Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (38 page)

On April 20, 1496, the fleet finally set sail for Spain. In the cramped quarters, illness spread rapidly, and the Indians proved most vulnerable. Caonabó, who had survived so many challenges on his native soil, died at sea. The court of Ferdinand and Isabella, about which he had heard so much, and which had fired his imagination with impossible grandeur, would never greet him, or enslave him.

 

“W
ith the wind ahead and much calm,” Ferdinand wrote, Columbus sailed “as close to the twenty-second degree of latitude as the wind permitted; for at that time men had not learned the trick of running far northward to catch the southwest winds.” These conditions made for slow progress, and by May 20, the men “began to feel a great want of provisions, all being reduced to a daily ration of six ounces of bread and a pint and a half of water.”

To add to their anxiety, none of the caravels’ pilots had the slightest idea of their true location. Columbus believed they were approaching the Azores, confiding his reasoning to his journal. The Flemish and Genoese compasses, or “needles,” were not synchronized: “This morning the Flemish needles varied a point to the northwest as usual; and the Genoese needles, which generally agree with them, varied slightly to the northwest; later they oscillated between easterly and westerly variation, which was a sign that our position was somewhat more than one hundred leagues to the west of the Azores.” His calculations showed they were getting closer to home with every passing swell, and he expected to see “a few scattered branches of gulfweed in the sea” at any time. Two days later, on May 22, a Sunday, he affirmed that they were one hundred leagues from the Azores.

The compass needles told a different story: the ships were off course and dashing headlong into danger. Columbus “assigned the cause to the difference of the lodestone with which the needles are magnetized.” As the men protested, and fear of disaster mounted, the Admiral pursued his course, relying on dead reckoning, that is, arriving at his location by carefully calculating the speed at which his ship traveled, and the distance he had come, since leaving the island of Guadeloupe on April 20.

On the night of June 7, a Tuesday, the pilots estimated they were still “several days’ sail from land,” but Columbus alarmed them all by taking in sail “for fear of striking land.” They were nearing Cape St. Vincent on Portugal’s coast, he insisted, as the pilots, eight or ten all told, mocked the misguided Admiral. Some said they would raise the coast of England, and others claimed they were not far from Galicia, in northwestern Spain, and in that case, Columbus should let out all the sheet he could, “for it was better to die by running on to the rocky coast than to perish miserably from hunger at sea.” But he did nothing of the kind. Shorn of sail, the ships coasted uncertainly through the dark, gelatinous sea.

Ravenous, the men talked openly about desperate survival measures. The Caribs proposed to eat the other Indians aboard, while the Spaniards conserved their food by heaving the Indians overboard. They were prepared to execute their plan, but at the last minute the Admiral forbade them, reminding them all that the Indians, as Christians and human beings, deserved to be treated as the others.

Columbus held to his course through the night, until, on Wednesday, June 8, 1496, “while all the pilots went about like men who were lost or blind, they came in sight of Odemira, between Lisbon and Cape Saint Vincent.” The little town sparkled in the distance, and it lay exactly on the Portuguese coast where Columbus’s dead reckoning told him it would. So much for the pilots and their predictions.

“From that time on,” Ferdinand noted, “the seamen regarded the Admiral as most expert and admirable in matters of navigation.” He had gotten them home alive, and that alone merited their gratitude. He had survived storms, countless Indian attacks with poison-tipped spears, mutiny, the prospect of starvation, and a severe illness.

Now Spain and all its challenges beckoned, and the imperative to extol his accomplishments and justify his actions invigorated him. He had left Hispaniola as the proud Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Preparing to go ashore, he carefully altered his appearance, wearing the simple habit of a friar, out of a mixture of piety, penitence, and cunning. The authorities might jail a captain, but how would they treat the pious man returned from the sea who stood before them?

 

C
olumbus had not seen Spain since September 25, 1494, nearly two years before, and great events had occurred during his absence. The Catholic Sovereigns, whom he ardently desired to see, were in Burgos, in northern Spain, preparing the marriage of their only son, the Most Serene Highness Don Juan, Prince of Asturias, to Archduchess Margarita, the daughter of Emperor Maximilian of Austria. Everywhere, the “solemn pomp” of the Spanish nobility was in evidence, said Ferdinand Columbus, privileged to attend as a page to the prince, who was just eighteen years of age and known for his frail constitution.

In Burgos, Columbus displayed mementos of his latest voyage to the Indies: plants, trees, birds, and other animals. He exhibited implements employed by the Indians, their masks, belts accented with gold, and handfuls of gold dust “in its natural state, fine or large as beans and chickpeas and some the size of pigeon eggs.” These quantities did not satisfy Columbus’s greed, or his promises to return with fistfuls of gleaming nuggets of gold. In a rare moment of ambivalence, he “accepted that up till now the gain had barely met the cost.” Despite the Admiral’s private reservations, the trophies amazed many who saw them. Columbus and his men seemed latter-day versions of Jason and the Argonauts returning from their quest with rare specimens of the Golden Fleece.

“I send you samples of seeds of every kind,” Peter Martyr boasted to Cardinal Sforza on April 29, 1494, “bark, and pitch from those trees they think may be cinnamon.” He warned the cardinal to “barely touch them when you draw them near your lips: although not harmful, they produce excessive heat that can irritate and sting the tongue, if you leave them on it a long time.” And if the cardinal felt his tongue burn after he tasted them, “the hot sensation is quickly eliminated by drinking water.” A “piece of wood,” on the other hand, resembled aloe. “If you have it split, you will smell the ensuing delicate perfume.”

