Columbus

by Laurence Bergreen

  By May 1, Columbus was sailing through weed-choked waters, “encountering commodious harbors, lovely rivers, and very high mountains,” and waving at locals who believed the black ships had descended from heaven. The well-wishers offered tributes of fish and cassava bread, asking nothing in return. As before, Columbus bestowed hawk’s bells and glass beads on his supplicants, “wishing to send them away happy.” And with that altruistic gesture, he resumed the crucial task of finding gold. In Ferdinand’s worshipful view, the quick departure demonstrated his father’s resolve, but Columbus himself took a more pragmatic view. “The wind was fresh and I was using it, because things at sea are never certain, and many times an entire trip is lost because of a single day.”

  After two days and two nights of “excellent weather” Columbus beheld a view of the island’s primeval interior. Through some trick of light and atmosphere the vista seemed close at hand, as though he could reach out and graze a mountaintop with his fingertips. That may have been why Columbus—no aesthete—was moved by the sight. “It is the prettiest that eyes have ever seen,” he exulted. “It is not mountainous, yet the land seems to touch the sky, and it is huge, bigger than Sicily, with a perimeter of eight hundred miles. It is most fertile and densely populated, both on the seacoast and inland. . . .”

  Once again, he was Jamaica-bound, and in search of gold.

  The fleet stood offshore until the next day, when “the Admiral cruised down the coast to explore the island’s harbor.” All was peaceful until the moment “there issued from the shore so many armed canoes that the boats had to return to the ships, not so much from fear of the Indians as to avoid hostilities with them,” Ferdinand said. To avoid a confrontation, Columbus entered another harbor, only to realize he had sailed straight into an ambush. Or was it? On these islands, the Indians’ desire to fight, to trade, or just to make noise frequently overlapped, and Columbus resorted to guessing about their real intentions. His own stance was just as ambivalent; within the span of a few days he was capable of regarding the Indians as political allies, trading partners, converts, slaves, or deadly enemies. In the pages of his journal and letters they appeared as wise or primitive, indolent or resourceful, according to his judgment and whims.

  Columbus returned to Cuba and resumed his westward course, pondering a familiar question: Was Cuba part of the mainland, a hypothesis consistent with his insistence that he had reached the Indies, or was it an island? If so, he had not yet reached the Indies. In the midst of his reverie, “there arose a terrible storm of thunder and lightning that, added to the numerous shoals and channels, caused him great danger and toil.”

  In severe weather, Columbus would normally strike sail, but his fleet was in danger of colliding with small islands, their dull trees and beaches just visible through the fog and mist. As the weather brightened, the palm trees and scrub sparkled. Columbus called the islets the Queen’s Garden, in honor of his sovereign. “The farther he went, the more islands he discovered, and on one day he caused to be noted 164 islands. God always sent him fair weather for sailing among them, and the vessels ran through those waters as if they were flying,” Bernáldez said.

  Ashore, they marveled at the profusion of wildlife, “cranes the size and shape of those of Castile, but bright red.” Nearby, “they found turtles and many turtle eggs, resembling those of hens but having very hard shells.”

  Returning to their ships, Columbus’s men noticed the strange manner in which Indians fished from their canoes. As they approached, Ferdinand relates, the Indians “made signs not to come nearer until they had done fishing,” which meant tying “slender cords to the tails of certain fish that we call revesos”—remoras, or suckerfish—“that pursue other fish, to which they attach themselves.” Despite Ferdinand’s enthusiasm for the technique, the Spanish colonists did not trouble to learn this method of fishing for themselves, preferring to rely on the Indians’ largesse.

