The City on a Hill An unfinished history of America

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Paradise regained

1492–1607

In fourteen hundred and ninety two…

First contact

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The 'Santa Maria' at AnchorAndries van Eertvelt (c.1628)
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
James Joyce

The ship’s deck was sixty feet or so long, maybe eighteen feet wide, and forty men called her home. Out on the open ocean they slept where they could, on deck for the most part, tied down in rough weather, unless the rain was so bad it drove them to seek what space there was to be found in the hold, which grew only more filthy and foul-smelling as the weeks passed by. They ate rice and hard biscuits, soaked in water to make them some way edible, and big stews of poorly-boiled meat or fish with chickpeas and beans. But there was cheese too, and honey, olives and raisins, and wine from the vineyards around Cadiz, cultivated over the centuries by Moors, Romans, and Greeks, all the way back to the early Phoenician colonists. So it wasn’t all bad.

And they were making history, these men. Their captain promised it. As well as riches. Their captain promised those too. A westward route to the Indies, to the wealth and wonders of the Orient. Ninety or so men sailing into the unknown, on three ships, off the edge of the maps, because their Captain said the Indies lay three weeks west of the Canaries. Their Captain had studied the trade winds and calculated the distance, and set out to do what no man had done before. Their Captain lied: he kept two log books, one to share with his crew, and one of his own, that showed how far they had really come, how far they really had to go, for he did not trust them not to mutiny if they understood the true distance involved. Their Captain was a liar: worse, he was wrong. It was further, much further than he thought. They were all going to die.

But as it turned out their Captain, Christoforo Colombo, was one thing more: he was lucky. The Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria never found their westward passge. They found something else. At two o’clock in the morning of 12 October 1492 they discovered a new world when Rodrigo de Triana, a lookout on the Pinta, spied shore (probably that of San Salvador, Samana Cay, or Plana Cays, all situated some 250-300km north-east of Cuba though the precise location is unknown) in the Bahamas.

This is how the story begins. Not to Columbus of course, to whom America meant nothing. So far as he was concerned, he'd made it, and opened up a new and lucrative trade route from Europe to the spices and gold of the Far East. Spain’s Admiral of the Ocean Seas (a title he earned for this masterpiece of misdirection) had traversed the Atlantic to reach the uncharted eastern shores of Asia, shores he immediately claimed for the crown of Castile. Governorship of these new lands, untold glory, and 10% of the profits would be his (a very generous agreement, so much so that we might imagine their Catholic majesties never seriously expected to see him again). What was America compared to this?

European explorers had once more beached upon the shores of the New World, and this time they were here to stay. It was the changing balance of power half a world away that had set Columbus out on this route. The shortest distance between Europe and the Far East had once been the Silk Road running from China through Central Asia via India and Afghanistan amongst others to Constantinople and the commercial metropolis of Rome. But the once-mighty Mongol Empire that guaranteed the safety of travellers was crumbling, while the fall of Constantinople (and with it the final vestiges of the Roman Empire) to the Ottomans in 1453 heralded a Middle East suddenly less welcoming to Christian merchants.

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Columbus Before the QueenEmanuel Leutze (1843)

With overland trade inconvenienced, the great powers of Western Europe resolved to find alternative means of tapping the riches of the Orient. The Portuguese went south, around the horn of Africa, earning their fortunes in gold, ivory and slaves as they did so. The venture Columbus hawked around the royal courts of Europe was more reckless: go west. Too reckless for the Portuguese, Genoese, Venetians and English, all of whom dismissed his petitions for royal sponsorship. The Spanish court too determined that he had wildly underestimated the distances involved, but elected to keep their options open by paying Columbus an annual allowance to retain first refusal on the scheme. The Catholic Monarchs Fernando II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile had united their lands in their marriage, and were just about to recapture Granada, completing their reconquest of Spain from the Moors when they sealed the deal with Columbus on the outskirts of the still besieged city. No doubt flush with their imminent success, the royal couple no doubt gambled that what they might lose paled into significance set against what they could win.

The Arawaks who saw three ships come sailing into harbour in Guanahani, as they called it, knew nothing of Catholicism, Castile or the value of gold and spices to Europeans. All they saw was something they’d never seen before, and they swam out to get a closer look. Columbus in turn knew that he was seeing something unseen and unclaimed by any Christian prince, so claim it he did, for Castile, for Spain, and for himself. And like the first Christian, he gave names to all that he found: the island he called San Salvador, and the natives became Indians, one of history’s most enduring misnomers.