Setting aside their doubts, the Catholic Sovereigns prepared a stirring announcement that Spain had claimed a new realm, with the pope’s blessing. On October 15, 1495, approximately three years after his first landfall in the area, Columbus could inform Ferdinand and Isabella: “The entire island is completely subjugated and its people know and accept the fact that they must pay tribute to Your Highnesses, each one a certain amount every so many moons.” So ran the official version of the just-completed second voyage, in which the Admiral of the Ocean Sea consolidated his, and Spain’s, control of international trade. Portugal take note: the Treaty of Tordesillas had legitimized the land-and-sea grab.

As if to confirm the Spanish ascendance, João II of Portugal died ten days later. He was only forty years old, and poisoning was strongly suspected. With the Portuguese monarch gone, Ferdinand and Isabella seemed to have a fair portion of the globe to themselves. They had reconquered Iberia, and with the help of Columbus they stood ready to claim still more.

Yet the maintenance of an overseas empire raised more questions than it settled, and troubling, persistent questions they were. First of all, where, precisely, was this newly acquired empire located? Columbus insisted they had reached India’s distant precincts yet again, but skeptics and rivals believed that he had only the vaguest idea of where they were located. Next, what to do about the numerous people they had encountered in these islands, the so-called Indians? There were those who were obliging, and offered succor, and those who came racing to the water’s edge to hurl spears at their ships. And there were those who committed suicide rather than coexist with the Spanish. There were alarming signs of cannibalism among these “Indians,” yet it appeared that no Spaniard had been subjected to this fate. Columbus had tried to form strategic alliances with Indian leaders whom he encountered, yet his supposed ally Guacanagarí had massacred dozens of isolated, vulnerable Spanish scouts. Finally, converting the Indians to Christianity had proved difficult, time-consuming, and frustrating. Even Father Pané admitted that “force and craft” were sometimes necessary to effect conversions, and there was no assurance that Indians who had been baptized would practice the Christian faith after the priests departed. In reality, many fell away from the faith as rapidly as they had embraced it.

So the questions, for now, went unanswered.

 

A
s he had at the completion of his first voyage, Columbus guaranteed himself a return trip with the simple expedient of leaving men behind to fend for themselves, and he immediately went about mounting a third expedition to rescue or support them. His friend Peter Martyr wrote that the Admiral, “quite saddened by the murder of our men but of the opinion that he should not delay any longer,” immediately began to lobby the Catholic Sovereigns to send a dozen ships to these troubled islands, and it appeared that he would get his wish. Both he and his royal patrons seemed determined to repeat the mistakes rather than learn the painful lessons of the first two voyages. The Admiral of the Ocean Sea remained convinced that the wealth of India and the Grand Khan lay only a short cruise from the islands he had already explored. The age of exploration, or, as it was in danger of becoming, the age of exploitation, continued to be driven by this illusion.

Columbus wished to return immediately to bring his stranded men provisions and weapons. “But insist as he might,” Ferdinand commented sharply, “since the affairs of that court are usually attended by delay, ten or twelve months passed before he obtained the dispatch of two relief ships under the command of Captain Pedro Fernández Coronel.”

 

T
he desperately needed ships finally sailed from Spain for the Indies in February 1497 without Columbus, who “stayed to attend to the outfitting of the rest of the fleet that he required for his return voyage to the Indies.” Short of men and supplies, the task would require a year.

During this interval, a noticeable change came over Columbus. “Being a great devotee of Saint Francis, he also dressed from this time on in brown,” Las Casas wrote sympathetically, “and I saw him in Seville when he returned from here, dressed almost identically as a Franciscan friar.” Wearing the somber garb of a religious order signaled that Columbus had given himself over to his destiny with a renewed vigor.

 

B
y the time Columbus departed from Hispaniola, La Isabela had become a ghost town. The highly emotional Las Casas, who later visited the settlement and lamented its failed hopes, noted that “it was advised by many that no one could dare to pass by La Isabela after it was depopulated without great fear and danger” caused by “many frightening voices and horrible ghosts.” And he related a fantastic tale:

In reality, Columbus’s final deed before leaving Hispaniola had been to instruct his brother Bartholomew to establish a new city at the mouth of the Ozama River. Santo Domingo was so named because Bartholomew arrived there on a Sunday. The site seemed promising: “a river of wholesome water, quite rich in excellent varieties of fish, flows into the harbor along charming banks,” Peter Martyr noted. “Native palms and fruit trees of every kind sometimes drooped over the heads of our sailors, their branches weighed with blooms and fruits.” The soil appeared to be even more fertile than that of La Isabela. Work on the fortress of Santo Domingo commenced that year, or the next, 1497, and before long twenty men resided in the future capital of the Spanish empire of the Indies. Santo Domingo is now the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the Western Hemisphere.

The rise of Santo Domingo meant the end of La Isabela. The ill-starred settlement became the final resting place of the bones of both Spanish settlers and Indians, finally at peace in death. In their shallow graves, the Indian corpses rested on their sides, according to their custom, and the Spanish on their backs, with their arms crossed over their rib cages and their eyes staring into eternity.