  The Jamaican coast emerged from the fog to take shape before his eyes on May 5. He arrived at what is now called St. Ann’s Bay, which he named Santa Gloria, a timeless paradise of powdery beach and gently surging ultramarine sea. In every direction, the Admiral noticed “very big villages very close together, about four leagues apart. They have more canoes than elsewhere in these parts, and the biggest that have yet been seen, all made each of a single tree trunk.” The settlements were so prosperous that “every cacique has a great canoe for himself in which he takes pride as a Castilian gentleman”—a station to which Columbus aspired—“is proud of possessing a fine, big ship.” The canoes were finely worked, and at least one appeared to be astonishingly long; Columbus measured it to make sure his eyes did not deceive him. It was “96 feet in length [with] an 8-foot beam,” he noted with appreciation. The canoes had been fashioned from logs hollowed out by craftsmen who charred and later scraped them with sharp stone axes. The Indians relied on the paddle for propulsion; they had never seen sails until Columbus’s ships appeared on the horizon.

  While methodically sounding the harbor, he and his men were alarmed by the sight of seventy giant canoes, paddles churning through the sea, Indians shouting, ready to attack. “After I anchored, they came down to the beach in numbers to cover the earth, all painted up with a thousand colors, primarily brown, and all of them naked; they wore various kinds of feathers on their heads, their chests and bellies were covered with palm fronds, and they shouted at the top of their lungs and threw spears, although they did not strike us.” Columbus feigned indifference, occupying himself by taking on wood and water, repairing his battered vessels, indirectly letting the Indians know that their bellicose gestures would accomplish nothing. To flee would only encourage the Indians, who, Columbus reminded himself, were so inexperienced that they would grasp a Spanish sword by the blade “without thinking they can be hurt.”

  According to Ferdinand, Columbus resolved to “scare them right at the start” by sending small craft filled with crossbowmen who wounded at least six or seven Indians by a conservative estimate. The brawl settled matters for the moment.

  Columbus’s Indian interpreter sailed to shore in a longboat to conduct diplomacy among the inhabitants, and once he had calmed their anxieties, struck a deal, the outlines of which quickly became apparent. “A multitude of canoes came peacefully from the neighboring villages to trade their things and provisions for our trinkets.” He obtained all he wished, except for the gold that he believed was just waiting to be discovered.

  Having repaired the damage sustained by his flagship in the battle, Columbus was planning to return to Cuba when his departure was delayed by a surprising defection. “A young Indian came aboard saying he wished to go to Castile,” and he was followed by canoes bearing his relatives and supporters pleading with him to return, but they failed to persuade him. “To escape the tears and lamentations of his sisters, he hid where they could not see him,” Ferdinand noted of the drama. The Indian had his way and remained aboard ship. The defection was complete. “The Admiral marveled at the firm resolution of this Indian and ordered him to be well treated.”

  That night, the fleet rode at anchor in Santa Gloria’s idyllic harbor, and in the morning, May 6, the Admiral raised sail, and traveled fifteen miles west along the Jamaican coast, dropping anchor again in a horseshoe-shaped place of refuge that instantly became Puerto Bueno.

  Onshore, Indians donned brightly colored feather headdresses and masks, and hurled their poison spears at Columbus’s ships. Undeterred by what he considered a ritual show of force, the Admiral sent a party of men ashore in a longboat to scrounge for water and wood and the opportunity to repair their leaky boats, only to meet with a hail of stones. To tame the warriors, Columbus sent another boat with sailors armed with crossbows, whose arrows injured and killed several. To teach the Indians a lesson, Bernáldez recalled, the Spanish deployed a vicious dog that “bit them and did them great hurt, for a dog is worth ten men against the Indians.”

  The following day, a half-dozen Indians appeared o
nshore with offerings of cassava bread, fruit, and fish to appease the Spanish invaders. Columbus and his men helped themselves to the Indians’ bounty, all they could want with the exception of gold. On May 9, the newly repaired ships raised anchor and sailed from Puerto Bueno, again in a westerly direction, to a spacious harbor Columbus named El Golfo de Buen Tiempo, the Fair Weather Gulf—now known as Montego Bay. Inevitably, a storm blew up. Without giving a reason, striking out blindly in search of gold and the Grand Khan, Columbus left the Jamaican coast and returned to the mysterious land of Cuba—Juana—reaching Cape Cruz on May 14.

  To his surprise, he heard rumors of himself. The Indians had been expecting the man with the large black ships to return.

