Storm-driven into the Tagus: Columbus and João II, March 1493

After sunset on Sunday 3 March 1493, a squall hit the caravel Niña and split all her sails. The crew ran before the gale under bare poles, in a heavy sea, somewhere off the coast of Portugal. They drew lots to send one of their number on pilgrimage, in his shirt, to Santa Maria de la Cinta at Huelva, and the lot fell on the man who commanded them: Christopher Columbus.2 sources2 sources

The night was worse. Cross-seas threatened to swamp the little ship, there was rain and lightning on several sides, and the wind seemed to lift the caravel into the air. In the first watch the sailors saw land. Columbus could not tell whether there was a harbour to run for, so he set the mainsail and held on, in great danger, until daylight. At daybreak he knew the coast: it was the Rock of Sintra, at the mouth of the river of Lisbon, and he decided to run in because there was nothing else to be done.1 source1 source

Those words, like most of what is known of the voyage, are not quite Columbus's own. His log does not survive. The text called his journal is an abridgement in the hand of the friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, who now and then quotes the Admiral but mostly retells him in the third person. The historians David Henige and Margarita Zamora call it at least a third-hand transcription.2 sources2 sources

Once the Niña was inside the bar, people came out to her and called her escape a miracle. At the third hour of the day she passed Restelo, then a small village and sheltered anchorage downstream from Lisbon, and anchored. The locals told the crew that nobody remembered such a winter: 25 ships had been lost in Flanders, and others had been stuck in the river for four months waiting for the wind.2 sources2 sources

Columbus was coming back from the other side of the Atlantic. He had sailed from Palos, in Andalusia, on 3 August 1492 with three ships and sighted Guanahani, in the islands of the Lucayos, in the night of 11 to 12 October. He left 39 men (38 in Barros) in a wooden fort on Hispaniola and was bringing home ten or twelve islanders and some gold. The Pinta had vanished in an earlier storm on 14 February. Now he was in the harbour of the king who had turned him down.3 sources3 sources

Columbus, a Genoese, had learned much of his seamanship in Portugal. His voyages took him to Lisbon, England, the Azores, Madeira and Porto Santo, and down the African coast to Guinea, though the dates and some of the voyages are uncertain. In about 1483 he asked King João II for ships to sail west across the Atlantic to Asia.1 source1 source

João de Barros, the sixteenth-century historian of Portuguese Asia, says the king found Columbus a great talker, vain of his abilities, and gave him little credit. Pressed, João passed the plan to Diogo Ortiz, Bishop of Ceuta, and to Master Rodrigo and Master José, the experts he consulted on cosmography. They dismissed it as vanity, built on Marco Polo's tales of Cipango, as Japan was then called. Columbus left for Castile with his son Diego and was at Palos by 1485.2 sources2 sources

The door did not close at once. In March 1488 João wrote from Avis inviting him back and promising that he would not be arrested or sued over any civil or criminal matter while in Portugal. Historians have suggested several reasons for the safe-conduct: debts left in Lisbon, a quarrel with his Genoese employers, or a part in the Duke of Viseu's conspiracy against João in 1484.2 sources2 sources

Then, in December 1488, Bartolomeu Dias sailed into Lisbon with news that he had rounded the southern tip of Africa. A note in a book owned by Columbus says its writer was present when Dias showed the king his chart; whether Columbus wrote it himself is still argued. With the sea road to India in sight, the chance of Portuguese backing for a western voyage faded. Castile took Columbus up once Granada fell in January 1492.3 sources3 sources

On 4 March, the day he arrived, Columbus wrote to João II, who was staying nine leagues from Lisbon. He said the Sovereigns of Castile had told him to put into His Highness's ports and pay for what he needed, and asked leave to bring the caravel up to the city. He was afraid that robbers, hearing that he had gold on board, might attack him at a lonely anchorage, knowing he came from the Indies and not from Guinea.1 source1 source

He probably also added a postscript that day to the letter he had written at sea for Luis de Santángel, the Aragonese court official who had helped pay for the voyage. “I ran hither to-day into this port of Lisbon, which was the greatest wonder in the world,” it says, in Bourne's translation. The printed letter carries the date 14 March; the editor R. H. Major thought Columbus redated it when he reached Spain.1 source1 source

On 5 March a Portuguese warship lay at Restelo too, the king's great ship, with the best provision of artillery and arms Columbus had ever seen. Her master, named in the journal as Bartolomé Diaz of Lisbon, came over in an armed boat and ordered Columbus to come and give an account of himself to the king's agents. Columbus refused: he was Admiral of the Sovereigns of Castile and would leave his ship only by force.1 source1 source

The master backed down and asked to see the Castilian sovereigns' letters, which Columbus showed him. Then the warship's captain, Álvaro Dama, came across with trumpets and drums and offered whatever help the Admiral needed. On 6 and 7 March, crowds came out from Lisbon to see Columbus and the islanders he had brought, among them knights and the king's agents.1 source1 source

On 8 March Dom Martinho de Noronha brought a letter from the king inviting Columbus to visit him, since the weather was not fit for sailing. João had ordered his officers to give the Admiral, his crew and the caravel everything they needed, free of charge. Columbus went “to prevent suspicion, although he did not wish to go”, and spent the night at Sacavém.1 source1 source

