Vicente Yáñez Pinzón
gigatos | May 31, 2022
Summary
Vicente Yáñez Pinzón (Palos de la Frontera, ca. 1462-1514) was a Spanish navigator and explorer, co-discoverer of America and the first European navigator to reach Brazil. He sailed with Christopher Columbus on his first voyage to the New World in 1492 as captain of the caravel La Niña. He discovered the coasts of the northern tip of Brazil in January 1500, three months before the arrival of Pedro Álvares Cabral at Porto Seguro.
Vicente Yáñez was born approximately around 1462 in Palos de la Frontera, Spain, so he was the youngest, by far, of the Pinzón brothers, being very likely that he took the nickname Yáñez from Rodrigo Yáñez, a bailiff of Palos who would be his godfather, as was the custom of the place. Tradition in Palos points to his plot of land on Ribera Street. From a very young age he learned the art of sailing from his older brother, one of the most outstanding sailors of the time, and participated from his adolescence, which was wartime, in battles and assaults. He married twice, the first time to María Teresa Rodríguez, who gave him two daughters: Ana Rodríguez and Juana González. The second, on his return from his last trip to Yucatan, in 1509, with Ana Núñez de Trujillo, with whom he lived in Triana until his death.
The first documented news about Vicente Yáñez are several reports about assaults on Catalan and Aragonese ships that he made, since he was only fifteen years old, between 1477 and 1479, a time of war with Portugal, in which Palos participated actively and which aggravated its usual shortage of wheat. Its neighbors complained of starvation, and royal orders to various places to allow the supply of grain to Palos were disobeyed. The Pinzón, assuming their responsibilities as natural leaders of the region, attacked caravels carrying mainly wheat.
Vicente Yáñez was the first to accept his brother”s invitation to enlist when Martín Alonso decided to support Christopher Columbus” expedition. Together they visited their relatives, friends and acquaintances house by house, encouraging the most prominent sailors in the area to embark, rejecting the ships seized by Columbus, hiring more suitable vessels, and contributed half a million maravedíes from their estate.
As captain of the Niña, his interventions were fundamental during the voyage, encouraging the expedition to continue when even Columbus himself wanted to turn back. He quelled the protests of the sailors of the Santa María, rescuing them when the ship was shipwrecked and bringing the Admiral back to Spain.
In 1495 he prepared two caravels, the Vicente Yáñez and the Fraila, to participate in the armada that Alonso de Aguilar, elder brother of the Great Captain, was going to lead against North Africa, but the wars of Naples took place and they went to Italy, from where they did not return until 1498, passing along the coasts of Algiers and Tunisia.
That same year, the Crown decided to allow private individuals to make voyages of discovery. After capitulating in Seville with the all-powerful Bishop Fonseca on behalf of the Catholic Monarchs, on November 19, 1499, Yáñez left the Port of Palos with four small caravels, on his own initiative and at his own expense. He was accompanied by a large number of relatives and friends, among them, as scribe, Garcí Fernández, the famous physicist of Palos who supported Columbus when no one else did, his nephews and captains Arias Pérez and Diego Hernández Colmenero, first-born son and son-in-law, respectively, of Martín Alonso, his uncle Diego Martín Pinzón with his cousins Juan, Francisco and Bartolomé, the prestigious pilots Juan Quintero Príncipe, Juan de Umbría, Alonso Núñez and Juan de Jerez, as well as the sailors Cristóbal de Vega, García Alonso, Diego de Alfaro, Rodrigo Álvarez, Diego Prieto, Antón Fernández Colmenero, Juan Calvo, Juan de Palencia, Manuel Valdobinos, Pedro Ramírez, García Hernández and, of course, his brother Francisco Martín Pinzón.
He was appointed governor:
It is agreed to know: in remuneration of the seruicios and expenses and the damages that were recrecieron vos in the said trip, vos the said Bicente Yáñes, quanto our merced e voluntad fuere, seades nuestro Capitán e Governador de las dichas tierras de suso nonbradas, from the said point of Santa María de la Consolación following the coast until Rostro Fermoso, and from there all the coast that runs to the northeast until the said river that you possessed called Santa María de la Mar Dulce, with the islands that are at the mouth of the said river, which is called Mariatanbalo; which said office and charge of Captain and Governor you may vsar and exercise and vsedes and exercedes by you or by whom your power oviere, with all the things annexed and concerning the said charge, as the other our captains and governors of the similar islands and newly discovered land vsan and can and should use it.
