Like many sailors, he feared the thick, floating mats would snarl his ships and lead to disaster. In reality, sargassum is too fragile to act as a barrier. It consists of miniature floats containing oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen for buoyancy, and it derives its name from these little structures, which reminded Portuguese sailors of a grape they called salgazo. The designation evolved into the word sargaço, or seaweed, and later the floating mats of seaweed were classified as the genus Sargassum. (There are six species of Sargassum, with two, Sargassum natans and Sargassum fuitans, predominating.) Columbus called it, simply, “weed,” and it was ubiquitous, covering a million square miles, or more, of the Sargasso Sea and Atlantic Ocean. From time to time storms scattered sargassum into the Caribbean Basin, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Gulf Stream, which carried it to the north, along the Atlantic Coast. In time, the Gulf Stream nudged it ashore, or swept it back into the vortex of the Sargasso Sea. So Columbus encountered its feathery stems wherever he went.
The homeward passage commenced three hours before dawn, on January 16, before a moderate offshore breeze. Relying on his four Indian guides, he headed in the general direction of the Caribs, “the people whom all those islands hold in so great fear, because it is said that with their countless canoes they range over all those seas, and it is said that they eat the men whom they can take.”
After traveling sixty-four miles, according to his dead reckoning, the Indian guides indicated that their destination would “lie to the southeast.” Instead, he trimmed the sails, proceeded another two leagues, and Niña caught what he considered a wind capable of bearing the ship all the way to Spain.
His confidence surged. He had survived the voyage, outlasted a partial mutiny, and discovered a previously unknown part of the world. He had even established and staffed a fort in this remote outpost. Nor did his achievements end there. He had demonstrated the validity of his “grand design” to himself, and soon enough, he would do the same for Ferdinand and Isabella. Nothing could alter those achievements, with the possible exception of Pinzón’s malice or divine intervention.
The two surviving ships of the little fleet (Pinta was not far behind) headed out to the open sea with all its hazards. What awaited him on the Iberian Peninsula would be far more uncertain and dangerous than anything he had faced in the mild waters and on the powdery white beaches of the Caribbean.
CHAPTER 4
“The People from the Sky”
Symptoms of prolonged isolation from women crept into Columbus’s log. He confessed his fixation with the “island of Matinino,” said by the Indians to be inhabited by “women without men”—a prospect that answered the prayers of many a sailor and even enticed the more circumspect Admiral. According to the local gossip, newborn baby girls were conveyed to a certain island once a year, while newborn baby boys were sent to an equivalent retreat.
The more he questioned his Indian guides on the exact whereabouts of this island, the vaguer they became about its location, their evasions intensifying his interest in the matter. Columbus was never more zealous than when in pursuit of an illusion. He considered making exploratory gestures, but, he recorded, he “didn’t care to tarry,” not to mention the way this nautical detour into venery would be portrayed at home by his enemies and rivals. Fair weather and brisk wind encouraged Columbus to put aside thoughts of the Sirens of the Caribbean and to pursue his northing and easting toward Spain. By sunset, he reported, the breeze began to die down.
Columbus’s system for marking the days was eccentric, even by maritime standards. Mariners generally began their days at noon rather than at midnight, but Columbus preferred to commence his days at sunrise, at least for the outward-bound voyage. On the inbound voyage, such as this one, he marked his days from sunset to sunset. These variations meant that calculations of his fleet’s day-to-day progress were often irregular, and did not always agree.
Similar discrepancies and irregularities marked timekeeping aboard Columbus’s ships. His pilots kept time with a capacious hand-operated hourglass known as the ampolleta. On fair days, he was able to correct timekeeping errors by observing the moment the sun reached the zenith, that is, the highest point overhead. Then, for a few hours, all was regulated, but at sea, nothing stayed the same for very long. On heaven and on earth, everything was in motion.
