The men later learned that the promising mines they had visited were not in Veragua, as they had assumed, but in Urirá, a neighboring province at war with Veragua. “The Quibián had guided the Christians there to annoy his enemies,” and, even worse, “in the hope that Christians would go to that country and quit his own,” said Ferdinand. The stately, civil Quibián was capable of more guile than the Europeans realized, and began to plot against them.
As Columbus prepared to return to Spain, his brother the Adelantado undertook yet another expedition in search of gold. With the exception of the sleight of hand concerning the gold mines, the Europeans were treated as ambassadors or honored guests wherever they went rather than as dreaded or reviled conquerors. By February 24, they had ventured so far inland that Bartholomew became concerned; he had wandered too far from the ships, and decided to retrace his route.
Along the way, and almost as an afterthought, so casually did Ferdinand mention it, the Adelantado—Bartholomew Columbus—laid the basis for a new European settlement, the first in the region. Divided into eight groups of ten, the men “set about building houses on the banks of the Río Belén about a lombard shot from its mouth, beyond a gully that comes down to the river, at the foot of which there is a little hill,” Ferdinand recalled. Step by step, building by building, the Spanish empire extended into Central America (not that Veragua was recognized as such at the time). Before long, “ten or twelve houses” emerged in the jungle. They were no match for the sophisticated edifices of the Maya, but they offered proof that the Europeans who fashioned them were there to stay. “Besides these houses, which were of timber and thatched with the leaves of palm trees that grow on the shore, they built a large house for use as a storehouse and arsenal, in which they placed many pieces of ordnance, powder, and foodstuffs.” However, “the necessities of life, such as wine, biscuit, garlic, vinegar, and cheese, being all the Spanish food they had,” were stored aboard La Gallega for maximum security. Columbus intended to leave the ship for the Adelantado’s use.
Catching his breath, Ferdinand recorded his on-the-fly impressions of Veragua’s Indians, the curious way they turned their backs when they spoke to each other; their habit of incessantly chewing an herb (“We decided that must be the cause of their rotten teeth”); the way they caught fish with hooks “sawed out of tortoise shell” and then wrapped the fish in leaves to dry.
As his impressions of Indian customs accumulated, the young Ferdinand came to regard his hosts from a very different perspective than that of his father. The Admiral appraised the Indians’ abilities, trying to be as utilitarian as he could, assessing their tactical value, fitness for conversion to Christianity, and usefulness. Ferdinand was simply in awe of their gracefulness and mastery of their environment, and quite unlike his father, never forgot that he was in their homeland, rather than the other way around. In his descriptions, they had a way of materializing and disappearing without warning, usually benign, occasionally sly, always cloaked in mystery. To the young man, they were Indians, not potential slaves or in need of conversion. They were already complete.
Europeans in Veragua lived by its waterways, and, Ferdinand discovered, died by them. “The river, which had before placed us in grave peril by flooding, now placed us in an even worse plight by a sharp drop in water level,” he grimly observed. “The reason was that the January rains having ceased, the mouth of the river became so choked up with sand that instead of four fathoms, which had barely permitted our entrance, there was only half a fathom of water over the bar. We thus found ourselves trapped and without hope of relief.” Hauling the ships over the sand to the ocean was out of the question, and “even had we the equipment to do it, never was the sea so quiet but that the least wave could break a ship to pieces against the shore—especially ships like ours that were already like honeycombs, riddled through and through with shipworm.” All the men could do was pray for rain, which, in sufficient quantities, would float the ships over the bar to open water.
They preferred risking the hazards of the ocean to those on land, where their onetime ally the Quibián, “greatly offended that we had settled on that river,” now “planned to set fire to the houses and kill the Christians.” In retaliation, the Spaniards would spirit the Quibián and “all the leading local citizens” away to Castile, and make sure those who remained behind “accepted the overlordship of the Christians.”
As unrealistic as his plan to double-cross the cacique sounds, Columbus’s men counted on their horses, their dogs, and most of all their firearms to prevail. And so the scene was set for another confrontation between the righteous Christians and the threatened Indians.