  Within the embrace of Cape Cruz lay an Indian village, where Columbus encountered the cacique, who explained through an interpreter that he had conferred with other Indian leaders, who remembered Columbus from his previous voyage. The Indians had acquired a surprising amount of intelligence about the fleet. They knew that the Indian interpreter was a convert to Christianity, and they were familiar with Columbus’s need for provisions, especially water, his noisy but ineffectual firearms, and his obsession with gold.

  After reaffirming his good intentions to the Indian sentinels of Cape Cruz, Columbus departed, plying a northeastern route that took the fleet along what is now the Balandras Channel to the Gulf of Guacanayabo. Although the Admiral seemed to have reoriented himself now that he was back in Cuba, he remained befuddled about his global whereabouts, and as reliant as ever on spurious sources, especially Sir John Mandeville.

  The fair weather held, revealing a sparkling still life edged with dew. “Next day at sunrise,” wrote Bernáldez, “they looked out from the masthead and saw the sea full of islands in all four quarters, and all green and full of trees, the fairest that eyes beheld.” Columbus desired to pass to the south of the islands, but he recalled Mandeville, who claimed there were more than five thousand islands in the Indies, and decided instead to sail along the coast of “Juana, and to see whether it was an island or not.” Columbus bet that Cuba was part of the mainland.

  They sailed on, Columbus anxious to avoid the slightest contact with razor-edged coral reefs and sinister sandbars. From the Gulf of Guacanayabo on May 15, he sailed gingerly to the west, probably past an archipelago off Santa Cruz del Sur, into the Rancho Viejo Channel (as it is now called) and the Pingue Channel, into a gulf guarded by a blockade of islands with the alarming name of Laberinto de las Doce Leguas, Labyrinth of Twelve Leagues. It was but one more maze that Columbus had entered, some geographical, others conceptual, combining to mislead him into exploring dead ends and arriving at false conclusions. He was saved from folly or disaster by his remarkable navigational intuition and his instinct for self-preservation as storms buffeted his ships when they were trapped and vulnerable in the channels. Daily tempests forced him into impossible navigational quandaries in tight spaces—whether to spread sail or take it in, to drop anchor or not to drop anchor—and he often violated his own cardinal rule by scraping the bottom of the channels he explored. The worst transgression occurred when Santa Clara ran aground, and for many anxious hours he was unable to dislodge her. Eventually he and his crew freed her, and he regained the freedom of the sea.

  As Columbus resumed his exploration of the southern coast of Cuba, he arrived at the massive incursion known as the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs). Always persuaded that he was on the verge of reaching India, he suspected that he had located—at last!—a passage from Juana to the mainland. The navigator in him eventually realized that he was in fact exploring a spacious gulf, as he later described to Bernáldez, “on the edge of the sea, close by a great grove of palms that seemed to reach the sky” shielding two gushing springs. “The water was so cold and of such goodness and so sweet that no better could be found in the world.” Never had he sounded more charmed by his surroundings. For once Columbus gave himself up to rapt contemplation of the vistas before him.

  Departing the bay, Columbus led his fleet past Cayo Piedras and the Gulf of Cazones. All at once, he told Bernáldez, the ships “entered a white sea, as white as milk, and as thick as the water in which tanners treat their skins.” Then they found themselves “in two fathoms’ depth and the wind drove them strongly on, and being in a channel very dangerous to come about in, they could not anchor the ships.” The caravels negotiated the channels for thirty miles until they reached an island in only “two and a half fathoms of water,” where they anchored, “in a state of extreme distress.” He had inadvertently sailed into the midst of diminutive islands near the Zapata Peninsula, where every swell concealed peril.

  He had no choice but to find a way out. For once his gift for dead reckoning failed him. Never before had he seen such an erratic display of water—white, black, milky, and indigo, as if all the formations and currents with which he had become familiar during a lifetime of sailing had lost their meaning. He spent several days cautiously proceeding along Cuba’s sweltering southern coast, always near to the shore should disaster strike. He sent an agile caravel into a channel to find water, or signs of human habitation, but the ship soon returned, her crew reporting that the vegetation was “so thick that a cat couldn’t get ashore.” Columbus tried to pierce the dense mangrove cover, but he, too, complained that the land was “so thickly wooded down to the seashore that they seemed to be walls” that excluded his fleet from the gold, the glory, and the fulfillment of discovery and conquest.