They [the Arawaks] willingly traded everything they owned … They were well-built with good bodies and handsome features… they do not bear arms and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.
From The Journal of Christopher Columbus

Entranced by all he saw, Columbus sailed on in search of the mainland and the coast of India. He landed next on Cuba (the peaks of which he mistook for the Himalayas) and Hispaniola (present day Haiti and Dominican Republic), where his flagship the Santa Maria hit a reef and foundered on Christmas Eve. From the timbers of his ruined vessel Columbus built the first European outpost in the Americas, the fort of La Navidad, in which he left 39 men to maintain trading relations with the Indians while he sailed back to Europe to bask in his triumph.

News of the discovery swept Europe, and despite the relatively tiny amount of gold he brought back, as well as a number of kidnapped natives, Columbus spun tales of miraculous lands abundant with ‘many spices, and great mines of gold’, promising his Spanish majesties ‘as much gold as they need … and as many slaves as they ask’. Such was the bounty on offer that a second expedition of seventeen ships and about 1,200 men was quickly launched on 3 November 1493.

Before it left however the Spanish sought to legitimise their claim with a Bull of Papal approval. The 1479 Peace Treaty of Alcáçovas that had settled the War of the Castilian Succession between the Catholic Monarchs and Afonso V of Portugal had granted all land south of the Canaries to the Portuguese (largely on the grounds that no-one had much use for them at that time anyway), subsequently confirmed by the Papacy in the 1481 Aeterni regis bull. The Portuguese had already passed on Columbus's insane venture, but upon his return (he made landfall in Portugal before he did in Spain thanks to a storm that blew him into Lisbon on 4 March 1493) King John II was immediately more mindful of his rights over undiscovered lands in the Atlantic.

Pope Alexander VI was a Spaniard, and moreover undergoing a spot of trouble with Ferdinand's cousin, the King of Naples, and was thus more than willing to extend the Spanish court every courtesy. Three bulls issued within two days undid Portugal's eternal kingdom with surprising speed: Inter Caetera (an impressive title meaning 'amongst other things') effectively granted to Spain any undiscovered (meaning unChristian) lands in the west. The Papal pronouncements were somewhat short on specifics however, so Spain and Portugal settled matters in the spring of 1494 with a treaty signed at the Spanish town of Tordesillas that divided the globe between them along a meridian (a line running from the North Pole to the South) halfway between the Portuguese Cape Verde islands and Columbus's discoveries. The world was theirs: they had but to reach out and take it.

Sailed this day nineteen leagues, and determined to count less than the true number, that the crew might not be dismayed if the voyage should prove long.
From The Journal of Christopher Columbus
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The term 'Indies', or the East Indies, refers to areas of South and Southeast Asia. THe name comes from the River Indus which flows for almost 2,000 miles through China, India and Pakistan.

Trade had flourished between Europe and the Indies since pre-Roman times, and grown stronger after the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30BC. It was the promise of alternative routes to the Indies that inspired the Portuguese voyages of discovery by Bartolomeu Dias in 1488 and Vasco de Gama in 1497-99. Spanish explorer Nuñez de Balboa's discovery of the Pacific in 1513 confirmed what many already suspected, that Colombus had in fact found an entirely new world, and it was Ferdinand Magellan's expedition of 1519-22 that finally realised the dream of a westward route, around the southern tip of Latin America and over the Pacific to the Philippines.

As late as the seventeenth century Gottfried Liebniz, expressing an established opinion among cosmopolitan Europeans, said that "Everything exquisite and admirable comes from the East Indies... Learned people have remarked that in the whole world there is no commerce comparable to that of China".

The son of a minor Spanish nobleman, it was Rodrigo de Triana who supposedly saw the Bahamian shore at around 2am on 12th October 1492, becoming the first European in centuries to see the Americas. Columbus however claimed to have seen light at 10pm on the previous evening, albeit "so indistinct that he did not dare affirm it was land". He then changed his mind, daring to affirm it after all, along with his claim to the annual pension of 10,000 maravedis (Spanish gold and silver dinar) Queen Isabella had promised the first man to spy land.

Rodrigo de Triana got no pension. However, NASA originally named their Deep Space Climate Observatory that was launched into Earth orbit in February 2015 after him, so there's that. They changed their mind though, and named it DSCOVR. At least they didn't name it Columbus.

Castile was one of the independent medieval states of the Iberian Peninsula. It was named, no surprises, after the number of castles it contained.

