Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [72]
His captains included bureaucrats and political leaders. Alonso Sánchez de Carvajal, for example, was the mayor of Baeza rather than an experienced mariner. Another participant, Pedro de Las Casas, was the father of Bartolomé de Las Casas, who had observed Columbus’s return to Seville after the first voyage. (It is believed that Bartolomé’s grandfather, Diego Calderón, was Jewish and had been burned at the stake in Seville in 1491.) Three of Bartolomé de Las Casas’s uncles were also on board, ensuring strong familial ties to Columbus.
Although the fleet’s physician, Diego Alvarez Chanca, had treated Queen Isabella, physicians in Spain were rarely revered, but he enjoyed Columbus’s trust and was considered one of the better-qualified medical practitioners in the land. Of all those on board the ships with Columbus, Chanca was among the best educated. If not quite brilliant, he showed himself to be reasonably thoughtful and resourceful in the journal of the voyage that he maintained.
Two other members of the fleet’s roster went on to win renown. The chart maker, Juan de la Cosa, aboard Maríagalante, had sailed on the first voyage as the owner and master of Santa María, Columbus’s flagship, and he would sail with Columbus on the third voyage; after that, he went to sea with Columbus’s sometime rival Amerigo Vespucci. Juan de la Cosa fashioned the celebrated Mappa Mundi of 1500, considered the first European cartographic representation of the New World, and the sole surviving map of Columbus’ voyages made by a participant. (His map is on display at the Museo Naval in Madrid.)
Then there was the charming and ambitious soldier of fortune, Juan Ponce de León, who later rose to become the first governor of Puerto Rico, by order of the Spanish government. Only eleven years after participating as a gentleman passenger on the second voyage, he financed his own expedition, a feat that not even Columbus at the height of his influence managed to accomplish. On April 2, 1513, Ponce de León would encounter a landmass he took to be an island. He called it La Florida because of its luxuriant foliage, and because it was Eastertide, observed in Spain as Pascua Florida, Festival of Flowers. He had landed somewhere in North America, and that alone was a significant accomplishment. Columbus, in all his voyaging, never touched, and never even knew, that a North American landmass existed.
While Columbus prospered, King João II of Portugal feverishly tried to reverse the papal decree, which threatened to diminish or even extinguish the Lusitanian empire. A unified Spain could abide without the resources of an overseas empire, but tiny, underpopulated Portugal required its colonies’ assets for survival. After enduring threats of naval action and pleas for Iberian cooperation for a year, João II cajoled Ferdinand and Isabella to send representatives to a summit conference in Tordesillas, Spain, on June 7, 1494, where a treaty between the two sovereign powers shifted the line of demarcation to 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, although this refinement opened the door to further confusion. Where was the line itself—in the middle of the islands, at the western edge? No one could say with certainty. Moreover, the size of the globe was badly misunderstood, so even if everyone came to an agreement on the line’s theoretical location, no one could actually find this geographical unicorn.
What seemed merely a technical victory for Portugal turned out to be critical. The alteration meant that ships flying the flag were permitted to ply trade routes along the west coast of Africa. Still more important and less appreciated, the redrawn line of demarcation gave to Portugal the immense, fertile, and largely unexplored land of Brazil.
But for now, the new order favored Spain’s emergent empire. It was said that Columbus had personally influenced the pope’s thinking, and he was duty-bound to follow up on it. He was already forty-three, an advanced age for a mariner, and