After the Niña lost contact with the Pinta on the terrible night of February 13, 1493, somewhere in the vicinity of the Azores, the tempest of cross swells and hurricane-force winds increased. The tiny caravel was in desperate peril of being swamped as the waves crashed over it from all sides. To save his craft, Columbus had the yardarms lowered as far as he dared, so the sails would still propel the craft forward but would not be ripped by the savage waves. He allowed the Niña to run before the gale, wherever the gale might take her.
The battle with the elements raged outside, but also within Columbus himself, for not only his life but his revelation was at stake. His terror was great. With his mystical nature, he saw his plight as biblical, and he was beset by contradictory emotions, his worries and hopes as crosshatched as the winds and the waves outside. Was his God punishing him for his lack of faith in divine providence? Had he been permitted to see the paradise of the New World, only for his God to kill him? Where was the meaning in that, if his sons were now to be orphaned, and his sovereigns were never to know what had been discovered? Or perhaps as humiliating, that he should perish, and Pinzón should live to take all the credit. Mysterious indeed were the ways of the Lord.
Yet, within his inner prayers, he drew confidence from the honor he had been accorded. He should not fear the squall but only his own inner “weakness and anxiety.” His God had granted all his prayers. He had overcome despair and mutiny and Pinzón’s betrayal. Many wonders had he seen. After he had been allowed “so great a triumph in discovering what he had discovered,” surely his God would allow him to complete what He had begun.
Even as the waves crashed over the Niña and the tiny vessel swayed dangerously from side to side, the Admiral sat in his cramped cabin, furiously scribbling down all he remembered about what had been revealed to him in the past three months. When he had finished, he enclosed his parchment in a waxed cloth envelope, put it in a barrel, and threw it overboard.
Then he called the crew together for a collective supplication. For each crew member (but probably not for the Indians they had with them), a garbanzo bean was placed in a cap. One bean was scored with a cross. Whoever drew the cut bean promised to make a pilgrimmage of thanksgiving to the shrine of Santa María at Guadalupe, if they survived this ordeal. The pilgrim was to go “in his shirt” as a sign of humility. Columbus drew first—and drew the crossed bean. Twice more during the night, they gathered to encourage one another, making vows to send a pilgrim to Santa Maria of Loreto in Ancona, Italy, where according to legend, the Holy House of the Virgin Mary had been carried by angels after the twelfth-century Crusades and which as the patron for mariners was supposed to spawn miracles. And later, in a vow they came to regret, they promised to visit the first church of the Holy Virgin that they encountered once they were safely on land.
They did survive the tempest, only to find themselves with a different predicament. At sunrise on February 15 they saw land, and fantasies abounded. Pilots thought it might be Castile or Portugal, but it turned out to be the southernmost island of the Azores, called St. Mary’s. This outpost had no good refuge from the raging winds, though it was a regular way station for caravels traveling down the coast of Africa. Its governor immediately jumped to the conclusion that the Niña was another of those Spanish pirate ships from Palos that were poaching on Portuguese territories in Africa. Word that Pinzóns of Palos were involved in the expedition only deepened his suspicions. When the ship’s grateful pilgrims came ashore to fulfill their vow of giving thanks to their Saviour, the governor promptly threw them all in prison. It would take a week for the Admiral to sort out this annoyance, a time when he sought vainly and without success in the continuous bad weather to take wood and ballast on board for the last leg of the journey.
At last the storm subsided, and when a patch of blue appeared overhead, they sailed for Spain, lightheaded and light-weighted. None was more impatient to reach home than Columbus, for he remained in high anxiety that Martín Alonso Pinzón had arrived before him and was spreading lies about the journey. His resentment against his captain was great. Only ten days after they arrived in the New World, Pinzón had sailed off on his own without Columbus’s permission, in the company of an Indian who said he knew where the gold was. It had been a miracle that the Niña and the Pinta happened upon one another two months later on the southern coast of Hispaniola. Columbus had dressed Pinzón down furiously for his “cupidity” and insubordination and threatened to hang him from the yardarm.