The account of this voyage appears in several chronicles. Of these, the Decades of the New World, written in 1501 by the Milanese Pedro Mártir de Anglería, are the closest in time and based on eyewitness reports, among them Vicente Yáñez himself, but, above all, Diego de Lepe, the Palermo captain who made a “twin” voyage to Pinzón”s, left Palos a month and a half or two months later and followed his course until overtaking him in the Amazon River. The version of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in his Historia general y natural de las Indias is also quite interesting, since he “knew and treated” Pinzón, who provided him with much of the data he narrates. As for the respective Chronicles of Father Bartolomé de las Casas and Antonio de Herrera, the one of Fray Bartolomé is based on Anglería and the one of Herrera on the Dominican.
In his peculiar and flowery language, Anglería reports that, past the Canaries and the Cape Verde Islands, Vicente Yáñez”s ships set a southwesterly course until they lost sight of the North Star. For the first time, the Spanish sailors passed the equator and entered the Southern Hemisphere. A serious contingency, because logically they did not know how to be guided by the stars in the southern sky.
Oviedo does not relate the trip. As for Las Casas, he substantially follows Anglería, although with more austere expressions, stating that “having taken the road to the Canary Islands and from there to Cape Verde, and having left Santiago, which is one of them, on the 13th day of January 1500 years ago, they took the Austro route and then to the Levant, and having gone, as they said, 700 leagues, they lost the North and passed the equinoctial line. After passing it, they had a terrible storm that they thought they would perish; they traveled another 240 leagues on that route to the East or Levant”. Herrera says the same thing, but when he narrates the crossing of the equinoctial line, he states that Vicente Yáñez was “the first subject of the Crown of Castile and Leon to cross it”. Finally, Anglería tells us:
(…) on January 26th they saw land from afar, and observing the turbidity of the sea water, they launched the probe and found a depth of 16 cubits, which they vulgarly call fathoms. They approached and disembarked and, having remained there for two days, since they did not find any man during that time even though they saw his footprints on the beach, they engraved on the trees and rocks near the coast the names of the Kings and their own names, with news of their arrival, and left.
Nothing more. The parsimony of words of the exuberant Pedro Mártir is astonishing, especially compared with the previous paragraph and with what Las Casas says about the same fact when he affirms that “on January 26th they saw land far away; this was the cape that is now called Sant Agustín, and the Portuguese called the Land of Brazil: Vicente Yáñez called it cape of Consolation”.
The Sevillian friar inserted two very important statements in his work: first, that the cape Pinzón reached and baptized as Consolación was the cape known as San Agustín. Second, that Vicente Yáñez took possession of the land. Fray Bartolomé follows the account of the Milanese, but does not hesitate to complete it with the information and convictions that he has been gathering over the years. For him there was not the slightest doubt: the cape of Santa María de la Consolación was that of San Agustín, the first land discovered in Brazil by Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, who took possession of it. Faced with the hostile attitude of the natives, they decided to hoist the sails and continue sailing until they reached:
(…) another river, but not deep enough to be crossed with the caravels, for which reason they sent four skiffs with armed men ashore to reconnoiter it. These saw on an eminence next to the coast a multitude of Indians, whom, sending ahead an infantryman, they invited to treat. It seemed that they were trying to seize and carry off our man, for just as he had thrown them a rattle to attract them, they, from afar, did the same with a golden stick of an elbow; and when the Spaniard bent down to catch it, they quickly surrounded him with the intention of seizing him; but our infantryman, protecting himself with the shield and sword with which he was armed, defended himself until his companions helped him with the boats.
The sad result of this first bloody confrontation was, according to all the chroniclers, eight dead Spaniards and more than a dozen wounded, being among the Indians the casualties much more numerous. The chroniclers coincide in the narration, with the nuance of Oviedo, who says that it was a “piece of carved gold” what the Indians used as bait.
From this episode some authors deduce, adventurously, that the natives knew the ambition of the Christians for gold. In the first place, the “gold stick” that, little by little, from chronicler to chronicler, became a “piece of carved gold” was not recovered, so we will never know if it was really gold or not. However, this fact, as well as a cross found by Diego de Lepe”s expedition, which according to Professor Juan Manzano would not have surprised them so much, nor would Juan de la Cosa have mentioned it in his famous map, if they had believed that Yáñez”s men had placed it there, are the flimsy arguments with which this author doubts that the true discoverer of Brazil was Pinzón, and attributes, without further ado, this merit to the expedition of the Portuguese Duarte Pacheco in 1498, which no one knows exactly where it went, because political circumstances made it advisable to keep it secret.