The king was at Vale do Paraíso, above the monastery of Santa Maria das Virtudes, where he was staying because of plague in the main towns of the district. Today the village is a parish of the municipality of Azambuja. Slowed by rain, Columbus did not arrive until nightfall on 9 March. The king's chief officers met him, and João received him warmly, made him sit and talked pleasantly. Then he came to the point.3 sources3 sources

The “capitulation” was the Treaty of Alcáçovas. Columbus replied that he had not seen it. He knew only that his sovereigns had forbidden him to go to La Mina or any other port of Guinea, and had had that order proclaimed in every port of Andalusia before he sailed. The king answered graciously that he was sure there would be no need for arbitrators. Columbus was lodged with the Prior of Crato, the leading figure in the place.2 sources2 sources

Rui de Pina, who later wrote the chronicle of João's reign, told the story less politely. In Bourne's translation, he wrote that the king “felt disgusted and grieved”, believing the discovery had been made within the seas and bounds of his lordship of Guinea, and because Columbus, a little puffed up, always went beyond the truth and made his gold, silver and riches much greater than they were. He adds that João was charged with negligence for having sent Columbus away years before for want of trust in him; the Portuguese can also mean that the king blamed himself.2 sources2 sources

According to Pina, some at court urged João to let them kill Columbus there and then. Since he was discourteous and elated, they said, a quarrel could be picked that would make his own faults seem the cause of his death, and Castile's enterprise would die with its discoverer. The king, “like a most God-fearing prince”, forbade it, honoured Columbus and sent him away. Bourne thought Pina was probably an eyewitness.2 sources2 sources

On Sunday 10 March, after mass, the king talked with Columbus at length about the voyage, always asking him to sit. On the 11th Columbus took his leave with messages for Ferdinand and Isabella. Noronha and a party of knights rode out with him. On the way he called at a monastery of Santo António near Vila Franca, where the queen had asked to see him, and kissed her hand. A duke and a marquis were with her; Bourne suggested the duke was her brother Manuel, Duke of Beja, who became king in 1495. Columbus slept that night at “Llandra”, probably Alhandra.2 sources2 sources

On 12 March a squire of the king caught up with him, offering lodgings and animals if he wanted to go home to Castile overland. Columbus kept to the sea, but the squire had a mule given to him and another to his pilot, who also received twenty espadins, gold coins of João II worth about twenty ducats. At eight o'clock on 13 March the Niña weighed anchor with the flood tide. At noon on 15 March she crossed the bar of Saltes into the port she had left on 3 August.1 source1 source

The king could not let it rest. Pina says he held a first council at Aldeia Gavinha and more at Torres Vedras after Easter, which decided to arm a fleet against “those parts”. João made Dom Francisco de Almeida, son of the Count of Abrantes, its captain-major. It never sailed, but news of it was enough to bring Castile to the table.3 sources3 sources

Ferdinand and Isabella heard of the preparations from the Duke of Medina-Sidonia; their letter to him on the subject is dated 2 May 1493. They sent an envoy, Lope de Herrera in the Spanish sources and a messenger called Ferreira in Pina, to ask João to hold the fleet back until it was settled in whose seas the islands lay. João agreed. Meanwhile João had sent Rui de Sande to propose that the parallel of the Canaries divide the ocean, with everything to the south left to Portugal.2 sources2 sources

Castile also went to Rome, where Pope Alexander VI, a Valencian and a friend of Ferdinand, issued four bulls in its favour in 1493. The best known, Inter caetera, is dated 4 May but was drawn up in June, and gave Castile everything west of a line 100 leagues beyond the Azores and Cape Verde islands; the bulls and the line have their own article.2 sources2 sources

In mid-August the Portuguese envoys Pero Dias and Rui de Pina, the same man who wrote the chronicle, reached the Catholic Monarchs at Barcelona. Nothing was agreed. Pina blamed Castile for stalling until its ships came back with more news, and said the proposals of the Castilian envoys who came to Lisbon in November were so unreasonable that the delaying tactic was plain.2 sources2 sources

Once Castile's second fleet had reported, João sent new envoys, and at Tordesillas, on 7 June 1494, the two crowns agreed a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands.3 sources3 sources

The week in the Tagus is when the two crowns' claims first collided. Alcáçovas had been written with Africa in view: it left Portugal the islands “from the Canary Islands down toward Guinea”. Columbus's landfall made each side read it its own way, João as a parallel running west from the Canaries, Castile as a deal about the African coast alone. Tordesillas replaced it with a meridian running from pole to pole.2 sources2 sources

The 370 leagues mattered for India as much as for America. João's stated reason was the Cape route: ships coming home from the Cape had to swing far out into the open Atlantic, and the wider margin kept that loop in Portuguese waters. Some historians think he also suspected land in the south-west Atlantic. With the knowledge of the time nobody could place the meridian exactly, and where it ran was argued over for centuries.3 sources3 sources

What happened at Vale do Paraíso is known only from a few texts, each with an angle. The journal survives only in Las Casas's abridgement. Pina was one of João's envoys in the dispute that followed and wrote his chronicle years later; Barros wrote half a century on. They disagree even on the day Columbus arrived, 4 or 6 March. Bourne, the journal's editor, and Portugal's Navy Museum follow the journal's 4 March.5 sources5 sources