Never completely breaking free of his medieval frame of mind, Columbus relied on a traditional canonical schedule, even at sea. Prime, or daybreak, occurred at 6:00 a.m., Terce at 9:00 a.m., Sext at noon, Nones at 3:00 p.m., Vespers at 6:00 p.m., and Compline at 9:00 p.m. These hours were occasionally elastic, with Prime, usually indicating dawn, observed whenever it occurred, Vespers in late afternoon or early evening, and Compline before the men went to sleep. At Vespers, when circumstances permitted, Columbus called all hands, who read or looked on while prayers were uttered, and the men of the day watch gave way to the evening guard.
It was then, in the dying light of day, he saw a remarkable sight, a booby, the awkward-looking seabird whose name was based on the Spanish word for “dunce,” known to oceangoing sailors everywhere. Soon another booby appeared, and then seaweed: hints and promises of land.
On Friday, January 18, the sea churned with albacore, one of the few species of fish recognizable to Columbus and his crew and an encouraging sign that they were approaching Spain. Repeating sailors’ lore, Columbus expressed the belief that they, accompanied by a frigate bird, would lead the ship to a coastal village called Conil, near the city of Cadiz, where they were supposed to congregate. Or as the sailors might have put it, the tuna were towing them toward the city’s girls, renowned for beauty and bawdy repartee. The next day brought boobies and other pelagic birds, but no signs of Cadiz or its beauties. And by Sunday, he was yearning for home, imagining the ocean breeze “as soft and sweet as Seville during April and May,” as it wafted over a gentle, unruffled sea.
He varied his course between north, north northeast, “and at times did northeast by north,” making up so much time that soon Niña was bearing down on Pinta “in order to speak to her,” by which he meant to apprise himself of Pinzón’s latest intentions. Suddenly the air turned chill, and he expected more cooling as he proceeded north, “and also the nights were very much longer from the narrowing of the sphere.” This observation is but one of many made by Columbus that demonstrate that he fully understood and appreciated that the earth was round, or nearly so, and certainly not flat.
More birds appeared, including petrels, and still more seaweed, “but not so many fishes, because the water was colder.” Yet there was no sign of land, and he had scant idea of his whereabouts in the Ocean Sea or in relation to his outgoing voyage. Amid the unease, the wind died down the following day, and with nothing better to do, the ship’s Indian passengers went swimming in the briny deep, as their more cautious European keepers looked on from the deck of the Niña.
That night, a revived but variable wind teased Niña to life, but Columbus and his crew resisted the temptation to proceed. They were waiting for Pinta to catch up, yet she appeared crippled. “She sailed badly close-hauled,” Columbus noted, “because she had little help from the mizzen owing to the mast not being sound.” For that lapse, the Admiral blamed his subversive rival. “If her captain, Martín Alonso Pinzón, had taken as much care to provide a good mast to the Indies,” he scolded, “where there were so many and of that sort, as he was greedy in leaving them, thinking to fill the ship with them, he would have done well.”
Columbus took comfort in the fact that the ocean remained “always very smooth as in a river,” for which he thanked God, who apparently still favored him above all others.
So it went for the remainder of January and into the middle of February 1493. One day, the seamen “killed a porpoise and a tremendous shark.” By night, the water, “very smooth,” slid silently past the ship’s hull, shattering the celestial illumination into glistening fragments.
On the evening of Sunday, February 3, Columbus tried his luck with the astro
labe and the quadrant, instruments on which navigators in many parts of the world had relied for centuries. In its simplest form, an astrolabe consists of a disk marked in degrees, together with a pointer. It is used to make astronomical measurements, especially the altitudes of celestial bodies, and to calculate latitude. Columbus’s instrument was rudimentary, and he was by no means expert with it. The quadrant, the other traditional instrument for celestial navigation, consisted of a graduated quarter circle and a sight. This was designed to take angular measurements of altitude in astronomy, and was usually made of wood or brass.
Columbus hoped to take the altitude of the North Star to ascertain his location, but failed. He blamed rough water, or, as he put it, “the rolling wouldn’t permit it.” Yet his previous sentence notes that the sea was “very smooth.” More likely, he was frustrated by his lack of skill in handling the devices, even in calm weather. A sophisticated dead-reckoning navigator who could read currents and clouds and wind with uncanny precision, Columbus lacked mastery of these instruments. In due course he gave up on the quadrant and astrolabe, and relied on his senses, especially his keen eyesight. For all his visionary qualities, Columbus remained the pragmatic Genoese sea captain, impatient with the latest navigational technology.
