; while Marinus, the Tyrian, of the opposing school, and the most eminent geographer before Ptolemy, held that the extent of the then known world spanned as much as two hundred and twenty-five degrees, or about one hundred degrees too much. Columbus’ calculations were all on the side of this insufficient size. He wrote to Queen Isabella in 1503 that “the earth is smaller than people suppose.” He thought but one seventh of it was water. In sailing a direct western course his expectation was to reach Cipango after having gone about three thousand miles. This would actually have brought him within a hundred miles or so of Cape Henlopen, or the neighboring coast; while if no land had intervened he would have gone nine thousand eight hundred miles to reach Japan, the modern Cipango. Thus Columbus’ earth was something like two thirds of the actual magnitude. It can readily be understood how the lesser distance was helpful in inducing a crew to accompany Columbus, and in strengthening his own determination.

Whatever the size of the earth, there was far less palpable reason to determine it than to settle the question of its sphericity. The phenomena which convince the ordinary mind to-day, weighed with Columbus as they had weighed in earlier ages. These were the hulling down of ships at sea, and the curved shadow of the earth on the moon in an eclipse. The law of gravity was not yet proclaimed, indeed; but it had been observed that the men on two ships, however far apart, stood perpendicular to their decks at rest.

Columbus was also certainly aware of some of the views and allusions to be found in the ancient writers, indicating a belief in lands lying beyond the Pillars of Hercules. He enumerates some of them in the letter which he wrote about his third voyage, and which is printed in Navarrete. The Colombina Library contains two interesting memorials of his connection with this belief. One is a treatise in his own hand, giving his correspondence with Father Gorricio, who gathered the ancient views and prophecies; and the other is a copy of Gaietanus’ edition of Seneca’s tragedies, published indeed after Columbus’ death, in which the passage of the Medea, known to have been much in Columbus’ mind, is scored with the marginal comment of Ferdinand, his son, “Hæc prophetia expleta ē per patrē meus cristoforū colō almirātē anno 1492.” Columbus, further, could not have been unaware of the opposing theories of Ptolemy and Pomponius Mela as to the course in which the further extension of the known world should be pursued. Ptolemy held to the east and west theory, and Mela to the northern and southern view.

The Angelo Latin translation of Ptolemy’s Greek Geographia had served to disseminate the Alexandrian geographer’s views through almost the whole of the fifteenth century, for that version had been first made in 1409. In 1475 it had been printed, and it had helped strengthen the arguments of those who favored a belief in the position of India as lying over against Spain. Several other editions were yet to be printed in the new typographical centres of Europe, all exerting more or less influence in support of the new views advocated by Columbus. Five of these editions of Ptolemy appeared during the interval from 1475 to 1492. Of Pomponius Mela, advocating the views of which the Portuguese were at this time proving the truth, the earliest printed edition had appeared in 1471. Mela’s treatise, De situ orbis, had been produced in the first century, while Ptolemy had made his views known in the second; and the age of Vasco da Gama, Columbus, and Magellan were to prove the complemental relations of their respective theories.

MARCO POLO.

This follows an engraving in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 53. The original is at Rome. There is a copy of an old print in Jules Verne’s Découverte de la Terre.

It has been said that Macrobius, a Roman of the fifth century, in a commentary on the Dream of Scipio, had maintained a division of the globe into four continents, of which two were then unknown. In the twelfth century this idea had been revived by Guillaume de Conches (who died about 1150) in his Philosophia Minor, lib. iv. cap. 3. It was again later further promulgated in the writings of Bede and Honoré d’Autun, and in the Microcosmos of Geoffroy de Saint-Victor,—a manuscript of the thirteenth century still preserved. It is not known that this theory was familiar to Columbus. The chief directors of his thoughts among anterior writers appear to have been, directly or indirectly, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and Vincenzius of Beauvais; and first among them, for importance, we must place the Opus Majus Of Roger Bacon, completed in 1267. It was from Bacon that Petrus de Aliaco, Or Pierre d’Ailly (b. 1340; d. 1416 or 1425), in his Ymago mundi, borrowed the passage which, in this French imitator’s language, so impressed Columbus.

ANNOTATIONS BY COLUMBUS.

On a copy of Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago mundi, preserved in the Colombina Library at Seville, following a photograph in Harrisse’s Notes on Columbus, p. 84.

