To some extent, however, the explorers who enormously extended the coverage of the map in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries must be seen as operating independently of the influence of academic geographers. Columbus was exceptional in his bookishness and in his taste for theoretical cosmography; and, even in his case, his academic interests seem to have developed rather in consequence than in anticipation of his vocation as an explorer. Explorers did share a common culture, unique to Latin Christendom, which may help to explain the pre-eminence of parts of western Europe in this field; but its sources must be sought in other texts and other traditions, its ingredients discerned rather in patterns of behaviour than of thought. The task is not easy, because most explorers — those who were unsuccessful or unsung — probably remain unknown. The precarious nature of their memorials is obvious: few, outside the household of Dom Henrique of Portugal, had a chronicler to itemise their feats; fewer still had the skill in self-praise of a Columbus or a Vespucci; only one, Diogo Cao, engraved his deeds in stone. Many known by name are reported only or chiefly on maps: Lanzarotto Malocello, of Genoa, was recorded on the island in the Canaries which still bears a version of his name by a cartographer of 1339; in a map maker’s note, Jaume Ferrer of Majorca was reported lost off the west African coast in 1346; of the Portuguese Diogo Silves, who may have established the true lie of the Azores in 1427, the sole memorial, on a Majorcan map, was accidentally blotted by ink spilled by George Sand. However, just as their efforts can be reconstructed, in part, from maps, so their common profile can be built up from a few surviving documents.
They came, to begin with, mainly from Genoa and Majorca and — later and increasingly — from Portugal, Andalusia and some maritime communities of northern Europe. They often had crusading experience or aspirations, like the Poitevin adventurer Gadifer de la Salle, who went to the Canaries in 1402, Joan de Mora, who was the king of Aragon’s captain in Canarian waters in 1366, or Columbus, whose long-term destination was Jerusalem. Others had a background in piracy or privateering, like members of the retinue of the Infante Dom Henrique of Portugal (1394—1460), who were said to have raided Aragonese shipping in the 1430s, or crewmen from Andalusia who sailed in Columbus’s wake in the 1490s and had formerly served, as privateers, against Portuguese vessels off the Guinea coast. Some of them were merchants, prospecting for offshore assets; more were penurious noblemen or would-be noblemen escaping from a society of restricted opportunity at home. They sought a ‘river of gold’ like Ferrer and la Salle; or a route to spices, like the Vivaldi brothers whose galleys were lost in 1291 on their way ‘ad partes Indiae per Oceanum’; or a rich fishery, like the Bristol merchants who loaded salt on their quest for the fabled Isle of Brasil in 1481; or a source of slaves, like the Las Casas and Peraza families of Seville, who promoted a series of raids and conquests in the Canaries from 1393.
They sought to win fiefs or create kingdoms, like la Salle’s partner, Jean de Bethencourt, who had himself proclaimed King of the Canaries in the streets of Seville, or the ‘knights and squires’ of Dom Henrique, who felt called by his horoscope to the accomplishment of great deeds. They came from a world steeped in the idealisation of adventure: the Perazas’ squalid wars against stone-age aboriginals on the island of Gomera in the 1440s were celebrated in chivalric verse; the coat of arms of the Bethencourt family was charged with wild men in tribute to Jean’s wild adversaries. They bore or appropriated story-book-names, like ‘Gadifer’ and ‘Lancelot’ or, in the case of an unsavoury thug who served Dom Henrique, ‘Tristram of the Island’. They aspired to fame, yet have been forgotten.
Most of them shared, and strove to embody, the great aristocratic ethos of the late Middle Ages in the west, the ‘code’ of chivalry. Their role-models were the footloose princes who won themselves kingdoms by deeds of derring-do in popular romances of chivalry, which often had seaborne settings: figures like the medieval ‘Brutus’, who, when Troy was lost, found a realm in Albion, or Prince Amadis of Gaul, who battled with giants and won an enchanted island. Their spokesman was the Castilian knight, Count Pero Nino, whose chronicle, written by his standard-bearer in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, mixes history, romance and chivalric discourse: El Victorial celebrates a knight never vanquished in joust or war or love, whose greatest battles were fought at sea. Columbus, whose life’s trajectory startlingly resembled the plot of a chivalric romance of the sea, probably had similar role-models in mind. He arrogated to himself the prize for sighting land on his first Atlantic crossing, less, perhaps, out of naked greed than because his journey, though without precedent in fact, was precedented in literature: in a Spanish version of the medieval Alexander romance, Alexander makes his own discovery of Asia by sea and, the poet emphasises, was first, before all his seamen, to see it.
The trajectory of fictional heroes of romances of the sea could be followed in real life. A suggestive case in point is that of Bartolomeu Perestrelo, the father of Columbus’s wife. He was the younger son of a merchant of Piacenza, who made a fortune in Portugal, sufficient to enable him to place his children at court or in its vicinity. Bartolomeu entered the household of the Infante Dom Henrique, where service as a seafarer and coloniser won him the hereditary captaincy of the island of Porto Santo in 1446. This example, which Columbus had before his eyes, was typical of the experience of adventurers in other islands of the Atlantic. ‘Tristram of the Island’ in Madeira presided over a chivalric pantomime in which his vassals exchanged ritual kisses and inserted hands according to time-honoured convention. Columbus’s fellow Genoese, Antonio da Noli, set up as ruler of Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands. The Peraza family ruled Gomera from a keep of stone and celebrated a chivalric self-perception. In 1499, Pedro Alvares da Caminha dreamed of building on his island of Sao Tome in the Gulf of Guinea a city that would rival Rome. These self-cast romantic heroes were like pre-incarnations of Sancho Panza, begging the Don to make him governor of some island. Their spirit of seaborne knight-errantry contrasted with the landlubbers’ complacency and contempt for the maritime life that dominated prevailing values in China, say, or the Maghrib.