Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  All of this Columbus put to King John of Portugal. But a royal committee refused to accept his abbreviated distances – besides, they were already pondering a route to the Indies via the southern tip of Africa. Undaunted, Columbus turned elsewhere. Neither the English nor the French were interested. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain considered his project in 1489, but eventually they too rejected it. They were not worried by his inaccurate calculations, and Isabella, who was as devout a Catholic as Columbus, particularly liked his idea of converting the Chinese. It was simply that they could not afford it, being engaged in an expensive campaign to expel the Moors from Granada. By this time Columbus was 38. He had been peddling his scheme for a decade, during which his money had run out, his wife had died and he had become persona non grata in Portugal. Nevertheless, he persevered in his quest, accompanied by his brother, his mistress and his two young sons.

  His persistence was rewarded in 1492. In that year Granada fell to Spain and the whole of Iberia came under Christian rule, thereby giving Ferdinand and Isabella the time and the money to contemplate an expedition to the Indies. After a wrangle over terms – Columbus wanted the rank of admiral and to be appointed viceroy and governor-general of all lands he discovered with a 10 per cent cut of any profit – the Spanish Crown supported the project wholeheartedly. It directed carpenters, ships’ chandlers, bakers and provisioners to supply Columbus with all he needed at reasonable rates. It exempted him from taxes on whatever he purchased. It promised to drop any outstanding civil or criminal actions against those who wished to sail with him. And it ordered the port of Palos, on the Gulf of Cádiz, to provide him with two ships free of charge. With this assistance, it took Columbus little more than two months to assemble his expedition. He left Palos for the Indies on 3 August 1492.

  His fleet comprised three vessels: the caravels, Pinta and Niña, commanded respectively by the brothers Martin and Vicente Pinzón; and Columbus’s flagship the Santa Maria. Small, agile and shallow-draughted, the caravels were ideal for coastal exploration. The Santa Maria, on the other hand, was a nao, a heavier, slower vessel that usually plied the Mediterranean routes. A nao was not what Columbus had wanted – he had asked for three caravels – but it did have the advantage of a large hold, which was useful for the vast quantity of food, fuel, spare equipment, weapons, ammunition and trade goods he was taking with him. All three ships were heavily manned: the Santa Maria carried 40 men, the Pinta 26 and the Niña 24, which was far more than was needed to sail them, but which probably included several supernumeraries. The owner of each vessel came on the voyage, as did scientific observers from the Spanish court, and many people were sailors only in name: one man, for example, although listed as an ordinary seaman, was a silversmith hired to assay any precious metals they might find.

  The cramped flotilla sailed south-west to the Canaries, where they repaired their ships – the Pinta was already leaking and its rudder had broken – took aboard water, wood and meat, before leaving on 6 September for China. They made such good progress, averaging some 110 nautical miles per day, that Columbus feared they might outstrip his projected distances. ‘I have decided to log less than our true run,’ he recorded on the 9th, ‘so that if the voyage is long the crew will not be afraid and lose heart.’ It did not work. By the 19th he was writing, ‘The men are beginning to complain about the length of the journey and about me for involving them in it... [They are] impatient and outspoken in their complaints against me.’ That day they met patches of bright green weed, which soon coalesced into great clumps covering the whole ocean. They assumed this was a sign of land but, despite several false alarms, none was to be seen. (In fact, they were in the Sargasso Sea.) This puzzling phenomenon, linked to the sudden disappearance of the prevailing south-east winds, alarmed the men. Rather than become becalmed in this mass of weed, they wondered if they shouldn’t throw their admiral overboard and return to Spain. Even when the wind picked up it made them no happier. On 10 October there was a tentative mutiny aboard the Santa Maria. ‘Sixty-two and a half leagues in the twenty-four hours; I told the men only forty-six and a half,’ Columbus wrote in his journal. ‘They could contain themselves no longer.’ At first he tried to cajole them, painting glorious pictures of the wealth that would be theirs. And when that did not work he promised that he would consider turning back if they did not sight land in the next two or three days. In his journal, however, he revealed that this was just a sop: ‘Having set out for the Indies I shall continue this voyage until, with God’s grace, I reach them.’

