Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (39 page)

So the animals brought by Europeans were not an unmixed blessing. Along with them—and with the associated black rats and sinister
Aedes aegypti
mosquitoes—came deadly disease: smallpox, measles, chicken pox, influenza, yellow fever, and dengue fever. These pathogens infiltrated the New World, leaving destruction and suffering in their wake. The human animal also brought its pathogens, including syphilis.

Columbus labored uncertainly on muleback along stony trails and dusty plains toward Valladolid, in north central Spain. Ferdinand and Isabella had wed here twenty-eight years earlier, in 1469, and they occasionally returned to preside over their expanding empire. Columbus’s companions included two close relatives of Caonabó, the duplicitous Indian cacique with whom he had formed an alliance. The Admiral of the Ocean Sea had planned to present Caonabó himself to the Sovereigns as a trophy, but he had died of disease at sea. Only his relatives remained.

The Admiral had returned to Spain at the conclusion of his second voyage only weeks before, and he managed this overland journey as if it were an extension of that seagoing enterprise. As the party stumbled on their way, their caged parrots, souvenirs of Hispaniola, screeched in alarm. Caonabó’s brother, who had converted to Christianity and taken the name Don Diego, remained nearly as conspicuous, wearing a prominent collar fashioned from gold and his crown, said to be “big and tall, with wings on its sides like a shield and golden eyes as large as silver cups.”

Ravaged by illness, Columbus looked a decade older than his forty-six years, drained of the vigor and stamina that had propelled him as a young navigator. His fine mane of hair had gone white, and his vision constantly troubled him, his retinas scorched from long hours of gazing at the sunlit sea. His bones ached with every lurch of the mule on which he rode. Suffering from arthritis and other disorders, he knew his time was limited, and rather than resting on his laurels, and allowing others to win glory and riches by building on the discoveries that he had made in the previous five years, he was determined to cram as much exploration as possible into the time left to him.

At times he brooded on the lack of recognition for his astonishing exploration of the Indies. “I discovered for you,” he reminded Ferdinand and Isabella between voyages, “333 leagues of mainland at the very end of the Orient and named 700 islands in addition to what was discovered on the first voyage, and I pacified for you the island of Hispaniola, which is larger than Spain and inhabited by innumerable people.” Columbus should have thought twice before making this boast. The Sovereigns had made him, and they could break him, confiscate his discoveries, and strip him of his honors, titles, and wealth if they wished.

Columbus, in contrast, believed that he had been unfairly penalized for his empire building rather than generously rewarded, as he deserved. He decried the “cursing and the scorn for the enterprise” that he had risked his life to set in motion, all because “I had not sent back ships right away laden with gold.” No one bothered to take into account the “enormous difficulties” that he faced. “For my sins, or rather, for my salvation, I was held in aversion, and obstacles were raised to whatever I said and asked.” He reminded his Sovereigns that he had, in the past, “brought you enough samples of gold and told you about the existence of gold mines and very large nuggets and also copper, and I delivered to you so many kinds of spices that it would be too long to write down,” but, he said bitterly, “all of this made no difference to some people”—his critics and rivals at court—“who had very consciously begun speaking ill of the enterprise.” He had performed the tasks that explorers through the ages had accomplished on behalf of their rulers and princes: “to serve God while expanding their own dominion.” Yet, “the more I argued for [the enterprise], the more the detractors redoubled their jokes on the subject.” He had implored Ferdinand and Isabella to hear his plea, but “Your Highnesses responded to me with a smile, saying that I should not be troubled at all by it because you did not view those who spoke ill of this enterprise as deserving authority or credence.” Nevertheless, he feared they hovered on the verge of betraying the sacred cause he shared with them.

His many discoveries had whetted his appetite for more. He was driven in part by greed and self-aggrandizement, and in part by a need to exonerate himself, to prove to the Sovereigns that he had kept his sacred promises to them, despite the incomplete and often contradictory evidence of his voyages. Even more troubling, he refused to address his monstrous blunders: the oath he had made his men swear on pain of death that Cuba belonged to the mainland of India, the fifty thousand Indians who had committed suicide in protest of his occupation of their lands, and his failure to locate the Grand Khan.

To proclaim his humility and piety, and perhaps unconsciously atone for the fatal outcome of his administration, Columbus took to wearing the habit of a Franciscan friar, woven of coarse brown cloth. Following the precepts of St. Francis of Assisi, members of this mendicant religious order emphasized penance. Presumably he belonged to the Third Order, the most secular Franciscan subdivision, which did not require its members to live in a Franciscan community but instead to work zealously to improve their lives. He scarcely resembled the imperious Admiral of the Ocean Sea, celebrated discoverer of an empire, and intimate of the Sovereigns. He had carefully concealed signs of worldly ambition and vanity in favor of devotion and humility.