LAUSR

In the late fifteenth century, Iberian mariners active between Atlantic Europe, the Mediterranean, and Atlantic Africa routinely engaged in a heady mix of labor and violence at sea. The Andalusian navigator Martín Alonso Pinzón and his next of kin were no exception. Remembered in their hometown of Palos as the foremost seafarers of their day, the Pinzones became particularly renowned for their role in Christopher Columbus’s transatlantic voyage of 1492. On the fleet, Martín Alonso and his younger brother Vicente Yáñez captained two of the three ships. Yet scholars have not come across much extant documentation relating to the Pinzón family’s activities prior to 1492, leaving many questions unanswered about what led a vital group of crewmembers to participate in Columbus’s first voyage to the Caribbean. More generally, it remains unclear how skills and stratagems developed in eastern Atlantic maritime circuits were leveraged in the Caribbean by a diverse array of Iberian mariners—the Pinzones among them—who figured among the first generation of European colonizers in the Americas. Previously unknown archival fragments from legal and administrative records offer us new clues. For one, they allow us to piece together in remarkable detail the role Martín Alonso Pinzón and his relatives played in Portuguese and Atlantic fisheries in the 1480s. While the Pinzón family’s work as fishers and merchants will come as no surprise to many, the evidence presented here allows for an intricate account of one particularly memorable fishing season for the Andalusians in southern Iberia. Recuperating the Pinzón family’s role in regional fisheries forces us to acquaint ourselves with how Andalusian and Portuguese fishers, fishmongers, tax collectors, and other officials interacted along maritime corridors. Better understanding the Pinzón family’s path to collaborating with Columbus allows us to more adequately situate the role of fishing amidst the array of other types of enterprises—from slaving and plunder to captive-taking and trade—that characterized Iberian patterns of colonization in Atlantic Africa and the Caribbean in the late fifteenth century. Maritime historians have long recognized fishing and its laborers on water and land as worthy subjects of study (Starkey 2014; Sicking and Abreu-Ferreira 2008). When it comes to late medieval and early modern Iberia, the historiography generally approaches fishing in isolation, or as a discrete sub-culture within a broader landscape of regional or colonial history (Bello 2008; Santana and Santana 2014; Godinho 1981; Iria 1956; Rumeu 1956). However, as the maritime initiatives pursued by the Pinzón family make clear, fishing ventures operated within a larger arena of social and political struggle unfolding across coastal