  At 2.00 a.m. on Friday 12 October, just before his deadline, he saw a light in the darkness ahead. It moved about, as if it was a candle or a flare. He pointed it out to one of the royal observers, but to Columbus’s irritation the man did not see it. ‘He was standing in the wrong place,’ he wrote, ‘but I was sure we were close to a landfall.’ Whatever the cause of the light, Columbus was correct: come daylight there was an island before them. Clad in a scarlet doublet, and carrying the royal standard, Columbus stepped ashore to claim it for Spain. Having covered 3,066 miles in 33 days, he was at last in the Far East. He named his discovery San Salvador. It is a name that it bears to this day – except that it is to be found not in the Far East but in the Bahamas.

  The island was flat, luxuriant and well watered, with a large lake in the middle. The inhabitants, however, were not quite what he had expected. ‘They appeared to me to be a very poor people in all respects. They go about as naked as the day they were born, even the women, though I saw only one, who was quite young . . . Their hair is coarse, almost like a horse’s tail and short; they wear it short, cut over the brow, except a few strands of hair hanging down uncut at the back. Some paint themselves black, some with the colour of the Canary Islanders [red], neither black nor white, others with whatever they can find. Some have only their face painted, others their whole body, others just their eyes or nose. They carry no weapons and are ignorant of them; when I showed them some swords they took them by the blade and cut themselves.’ They were very friendly – servile almost – giving him the impression that they were a race of slaves in thrall to the Great Khan. He had brought with him an interpreter who spoke both Aramaic and Hebrew, but the people of San Salvador understood neither language. All he could ascertain, by sign language, was that they had gold and that to the south or south-west ‘there is a king with great jars full of it, enormous amounts. I tried to persuade them to go there but I saw the idea was not to their liking.’ Columbus took several of the men prisoner, both as curiosities and guides, then headed south-west.

  Stopping at several small islets, he was impressed by what he saw. The trees were ‘as different from our own as night is from day, as is everything else, the fruits, the plants and the stones’. The fish were breathtaking: ‘Some are like cocks, with the handsomest colouring in the world: blue, yellow, red, all colours; others are marked in a thousand different ways. No man could look at them without amazement and delight, the colours are so beautiful.’ The inhabitants were universally friendly and peaceful, and ‘exchanged their possessions for whatever one gave them’. At one point he recorded that they appeared to think him some kind of god. The rumours of gold increased, with reports of a king who wore copious amounts of the stuff – but as Columbus remarked, it was so difficult understanding the natives that they could have been telling him anything; ‘also they have so little gold themselves that whatever small amount the king has will seem a lot to them’. Indeed, by 23 October he was certain that these tiny islands had no gold at all. Far more tempting was a body of land that he judged must be Japan. ‘They call it Colba [Cuba], and say that there are many big ships there, and seafarers, and that it is very large. From there I shall go to another island called Bohio [modern Hispaniola, comprising Haiti and the Dominican Republic], also very large, according to them. The ones in between I shall observe in passing, and depending on what store of gold or spices I find I shall decide what to do. But I am still determined to continue to t
he mainland.’

  Cuba did not live up to expectations. He studied its northern coast, reported on the state of the sea, the excellence of its harbours, the nature of its flora and fauna, the customs of its inhabitants and the hospitality of its rulers. The natives were as friendly as before, but his opinion of them now took an arrogant turn: ‘Ten men could put ten thousand of them to flight,’ he mocked. ‘They are so cowardly and timid that they do not even carry real weapons, just staffs with a little sharp stick burned to a point on the end.’ They did, however, believe in a god and were quite willing to repeat the prayers he taught them, from which he concluded they would happily accept Christianity. ‘A host of peoples will soon be converted to our Holy Faith,’ he exulted, ‘and great domains and their wealth and all their peoples will be won for Spain, for there is no doubt that these lands hold enormous quantities of gold.’ Behind his enthusiasm there was doubt. From both the Cubans and his captives (who had now learned a smattering of Spanish) came reports of gold, of pearls and of endless riches somewhere to the south. To the south, always to the south. They had been saying this ever since San Salvador. Yet no matter how far south he went, the gold was always one horizon ahead of him. That it existed he was sure, because he had purchased the occasional piece of jewellery and small amounts of gold dust. But he was no longer confident that it existed in the quantity he desired – or that if it did he would be able to find it on this expedition.