On March 30, the Adelantado set out with seventy-four men to a hamlet in Veragua to confront the Quibián. From his hillside hut, the cacique warned the Spaniards away. He did not want his kin seeing him with the outsiders, nor did he want the outsiders violating the sanctity of his home. To discourage the cacique from fleeing, Bartholomew arrived with a detachment of only five men. What could be the harm in that? The other Europeans, meanwhile, lurked in the jungle in widely spaced pairs, ready to spring a trap. “Having come within a musket shot of the house, they were to surround it and allow no one to escape.” It was an absurd exercise, trying to place Indians under house arrest in their own village, but Bartholomew proceeded with a stubbornness worthy of his brother. As he approached the hut, “the Quibián sent word that the Adelantado must not enter the house, that although he was suffering from an arrow wound, he himself would come out to speak with him. He did this to keep the Christians from seeing his wives, for the Indians are very jealous. So he came out and sat down in the doorway, saying that the Adelantado might approach, and this the Adelantado did, telling the other Christians to attack as soon as he had grasped the Quibián by the arm.”
With scores of his men lurking just out of sight, Bartholomew feigned concern for the cacique’s injured arm, reaching for it, and holding it tightly until his complement of four Spaniards ran to the hut to take the Quibián hostage. “Thereupon the fifth man fired off his gun, and all the Christians rushed out of their ambush and surrounded the house.” Within, they found fifty Indians, whom they captured without inflicting a single wound. The number included the Quibián’s wives and children. The sight of their chieftain taken prisoner paralyzed the other Indians, who, rather than resisting, “offered a rich ransom for their freedom, saying they would give us a great treasure that was hidden in a nearby wood.” The Adelantado was having none of it, and brusquely ordered the Quibián, his wives, children, and followers to confinement aboard the ships before other Indians could effect a rescue. (“This was one among several great deeds accomplished that day and in that place by the commander,” Las Casas commented sarcastically.) As the Indians departed, Bartholomew and his men stayed behind to pacify the Quibián’s allies and family.
The Spaniards’ plan began to come apart when the men debated who should accompany the dozens of captive Indians to the ships waiting at the river’s mouth. In the end, said Ferdinand, responsibility fell to Juan Sánchez of Cadiz, the fleet’s highly regarded chief pilot. He offered to take the cacique “bound hand and foot.”
The Adelantado agreed, admonishing the pilot to keep the Quibián secure at all times. If the cacique escaped, Sánchez vowed to “permit the hairs of his beard to be plucked out one by one.” With that, he went down the river with the Quibián under close watch. When they neared the mouth of the river, the cacique started to complain that his restraints were painful. Taking pity on him, Sánchez loosened all the ropes binding the captive except for those tying his hands.
Carefully watching his captor, the Quibián chose a moment when the pilot’s attention wandered, and jumped overboard. The rope tying the two men together tugged so powerfully at Sánchez that he was forced to let go in order not to be pulled to his death by the fugitive cacique. “By this time it was dark, and the other prisoners made such a racket that the Christians could neither hear nor see the cac
ique swim ashore, and he vanished like a stone fallen in water.” The Quibián had escaped into the night as Sánchez realized to his chagrin that he had violated his oath. If the hairs of his beard were actually plucked out, no mention was made of it.
Determined and fearless, the Adelantado roamed the lush hills in search of escaped Indians. By April 1, he was having doubts. The populace had abandoned the countryside; empty huts lay scattered about the hills like silent sentinels. Even he acknowledged that it might be difficult to return home safely if attacked, but he made it back to the waiting ships without losing anyone. He presented Columbus with “about 300 ducats’ worth of booty in gold mirrors and eagles, gold twists that the Indians wear around the arms and legs, and gold cords that they wear about their heads in the manner of coronets.” The men set aside the fifth part, owed to the Sovereigns, and “divided the rest among members of the expedition, giving the Adelantado one of the crowns as a token of victory”—a victory that would prove worthless.
