Columbus

by Laurence Bergreen

  He set sail at the height of midsummer, June 21, bound for Hierro, on the western edge of the Canary Islands, where during the brief hours of darkness he and his two accompanying vessels bade farewell to the supply fleet bound for Hispaniola. He dropped anchor in a bay near barren Boa Vista—the name roughly equivalent to “land ahoy!” in Portuguese—an island known for its leper colony. The Portuguese notary-in-charge, Rodrigo Alonso, told the Admiral that lepers came to Boa Vista in the belief that eating the meat of turtles and washing in their blood cured the affliction. The islanders caught the turtles by night, first by looking for their tracks with the help of lantern light. When they found one of the sleeping creatures, they flipped it onto its back, rendering it helpless, and then they turned over the next, and the next after that, before butchering the lot.

  On Saturday, June 30, 1498, Columbus set sail for nearby São Tiago, the largest of all the islands in Cape Verde. Fog accumulated even in the intense heat, obscuring the sun by day and stars by night. Despite this obstacle, the little fleet departed on a southerly course on July 4, with the Admiral determined to test the boundaries of the recently modified Treaty of Tordesillas. He was, finally, bound for the Indies.

  In search of a shortcut, as always, he sailed as far south as he dared, to the latitude of Sierra Leone, 8º30’ north of the equator, before heading west to the island of Hispaniola. On Friday, July 13, Columbus’s fleet entered a convergence zone where winds from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres flow together. The wind died, the ocean’s surface became ominously flat, and the temperature shot up. They had arrived at the Doldrums, a region that few Europeans, Columbus included, had ever explored, let alone survived.

  “I entered a zone of heat so high and intense that I believed that the ships and crews would be burnt up,” he confided. “The heat came so unexpectedly and so out of measure that not a single man dared go below deck to salvage barrels of drink and victuals.” Becalmed, afflicted by melancholia, Columbus reeled with dread. In the “intense heat,” said Las Casas, “he feared that the ships would burn and the men perish.” The temperature was already taking its toll on the equipment. Wine and water casks ruptured, breaking the barrels’ hoops. Sheaves of wheat withered. Bacon and salted meat rotted almost before their eyes. Only clouds and the occasional rainfall spared them all death by exposure to the pitiless sun.

  Suffering from painful gout and disorienting heatstroke, unable to sleep, scarcely able to breathe, Columbus forced himself to conjure a course to more temperate weather. He took heart from the sight of black and white rooks, birds that he believed did not stray far from land. By July 19, the heat was even more intense, and the suffering greater. But then a zephyr filled the ships’ sails, a few uncertain puffs at first, followed by more convincing gusts, until the sheets bulged and the air pulsed with vitality once again. “It pleased Our Lord at the end of these eight days to grant me a good wind from the east,” Columbus noted, “and I went west . . . always westward on the parallel of Sierra Leone with the intention of not changing course until I reached the location where I thought I would find land and repair the ships and replenish, if possible, our victuals and take on the water I needed.” He followed his westward course for seventeen days, believing that he would eventually arrive at a point due south of Hispaniola.

  But first he had to find land. His ships were coming apart at the seams, and in urgent need of repair, and their stores were equally in need of replenishment. Sunday, July 22, brought birds flying from the west southwest to the northeast . . . still more birds traversing the skies on Monday . . . and, later that week, a pelican perched proudly on the flagship, suggesting the proximity of land, and drinking water, but where?

  Veering north, he made for the big island of Dominica, whose coast he had skirted on the second voyage. Because of its reputation as a cannibal haven, he had chosen to avoid it on that occasion, but now he was so desperate for water and respite from the torments of the sea that he was willing to risk a landfall. Before he did, he sent his servant, Alonso Pérez, up to the mainmast. From his vantage point, “he saw land to the west, fifteen leagues away,” Columbus noted. “What appeared were three knolls or mountains.” They formed an unexpected deliverance from the anthropophagi. He named the outcroppings Trinidad, after their tripartite nature. As he approached, they appeared to him as “three mountains all at one time, in a single view.” Not since encountering land during his first voyage had he felt so relieved. “It is certain that finding this land in this place was a great miracle,” he recorded. He had just sighted one of the two islands that comprise today’s Trinidad, the southernmost landmass of the Caribbean, only seven miles from the coast of Venezuela and South America. The Spaniards on board rejoiced and chanted the “Salve Regina” as the others nodded in fervent agreement.

