Christopher Columbus - The Four Voyages

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUSs four voyages of discovery to the New World were recorded in a number of letters and dispatches written by him and the officers who sailed with him. The story was taken up by a talented writer of newsletters to the great, Peter Martyr, and later by the royal historian Captain Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo and by Fray Bartolom de las Casas, in particular, both of whom knew the Indies, and by Columbuss own son Hernando, who accompanied his father on his fourth voyage and wrote his biography. A great library of documents was collected in the Casa de las Indias at Seville (where American affairs were initially handled) and afterwards taken to Hispaniola, and in addition Hernando himself had many papers which were read also by Bartolom de las Casas, who was a friend of the Columbus family. During the litigation concerning that familys claims to wealth and governorship, facts were discussed and interpreted in a variety of ways. When Oviedo published his official Historia general y natural de las Indias in 1547 - fifty-six years after Columbuss landfall - it might have seemed that everything relevant to the voyages had been read and written.

It was not until the quatercentenary of 1892, which inspired a number of books and articles on the man and his discovery, that Christopher Columbus emerged as a mysterious figure about whom many cardinal questions can be asked and few conclusively answered.

Oviedo, with whose narrative this book begins, accepted Columbus as a Genoese of no great lineage, education or attainments, one who had sailed on various commercial voyages, and who conceived and tirelessly advocated from court to court a scheme for crossing the ocean from Spain to China and opening up a direct trade route to the west, by which the gold, jewels and spices of the Orient could be brought to the ports of Castile: a reasonable trading venture, which he made more attractive to the Catholic sovereigns Ferdinand and Isabela, by offering them the prospect that the inhabitants of the intervening lands, perhaps of China and Japan themselves, might be converted to Christianity on the way. The royal pair were enthusiasts for the conversion of Jews and Moslems, and Columbus carried on his first voyage a converted Jew with a knowledge of Arabic, who would be able to expound the Christian mysteries to the Chinese, Japanese and Indians, who were presumed to speak Arabic.

Oviedo, as the royal historian, takes care to refute Columbuss claims to having presented the sovereigns with a new world. This so-called new world was already known to the ancients, and, as Oviedo tries to prove by a resort to legends which could surely have convinced nobody, had actually belonged to the earliest kings of Spain.

Oviedos legends are transparent nonsense. But they are no more foolish than most of the arguments which Columbus himself put forward when trying to find backers for his first voyage, and even when theorizing about the probable shape of the world just after the discovery of Trinidad on his third voyage. Ever since the time of the Greek cosmographers Marinus of Tyre and Ptolemy, there had been theories that the world was a sphere and that it would consequently be possible to go to the east by sailing west. Two things were in dispute: the distance, which could only be calculated by computing the circumference of the world at some given latitude; and whether or not there were lands or islands on the way. As for the distance, the shortest possibility was advanced by Marinus of Tyre, and this figure was accepted by Paolo Toscanelli of Florence, an aged cosmographer, who had been approached by the Portuguese and with whom Columbus had exchanged letters. Toscanelli thought Columbuss project feasible, but does not appear to have respected his learning. However, he sent him a map, which Columbus undoubtedly carried and consulted. Indeed, we find him discussing it with the captain of one of his caravels, Martin Alonso Pinzn, when he was already in the latitude of the Indies on his first voyage.

Columbuss theories were more rigid and even more optimistic than Toscanellis. He mentally fixed the distance between Portugal and Chipangu Qapan) at 2,760 miles. The actual distance is 12,000. We can no more accept Hernando Colons claim that his father was a man of education than that he was of noble descent.

In relation to the possible islands lying between Spain and China, of which he was granted the governorship by the Catholic sovereigns at Granada before his first voyage, Columbus was equally credulous. There were many stories of islands lying out in the Atlantic - Antilla, Brasil, St Brendans Isle - which were either pure inventions or sailors tales of cloud banks or ice-floes. In Ireland, the Azores, the Canaries and the Cape Verde Islands there were stories of lands to be seen on clear days to the west, but the only western lands that had been visited - Greenland, Labrador and Newfoundland, which had been colonized by the Vikings - were not mentioned in any of Columbuss letters or notes. The Danes, with a Portuguese pilot aboard, had actually revisited Labrador only fifteen years before he landed in the Bahamas. But having visited Iceland, on a trading voyage, Columbus had no interest in the discovery of more frozen wastes. His goal was the rich lands described by Marco Polo and the romantic Sir John Mandeville, lands flowing with gold and spices and eager to be awakened to the true faith.