Shortly before sunset that evening Columbus raised sail and proceeded east by south to a promontory he named the Cape of Cuba.
O
f all the days he had endured at sea thus far, November 21, a Wednesday, proved to be the most treacherous, and not just because he committed a spiraling series of navigational misjudgments. Based on the hasty, elliptical comments in his diary, it appears that he was attempting to use his quadrant to fix his location. The quadrant readings placed him at a latitude of 42 degrees, but “it seemed to him that he could not be so far distant [from the equator].” His assumption was correct. The 42nd parallel passes through the border between New York and Pennsylvania; he was, in fact, at 21 degrees of latitude. At least he knew that something was seriously awry, it being “manifest that in latitude 42 degrees in no part of the earth is there believed to be heat, unless it be for some accidental reason.” Infuriated, he complained that the quadrant must be at fault and in need of repair.
Had Columbus relied on celestial navigation alone, he would have wandered off course, but he possessed another asset that made all the difference: an inborn sense of the sea, of wind and weather. Like other navigators of the day, Columbus did not refer to “true north” (the geographic north pole) or to the “north magnetic pole” (where the earth’s magnetic field suddenly points downward). Instead, he set his course, or direction, with reference to the winds, eight in all, each bearing a traditional Italian name. Tramontana indicated north, Greco northeast, Levante east, Sirocco southeast, Ostro or Auster south, Libeccio or Africo southwest, Ponente west, and Maestro northwest. Because these names referred to the familiar geography of the Mediterranean, Columbus and other navigators simplified this system into eight cardinal points—N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, and NW. As additional refinement, he included eight intermediate points—
los medios vientos
—or half winds. These were NNE, ENE, ESE, SSE, SSW, WSW, WNW, and NNW. There was a further subdivision as well, each point equivalent to 11¼ degrees, or one compass point.
Columbus remained silent concerning his truly remarkable gift: dead reckoning, that is, sailing by the seat of his pants, estimating time and distances with simple devices such as a rope or buoy or landmark. He was an intuitive master of the most ancient form of navigation. All his maps and charts and painfully acquired formal education—so impressive, yet so misleading—were of little use to him. He relied on his instincts and experience concerning tides and wind; the color of the sea and composition of clouds mattered more to him than the mathematical calculations of the era’s leading cosmographers. They had never gone to sea, but Columbus had. His dead reckoning proved so accurate that he had already sailed from Spain to the New World without incident the very first time, and, incredibly, with no loss of life. And each time after that, he improved his course based on experience rather than theory.
The onset of a crisis on November 22 startled him out of the mathematical maze into which he had blundered: “This day Martín Alonso Pinzón”—his chief rival for glory on the voyage—“departed with the caravel
Pinta
without the permission or desire of the Admiral.” Columbus had no idea why; the weather was fine. Perhaps Pinzón had located a source of gold and wished to keep it secret. Striking an ominous note, Columbus added that he was already building a case against the rebellious captain, noting, “Many other things he had done and said to me.”
Martín Alonso Pinzón’s unauthorized flight was troubling because the voyage had benefited from a professional collaboration between the two captains. A portrait of
Pinta
’s captain (on display in Madrid’s Museo Naval) shows a studious young man who looks more like a scholar or an aide-decamp than a sea dog or mutineer. His melancholy gaze suggests that he is lost in contemplation or looking at a distant object. He had been born in Palos, which is to say, born to the sea, in 1441 and was now over fifty, experienced, even old for a captain.
As recently as September 25, Columbus had written approvingly in his logbook about a chart “on which it seems the Admiral had depicted certain islands on that sea.” Martín Alonso expressed the opinion that the islands were nearby, and Columbus agreed, and the fleet’s inability to locate them could be attributed to the “currents which set the ships all the while to the NE.” Assuming this to be the case, Columbus asked Pinzón to return the chart for further study “with his pilot and mariners.”
At sunset, “Martín Alonso came up on the poop of his ship, and with much joy shouted to the Admiral, claiming largesse”—a reward—“for sighting land.” What land? Columbus deliberately kept the name and location of the island vague so that his rivals would not be able to take advantage of the discovery.
