A History of Sea Power

by William Oliver Stevens; Allan F. Westcott

Alfonso d'Albuquerque, greatest of the Portuguese conquistadores, succeeded Almeida in 1509. Establishing headquarters in a central position at Goa, he sent a fleet eastward to Malacca, where he set up a fort and factory, and later fitted out expeditions against Ormuz and Aden, the two strongholds protecting respectively the entrances to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. The attack on Aden failed, but Ormuz fell in 1515. Albuquerque died in the same year and was buried in his capital at Goa. His successor opened trade and founded factories in Ceylon. In 1526 a trading post was established at Hugli, near the mouth of the Ganges. Ormuz became a center for the Persian trade, Malacca for trade with Java, Sumatra, and the Spice Islands. A Portuguese envoy, Fernam de Andrada, reached Canton in 1517—in the first European ship to enter Chinese waters—and Pekin three years later. Another adventurer named Mendez Pinto spent years in China and in 1548 established a factory near Yokohama, Japan. Brazil, where a squadron under Cabral had touched as early as 1502, was by 1550 a prosperous colony, and in later centuries a chief source of wealth. Mozambique, Mombassa, and Malindi, on the southeastern coast of Africa, were taken and fortified as intermediate bases to protect the route to Asia. The muslins of Bengal, the calicoes of Calicut, the spices from the islands, the pepper of Malabar, the teas and silks of China and Japan, now found their way by direct ocean passage to the Lisbon quays.

A few strips along the African coast, tenuously held by sufferance of the great powers, and bits of territory at Goa, Daman, and Diu in India, are the twentieth century remnants of Portugal's colonial empire. The greater part of it fell away between 1580 and 1640, when Portugal was under Spanish rule. But her own system of colonial administration, or rather exploitation, was if possible worse than Spain's. Her scanty resources of man power were exhausted in colonial warfare. The expulsion of Protestants and Jews deprived her of elements in her population that might have known how to utilize wealth from the colonies to build up home trade and industries. Her situation was too distant from the European markets; and the raw materials landed at Lisbon were transshipped in Dutch bottoms for Amsterdam and Antwerp, which became the true centers of manufacturing and exchange. Cervantes, in 1607, could still speak of Lisbon as the greatest city in Europe,[1] but her greatness was already decaying; and her fate was sealed when Philip of Spain closed her ports to Dutch shipping, and Dutch ships themselves set sail for the east.

[Footnote 1: Persiles and Sigismuda, III, i.]

But the period of Portugal's maritime ascendancy cannot be left without recording, even if in barest outline, the circumnavigation of the globe by Fernão da Magalhães, or Magellan, who, though he made this last voyage of his under the Spanish flag, was Portuguese by birth and had proved his courage and iron resolution under Almeida and Albuquerque in Portugal's eastern campaigns. Seeking a westward passage to the Spice Islands, the five vessels of 75 to 100 tons composing his squadron cleared the mouth of the Guadalquivir on September 20, 1519. They established winter quarters in the last of March at Port St. Julian on the coast of Patagonia. Here, on Easter Sunday, three of his Spanish captains mutinied. Magellan promptly threw a boat's crew armed with cutlasses aboard one of the mutinous ships, killed the leader, and overcame the unruly element in the crew. The two other ships he forced to surrender within 24 hours. One of the guilty captains was beheaded and the other marooned on the coast when the expedition left in September. Five weeks were now spent in the labyrinths of the strait which has since borne the leader's name. "When the capitayne Magalianes," so runs the contemporary English translation of the story of the voyage, "was past the strayght and sawe the way open to the other mayne sea, he was so gladde thereof that for joy the teares fell from his eyes."

