Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Author:Felipe Fernández-Armesto [Fernández-Armesto, Felipe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2007-10-16T21:00:00+00:00

Juan Vespucci’s Planisphere, 1526, detail. The map exemplifies, and perhaps fortified, belief in a narrow New World and a passage through it from the northwest Atlantic

Verrazano discovered, by his own account, ‘a new land, never before seen by anyone, ancient or modern’—implicitly excepting the people who lived there. The land blocked the site of the expected passage to Asia. He tried to make up for the disappointment by some rather unconvincing promotional writing. The land was ‘adorned and clothed’ with useful trees. It ‘partook of the nature of the Orient.’ It was full of hospitable people, at least at intervals. It looked as if it had gold, ‘to which land of such appearance has every disposition.’ It was full of game. Verrazano established the existence of a continuous coastline. He also initiated a new myth: that North America was a narrow continent and that the Pacific lapped it, at its closest point, only a short way from the eastern shore of the continent. Rounding Cape Lookout, he claimed to be off an isthmus only a mile wide, ‘where from the ship we could see the Oriental Sea . . . which, no doubt, surrounds the shores of India, China and Cathay.’ Presumably, the shallow islets of the Carolina Outer Banks deluded him.33

Meanwhile, the king of Spain sent an expedition under yet another Portuguese renegade, Estevão Gomes, who had accompanied and deserted Magellan, to ‘go and explore eastern Cathay as far as our island of Maluco.’ Gomes reported no way through between Cape Breton and Florida, which was well known, about as far north as Cape Fear, from Ponce’s efforts and those of failed colonizing ventures that followed in his wake.

The only remaining prospect of a short sea route from Europe to Asia now lay in the far north, through the abominable hazards of icy Arctic waters. In the years after John Cabot’s voyages,34 Portuguese reconnaissances of the coasts of Labrador, Newfoundland, and, perhaps, Nova Scotia had impressed mapmakers, but not backers of further voyages, except in England, which was the realm best placed for access to these bleak lands and deceptive waters. Robert Thorne, merchant of Bristol, whose father had been among John Cabot’s financiers, made the point in a petition he addressed to Henry VIII of England in 1527. To reconnoiter the ‘north parts . . . is only your charge and duty.’ Thorne subscribed to a theory widely espoused at the time and inherited from late medieval geographers: that the Arctic Ocean was navigable and traversable via the North Pole. One of the sources cited by sixteenth-century cartographers in support of the theory was the now lost work of a fourteenth-century English friar, recounting his voyages to the Pole.35 This was an unfortunate basis on which to begin the task of Arctic exploration. John Rut, sent to put the theory to the test in 1527, turned back at about the fifty-third parallel for fear of ice.

The English assault on the Northwest Passage began in earnest only in the 1570s, when English envy of Spain and Portugal became acute.

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