Before paying up, he “went down on his knees to give thanks to Our Lord, and Martín Alonso said the
Gloria in excelsis Deo
with his people.” Soon
Niña
’s rigging groaned with the weight of sailors, who had scaled it to catch sight of land, only twenty-five leagues distant, by Columbus’s reckoning. He was wrong. The fleet sailed on that day, and the next, and a week later, the ships were still in search of land. In his journal, Columbus revealed that he had tinkered with the distances to reassure the crew that their goal was slowly but surely approaching, but he might have manufactured this excuse to disguise his miscalculation.
If Martín Alonso Pinzón took exception to this strategy, or suffered doubts about the wisdom of their navigational choices, Columbus did not record it. The challenge lent a sense of drama to a voyage that was in danger of losing its raison d’être, and it offered a chance to prove his mettle. He gravitated toward the crisis as if it were a manifestation of divine will. He had made a career thus far out of proving others wrong, not because he had better theories or answers, but because he was more resilient. He was confident that he could put the renegade captain in his place. But first, Columbus had to catch him.
In fact, he faced challenges from all three Pinzón brothers.
The first was Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, a part owner of both
Niña
and
Pinta
, both caravels—ships combining Western rigging with an Eastern, or lateen, sail for better maneuverability. Columbus’s flagship,
Santa María
, was known simply by the generic term
nao
; it was round, stable, broad-beamed, and most likely built according to time-honored methods by Basque shipwrights. Juan de la Cosa, who also served as the ship’s master, owned her. And the second brother was Francisco Martín Pinzón, who served as captain of
Niña
.
So Columbus was surrounded by Pinzón brothers, whose support had been critical in his overcoming skepticism for the voyage from the seamen of Palos, from which the fleet had sailed, and from nearby Huelva and Moguer. To the practical seamen, Columbus appeared as a wild-eyed dreamer and foreigner who spoke of crossing a sea that no one to their knowledge had succeeded in crossing before—Mar Tenebroso, it was sometimes called, “Dark Sea,” practically synonymous with death itself—to reach fantastic kingdoms such as China and Japan that might not exist, except in the minds of dreamers and scholars, and now Columbus was asking them to trust him with their lives in his unlikely quest. He met with stiff resistance, until Martín Alonso Pinzón urged them to join with these words: “Friends, come away with us on this voyage. You are living here in misery. Come with us on this voyage, and to my certain knowledge we shall find houses roofed with gold and all of you will return prosperous and happy.” Pinzón’s words and reputation and example won the seamen over to Columbus’s side. “It was because of this assurance of prosperity and the general trust in him that so many agreed to go with him,” said one of his listeners.
Actually, he had done even more than that for Columbus. According to his son, Arias Pérez Pinzón, his father happened to have a friend, a cosmographer, or celestial mapmaker, who worked in the Vatican Library and who passed on a copy of a chart showing that one could sail westward across the Atlantic to Japan. (Without knowledge of the New World and the Pacific Ocean, such speculation ran rampant.) Martín Alonso, his son said, decided to mount a voyage of his own, but met with rebuffs in Portugal and Spain. In search of safe haven, spiritual support, and scholarly advice, Columbus retreated to the Monasterio de Santa María de la Rábida, a dramatically situated Franciscan friary in the town of Palos de la Frontera. There he encountered Martín Alonso Pinzón, who displayed a copy of the chart. Columbus was on the verge of abandoning Spain for France in his search for backing, but once equipped with this crucial document, he was finally able to win the support of the Spanish Sovereigns.
So the sudden, unexplained disappearance of Martín Alonso Pinzón on November 22 signified more than an ordinary act of insubordination. And because Pinzón was a part owner of the fleet, Columbus could not treat him as he might an ordinary seaman and punish him for disloyalty; the most he could do was outwait and outwit him, and eventually prove him wrong. Yet there was reason for hope. It might be expected that Pinzón’s two brothers would follow suit, but they remained loyal to Columbus rather than to their brother. Columbus could not guess what their behavior implied about the fitness of Martín Alonso Pinzón, but he was bolstered by their loyalty; in fact, he expected no less.