  He made for a cape that had caught his attention. It seemed to resemble a galley under sail, and so he named it Cabo de la Galera, where, according to his records, he arrived at the hour of Compline, at day’s end. In search of a safe harbor, he coasted past miles of shoreline cloaked in forests that “reached to the sea.” Finally, Columbus caught sight of a canoe: his first contact with the people of Trinidad. Rather than expressing relief or curiosity, he brushed off the overtures of a small tribe approaching them in canoes. Stressed from the voyage, suffering from aches and pains, and even near blindness, and puzzled that the canoes did not carry Chinese, as expected, he avoided both their friendly gestures and hostile arrows. In reality, he was no closer to India than before, and had happened upon a local community related to the Taíno and Carib tribes.

  The next morning, his fleet, rationed to a single cask of water, proceeded along a southerly course until dropping anchor at Point Erin, where the men gratefully refilled their supply of fresh water and cleaned themselves and their garments in heartfelt rites of renewal.

  Aboard their ships once again, Columbus’s men spied thatched huts ashore, put them astern, and proceeded along Icacos Point, which marked Trinidad’s southwesternmost extension. The icaco, or cocoa plum, for which the point was named, sends forth glaucous leathery leaves and velvety fruit, often of a purplish hue. Tolerant of salt, cocoa plums provide a natural barrier against the sea’s erosion.

  The flotilla paused again when Columbus sighted a landmass he took to be an island. But further exploration of the extensive coast—more than twenty leagues—challenged his judgment. On Wednesday, August 1, he arrived at the broad mouth of the Orinoco, among the longest rivers in South America, located at the border of Venezuela and Brazil. The topography persuaded him that he had arrived at the mainland, and the recognition marked the signal discovery of this or any other of his voyages, his first sighting of the continent whose size and location neither he nor anyone else in his ships fully understood or acknowledged. The mystic in him preferred to assume that Providence had led him closer to the entrance to paradise. He shied away from the rigors of geographical adjustment required for nautical reckoning. Nor did he know what to make of the coastal flora beyond noting that it appeared lush and reassuring. “The trees brushed against the sea,” in Las Casas’s paraphrase, a sign that the sea was calm “because when it is rough there are no trees there at all, but rather sand.” Yet a “surging current” appeared to emanate “from above,” and a “mounting current” from below.

  He led the ships into a shallow, brackish body of water west of Trinidad, now known as the Gulf of Paria. After all he had endured, the sweeping shore seemed a sort of paradise, as befitting one of the best harbors in the continent’s eastern coast. “This gulf is a marvelous thing,” Las Casas commented, “and dangerous because of the great river that flows into it.” He called it Yuyaparí, now the Orinoco River. “This river travels more than 300, I believe 400 leagues.” He was describing the Orinoco Delta, a giant, fanshaped network of waterways. Between the land and sea lurked danger, as Las Casas explained. “Since that gulf is surrounded by mainland on one side and on the other by the island of Trinidad, and is, a
s a result, very narrow for the violent force of the opposing waters, they meet in a terrible confrontation and very dangerous battle.”

  Dropping anchor on Thursday, August 2, Columbus permitted his exhausted men to venture onto a swampy brown beach near Icacos Point “so that they might rest and enjoy themselves” after their anxiety-ridden crossing. Restful it might have been, but the setting had an isolated, melancholy feel, as if time were running out as surely as the tide.