“This is what I deserve for having raised you in the honor in which you now stand,” Pinzón replied bitterly. He had found gold, and he supposed that this might excuse his independence and assuage the Admiral’s anger. It did not, and now, as Columbus fretted about the possibility that Captain Pinzón was being lionized in the company of the king and queen, he must have berated himself for not hanging Pinzón when he had good cause. Especially grating was the memory of Pinzón’s remark that he had raised Columbus to the honor he now enjoyed.
On March 3, another bad omen presented itself as swallows landed on the railings and yardarms of the Niña, and a whale raced by them for the outer ocean. That could only mean that heavy weather lay ahead, and they promptly found themselves in a second storm. Now they huddled once more for mutual support and vowed a third time to dispatch a pilgrim, this time to the shrine of La Cinta in Huelva, a shrine much revered by the local seamen of Palos. Again Columbus drew the lucky bean.
But there was no luck that day. The wind and waves were so fierce that it seemed to the mariners as if the caravel was levitating off the surface of the ocean. In one blast, the working sails were shredded. If the caravel came near shore, it would surely be dashed to pieces against the rocks. Dry-masted and unballasted, they were in the gravest peril.
Still, at sunrise on March 4, as if some benevolent pilgrim had gone to the House of Loreto for them, land was sighted, and Columbus recognized the great promontory as the Rock of Sintra, at the mouth of the Tagus River outside Lisbon. If his working sails were in tatters, the square storm sail was still intact; and so, despite his anxiety about how he would be received in the land of Spain’s bitter rival, he made for the rivermouth. At the village of Cascaes, the first anchorage in the river, fishermen turned out in amazement to see the battered wreck. From them, the crew learned that the winter’s storms had been especially harsh, and that some twenty-five ships had been lost at sea off Flanders. As the wind was still up, the Niña moved farther upriver to an anchorage at Belém.
As Columbus anticipated, it was not long before an imposing military launch from a nearby warship approached the Niña. Standing in her bow was none other than the great commander and discoverer of the Cape of Good Hope himself, Bartholomew Dias. It is understandable that Dias assumed this bedraggled Spanish craft to be a poaching pirate ship blown off course. Moreover, Dias was not to be trifled with. He had become an aggressive, difficult character, for he languished in a subordinate role in the Portuguese navy and resented the fact that he had never been properly honored for his African discovery. Recognizing Columbus, he commanded the Admiral to board his launch forthwith and be taken ashore. Columbus refused ostentatiously. He was an Admiral of the Sovereigns of Spain, he shouted back importantly, and he would not leave his ship, unless compelled to do so by force of arms. Then send your master, Dias barked. Columbus refused again. To send him or any other member of his crew would be the same as going himself.
“It is the custom of Admirals of the Sovereigns of Castile to die before they yield themselves or their people,” Columbus said grandly.
Getting nowhere, Dias backed off and requested with somewhat more respect to see Columbus’s credentials from the Spanish sovereigns. On board, these documents seemed to satisfy Dias as he cast a skelly-eye at the flatheaded creatures from the New World—the five Indians, as Columbus was calling them—three of whom were decidedly under the weather. (A sixth had died on the passage over.) After Dias left, it was not long before a higher-ranking se
a captain arrived with trumpets and pipes to accord the Admiral a more dignified welcome.
Word spread rapidly, and the scene became a spectacle. Crowds gathered along the shoreline to gaze at the intrepid discovery ship. Skiffs swarmed around the caravel. Dignitaries clamored to come aboard to see the Indians and the parrots and the strange weed called tobacco. While some grumbled that their king had allowed so great an opportunity to slip through his fingers, many gave thanks to their Christian God “for so great and good an increase of Christianity.”
Meanwhile, Columbus penned a letter to King João II about his discovery. The king was then staying at a monastery thirty miles north of Lisbon called Val do Paraiso. The news stunned him. On the one hand, he blamed himself for his shortsightedness four years earlier when he rejected Columbus’s overture. More important, he suspected that the lands Columbus had found fell within the Portuguese sphere of influence, as it had been determined in 1479 at the treaty with Spain at Alcácovas. The papal bull Aeterni regis in 1481 had certified the terms of the treaty at Alcáçovas and had confirmed grant of Portuguese sovereignty over all territories south and west of the Canary Islands.
