Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (61 page)

Days later, Diego Méndez’s caravel dropped anchor in the bay. After their struggles to survive and their battles with one another, the men who had been stranded, without hope, were more relieved than ebullient to board the vessel that would take them away. “In this ship we embarked, friends and enemies alike,” Ferdinand laconically recalled. It was June 28, 1504.

Winds and currents remained contrary throughout the crossing from Jamaica to Santo Domingo, where they did not arrive until August 13. When they reached the island of Beata, off the coast of Hispaniola, they encountered currents that defeated their progress. As he did in times of enforced idleness, Columbus unburdened himself. In a letter to Ovando, he described the actions taken to end the mutiny, singling out the Porras brothers for their evil deeds. Columbus again swore loyalty to the governor, and concluded the letter with his distinctive, and cryptic, signature:

which, in his private language, meant “Columbus, the Christ-bearer.” He adopted this signature as his special imprimatur. His heirs, he urged, should also “sign with my signature which I now employ which is an X with an S over it and an M with a Roman A over it, and then an S and then a Greek Y with an S over it, preserving the relations of the lines and points.” Despite these highly specific instructions, the full meaning of the signature, the product of Columbus’s fertile spiritual imagination, has yet to be fully decoded, but it likely includes biblical as well as maritime references. In its shape, some see a ship’s mast, others a cross, and still others cryptic references to invocations and hymns.

 

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n arrival in Santo Domingo, to his great surprise, Columbus received a welcome distinguished by “great honor and hospitality” (said Las Casas) from an unlikely source: Nicolás de Ovando. After a year of living in the shadow of obscurity, Columbus had emerged into the dazzling sunlight of prominence. The governor’s unexpected goodwill extended to sheltering Columbus in the newly built governor’s residence, “with orders that he was to be accorded every consideration.”

The show of hospitality concealed persistent conflicts between the present and former governor of Hispaniola. Columbus was quick to take offense at perceived slights; these unnamed actions he “regarded as insulting and as affronts to his dignity,” Las Casas learned. Ferdinand took Ovando’s hypocritical behavior as “a scorpion’s kiss.” The concealed poison within the kiss consisted of Ovando’s freeing Francisco Porras, the acknowledged “ringleader of the mutiny,” in the presence of Columbus himself, in a gesture designed to humiliate his predecessor. “He even proposed to punish those who had taken up arms to defend the Admiral.” Later, Columbus muttered darkly to his son Diego about the Porras brothers, “They did such bad things, with such raw cruelty as was never heard before. If the King and Queen leave them unpunished I do not know who will dare take more people out in their service.” Their mutiny forgiven and forgotten, the Porras brothers received their back pay, positions, and titles.

In the same spirit, Ovando excluded the Admiral of the Ocean Sea from official dealings with Ferdinand and Isabella. With that, Columbus realized he was more prisoner than honored guest, disgraced and endangered by Ovando, who refused to recognize the Admiral’s credentials as the “captain general” of the fleet. The bona fides, declared Ovando, were none of his business. It is difficult to imagine Columbus, a man of soaring vanity, reduced to the status of a vassal in the capital of the empire he had discovered as Ovando went about humiliating him, but he had no choice. It was left to Ferdinand to express indignation on his behalf.

 

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month later, on September 12, Columbus, his son Ferdinand, and servants sailed for Spain in a chartered caravel accompanied by one other ship. The rest of Columbus’s crew, the men who had endured a harrowing year on the beach in Jamaica, stayed behind on the island of Hispaniola. Of those men, many former mutineers, Las Casas noted in passing, “some of them later crossed over to Puerto Rico to settle the island—or, to put it more accurately, to destroy it.”

 

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he weather turned fierce. Two leagues offshore, the mainmast of one of the ships in Columbus’s little fleet split “right down to the deck,” most likely the result of heavy winds. Columbus ordered the damaged vessel to return to Santo Domingo, and he resumed the journey to Castile in the accompanying vessel. But “after sailing with fair weather for almost a third part of our course,” Ferdinand reported, “we had a terrible storm that placed us in great jeopardy.” That was October 19. The following day, the ship’s mainmast “broke in four pieces,” precipitating still another emergency.

Ferdinand ascribed their survival to the “valor of the Adelantado and the ingenuity of the Admiral, who could not rise from bed on account of his gout.” Nevertheless, the two brothers “contrived a jury mast”—that is, a replacement—“out of a lateen yard”—a triangular sail’s spar—“which we secured firmly about the middle with ropes and planks taken from the stern and forecastles, which we tore down.” The ship remained seaworthy, so long as the weather did not trouble them.

Presently another storm descended, cracking the mast.

 

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fter more repairs, the ship made the final seven hundred leagues to the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, in southern Spain, last seen by Columbus two and a half years earlier. Frail and vulnerable, he had survived, and so long as he lived, the promise of a Columbian empire—sanctioned by the Sovereigns, of course—remained alive. Despite the tranquil splendor of Dry Harbour, Jamaica, his time there had been extraordinarily dispiriting, time spent tending to his physical and psychic wounds. His year on the beach had been no idyll; there was no coming to terms with himself, or with the “Indies.” It was, at best, a refuge.

Many of the 140 men who had set out with Columbus did not live to see the end of the voyage. Several deserted at Hispaniola. Thirty succumbed to disease, or drowned, or died in battles with the Indians or with mutineers. Columbus, confronting disease, mutineers, hostile Indians, and his own delusions, was among those who survived, as were his son and brother.