  Later that day, a large canoe bearing twenty-four Indians appeared, halting at a safe distance. The Indians shouted over the water, and Columbus’s men responded not with words but with a show of objects—“brass pots and other shiny things”—to encourage the canoe to approach for a bit of friendly trading. The Indians came closer, but still kept their distance, even though Columbus improvised a dance of welcome. “I wanted very much to speak with them, and not having anything more that seemed to me suitable to show and lure them to approach, my last resort was to have a tambourine brought up on the quarterdeck to play and have some boys dance, believing that this way they would draw near to see the celebration.”

  The Indians interpreted the merriment as a war dance and “took up and strung their bows, held up their shields, and began shooting arrows.” Their intended targets scurried below deck. Columbus “gave the command to stop the fiesta of drumming and dancing,” and ordered his men to bring out their crossbows and fire several warning projectiles at the Indians, who had expended their arrows and positioned themselves at the stern of one of the caravels, as if readying to overrun her. At that moment, the ship’s pilot summoned the confidence to dangle from the stern and lower himself into the canoe, armed only with gifts in the form of a “robe” and a “bonnet,” quickly accepted by the Indians, who gestured that the Spanish pilot should go ashore to receive their offerings. He agreed, and asked to be taken to the flagship so that he could ask permission from the Admiral. Before he completed the protocol, the Indians had given up and departed.

  Columbus thought he had seen the last of them until one of their caciques came to the flagship. The Indian’s gold crown caught the eye of every Spaniard, as did his crimson cap and the dignified manner in which he paid his respects to the Admiral. He placed his crown on Columbus’s head, sealing their sudden bond. The generous gesture was not quite enough for Columbus, who was hoping for an offering of silk, or brocade, as if to reenact a scene from Marco Polo’s Travels. Instead, he met the steady gaze of curious Indians. “They were not so brown as the others,” said Las Casas, drawing on the accounts of Columbus and other participants, “rather more white than others that had been seen in the Indies, very good-looking with handsome bodies. Their hair was long and straight, cut in the Castilian style.” Their heads were bound with woven cotton, which Columbus, always on the lookout for signs that he had reached the East, took for turbans. Other Europeans eyed the Indians’ weapons, especially their bows and feathered arrows tipped with a sharp, barbed bone “like a fishhook.”

  Negotiating their way past the Indians, Columbus and his men stumbled ever deeper into a boisterous paraíso teeming with anacondas, pythons, howler monkeys (the loudest land animals in the New World), capuchin monkeys (whose monkish appearance reminded early European visitors of the habits and hoods of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin), macaws, toucans, parrots, storks, kingfishers, and woodpeckers. Agile jaguars and pumas wound their way through the impenetrable undergrowth. In search of pearls, Columbus, bewildered, remarked on the “very large oysters” before turning his attention to the plentiful fish and parrots staring at the intruders in their midst. The parrots were “green, of a very bright color tending toward white, while those of the islands are greener and of a darker color. All those of the mainland have yellow necks, like stains, and the points above the wings have colored patches, and there are some yellow feathers on the wings,” according to Las Casas.

  Surveying from Point Arenal, on Venezuela’s northern coast, Columbus studied the islands to the north and the mountains to the south with growing curiosity. They saw tracks of animals—goats, the men assumed, but actually deer—but found the corpse of only one. Like so much else in the “other world,” they knew not what to make of the sight.

  Columbus resumed searching for an Indian interpreter and for water. His men were at the point of digging wells in the sand when they came upon several boreholes that fishermen had apparently abandoned. He arrived at a channel that he named Boca del Dragón, the “Dragon’s Mouth,” between the pincerlike land extensions of Trinidad and Isla de Gracia. Refreshed, the Admiral intended to sail to the north toward the familiar sights of Hispaniola, but, he noted with alarm, “there were some great crosscurrents throughout the entrance that made a great roaring . . . like waves breaking and shattering on the rocks.” The question was how to get around the churning seawater. He anchored just beyond the opening of the channel, and “discovered that the water came in, night and day, from east to west with a fury like that of the Guadalquivir when it is high, and it flowed so continuously I feared I could not turn back because of the current nor proceed farther because of the shallows.” He was trapped.

