No: not Joseph Heller's 'forgotten novel' — though I ought to get to Heller sometime. Just a thought about the moment English navigators and seamen looked across the Atlantic.
I doubt it was just Cristóbal Colón, antea Cristovão Colom, né Cristoforo Colombo finding his way and naming San Salvador.
All the evidence is that the shipmen of Bristol (and perhaps places like Waterford) had gone beyond the Porcupine Bank and been fishing off Newfoundland for at least two decades before — and presumably had some idea of land nearby. They just kept that knowledge to themselves. Else, how do we explain John Lloyd in a small vessel out of Bristol (15 July 1480) heading out to look for the mythical island of Hy Brasil? Lloyd's cargo included forty bushels of salt — a bit of cod-fishing was obviously part of the deal.
There's more evidence in Hakluyt, who included in Principal Navigations a Robert Thorne's map and some memoirs. Thorne, in two letters (one to Henry VII Tudor, the other to Edward Lee, the English Ambassador to Spain), tells of his father having been involved in explorations of the Newfoundland coast, and urging the 'authorities' to get on with repeating it.
All of which, and far, far more suggests to my mind that 'Something was happening' in Tudor times to turn English attention to look west. The only question is when to date it.
Allow me to leap a very eventful century to 4 November 1576. That date was the sacking of Antwerp, and a period of anarchy for the Spanish Netherlands, which had all kinds of consequence. Out of that, the Union of Arras (formulating a core for the remaining Spanish power) and the Union of Utrecht (the cohesion of the United Provinces), both in late 1579, explain why the modern Netherlands (mainly lapsed Protestants) and Belgium (heavily Catholic, but no longer as sincere as they used to be) still persist. This was when the Habsburgs were realising the limits of Spanish power in the Low Countries. After, the main commerce centre moved north along the coast to Amsterdam. From a specific English point-of-view, it destroyed the main export wool-market.
And it's why I have been reading ...
17. Michael Pye, Antwerp: The Glory Years
I bought this book on the back of very warm reviews, and because I knew (and took to) Pye's earlier The Edge of the World, How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are — which is very much the other half of this story. In the matter of the city and history of Antwerp, Pye's two books overlap to the extent one may spot borrowings from one to the other: the same names flit from one to the other.
Another reason for acquiring this book was — I know and like Antwerp. Getting there is too easy — off the Eurostar at Brussels-Midi, change platform and the same ticket takes me the rest of the way. Antwerpen Centraal is gloriously theatrical, turn-of-the-nineteenth-century and splendidly over-the-top.
Belgium as a whole is the epitome of Northern European bourgeoisification. Antwerp must count as the country's most bourgeois provincial city. And the ultimate bourgeois bit of Antwerp is Meir, the fashion district. Money still talks here — but with style.
Pye's story of the great century of Antwerp, the sixteenth century. His account is topped-and-tailed by two events, making for a compact account (the text is barely a couple of hundred pages). It kicks off with the arrival of Portuguese Jews fleeing from the Inquisition, bringing their skills, trades and acumen. It ends with Alexander Farnese, duke of Parma, suppressing of dissent, enforcing Catholic conformity, and so with the flight of those Jews, of Lutherans and Calvinists to more congenial cities. In between is a period of liberalism, especially in economics.
Hence the story never strays too far from money. The book is delightfully full of anecdotes and vignettes. This is from page 116, starting chapter 8 (which is entitled — yes — Money):
The banker and merchant Erasmus Schetz tried to explain money to his 'most special friend', the 'great and most learnèd man', the philosopher Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. He was not doing well. 'I was certain,' Schetz wrote, 'that within a year I would have rendered you capable of understanding all this.' He added: 'I would prefer that you were more capable of grasping this matter than I see you are.'
Erasmus was expecting income from a parish in England, but the coins seemed to have different values in different places. Schetz had to tell Erasmus that there was money in coins and money on paper and the value of the two could shift, that other people could take the difference between the markets in money 'to their own gain, and to your detriment'. The great philosopher had a simpler view: he assumed he was being robbed.
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