In short, the Turks were now expanding all around the Mediterranean, and strangling trade. There had even been a point when they commanded the gateway to the Mediterranean itself, a North African town called Ceuta which looked across the narrow Strait of Gibraltar. If the Turks had been – like the Arabs before them – willing to exchange ideas and trade, it would have made no serious difference; but they seemed to be particularly difficult and bloody-minded – for centuries afterwards, the phrase ‘to play the Turk’ meant to behave with stupid ferocity, like a dog in a manger.
So in 1415 the Portuguese sent an expedition against Ceuta. Portugal was a young country which had been founded by commoners during the second crusade. It had a fairly small population and a long sea coast, and it was natural they should become sea traders. Ceuta threatened its livelihood. King John of Portugal sent his son, Prince Henry, with a fleet of ships, and they were lucky enough to be driven by favourable winds and to take the Turks by surprise. Prince Henry sank their fleet, then systematically destroyed Ceuta. Now, at least, European merchants could come and go as they pleased into the Mediterranean.
But the Turks continued to play the Turk, and to block the overland trade routes to the east – to Persia, India and China. And since the Europeans of the fifteenth century had developed a taste for silks and spices, this was disastrous. They had discovered that spices would preserve meat through the long winter, and leave behind a rather more interesting taste than salt. They also believed – quite erroneously – that the smell of spices could prevent the plague, and every nobleman carried an orange stuck with cloves of cinnamon to sniff when he had to walk through a slum quarter. The east was full of cheap spices. But the Turks blocked the route, or charged such enormous duties that it was not worth the long journey.
Europe had still not forgotten Prester John, that great Christian monarch who lived somewhere on the other side of the Turks. If they could find a direct sea route to his lands, the problem would be solved. But no one had any idea of whether such a route existed.
The Portuguese had sailed down the west coast of Africa for a thousand miles or so, to Cape Bojador, south of the Canaries; but there the water turned white and looked very dangerous – it was culled the Boiling Sea. No one had ventured farther south than that.
Fortunately, Prince Henry of Portugal had money to spare, since he was the Grand Master of the Order of Christ, which had replaced the Templars. He hired map-makers, navigators and ship-designers, and opened a school to train sailors for long-distance exploration. This problem of the sea route to the realm of Prester John became his obsession, so that he earned himself the title of Henry the Navigator. In fact, all his navigating was done from an armchair – he had no desire to risk his own life. His shipwrights built a new type of vessel called a caravel, designed for the open sea instead of (like most ships of his time) the Mediterranean. And in 1427 his caravels sailed out into the Atlantic nearly eight hundred miles from the shores of Portugal. They discovered the islands called the Azores, and Portuguese settlers were soon on their way there.
Cape Bojador still remained a barrier to the south. In 1433, the sailors on a caravel refused to venture into the Boiling Sea, and turned back. Henry, from his armchair, insisted that they had nothing to be afraid of; the boiling seas were probably due to shallows, and all they had to do was to sail out into the ocean and round them. He proved to be correct; the following year, the same ship sailed beyond Cape Bojador and landed on the other side. The sailors found a pleasant land with vines and flowering plants and took samples back to Portugal. Soon Henry’s ships were exploring the coast of Africa and setting up trading posts.
Henry the Navigator died in 1460, his dream of finding the route to India still unrealised. Twenty-eight years later, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope. His successor, Vasco da Gama, reached the mouth of the Zambesi and discovered that the Arabs had preceded him by the overland route. But an Arab pilot guided him across to Calicut, in India. When he finally returned home, he had lost three-quarters of his men from scurvy and several of his ships. The Portuguese sent warships to deal with the hostile Arabs and built trading posts all round the coast of Africa.
Meanwhile, a Genoese adventurer named Christopher Columbus had also been in Portugal trying to raise money for his own pet project – finding a way to China and India by sailing west across the Ocean Sea (as the Atlantic was then called). The Portuguese turned him away and he took his project to Spain. Here his luck improved when the Spanish queen, Isabella, became his patroness. Delays were interminable; it was six years before he was ready to start. But on the morning of 3 August 1492, the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina sailed from Palos.
According to the maps of that time, the island of Japan (Zipangn) should be due west of the Canaries, so Columbus began by turning south, then west. Luck had taken him in the right direction – into the north-west winds that roared up the coast of Africa. For weeks, these winds carried them into the Atlantic. The sailors became increasingly nervous – some believed they might fall off the edge of the world. Columbus kept two log books, one showing the real distance and the other a greatly reduced distance, to keep his officers quiet. But when the crew threatened mutiny, he had to promise that if there was no land within three days they would return to Spain.
On the third day – 11 October – a branch with green leaves drifted past the ship. By mid morning of the following day, the delighted sailors were splashing ashore towards a group of naked human beings who looked at them curiously. Columbus had landed on one of the Bahamas; he called it San Salvador. He went on to discover Haiti and Cuba. Then, leaving behind a colony to search for gold, he sailed back to Spain. The total voyage had taken seven months. Columbus was received like a hero and loaded with honours and riches. Yet it is typical of him that he also claimed the large reward that was supposed to go to the first sailor who sighted land. The persistence that enabled Columbus to discover America was partly the sheer manic obsessiveness of the typical Right Man. It was to be responsible for most of his later misfortunes.
When the second ship, the Pinta, arrived back in Palos, it brought a rather more dubious gift to the old world – a sexual disease that the captain, Martin Pinzon, had picked up from a native woman. It was called syphilis, and within ten years had spread all over the ports of Europe and the near east – an ironic testimony to how far communications had improved.
Columbus made three more voyages – on the third of which he discovered the mainland of America, landing at the place now called Colon on the Isthmus of Panama. But the remainder of his life was something of an anticlimax. His arrogance and stubbornness caused endless trouble, and at one point he was loaded with chains and sent back to Spain. Totally blind to his own shortcomings, he remained convinced that he was a misunderstood saint. He died, exhausted and embittered, at the age of fifty-five.
Absurdly enough Columbus was quite unaware that he had discovered a new land; he thought he had landed in Asia. It was an Italian scholar named Pietro Martire who made a calculation based on the size of the earth (which Eratosthenes had worked out) and realised that Columbus had found an unknown continent – which he christened the New World. Another explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, who crossed the Atlantic soon after Columbus, gave his name to the new continent: America. On a map of 1507, ‘America’ was shown as a curiously shaped island about a quarter the size of Africa.
Many of these early explorers lost their lives. John Cabot, who explored the coast of north America, vanished with his whole fleet somewhere in the Atlantic; Ponce de Leon, who discovered Florida, was killed by an Indian arrow; Vasco Nunez de Balboa, who crossed Panama and saw the Pacific, survived hostile Indians to be executed by a governor sent out from Spain; Juan Dia de Solis was killed by hostile natives after discovering the River Plate; and Fernando Magellan, who is credited with the first circumnavigation of the globe, never actually completed the two-year voyage (1519-21); he tried to convert the natives of the Philippines to Christianity by pointing guns at them and was killed.