Columbus

by Laurence Bergreen

  The latest tempest proved powerful enough to part the ship’s cables. After making repairs and filling pipes with seawater as ballast, Columbus decided to weigh anchor at the first opportunity. Soon Niña was headed away from Santa María and all its troubles toward St. Michael. If he could not find better anchorage—and a better reception—at the neighboring island, “he had no recourse but to flee seaward.”

  It seemed that he could discover a New World with ease, but he negotiated the Azores only with difficulty. He wanted only to declare his feat, but he could not find anyone who would listen. To the Portuguese inhabitants of the Azores, Columbus was more of a trespasser than an explorer. Only Ferdinand and Isabella, his sponsors, would properly appreciate and validate his accomplishments, once he freed himself from the flytrap hospitality of the Portuguese.

  Thursday, February 21, found Columbus again battling rough seas and high winds as he tried without success to locate St. Michael, “owing to the mighty cloud-wrack and thick weather that the wind and sea raised.” Niña came close to foundering. The force of the storm “amazed” him; in all his experience sailing around the Azores and the Canary Islands he had never seen anything like it, and in the Indies, he had sailed “all that winter without anchoring,” or so it seemed in retrospect. (In reality, Caribbean storms had on occasion prompted him to ride at anchor until they abated.)

  Sunrise failed to disclose any suggestion of his goal, St. Michael, and he decided to return to Santa María “to see if he could recover his people and the barge and the anchors and cables that he had left there.”

  The small humiliations resumed as soon as he anchored. A functionary balancing on the rocks overlooking the harbor warned him not to leave. Then a barge bearing “five seamen and two priests and a scribe” boarded the ship. The seamen were armed. Columbus permitted them to spend the night on board, having no other choice. In the morning, they demanded to see signs of the authority conferred on Columbus by the “Sovereigns of Castile,” and a scuffle ensued. Columbus related that he broke the deadlock by persuading the intruders of his authority, and the Portuguese finally released all the pilgrims whom they had arrested.

  Come Sunday, the unstable weather turned fair, and after taking on food, water, and much needed ballast, Columbus headed due east, toward Spain and the acclaim he expected. Yet the closer to home, the greater the danger he faced. Foul weather blew Niña off course. “It was very painful to have such a tempest when they were already at the doors of home,” he confided to his diary. On the evening of March 2, “a squall blew up which split all the sails and he found himself in great peril.”

  As before, the beleaguered men drew lots to select a pilgrim to pray at Santa María de la Cinta, near Huelva, and once again the “the lot fell to the Admiral.” There was little time for discussion, as the storm’s intensity redoubled, and they found themselves blown not to Spain, as they intended, but toward the one place they did not wish to go: Lisbon.

  And the storm grew still more violent.

  “Last night,” Columbus wrote of the events of March 4, “they experienced so terrible a tempest that they thought they were lost from the seas that boarded them from two directions, and the winds, which seemed to raise the caravel into the air; and the water from the sky, and lightning flashes in many directions.” He had no time to consider the irony of his situation: he had gone all the way to the Indies and back, only to face his worst perils in European waters. Columbus’s many detractors later charged that the Admiral deliberately headed toward Lisbon under pretext of fleeing the storm in pursuit of a covert agenda influenced by Portugal. On the basis of his account, and others, of the severity of the weather, his agenda consisted solely of survival.

  He “made some headway, although with great peril, keeping out to sea, and so God preserved them until day,” a task that Columbus said meant incurring “infinite toil and terror.” Taking on water, barely navigable, guided by her exhausted crew, Niña approached a landmark Columbus recognized: the Rock of Sintra, a peninsula north of the Tagus River, which flows into Lisbon. He had a choice: either attempt to veer off into the storm and the near certainty of oblivion, loss of life, and the failure of his Enterprise of the Indies, or enter the river, and so he did “because he could do nothing else.” He made for the fishing village of Cascais, near the mouth of the Tagus, and despite the tempest found anchorage.

