Departing the bay, Columbus led his fleet past Cayo Piedras and the Gulf of Cazones. All at once, he told Bernáldez, the ships “entered a white sea, as white as milk, and as thick as the water in which tanners treat their skins.” Then they found themselves “in two fathoms’ depth and the wind drove them strongly on, and being in a channel very dangerous to come about in, they could not anchor the ships.” The caravels negotiated the channels for thirty miles until they reached an island in only “two and a half fathoms of water,” where they anchored, “in a state of extreme distress.” He had inadvertently sailed into the midst of diminutive islands near the Zapata Peninsula, where every swell concealed peril.
He had no choice but to find a way out. For once his gift for dead reckoning failed him. Never before had he seen such an erratic display of water—white, black, milky, and indigo, as if all the formations and currents with which he had become familiar during a lifetime of sailing had lost their meaning. He spent several days cautiously proceeding along Cuba’s sweltering southern coast, always near to the shore should disaster strike. He sent an agile caravel into a channel to find water, or signs of human habitation, but the ship soon returned, her crew reporting that the vegetation was “so thick that a cat couldn’t get ashore.” Columbus tried to pierce the dense mangrove cover, but he, too, complained that the land was “so thickly wooded down to the seashore that they seemed to be walls” that excluded his fleet from the gold, the glory, and the fulfillment of discovery and conquest.
As he coasted along an uninspiring formation he named Punta de Serafín, a wind arose, and the obstructing islands gave way to open water and a prospect of distant mountains. And so, Bernáldez writes, “the Admiral decided to lay a course toward those mountains, where he arrived the following day, and they proceeded to anchor off a very fine and very large palm grove”—almost any grove would have looked appealing after the oppressive wall of mangroves they had endured—“where there were springs of water, sweet and very good, and signs that there were people about.” Strange things started happening.
As the Queen’s Garden disappeared over the horizon, Columbus slumped in exhaustion. The stress of exploring, the strange diet, the inimical climate, and more than anything else, the lack of sleep had taken their toll. He was, said his son, “worn out,” and “had not undressed and slept a full night in bed from the time he left Spain until May 19, the day he made this notation in his journal.” Adding to his cares was the difficulty of picking his way through the “innumerable islands among which they sailed,” or, to be more specific, the dangers presented—coral reefs capable of slicing a hull to shreds, sandbars that could ensnare a ship as surely as a remora attached itself to its host, unpredictable winds, and even more unpredictable tribes who might attack at any moment.
The very next day, May 20, Columbus negotiated his way past seventyone islands, “not counting the many they sighted at sunset toward the westsouthwest.” The vista was anything but reassuring: “The sight of these islands or shoals all about them was frightening enough, but what was worse was that each afternoon a dense mist rose over them in the eastern sky, with such thunder and lightning that it seemed a deluge was about to fall; when the moon came out, it all vanished, dissolving into rain and part into wind.” It was such a common atmospheric phenomenon, he said, that “it happened each afternoon.”
On May 22, the fleet approached an island that appeared slightly more substantial than the others he had recently passed. Santa Marta, Columbus decided to call it as he went ashore, desperately in need of food and water. The Indians had abandoned their village, and in their huts, the starving sailors found only fish. In the background, large dogs, “like mastiffs,” pawed the earth and growled. Unsatisfied and bewildered, the Spanish returned to their ships and sailed onward, “northeasterly among the islands,” past stately cranes and gaudy parrots, wandering blindly into a “maze of shoals and islands” that “caused the Admiral much toil, for he had to steer now west, now north, now south, according to the disposition of the channels.” Within their confines, the ships could not tack and maneuver. Peter Martyr related that “the water of these channels was milky and thick for forty miles, as if they had sprinkled flour all over the sea.” While Columbus and his men frantically sounded the bottom and kept lookout, the keels often scraped bottom. Nevertheless, the fleet made it through and exited into the open sea, where, eighty miles away, lofty mountains hung suspended against the sky. They were approaching Cuba and apparent safety.