For his part, Martín Alonso Pinzón believed he was just as responsible for the voyage as Columbus. Yet it was Columbus, not Pinzón, who had negotiated the terms of the voyage with Ferdinand and Isabella, including the detailed and explicit series of capitulations, or agreements, about his obligations and entitlements. Lacking comparable credentials, Pinzón behaved as though he had been forced into a partnership with a hotheaded Genoese mystic named Christopher Columbus who was out to claim the glory for himself, if he did not get them all killed in encounters with storms, sea monsters, reefs, or starvation.
So far, he had managed an unprecedented feat in the history of exploration, sailing across the Atlantic without loss of life. In contrast, Martín Alonso Pinzón became ever more erratic.
“T
his night Martín Alonso followed the course to the East,” Columbus recorded on November 22 as he headed toward an island called Vaneque, lured by the promise of gold, or so the Indians said. Columbus passed the night sailing toward the island, and then, to his surprise, it seemed that Pinzón had changed course and was “coming toward him; and the night was very clear and the light wind favorable for coming to him, had he so wished.” Through weary eyes, the Admiral gradually realized that he had been mistaken; perhaps Pinzón had maneuvered toward the flagship but had changed his mind. The mystery of his motives and plans bedeviled Columbus as he shaped a course for the island he called Bohío, about which the Indians conveyed a familiar set of rumors concerning “people who had one eye in the forehead” and fearsome cannibals. When the Indians realized the course chosen by Columbus would lead to Bohío, he wrote, “they were speechless.” Columbus did not dismiss the rumors of cannibals entirely, remarking that he believed “there is something in this.” Bohío would have to wait.
In the predawn darkness of Sunday, November 25, Columbus went ashore at Cayo Moa Grande, located on Cuba’s northeastern coast. It was unusual to begin an expedition on the Lord’s Day, but he was operating on an instinct “that there should be a good river there.” His hunch seemed to pay off when he “went to the river and saw some stones shining in it, with some veins in them of the color of gold”—actually, they were iron pyrites, or fool’s gold—but Columbus convinced himself that he had discovered the genuine article. “He ordered some of these stones to be collected to bring to the Sovereigns.”
This investigation quickly led him to something less precious than gold, but of greater practical value: wood to repair and strengthen the ships. “Being there, the ship’s boys sang out that they saw pine trees; he looked toward the sierra and saw many great and such marvelous ones, that he could not exaggerate their height and straightness, like spindles, thick and elongated, when he realized that ships could be had, and planks without number, and masts for the best ships of Spain. He saw oaks and arbutus” or, rather, trees closely resembling them, “and a good river, and the means to build sawmills. He saw on the beach many other stones of the color of iron, and others that some said were from silver mines; all of which the river brought down. There he cut a lateen-yard and mast for the mizzen of the caravel
Niña
.” The neighboring cape was so capacious that “100 ships could lie without any cable or anchors.” He envisioned a large, productive shipyard busily engaged in harvesting sturdy pine trees to construct “as many ships as were wanted,” all sealed with readily available pitch. The possibilities for a permanent outpost in this newly discovered land provoked Columbus to paroxysms of ecstasy and overstatement. It seemed that the prospects for settlement steadily improved with every landfall; the air became sweeter, the prospect more pleasing to the eye, and nowhere more than here, in Cuba. Anyone seeing this land, he maintained, would be “full of wonder.” And, of course, China lay just over the horizon.
Columbus continued to praise his newly discovered land, evoking “nine very remarkable harbors which all seamen considered wonders, and five great rivers . . . very high and beautiful mountains . . . the most beautiful valleys . . . thick with high and leafy trees, which were glorious to see.” The one gnawing concern in this paradise was “tremendous fear” of cannibals, rumored to launch raiding parties in which they captured the land’s timid inhabitants. The Indians he had brought on board as passenger-captives were horrified when they realized he was headed for their domain, “lest they make a meal of them, nor could he quiet their fears.” Instead, they babbled about the cannibals’ single eyes and “dogs’ faces.” Columbus chose to deal with the rumors thus: “The Admiral believed they were lying, and thought that those who had captured them must be under the sovereignty of the Grand Khan.”