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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
yo e andado veynte y tres años en la mar.y ví todo el levante y poniente,…y e andado la Guinea…
The first world empire (truly one on which the sun never set) was created by the union of the crowns of Portugal and Spain in 1580. If the events immediately leading up to the union were unexpected and contingent, the creation of a global hegemony had been adumbrated nine decades earlier, with the almost simultaneous voyages, to west and to east, of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama. What lay behind these voyages on the parts of Portugal and Spain, and hence the respective claims of these nations to have set in motion the process which led to world empire, form the background theme of this paper.
Concentration on the heroic figures of Vasco da Gama and Columbus has often prevented historians from appreciating the significance of earlier developments. Writers discussing Columbus and the consequent impact of Spain on the Americas regularly fail to lay sufficient weight on the seventy years of previous Portuguese discovery of the coast of Africa, and therefore on the consequent Portuguese grapplings with the political, economic, and moral problems of culture contact and imperial policy in an Outer Continent. Equally, historians of the Portuguese imperial effort, eager to reach the better-evidenced complexities of the Lusitanian contact with Asia, tend to neglect, not only the Portuguese effort in the South Atlantic, but also the rival Castilian effort in the same ocean—an effort that preceded Columbus and paralleled, to some extent, the deeds of Portugal. Yet, within Iberia the two kingdoms, Portugal and Castile (the latter in process of generating the new kingdom of Spain), were in close and involved contact, not least because the territorial shape of each in the 1490s had only been hammered out during the preceding one hundred years. There is thus a strong case for treating the global expansion of Iberia as a single process and not merely as two coincidental thrusts around the globe, ultimately in opposite directions.
1. de Lollis, Cesare, ed., Schitti di Cristoforo Colombo (Rome, 1892), 1/1:71.Google Scholar “I have been to sea twenty-three years … and I have seen all the east and the west … and I have gone to Guinea…”
2. Present-day historians tend to emphasize the separateness of the post-1580 administrations of the Portuguese and Spanish empires. But there was much cooperation in strategy between the two parts of the royal domain, and in the minds of many of the first post-1580 generation in each country the two empires were considered to be one. Thus in the 1580s Gaspar Frutuoso wrote a common history of all the Atlantic Islands, both Spanish and Portuguese. However, the specialization of modern historians of Spain and those of Portugal is such that to date not only have almost no works been produced treating synoptically both of King Philip's kingdoms and empires, but Frutuoso's history has never been published as a whole or in toto.
3. On Columbus as a “wildly consistent” visionary see Cummins, J. S., “Christopher Columbus: Crusader, Visionary and Servus Dei” in Deyermond, A. D., ed., Medieval Hispanic Studies Presented to Rita Hamilton (London, 1976), 45–55Google Scholar, reprinted in Cummins, J. S., Jesuit and Friar in the Spanish Expansion to the East (London, 1986).Google Scholar
4. It has been recently contended that the anecdote relating Columbus' arrival in Portugal to a naval battle is a posthumous invention and that Columbus probably spent more than ten years in Portugal: de Armas, Antonio Rumeu, El “Portugues” Cristobal Colón en Castilla (Madrid, 1982), 60–65.Google Scholar But the argument has been dismissed as unconvincing: Arranz, Luis, ed., Cristobal Colón, Diario de a bordo (Madrid, 1985), 26n31.Google Scholar A document in the archives of Genoa shows that Columbus was in Lisbon at least by mid-1478, working for a Genoese merchant residing there, and that he made a brief visit to Genoa in 1479 after he had been in Madeira buying sugar (La Sala Colombiana dell'Archivio di Stato di Genova: Catalogo, 1978, item 44). I am indebted to D. B. Quinn for presenting me with a copy of this catalog.
