Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 43

It seems to have been the apprehension of the Portuguese, if we may trust this letter, that the new coast lay directly in the route to the Cape of Good Hope, though on the right hand.

[Sidenote: Cabral at Calicut, September 13, 1500.]

Leaving two banished criminals to seek their chances of life in the country, and to ascertain its products, Cabral set sail on May 22, and proceeded to the Cape of Good Hope. Fearful gales were encountered and four vessels were lost, and his subordinate, Diaz, found an ocean grave off the stormy cape of his own finding. But Calicut was at last reached, September 13.

[Sidenote: Date of Cabral's discovery.]

[Sidenote: His landfall.]

There is a day or two difference in the dates a.s.signed by different authorities for this discovery of Cabral. Ramusio, quoting a pilot of the fleet fourteen months after the event, says April 24, and leading Portuguese historians have followed him; but the letter which Cabral sent back to Portugal, as already related, says April 22. The question would be a trifling one, as Humboldt suggests, except that it bears upon the question of just where this fortuitous landfall was made, involving estimates of distance sailed before Cabral entered the harbor of Porto Seguro. It is probable that this was at a point a hundred and seventy leagues south of the spot reached earlier (January, 1500) by Pinzon and De Lepe. Yet on this point there are some differences of opinion, which are recapitulated by Humboldt.

[Sidenote: Cabral and Pinzon.]

The most impartial critics, however, agree with Humboldt in giving Pinzon the lead, if not to the extent of the forty-eight days before Cabral left Lisbon, as Humboldt contends.

If Barros is correct in his deductions, it was not known on board of Cabral's fleet that Columbus had already discovered in the Paria region what he supposed an extension of the Asiatic main. The first conclusion of the Portuguese naturally was that they had stumbled either on a new group of islands, or perhaps on some outlying members of the group of the Antilles. Of course nothing was known at the time of the discoveries of Pinzon and Lepe.

[Sidenote: The results of the African route.]

It has often been remarked that if Columbus had not sailed in 1492, Cabral would have revealed America in 1500. It is a striking fact that the Portuguese had pursued their quest for India with an intelligence and prescience which geographical truth confirmed. The Spaniards went their way in error, and it took them nearly thirty years to find a route that could bring them where they could defend at the antipodes their rights under the Bull of Demarcation. Columbus sought India and found America without knowing it. Cabral, bound for the Cape of Good Hope, stumbled upon Brazil, and preempted the share of Portugal in the New World as Da Gama has already secured it in Asia. Thus the African route revealed both Cathay and America.

[Sidenote: The Columbus lawsuit.]

[Sidenote: La Cosa's map, 1500.]

For these voyages commingling with those of Columbus along the s.p.a.ces of the Caribbean Sea, we get the best information, all things considered, from the testimonies of the partic.i.p.ants in them, which were rendered in the famous lawsuit which the Crown waged against the heirs of Columbus.

The well-known map of Juan de la Cosa posts us best on the cartographical results of these same voyages up to the summer of 1500.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SKETCH OF LA COSA'S MAP.]

La Cosa was, as Las Casas called him, the best of the pilots then living, and there is a story of his arrogating to himself a superiority to Columbus, even.

As La Cosa returned to Spain with Ojeda in June, 1500, and sailed again in October with Bastidas, this famous map was apparently made in that interval, since it purports in an inscription to have been drafted in 1500. In posting the geographical knowledge which he had acquired up to that date, La Cosa drew upon his own experiences in the voyages which he had already made with Columbus (1493-96), and with Ojeda (1499-1500). It is to be regretted that we have from his pencil no later draft, for his experience in these seas was long and intimate, since he accompanied Bastidas in 1500-2, led expeditions of his own in 1504-6 and 1507-8, and went again with Ojeda in 1509.

La Cosa, indeed, does not seem to have improved his map on any subsequent date, and that he puts down Cape St. Augustine so accurately is another proof of that headland being seen by Pinzon or Lepe in 1500, and that news of its discovery had reached the map makers.

[Sidenote: Objections to La Cosa's map.]

The objections to La Cosa's map as a source of historical information have been that (1) he gives an incorrect shape to Cuba, and makes it an island eight years before Ocampo sailed around it; and that (2) he gives an unrecognizable coast northward from where the Gulf of Mexico should be. Henry Stevens, in his _Historical and Geographical Notes_, undertakes to answer these objections.

[Sidenote: Insularity of Cuba.]

First, Stevens reverts to the belief of La Cosa that he did not imagine Cuba to be an island, because no one ever knew of an island 335 leagues long, as Columbus and he, sailing along its southern side, had found it to be, taking the distance they had gone rather than the true limits.

Stevens depends much on the belief of Columbus that the bay of islands which he fancied himself within, when he turned back, was the Gulf of Ganges,--supposing that Peter Martyr quoted Columbus, when he wrote to that effect in August, 1495. If Varnhagen is correct in his routes of Vespucius, that navigator, in 1497, making the circuit of the Gulf of Mexico, had established the insularity of Cuba. Few modern scholars, it is fair to say, accept Varnhagen's theories. It became a question, after Humboldt had made the La Cosa chart public in 1833, how its maker had got the information of the insularity of Cuba. Humboldt was convinced that though a "complacent witness" to Columbus's ridiculous notarial transaction during his second voyage, La Cosa had dared to tell the truth, even at the small risk of having his tongue pulled out.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RIBERO'S ANTILLES, 1529.]