An important element in the problem was the statements of Marco Polo regarding a large island, which he called Cipango, and which he represented as lying in the ocean off the eastern coast of Asia. This carried the eastern verge of the Asiatic world farther than the ancients had known; and, on the spherical theory, brought land nearer westward from Europe than could earlier have been supposed. It is a question, however, if Columbus had any knowledge of the Latin or Italian manuscripts of Marco Polo,—the only form in which anybody could have studied his narrative before the printing of it at Nuremberg in 1477, in German, a language which Columbus is not likely to have known. Humboldt has pointed out that neither Columbus nor his son Ferdinand mentions Marco Polo; still we know that he had read his book. Columbus further knew, it would seem, what Æneas Sylvius had written on Asia. Toscanelli had also imparted to him what he knew. A second German edition of Marco Polo appeared at Augsburg in 1481. In 1485, with the Itinerarius of Mandeville, published at Zwolle, the account—“De regionibus orientalibus”—of Marco Polo first appeared in Latin, translated from the original French, in which it had been dictated. It was probably in this form that Columbus first saw it. There was a separate Latin edition in 1490.

The most definite confirmation and encouragement which Columbus received in his views would seem to have come from Toscanelli, in 1474. This eminent Italian astronomer, who was now about seventy-eight years old, and was to die, in 1482, before Columbus and Da Gama had consummated their discoveries, had reached a conclusion in his own mind that only about fifty-two degrees of longitude separated Europe westerly from Asia, making the earth much smaller even than Columbus’ inadequate views had fashioned it; for Columbus had satisfied himself that one hundred and twenty degrees of the entire three hundred and sixty was only as yet unknown. With such views of the inferiority of the earth, Toscanelli had addressed a letter to Martinez, a prebendary of Lisbon, accompanied by a map professedly based on information derived from the book of Marco Polo. When Toscanelli received a letter of inquiry from Columbus, he replied by sending a copy of this letter and the map. As the testimony to a western passage from a man of Toscanelli’s eminence, it was of marked importance in the conversion of others to similar views.

It has always been a question how far the practical evidence of chance phenomena, and the absolute knowledge, derived from other explorers, bearing upon the views advocated by Columbus, may have instigated or confirmed him in his belief. There is just enough plausibility in some of the stories which are cited to make them fall easily into the pleas of detraction to which Columbus has been subjected.

A story was repeated by Oviedo in 1535 as an idle rumor, adopted by Gomara in 1552 without comment, and given considerable currency in 1609 by Garcilasso de la Vega, of a Spanish pilot,—Sanches, as the name is sometimes given,—who had sailed from Madeira, and had been driven west and had seen land (Hispaniola, it is inferred), and who being shipwrecked had been harbored by Columbus in his house. Under this roof the pilot is said to have died in 1484, leaving his host the possessor of his secret. La Vega claimed to have received the tale from his father, who had been at the Court of Spain in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. Oviedo repeated it, but incredulously; and it was later told by Gomara, Acosta, Eden, and others. Robertson, Irving, and most later writers find enough in the indecision and variety of its shapes to discard it altogether. Peter Martyr, Bernaldez, and Herrera make no mention of it. It is singular, however, that Ferdinand de Galardi, in dedicating his Traité politique des abassadeurs, published at Cologne in 1666, to a descendant of Columbus, the Duke of Veraguas, mentions the story as an indisputable fact; and it has not escaped the notice of querulous writers even of our day.

Others have thought that Columbus, in his voyage to Thule or Iceland, in February, 1477, could have derived knowledge of the Sagas of the westerly voyages of Eric the Red and his countrymen. It seems to be true that commercial relations were maintained between Iceland and Greenland for some years later than 1400; but if Columbus knew of them, he probably shared the belief of the geographers of his time that Greenland was a peninsula of Scandinavia.

The extremely probable and almost necessary pre-Columbian knowledge of the northeastern parts of America follows from the venturesome spirit of the mariners to those seas for fish and traffic, and from the easy transitions from coast to coast by which they would have been lured to meet the more southerly climes. The chances from such natural causes are quite as strong an argument in favor of the early Northmen venturings as the somewhat questionable representations of the Sagas. There is the same ground for representing, and similar lack of evidence in believing, the alleged voyage of Joāo Vas Costa Cortereal to the Newfoundland banks in 1463-1464. Barrow finds authority for it in Cordeyro, who gives, however, no date in his Historia Insulana das Ilhas a Portugal, Lisbon, 1717; but Biddle, in his Cabot, fails to be satisfied with Barrow’s uncertain references, as enforced in his Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions, London, 1818.