The fleet put in, and a lone Spanish scout, armed with a crossbow, went ashore in search of desperately needed water. During his search, he confronted the spectacle of a man dressed in a white tunic. At first, the scout thought he beheld a friar whom the Admiral had brought along. “Suddenly, from the woods he saw a whole group of about thirty so-clothed men coming,” Peter Martyr related. “He then turned around shouting and ran as fast as he could toward the ships. These men dressed in tunics clapped their hands at him and attempted to persuade him with all means not to be so fearful, but he kept running.” Stranger still, the men appeared to have complexions as light as those of the Spanish. From what tribe had they come? Were they lost Europeans? Emissaries of the legendary Prester John? And if so, had Columbus’s fleet finally reached the Indies?
Astonished by the apparition, Columbus sent a delegation “to see if they could talk with these people, for according to the crossbowman, they came not to do any harm but to speak with us.” They found no one, “which displeased me much because I wanted to speak with them since I had traversed so many lands without seeing people or villages.” Attempting to blaze a trail inland to the men, the Spanish “got themselves so entangled that they hardly made a mile,” let alone forty. They returned to the ships, exhausted and empty-handed.
Under way once again, the fleet proceeded ten leagues to the west, past “marsh and mire,” as Ferdinand put it, and within hailing distance of huts onshore. More canoes approached Columbus’s ships, with Indians bearing water and food, which the sailors were in no position to refuse. They paid in trinkets, over the protests of their Indian benefactors, who wanted nothing in return.
Columbus snatched one of the Indians, “telling him and the other Indians through an interpreter that he”—the Indian hostage—“would be released as soon as he had shown him the way and given him other information about that region.” The information Columbus received was exactly what he did not want to hear: Cuba, said the Indian, was an island, which meant that the fleet had not reached the outskirts of the Indies. Ferdinand is silent on his father’s reaction to this news, but the Admiral’s sense of bewilderment can be imagined, and it was compounded by the fleet’s having wandered into a dangerously shallow channel. In the effort to move to a deeper waterway, Columbus “had to kedge it with cables over a sandbank less than a fathom deep but two ship lengths in size.” Kedging meant dragging the ship from one small anchor to another.
The ship emerged at night into a sea that seemed to be covered from one end to the other with turtles. (Peter Martyr said the ships “had to slow down” just to get past them all.) At daybreak, cormorants took wing, “so numerous that they darkened the sun.” And the next day, “so many butterflies flew about the ships that they darkened the air till afternoon, when a heavy rain squall blew them off.”
Suffering from exhaustion and malnutrition, Columbus headed back to the safety of La Isabela after nearly three months’ absence. The prospect of security turned to peril when the fleet sailed into a channel that quickly narrowed. Before he could react, the ships were trapped in a bottleneck. As his men fought to overcome panic, Columbus, marshaling his inner resources, never appeared more confident than he did at this impasse. “He shrewdly put on a cheerful countenance,” Ferdinand noted. In fact, he loudly praised God for making him come by this route; if they had gone another way, “they might have become hopelessly entangled or lost and without ships and provisions with which to return.” He sought to calm his men by reminding them that they could turn back at any time, and during the last days of June he was eventually forced to retrace his track through the channel, then coast uneasily over a “green and white sea,” which seemed to conceal a massive and hazardous shoal, before he reached “another sea as white as milk,” apparently a shoal, but in reality only three fathoms deep.
“All these changes and the appearance of the sea caused great dread among the sailors, since they had never seen or experienced anything of the kind before and accordingly believed themselves to be irretrievably doomed,” said Las Casas. They anxiously traversed this sea, only to come to another, black as ink and five fathoms deep, and then, to Columbus’s great relief, the fleet made Cuba, where he turned east, negotiating the headwinds and in search of fresh water, safe harbor, and a brief respite from the toil of discovery.
The ships had taken a beating. Their keels had been battered and torn from repeated contact with the bottom. Their ropes and sails had rotted away. The food, sodden with seawater and fouled with vermin, had spoiled. As if these troubles were not enough, while Columbus was writing in his journal on June 30, he felt his ship run aground “with such force that they could not get her off by the stern with the anchors or by any other means; however, with God’s aid, they managed to pull her off by the prow, though she suffered considerable damage from the shock of the grounding.” Columbus found wind to sail away from the near disaster with as much speed as he could muster “through a sea that was always white and two fathoms deep,” and he kept going, enduring every evening at sunset “violent rainstorms which wore the men out,” said Las Casas, who continued, “The Admiral was in a state of extreme anxiety.”