Castilian kings succeeded in reconquering much of the Muslim-occupied peninsula, and this combined with a lucky and judicious sequence of secessions, marriages, and subjugations paved the way for a union of crowns following the marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile in 1469. From 1479 this single kingdom was once again known as España (Spain). The siezure of Granada from the Moors in 1492 completed the Reconquista, and finally expelled Muslim rulers from Spain.

A section from the 1375 Carta Catalana detailing Marco Polo's travels

The Silk Road wasn't a road, nor did anyone before the nineteenth century refer to it as such. Instead it was a network of trading routes linking China, Central Asia, the Horn of Africa and Europe in ancient and medieval times. It carried trade between Chinese, the Arabs, the Indians and Persians, the Greeks, Romans, and Turks amongst others, and not only in silks but also in gold, bronzes, textiles, and jade, as well as ideas, religions, technologies, and plagues.

The security of these trade routes depended in large part on the Eurasian land empires, be it the Tang Dynasty, the Byzantine Empire or the Mongols. Marco Polo's famous travels from Venice to the court of Kublai Khan in the mid-thirteenth century took place amid the Mongol expansion that created a land empire stretching from the Pacific to Eastern Europe.

When Columbus set sail in 1492, he packed his copy of The Travels of Marco Polo in the expectation that it would prove useful at the other end of his journey. It wouldn't.

It was common knowledge in among Columbus's educated contemporaries that the Earth was a sphere ( a Greek mathematician, Eratosthenes, had managed to calulate its circumference to within 99% accuracy as far back as 200BC). The question was: how big a sphere?

Columbus was an optimist, a shameless one, and that optimism should have been his undoing. Sixteenth-century sailors could determine their latitude (north-south position) using sextants to measure the angle between the horizon and the sun at noon. Longtitude (east-west) was a mystery. But Columbus knew Spain and Japan (Cipango as it was known then) were on the same latitude, so his plan was essentially to sail west in a straight line until he hit it. This relied upon a technique known as dead reckoning, whereby navigators charted their start point, measured how long and how fast they'd been sailing, and then basically guessed where they were based on that.

Columbus's estimated that the Indies lay some 3,500 miles away. The actual distance was almost 8,500 miles. Columbus was wrong about where he was going, wrong about where he was when he got there, and wrong about where he had been on his return to Spain.

He changed the world anyway.

The Arawaks, often also referred to as the Taíno, were a group of native peoples who had spread from Central America across the Bahamas. They were skilled farmers and fishermen, and lived in chiefdoms made up of nobles and commoners all under the leadership of a cacique. Their villages were made up of large circular huts of some 10-15 families per hut, in which women and children lived apart from the men. We don't know how many of them there were in 1492. The smallpox epidemic that began in 1518-19 would wipe out nearly 90% of those who had not already succumbed to war or slavery. By 1548 fewer than 500 remained.

Many Spanish cities were named after native settlements, including Havana. Certain Arawak words also live on in Spanish and English, including tabaco (tobacco), batata (potato), juracán (hurricane), and hamaca (hammock).

Columbus had little choice in leaving those men, as the Niña was hardly capable of carrying everyone, and the Pinta was already missing. Indeed he was in something of a hurry to leave in case the other vessel was already en route back to Spain to announce their success and steal his thunder.

But he had heard Hispaniola was rich in gold, and thus agreed with Guacanagari, one of the caciques, that a permanent trading post be established. Columbus was confident of his crew's safety: 'I am certain the people I have with me could subjugate all this island… as the population are naked and without arms and very cowardly.'

Again his optimism was misplaced. Upon his return on 27 November 1493 he found La Navidad burned to the ground, and no trace of his men.

When Henry IV of Castile died in December 1474, both his daughter Joanna and his half-sister Isabella were hastily proclaimed Queen of Castile. Joanna's paternity was the subject of more lively debate than was strictly proper, but Isabella had also queered the deal by marrying Ferdinand of Aragon five years previously when Henry had been entirely adamant that she shouldn't.

Joanna was backed by the French and Portuguese, not least because she was engaged to her uncle, Afonso V of Portugal, but Ferdinand and Isabella's forces proved more successful. Some typically knotty intermarriage followed to cement the peace, and the thrones of Portugal and Spain were circuitously, and temporarily, united in 1580 under Philip II, who was the great-grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, and great-great-nephew of Afonso. So it all came good in the end. For a bit.