For now, fortune favored the Admiral’s cause. The rains returned, summoned, the men believed, by their fervent prayers, and swelled the river to the point where the ships could clear the bars and sail into the ocean. Columbus seized the opportunity to begin the inbound voyage with three ships “to be able to send to the settlement as quickly as possible”—a settlement that consisted of only eight or ten dwellings, a handful of men, and countless Indians waiting to overwhelm them. The Admiral gave every indication of resorting to the dubious strategy he had adopted during the first voyage to guarantee himself a second voyage: stranding a small number of men, vulnerable, ill equipped, and of wavering loyalty, in the midst of a hostile wilderness, and so requiring eventual rescue.
Although Columbus had repeatedly shown masterful command of the Atlantic, resulting in swift, safe crossings, the ships seemed to be in constant peril from the start, and the men had to load and then unload the ballast to lighten the ships sufficiently to skim pass the shifting sandbars. Even Ferdinand, who placed all his trust in his father’s seamanship, began to have doubts. When “we reached the open coast,” he recalled, “a league from the mouth of the river, and were about to depart, God put it into the Admiral’s mind to send the flagship’s boat ashore to take on a supply of water . . . whereby the boat was lost but many men were saved both on land and sea.” What could his father have been thinking?
After this lapse in judgment, things were never the same.
“When the Indians and the Quibián saw that the caravels had sailed,” Ferdinand wrote, “and we could not help the men who remained behind, they attacked the Christian town at the very time the ship’s boat was approaching the shore. The dense woods allowed the Indians to creep up unobserved to within fifty feet of the huts; they attacked with loud cries, hurling darts at every Christian they saw.” Stunned, Columbus’s men fought back for their lives, led by Bartholomew, who had increasingly filled the leadership void left by his infirm brother.
Seizing a lance, the Adelantado, having found new sources of courage, charged the Indians, who retreated into the forest bordering their dwellings. Both sides hurled their darts, or spears, at the other, as if “in a game of jousts,” Ferdinand commented. The Spaniards repelled the Indians “by the edge of the sword and by a dog who pursued them furiously.” The toll: “one Christian dead and seven wounded, one being the Adelantado, who received a dart wound in the chest.” But he would survive.
Ferdinand, close to the action, appeared satisfied with the outcome, but Las Casas sputtered with rage as he considered this latest example of Spanish barbarism: “As ever, it is the poor naked and defenseless Indians who come off the worse while the Spaniards are free to butcher them with their swords, lopping off their legs and arms, ripping open their bellies, and decapitating them, and then setting their dogs on them to hunt them down and tear them to shreds.” Las Casas might have been grimly satisfied to note that the Indian darts later claimed many Spanish victims attempting to flee the warriors in their canoes. One of the survivors, a cooper from Seville named Juan de Noya, escaped by swimming underwater to the riverbank, running to safety in the jungle, and eventually reaching the tiny European settlement, where he warned the others about the attack and casualties. “At this news, our men were beside themselves with fear,” said Ferdinand. They were vastly outnumbered, many of their comrades were dead, and “the Admiral was at sea without a boat and unable to send them aid.”
They had no choice but to flee the settlement before they, too, were killed. “They would have done this, too, in a disorderly, mutinous fashion, if not prevented by the closing of a river through the onset of bad weather.” They could not launch the caravel set aside for them, and “they could not even send a boat to inform the Admiral of what happened because the sea broke so heavily over the bar.” They were stranded, castaways in paradise. The “India” that Columbus had sought so eagerly, and explored so thoroughly, had ensnared him. With no seaworthy ship, and no prospect of rescue, they were bound to perish in utter obscurity. In desperation, they resorted to mutiny, “crowding into the ship with the intention of making their way out into the open sea, only to find their way blocked by a sandbank.” The rough, buffeting seas prevented their sending a vessel to Columbus with a message.
