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How the South was Won—and How Portuguese Discovery Began

1994; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 71; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382942000371039

1469-3550

P. E. H. Hair,

Cuban History and Society

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1. This is a lightly revised version of an introductory paper presented at a conference on ‘Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo/João Rodrigues Cabrilho and the exploration of the Californian coast’, held as part of the Columbus Quincentenary Programme at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies of the University of California at Los Angeles, in November 1992. The original nationality of the explorer, Portuguese or Spanish, remains in dispute.2. By far the best summary of the earliest stages of this movement is in Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonisation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492 (London: Macmillan, 1987)-despite thereservations 1 subsequently express. Note the following assessment of the drive to theSouth. Though achieved a little later than Columbus's creation of a central transatlanticroute, the exploration of the South Atlantic was perhaps more significant. That it was aEuropean achievement, neglected or abandoned by indigenous cultures and explorersapproaching from the East, helped to secure Europe's preponderance in world explorationand therefore Europe's long-lasting hegemony in the modern world' (The Times Atlas of World Exploration, ed. Felipe Ferniindez-Armesto [London: The Times, 19911, 56). Thecentral clause of the last sentence would be more correct, at least historically, if it read-‘neglected by indigenous cultures and abandoned by explorers approaching from the East’.3 Se3. See P. E. H. Hair, ‘Columbus's First Very Long Voyage?’ (forthcoming).4. To Defend Your Empire and the Faith: Advice Offered c.1590 to Philip, King of Spain and Portugal, by Manoel de Andrada Castel Blanco, edited by P. E. H. Hair (Liverpool: Liverpool U. P., 1990), 68; P. E. H. Hair, ‘A Note on French and Spanish Voyages to Sierra Leone 1550–1585’, History in Africa, XVIII (1991), 137–41.5. For the Canaries contribution to the process, see Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The Canary Islands after the Conquest: The Making of a Colonial Society in the Early Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982); and many articles in the volumes of the proceedings of the regular Coloquio de Historia Canario-Americana, issued from Las Palmas. The contribution of the Portuguese islands to Portuguese America in the early period appears to have been less studied.6. Since British historians of the nineteenth century were largely responsible for excessive speculation about the character and role in the Discoveries of the Infante D. Henrique, virtually inventing ‘Henry the Navigator’ (no doubt on account of his half-English ancestry), it is just that the present-day ‘Oxford School’ should lean the other way and be sceptical about the achievements of Prince Henry. Hence P. E. Russell, Prince Henry the Navigator: The Rise and Fall of a Culture Hero (Oxford: Taylorian Special Lecture, 1984). But Fernández-Armesto extends the scepticism from the role of Henry to most of the claimed early Portuguese achievements. A critical reassessment was certainly in order, in reaction to the ‘patriotic’ school of Portuguese imperial historians, represented at its most learned by Jaime Cortesão. This is not to suggest that Portuguese historians have been excluded from the reaction. If we set apart economic determinists pursuing their own stimulating myths, such as António Sergio and the early Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, no historian could have been more independently critical than Duarte Leite (curiously also part-English in ancestry).7. Norman Houseley, The Later Crusades 1274–1580 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1992), 310–11.8. C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825 (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 21. In an outstanding work of exposition, the denunciatory approach is of course minimal and critical—whereas in lesser works it is painfully de rigueur and overwhelmingly a priori.9. It should be noted, however, that because of miscenegation the Guanche were not eliminated genetically—'genocide’ in this strict sense being almost impossible—while certain of their culture traits no doubt persisted in or influenced subsequent Canarian society. In respect of the contrast between Spanish and Portuguese activities, it is only fair to add that in the early stages of the conquest of the Canaries the Portuguese participated in the enslavement of the Guanche. As regards early Portuguese activities in Black Africa, that is, in Guinea, Afro-Portuguese relations are discussed briefly in P. E. H. Hair, ‘Columbus from Guinea to America’, History in Africa, XVII (1990), 113–29, at 122–23, and will be discussed at greater length in a forthcoming piece. Relations in Guinea can be summed up as being dominated from an early date by the desire on both sides for peaceful commerce and the counterproductive effects of any use of force. This is equally the view of the most detailed account of those relations, Ivana Elbl, ‘The Portuguese Trade with West Africa 1440–1521’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1986.10. The subsequent discussion broadly follows the interpretation of events presented in Luís Filipe Thomaz, ‘Le Portugal et l'Afrique au XVe siècle: les débuts de l'expansion’, Arquivos do Centro Cultural Português, XXVI (1989), 161–256, also série separatas 221 (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos de História e Cartografia Antiga, 1989). One advantage of recent studies over earlier writings on the subject (for instance, a seminal work, Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, Documentos sobre a expansão portuguesa (Lisbon, [1943]–1956), 3 vols), is the new-found ease of scholarly access to archive documents supplied by the recent publication of two massive collections: Descobrimentos portugueses, ed. J. M. da Silva Marques (Lisbon: Instituto de Altura Cultura, 1944–1971), 3 vols; Monumento Henricina, ed. A. J. Dias Dinis (Coimbra: Comissão Executiva das Comemorações do V Centenário da Morte do Infante D. Henrique, 1960–1975), 15 vols.11. Earlier editions and studies by Portuguese scholars of Zurara's Crónica dos feitos … na conquista de Guiné por mandado do Infante D. Henrique contributed to the superior and still the fullest annotation in the French translation: L. Bourdon et al., Gomes Eanes de Zurara: Chronique de Guineé, Mémoires 60 (Dakar: Institut Français d'Afrique Noire, 1960).12. Zurara, Crónica, cap. 96.13. Thomaz, ‘Le Portugal’, 16.14. The Unconquered Knight: A Chronicle of the Deeds of Don Pero Niño, ed. Joan Evans (London: Routledge, 1928), 78–79.15. Zurara, Crónica, cap. 5.16. Zurara claimed that Henry ‘sent a great fleet to the Canary Islands in order to reveal to them the path of holy faith’ (Zurara, Crónica, cap. 5).17. Le navigazioni atlantiche del veneziano Alvise da Mosto, ed. Tullia Gasparrini Leporace (Venice: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, 1966), 6–7; translated in G. R. Crone, The Voyages of Cadamosto … (London: Hakluyt Society, 1937), 2–3.18. Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, various editions, liv. 1, cap. 22.19. Zurara, Crónica, cap. 5.20. Ibid., cap. 7.21. Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo, liv. 1, cap. 22.22. For the ‘racial’ and ethnic mixture of slaves in a fourteenth–century Italian city— North African browns, Central Asian ‘yellows’, even Greek whites (enslaved for being schismatic), as well as West African blacks—see Iris Origo, ‘Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, Speculum, XXIX (1955), 321–66; and for the variety of provenances of slaves in late medieval southern Europe, see Charles Verlinden, L’esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale, Rijksuniversiteit te Gent, Werken uitgegeven door de Faculteit van de Letteren en Wijsbegeerte, 119e Aflevering, 162e Aflevering (Bruges: De Tempel, 1955, Ghent 1977), 2 vols. There were of course large numbers of non-black slaves in Iberia. In Portugal, only by the mid-sixteenth century did black slaves ‘outnumber the Moors who had composed the bulk of Portugal's slave population in the medieval period’ (A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal 1441–1555 [Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1982], 1)—a cryptic statement indicating that, because fifteenth-century Portuguese slave records often do not distinguish race, the demographic balance between black and non-black slaves is not known and generalizations about black slaves are therefore not wholly secure.23. Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus, 108, 144.24. ‘Jungle apart’—because the goldfields of West Africa are not in the forest belt but in the grassland belt.25. De la première découverte de la Guinée récit par Diogo Gomes (fin XVe siècle), ed. Th. Monod, R. Mauny and G. Duval, Memórias 21 (Bissau: Centro de Estudos da Guiné Portuguesa, 1959), f. 270v.26. Rui de Pina, Crónica de el-Rei D. João II, ed Alberto Martins de Carvalho (Coimbra: Atlântida, 1950), cap. 2; A. Teixeira da Mota, Alguns aspectos da colonização e do comércio marítimo dos portugueses na Africa Ocidental nos séculos XV e XVI’, Anais do Clube Militar Naval, CVI (1976), 690, also série separatas 98 (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga, 1976), 18; English version, Some Aspects of Portuguese Colonisation and Sea Trade in West Africa in the 15th and 16th Centuries, Hans Wolff Memorial Lecture (Bloomington: African Studies Program, Indiana University, 1978), 16. The regulation laid down that the senior officers were not to monopolize the women, by having them as kept mistresses, in-house or out; instead the women were to be available to all men in the garrison. The numerical imbalance between ‘comfort women’ and customers was no doubt mitigated in actuality by the prevalent sickness of the garrison, and in any case the first part of the regulation may well have been disregarded by the officers. In 1489, a number of women were included in the party of Portuguese skilled workers sent to the Congo, allegedly on request from the local ruler, the purpose of sending the women being described by the chronicler as that of teaching the Africans how to make bread! (Pina, Crónica, cap. 58).27. Leporace (ed.), Navigazioni, 120, wrongly translated in Crone, Voyages, 80; see P. E. H. Hair, ‘Early Sources on Religion and Social Values in the Sierra Leone Region: (1) Cadamosto 1463’, Sierra Leone Bulletin of Religion, XI (1970), 51–64, at 56, 60 (an apparent reference to infibulation); [Eustache de la Fosse], Voyage à la côte occidentale d'Afrique, en Portugal et en Espagne (1479–1480)’, ed. R. Foulché-Delbosc, Revue Hispanique, IV (1897), 184.28. João de Barros, Asia, various editions, déc. 1, liv. 3, cap. 4.29. Leporace (ed.), Navigazioni, 126, translated in Crone, Voyages, 84; P. E. H. Hair, ‘The Use of African Languages in Afro-European Contacts in Guinea, 1440–1560’, Sierra Leone [later African] Language Review, V (1966), 5–26, on 16–17.30. Ch.-A. Julien, Les Voyages de découverte et les premiers établissements (XV e –XVI e siècles) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), 90.