Another of these alleged northern voyagers was a Polish navigator, John Szkolny,—a name which we get in various Latinized or other forms, as Scolve, Skolnus, Scolvus, Sciolvus, Kolno, etc.,—who is said to have been on the Labrador coast in 1476, while in the service of Denmark. It is so stated by Wytfliet, Pontanus, and Horn. De Costa cites what is known as the Rouen globe, preserved in Paris, and supposed to belong to about 1540, as showing a legend of Skolnus reaching the northwest coast of Greenland in 1476. Hakluyt quotes Gemma Frisius and Girava. Gomara, in 1553, and Herrera, in 1601, barely refer to it.

There is also a claim for a Dieppe navigator, Cousin, who, bound for Africa, is said to have been driven west, and reached South America in 1488-1489. The story is told by Desmarquets in his Mémoires chronologiques pour servir à l’histoire de Dieppe, i. 92, published at Paris, 1785. Major, giving the story an examination, fully discredits it.

There remains the claim for Martin Behaim, the Nuremberg cosmographer and navigator, which rests upon a passage in the Latin text of the so-called Nuremberg Chronicle which states that Cam and Behaim, having passed south of the equator, turned west and (by implication) found land. The passage is not in the German edition of the same year, and on reference to the manuscript of the book (still preserved in Nuremberg) the passage is found to be an interpolation written in a different hand. It seems likely to have been a perversion or misinterpretation of the voyage of Diego Cam down the African coast in 1489, in which he was accompanied by Behaim. That Behaim himself did not put the claim forward, at least in 1492, seems to be clear from the globe, which he made in that year, and which shows no indication of the alleged voyage. The allegation has had, however, some advocates; but the weight of authority is decidedly averse, and the claim can hardly be said to have significant support to-day.

It is unquestionable that the success of the Portuguese in discovering the Atlantic islands and in pushing down the African coast, sustained Columbus in his hope of western discovery, if it had not instigated it. The chance wafting of huge canes, unusual trunks of trees, and even sculptured wood and bodies of strange men, upon the shores of the outlying islands of the Azores and Madeira, were magnified as evidences in his mind. When at a later day he found a tinned iron vessel in the hands of the natives of Guadeloupe, he felt that there had been European vessels driven along the equatorial current to the western world, which had never returned to report on their voyages.

Of the adventurous voyages of which record was known there were enough to inspire him; and of all the mysteries of the Sea of Darkness, which stretched away illimitably to the west, there were stories more than enough. Sight of strange islands had been often reported; and the maps still existing had shown a belief in those of San Brandan and Antillia, and of the Seven Cities founded in the ocean waste by as many Spanish bishops, who had been driven to sea by the Moors.

The Fortunate Islands (Canaries) of the ancients—discovered, it is claimed, by the Carthaginians—had been practically lost to Europe for thirteen hundred years, when, in the beginning of the fifteenth century (1402), Juan de Béthencourt led his colony to settle them. They had not indeed been altogether forgotten, for Marino Sanuto in 1306 had delineated them on a map given by Camden, though this cartographer omitted them on later charts. Traders and pirates had also visited them since 1341, but such acquaintance had hardly caused them to be generally known.

The Canaries, however, as well as the Azores, appear in the well-known portolano of 1351, which is preserved in the Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana in Florence. A chart of the Brothers Pizigani, dated in 1367, gives islands which are also identified with the Canaries, Azores, and Madeira; and the Canaries also appear on the well-known Catalan mappemonde of 1375. These Atlantic islands are again shown in a portolano of a period not much later than 1400, which is among the Egerton manuscripts in the British Museum, and is ascribed to Juan da Napoli; and in 1436 they are conspicuous on the detailed sea-chart of Andrea Bianco. This portolano has also two islands on the extreme western verge of the sheet,—“Antillia” and “De la man Satanaxio,” which some have claimed as indicating a knowledge of the two Americas. It was a map brought in 1428 from Venice by Dom Pedro,—which, like the 1351 map, showed the Azores,—that induced Prince Henry in 1431 to despatch the expedition which rediscovered those islands; and they appear on the Catalan map, which Santarem (pl. 54) describes as “Carte de Gabriell de Valsequa, faite à Mallorcha en 1439.” It was in 1466 that the group was colonized, as Behaim’s globe shows.