Thus, it was entirely possible that, if the discoveries lay south of the agreed-upon demarcation line for the Spanish and Portuguese spheres—the 28th parallel, which ran through the Canary Islands—the new discoveries were Portuguese! The king had a point. The island of Hispaniola lay astride the 20th parallel. The king supposed that this was the mythical island called Antilia, the Island of Seven Cities which was peopled by the ancestors of the Christian refugees who had fled Portugal after the Moorish conquest of the eighth century.
In an even grander sense, Columbus’s disclosure connected with João II’s dreams about a global Portuguese empire that would span the globe and eclipse the power of the newly consolidated Spanish Empire to his east. At about the time that the Niña appeared off the Rock of Sintra, Pero da Covilhã, the Portuguese emissary whom João had dispatched overland to India four years earlier, returned to Lisbon. From him, the king had intelligence about the significant ports and places of wealth in the subcontinent to which the next great Portuguese mission around the Cape of Good Hope might go. (It would be Vasco da Gama’s voyage.) Covilhã had left his companion, Afonso Paiva, in Cairo, with instructions to travel south into Ethiopia to find the kingdom of Prester John (which Paiva did, to Covilhã‘s great disappointment). And so dancing in João’s mind was the grandest of designs: a Portuguese dominion that stretched from India to Ethiopia and now to the New World.
Between his regret and his anger, his imperial ambition and his affection for Portuguese myth, João II was a dangerous man. The court around the king was even more dangerous to Columbus. The royal advisers were getting reports of Columbus boasting about his triumph to the visitors who now flocked to the Niña and scoffing at Portuguese discoveries by comparison. He was, the courtiers heard, telling tall tales about the riches of the “Japan” that he had found. This penchant for grandiosity and exaggeration and self-congratulation was highly annoying and well remembered from four years ago. No wonder they had rejected this show-off.
These unpleasant traits might be turned to the advantage of Portugal. Why not, someone suggested, provoke the Admiral into a fight and kill him? Since he was discourteous and conceited, they could fix it so that “one of his shortcomings could seem to be the true cause of his death,” as the chronicler of the Portuguese court later related it. The assassination could be done discreetly. “With his death the prosecution of this enterprise by the Sovereigns of Castile would cease with the death of the discoverer.” With Columbus out of the way, a Portuguese expedition to the New World could quickly be mounted to claim the lands that were rightly theirs.
Of João II’s ruthlessness no one could be in doubt. He certainly had no scruples about political murder. In the revolt of the aristocracy in 1483, he had had the duke of Braganza beheaded, and when a second conspiracy dared to arise a year later, seeking to replace João with his wife’s brother, the duke of Viseu, João had killed his rival with his own hand.
Within a day, Columbus received a warm response from the king. The royal letter oozed praise and congratulation and invited the explorer to come to Val do Paraiso to visit and to tell everything about the great adventure. The Admiral was skeptical; he sensed the danger. He accepted, perhaps thinking that in the crowds and with the news now so widely public, he had achieved a measure of safety. As a further safeguard of his security, he had dispatched a letter to the count of Medina Celi, then in Madrid, telling him of the discovery and saying he was in Lisbon. Columbus remained on his guard.
The royal reception in the country, however, was warm and replete with expressions of admiration. The king commanded that every courtesy and honor be accorded to Columbus. They talked at length, Columbus insisting that he had returned from “Cipangu and Antilia,” the islands that formed the approaches to India. In their conversation, the king did not mask his opinion that by virtue of treaty and papal bull the discoveries were Portuguese. To this challenge, Columbus professed ignorance about such lofty matters of state diplomacy, saying only that he had scrupulously followed his orders from the Spanish sovereigns to avoid the Portuguese stronghold on the Guinea coast called St. George of the Mine. This satisfied the king, at least on the surface. These matters would be amicably worked out between the nations, João assured his visitor.
