The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World by Paine Lincoln

Author:Paine, Lincoln [Paine, Lincoln]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307962256
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-28T22:00:00+00:00

Christopher Columbus

The exploratory activity on the Atlantic had attracted any number of ambitious mariners, one of whom, the Genoese-born Christopher Columbus, conceived a bold plan “that he would sail south and west, discovering great stretches of highly fertile land, both islands and terra firma, all extremely rich in gold and silver, pearls and precious stones and teeming peoples; and that, sailing in this direction, he would eventually come to the land of India, with the noble island of Cipangu [Japan] and the realms of the Grand Khan.” He was not the first to believe such a voyage was possible, and one can say with complete candor that he failed: Columbus underestimated the size of the earth; he did not reach Asia; and he did not tap into the great spiceries of the Orient. None of this diminishes his epochal accomplishment in establishing an unbroken link between Eurasia and Africa in the east and the Americas in the west. If he excelled his contemporaries, it was not necessarily in navigational ability or intuition, but in his persistent vision and relentless pursuit of the financial and political support without which the honor of bridging the Atlantic would have fallen to another.

Born in the mid-fifteenth century, Columbus served his apprenticeship in the Ligurian and Tyrrhenian Seas and seems to have sailed into the Atlantic for the first time in his early twenties. By 1476 he was based in Lisbon, where he married Filipa Moniz, whose father, Bartolomeo Perestrello, was the son of an Italian merchant in Lisbon and had been raised in the household of Dom Henrique. A participant in the expedition sent to claim the Madeiras, Perestrello was rewarded with the governorship of the island of Porto Santo, where he settled in 1446. Although he died twenty years before his daughter’s marriage, Filipa’s dowry seems to have included his personal papers, including sailing instructions and portolan charts for the Atlantic. According to Columbus’s biographer, Bartolomé de Las Casas, in Perestrello’s day

the world was buzzing with all sorts of discoveries that were being made along the Guinea coast and among the islands of the Atlantic, and Bartolomeu Perestrelo hoped to make some discoveries of his own using Porto Santo as his base. Such discoveries were indeed forthcoming … and it must therefore have been the case that Bartolomeu Perestrelo had in his possession instruments, documents, and navigation charts and that these were given to Christopher Columbus by his mother-in-law. He took great delight in contemplating these and it is believed that this gift … led him to inquire further into the practice and lessons to be drawn from the experience of the Portuguese in making sea-voyages to Mina del Oro [Elmina] and the Guinea coast where the Portuguese were … busily employed.

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