A hypothesis with which, according to historian Julio Izquierdo Labrado, we cannot agree because it is too adventurous and gratuitous, not only because the arguments, we repeat, are very flimsy, but also because secrecy and discovery are not concepts that go well together. To discover is not only to arrive, it is to take possession, to record names, to record that one has arrived, to have a notary record the event, to know with greater or lesser accuracy where one has arrived, to measure, to map and, above all, to inform kings, cosmographers, chroniclers, sailors, to name a few trades, and the public in general, so that the lands that have been reached are incorporated into the general knowledge of the culture, of the civilization that sent that expedition. That is discovery. And that did not happen from the arrival, if it arrived, of Duarte Pacheco to the Brazilian coast, but of Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, the only sailor who deserves the title of discoverer of Brazil. A title that, by the way, was neither spared nor disputed, as we shall see, by his contemporaries, neither Spanish nor Portuguese.
Nor did anyone dispute the title of discoverer and first explorer of the Amazon River, the place where the confrontation took place, at the mouth of the Pará, and from which they left saddened because of the dead, until they reached what they believed to be another river that was 40 leagues away. In reality, as Oviedo states in his chronicle, it was the other shore, the other mouth of the immense Amazon. They were astonished to find that the fresh water flowed 40 leagues into the sea, and they renewed all the water in their vessels. Determined to investigate the secret of such a powerful river, they headed towards it and, according to Anglería, they found that the fresh water flowed 40 leagues into the sea:
They discovered that from some great mountains, rivers of rapid currents were rushing with great impetus. They say that within that island there are numerous islands fertile for the richness of its soil and full of people. They say that the natives of this region are peaceful and sociable, but not very useful to our people, since they did not obtain from them any desirable benefits, such as gold or precious stones; in view of this, they took 30 captives from there. The Indians call this region Mariatambal; however, the one located to the east of the river is called Camamoro, and the western one Paricora. The Indians indicated that in the interior of that coast there was a not inconsiderable amount of gold.
…
Oviedo categorically affirms that it was Vicente Yáñez Pinzón “the first Christian and Spaniard who gave news of this great river”, which he already calls Marañón, a name also used by Las Casas, although he affirms he does not know who and why they baptized it this way. In addition, the Dominican adds the surprise that the phenomenon of the tidal wave produced in them, “because being in the river with the great impetus and force of the fresh water and that of the sea that resisted it, they made a terrible noise and lifted the ships four states high, where they did not suffer little danger”.
Entertained in this exploration of the Amazon, they were overtaken by the expedition of Diego de Lepe, who had been following them from Palos. Thus, strictly speaking, Pinzon”s discoveries in the Amazon concluded in the Brazilian lands. From there, Anglería tells us, they followed the coast “westward towards Paria, in a space of 300 leagues, to the point of land where the Arctic pole is lost”. This point is especially interesting and we will return to it later, when dealing with the controversy surrounding the location of Cape Santa María de la Consolación.
Anglería continues to report on Pinzón”s voyage, their arrival at the Marañón (the Orinoco, although Las Casas calls the Amazon that way). From there they continued to the Gulf of Paria (present-day Venezuela), where they loaded three thousand pounds of palo brasil, one of the few products that made a profit on this voyage. With a northwest wind, they sailed among several islands, very fertile but sparsely populated due to the cruelty of the cannibals. They land on several of them, discovering the island of Mayo, but the natives flee. They find enormous trees and, among them, an amazing marsupial animal.
They had already traveled 600 leagues, and had already passed by the island of Hispaniola, when in the month of July they suffered a terrible storm, which wrecked two of the four caravels they were carrying in the shallows of Babueca, and took another, tearing it violently from its anchors and causing it to be lost from sight. They were desperate when, fortunately, when the storm ceased, the caravel they believed lost returned, manned by 18 men. The chronicler Pedro Mártir affirms that “With these two ships they set course for Spain. Battered by the waves and having lost not a few companions, they returned to their homeland of Palos, together with their wives and children, on September 30”.