On the way back to the Niña, Columbus stopped at another monastery for a visit with the Queen of Portugal. And then safely back on board on the evening of March 12, he received an odd letter from João II. If Columbus wished to travel overland to Castile, the king would be glad to provide the escort and the horses. The letter reeked of danger. How easy it would be to arrange for the convoy to be attacked by brigands. And how easy for the King of Portugal to deny responsibility.
Columbus politely demurred and then secretly put his pilot ashore with 20 gold doubloons and orders to make his way, humbly on a mule in disguise, overland into Castile, there to seek out the royal court with the news.
The following morning, as the sun rose, the Niña slipped out of Belém unceremoniously and, unimpeded, rode the strong ebb tide out into the open sea.
Two days later, on March 15, 1493, the Niña rode the flood tide gently over the bar of Saltes and docked at Palos. With the completion of his first voyage, Christopher Columbus wrote the last words in his journal, pointing to the many “signal miracles” from which he had benefited, swiping again at those who had considered his undertaking to be folly, and trusting that his voyage would redound to “the greater glory of Christianity.” For a month he had had the draft of his formal letter to Ferdinand and Isabella ready. He polished it now, adding a postscript about the storms he had survived from the Azores and about his detour in Lisbon.
“Finally,” the letter concluded, “Your Highnesses can see that I shall give you as much gold as you want, if you will give me a little help; as much spice and cotton as you command; and gum mastic as much as you order to be shipped which, up to now, could only be found in Greece on the island of Chios; and aloe wood; and slaves, as many as you shall order, who will be idolaters.” It would not be correct, this last phrase implied, to enslave natives who had converted to Christianity. When the letter was right, he made several copies, and sent duplicates to the royal comptroller, Luis de Santángel, who had changed the queen’s mind, and to the treasurer of Aragon, Gabriel Sánchez, who had provided part of the funds.
The excitement at La Rábida, in Palos and Moguer and Huelva, was predictably extravagant and unbridled, and reached an even higher pitch when, within hours, the Pinta followed the Niña over the bar and into Palos. Bittersweet was the spectacle of Martín Alonso Pinzón being carried ashore and taken to his house in Moguer. Grotesque, coppery pustules covered his body. He shook with fever. His heart and nervous system were shot. He had five days to live.
As Columbus watched from a distance, his anger toward his captain drained away. They
had logged many miles together. Pinzón had been central to the success of the mission. Columbus could admit that now. And through the tempest of the winter seas, he had brought home the sons of Palos safely. In Pinzón’s present condition, it was easy to forgive him. Though it is not recorded, it is probable that the two seamen met for the last time, either at La Rábida or, more likely, at Pinzón’s bedside. The Admiral of the Ocean Sea had to be wary, for Pinzón’s illness was highly contagious. The captain was in the third, last, and awful stage of a new and unknown illness. Only two decades later, around 1512, would an Italian poet named Girolamo Fracastoro write a poem about the scourge and give it its name, syphilis.
Say, Goddess, to what Cause we shall at last
Assign this Plague, unknown to Ages past;
If from the Western Climes ‘twas wafted o’er,
When daring Spaniards left their native shore;
Resolv’d beyond th‘ Atlantick to descry,
Conjectur’d Worlds, or in the search to dye.
And so, in the year of 1492, Columbus’s men had crossed yet another barrier besides the sea: the blood barrier. It was as if, from the medical standpoint, the Antipodes did exist, and it was not meant for the peoples of the different hemispheres to interact with one another. Syphilis had long existed in a mild form among the American Indians, and they had a natural remedy for its annoying symptoms: the resin with a faint balsamic odor that came from the guaiacum tree of the bean-caper family. But Pinzón and the others on the first voyage had no resistance to the venereal disease, and no resistance to the young women with beautiful bodies who welcomed them, “as naked as the day they were born,” to the shores of Cuba and Haiti. Men were men, and they did not practice, as a historian of the time put it quaintly, the “virtue of chastity.”
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