He had sworn he would go on if he had to eat the leather from the ships' yards. With three vessels—one had been shipwrecked in the preceding winter and the other deserted in the straits—they set out across the vast unknown expanse of the Pacific. "In three monethes and xx dayes they sailed foure thousande leagues in one goulfe by the sayde sea called Pacificum.... And havying in this tyme consumed all their bysket and other vyttayles, they fell into such necessitie that they were in forced to eate the pouder that remayned thereof being now full of woormes.... Theyre freshe water was also putryfyed and become yellow. They dyd eate skynnes and pieces of lether which were foulded about certeyne great ropes of the shyps." On March 6, 1521, they reached the Ladrones, and ten days later, the Philippines, even these islands having never before been visited by Europeans. Here the leader was killed in a conflict with the natives. One ship was now abandoned, and another was later captured by the Portuguese. Of the five ships that had left Spain with 280 men, a single vessel, "with tackle worn and weather-beaten yards," and 18 gaunt survivors reached home. "It has not," writes the historian John Fiske of this voyage, "the unique historic position of the first voyage of Columbus, which brought together two streams of human life that had been disjoined since the glacial period. But as an achievement in ocean navigation that voyage of Columbus sinks into insignificance beside it.... When we consider the frailness of the ships, the immeasurable extent of the unknown, the mutinies that were prevented or quelled, and the hardships that were endured, we can have no hesitation in speaking of Magellan as the prince of navigators."[1]

[Footnote 1: The Discovery of America, Vol. II, p. 210.]

2. SPAIN AND THE NEW WORLD

It is generally taken for granted that the great movement of the Renaissance, which spread through western Europe in the 15th and the 16th centuries, quickening men's interest in the world about them rather than the world to come, and inspiring them with an eagerness and a confident belief in their own power to explore its hidden secrets, was among the forces which brought about the great geographical discoveries of the period. Its influence in this direction is evident enough in England and elsewhere later on; but, judging by the difficulties of Columbus in securing support, it was not in his time potent with those in control of government policy and government funds. The Italian navigator John Cabot and his son Sebastian made their voyages from England in 1498 and 1500 with very feeble support from Henry VII, though it was upon their discoveries that England later based her American claims. Even in Spain there seems to have been little eagerness to emulate the methods by which her neighbor Portugal had so rapidly risen to wealth and power.

But the influence of revived classical information on geographical matters was keenly felt; and the idea of a direct westerly passage to India was suggested, not only by Portugal's monopoly of the Cape route, but by classical authority, generally accepted by the best geographers of the time. The Imago Mundi of 1410, already mentioned, embodying Roger Bacon's arguments that the Atlantic washed the shores of Asia and that the voyage thither was not long, was a book carefully studied by Columbus. Paul Toscanelli, a Florentine physicist and astronomer, adopting and developing this theory, sent in 1474 to Alfonso V of Portugal a map of the world in which he demonstrated the possibilities of the western route. The distance round the earth at the equator he estimated almost exactly to be 24,780 statute miles, and in the latitude of Lisbon 19,500 miles; but he so exaggerated the extent of Europe and Asia as to reduce the distance between them by an Atlantic voyage to about 6500 miles, putting the east coast of China in about the longitude of Oregon. This distance he still further shortened by locating Cipango (Japan) far to the eastward of Asia, in about the latitude of the Canary Islands and distant from them only 3250 miles.

With all these opinions Columbus was familiar, for the list of his library and the annotations still preserved in his own handwriting, show that he was not an ignorant sailor, nor yet a wild visionary, but prepared by closest study for the task to which he gave his later years. His earlier career, on the other hand, had supplied him with abundant practical knowledge. Born in Genoa, a mother city of great seamen, probably in the year 1436, he had received a fair education in Latin, geography, astronomy, drafting, and other subjects useful to the master-mariner of those days. He had sailed the Mediterranean, and prior to his great adventure, had been as far north as Iceland, and on many voyages down the African coast. Following his brother Bartholomew, who was a map-maker in the Portuguese service, he came about 1470 to Lisbon, even then a center of geographical knowledge and maritime activity. Probably as early as this time the idea of a western voyage was in his mind.