Even Las Casas pitied Columbus at this point, evoking “the unparalleled suffering of the admiral on these voyages of discovery.” Reviewing the misfortunes plaguing the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the chronicler rose to a histrionic pitch, declaring, “His life was one long martyrdom, something which will lead others . . . to conclude that there is little to be gained and little rest to be enjoyed in this world for those who are not forever conferring with God.” Las Casas was unique in considering Columbus impious; from another perspective, the Admiral’s misfortunes, and those he caused others, could be traced to his tightly held spiritual convictions, which were both his inspiration and his undoing.
As if they were biblical plagues, Las Casas listed the afflictions: the “sudden squall that placed him in imminent and deadly danger” by “thrusting the neck of his vessel down beneath the waves so that it seemed that it was only by the grace of God that he was able to take in the sails and hold fast by using the heaviest of anchors.” That crisis was followed by “the great quantity of water the ship took on board,” the exhausted crew, and the lack of food, supplemented only by “the odd fish they managed to catch.” Columbus’s distress was made all the worse by his oppressive sense of responsibility for the others and for himself. No wonder that he felt moved to cry out to Ferdinand and Isabella: “Not a day goes by that I am not faced with the prospect of the certain death of us all.”
The Admiral returned, Ferdinand said, as if under his breath, to the “island of Cuba.” Whether island or peninsula, “the air was fragrant with the sweet scent of flowers.” Columbus’s men devoured fowl they thought resembled pigeons but were larger and tastier and which exhaled an aromatic odor. When their gullets were opened, they revealed partly digested bouquets of flowers.
While resting and overseeing repairs to the ships, Columbus went ashore to attend Mass on the beach; it was now July 7. There he was approached by an “eighty year old man,” said Peter Martyr, relying on Columbus, “a leader all respected, though naked, with many followers. During the service, this man remained still, looking surprised, face and eyes still; then, he gave the Admiral a basket full of fruits that he held. Communicating with the Admiral by means of signs, they exchanged religious affirmations.” With the help of Diego Colón—an Indian convert to Christianity who had taken the Admiral’s surname—the elderly man “made a speech,” and quite a surprising oration it was, covering morality and the afterlife. According to Ferdinand Columbus’s version, the chieftain said he had been to Hispaniola himself; in fact, he was acquainted with his counterparts there, and he had also been to Jamaica, and even “traveled extensively in western Cuba.” If so, this was a personage who could give Columbus reliable information about these islands, and he even offered an explanation for the apparition the scout had seen weeks before: “the cacique of that region dressed like a priest.” A priest: it again seemed possible that Prester John had preceded the Spanish to this partially Christian land, and if he had, so might the Grand Khan, just as Marco Polo had written. If Columbus interpreted the cacique’s sign language correctly, they might have arrived in the Indies, after all. The illusion would remain undisturbed, as compelling as ever. He could sail on indefinitely, if uneasily, in search of his elusive Indies, and, of course, gold, passing up countless Edens with their hatching turtles and butterfly storms.
But the cacique had more to say. He talked of human souls following one of two paths, gloomy or pleasant, and he admonished Columbus to decide for himself which direction to take, and what his reward or punishment in the afterlife would be for his actions. Or so the cacique’s translated, partly understood words sounded to Columbus, who expressed surprise at the wisdom of the elder. He explained that he was familiar with the concept of punishment and reward in the afterlife, yet he wondered how the cacique, at home in a state of nature, had come to subscribe to the same philosophy.
Columbus explained that the king and queen of Spain had sent him to “bring peace to all the uncharted regions of the world,” which, to his way of thinking, meant subduing cannibals and punishing criminals wherever they were found. Men of goodwill had nothing to fear from the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. It seemed to Columbus that his words had pleased the cacique so deeply that the old man would have joined the Spaniards if his wife and children had not objected. Yet the philosophical Indian was puzzled: How was it that the Admiral, who appeared to have supreme power, bowed to the authority of another? Even more incredible to his ancient ears were the descriptions of the “pomp, power, and magnificence of the Sovereigns and their wars, how big their cities and how strong their fortresses,” in Peter Martyr’s words. Such splendor was overwhelming, and the cacique’s wife and children wept at the Admiral’s feet.