All of these choices share an assumption: Columbus meant to indicate the actual location of his first landfall. On this basis both Morison and Judge insisted that the answer must closely fit Columbus’s description in the log. But that approach might well be flawed. Columbus’s description was curiously generic, as if he were not paying close attention, or deliberately trying to be vague. And what about erosion altering the reefs, shoals, harbors, and beaches, as was likely to happen over time? What if Columbus camouflaged the location to protect his claim, as if it were buried treasure that he wanted no one else to find? He was not above manipulating data in the log to suit his purposes, and what more likely occasion than his first landfall to throw others off his track? Or was he sincere, but having one of his delusional episodes ? Keep in mind that this is the same Columbus who, on a later voyage, believed the seas sloped upward in the vicinity of paradise. He wrote about that phenomenon with as much conviction as he reported any of his other findings. Who is to say exactly when Columbus was delusional and when he was not? Because of these questions, it seems unlikely the exact landfall will ever be determined with complete assurance.
For another consideration of the erratic history of the first landfall, see John Noble Wilford’s
The Mysterious History of Columbus
, pages 129 and following.
Chapter 1: Thirty-three Days
Luis de Torres was not, as has been sometimes claimed, subsequently the owner of an enormous estate in the New World.
Tobacco is mentioned in
Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus
, page 91, note 2. Fernández de Oviedo discusses pineapples on page 99 of
Oviedo on Columbus
.
The subsequent journey, beginning around December 16, was as follows, based on Columbus’s log:
Daring to enter “an arm of the sea” reaching inland aboard one of his longboats, he observed villages consisting of attractive dwellings, all the while terrifying their dwellers. One look at the approaching Europeans and their weapons, one whiff of their unfamiliar scent, and “they all fled.” The explorer assumed “those people must have been persecuted because they had so much fear.” Persecuted by whom? Columbus did not say, but his guess was a good one. As soon as he and his crew drew nigh, “signal fires” illuminated ubiquitous lookout posts, warning of, rather than heralding, his arrival in this strange land. “These people must have been persecuted because they had so much fear.” Overwhelmed by the sand, the sea, and the fragrant air, Columbus named the region Paradise Valley, and the river the Guadalquivir after the main waterway to Seville.
At midnight, Sunday, December 16, a “light offshore breeze” picked up, and along with it, the explorer’s fortunes. He “sailed close-hauled along the coast of Hispaniola.” At three in the morning, “a wind sprang up” and as he approached the “middle of the gulf ”—anyone’s guess which one, with Columbus obscuring his track to preserve secrecy—his fleet encountered a tiny, isolated craft: one canoe bearing one Indian. Columbus wrote that he wondered how this “Indian could stay afloat with such a strong wind,” and moved quickly to seize him and have him “brought aboard ship.” Columbus resorted to his standard procedure for dealing with unwilling guests, bestowing glass beads, bells, and brass rings on the Indian, whom he transported sixteen miles to a position “near the sea.” Disembarking at another settlement consisting of new houses, the Indian became the explorer’s goodwill ambassador, telling the locals that the great chief and his men, the Admiral and the Christians, as they thought of themselves, were “good people,” and confirming rumors that had already reached the ears of the inhabitants.
Walking out of the dense, leafy growth came five hundred men, and eventually, their chief. Impressed and gratified, the Admiral described the extraordinary sight: “One by one, and many by many, they came to the ship, bringing nothing with them, although they wore the finest gold in the ears or in the nose, which they gave with good grace.” He responded to their generosity, and to the lure of gold, by ordering them to be treated honorably because “they are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest.” During these respectful rituals, their twenty-one-year-old king remained safely on the beach, earning Columbus’s goodwill by encouraging a flow of intelligence concerning the location of gold. Even they reminded him of his adopted home. “This king and all the others went naked as their mothers bore them, and so too the women, without any shame; and they are the most handsome men and women that he had found hitherto; so white that if they went clothed and protected themselves from the sun and air they would be almost as white as in Spain.” The gratifying potential of gold prompted Columbus to lavish praise on their island, and he went so far as to claim that in all Castile “nothing compared with it for beauty and excellence.” The very trees were exceptional, to his way of thinking, “so luxuriant that their leaves ceased to be green, and were of blackish verdure.” Here, he concluded, could be found “everything that man could want.”