The Admiral's belief, bolstered after his own fas.h.i.+on by suborning his crew, was far from being accepted by all.

Peter Martyr not long afterward voiced the hesitancy which was growing.

It was beginning to be believed that the earth was larger than Columbus thought, and that his discoveries had not taken him as far as Cathay.

Every new report veered the vane on this old gossiper's steeple, and he went on believing one day and disbelieving the next.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WYTFLIET'S CUBA.]

We may perhaps question now if the official promulgation of the Cuban circ.u.mnavigation by Sebastian Ocampo in 1508 was much more than the Spanish acknowledgment of its insularity, when they could no longer deny it. Henry Stevens has claimed to put La Cosa's island of Cuba in accord with Columbus, or at least partly so. He finds this western limit of Cuba on the La Cosa map drawn with "a dash of green paint," which he holds to be a color used to define unknown coasts. He studied the map in Jomard's colored facsimile, and trusted it, not having examined the original to this end,--though he had apparently seen it in the Paris auction-room in 1853, when, as a compet.i.tor, he had run up the price which the Spanish government paid for it. He says that the same green emblem of unknown lands is also placed upon the coast of Asia, where a peninsular Cuba would have joined it. He seems to forget that he should have found, to support his theory, a gap rather than a supposable coast, and should rather have pointed to the vignette of St. Christopher as affording that gap.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WYTFLIET'S CUBA.]

Ruysch in 1507 marked in his map this unknown western limit with a conventional scroll, while he made his north coast not unlike the Asiatic coast of Mauro (1457) and Behaim (1492), and with no gap.

Stevens also interprets the St. Die map of 1508-13 as showing this peninsular Cuba in what is there placed as the main, with a duplicated insular Cuba in what is called Isabella. The warrant for this supposition is the transfer under disguises of the La Cosa and Ruysch names of their Cuba to the continental coast of the St. Die map, leaving the "Isabella" entirely devoid of names.

Stevens ventures the opinion that La Cosa may have been on the first voyage of Columbus as well as on the second, and his reason for this is that the north coast of Cuba, which Columbus then coasted, is so correctly drawn; but this opinion ignores the probability, indeed the certainty, that this approximate accuracy could just as well be reached by copying from Columbus's map of that first voyage.

It should be borne in mind, however, that Varnhagen, who had faith in the 1497 voyage of Vespucius as having settled the insular character of Cuba, interprets this St. Die map quite differently, as showing a rudimentary Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi mouth instead of the Gulf of Ganges.

[Sidenote: La Cosa's coast of Asia.]

Second, Stevens grasps the obvious interpretation that La Cosa simply drew in for this northern coast that of Asia as he conceived it. This hardly needs elucidation. But his opinion is not so well grounded that the northern part of this Asiatic coast, where La Cosa intended to improve on the notions which had come from Marco Polo and the rest, is simply the _northern_ coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence as laid down by the explorations of Cabot. If it be taken as giving from Cabot's recitals the trend of the coasts found by him, it seems to show that that navigator knew nothing of the southern entrance of that gulf. This adds further to the uncertainty of what is called the Cabot mappemonde of 1544. That La Cosa intended the coasts of the Cabots' discoveries to belong to inland waters Stevens thinks is implied by the sea thereabouts being called _Mar_ instead of _Mar ocea.n.u.s_. It is difficult to see the force of these supplemental views of Stevens, and to look upon the drawing of La Cosa in this northern region as other than Asia modified vaguely by the salient points of the outer coast lines as glimpsed by Cabot.

If the Spanish envoy in England carried out his intention of sending a copy of Cabot's chart to Spain, it could hardly have escaped falling into the hands of La Cosa. We have already mentioned the chance of John Cabot having visited the peninsula in the interval between his two voyages.

[Sidenote: Columbus and the Cabot voyages.]

The chief ground for believing that Columbus ever heard of the voyages of the Cabots--for there is no plain statement that he did--is that we know how La Cosa had knowledge of them; and that upon his map the vignette of St. Christopher bearing the infant Christ may possibly have been, as it has sometimes been held to be, a direct reference to La Cosa's commander, who may be supposed in that case to have been acquainted with the compliment paid him, and consequently with the map's record of the Cabots.

[Sidenote: The Cantino map.]

Whether La Cosa understood the natives better than Columbus, or whether he had information of which we have no record, it is certain that within two years rumor or fact brought it to the knowledge of the Portuguese that the westerly end of Cuba lay contiguous to a continental sh.o.r.e, stretching to the north, in much the position of the eastern seaboard of the United States. This is manifest from the Cantino map, which was sent from Lisbon to Italy before November, 1502, and which prefigured the so-called Admiral's map of the Ptolemy of 1513. There will be occasion to discuss later the over-confident dictum of Stevens that this supposed North American coast was simply a duplicated Cuba, turned north and south, and stretching from a warm region, as the Spaniards knew it, well up into the frozen north. Cosa's map seems to have exerted little or no influence on the earliest printed maps of the New World, and in this it differs from the Cantino map.

[Sidenote: Minor expeditions.]

We know not what unexpected developments may further have sprung from obscure and furtive explorations, which were now beginning to be common, and of which the record is often nothing more than an inference. Stories of gold and pearls were great incentives. The age was full of a spirit of private adventure. The voyages of Ojeda, Nino, and Pinzon were but the more conspicuous.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE DEGRADATION AND DISHEARTENMENT OF COLUMBUS.

1500.