5. Morison, S. E., Christopher Columbus: admiral of the Ocean Sea (London, 1942)Google Scholar, cited hereafter as Columbus, an unannotated version of Admiral of the Ocean Sea (2 vols.: Boston, 1942)Google Scholar, cited hereafter as AOS. For a more recent but not dissimilar view of Columbus in Portugal, see Columbus, , Diario, 25–37.Google Scholar On a few details of navigational practice (notably the extent of celestial navigation), Morison's views were challenged by Avelino Teixeira da Mota, who had unrivaled knowledge of the Portuguese nautical background. See “Christopher Columbus and the Portuguese,” Journal of the American Portuguese Cultural Society, 2 (1968), 1¬22Google Scholar; = Colón y los Portugueses (Valladolid, 1975)Google Scholar; = Cristovão Colombo e os Portugueses (Lisbon, 1987).Google Scholar Teixeira da Mota (8-9) summed up the technological context of Columbus' voyages as follows.
Improvements in ship-building, progress in the pilot's art culminating in navigation by the stars, development of nautical map-making leading to the introduction of the scale of latitudes, study of ocean-current conditions and the subsequent tracing of the best routes, taking into account the winds and currents of each area—all these factors made it possible to create an effective system of high-seas navigation in the Atlantic.… Columbus came on the scene precisely when half a century of progress in these different spheres, on the part of the Portuguese and Castilians, was leading to spectacular practical results.
Statements in the text about Columbus' earlier career are drawn from Morison, but are ocasionally modified from Teixeira da Mota.
6. However, it has been pointed out that some of Columbus' corrupt Spanish may represent confusion, not only with Portuguese but also with his mother tongue, the variant Genoese dialect of Italian: Milani, V. I., The Written Language of Christopher Columbus (Buffalo, 1973).Google Scholar It is curious that Columbus seems never to have written in Italian, not even when writing to his brother, perhaps indicating the extent to which he had been Iberianized. No writings in Portuguese survive, but it is difficult to believe that in Portugal he learned to speak both Portuguese and Castilian, yet learned only to write in the latter.
7. Morison, , Columbus, 21.Google Scholar
8. Morison, , Columbus, 41–42.Google Scholar
9. The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand, trans. Keen, Benjamin (London, 1960), 32.Google Scholar The writer cited was Agostino Giustiniani.
10. According to de Armas, Rumeu, Colón en Castilla, 29.Google Scholar
11. For Spanish traders in Guinea in the sixteenth century see da Mota, A. Teixeira, “Viagens espanholas das Canarias à Guiné no século XVI segundo documentos dos arquivos portugueses” in III Coloquío de Historia Canario-Americana (1978) (Las Palmas, 1980), 2:219–50Google Scholar; Cabrera, Manuel Lobo, La esclavitud en las Canarias Orientales en el siglo XVI (Gran Canaria, 1982), 114–15.Google Scholar
12. Russell, P. E., “Fontes documentais castelhanas para a história da expansão portuguesa na Guiné nos ultimos anos de D. Afonso V,” Do Tempo e da Historia, 4 (1971), 5.Google Scholar
13. My account of the naval campaigns is based on Russell, “Fontes,” See also Vogt, John, Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast, 1469-1682 (Athens, GA, 1979), 10¬16.Google Scholar
14. Morison, , Columbus, 41.Google Scholar In the margins of books he was reading Columbus twice wrote that he had seen Mina. The obscurity of his earlier life is such that Colón, Fernando (Life, 40)Google Scholar in his biography of his father, could only state: “I do not know if it was during this marriage that the Admiral went to Mina or Guinea, but it seems reasonable that he did so.” Historians are not certain when Columbus married and when his wife died, but the dates were probably 1479 and 1484 respectively.
15. Pre-1492 knowledge of the Canaries on die part of Columbus is suggested by de Armas, Rumeu, Colón en Castilla, 59.Google Scholar
16. Morison suggests that Columbus went to Mina “as master or officer of a trading expedition, or of royal ships sent to reinforce the garrison” (Morison, , Columbus, 42Google Scholar). The latter suggestion seems to me implausible, mainly because Columbus was not a Portuguese citizen; the former suggests an exaggerated role for Columbus. From 1481 the Mina trade was strictly under royal control, so there was no place for a “master of a trading expedition” (see Vogt, , Portuguese Rule, 32–40Google Scholar). But when royal ships were lacking, the annual Mina fleet could include some private vessels under contract, and it is plausible that Columbus traveled in one of these, perhaps by the favor of one of the Italian businessmen in Lisbon, perhaps as a ship's officer, perhaps even as master. (Very little is known about his nautical experience before 1492 but he claimed at an unstated date to have commanded two ships sailing between Porto Santo and Lisbon: Colón, , Life, 37Google Scholar). A position with some responsibility for navigation would fit Columbus' statement that he took observations on the way. But if, contrary to Morison's view, he went to Mina before 1481 he may have gone as a commercial agent.
