At Home - Bill Bryson [94]
So began the great age of exploration. Christopher Columbus is the best remembered of the early explorers, but he was not the first. In 1487, five years ahead of him, Fernão Dulmo and João Estreito set off from Portugal into the uncharted Atlantic, vowing to turn back after forty days if they hadn’t found anything by then. That was the last anyone ever heard of them. It turned out that finding the right winds to bring one back to Europe wasn’t at all easy.
Columbus’s real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer. It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal South America convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset. He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States. He filled his holds with valueless iron pyrite (thinking it was gold) and with what he confidently believed to be cinnamon and pepper. The first was actually a worthless tree bark, and the second were not true peppers but chili peppers—excellent when you have grasped the general idea of them, but a little eye-wateringly astonishing on first hearty chomp.
Everyone but Columbus could see that this was not the solution to the spice problem, and in 1497 Vasco da Gama, sailing for Portugal, decided to go the other way to the Orient, around the bottom of Africa. This was a much trickier proposition than it sounds. Contrary prevailing winds and currents wouldn’t allow a southern-sailing vessel to simply follow the coastline, as logic would indicate. Instead it was necessary for Gama to sail far out into the Atlantic Ocean—almost to Brazil, in fact, though he didn’t know it—to catch easterly breezes that would shoot his fleet around the southern cape. This made it a truly epic voyage. Europeans had never sailed this far before. Gama’s ships were out of sight of land for as much as three months at a time. This was the voyage that effectively discovered scurvy. No earlier sea voyages had been long enough for the symptoms of scurvy to take hold.
It also brought two other unhappy traditions to the maritime world. One was the introduction of syphilis to Asia—just five years after Columbus’s men conveyed it to Europe from the Americas—helping make it a truly international disease. The other was the casual infliction of extreme violence on innocent people. Vasco da Gama was a breathtakingly vicious man. On one occasion he captured a Muslim ship carrying hundreds of men, women, and children, locked the passengers and crew in the hold, carried off everything of value, and then—gratuitously, appallingly—set the ship ablaze. Almost everywhere he went, Gama abused or slaughtered people he encountered, and so set a tone of distrust and brutish violence that would characterize and diminish the whole of the age of discovery.
Vasco da Gama never got to the Spice Islands. Like most others, he thought the East Indies were just a little east of India—hence their name, of course—but in fact they proved to be way beyond India, so far beyond that Europeans arriving there began to wonder if they had sailed most of the way around the world and were almost back to the Americas. If so, then a trip to the Indies for spices would be more simply carried out by sailing west, past the new lands lately discovered by Columbus, rather than going all the way around Africa and across the Indian Ocean.