That night, the young king ventured aboard the flagship, and cast doubt on the story of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and Columbus’s mission. Through interpreters, the navigator and his officers heard that the king believed these three ships had come from the sky, as did the “Sovereigns of Castile,” who were “not of this world.”
Columbus interpreted these naive words with dismaying opportunism. “You may believe that this island and all the others are as much yours as Castile,” he advised. “There is nothing wanting save a settlement, and to command them [the inhabitants] to do as what you will.” Having made this assessment, he naturally took the next step: “I, with the people on board, who are not many, could overrun all these islands without opposition; for already I have seen that when only three of the mariners went ashore, where there was a formidable multitude of these Indians, all fled, without seeking to do them ill.” Even better, “they bear no arms, and are completely defenseless . . . so that a thousand [of them] would not face three [of Castile]; and so they are fit to be ordered about and made to work, to sow and do all else that may be needed, and you may build towns and teach them to go clothed, and to [live by] our customs.” In other words, their nakedness, their innocence, and their gentleness could be employed against them; these “best people in the world” would make ideal slaves of Castile, or so he wanted his Sovereigns to believe. If he could not bring Ferdinand and Isabella gold and a direct route over water to the Indies, he would instead bring them slaves and an empire.
Chapter 2: Son of Genoa
For an insider’s appreciation of La Superba, “Genoa the Proud,” see Emilio Pandiani,
Vita privata genovese nel Rinascimento
(1915) and
Vita della Repubblica di Genova nell’Etá di Cristoforo Columbo
(1952).
The Piccolomini quotation is drawn from Gaetano Ferro,
Liguria and Genoa at the Time of Columbus
(1992), page 197 (vol. 3,
Nuova Raccolta Colombiana
).
Paolo Emilio Taviani discusses the genealogy of Columbus’s mother in
Cristoforo Colombo: Genius of the Sea
(1990). Also see Genoa, Commissione Colombiana,
Christopher Columbus: Documents and Proofs of His Genoese Origin
(1932) and Silvio A. Bedini,
The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia
(1992), vol. 1, page 283.
Details of the plague can be found in Pandiani,
Vita della Repubblica di Genova
(1952).
The descriptions of Genoa harbor, city, and trade are drawn from
Vita della Repubblica di Genova
. Pandiani’s
Vita privata genovese nel Rinascimento
describes Genoese trade and sailing. Accounts of slavery in Genoa, which imprinted itself on Columbus’s consciousness, come from the same author’s
Vita privata genovese nel Rinascimento
, pages 205–13.
Among the earliest to sing Genoa’s praises was the fourteenth-century Italian scholar and traveler (sometimes called the “first tourist”) Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch. In his “Itinerarium ad Sepulcrum Domini” (“Journey to the Holy Sepulchre”), a travel guide that he wrote for a friend in about 1350, Petrarca said, “Let’s go to Genoa. Here you will see rising from a rocky mountain an imperious city of proud walls and superb men, whose very appearance announces her as the Lady of the Sea.”
Works on the Inquisition are numerous. Useful summaries include François Soyer’s
The Persecution of the Jews and Muslims of Portugal
(2007), pages 140 and following. Also, Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s
1492
(2009) contains a lucid consideration of the subject in a global context, beginning on page 99.
An analysis of the evidence of the Perestrello-Columbus marriage can be found in Rebecca Catz’s “Christopher Columbus’ Portuguese Family,” a paper presented at the XIII Symposium on Portuguese Traditions at UCLA on April 21, 1990, and in her book
Christopher Columbus and the Portuguese
(1993), pp. 15–16. See also Las Casas on Columbus, pages 30–47. For more on the controversy surrounding Felipa’s death, see Justin Winsor’s antique but reliable
Christopher Columbus
(1892), pages 154–55.
Columbus’s assertion that he observed Ferdinand and Isabella occupy the Alhambra can be found in Wilford’s
The Mysterious History of Columbus
, pages 25–26. Finally, Morison’s
Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus
discusses the peripatetic Sovereigns on page 299.