This voyage, which was the longest and most important made at the time for its geographical results, was instead an economic disaster. In spite of everything, the Kings were very interested in the possession of the immense coast discovered by Pinzón, so they tried to stimulate him to return to it, so on September 5, 1501 they signed with him a capitulation in which, among other things, they named him captain and governor of “the said point of Santa María de la Consolación and following the coast until Rostro Fermoso, and from there all the coast that runs to the Northeast until the said river that you possessed not named Santa María de la Mar Dulce, with the islands that are at the mouth of the said river, which is called Mariatanbalo”. And in addition they granted him the sixth part of all the products that were obtained of that land, whenever he returned to her “within a year, that is counted of the day of the date of this capitulaçión and seat”.
Undoubtedly, the Catholic Monarchs show that they attach great importance to Pinzón”s discoveries and that they trust in his worthiness to continue serving them. Therefore, to reward him for what he had achieved, while at the same time encouraging and helping him to continue serving them, on Friday, October 8, 1501, he was knighted by King Ferdinand the Catholic in the Comares Tower of the Alhambra, the Royal Palace of Granada.
Everything was useless, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón was unable or unwilling to make this voyage. It is generally said that the lack of resources of the Palermo captain prevented him from doing so. This was certainly the case. However, Yáñez was able to obtain credit when necessary, albeit at very high interest rates. Therefore, it is not convenient to discard the possibility that already at such an early date he doubted, as a result of the Portuguese voyages to those coasts, the sovereignty of the Spanish kings over it by reason of the Treaty of Tordesillas and, consequently, their power to grant him its governorship.
Juan Manzano y Manzano tries to demonstrate that Pinzón returned to the lands he discovered in 1504, in a great effort to clarify Anglería”s confusing narration of the last voyage of Vicente Yáñez, where he mixes his wanderings with Solís in the Gulf of Mexico with a return to the lands found in 1500, in an absurd and meaningless journey. Why did Pinzón have to return to Brazil? To verify that the calculations of the Portuguese were correct and report on them to the King and Queen? This is possible, but the capitulation of 1501 said that Pinzón was to go at his own expense, bearing the expenses that his difficult economic situation made very burdensome, and that effort for what? To verify that neither he nor Spain had rights over this land? Sailing with such secrecy that none of his contemporaries found out? Risking his life and that of his crew more than usual by taking only one caravel? Had he not written down the data well on his first trip that he had to repeat it, going through the same places again? And when in 1513 he gave his statement, with such accuracy and honesty that he perfectly delimited between the coast he had discovered and the one he had simply “run”, since he admitted that his discovery corresponded to his countryman Diego de Lepe, why is he not so specific about his arrival at Cape St. Augustine, without the slightest reference to his having been there the second time and not the first time?
Too many unanswered questions in this supposed second voyage of Pinzón to Brazil, too many questions from a confused and disorderly account by Anglería. The truth is that the wanderings of Vicente Yáñez between 1502 and 1504 are still unclear.
His presence in America during those years was confirmed, probably to fulfill his obligations as Captain General and Governor of Puerto Rico, the island discovered by his brother Martín Alonso Pinzón during the second voyage of 1493. On the other hand, from the spring of 1505 we find him again in Spain, specifically in the Board of Navigators of Toro, in which, by a capitulation dated April 24, he was named captain and corregidor of the island of San Juan or Puerto Rico. He also participated as an expert summoned by the Crown in the Board of Navigators of Burgos in 1508 to take up again the subject of the search for a passage to the islands of the Spices. In his last voyage to the Indies in 1508, Captain Pinzón together with Juan Díaz de Solís traveled the coasts of Paria, Darién and Veragua, present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. When they did not find the passage they were looking for, they rounded the Yucatan Peninsula and entered the Gulf of Mexico up to 23.5º North latitude, making one of the first contacts with the Aztec civilization.
Upon returning from that trip, Vicente Yáñez marries for the second time and settles in Triana, testifying in 1513 in the Colombian lawsuits against the Admiral with his customary moderation. In 1514 he is ordered to accompany Pedrarias Davila to the Darien, but Vicente Yanez is ill and asks to be excused. It was March 14, 1514, and this is the last document in which he is mentioned. According to his friend, the chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Vicente Yáñez died that same year, probably at the end of September, with the same discretion that he lived, without knowing the place where he was buried, surely in the cemetery of Triana. A sad and dark end for the greatest of the great navigators of his time.
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