Despite his extensive reconnoitering of the coast of what is now Panama and Costa Rica, he never grasped where in the world he had been. Yet Columbus realized he had found some great entity that seemed to expand the more he explored it, a place without clearly defined borders, poorly understood or described by the writers of antiquity, to which even the Bible made scant reference, simultaneously concealing and revealing incalculable riches. He later claimed part of its wealth as his own, even while he devoted the whole of his time in Spain not in palaces or brothels but in austere monasteries or tottering on muleback along steep mountain trails, driven by the twin demons of vanity and duty.

To his loyal son, Columbus’s accomplishments were anything but foreordained or clear-cut. An aura of chaos hovered over his entire life and adventures, against which he tried to impose his will. In Ferdinand’s retelling of events, his father was always vulnerable—to the whims of monarchs, the caprices of Indians, the power of tides and storms, and the moods of the impressionable men serving under him. He emerged as a hostage to fortune in the high-stakes game of European expansion; time and again, his exploits could have gone one way or another, were it not for his singular vision, or so Ferdinand would have his readers believe. The adventure gave impetus to his imagination and intellect for the rest of his days.

For Columbus’s brother Bartholomew, the Adelantado, the journey had been the occasion for acts of heroism, at least in the eyes of the Spanish. If not for his vigilance, Columbus and his band of loyalists would not have lasted a year on the beach. Yet the most heroic acts of all had been performed not by his brothers, but by the self-effacing Diego Méndez, who had survived a perilous journey in an open boat and a year in the realm of Nicolás de Ovando to bring the caravel to Jamaica to rescue Columbus and his men.

Despite these hardships and frustrations, Columbus retained a particular affection for El Alto Viaje—the High Voyage—perhaps because it gave him a chance to show off his navigational skills as never before, and to accomplish feats that would make less accomplished explorers gasp in wonder. Or perhaps because the hardships of the voyage, its reversals and privations and narrow escapes, brought him closer to God, to his son Ferdinand, and to his sense of mission.

It was now November 7, 1504. He planned to return to Seville to recover his health, and then journey once again, this time to make amends with the queen who had backed his voyages for a dozen years. As with many of his expectations, it was not to be.

 

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ueen Isabella, still at Medina del Campo, continued her decline. Only weeks before, on October 4, she signed her will, in which she exhorted her husband and daughter to conquer Africa—considered by some to belong to the Spanish empire—and to complete the Crusade. There were other requests: she would be buried in a habit of St. Francis, and she appointed her daughter, Juana, her “universal heir.” As for King Ferdinand, she was thankful for his labors, and he would receive half the income flowing to Spain from the empire that Columbus discovered for them both—the Indies.

Beyond that, a codicil to her will maintained that “our main aim was to arrange the introduction there of our holy Catholic faith and to ensure that the people there accepted it, and also to send prelates, monks, priests, and other learned people who fear God to instruct the people in the faith and to teach and indoctrinate them with good customs.”

By this time she had given her blessing to a new mission to the Indies, led not by Columbus or one of his brothers, but by Juan de la Cosa, the mapmaker. Later, she assigned Alonso de Ojeda, whom Columbus considered a poacher on his demesne, as the governor of the bay of Urabá, between today’s Colombia and Panama. Although the mission, backed by an amalgam of conversos and nobles, was slow to start, its mere existence was enough to alarm the Admiral, who complained that “nobles of the realm now sharpened their teeth as if they had been wild boar, in the expectation of a great mutation of the state.”

Although Columbus was already sketching out another voyage in his fevered imagination, it was apparent that his remaining strength would not be equal to the demands of life at sea. He had deteriorated badly, like one of his ships too riddled with shipworms to endure another squall.

 

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n November 26, nineteen days after Columbus had arrived in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Isabella I, Queen of Castile and Léon, died in Medina del Campo. She was fifty-three years old. With her went Columbus’s hopes of obtaining backing for another voyage. For all her reign’s brutality, she had been a powerful leader, bringing the nobility under control and a semblance of order to Castile. Reflecting the conventional opinion of the era, Peter Martyr described her as “the mirror of virtues, refuge of good things, scourge of evil.” But she would always be remembered as the sponsor of the Inquisition—and of the voyages of Christopher Columbus.

“Her death caused the Admiral much grief,” wrote his son, “for she had always aided and favored him, while the King he always found somewhat reserved and unsympathetic to his projects.” Ferdinand was not the only observer who noticed the disparity in the way the two monarchs treated Columbus. “The Catholic king,” Las Casas observed, “I know not why nor with what motive, not only failed to show him any material sign of gratitude but also, while very complimentary in what he said, did his level best to ensure that [Columbus’s] route to advancement was blocked.” The chronicler shook his head in wonder, and suddenly came to the defense of the man he had devoted volumes to condemning. “I never managed to get to the bottom of this dislike,” he admitted, “unless it was that the king paid more attention than was warranted to the false witness brought against the Admiral by those at court who were jealous of him.” The whispering campaign against Columbus continued unabated.

 

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t is painful to contemplate Columbus entering into his final round of negotiations with King Ferdinand. Like Nicolás de Ovando, the king acknowledged the explorer’s accomplishments and service to the crown, without promising anything for the future. Refusing to recognize this reality, Columbus persisted in beseeching his Sovereign for confirmation of his titles, and even for backing of future voyages, although he was barely capable of traveling overland, let alone over the Ocean Sea. He had lived long enough to see his moment pass, all too briefly. Now he bargained with the king as with death itself for more time, money, and glory. Columbus regained enough strength to plan a visit to the movable Spanish court, guessing that it was at Valladolid. He proposed to travel aboard the ornate palanquin once used to transport a cardinal’s corpse to be interred at the Seville Cathedral, but put the plan aside in favor of journeying as he did so often overland, on the back of a mule.