Chapter 3: Shipwreck
To navigators, coral reefs pose a lethal menace, but to an oceanographer or naturalist, they rank among the wonders of the deep: fragile, varied ecosystems of hard corals made of skeletons secreting calcium carbonate, the primary component of pearls, eggshells, and especially seashells. There is more to a coral reef than a pile of shells, however. Sponges, worms, and bivalves, among other marine creatures, bore into the calcium carbonate, reducing the coral skeletons into sediment filling the gaps in the reef. Eventually, algae and other microorganisms hold the reef in position. Nearing the end of his voyage aboard the
Beagle
, a naval survey brig, Charles Darwin became fascinated by reefs during his passage through the Indian Ocean in 1836, and after intense study, offered a theory of coral formation the following year in which he identified three main types: the fringing reef, the barrier reef, and the atoll. Fringing reefs commonly border continental and island shorelines, especially in the Caribbean. Farther offshore can be found barrier reefs, which come into being when the ocean floor sinks, and fringing reefs are pulled away from shore.
Barrier reefs are prevalent in the Indo-Pacific, and also in the Caribbean. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, extending over 1,200 miles, is considered the largest of its type. Finally, if the reef sinks below the ocean surface, it can be considered an atoll, and surrounds a lagoon.
On the voyage out, Columbus had erroneously considered the appearance of sargassum a sign that he was approaching land, and he set about sounding the depths of the Atlantic only to find that he was nowhere near the shore, a mistake he did not repeat when inbound.
For more on the mesmerizing Sargasso Sea and seaweed, see Stan Ulanski,
The Gulf Stream
(2008), pages 78–81, a worthwhile popular account.
Chapter 4: “The People from the Sky”
For more on the Treaty of Alcáçovas, see Morison,
Admiral of the Ocean Sea
, pages 40 and 344.
Columbus’s inadvertent return to Portugal rather than Spain remains one of the most hotly contested issues in Columbus scholarship. Partisans of his supposed Portuguese origins seized on it as an example of where his true sympathies lay. Other commentators have suggested that Columbus’s return to the Iberian Peninsula indicated that he unconsciously had his heart set on returning to Portugal all along, or that he pursued a covert agenda favoring João II rather than his announced sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella. Or even that he functioned all along as a secret agent on behalf of Portugal. Columbus did have some residual feeling for Portugal after all his years there, but in reality, João II contemplated assassinating Columbus to prevent his return to Spain, and the mariner lived to regret washing up on the Portuguese coast in a tempest. Had the weather been better, he would have proceeded directly to Spain rather than engaging in a distracting and dangerous detour.
Had Columbus by some miracle managed to cross the Pacific Ocean and make it to China, no Grand Khan would have greeted him as Marco Polo had once been greeted; instead, he would have been rebuffed by the newly resurgent Ming dynasty, whose bureaucrats had banned maritime trade and led their nation into deep isolationism. How can we know? That was exactly what happened to Columbus’s cousin (on his wife’s side), Rafael Perestrello. He sailed on behalf of Portugal to the Chinese coast in 1513, the first European to accomplish that feat. Perestrello traded successfully in Guangzhou, but when a Portuguese embassy charged with opening formal relations reached the Chinese court, the Ming emperor, Zhengde, threw them in jail, and all dealings between the two nations ceased.
Columbus’s “Letter on the First Voyage,” sometimes known as “The Spanish Letter of Columbus,” has a varied and intriguing history of its own. The original fourpage black-letter document, issued without a title, was probably published in Barcelona in April 1493, based on Columbus’s original manuscript, dated February 15 of that year. The Admiral called it “Columbus’s Letter to Santángel,” although it was actually intended for his Sovereigns. It is possible that the conventions of the royal court demanded that an intermediary, such as King Ferdinand’s finance minister, Luís de Santángel, announce or otherwise convey a document like this to the Sovereigns rather than their receiving it directly.
Leandro de Cosco’s Latin translation, probably completed in late April of the same year, elevated the document’s stature, and went through nine editions in a year’s time. A copy can be found at the New York Public Library, although the images contained within are misleading. One portrays a figure purported to be Columbus disembarking from a large galley with oars. That, like the others, were simply reprints from books already printed in Switzerland. Nevertheless, Columbus’s “Letter on the First Voyage” ranks as the first significant American document.