In the long list of half-arsed explorers, England’s Martin Frobisher may be among the most hopeless. Fancying himself as “Albion’s Columbus and Cortés combined”, he made three expeditions in the 1570s in search of the fabled Northwest Passage, which was supposed to lead round the top of North America to the Indies. To spices. To gold. He paid Elizabeth I £1 for a useless letter of recommendation and made it as far as Baffin Island — freezing cold — before returning with nothing.
Well, almost nothing. He brought back tons of black rock that turned out to be rubble despite endless promises that it contained gold. (Apparently, you can still see the stone in walls around Dartford.) He discovered the “geographical dead end” of Frobisher Sound. He also kidnapped a couple of Inuit men. One of them bit off his own tongue on being seized “in choler and disdain”. Both died soon after arriving in England.
They didn’t teach me about Frobisher at school, and it seems there was a lot that they didn’t teach me. Simon Park is a professor of medieval and Renaissance Portuguese at the University of Oxford. Here, he tackles the dark side of the “age of discovery” — the many shipwrecks, mishaps and misadventures that befell ocean-going explorers in the 100 years after Columbus did not arrive where he thought he was going.
Park is particularly strong on the Portuguese. He opens with Vasco da Gama and his 1497 voyage round the Cape of Good Hope to India and back. I remember “doing” Da Gama at school. I don’t remember being told that he messed up his navigation in the south Atlantic and made landfall 124 miles short of the Cape. Nor that he only got to India because he kidnapped a Gujarati pilot who knew the way. Nor that on arrival he found traders from Tunis who could chat to him in Castilian and Genovese.
As a Portuguese nobleman scoffed on Da Gama’s return: “It was not the Portuguese who discovered India, but India that had discovered the Portuguese.” The raja of Calicut was deeply unimpressed by the diplomatic gifts he was offered: six hats, six basins, four strings of coral, some cloth and sugar. He thought the Portuguese were probably pirates pretending to be ambassadors, not potential trading partners.
Park adds nuance and shade to the usual swashbuckling stories without detracting from their excitement or descending into what he calls “anti-imperial schadenfreude”. The most remarkable feat recounted here — Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, from 1519 to 1522 — was also among the most disastrous. On that voyage, 150 men out of the crew of 240 died, including Magellan.
The expedition featured coups, mutinies, desertions, kidnapping raids, stabbings, torture (of indigenous peoples, of course), shipwrecks, scurvy, starvation and the execution of the master of one ship for having sex with a ship’s boy. The boy later threw himself overboard after being “hounded and taunted” by the sailors. We “did” Magellan too. That part definitely wasn’t mentioned.
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These are cracking narratives. At the same time, each chapter is its own thoughtful historical essay. They even come with little historiographical morals, like fables. Take the paired stories of the Spanish sailor Gonzalo Guerrero and the indigenous Taíno man known as “Enrique”.
Gonzalo was shipwrecked in a storm off the coast of Jamaica in 1511 and enslaved by the Maya. He later married and had children, and even fought against the Spanish. When, in 1519, Cortés sent a messenger to try to persuade him to return to Spain, Gonzalo refused, claiming his Mayan tattoos and piercings would make reintegration impossible. Plus, his Mayan wife told the messenger to “shut up and go away”.
Enrique was educated in a Franciscan monastery on the island of Hispaniola. In 1519, after his Spanish overlord raped his wife and seized his horse, he went to live a life of brigandage in the hills. He was a A sort of Hispaniolan Robin Hood — his men even cut the tongues out of the cockerels so that their camp could not be tracked down — he was finally persuaded to return to the Spanish-speaking world after 15 years.
These stories illustrate, for Park, how actively the European powers were resisted and how they were rarely entirely in control. Colonial maps, he says, are “fantasies of national boundedness” that reveal little of “the flux that surges within”.
Indigenous peoples are more than a backdrop here. The thrilling and implausible story of the German explorer Hans Staden, for instance, is framed as being about the resilience of Brazilian Tupinamba culture. Shipwrecked off Brazil, Staden served in a Portuguese fort as a soldier-of-fortune until it was attacked by the Tupinamba.
The storytelling is luscious: “The screams hit him first, slicing through the mottled shadows beneath the canopy. Then he saw them.” Staden was taken prisoner. For nine protracted months his captors promised to eat him, but he kept talking his way out of it and eventually wangled his way on to a French ship before writing a bestselling autobiography.
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Resistance sometimes took a more symbolic form. Fascinatingly, one of the giant crosses that Da Gama set up on the African coast was torn down by the locals even as he sailed off. And a statue of him erected in India in 1599 was toppled within two years. Park pointedly observes that “people have been tearing down statues as long as people have been putting them up”.
I do have two quibbles. Park repeats an old Spanish anecdote, that Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula got its name when the Maya were asked what it was called and responded, “Uic athan,” supposedly meaning, “We don’t understand.” Nice story, but the etymology is dodgy. And Park surely belabours a straw man when he says “we are too addicted to an action-hero version of history”. Didn’t we already know that early explorers were ghastly and incompetent? I mean, Columbus?
Still, this is a clever and compelling book. The storytelling and the scholarship fairly spark off each other. It could be a model for how academics should write history for a general audience.
Wreckers: Disaster in the Age of Discovery by Simon Park (Viking £25 pp320). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