  As he coasted along an uninspiring formation he named Punta de Serafín, a wind arose, and the obstructing islands gave way to open water and a prospect of distant mountains. And so, Bernáldez writes, “the Admiral decided to lay a course toward those mountains, where he arrived the following day, and they proceeded to anchor off a very fine and very large palm grove”—almost any grove would have looked appealing after the oppressive wall of mangroves they had endured—“where there were springs of water, sweet and very good, and signs that there were people about.” Strange things started happening.

  As the Queen’s Garden disappeared over the horizon, Columbus slumped in exhaustion. The stress of exploring, the strange diet, the inimical climate, and more than anything else, the lack of sleep had taken their toll. He was, said his son, “worn out,” and “had not undressed and slept a full night in bed from the time he left Spain until May 19, the day he made this notation in his journal.” Adding to his cares was the difficulty of picking his way through the “innumerable islands among which they sailed,” or, to be more specific, the dangers presented—coral reefs capable of slicing a hull to shreds, sandbars that could ensnare a ship as surely as a remora attached itself to its host, unpredictable winds, and even more unpredictable tribes who might attack at any moment.

  The very next day, May 20, Columbus negotiated his way past seventyone islands, “not counting the many they sighted at sunset toward the westsouthwest.” The vista was anything but reassuring: “The sight of these islands or shoals all about them was frightening enough, but what was worse was that each afternoon a dense mist rose over them in the eastern sky, with such thunder and lightning that it seemed a deluge was about to fall; when the moon came out, it all vanished, dissolving into rain and part into wind.” It was such a common atmospheric phenomenon, he said, that “it happened each afternoon.”

  On May 22, the fleet approached an island that appeared slightly more substantial than the others he had recently passed. Santa Marta, Columbus decided to call it as he went ashore, desperately in need of food and water. The Indians had abandoned their village, and in their huts, the starving sailors found only fish. In the background, large dogs, “like mastiffs,” pawed the earth and growled. Unsatisfied and bewildered, the Spanish returned to their ships and sailed onward, “northeasterly among the islands,” past stately cranes and gaudy parrots, wandering blindly into a “maze of shoals and islands” that “caused the Admiral much toil, for he had to steer now west, now north, now south, according to the dispo
sition of the channels.” Within their confines, the ships could not tack and maneuver. Peter Martyr related that “the water of these channels was milky and thick for forty miles, as if they had sprinkled flour all over the sea.” While Columbus and his men frantically sounded the bottom and kept lookout, the keels often scraped bottom. Nevertheless, the fleet made it through and exited into the open sea, where, eighty miles away, lofty mountains hung suspended against the sky. They were approaching Cuba and apparent safety.

  The fleet put in, and a lone Spanish scout, armed with a crossbow, went ashore in search of desperately needed water. During his search, he confronted the spectacle of a man dressed in a white tunic. At first, the scout thought he beheld a friar whom the Admiral had brought along. “Suddenly, from the woods he saw a whole group of about thirty so-clothed men coming,” Peter Martyr related. “He then turned around shouting and ran as fast as he could toward the ships. These men dressed in tunics clapped their hands at him and attempted to persuade him with all means not to be so fearful, but he kept running.” Stranger still, the men appeared to have complexions as light as those of the Spanish. From what tribe had they come? Were they lost Europeans? Emissaries of the legendary Prester John? And if so, had Columbus’s fleet finally reached the Indies?

  Astonished by the apparition, Columbus sent a delegation “to see if they could talk with these people, for according to the crossbowman, they came not to do any harm but to speak with us.” They found no one, “which displeased me much because I wanted to speak with them since I had traversed so many lands without seeing people or villages.” Attempting to blaze a trail inland to the men, the Spanish “got themselves so entangled that they hardly made a mile,” let alone forty. They returned to the ships, exhausted and empty-handed.