‘The Race to the New World’ by Douglas Hunter

Reviewed by Hubert O’Hearn

Your enjoyment of The Race to the New World: Christopher Columbus, John Cabot and a Lost History of Discovery is dependent on one crucial factor: what do you expect of a history? If it is a speculative narrative filled with fleshed-out characters whom the reader can identify with and enjoy—boy have you come to the wrong place. If it is for diligent, non-speculative research put forth in clean, non-judgmental prose—boy, have you come to the right place.

One cannot help but be impressed by the level of Douglas Hunter’s research. As noted in the Introduction, this book appeared as an indirect consequence of another historian ‘doing the Kafka’ as it were and ordering all her research for a book on John Cabot to be destroyed upon her death. Franz Kafka’s executor ignored the order; Alwyn Ruddock’s did not. As such, a promised revelatory biography of the Venetian engineer who became the first acknowledged European explorer of North America was not published. One has to wonder if Ruddock’s pronouncements over four decades that she was, poised to turn the story of Cabot and the discovery of North America (in her own words) “upside down”’ were perhaps her version of Joe Gould’s Secret. Gould was the New York tramp (no other term fits as well) who in the 1940s and 50s claimed to have written an oral history of pretty much everything in civilization. After Joseph Mitchell twice profiled him in The New Yorker, Gould became a célèbre with a cause, invited to all the right parties and so forth. When Mitchell discovered that Gould’s manuscript was non-existent and the man himself was a hoax, Mitchell never again published another word. He would go to his office at The New Yorker every working day and Not Write.

That scenario might have applied here if Hunter had written a biography of Alwyn Ruddock, however he found her subject more interesting and so took off on his own quest to discover what the existent truth actually is about Columbus (or Colon) of Genoa and Cabot (or Cabotto—spellings shifted like the wind in the fifteenth century). One must be glad for his efforts as much is revealed about these schoolboy idols, yet there is a lot of heavy lifting to be done by the reader.

The essential intrigue about Cabot in particular is well-phrased by Hunter:

That John Cabot—a man who had left behind a trail of prominent creditors in Venice, had no oceanic resume to speak of, could not fulfill a promise to build a bridge at Seville across the Guadalquivir, and in the process had angered some of the most powerful nobles in Spain—became the focal point of such an ambitious English royal gambit is one of the true oddities of the Renaissance.

Oh my yes. It is only the smallest exaggeration to state that the present-day equivalent would be your family accountant somehow lucking into commanding the first manned exploration of Mars. As such, the story of Cabot by its very nature fascinates. How in hell did this ever happen?

Hunter is unwilling to state any conclusion that is not absolutely verifiable, however he does present evidence to suggest that Cabot had two lucky associations. One, he vanishes off the public records (and from his Venetian creditors who very much had it in for him) during the exact time of Columbus’s second voyage to the Caribbean. Second, it is reasonably likely he made the acquaintance of one Martin Behaim, a ‘Burgundian’ who because of the boiling politics of the time had no hope of ever convincing Henry VII of England to launch an expedition, but as one of the very few alive who could construct a three-dimensional globe out of two-dimensional maps was, able to supply the demonstrable evidence Cabot needed to sway the King’s opinion his way.

As for Columbus, sorry to ruin many an American parade, but the conclusion one reaches is that the man was a brute, fraud and liar. Perhaps the most fascinating passage of The Race to the New World is when Columbus’s insistence that he had established a colony in Asia was finally put to a clear test. There were, remarkably for 1494, pretty reliable charts predicting lunar eclipses. And so one would appear on September 14th of that year. As he knew what time the eclipse would be seen over Seville, by extrapolation Columbus could determine his position on the globe by when the moon blotted out over Espanola. He wasn’t in Asia, the Indies, Cathay, or anywhere close to it. Oh dear. Well, rather than admit his error, what the much-celebrated Admiral of the Ocean Sea did was to, um, claim that the island of Espanola was much bigger than what it was. Much bigger, much longer, perhaps the length of South America longer. And oh by the way, anyone whose opinion differed from Columbus would have their tongue cut out or at the very least their return passage to Spain denied.

Columbus was an intensely cruel, vain and rather cowardly man. He did not venture north of the Caribbean, so laying the path open for Cabot and England, because he didn’t like the cold weather. He scooped up the native Arawaks as slaves for sale, and when after the first and much-lauded 1492 expedition he left thirty-nine men behind to establish a colony, and on his return found them slaughtered, he claimed that was because of the cannibal Carib tribesmen. The truth was that these lonely sailors went on a rape and abduction mission amongst the Arawaks, whose men understandably objected. The first colony of Isabella was established smack in a hurricane path because Columbus refused to consider the better site that had been discovered by his deceased associate on the first voyage, Martin Alonso. Alonso, by the way, like Behaim deserves his own biography.

And so, Columbus was a self-serving idiot and Cabot a chancer. Who could ask for anything more? Yet what lacks in The Race to the New World is any sense of who these men were. I found myself begging for some character description, some feel, some life in the work. How did they live on the ships and in the colonies? Every financial arrangement is recorded to the last penny, yet physical arrangements are not. Ultimately, this is a book that begs for a top-grade historical novelist to take Hunter’s research and run it through the imagination. This is an excellent source, and satisfying for those who find an academic book a great read, but charm is not its bag.

Douglas & McIntyre | 288 pages |  $34.95 | cloth | ISBN #978-1553658573