The trades rapidly bore Niña along, and she covered two hundred nautical miles during a twenty-four-hour period beginning on February 6. The pilot, Vicente Yáñez, assisted by a seaman, Bartolomé Roldán, persuaded themselves, and their captain, that they were approaching the Azores, the westernmost projection of European influence into the Atlantic. They convinced themselves that they spied Flores Island, discovered less than twenty years earlier, and then Madeira Island. But on this occasion Columbus’s dead reckoning misled him about the position of the two islands and the position of Niña. He believed himself seventy-five leagues south of Flores, when he was actually six hundred miles to the east and two hundred miles to the south of his presumed location, yet he remained convinced of his interpretation, and sought confirmation in the appearance of clumps of seaweed that the sailors associated with the Azores.
The longer Columbus remained at sea, the greater the divergence between his actual and presumed locations, which meant the greater the danger. As the voyage unfolded, the ultimate test of his navigational abilities occurred not in the outward-bound journey—which was a demonstration of his vision, not his navigational accuracy, with any landfall in the New World considered a “discovery”—but on the return voyage, when he headed toward a specific destination, not a fanciful idea concocted by Marco Polo or the result of calculations based on inexact measurement. Not knowing where he was as he commenced the return leg of the voyage, and resolute in the belief that he was somewhere off the coast of “India,” he found himself at an enormous disadvantage as he attempted to retrace his course, and the problem became worse with every league he traversed. He was lost without realizing it, just as he had been since the day the soft outlines of the Canary Islands faded into the mist.
Amid this relatively calm interval during the inbound journey, Columbus prepared to defend himself against challenges sure to come from Pinzón, the Portuguese, and other rivals, by summarizing his exploits for Luís de Santangel, the Queen’s Keeper of the Privy Purse, to pass on to the Sovereigns. (It is conceivable that Columbus wrote two such letters, one intended for each party, but only the letter to Luís de Santangel has survived.) Published only weeks later, in April 1493, it is considered the first instance of printed Americana, and perhaps the most important and valuable.
Columbus’s “Letter on the First Voyage” attempted to burnish the events of his first voyage. If his diary reads as a jumbled, frequently contradictory series of impressions made on the fly, his letter reveals his more considered impressions, those he expected to secure his place in the scheme of things. From start to finish, he was determined to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative aspects of his voyage. “Since I know you will be pleased at the great success with which the Lord has crowned my voyage,” he began, “I write to inform you how in thirty-three days I crossed from the Canary Islands to the Indies, with the fleet our most illustrious Sovereigns gave to me. And there I found many islands filled with people without number, and of them all have I taken possession for Their Highnesses, by proclamation and with the royal standard displayed, and nobody objected.”
Although he had no idea where he actually had gone, he proceeded to explain his taxonomy of discovery: “To the first island which I found I gave the name Saint Salvador, in recognition of His Heavenly Majesty, who marvelously hath given all this; the Indians call it Guanahani. To the second I gave the name Isla de Santa María de la Concepción; to the third, Fernandina ; to the fourth, Isabela, to the fifth, Juana, and so to each one I gave a new name.” How splendid it was to conjure and name a new world.
On a more troubling subject, he added, “When I reached Cuba, I followed its north coast westwards, and found it so extensive I thought this must be the mainland, the province of Cathay.” Here he rewrote his own history. As his logbook indicated, he initially believed that Cuba was a very large island, and if that were the case, it could not be connected to Cathay, or China, a result that would undercut his promises to the Sovereigns, the purpose of his expedition, and his cosmography. The explorer did not want to confront the consequences of his own discovery, and so he resorted to a convenient fiction, explaining that as he sailed along the Cuban coast, he saw only “small groups of houses whose inhabitants fled as soon as we approached,” and stayed on his course, “thinking I should undoubtedly come to some great towns or cities.” Worse, the “coast was bearing me northward,” and winter was approaching, not that he had any realistic expectation of encountering ice and snow in this subtropical climate, where persistent heat and humidity plagued Columbus and all the men as they went out in their wool and linen clothing, while the Indians went about nearly naked. Pretending that he was fleeing the cold—and how would the Sovereigns ever know the difference, unless they had actually traveled there?—he decided to journey south, but he did not want to carry on in that direction either, preferring to anchor in a “remarkable harbor that I had observed.” By the time he finished his little fable about fleeing the harsh Cuban winter, the Sovereigns (and their advisers) would have stopped wondering whether Cuba was an island, after all. More likely, it was some part of “India.”
