From Poison Arrows to Prozac. Stanley Feldman
– and from the southern coastal areas of India and Serendip (Sri Lanka). At its source in these countries a bale of pepper would cost less than one guinea (£1.05) but, by the time it reached the shops in London, it would sell for more than a hundred times that amount. This was due to the long and hazardous journey necessary to bring the spices to Europe.
Originally, most of the spices travelled by the Silk Route across Asia to Constantinople (Istanbul), but this route, largely exploited by the traders from the Republic of Venice, became increasingly difficult after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Caliphate. The alternative route started in the Orient, where bales of spices were loaded onto boats and carried by Arab traders across the Red Sea. They then travelled overland to the ports of the Mediterranean, such as Alexandria. A large part of this land route was controlled by Arab warlords, who either extracted a toll or required a duty to be paid when goods passed through their lands.
There was a particularly sharp rise in the price of all the spices following the fall of Egypt to the Ottoman Empire in 1453. This gave them control of the all the Mediterranean ports of the Levant and Egypt. The problem was made worse because at this time the Ottoman Empire was at war with Catholic Europe.
Christopher Columbus
By the middle of the fifteenth century only the very wealthy could afford to use spices. Their use became restricted to great banquets and grand occasions. Because of the increase in demand, there was considerable commercial interest in finding an alternative way of bringing these spices from the Orient to Europe. This caused an upsurge of interest in the possibility of finding a sea route from Europe to the Indies and the Far East.
It resulted in some of the great voyages of exploration that took place at this time. It led Henry, King of Portugal, to establish a school of navigation at Cape St Vincent, the most westerly point of the European continent, to train sailors and to encourage exploration of the coast of Africa in the hope of finding a way to the Indies and the Spice Islands.
In the early part of the fifteenth century, Portuguese and Spanish sailors sailed down the coast of Africa in the hope of finding a way around this seemingly endless land mass. They also voyaged across the Atlantic as far as Madeira and the Canary Islands, where they established colonies. In 1488, Bartholomew Diaz, a Portuguese explorer, returned to Lisbon having found the southernmost tip of the African continent. His rapturous reception was not only a tribute to his navigational skills but also recognition of the commercial implications of his voyage. It opened up the possibility of an alternative route to the Spice Islands by sailing round the Cape of Good Hope and to the East. It eventually led to the voyage of Vasco de Gama in 1499 and the establishment of a Portuguese colony in Goa, India, in 1510.
It would not have been at all surprising if the Genoese sailor Christopher Columbus had been dockside in Lisbon when Bartholomew Diaz returned home in 1488. At the time of Diaz’s voyage, Columbus had left his native country and settled with his wife and children in Lisbon, where, together with his brother Batholomew, he earned his living as a map maker. He no doubt listened carefully to the accounts of the voyages made by these early explorers and incorporated the information gleaned from their stories into his maps.
There is little doubt that most navigators at the time realised that the world was a sphere, but they had little idea of distances involved or the land masses that existed. Many believed that there was open sea between Europe and Asia, and sailing to the West from Europe would land them in Asia and the East Indies. This view was the result of the writings of Ptolemy, who considered half the surface of the world to be covered with water and the other to be composed of the land mass of Europe and Asia. (Fig 1)
Columbus became convinced, after studying the maps available at that time and listening to the tales told by sailors returning to Lisbon, that it would be possible to reach the East Indies by sailing some 2,400 miles to the West across the Ocean Sea, as the Atlantic was known. He came to this conclusion from calculations based on the erroneous notion prevalent at the time, that the sphere of the Earth was 25,255 kilometres in diameter. He concluded that the 2,400 miles to the Indies was ‘not too great a space to be passed’ and that such a voyage ‘has become not only possible but certain, fraught with inestimable hazard and gain and most lofty among Christians’. The problem he faced was mainly one of logistics: how to carry sufficient water and food for such a long time at sea.
In his opinion, presented in his numerous petitions to the Spanish and Portuguese courts for royal patronage, he argued that this would be no further than sailing to the south around the tip of Africa and then to the East and across the Indian Ocean, and it was likely to prove less hazardous. However, his attempts to interest the Portuguese king in the adventure failed, since he could not persuade the cautious Portuguese that he could overcome the difficulty of carrying sufficient food and water for such a long time at sea.
After the failure of his attempts to obtain royal consent from the Portuguese – who by the latter part of the fifteenth century had established a vested interest in the passage around Africa to the Far East – he turned to Spain. After an initial failure, he finally persuaded King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain to back the venture. It is recorded that this was largely due to the intervention of a converted Jew, Luis de Santangel, who was the keeper of the queen’s purse and who probably drew up the rigorous terms under which royal patronage for the voyage was provided. Certainly, by 1492, when approval was granted, the king needed a source of money as the war to expel the Moors from Grenada and southern Spain had exhausted the treasury. Under the contract that was drawn up, half the cost of the expedition had to borne by the citizens, while the crown provided the rest of the money and received the lion’s share of any bounty.
As dusk fell on the evening of 3 August 1492, Columbus’s fleet of three small ships – the largest one, the Santa Maria, commanded by the newly promoted Admiral of the Oceans, Columbus, and the two caravels, the Pinta and the Niña – set sail from the port of Palos in southern Spain. Their first stop was the Canary Islands, where they obtained fresh food and water before setting out to sail across the ocean.
After five weeks at sea, they eventually sited land at 2 a.m. on 12 October 1492 and anchored off what is probably one of the islands in the Bahamas. They were fortunate in the choice of the time of year they chose to cross the Atlantic. Even today, yachtsmen sailing to the West Indies try to leave from the Canary Islands towards the end of September so as to pick up the favourable westerly winds prevalent at that time of year.
Clearly, it was not purely altruism or even the desire to establish new overseas colonies that persuaded the Spanish crown to support the expedition. The Spanish monarchs needed money to pay for the war against the Moors and the looming wars in Europe. Although this was a high-risk adventure, it promised enormous rewards if a secure route to the Spice Islands could be found by sailing across the Atlantic and spices could be brought to Europe through the ports of Spain.
When the three small caravels made landfall in the Caribbean, Columbus was confident that he had arrived in the East Indies. Even by the time he returned to Spain, he was unaware that he had not landed in the East Indies.
During the time he spent in the Caribbean he made several exploratory trips. On one such voyage he discovered Cuba (Hispaniola) and established a colony there. On his return to Spain, he painted a glowing picture of the fertile and beautiful land he had discovered, whose rivers contained gold and whose mountains were a rich source of minerals. He also suggested that he had evidence of countries that were rich in silver and gold that were a short distance to the west of the land he had found.
The Columbus trail
A combination of missionary zeal and the lure of gold led to further expeditions in the years following Columbus’s return from his first voyage to the New World. Very soon Spanish colonies were established on the island of Hispaniola and at Darien, on the southern end of the Panama isthmus. It was from this latter colony that Hernán Cortés led his expedition to the land of Montezuma and the Aztecs, in what is now Mexico. He sent back gold and silver treasure to King Charles in Spain as evidence of the riches to be found in the New World.
However, it was the exploits