17. Foulché-Delbosc, R., “Voyage à la côte occidentale d'Afrique en Portugal et en Espagne (1479-1480),” Revue Hispanique, 4 (1897), 175–201.Google Scholar
18. Russell, , “Fontes,” 30–31.Google Scholar On the construction of the fort, and the reasons for this, see Vogt, , Portuguese Rule, 19–20.Google Scholar Very little is known about English interest in South Atlantic discovery before the 1490s, but English merchants were establishing links with Morocco as early as the 1460s and ca. 1480 a list of the Cape Verde Islands was available in Bristol: Quinn, D. B., “Edward IV and Exploration,” Mariner's Mirror, 21 (1935), 277CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hair, P. E. H., “Pre-1650 Printed Literature in English on the Atlantic Islands” in V Coloquío de Historia Canario-Maritima (1982)/Coloquío Internacional de Historia Marítima (Las Palmas, 1985), 180–181Google Scholar; Scammell, G. V., “The English in the Atlantic Islands,” Mariner's Mirror, 12 (1986), 297.Google Scholar
19. I have extracted references to Guinea from two editions of Columbus' reports on his voyages, Morison, S. E., Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York, 1965)Google Scholar, and Cioranescu, Alejandro, Oeuvres de Christophe Colomb (Paris, 1961)Google Scholar, which is even more comprehensively annotated (and is a more cautious translation of the Spanish). I use the general term “report” to describe the writings of Columbus about each voyage, but where the report includes what appears to be a dated log I supply the date of the entry. Supplementary comment by Las Casas is derived from Cioranescu, and the references are to Casas, Bartolomé de Las, Historia de las Indias (5 vols.: Madrid, 1875–1876).Google Scholar
20. “The Diario de a bordo is splattered with references indicating a good knowledge of Guinea. It frequently serves Columbus as a point of comparison with the new world of the Indies.” Columbus, , Diario, 35.Google Scholar
21. Report on the third voyage, Cioranescu, , Oeuvres, 221.Google Scholar
22. Report on the first voyage (August 1492/March 1493), Cioranescu, , Oeuvres, 177.Google Scholar
23. Report on the third voyage, Cioranescu, , Oeuvres, 230, 232.Google Scholar
24. Casas, Las, Historia, 1:132Google Scholar, cited in Cioranescu, , Oeuvres, 449.Google Scholar
25. Report on the first voyage (12.11.1492), Cioranescu, , Oeuvres, 76.Google Scholar The whole passage reads as follows, “así que ayer vino à bordo de la nao una almadía con seys mancebos, y los çinco entraron en la nao; estos mandé detener é los traygo. y después enbié à una casa, que es de la parte del río del poniente, y truxeron siete cabeças de mugeres, entre chicas é grandes, y tres niños, esto hize, porque mejor se comportan los hombres en España, abiendo mugeres de su tierra que sin ellas; porque ya otras muchas vezes se acaeçió traer hombres de Guinea, para que deprendiesen la lengua en Portugal, y después que bolvían y pensavan de se aprovechar d'ellos en su tierra, por la buena compaía que le avían hecho y dàdibas que se les avrían dado, en llegando en tierra jamàs parecía” (Lollis, , Scritti di Cristoforo Colombo, 1/1:40.Google Scholar In translation: “Yesterday there came alongside the ship a canoe with six young men and five came on board, whom I ordered to be detained and I am bringing them [back]. I then sent [some men] to a house on the West bank of the river and they took seven adult women, some large, some small, and three children/boys. I did this because the men would behave better in Spain if they had females of their own land with them than if they were without females. For it has often occurred when men have been brought from Guinea to learn the language in Portugal that, after they returned [to Guinea] and it was expected that they would be useful in their land because of the good treatment they had had and the gifts they had received, once they reached [Guinea and had set foot] on land it did not turn out that way.” Morison's translation is ungrammatical and misleading, the central part reading “often I happened to take men of Guinea” (Morison, , Journals, 93Google Scholar). This gives the impression that Columbus played a commanding role in several Guinea voyages, although Morison's biography does not take this line. Columbus' point about taking women to Spain is not wholly clear. He later says that the women will keep the men in order while in Spain, and also that the women will teach their language to the Spaniards (perhaps as concubines?). But possibly the underlying thought is that the women will be kept in Spain, and the men, having formed unions with them, will be eager to return there, and so will not desert the Spaniards when taken back to America.
