The Wandering Bones of Columbus:

An Age of Discovery Pilgrimage

Most historians study people they will never meet because the people they study are dead. Historians often write about places they have never visited but know only from maps and pictures. What an advantage, then, for historians to visit the places they study. This trip I finally got to visit Cadiz, Seville, and Lisbon, places I have been read about and studied for years.

The Independence of the Seas sailed into Cadiz on Thursday, 24 June, at about 8:30 of a hazy morning. Cadiz is located on a peninsula next to a very large bay. It has been an important port since ancient times and is the oldest continuously occupied city in Western Europe. The Phoenicians founded a trading colony there called Gadir, which evolved into Gades when pronounced by the Greeks and the Romans. Gades ultimately became Cadiz.

Sands and Silt Transform a Fortress.

When the Phoenicians established their settlement, Gadir/Cadiz was located on an island. Eventually, shifting sands and silting in the bay between the island and the mainland transformed it into a peninsula. It was an important port during the Age of Discovery. Visitors to Cadiz can still see many of its fortifications. The town needed the fortifications, too, because it was attacked many times.

Sir Francis Drake singed the beard of the King of Spain when he raided Cadiz in 1587. Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, again captured Cadiz in 1596 and created his "Knights of Cadiz," much to the displeasure of Queen Elizabeth I.

George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham and favorite of Charles I of England, was not so lucky. A huge expedition he organized in 1625 failed to capture the port, adding to his growing unpopularity. And as we know from the story of Gibraltar I posted here a few days ago, Admiral Rooke considered Cadiz to be too heavily fortified and instead took his fleet to attack and capture Gibraltar.

A Christian Cathedral Replaces a Mosque.

Seville is even more historic. It was an important city in Muslim Spain, second only to Cordoba. When the Christians recaptured Seville, they built a great cathedral on the site of the Muslim mosque. The lower two-thirds of the bell tower of the Cathedral of Seville are remains of the original Islamic minaret. The courtyard of orange trees is also a legacy of the Muslim mosque.

The Cathedral of Seville is the third largest in all of Christendom. Its ceiling is held up by massive pillars of stone with numerous side chapels tucked into its interior. The main altar is adorned with gold, and a side alter is crafted from silver. Work on the current gothic cathedral began in 1434 and was not finished until 1517, so it was a work in progress during the lifetime of Columbus.

Columbus is buried there — but just how much of him is buried there remains a subject of dispute. Santo Domingo also claims to be the site of Columbus's grave. Another church may also have some of the remains. In those days bodies were moved around; or rather, the bones were moved around. Still, it is a thrill for a student of Columbus to see the tomb of Columbus, even if there is more than one. I am used to that type of situation. My hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana, proclaims itself as one of several Johnny Appleseed graves.

The Grand Old Archive of an Empire.

Seville was the home port for the silver and gold that Spain's American colonies shipped back to the mother country. It was also place where the Council of the Indies worked. That body administered Spain's American empire, and their papers form the Archivo General de Indias, a wonderful archive housed in a grand old building. It is definitely worth a walk through.

The Guadalquivar River flows through Seville. It was on this river that some of Columbus's ships made their way down to the sea. Seville was an important port, but by the sixteenth century it was in trouble. The river was silting up — a process that had been going on for thousands of years — and was becoming increasingly difficult to navigate. The silting turned lakes into marshes and marshes into dry land. It made the river shallow and filled it with sandbars whose locations shifted constantly.

Down on the banks of the Guadalquivar is the Torre del Oro, a medieval tower that once protected the city from attackers coming up river. It is another magnificent structure.

I highly recommend Seville for a visit. They say it is the loveliest city in Spain, and I believe they are right. There are many wide streets with trees, and the banks of the river are lined with great sycamores. Many of the buildings reflect the Moorish heritage of the city and are very attractive.

Entering Lisbon by the Mouth of the Tagus.

Arriving at Lisbon on a cruise ship is an exciting experience for historian and non-historian alike. The ship enters the mouth of the Tagus River — just like Vasco da Gama, Pedro Cabral, Christopher Columbus, and a host of other explorers would have done. Moving up the Tagus, the ship passes the Belem Tower and the Monastery of San Geronimos, both landmarks that would have been familiar to seafarers of the sixteenth century. Next it passes the Monument of the Discoveries and the great suspension bridge of the 25th April Bridge, the third largest in the world. After passing under the bridge, the cruise ship docks.

We took a city of Lisbon tour, which was good. We had a knowledgeable guide named Elena. In the city center we stopped at a little cantina, where I tried the Portuguese beer Sagres on draft. Definitely a good one, check it out. The day before, we had stopped at a Seville McDonalds near the tour meeting point. I got a beer called Mahou. My advice is to skip that one.

We saw a number of interesting things, including the ruins of a Carmelite nunnery that was heavily damaged during the great earthquake of 1755 and never rebuilt.

For me, the highpoints of the tour were the Maritime Museum, the Monastery of San Geronimos, the Belem Tower, and the Monument of the Discoveries. At the Maritime Museum, I got photos of statutes and portraits of various Portuguese explorers whose images I had never seen before.

After a too brief time in the museum, our guide Elena led us into the church of the monastery, the burial place of Vasco da Gama and the national poet of Portugal, Luis de Camoes. Whether all of Gama is actually buried in the crypt is problematic. He died in India and was buried there with others in a Portuguese church. Some years later his body — or rather, his bones — was transferred for burial in Portugal. They may not have gotten all of Vasco, or they may have picked up pieces of someone else. It all goes to show that Antonio Vieira was right when he said, "God gave the Portuguese a small country as a cradle but all the world as their grave." The church is a beautiful and wonderful place, full of artistic motifs that play off of Portugal's world explorations. Indian elephants hold up the royal crypts.

A Scoop of Sand for the Home Folks.

Elena told us that the Belem Tower was built on an island, but due to silting of the Tagus River, it is now connected to the land. That turned out to be a good thing. Not expecting to get the chance to scoop-up some sand samples for George Williams and his students, I was surprised to find a beach beside the Belem Tower. I grabbed a handful of sand and took it back to the bus for safe deposit in a specimen envelope. Science marches on — and so did the tour.

We next stopped at the Monument of the Discoveries,
a vast statue in the shape of a boat with Prince Henry the Navigator at the head and other figures lined up on both sides of the monument behind him. I found a brochure that identifies all the figures and was relieved to discover that the Portuguese had not put any dubious people on the monument. During the ultra-nationalistic Salazarian dictatorship (1932-1974), some Portuguese scholars suggested, among other questionable claims, that several people had reached the Americas before Columbus. The revisionist ideas of that time have appeared in some Portuguese monuments, but not on the Monument of the Discoveries. This was the last stop of our tour.

About 5 o'clock that evening, the ship embarked on the next leg of our journey, sailing out of the Tagus estuary and into the Atlantic Ocean. I took my camera to the stern and snapped pictures of the 25th April Bridge, the Monument of Discoveries, and the Belem Tower. The mouth of the Tagus is wide and unmistakably a great port, even without the modern buildings along the waterfront. As the historian and citizen of Lisbon Damiăo de Góis (1502-1574) wrote most truly of his beloved home city,

"Lisbon, as Queen of the Seas, claims for herself dominion over so much of the ocean as extends from the mouth of the Tagus to Africa and Asia in an immense maritime circuit."

Click on the black panther to read Ron Fritze's third report from his sea cruise, "Four in a Row: Cannes, Florence, Rome, and Sardinia."