At Sea
We have now crossed the Equator in our Atlantic odyssey from the Falkland Islands and South Georgia in the southern hemisphere to the Canary Islands in the northern hemisphere. By the end of the voyage we will have been privileged to visit some of the remotest places on earth, but just three European maritime powers have, in their time, claimed ownership of these islands: Portugal, Spain and Britain.
The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 sent shock waves across Europe. The traditional overland trade in spices (a necessity for meat preservation before refrigeration) was fatally disrupted. The Italian cities of Venice and Genoa that had redistributed these commodities from Constantinople went into decline. Nations previously on the fringe, Portugal and Spain, then Britain, rose to prominence.
Portugal, under the leadership of Henry the Navigator, invested in a program of exploration along the African coast to try to find a sea route to the Spice Islands that would bypass the Middle East altogether. The Cape Verde archipelago, our next destination, lay on this route and was quickly acquired as a convenient place to provision. In 1487, on Christmas Day (Natal, in Portuguese), Bartholomew Diaz reported the Good Hope that a way had been found around the southern tip of Africa. Ten years later Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in India by sea from Lisbon.
Traveling with da Gama was a sailor called Cabral who is now credited with the discovery of Brazil. He made this discovery, which he thought of no great consequence, doing what all Portuguese sailors in these latitudes had to do, running with the Easterlies in search of the Trade Winds that would carry them around the Cape of Good Hope. Meanwhile Spain, having expelled the Moors in 1492 (felt by Christendom to be some compensation for the loss of Constantinople), was embarked on a parallel program of exploration, in its case by attempting to reach the Spice Islands by sailing West. Columbus, who used the Canary Islands for his provisioning, thought he had succeeded in that momentous year of 1492, giving us as a linguistic legacy both Red Indians and the West Indies.
Before long Portugal and Spain were in dispute as to which country was entitled to what new territory. Since the Pope claimed the right to settle disputed between Catholic monarchs he was able to arbitrate. The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas drew a line of longitude 370 miles to the west of the Cape Verde islands. To the west of that line was to be Spanish territory; to the east of it, Portuguese. This explains why Brazil speaks Portuguese today and the rest of South America speaks Spanish. It does not explain the widespread use of English in North America, however.
During the sixteenth century the British Tudor dynasty had been hard at work modernizing their nation-state. The ideas of the Reformation had been adopted and a Protestant national church, with the monarch at its head, established. In 1588, Spain was crushed with the defeat (mainly by the British weather) of the Spanish armada. Queen Elizabeth made it clear that as a Protestant monarch the Treaty of Tordesillas did not apply to her and the foundations of a British Empire were laid in North America. By 1815, Britain had lost her American colonies but had demonstrated naval superiority over the French. When Napoleon was exiled to St Helena in that year, the neighboring islands of Tristan da Cunha and Ascension were also garrisoned by the British against the possibility of a Bonapartist rescue mission. The Falkland archipelago was but one of many remote islands taken over to serve the British navy as it patrolled its growing imperial possessions.
Today there is a twilight feel to these British possessions that is a far cry from the days of Rule Britannia and the “empire on which the sun never set.” The British Foreign Office is making new arrangements for self-government wherever it can, conscious of its moral obligations to communities who were brought into existence to serve purposes no longer relevant. In 1975, the people of Cape Verde were granted their independence from Portugal and proudly joined the Organization of African Unity. By contrast, any attempts by separatists on the Canary Islands to draw attention to the African roots of those islands (their aboriginal inhabitants, the guanche, probably came originally from North Africa) receive short shrift from a local population keen to enjoy the considerable benefits of Spain’s EU membership. Questions of identity and economic benefit matter even in these remote places. Our visits have stimulated us to see our own worlds anew in their reflection.
We have now crossed the Equator in our Atlantic odyssey from the Falkland Islands and South Georgia in the southern hemisphere to the Canary Islands in the northern hemisphere. By the end of the voyage we will have been privileged to visit some of the remotest places on earth, but just three European maritime powers have, in their time, claimed ownership of these islands: Portugal, Spain and Britain.
The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 sent shock waves across Europe. The traditional overland trade in spices (a necessity for meat preservation before refrigeration) was fatally disrupted. The Italian cities of Venice and Genoa that had redistributed these commodities from Constantinople went into decline. Nations previously on the fringe, Portugal and Spain, then Britain, rose to prominence.
Portugal, under the leadership of Henry the Navigator, invested in a program of exploration along the African coast to try to find a sea route to the Spice Islands that would bypass the Middle East altogether. The Cape Verde archipelago, our next destination, lay on this route and was quickly acquired as a convenient place to provision. In 1487, on Christmas Day (Natal, in Portuguese), Bartholomew Diaz reported the Good Hope that a way had been found around the southern tip of Africa. Ten years later Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in India by sea from Lisbon.
Traveling with da Gama was a sailor called Cabral who is now credited with the discovery of Brazil. He made this discovery, which he thought of no great consequence, doing what all Portuguese sailors in these latitudes had to do, running with the Easterlies in search of the Trade Winds that would carry them around the Cape of Good Hope. Meanwhile Spain, having expelled the Moors in 1492 (felt by Christendom to be some compensation for the loss of Constantinople), was embarked on a parallel program of exploration, in its case by attempting to reach the Spice Islands by sailing West. Columbus, who used the Canary Islands for his provisioning, thought he had succeeded in that momentous year of 1492, giving us as a linguistic legacy both Red Indians and the West Indies.
Before long Portugal and Spain were in dispute as to which country was entitled to what new territory. Since the Pope claimed the right to settle disputed between Catholic monarchs he was able to arbitrate. The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas drew a line of longitude 370 miles to the west of the Cape Verde islands. To the west of that line was to be Spanish territory; to the east of it, Portuguese. This explains why Brazil speaks Portuguese today and the rest of South America speaks Spanish. It does not explain the widespread use of English in North America, however.
During the sixteenth century the British Tudor dynasty had been hard at work modernizing their nation-state. The ideas of the Reformation had been adopted and a Protestant national church, with the monarch at its head, established. In 1588, Spain was crushed with the defeat (mainly by the British weather) of the Spanish armada. Queen Elizabeth made it clear that as a Protestant monarch the Treaty of Tordesillas did not apply to her and the foundations of a British Empire were laid in North America. By 1815, Britain had lost her American colonies but had demonstrated naval superiority over the French. When Napoleon was exiled to St Helena in that year, the neighboring islands of Tristan da Cunha and Ascension were also garrisoned by the British against the possibility of a Bonapartist rescue mission. The Falkland archipelago was but one of many remote islands taken over to serve the British navy as it patrolled its growing imperial possessions.
Today there is a twilight feel to these British possessions that is a far cry from the days of Rule Britannia and the “empire on which the sun never set.” The British Foreign Office is making new arrangements for self-government wherever it can, conscious of its moral obligations to communities who were brought into existence to serve purposes no longer relevant. In 1975, the people of Cape Verde were granted their independence from Portugal and proudly joined the Organization of African Unity. By contrast, any attempts by separatists on the Canary Islands to draw attention to the African roots of those islands (their aboriginal inhabitants, the guanche, probably came originally from North Africa) receive short shrift from a local population keen to enjoy the considerable benefits of Spain’s EU membership. Questions of identity and economic benefit matter even in these remote places. Our visits have stimulated us to see our own worlds anew in their reflection.
