Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (55 page)

The Admiral took his storms personally; they were contests with cosmic forces, in which he was bound to go mano a mano with the elements. He would not have been surprised to behold a spiteful angel emerge from a massive cumulonimbus, detonating with thunder and lightning, prepared to wrestle him to the bottom of the sea.

“For nine days I was lost with no hope of life,” he recalled.

O
n January 6, the battered fleet came to rest in today’s Panama off the mouth of a river that Columbus chose to name Río Belén, an abbreviation for Bethlehem. After three days of ambiguous encounters with Indians and fruitless expeditions in search of gold,
La Capitana
(Columbus’s flagship) and
Vizcaína
rode the flood tide over the bar and proceeded up the Río Belén. The sight of the strange ships summoned droves of Indians peddling their fish with all the vigor of the dockside merchants of Genoa or Seville. Ferdinand was astonished to learn that the fish swam
upstream
to meet their fate. Cadging a little gold wherever he could find it, Columbus gave over hawk’s bells and strings of beads for samples of the precious metal. The next day, the other two ships in the fleet crossed the bar, and, with his forces massed, the Admiral prepared to claim what he believed was gold hidden in the mines of Veragua.

“On the third day after our arrival the Adelantado took the boats down the coast and ascended the river to the village of the Quibián,” wrote Ferdinand, “which is the name those Indians give to their king.” Learning of visitors from afar, the Quibián immediately came downstream with his canoes to greet them. The result was perhaps the most decorous initial contact of the entire voyage: “They treated each other with much friendship and civility, each giving the other the things he most prized; and after they had conversed for a long while, the Adelantado and the Quibián each went their own way very peacefully.” The next day, the sociable cacique returned to greet the Admiral himself aboard the flagship, where they chatted for an hour without rivalry or rancor.

Then, on Tuesday, January 24, a storm broke. Moments before, the Spaniards had been feeling calm and secure, but now, in the deluge, the Río Belén overwhelmed its banks. “Before we could prepare for or run a hawser ashore,” Ferdinand wrote breathlessly, “the fury of the water struck the flagship with such force that she broke one of the two cables and drove with such force against
Gallega
, which lay astern, that the blow carried away her bonaventure mizzen”—the short, lateen-rigged fourth mast. “Then, fouling one another, they drifted so as to be in great peril of going down with all hands.” If they sank, all would be lost, and both Columbus and his son would go down with them.

Eventually the ships managed to untangle themselves, and they floated down the river to the sea. “So violent a storm raged there that the fleet would have been shattered to pieces at the mouth of the river.” There was nothing to do but wait, and pray. The outcome vindicated Columbus’s risky decision not to seek refuge at sea, where disaster lurked.

When the skies cleared several days later, he assigned his brother Bartholomew “to settle and conquer the land.” Columbus would give up his search for a strait leading to India in mid-voyage to return to Spain and his Sovereigns. The abruptness of the decision suggested that he was far sicker than anyone—even his son—realized, and he desired above all to return to Spain to recover, or die in the attempt.

By February 6, Bartholomew was leading a complement of sixty-eight men in rowboats along the coast to the mouth of the Río Veragua, west of the Río Belén, up the river to the Quibián’s village, where they spent a day resting from their labors and inquiring about the way through the jungle to the gold mines. The Quibián obligingly sent guides to show them the route, and within hours of their arrival, the men were collecting gold, many of them for the first time in their lives. That night they returned to their ships, feeling tired, content, and rich.

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.

 

A
s 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.

 

E
uropeans 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.

 

O
n 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 cacique 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.