Feigning curiosity when he was, in fact, avoiding a reasonable trajectory for his ships, he sent two men inland to look for “a king of great cities.” He dispatched two scouts to find centers of commerce and civilization, and three days of reconnoitering in the wild led only to “small villages and people without number, but nothing of importance.” More likely, Columbus deliberately altered parts of his log to conceal his precise whereabouts from his rivals, and it was possible that he was being similarly disingenuous about his half-completed exploration of Cuba.
Rather than pursuing geographical truth, he dashed away to another island, one that he named Hispaniola. Indians had told him about it, or so he said. His story was getting better with the telling, and so he continued to embellish, even when his journal, with its sense of wonder and ambiguity, contradicted his letter’s mythmaking.
He portrayed Hispaniola as an extraordinary opportunity for empire building. “It has many large harbors finer than any I know in Christian lands, and many large rivers. All this is marvelous.” In fact, everything there was “marvelous”—the plants, the trees, the fruit—and Hispaniola itself “is a wonder” replete with many “incredibly fine harbors” and “great rivers” containing gold (not really), “many spices” (not true), and “large mines of gold and other metals” (a flagrant exaggeration).
As with his fear of the Cuban “winter,” only Columbus could verify these statements. He preferred to evoke “lofty” lands, sierras, and mountains. “All are most beautiful, of a thousand shapes, and all accessible, and filled with trees of a thousand kinds and tall, and they seemed to touch the
sky.” Some flowered; others bore fruit, “and there were singing the nightingale and other little birds of a thousand kinds in the month of November.” He wrote on, telling of its rich red soil (true), its powdery beaches strewn with glassine sand (true), its cooperative populace, who seemed wholly of a piece with the soothing environment (hardly), and water of crystal clarity that he had seen nowhere else (for once, the absolute truth). “You could not believe it without seeing it,” he exclaimed. Even Marco Polo, also inclined toward hyperbole, had not remarked on such gentle and beguiling natural settings, and for the benefit of the Sovereigns, Columbus wondered if he were approaching the entrance to paradise. In Hispaniola, “the sierras and the mountains and the plains and the meadows and the lands are so beautiful and rich for planting and sowing, and for livestock of every sort, and for building towns and villages.” And so Columbus wrote on, soothed by the sound of the sea, encouraged by the prospect of his glorious return to Spain, storms and struggles all behind him as he evoked the magic isles of his voyage.
When he turned his attention to the inhabitants of “this island,” he became more candid, and for those who had not seen what he had seen, utterly baffling. They were profoundly human and sensitive, they were savage and dangerous, they flung their arrows at him, they offered to build a life-size gold statue in his image, they considered his fleet the fulfillment of a longstanding prophecy, and they drove him from their land. Their behavior varied from one harbor he visited to the next. Generalizations about them were difficult, if not impossible, to make, but he would try.
To begin, they all “go naked, men and women, as their mothers bore them, except that some women cover one place only with the leaf of a plant or with a net of cotton,” he warned, and appraised them as an avaricious Genoese might. “They have no iron or steel or weapons, nor are they capable of using them, although they are well-built people of handsome stature, because they are wondrous timid” and even refused to use the flimsy little sharp sticks they occasionally carried. When Columbus landed, “people without number” were drawn to the sight, only to flee. “Even a father would not stay for his son, and this was not because wrong had been done to anyone.” In all, they were “timid beyond cure.” And generous beyond reason. “Of anything they have, if you ask them for it, they never say no; rather they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as if they were giving their hearts; and whether the thing be of value or of small price.”
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