The Madeira group was first discovered by an Englishman,—Machin, or Macham,—in the reign of Edward III. (1327-1378). The narrative, put into shape for Prince Henry of Portugal by Francisco Alcaforado, one of his esquires, was known to Irving in a French translation published in 1671, which Irving epitomizes. The story, somewhat changed, is given by Galvano, and was copied by Hakluyt; but, on account of some strangeness and incongruities, it has not been always accepted, though Major says the main recital is confirmed by a document quoted from a German collection of voyages, 1507, by Dr. Schmeller, in the Memoirs of the Academy of Science at Munich, 1847, and which, secured for Major by Kunstmann, is examined by him in his Prince Henry. The group was rediscovered by the Portuguese in 1418-1420. Prince Henry had given the command of Porto Santo to Perestrello; and this captain, in 1419, observing from his island a cloud in the horizon, found, as he sailed to it, the island now called Madeira. It will be remembered that it was the daughter of Perestrello whom Columbus at a later day married.

It was not till 1460 that the Cape De Verde Islands were found, lying as they do well outside of the route of Prince Henry’s vessels, which were now following down the African coast, and had been pursuing explorations in this direction since 1415.

There have been claims advanced by Margry in his Les navigations Françaises et la révolution maritime du XIVe au XVIe siècle, d’après les documents inédits tirés de France, d’Angleterre, d’Espagne, et d’Italie, pp. 13-70, Paris, 1867, and embraced in his first section on “Les marins de Normandie aux côtes de Guinée avant les Portugais,” in which he cites an old document, said to be in London, setting forth the voyage of a vessel from Dieppe to the coast of Africa in 1364. Estancelin had already, in 1832, in his Navigateurs Normands en Afrique, declared there were French establishments on the coast of Guinea in the fourteenth century,—a view D’Avezac says he would gladly accept if he could. Major, however, failed to find, by any direction which Margry could give him, the alleged London document, and has thrown—to say the least—discredit on the story of that document as presented by Margry.

PRINCE HENRY.

This follows a portrait in a contemporary manuscript chronicle, now in the National Library at Paris, which Major, who gives a colored fac-simile of it, calls the only authentic likeness, probably taken in 1449-1450, and representing him in mourning for the death of his brother Dom Pedro, who died in 1449. There is another engraving of it in Jules Verne’s La Découverte de la Terre, p. 112.

Major calls the portrait in Gustave de Veer’s Life of Prince Henry, published at Dantzig, in 1864, a fancy one. The annexed autograph of the Prince is the equivalent of Iffante Dom Anrique.

Prince Henry, who was born March 4, 1394, died Nov 15, 1463. He was the third son of John I. of Portugal; his mother was a daughter of John of Gaunt, of England.

The African explorations of the Portuguese are less visionary, and, as D’Avezac says, the Portuguese were the first to persevere and open the African route to India.

The peninsular character of Africa—upon which success in this exploration depended—was contrary to the views of Aristotle, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy, which held to an enclosed Indian Ocean, formed by the meeting of Africa and Asia at the south. The stories respecting the circumnavigation of Africa by the ancients are lacking in substantial proof; and it seems probable that Cape Non or Cape Bojador was the limit of their southern expeditions. Still, this peninsular character was a deduction from imagined necessity rather than a conviction from fact. It found place on the earliest maps of the revival of geographical study in the Middle Ages. It is so represented in the map of Marino Sanuto in 1306, and in the Lorentian portolano of 1351. Major doubts if the Catalan map of 1375 shows anything more than conjectural knowledge for the coasts beyond Bojador.

Of Prince Henry—the moving spirit in the African enterprise of the fifteenth century—we have the most satisfactory account in the Life of Prince Henry of Portugal, surnamed the Navigator, and its Results ... from Authentic Contemporary Documents, by Richard Henry Major, London, 1868,—a work which, after the elimination of the controversial arguments, and after otherwise fitting it for the general reader, was reissued in 1877 as The Discoveries of Prince Henry the Navigator. These works are the guide for the brief sketch of these African discoveries now to be made, and which can be readily followed on the accompanying sketch-map.

SKETCH-MAP OF THE PORTUGUESE DISCOVERIES IN AFRICA.

Cf. Heinrich Wuttke’s “Zur Geschichte der Erdkunde in der letzten hälfte des Mittelalters: Die Karten der Seefahrenden Völker süd Europas bis zum ersten Druck der Erdbeschreibung des Ptolemäus,” in the Jahrbuch des Vereins für Erdkunde in Dresden, 1870; J. Codine’s “Découverte de la côte d’Afrique par les Portugais pendant les années, 1484-1488,” in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie de Paris, 1876; Vivien de Saint-Martin’s Histoire de la géographie et des découvertes géographiques, depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à nos jours, p. 298, Paris, 1873; Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 81; Clarke’s Progress of Maritime Discovery, p. 140; and G. T. Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des établissemens et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, Geneva, 1780; Paris, 1820. Paulitschke’s Afrika-literatur in der Zeit von 1500 bis 1750, Vienna, 1882, notes the earliest accounts.