  The same thought occurred to the captain of the Pinta, who had long since lost patience with his admiral. On 21 November he took matters into his own hands. ‘Today,’ Columbus wrote angrily, ‘Martín Alonso Pinzón has sailed away on his own in the Pinta without my permission, moved by greed. He believes that an Indian I ordered him to take aboard his ship will give him a lot of gold. He went without waiting, not through stress of weather but because he chose to. He has gone against me in word and deed many times before.’ What with Pinzón’s departure, the continued absence of gold, and a general restlessness on the Santa Maria and the Niña, Columbus decided it was time to turn back. Before he did so he would visit the island of Bohio, partly in case it contained the longed-for gold, but also to cover as much new land as possible – because, if he did not find the wealth he sought, he could at least return with a map of his discoveries. ‘I intend to make a new chart in which I will set out the whole of the Ocean Sea, with sea and land properly laid out with true positions and courses,’ he declared. ‘I also intend to compose a book including a true description of everything, giving its latitude from the Equator and its western longitude. Above all, I must have no regard for sleep, but must concentrate on the demands of navigation; all of which will be no small task.’

  His resolution had an inauspicious start: on the day that Pinzón deserted Columbus calculated his position at 42° N – roughly the latitude of Cape Cod. He admitted, privately, that he must be wrong: ‘I have hung up my quadrant until we reach port where I can have it adjusted, we cannot be so far north.’ Then, wistfully: ‘The heat makes me think that these islands and the area through which I am sailing must contain a lot of gold.’

  Bohio, which he christened Espaniola, was no more profitable than Cuba, but the welcome was magnificent. A chief named Guacanagari treated them royally. ‘He and his tutor and counsellor are very distressed that they do not understand me, nor I them, but nevertheless I understood him to tell me that if we needed anything the whole island was mine to command.’ On 18 December – ‘as I was eating under the sterncastle’ – Guacanagari came aboard with his entourage to visit the strangers. ‘I thought I should offer him food, and ordered some of what I was eating myself to be brought to him,’ wrote Columbus. ‘Whatever I put before him he took just enough of it to taste, sending the rest out to his people, who all took some. He did the same with the drink, scarcely touching it with his lips before giving it to others. All this was done with marvellous gravity and very few words, and what words he did utter, as far as I could judge, were full of sound good sense.’ What he said was that if the foreigners wanted gold he knew where it could be found: not south this time, but north on the island of Babeque. It was just a day’s journey away. ‘I believe I am now very close to the source of the gold and that Our Lord God will reveal it to me,’ Columbus all but wept into his journal. He left for Babeque on 24 December.

  The next day, with palpable weariness, he took up his pen again. ‘Last night,’ began the entry for the 25th, ‘around eleven o’clock, I decided to lie down to sleep, for I had not slept for two days and a night. Seeing it was calm, the helmsman gave the helm to an apprentice seaman and went off to sleep.’ An hour later the Santa Maria struck a reef. The damage was not serious and, with a few hefty tugs to the stern, the ship would be afloat and seaworthy. Columbus therefore ordered the master – in this case the ship’s owner, Juan La Cosa – to place an anchor so that it could be hauled free. But La Cosa and his men assumed the Santa Maria was lost, and rowed instead to the Niña. In the time it took to persuade La Cosa to return, the Santa Maria had swung beam on to the waves and was lost indeed. Columbus managed to transfer his crew to the Niña, ferry his supplies ashore and send word to Guacanagari, who despatched a flotilla of canoes to their rescue.

