Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (51 page)

With the cooperation of a Carthusian monk by the name of Gaspar Gorricio, Columbus assembled a work known as
Libro de las profecías
, or
Book of Prophecies
, an idiosyncratic amalgam of biblical texts, commentary, and observations gleaned from ancient authorities, in both Latin and Spanish. It is difficult to know how much of it was composed by Columbus himself—it was written primarily in the monk’s hand, with additional entries by his son Ferdinand—but the result was intended to reflect Columbus’s spiritual vision of his life’s work and destiny. In the explorer’s words, it gathered together the “sources, statements, opinions, and prophecies on the subject of the recovery of God’s Holy City and Mount Zion and on the discovery and evangelization of the islands of the Indies and of all other peoples and nations,” all with Columbus playing a leading, and divinely ordained, role. In it, he appears not as the explorer preoccupied with gold, pearls, and other tokens of greed, nor with titles and his share of the fruits of the Indians’ arduous labor, but as a devout servant of the Lord. “The Lord opened my mind to the fact it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies,” he reflected, “and He opened my will to desire to accomplish the project.”

Columbus portrayed himself as a man who earned scorn and ridicule for his vision from rival mariners, bureaucrats, scientists, and scholars. Only the Sovereigns, to their undying glory, heeded his call. Buttressing his message with biblical citations, he entertained the notion that the time had come to launch a new Crusade to recapture the Holy Sepulchre and spark conversions to Christianity around the world. “I believe that there is evidence that our Lord is hastening things,” he declared. According to his calculations, there were only 150 years before the end of the world.

The
Book of Prophecies
reflected Columbus’s circumstances of the moment, serving as an
apologia pro vita sua
, and announcing to his critics at court and to posterity that everything he did, all the violence, all the lives lost, was done according to a larger plan. Even in his most ascetic frame of mind, he courted grandeur. Having prepared himself, he yearned for an endeavor he might never live to complete: a fourth voyage.

 

I
nspired by Marco Polo’s voyage across Asia with his father and uncle, Columbus decided to bring his son Ferdinand on the fourth voyage to the New World. Polo was about seventeen years old at the time he embarked on his journey, and Ferdinand Columbus only a few years younger, thirteen years old. By voyaging with their families, both Ferdinand and Polo amassed a lifetime of experience and secured their dynastic legacies.

In maturity, Ferdinand recognized that as a young man he had been lucky enough to participate in one of the great events of his era, the exploration of a new world. But he was not merely a propagandist. As a scholar and amateur historian, he portrayed his father as a man determined to make and remake history. He generally avoided passing judgment on his father, and subtly censored some of his worst excesses. When matters went awry, as they did time and again throughout this voyage, Ferdinand preferred to blame disreputable Spaniards on board the ship rather than acknowledge his father’s failings. Although intended to vindicate the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the
Historie Concerning the Life and Deeds of the Admiral Don Christopher Columbus
can also be read as an indictment of the Spanish colonial enterprise in all its cruelty and absurdity.

C
olumbus’s fleet consisted of just four ordinary ships leased by the Sovereigns. The flagship was known as
La Capitana
, under the command of Diego Tristán, a Columbus loyalist who received 4,000 maravedís a month for his labors. Ambrosio Sánchez served as master, his brother Juan as chief pilot, each receiving exactly half the captain’s salary. They supervised a crew of thirty-four, including fourteen sailors, who received 1,000 maravedís per month, and twenty ship’s boys. Specialists included a cooper (to protect barrels holding water and wine), a caulker, a carpenter, a pair of trumpeters to sound alarms and perform music appropriate to maritime events, and two gunners. Afflicted with gout and the poor vision that tormented him on his previous voyage, Columbus assumed a less definite role in the enterprise, in case he again became incapacitated, but he was unquestionably its most important personage.

Santiago de Palos
, nicknamed
Bermuda
after her owner, Francisco Bermúdez, was a more compact vessel. Bartholomew Columbus functioned as her captain, without pay, while the nominal captain, Francisco Porras, earned a salary of 3,666 maravedís per month. His brother Diego Porras earned slightly less, serving as the crown’s comptroller and representative on board ship. Columbus had not wanted either Porras brother on the voyage, but he was compelled to take them along by the crown’s treasurer, Alonso de Castile, who maintained the Porrases’ sister as his mistress. This ship’s crew consisted of eleven sailors, a boatswain (in charge of the crew and equipment), a dozen or so cabin boys, along with a cooper, caulker, carpenter, and gunner, and six
escuderos
(gentlemen)—volunteers motivated by a combination of greed, lust, and thirst for adventure.

A more reliable crew operated
Gallega
(“the Galician”), with Pedro de Terreros as captain, earning the going rate of 4,000 maravedís per month. A diehard Columbus loyalist, he was sailing with the Admiral for the fourth time. The second-in-command, Juan Quintero, earning half that amount, had been boatswain aboard
Pinta
during the first voyage and, as the ship’s owner, had at least as much clout as the captain. A complement of sailors, a boatswain, cabin boys, and an
escudero
completed the roster.

The fleet’s smallest ship,
Vizcaína
(“the Biscayne”), boasted a captain with a famous name: Bartolomeo Fieschi came from a renowned Genoese family. Columbus was so determined to keep the fleet under his control that he bought the ship from her owner after sailing.
Vizcaína
carried several Genoese, a chaplain, and a page.

Whatever the flotilla lacked in size and status, it made up for in ambition.

“On May 9, 1502,” Ferdinand wrote, “we set sail from the harbor of Cádiz and made for Santa Catalina,” a fortress at the port’s opening, “whence we sailed again on Wednesday, the 11th of the month, for Arzila,” a city sometimes known by its older name, Asylum, situated on the Atlantic coast of northern Morocco, distinguished by stark white walls rising above the sea. In 1471, the Portuguese had wrested the city from Arab control.