  The curious gathered onshore, wondering how the crew had survived the ferocious storm and offering prayers. Columbus heard from other seamen that “never had there been a winter with so great storms, and that 25 ships had been lost in Flanders,” a frequent destination for ships leaving Lisbon, “and that other ships had been lying there for 4 months without being able to get out.” Against this background, Niña’s survival seemed miraculous.

  Columbus’s first thoughts were of King João, but there was no satisfaction in proving the disdainful Portuguese monarch wrong. Instead, the Admiral invoked Ferdinand and Isabella, explaining that they had “ordered him not to avoid entering the harbors of His Highness to ask for what was necessary, in return for pay.” When the weather cleared, he would be eager to sail to Lisbon “because some ruffians, thinking he carried much gold, were planning to commit some rascality.” It would require all his tact and diplomacy to persuade the Portuguese that he had not been raiding their protected interests on the Guinea coast—which Spain had promised to avoid—but was actually returning from the Indies. Either explanation would incite the wrath of King João.

  All the more surprising, then, was the appearance of the “master of the great ship of the King of Portugal,” riding at anchor nearby: Bartolomeu Dias. When last seen by Columbus in 1488, this courageous navigator was making his triumphal return to Lisbon after the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope. At the time, he enjoyed the great favor of the king who had refused to back Columbus’s scheme to find a water route to the Indies. But four and a half years had wrought changes. No longer a captain, Dias was now second-in-command, or master, of a modest vessel in the service of the king. And Columbus, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, had successfully completed his visionary if misunderstood mission, an accomplishment that further jeopardized his relationship with this deeply suspicious king.

  Dias impudently drew alongside Niña “and told the Admiral to enter the gig to come and give an account to the king’s factors and the captain.”

  No, Columbus replied, he would do no such thing, “unless by compulsion of being unable to resist armed force.” Dias proposed a compromise: Columbus could elect to send his second-in-command, but stubborn Genoese that he was, he insisted he would only go if forced, and “that it was the custom of the Admirals of the sovereigns of Castile to die before they yielded themselves or their people.”

  Faced with this bravado, Dias relented slightly, requesting to see the letters of authorization from Ferdinand and Isabella, which Columbus had initially offered to show. This he did, and having examined them, Dias returned in the gig to his ship to explain the situation to his own captain, who, “with a great noise of drums, trumpets, and pipes, came aboard the caravel [Niña], spoke with the Admiral, and offered to do all he commanded.”

  By the next day, March 6, Columbus’s exploits were the talk of Lisbon, and people regarded his triumph with awe. Of course, both they and the Admiral of the Ocean Sea were misinformed and confused about what he had accomplished. He had not reached Asia, as he would have everyone believe. Yet his actual deeds were even more impressive, and, it would later emerge, more traumatic and transformative, than his fanciful claims. Instead of establishing a new trade route, he had discovered a new world.

  Nevertheless, he clinched his argument that he had journeyed to China by displaying the Indian passengers he had brought with him, persuading both himself and his public of the veracity of his claims. He reported, “So many people came from the city of Lisbon today to see him and the Indians, that it was astonishing, and they were all full of wonder, giving thanks to Our Lord.”

&nb
sp; At long last a letter came from King João II, inviting Columbus to a royal audience at a monastery. The beleaguered discoverer preferred to remain with his ship for the sake of form and for personal security, but he had no choice but to comply with the request, “to disarm suspicion.” As an inducement, “The King gave orders to his factors that everything the Admiral and his people and the caravel [Niña] stood in need of he would supply without pay.”

  Columbus set out for the Monastery of the Vertudes, with rain delaying his arrival until evening. The lavish reception he received was calculated to allay his suspicions, and he proudly noted that the king “received him with much honor and showed him much favor.” After the honeyed words came the hard bargaining. It was a very impressive discovery that Columbus had made, as everyone acknowledged, but in the process, he had violated the Treaty of Alcáçovas—was he not aware of that? In this agreement, made in 1479 with just this possibility in mind, Portugal exercised rights along Africa’s west coast and the Cape Verde Islands, while Spain exercised hegemony over the Canary Islands. And so Columbus’s discoveries belonged to King João II, not Ferdinand and Isabella, and certainly not to the Admiral, who suddenly found himself ensnared in negotiations as perilous as the tempests he had recently survived.