  In the early hours of August 4, the Dragon’s Mouth bit.

  “Well into the night,” Columbus later recalled, “I heard while on deck a terrible roar coming from the south toward the nao; I ran to look and saw a tidal wave swelling from west to east like a hill as high as the nao coming toward me little by little, and on its crest an advancing line was visible, roaring with a great noise, with the same fury and roar of the other crosscurrents mentioned before and resembling waves breaking against rocks.” But he was delivered from destruction as suddenly and inexplicably as he had confronted it. “However, it went by and reached the entrance, where it stopped for a considerable time.”

  The massive displacement of water snapped the cable securing La Vaqueños’s anchor, carrying her to an impossible height. Riding “atop the swell,” Columbus marveled that he had never experienced anything approaching this wild and potentially disastrous ride. According to Las Casas, Columbus declared that “if they escaped from here, they could tell stories about how they escaped from the Dragon’s Mouth. And because of this, the name stuck, and with good reason.” It was one of the few names that did; Las Casas, whose life span overlapped that of Columbus, noted that Columbus generally wrote on water. “Of all the names that he gave to islands and capes of the mainland, which he knew as Isla de Gracia, none remain or are known today except the island of Trinidad, the Dragon’s Mouth, the Testigos, and Margarita.”

  As the wave passed, the ship plummeted toward the ocean floor, coming so close that the men could glimpse the bottom. And then the turmoil ended. He had survived his encounter with the Dragon’s Mouth. Months later, the memory of the traumatic event still shook him. “Even today,” he later informed Ferdinand and Isabella, “I have fear in my body, for it could have capsized the ship when it came under her.”

  The monstrous surge was most likely a tidal wave, or tsunami, caused by a significant undersea earthquake: 7.5 magnitude or greater. A tsunami occurs when the earth’s crust, or tectonic plate, below the ocean shifts abruptly and vertically dislocates water. The sudden change generates giant, fastmoving waves that propagate in all directions.

  Narrowly escaping disaster, Columbus sailed on until he made landfall on Venezuela’s Paria Peninsula, August 5, 1498. He sent men to find sweet water, which they soon did. “Since this was a mountainous area,” he reasoned, “I thought that farther on, to the west, the land would be flatter for that very reason, possibly more populated.” Or so he hoped. He raised anchor and skirted the coastline “to the low edge of this mountain and anchored in a river.”

  All at once, “many people came and told me they called this land Paria, and farther west there were still more people.” There is some doubt about when Columbus himself went ashore. His young page, Andrés de Corral, later testified that the Admiral’s inflamed eyes confined him aboard ship. In this version,
one of the fleet’s captains, Pedro de Terreros, took possession on behalf of the Admiral, and raised a large cross to mark the occasion. Another captain, Hernán Pérez, claimed that he arrived first on the mainland. Others agreed that Columbus did not go ashore at this time.

  Later, said Pérez, “the Admiral with about fifty men landed in the country of Paria and took a sword in one hand and a banner in the other, saying that in the name of Their Highnesses, he took possession of the province.” Once ashore, he carefully observed the inhabitants who greeted him. “They are the color of all the others in the Indies; some of them wear their hair very long, others like us, but none have cut it as in Spain and the other lands. They are of very fair stature, and all well grown.” And, he said, “they wear their genital member tied and covered, and the women all go naked as their mothers bore them.”

  Taking four Indians as hostage guides, Columbus sailed west for another eight leagues, past a point that he named Punta del Aguja, where the enthralling panoramas (“the prettiest in the world,” he enthused) convinced him to drop anchor once more, and go ashore and “see these people.” As soon as they saw him approach, they jumped into their canoes, paddled furiously to his ship, and, as he remembered it, “beseeched me, in the name of their king, to go ashore.”