26. For the use of such African interpreters see Viterbo, Sousa, “Noticia de alguns Arabistas e interpretes de linguas africanas e orientaes,” O Instituto, 52 (1905), 367–74, 416–24, 490–98, 547–52, 683–93, 749–56Google Scholar; 53 (1906), 48-53, 107-14, 237-41, 315-20; Hair, P. E. H., “The Use of African Languages in Afro-European Contacts in Guinea, 1440-1560,” Sierra Leone Language Review, 5 (1966), 5–26Google Scholar; Hair, P. E. H., “Portuguese Contact With the Bantu Languages of the Transkei, Natal, and Southern Mozambique, 1497-1650,” African Studies, 39 (1980), 3–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Had I known of the reference in the diario, I would have included it in my 1966 article, since it provides important evidence on the subject.
27. Letter to the king and queen, September 1498, in Cioranescu, , Oeuvres, 241.Google Scholar
28. Report on the first voyage (12.11.1492), Cioranescu, , Oeuvres, 77.Google Scholar It has been suggested that Columbus' mercantile activities may have included trading in slaves (Columbus, , Diario, 33Google Scholar). These would have been either Guanche or black Africans.
29. Casas, Las, Historia, 1:62Google Scholar, cited in Cioranescu, , Oeuvres, 414.Google Scholar
30. Morison, , AOS, 1:304–05Google Scholar; idem., Columbus, 232-33.
31. Letter to Santangel dd 15.2.1493, Cioranescu, , Oeuvres, 185.Google Scholar
32. Report on the first voyage (30.10.1492), Cioranescu, , Oeuvres, 66.Google Scholar
33. Colón, , Life, 40.Google Scholar
34. Report on the first voyage (28.10.1492/16.12.1492), Cioranescu, , Oeuvres, 63, 120.Google Scholar
35. Casas, Las, Historia, 1:131Google Scholar, cited in Cioranescu, , Oeuvres, 449.Google Scholar
36. Report on the third voyage, Cioranescu, , Oeuvres, 232.Google Scholar
37. Morison, , Columbus, 281–82.Google Scholar
38. Report on the first voyage (9.1.1493), Cioranescu, , Oeuvres, 147.Google Scholar “The Admiral said that…he had seen three sirens who emerged fairly high out of the waves. They were not as beautiful as described, only their face bearing any resemblance to a human one. He said that he had seen others of these, in Guinea, on the Malagueta Coast.” Commentators are generally agreed that the “sirens” were manatees or sea cows (Morison, , AOS, 1:398Google Scholar; Cioranescu, , Oeuvres, 417Google Scholar). For a manatee captured and examined in the Sierra Leone estuary in 1582, see Donno, E. Storey, ed., An Elizabethan in 1582: The Diary of Richard Madox (London, 1976), 200.Google Scholar
39. Report on the first voyage (27.11.1492), Cioranescu, , Oeuvres, 91.Google Scholar
40. Colón, , Life, 37.Google Scholar
41. Morison, , Columbus, 41, 390.Google Scholar
42. Ibid., 291.
43. With one exception, the contact with the Guanche during the short period when the Portuguese joined in the conquest of the Canaries. For comment on this see note 47 below.