  Badly shaken, Columbus retracted his derogatory remarks concerning the Indians. ‘Nowhere in Castile could everything have been looked after better; not a thing from the ship has been lost; not a lace point, not a single plank or nail was missing... They are of such a loving disposition, free from greed, friendly and willing to do anything... I believe there can be no better people, nor a better land, anywhere on earth... Men and women, it is true, go about as naked as they were born, but . . . their behaviour among themselves is beyond reproach.’ His admiration for them increased when Guacanagari – who had the measure of his guest – gave him more news about gold: in Japan they had so much gold they didn’t know what to do with it, he said; there was gold on Espaniola too, buckets of it; in fact the interior was bursting with gold; and to obtain it one had to do nothing more than defeat the warlike Carib tribesmen who regularly attacked his people. Columbus ignored Guacanagari’s hints that the white men help him eradicate his enemies, congratulating himself instead on the discovery of the source he had sought for so long: ‘My misery at losing the ship has been somewhat tempered. I can see that Our Lord caused her to go aground with the purpose of establishing us here, for various things have come together so handily that it has been a piece of good fortune rather than a disaster.’ At present he did not have the capacity to carry the gold, but he promised Guacanagari that he would return soon.

  Because it was impossible to squeeze the crews of both remaining ships on the Niña, he ordered 39 men to stay behind. They acquiesced readily: given the superiority of their weapons, the balminess of the climate, the placidity of the population, and the squalor of life in Europe, they had no reason to object. Indeed, faced with the horrors of a return journey across the Atlantic, many of them asked to be left behind. The remains of the Santa Maria were dragged ashore to construct a fort, at a place called Navidad. It was a fine structure, with ‘a tower, all good and sound, and a large moat’, and on the evening of 26 December, just one day after the shipwreck, Columbus could contemplate his departure with serenity: ‘So, they are finishing planks to use in building the fortifications, and I shall leave supplies of bread and wine for over a year, and seeds to sow, and the ship’s boat, and a caulker, a carpenter, [a canoneer], a cooper and many other men who are eager . . . to discover the mine which is the source of this gold.’ He also left a doctor, a tailor, a secretary and an engineer, who would not be needed on the way back and, perhaps as a punishment for what Columbus described as his ‘treachery’, Juan La Cosa, the agent of the Santa Maria’s misfortune.

  The Niña did not leave immediately. Columbus had first to be shown ‘some vegetables and trees’, accompanied by 1,000 natives, for which he rewarded Guacanagari with a shirt and a pair of gloves. Later he fired one of the Santa Maria’s canno
ns, whereupon he was given a wooden mask pierced with gold. On 28 December the chief invited him to a ceremony where a plaque of gold was apparently hung around his neck. On the 29th he was sent a ‘great mask of gold’. On the 30th he was given yet another ‘great plaque of gold’. On 1 January he dug up a patch of something he described as rhubarb – a renowned laxative, and one of China’s most profitable exports, this confirmed his belief that he had reached the Far East – and on 2 January Guacanagari said he was having a lifesize gold statue made in the image of his new friend: it could be ready in as little as ten days.

  The Espaniolan chief was exaggerating. And so, probably, was Columbus, when he spoke of great gold masks and solid plaques. Nevertheless, he had enough proof to show that he had discovered new lands and that even if he had not found Cathay – though he was sure he was close to it – there were regions to the south whose exploration would more than repay the Crown’s investment. Columbus sailed on 2 January 1493, having enjoined the garrison to ‘consider the mercies which God has granted them and me so far’, and to conduct themselves in a decent manner.

  Four days later, while attempting to enlarge his chart, he met the Pinta, which had been scouring the islands for gold. ‘Martín Alonso Pinzón came aboard the Nina to make his excuses, saying that he had left me without meaning to and giving me his reasons, all false, for he left me that night through his own greed and pride,’ Columbus wrote: ‘I do not know how he acquired the arrogance and dishonesty with which he has behaved towards me during this voyage. I have tried to ignore it, not wishing to assist Satan in his evil work and his desire to hinder this voyage as he has done hitherto ... In order to escape from such evil company, with whom I must dissemble despite their rebelliousness, though I do have many decent men with me, I have decided to make no further stops, but to make all speed for home, this not being the time to speak of punishment.’