All of these answers are great but this is the thing that I am most confused about. I picture the East Indies as having spice markets back then. Is that correct?If so, why didn’t Columbus get really concerned when there were no markets for the spices that he was looking for were nowhere to be found over the course of four trips? I have to believe that he wanted to buy and take those spices on his ships too for economic reasons but also for proof that he found the right place.
Columbus, as I said before, had a great capacity for self delusion, and also had an aptitude for studiously ignoring evidence that didn’t conform to his preconceptions. He was brought chilis by the natives, and called them peppers instead of the native name, aji, because he likened them to the black pepper of the East. The natives also brought him a local substance which he identified as cinnamon, but of course it was not. In cruising along the coast of Hispaniola he identified some trees as nutmegs - they didn’t have nutmeg fruit on them, but Columbus was sure that was just because it was the wrong season. And so on.
Not to hijack the thread, but I’ve also heard that some Muslims feel that the exploratory zeal at that time was driven by a desire by Christian nations to surround the Ottoman empire and stop the growth of Islam.
The Master speaks:
Why was America named for Amerigo Vespucci?
Not to contradict Colibri or anything, just sayin’.
When Columbus discovered America, it stayed discovered. That is his main claim to recognition: He convinced enough Europeans to go West that America wasn’t promptly forgotten about as it had been when the Vikings finally gave up on their doomed colonies in Vinland.
Erm, sit back and think about things for a moment. Today, in 2005, there are substantial parts of the East Indies area which are totally uninhabited jungle or occupied by tribes and settlements ranging from Neolithic to Medieval in technology. This is despite Indonesia and Singapore being quite major players in the global import/export, manufacturing and tourism trades. If you were to pitch up in some remote part of Sulawesi, would the lack of garment sweatshops and oil derricks convince you that these things were nowhere to be found in the ‘East Indies’? Now visualise how things were half a millenium ago.
CC may have been a bit of a nutter, but he wouldn’t be so deluded as to expect the entire shoreline of the East Indies to be lined with gold-paved streets and marble spice-trading bazaars. Remember that this was a period when you could still hunt bears and wolves in England - things were not that developed, and a ‘market’ could just mean ‘somewhere you would expect a reasonable number of people to have a reasonable surplus of stuff to barter’. He was probably just looking for a respectable sized city, which at the time you could lose quite easily (London at the time had a population of 120,000).
That certainly played a role. Prince Henry the Navigator, who launched Portuguese exploration down the coast of Africa, was a religious zealot convinced that he’d find a Christian ally (the legendary “Prester John”) against Islam if he just probed a little bit further down the African coast.
As the Portuguese continued their expansion, and as Spain sought to leapfrog Portugal via Columbus’ western route, mercantile considerations played a larger role. Religion was sometimes used as a fig leaf; explorers would refer to “converting the heathen” when seeking royal sponsorship when all they really wanted to do was make money.
But religious motivations were never entirely absent. To some degree religion and commerce were inseparable; the problem with the status quo was that indispensable commodities (spices) were not only expensive but were only available through hostile intermediaries (the Turks). Europeans of the Fifteenth Century didn’t like that any more than we like having to buy our oil from potentially hostile trade partners today.
To elaborate a little more on my previous answer, I think Shagnasty’s puzzlement may be due to thinking of Columbus in terms of more modern explorers such as Captain Cook, who were motivated mainly by a quest for knowledge, and were looking for objective data about the places they explored. Columbus was motivated mainly by a quest for riches - he didn’t really care about knowledge. He didn’t particularly care where he was exactly, as long as he could make some pesos off it. He kept searching for China and Japan because they were richer than the areas he had already reached.
Yes, I am aware of the controversy about Vespucci’s letters. I suppose I should have said “alledgedly among the first.”
It’s a bit ironic that Columbus’s own delusions about where he was may have prevented him from gaining the honor of having the continents named after him. When he reached Panama the Indians told him about another sea on the other side, which could have led him to figure it all out. But instead of anticipating Balboa by a dozen years, he instead chose to grub for as much gold as he could squeeze out of the area.
This isn’t really true today - most of the East Indies is well settled today, especially along the coast, and there are few if any places where intact tropical forest reaches the coast. Nobody today is at a Neolithic stage, and even “Medieval” would be a bit of a stretch. Even 500 years ago, Columbus couldn’t have explored an equivalent area in the East Indies to that which he explored in the West Indies without coming upon spice trading settlements or signs of substantial civilization. But yes, I think he eventually just assumed that he had reached some backwater part of Asia - but he never stopped thinking that the real deal was just over the horizon.
