European Maritime Expansion

1415–1488The long way down the coast

The expansion did not begin in 1492, and it did not begin as a search for America. It began as a Portuguese coasting operation down the western edge of Africa, pushed one cape at a time across most of a century. Ceuta was taken in 1415; the voyages that followed were organised under Prince Henry, whom later ages called the Navigator, and continued long after his death in 1460. Each expedition went a little further than the last and came back, and the coming back was the hard part: the north-east trades that carried a ship south would not carry her home.

The solution was counter-intuitive and it decided everything that follows. Rather than beat back up the African coast against wind and current, a returning ship stood far out into the empty Atlantic on the starboard tack, swung north and west until she found the westerlies of the higher latitudes, and let them carry her home — the volta do mar, the turn of the sea. It meant sailing away from your destination for weeks in order to reach it. Once a fleet trusted it, the ocean stopped being a wall along the coast and became a system of circulating winds that could be used in either direction. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias was driven round the southern tip of Africa by a gale and found open water on the far side. The road to the Indian Ocean was known to exist; nobody had yet sailed it through.

1492–1493Columbus goes the other way

Christopher Columbus, a Genoese in Castilian service, proposed the opposite solution to the same problem: if the earth is a sphere, the Indies can be reached by sailing west. The argument was not about the shape of the earth, which educated Europe had not doubted for centuries, but about its size, and on that Columbus was simply wrong — he made the westward distance to Asia perhaps a quarter of what it is. The experts who advised against him were right on the arithmetic. He sailed anyway, with three ships, in August 1492.

What he did understand was the wind. He dropped south to the Canaries first, refitted, and departed on 6 September on the latitude of the north-east trades, which blew him across in thirty-three days to a landfall in the Bahamas on 12 October. Coming home he did not attempt to sail back into the wind that had brought him: he worked north until he picked up the westerlies, and rode them to the Azores and then to Portugal — the volta do mar applied to a new ocean. The flagship had been lost on a reef off Hispaniola at Christmas and her timbers built a fort, La Navidad, where he left men behind. He reached Lisbon in March 1493, and Palos a fortnight later, convinced to the end of his life that he had been off the coast of Asia.

Plate · The Atlantic passage, 1492–1493 Click to enlarge

1497–1499Da Gama reaches the pepper coast

Portugal answered not by sailing west but by finishing the route it had spent a century preparing. Vasco da Gama left Lisbon in July 1497 with four ships and did something no one had done before: instead of following the African coast south, he swung out into the South Atlantic on the widest arc yet attempted and stayed out of sight of land for some three months, coming back in on the westerlies to make his landfall near the Cape. It was the volta do mar on an oceanic scale, and it worked.

Beyond the Cape he was in water Portugal did not know and other people did. The East African coast was a chain of Muslim trading cities in regular contact with Arabia and India, and the Portuguese arrived as an unknown and unimpressive quantity: their trade goods were the sort of thing that sold on the Guinea coast and were an embarrassment in Mombasa. What changed the voyage was Malindi, whose ruler was at odds with Mombasa and supplied a pilot who knew the monsoon. With him aboard, the crossing to India took twenty-three days on the south-west monsoon, and in May 1498 da Gama anchored off Calicut. The audience with its Hindu ruler, the Zamorin, went badly for the same reason; he left having bought a cargo of spices at a poor rate, and lost more than half his men on the way home. The cargo still paid for the voyage several times over, and that was the fact that mattered.

Scroll the map below to follow the voyage stage by stage — the Atlantic swing, the Cape, the Swahili coast, the pilot at Malindi, the monsoon crossing, and the return.

1519–1522Magellan, Elcano, and the size of the world

The question Tordesillas could not answer was where its line ran on the far side of the globe, and therefore which crown owned the Moluccas, the only place the clove then grew. Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese whose own king had no use for him, offered Spain a westward route to them. He sailed from Sanlúcar in September 1519 with five ships, wintered on the bleak Patagonian coast at Puerto San Julián where he faced down a mutiny, and in October and November 1520 felt his way through the strait that now carries his name.

What lay beyond it was the discovery of the voyage, and it was a discovery about scale. The Pacific took more than three months to cross with almost no landfall; the crews ate leather and sawdust and died of scurvy, and the ocean turned out to be very much larger than any European estimate of the earth had allowed. Magellan reached the Philippines in March 1521 and was killed there in April, in a fight on Mactan that was no part of his commission. Of the five ships one, the Victoria, loaded cloves at Tidore and went on west under Juan Sebastián Elcano, doubling the Cape of Good Hope and creeping up the African coast to reach Spain in September 1522 with eighteen men aboard.

They brought back one more thing. Keeping a careful log, the survivors found on reaching the Cape Verde islands that their reckoning was a day behind everyone else’s — the consequence, nobody had foreseen it, of having chased the sun the whole way round. The clove cargo of that single ship is said to have covered the cost of the entire expedition.

Plate · The first circumnavigation, 1519–1522 Click to enlarge