  Columbus replied that he had never seen the treaty and knew nothing of its provisions. He deferred to the Sovereigns, whose orders to avoid Guinea he had scrupulously followed. Realizing perhaps the impossibility of verifying where Columbus had or had not gone on his voyage, and pleased that the Admiral’s answer acknowledged Portugal’s right, King João appeared to relent, and replied that he was sure there would be no need for arbitrators in this matter. The king tried his best to draw out Columbus about his voyage. What countries had he visited, and who were the inhabitants? Had he found gold, pearls, and other precious gems? According to Las Casas, the king inquired “always with a pleasant face, dissembling the grief that he had in his heart.” Columbus boasted wildly about his accomplishments, without realizing the effect his claims had on the jealous king.

  Rui da Pina, a Portuguese court historian who might have witnessed the interview, remarked that the “king blamed himself for negligence in dismissing him for want of credit and authority in regard to this discovery for which he first came to make request of him.” So ran the official version. Behind the mask of humility, King João meditated on a chilling solution to the problem of the turncoat explorer. He could execute Columbus; or rather, he could let it seem that others wished him to be killed. And the deed could be carried out discreetly, with blame attributed to some lapse committed by the explorer. In the end, the king instead treated Columbus honorably before booting him out of the country.

  On March 15, 1493, Niña entered the harbor from which she had departed on August 3, 1492, with Pinta following close behind, borne “by a light wind.”

  Columbus had completed his mission, as he understood it, and expected to be treated with the greatest respect. At last the journey was done, and a glorious future lay before him and Spain. After the years of waiting, the discovery had been accomplished quickly, in a little over seven months, with virtually no bloodshed and with no loss of life, incredibly enough—nothing except a sunken ship from which all hands had been rescued, and bruised feelings on the part of the renegade Martín Alonso Pinzón. Even the threat he posed to Columbus sputtered out when Pinzón turned up in his hometown of Palos de la Frontera, seriously ill, and died within days of his return from the sea. The cause was believed to have been syphilis, and in that case, he might have caught the disease long before he sailed with Columbus, and it had lain dormant in his nervous system for years, until it emerged on the voyage as tertiary syphilis, which would account for his defiant, irrational behavior. He was, in short, going mad, more of a danger to himself than to anyone else.

  For now, Columbus savored his achievement. The new lands that he had discovered were closer to Spain and, to hear Columbus tell it, more benign than Marco Polo’s version. The soil was fertile, the people nothing like the monsters he had expected to find. Only the fate of the men stationed at the fortress in Hispaniola remained unknown.

  He planned to proceed to Barcelona “by sea, in which city he had news that Their Highnesses were, and thus to give them the story of his entire voyage that Our Lord had permitted him to perform.” He reminisced briefly about the opposition he had faced when planning his voyage, and the “opinion of so many high personages . . . who were all against me, alleging this undertaking to be folly.” Perhaps his critics, like the king of Portugal and his advisers, would see how mistaken they had been.

  He had been shrewd, he had been tough, and he had been wily, but most of all, he had been spectacularly lucky. He had been wrong at least as often as he had been right, most blatantly about his destination, but he had also been nimble, capable of reversing himself when it served his purpose. His words, as recorded in his diary, were emphatic, but his strategy was flexible and opportunistic.

  “Since I know that you will be pleased at the great success with which the Lord has crowned my voyage,” said Columbus in the famous letter to his Sovereigns at the conclusion of his first voyage, “I write to inform you how in thirty-three days I crossed from the Canary Islands to the Indies”—in reality, an island in the Caribbean—“with the fleet which our most illustrious Sovereigns gave to me. I found very many islands with large populations and took possession of them all for Your Highnesses; this I did by proclamation and unfurled the royal standard.”