On his last voyage, Columbus just barely missed discovering the high civilizations of the Maya (although they were already in declined) and the Aztecs. If he had turned west instead of east when he reached the Central American coast he would have done so. I wonder what he would have made of them.
Think of it this way. Suppose you find a wardrobe in your attic that takes you to a land of magic. You’ve read “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” a few years ago, so you’ve got some idea of what to expect. Some things are different than the book, but you’ve got to expect the book to have some errors anyway. How long will it take you to figure out that you’re not in Narnia but rather in Middle Earth? Especially since you’ve never even heard the name JRR Tolkien? And if you meet a few dwarves and see some talking eagles…well, they aren’t exactly what you’ve been lead to expect from CS Lewis, but damn close. You could spend years looking for the magical lamppost and Cair Paravel and Aslan, convinced you’re in Narnia all along.
Do they even have peyote in the Carribean and Central America? That would explain a lot.
Or by that matter, N. and S. Vaspucci.
Not to mention decent maps, or a lack thereof. Basically european maps during the middle ages were good enough for travel in Europe and maybe the middel east, but in regard to the far east, they were close to useless. Here’s an example of a 15th century map.
You try navigating using that thing.
These two are a bit better and closer to columbuses time.
http://www.henry-davis.com/MAPS/LMwebpages/256.html
http://www.henry-davis.com/MAPS/LMwebpages/256B.html
http://www.henry-davis.com/MAPS/LMwebpages/258E.html
You’ll still notice that even the 1490 map is next to useless as far as the far east goes. There’s a bunch of little little islands and Japan hanging out at the edge of the world all alone.
However, besides these general and innacurate maps, there were “ruters” (Is it the correct english name? Maybe “portulans”?) for known sea routes that were much more accurate and used by navigators (and if I’m not mistaken, essentially top secret).
Geekiest. Analogy. Ever.
Hm. ‘Ruters’ doesn’t appear to be an English word and Google can’t translate ‘portulans’ from French, although it appears in French websites. Hopefully, someone who knows maps will happen along.
‘Rutters’ and ‘Portolans’
What was the status of the Incas (I think they’re the right group. I admit I have trouble keeping the Aztec, Olmec, Toltec, Maya, and Inca straight. But, I think the Inca were the ones you’d find in Panama) at the time?
Re Navigation
Didn’t he have a sextant? Somebody should probably link to a thread on the development of maps, lattitude, longitude etc at this point.
The Inca Empire at the time stretched from southernmost Colombia to northern Chile, the largest empire in the New World. Panama, like most of the rest of Central America south of Honduras, was a region of small chiefdoms usually about 20 kilometers across. Eastern Panama was dominated by a group called the Cueva; there were many different linguistic groups in western Panama whose affinities with modern groups are somewhat obscure.
The Inca Empire was conquered by Pizarro in 1532 with only a few hundred men, surely the most remarkable conquest in history. (Cortez in Mexico had more men, and lots of Indian allies against the Aztecs.)
The Olmecs (1300-400 BC) and Toltecs (800-1200 AD) were both in Mexico but earlier than the Aztec Empire (c. 1300-1521 AD).
According to Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea, “the quadrant was the only instrument of celestial navigation that Columbus ever employed.”
Morison also asserts that:
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Celestial navigation played no part in in the professional pilot’s training in Columbus’s day
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Celestial observations were not used to find one’s way about the ocean, but only to determine latitudes of newly discovered lands once ashore in order to chart them correctly. Columbus and other navigators of the era relied instead on dead-reckoning, that is, laying down compass courses and estimated distance traveled on a chart to determine position.
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There was no accurate way to determine longitude at the time except by timing an eclipse.
According to my reading the usual method of navigation across the Atlantic, after the first trip by Columbus, was to go to the latitude of your desination and sail west on that latitude until you got there. That was the reason why the latitude of new discoveries was recorded.
After the earth’s prevailing wind patterns were figured out they sailed west in the trade winds belt below 30[sup]o[/sup] N (Horse Latitudes) and east in the prevailing westerlies belt above that same latitude.
True in principle, except that the trade winds are not the same as the horse latitudes; the horse latitudes are a belt of light winds between the trade winds (easterlies) to the south of them and the westerlies to the north.