In northern waters there was no great patron endowed with the means or tenacity of Dom Henrique or Dom Joao, no chronicler like Zurara to system tise or romanticise the gropings of the explorers. This is surprising. The northern seas were full of romance. They were, for example, the setting of the peregrinations of St Brendan and the adventures of Amadis, of the voyages of conquest of the Gesta Arthuri and the armchair travels of the fourteenth-century friar, Nicholas of Lynne, who claimed to have visited the north pole five times. Yet, perhaps because the results were disappointing, the real story of their exploration, compared with these engaging fantasies, is relatively unsung.
There was a route across the north Atlantic which might be called traditional: it led from Scandinavia, by way of easterly currents north of the Faroes to Iceland and Greenland. This route could be and was pursued as far as Newfoundland, at which point an adverse current inhibited further progress south, while prevailing westerlies were available to take ships homeward. The remains of a long-abandoned settlement or way-station at l’Anse-aux-Meadows in Newfoundland are consistent with Norse origins; these have been linked with the Icelandic saga tradition of the discovery of a land called Vinland at the end of the tenth century and its temporary settlement early in the eleventh. Until 1347, Icelandic annals continued to record journeys for trading or trapping to Markland, a name apparently applied to part of the north American mainland, north of Newfoundland. Thereafter, however, this island-hopper’s route across the Atlantic dwindled in significance, owing in part, perhaps, to the colder weather which seems to have characterised northern latitudes for a while in the late Middle Ages. Communication ceased with settlements in Greenland and attempts to revive it early in the fifteenth century found that the colonists had died out or disappeared, although, if sixteenth-century traditions can be trusted, the attempt was renewed intermittently from Denmark in the last third of the century. If, as is often assumed, fishing or whaling expeditions from European ports continued to make voyages deep into the Atlantic, they are unrecorded.
The axis of penetration of the Atlantic shifted south in the fifteenth century to the zone of prevailing westerlies. This may seem paradoxical, yet it is a curious fact that, outside monsoonal climates, in the history of maritime exploration as a whole, most voyagers seem to have preferred to make their outwards journeys against the wind, presumably as an investment of present trouble in the hope of future return. The discovery of Flores and Corvo in 1452 marks the beginning of a series of such Atlantic voyages, which it may have helped to inspire. Between 1462 and 1487 at least eight Portuguese commissions survive for voyages from the Azores to discover new lands; some of these refer explicitly to the evidence of sea charts. Among the most general terms are those of Fernao Teles’s grant, in 1474, of ‘the Seven Cities or whatever islands he shall find’. In 1487, the Fleming Ferdinand von Olmen, also sailing from the Azores under Portuguese auspices, was commissioned, in terms strikingly similar to those of Columbus, for islands and mainland in the ocean.
Meanwhile, a similar project took shape in Bristol, where long experience in the Iceland trade made navigators familiar with north Atlantic waters. What the islands of ‘Antillia’ or ‘the Seven Cities’ were to Azorean ambitions, that of ‘Brasil’ was to the Bristolians. The origins of the legend of Brasil are obscure but a putative island of that name appears, in various positions, on medieval Atlantic charts. The beginnings of what seems to be a sustained programme of exploration in search of it were noticed by the writer on chivalry, William Worcestre, in a notebook of personal memoranda of 1480. On 15 July, he records, a ship belonging to two well-known merchant families, who regularly traded with both Iceland and the Iberian peninsula, set off ‘usque ad insulam de Brasylle in occidentali parte Hibernie’. Bad weather forced them back in September without success. The following year, another expedition with the same objective was declared by a larger group of projectors. The continuation or resumption of the search is suggested by the terms of a letter of 1498, in which a Castilian ambassador assured his sovereigns that Bristolians annually equipped expeditions in search of the Isle of Brasil and the Seven Cities.
The context of this remark was the ambassador’s desire to acquaint his superiors with news of John Cabot, the Genoese navigator who had made Bristol his base for a more ambitious project: the crossing of the Atlantic in an attempt to reach China. Academic debate about the size of the globe and the extent of the ocean had encouraged speculations about the accessibility of the orient by way of the west. Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli had proposed it in a letter to a correspondent at the Portuguese court in 1474. The idea seems implicit in the globe attributed to Martin Behaim. Columbus had attempted to put the idea into effect along a relatively southerly latitude — and, therefore, across a longer distance than would apply further north — in 1492. The Nuremberg physician, Hieronymus Munzer, had appealed to the king of Portugal to sponsor an attempt in 1493. Columbus’s experiences seemed, to some, to confirm the viability of the project: Columbus himself professed to believe that he had got close to China and a published version of his report showed traders in oriental garb visiting the lands he had discovered. The result of Cabot’s attempts, between 1496 and 1498, was the recording of a viable direct route west, to and from Newfoundland, returning with the westerlies and making use on the way out of a brief spring season of variable winds. It seems likely that the use of these winds was already known in Bristol, where Cabot’s discovery was dismissed as of slight significance and identified with the Isle of Brasil; nor did Cabot’s exploits excite the imitators and emulators inspired by Columbus. The search for a route to Asia across the north Atlantic was not resumed until well into the sixteenth century.