  His initial contacts with the inhabitants of the New World were tentative and respectful, even heartening, he claimed. “I hoped to win them to the love and service of Your Highnesses and of the whole Spanish nation,” he wrote. “They have no religion, and are not idolaters; but all believe that power and goodness dwell in the sky and they are firmly convinced that I have come from the sky with these ships and people. . . . This is not because they are stupid—far from it, they are men of great intelligence, for they give a marvelously good account of everything—but because they have never before seen men clothed or ships like these.”

  Still convinced he had reached India, Columbus tailored his understanding of another major discovery, the island of Cuba, to suit his purposes. At first, he accurately labeled it as an island in his journal; later, when he realized he was bound to demonstrate to Ferdinand and Isabella that he had reached the East, he recast it as “the mainland,” that is, China, and its inhabitants as subjects of the Grand Khan. Ferdinand and Isabella appointed Columbus as viceroy of these lands without realizing they were creating a monarch potentially more powerful than any in Europe.

  PART TWO

  Conquest

  CHAPTER 5

  River of Blood

  To Columbus, one question took precedence on his return: the fate of the thirty-nine men left behind at La Navidad. He had placed their lives, and Spain’s honor, at risk. And he would have to return to “India” to rescue them, or to discover what befell these hostages to his ambition.

  His first voyage had been a qualified success. That he returned with his fleet and its men alive, reasonably healthy, and intact was itself miraculous. He contended that his accomplishment was divinely inspired. Exactly what he had discovered or explored was subject to human interpretation and so less certain. He claimed the dozens of islands he had visited comprised a western extension of India, or China; that the figure of the Grand Khan and the trading possibilities that he offered lurked somewhere to the north and west of the turquoise waters over which his tiny fleet had sailed. He offered his journal as evidence, bolstered by the testimony of the others who had accompanied him, in the hope of claiming the riches and titles and glory to which he believed he was entitled, even divinely ordained, to have. Carefully embellished and edited to meet Ferdinand and Isabella’s expectations and his contractual obligations to them, that journal purported to demonstrate that he had accomplished and even exceeded his mission to the point of establishing a Spanish outpost in the
islands he had discovered on his way to India. But the lives of thirty-nine Spaniards stationed there hung in the balance. He had created a situation in which he would play the champion, or, if matters went awry, the scapegoat.

  The little fort served as the kernel of a vision of empire on which Columbus had been meditating ever since his first voyage, and by now the plan had become firmly established in his mind. He envisioned two thousand colonists settling Hispaniola. They would build “three or four towns”; collect gold, which would be closely guarded; and establish churches with “abbots or friars to administer the sacraments, perform divine worship, and to convert the Indians.” He explained his plans to regulate shipping, handle cargo, and protect valuable exports, especially gold, in grinding detail to satisfy Spanish bureaucrats who administered the kingdom’s day-to-day operations. He displayed an impressive familiarity with the minutiae of his administrative agenda, which belied the difficulty of carrying it out. Concerning navigation, of which he possessed a singular mastery, he had almost nothing to say.

  Between the lines of his communiqué, Columbus urged Ferdinand and Isabella to act quickly, before the Portuguese or another rival outfoxed Spain. Rather than standing as an unprecedented feat of navigation, the voyage would become the first of many to assemble the greatest, the wealthiest, and the largest commercial empire in the world. Or so Columbus hoped. To make his case, the document simplified the complex reality of the “Indies.” He omitted references to the menace posed by the Caribs, the difficulty of replicating his feat of navigation, the vagaries of weather, and, of course, the stupendous misunderstanding of the location of his discoveries. He was selective to the point of being deceptive, but there was no mistaking his meaning. Spain would acquire a new empire and he would administer it, becoming wealthy in the process by founding a dynasty. The scheme had the virtue of familiarity; it echoed the Spanish—and for that matter, the Portuguese—approach to exploring and colonizing the African coast and the exotic islands to the south and west of the Iberian Peninsula, Madeira and Gomera and Cape Verde—not quite substantial enough for an empire, but a sphere of influence that might grow into one. Implementing Columbus’s plan meant pushing the boundaries of empire thousands of miles to the west.