Encouraged by King Ferdinand, Columbus attempted to repair his frayed relationship with Portuguese interests by offering to support the city in its struggle to ward off the foe, but by the time he arrived, “the Moors had already raised the siege,” wrote his son, for whom the spectacle of greeting one civilization after another assumed dreamlike clarity. “The Admiral sent ashore his brother the Adelantado Don Bartholomew Columbus and myself, together with the ships’ captains, to call on the captain of Arzila, who had been wounded by the Moors in the assault. He gave profuse thanks to the Admiral for this courtesy and for the offer of help, sending aboard certain of his gentlemen; some of these proved to be cousins of Doña Felipa Moñiz, who had been the Admiral’s wife in Portugal” and the mother of Ferdinand’s half brother, Diego.

Having paid their respects, the fleet called at Grand Canary on May 20, and began taking on “water and wood for the voyage” for the next four days, according to Columbus’s custom. “The next night we set course for the Indies,” said Ferdinand. Although ailing, Columbus performed a navigational marvel on this crossing by catching the trade winds, or easterlies. By the morning of June 15, “with a rather rough sea and wind,” they had arrived at Martinique, in the Caribbean Sea north of Trinidad, having crossed the Atlantic in only twenty days, a time frame that even a modern-day sailor would be hard-pressed to equal. If proof was needed that Columbus had not lost his navigational skill and weather eye, this feat surely provided it.

For all his skill, Columbus could not have expected to arrive precisely at this tiny speck, a little over four hundred square miles of sand and scrub at 14°40΄ 0˝ N, 61°0΄0˝ W. As his previous crossings had demonstrated, sailing west from the Canaries, with a push from the easterlies above and from the Gulf Stream below, he was bound to arrive somewhere in the Americas. But locating a specific port or island was highly unlikely. Except for a storm, little occurred in the open ocean that would affect a ship’s course, but coastal navigation was a different story, hit or miss. So it was that he discovered the diminutive island by chance.

On arrival, the men attended to chores, taking on water and wood, and washing their fetid clothing. On Saturday, they sailed the ten leagues to the island of Dominica. “Till I reached there I had as good weather as I could have wished for,” the Admiral noted some months and many disasters later, “but on the night of my arrival there was a great storm, and I have been dogged by bad weather ever since.” For a novice sailor like Las Casas, the misery of rolling and pitching in the ocean’s vastness was even greater, and it was all that he and his shipmates could do to endure the traumatic crossing. “The crew was so worn down, shaken, ill and overcome by such bitterness that they wanted to die rather than to live, seeing how the four elements working against them were cruelly torturing them,” he complained, having had a taste of the peril and misery that Columbus and his veteran crew members had endured for years at sea.

 

O
utlasting the storms, Columbus reached Puerto Rico and finally Santo Domingo in Hispaniola. Stripped of his status, he was not supposed to be there at all, having been replaced by Nicolás de Ovando, the new governor and widely known as a Columbus detractor. As Ferdinand carefully explained, Columbus urgently needed to avail himself of Santo Domingo’s safe harbor “to trade one of his ships for another because she was a crank and a dull sailor; not only was she slow but could not load sails without bringing the side of the ship almost under water.” If not for the need to replace the ship, said Ferdinand, Columbus would have been on his way to “reconnoiter the coast of Paria and cruise down it until he came to the strait” and so on his way to India, at last. (The discovery of the rumored strait, several thousand miles to the south, would have to wait for another eighteen years, until 1520, when Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese sailing for Spain, battling mutinies and rivals in a manner that Columbus would have recognized, finally reached it.)

Instead, Ferdinand said, Columbus sailed directly into a confrontation with Nicolás de Ovando, “the Knight Commander of Lares, governor of the island, who had been sent by the Catholic Sovereigns to hold an inquest into Bobadilla’s administration,” just as Bobadilla had been sent to investigate Columbus.

 

N
icolás de Ovando, a decade younger than Columbus, was a son of the Extremadura. Bordering Portugal, this Spanish province served as the cradle of conquistadors—Vasco Núñez de Balboa, Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, Gonzalo Pizarro, Juan Pizarro, Hernando Pizarro, and Hernando de Soto—those soldiers of fortune, adventurers, conquerors, and narrowminded visionaries who succeeded Columbus. All carried the region’s affinity for the rigors of adventure and exploitation with them.

On the strength of his father’s political connections, Ovando joined the Order of Alcántara, devoted to fighting infidels and obeying strict monastic vows. Distinguished by outstanding ability and loyalty, he had won the Sovereigns’ appointment to succeed Columbus and reform the administrative shambles left by Francisco de Bobadilla. As governor, Ovando was charged with performing sweeping tasks: transfer powers of government from Columbus to the Spanish crown, establish the church, promote economic development, extend Spanish rule over all laborers and towns, and convert Indians to Christianity, which, in practice, meant teaching them to live as Spaniards in Hispaniola. Although his responsibilities were clear, the way to fulfill them was not. Many colonists, having been brought to Hispaniola by Columbus, remained loyal to the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, while others developed ties to their Indian wives and mistresses. The oppressive climate, the spread of disease, and the strangeness of the setting challenged Ovando. His legacy of making Hispaniola more Spanish than Spain consisted of constructing public buildings of stone, as well as an opulent stone palace for himself. Like Columbus and Bobadilla before him, he fell under the illusion that he ruled the island, and all its inhabitants, the moment he set foot there, so he banned the Admiral of the Ocean Sea.