44. “I have often thought that this blindness and ill-thinking on the part of the Admiral was a reflection of those always shown by the Portuguese in this business, or, to speak more plainly, in the utterly execrable tyranny they exercise in Guinea,” Casas, Las, Historia, 1:154Google Scholar, cited in Cioranescu, , Oeuvres, 464.Google Scholar
45. Newitt, M., “Prince Henry and the Origins of Portuguese Expansion” in Newitt, M., ed., The First Portuguese Colonial Empire (Exeter, 1986), 9–35.Google Scholar
46. There is an opposing view. In a well-known passage, C. R. Boxer has argued at length that since the papal bulls of 1452-1456 giving the Portuguese authority to conquer and enslave overseas peoples include references to pagans, they were not intended solely to cover current campaigns against Islamic peoples, but “must surely refer to the population of the Saharan litoral and to the Negroes of Senegambia with whom the Portuguese were already in contact,” thus giving “the Portuguese—and in due course the other Europeans who followed them—a religious sanction for adopting a similarly masterful attitude towards all races beyond the pale of Christendom,” Boxer, , The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825 (London, 1969), 20–25.Google Scholar Whether Europeans, or any other section of humanity, have ever needed or noticed religious sanction for the normal attitude of superiority to other cultures may be questioned, as may the view that the bulls were an instant response to passing Cape Verde (the Saharan peoples were certainly regarded as being under Islamic influence). However, even if the bulls had the weight of meaning and the range Boxer attributes to them, it would not be easy to show that they influenced Portuguese behavior on the ground in black Africa. The predominant factor was most probably that the ordinary Portuguese expected a hostile reaction from Muslims, and often receiving one, was only exceptionally prepared to risk economic relations. Conversely, he expected a non-hostile reaction from “pagans,” and often receiving one, frequently developed “civil” and mutually advantageous economic relations, with only the need to react occasionally to exceptional pagan hostility.
47. “But after a few years of contact with the Negro peoples of Senegambia and Upper Guinea the Portuguese realised that slaves could be obtained more easily and conveniently by peaceful barter with the local chiefs and merchants” (Boxer, , Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 25Google Scholar). For the earliest development of peaceful contacts, and the distinction between the “Saracens” of the Sahara and the blacks beyond Cape Verde, see Gomes, Diogo, De la première découverte de la Guinée, ed. Monod, T., Mauny, R. and Duval, G. (Bissau, 1959).Google Scholar
48. It is conventional to argue that the destruction and deportation of the Guanche set the tone for the Spanish conquests in America. A recent historian treads fairly cautiously: “the likelihood that the Spaniards' experience in the Canaries may have influenced or predisposed them in their relations with the Indians seems strongly suggested.” And he points out that the genocide of the Guanche was mitigated by the Canarian nobility intermarrying into the Castilian: Fernàndez-Armesto, Felipe, The Canary Islands after the Conquest (Oxford, 1982), 126.Google Scholar It is worth noting, however, that not only did the Portuguese participate in the Guanche slave trade, but that at one stage they joined in the conquest of the Guanche. Since the Guanche were “pagans,” this Portuguese activity against non-Muslims contradicts the view expressed in the text, that the Portuguese distinguished between the two groups. But it is likely that the Guanche were suspected of being or having been Muslim, because of their physical resemblance to, and ethnic connection with, the mainland Berbers, who were Muslim.
49. Although opinions differ as to the point in his life at which Columbus the visionary overcame Columbus the businessman, there was undoubtedly a persistent level of Columbus' thought that reflected his Genoese commercial upbringing (a point I owe to discussion with D. B. Quinn). And as for Genoese commerce, “nowhere was the continuity of Genoese interests and the flexibility of Genoese techniques more clearly displayed than in slaving.” Scammell, G. V., The World Encompassed (London, 1981), 174.Google Scholar Columbus had grown up in a city where perhaps as many as one in ten of the population was unfree, and before reaching the Atlantic had traveled in the world of the Mediterranean, whose territories, almost without exception, contained slaves. He therefore hardly needed an experience of Atlantic slaving, either Guanche slaving or Guinea slaving, to feel disposed to carry the institution westwards.