The Admiral was also imperiled, anchored off an extremely rocky coast, without a ship’s boat, and with his force decimated by the Indians. Worse, the Spaniards stranded on land experienced the anguish of seeing the corpses of their compatriots float downstream, pierced with gaping wounds. In the stormy skies overhead, crows and vultures, “all of them croaking and wheeling about,” swooped down to feast on the corpses “as though possessed.”
Meanwhile, Ferdinand wrote, the men quietly moved to a “large cleared space on the eastern bank of the river,” where they constructed a makeshift fort from casks and pieces of artillery. The structure did its job, and the Indians, terrified of the cannonballs, kept their distance.
The thunderstorm took its toll on Columbus, who experienced the roaring wind and sickening swells as apocalyptic manifestations, all of it made worse by the fear that the Indians had killed the men he had left behind. All the while he remained confined to the captain’s cabin, hardly more than a closet, too weak and ill to mount a struggle against his adversaries and the elements.
Recalling the trauma for the benefit of Ferdinand and Isabella, who could only have considered him mad as they listened to his account, he described how his predicament worsened with every flash of lightning. “My brother and the rest of the crew were on a ship that remained inside [the bar] while I alone was outside, off a wild coast with a high fever, laid so low that all hope of recovery was gone.”
Finally, the incredible occurred; aboard the flagship La Capitana Columbus heard a voice from heaven, designating him the recipient of new scripture:In such a state of torment, I got up to the highest part of the ship, calling for help with a frightened voice, crying, and with great intensity invoking to the four winds the succor of Your Highnesses’ captains of war, but no one ever responded. Overcome by weariness, I fell asleep moaning. I heard a merciful voice saying,
“O fool, O man to believe in and serve your God, the God of all, what more did He do for Moses or David, His servants. From birth He always took great care of you; when He saw you were of an age that seemed right to Him, He caused your name to resound marvelously throughout the world. The Indies, that part of the world that is so rich, He gave to you; you divided them as you thought best, and He permitted you to do so. To you He gave the keys to open the barrier of the Ocean Sea, which were closed with such strong chains; you were obeyed in so many countries and this acquired such glorious fame among all Christians. . . .”
As if in a swoon I listened to it all but could make no reply to words so certain, and I could do nothing but weep for my errors. He who was speaking to me, whoever He was, ended thus:
“Fear not, have faith.”
It is unclear whether Columbus actually reached the “highest par
t” of his ship. His son, among others, mentioned his inability to leave his cabin. Perhaps he scaled these heights in his imagination. No matter what his location, he believed he had heard the voice of God.
In Columbus’s telling, his faith was rewarded nine days later, on April 15, when the weather cleared sufficiently to rally the survivors of the massacre and the storm for one last voyage. Despite everything, he remained determined to return to Spain, offering this justification: “I would have stayed with everyone to garrison the colony if I had had a way to inform Your Highnesses.” Having made his apologies to the distant Sovereigns, he left “on Easter night”—April 16. Ravaged by shipworms, his fleet was no longer seaworthy. He abandoned fragile La Gallega at Belén, and would soon forsake Vizcaína just before she broke up. “That left only two, in the same condition as the others, without boats or provisions, to cross 7,000 miles of sea and water or else to die along the way with a son, brother, and so many men,” he lamented. To those who would dare to second-guess Columbus’s decisions, he replied: “I would like to have seen them on this voyage!”
While Columbus underwent his catharsis, emerging with his faith intact, the situation aboard Bermuda rapidly deteriorated. Cowering in the fetid hold were the wives, children, and other relatives of the Quibián, the cacique who had freed himself from his fetters and escaped his guard, Juan Sánchez. They, too, resolved to escape.
One night, the sailors who slept on deck neglected to secure the hatch cover with chains. Below, the Indians gathered the ship’s ballast, loose stones, into a mound. Balancing precariously on it, they pushed their shoulders against the underside of the hatch, sending the sailors asleep on it sprawling, and quickly, before the other Europeans aboard ship could react, several of their leaders climbed out and leaped to freedom. When they awoke and realized what had happened, the sailors closed the hatch, this time with a chain, and realized they had better not fall asleep again while on watch.
Columbus Page 41