Prince Henry had been with his father at the capture of Ceuta, opposite Gibraltar, in 1415, when the Portuguese got their first foothold in Africa. In 1418 he established a school of nautical observation at Sagres, the southwestern promontory of his father’s kingdom, and placed the geographer, Jayme, of Majorca, in charge of it. The Prince at once sent out his first expedition down the Barbary coast; but his vessel, being driven out of its course, discovered the Island of Porto Santo. Expedition after expedition reached, in successive years, the vicinity of Cape Bojador; but an inexpressible dread of the uncertainty beyond deferred the passage of it till 1434. Cape Blanco was reached in 1445; Cape Verde shortly after; and the River Gambia in 1447.

Cadamosto and his Venetians pushed still farther, and saw the Southern Cross for the first time. Between 1460 and 1464 they went beyond Cape Mesurado. Prince Henry dying in 1463, King Alfonso, in 1469, farmed out the African commerce, and required five hundred miles to be added yearly to the limit of discovery southward. Not long after, Diego Cam reached the Congo coast, Behaim accompanying him. In 1487, after seventy years of gradual progress down six thousand miles of coast, southward from Cape Non, the Portuguese under Diaz reached the Stormy Cape,—later to be called the Cape of Good Hope. He but just rounded it in May, and in December he was in Portugal with the news. Bartholomew, the brother of Columbus, had made the voyage with him. The rounding of the Cape was hardly a surprise; for the belief in it was firmly established long before. In 1457-1459, in the map of Fra Mauro, which had been constructed at Venice for Alonzo V., and in which Bianco assisted, the terminal cape had been fitly drawn.

HO COMDE ALMIRANTE (Da Gama’s Autograph).

VASCO DA GAMA.

This follows the engravings in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 111, and in Stanley’s Da Gama, published by the Hakluyt Society. The original belongs to the Count de Lavradio. Another portrait, with a view of Calicut, is given in Lafitau’s Découvertes des Portugais, Paris, 1734, iii. 66.

Such had been the progress of the Portuguese marine, in exemplification of the southerly quest called for by the theory of Pomponius Mela, when Columbus made his westerly voyage in 1492 and reached, as he supposed, the same coast which the Portuguese were seeking to touch by the opposite direction. In this erroneous geographical belief Columbus remained as long as he lived,—a view in which Vespucius and the earlier navigators equally shared; though some, like Peter Martyr, accepted the belief cautiously. We shall show in another place how slowly the error was eradicated from the cartography of even the latter part of the sixteenth century.

During the interval when Columbus was in Spain, between his second and third voyages, Vasco da Gama sailed from Lisbon, July 8, 1497, to complete the project which had so long animated the endeavors of the rival kingdom. He doubled the Cape of Good Hope in Nov. 1497, and anchored at Calicut, May 20, 1498,—a few days before Columbus left San Lucar on his third voyage. In the following August, Da Gama started on his return; and after a year’s voyage he reached Lisbon in August, 1498.

The Portuguese had now accomplished their end. The éclat with which it would have been received had not Columbus opened, as was supposed, a shorter route, was wanting; and Da Gama, following in the path marked for him, would have failed of much of his fame but for the auspicious applause which Camoens created for him in the Lusiad.

Da Gama at Calicut and Columbus at Cuba gave the line of demarcation of Alexander VI. a significance that was not felt to be impending, five years earlier, on the 3d and 4th of May, 1493, when the Papal Bull was issued. This had fixed the field of Spanish and Portuguese exploration respectively west and east of a line one hundred leagues west of the Azores, following a meridian at a point where Columbus had supposed the magnetic needle pointed to the north star. The Portuguese thought that political grounds were of more consideration than physical, and were not satisfied with the magnet governing the limitation of their search. They desired a little more sea-room on the Atlantic side, and were not displeased to think that a meridian considerably farther west might give them a share of the new Indies south and north of the Spanish discoveries; so they entered their protest against the partition of the Bull, and the two Powers held a convention at Tordesillas, which resulted, in June, 1494, in the line being moved two hundred and seventy leagues westerly. No one but vaguely suspected the complication yet to arise about this same meridian, now selected, when the voyage of Magellan should bring Spaniard and Portuguese face to face at the Antipodes. This aspect of the controversy will claim attention elsewhere. From this date the absolute position of the line as theoretically determined, was a constant source of dispute, and the occasion of repeated negotiations.