Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [37]
Add to that enticing tale reports of rafts, described as “Indian canoes with houses on board,” and the entire world seemed to invite discovery and speculation. These random floating objects were as strange and enigmatic as meteorites from distant worlds touching down to earth. Something strange was out there. “All such tales certainly fanned the flames of Christopher Columbus’s interest in the whole business,” Las Casas remarked, “and they show God nudging him along in the same direction.” It took one incident in particular, the “clinching factor,” as Las Casas put it, and forever after the subject of controversy, to crystallize in Columbus’s mind. It began with a vessel from Spain bound for Flanders or possibly England, being violently blown off course, as if in a fairy tale or in a nightmare, and discovering an island.
The crew barely survived the ordeal, only to perish on the way home to Spain. “Most of them died of hunger and disease brought on by overwork and the few that survived as far as the island of Madeira were ill when they arrived and all soon died there.” Columbus “got wind of the whole incident from the poor wretches who made it back to Madeira or from the pilot himself.” The story goes that he might have invited the pilot to stay with him, and be debriefed, until he expired within the walls of Columbus’s dwelling. Before the end, the pilot supposedly gave his host a “detailed account of everything that had happened and left him a written record of the bearings the vessel had followed, the route they had taken, the distances they had covered, the degrees of longitude and latitude involved, and the exact place they had found the island.” Given the impossibility of determining longitude at the time, the “exact place” of the island was highly questionable.
One of the most persuasive accounts of distant lands came from the pen of “Master Paolo,” a Florentine physician, who maintained an extensive network of correspondence with informed sources in the Portuguese court. Learning of these bulletins, Columbus cultivated the physician by sending a globe through a Florentine intermediary, Lorenzo Girardi, who lived in Lisbon. After passing along this tangible symbol of exploration, Columbus announced his own grand scheme for exploration and trade in precious items such as spices. Impressed, Master Paolo replied in Latin with a summary of his knowledge of China and its riches, which advanced Columbus’s understanding of the fabled land from an emerging global perspective. “Do not marvel at my characterizing the region as ‘the West,’” he counseled Columbus, “when these lands are commonly known as ‘the East,’ for any man who sails westward will always find these lands to the west, just as he who sets out overland to the east will find them in the east.” And he included a chart illustrating what he meant.
Master Paolo expounded on China and its numerous merchants. “There are as many ships, seamen, and merchants in the area as in any other part of the world.” In the city of “Zaiton,” by which he probably meant Hangzhou, the wealthy capital of southern China, “every year a hundred large ships load and unload their cargoes of pepper, not to mention the many others that carry spices of other lands.” He also informed Columbus of a “sovereign known as the Grand Khan, a name which in our own tongue”—Italian—“means king of kings.” The ancestors of this Khan, Paolo recounted, “greatly desired to have contact and dealings with Christians, and, some two hundred years ago, sent an embassy to the Holy Father asking him to send them a large