Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

In 1498 the work of exploration begun by Diaz was completed by another famous navigator, Vasco da Gama. National hopes of wealth and glory were centred in his task, and when he and his company marched forth to their ships a large crowd went with them to the shore, carrying candles, and singing a solemn litany. Then the sails of his four vessels dipped below the horizon and were not seen for two years and eight months, but when at last men and women had begun to despair at the great silence, their hero reappeared amongst them, bringing news more wonderful and glorious than anything that Portugal had dared to hope.

There is little space to tell in this chapter the adventures that Vasco da Gama related to the King and his court. He and his crews, it seemed, had sailed for weeks amid ‘a lonely dreary waste of seas and boundless sky’: they had skirmished with Hottentots and ‘doubled the Cape’, caught in such a whirl of breakers and stormy winds that the walls of the wooden ships had oozed water, and despair and sickness had seized upon all. Vasco da Gama, even when ill and depressed, was not to be turned from his purpose. Eastwards and northwards he set his sails, in the teeth of laments and threats from his sailors, and so on Christmas Day landed on a part of the coast to which in memory of the most famous Dies Natalis he gave the name of Natal.

From Natal, battling the dread disease of scurvy brought on by a prolonged diet of salt meat, the Portuguese commander pursued his way, attacked, as often as he landed for water and fresh food, by fierce Mahometan tribes, until at last, guided by an Arabian pilot whom he had picked up, he came to the harbours of Calicut in India, where was a Christian king. The new route to Asia had been discovered. ‘A lucky venture—plenty of emeralds.... You owe great thanks to God for having brought you to a country holding such riches,’ declared the natives, and loud was the rejoicing of the Portuguese at this glorious national prospect.

The likely effects of Vasco da Gama’s voyage did not pass unnoticed elsewhere in Europe. ‘Soon,’ exclaimed a Venetian merchant in deep gloom, ‘it will be cheaper to buy goods in Lisbon than in Venice.’ The death-knell of the great Republic’s commercial prosperity sounded in these words.

Christopher Columbus

In the meanwhile, some years before Vasco da Gama’s triumphant achievement, a still greater discovery was made that was destined in the course of time to change the whole commercial aspect of the world. Its author was a Genoese sailor, Christopher Columbus, who, tradition says, once sailed as far north as Iceland, and in the south to the island of Porto Santo. Always in his spare time he could be found bent over maps and charts, calculating, weaving around his reasoned mathematical arguments the tales of shipwrecked mariners, until at last he brought to the ears of his astonished fellow men and women a scheme for finding Cathay, neither by sailing south nor east, but due west across the Atlantic.

Here is a fourteenth-century description of the Atlantic, a dismal picture still popularly accepted in the fifteenth: ‘A vast and boundless ocean on which ships dared not venture out of sight of land. For even if sailors knew the directions of the winds they would not know whither those winds would carry them; and, as there is no inhabited country beyond, they would run great risks of being lost in the mist and vapour. The limit of the west is the Atlantic Ocean.’

Many people still believed that the world was flat, and that to sail across the Atlantic was to incur the risk of being driven by the winds over the edge into space. Thus Columbus met with either reproof for contemplating such risks, or ridicule for his folly, but so convinced was he of his own wisdom that he only grew the more enthusiastic as a result of opposition.

Without money or royal patronage he could not hope to make the voyage a success, and so he laid his scheme before the King of Portugal, usually a willing patron of adventure. Unfortunately for Columbus, the discoveries along the African coast promised such wealth and trade to Portugal that her ruler did not feel inclined to take risks in other directions that, while they must involve expense, as yet held no guarantee of repayment.

‘I went to take refuge in Portugal,’ wrote Columbus at a later date, ‘since the King of that country was more versed in discovery than any other, but ... in fourteen years I could not make him understand what I said.’ Driven at last from Portugal by a decided refusal, Christopher went to Spain, sending his brother Bartholomew with a letter explaining his project to King Henry VII of England. It is interesting to note that the keen-witted Tudor, as soon as the scheme was laid before him, is said to have expressed his readiness to learn more and to lend his support; but Bartholomew had been shipwrecked on his voyage northwards, and owing to this delay Columbus had already received the patronage of Spain and set out on his voyage before his brother returned with the news.