Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (56 page)

 

D
etermined 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.

 

“W
hen 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.

 

T
he 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:

It is unclear whether Columbus actually reached the “highest part” 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!”

 

W
hile 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.

The Indians below deck lost all hope of regaining their freedom. They might drown or suffocate, far from their ancestral lands. In despair, they gathered ropes and, one by one, hanged themselves from the deck beams, “bending their knees because they had not enough headroom to hang themselves properly,” said Ferdinand. By the time they were discovered, it was too late to rescue them.

Ferdinand callously assumed that “their death was no great loss to us of the fleet, but seriously worsened the plight of the men ashore.” He believed that holding the Quibián’s children hostage had kept the cacique at bay, but now that their hostages had killed themselves, the Europeans on land and sea were vulnerable to retaliation by the Indians. The Admiral’s son lamented not the deaths of the Indians but these “misfortunes and vexations, with our lives hanging by the anchor cables, and ourselves completely in the dark on the state of affairs ashore.” Given the way the hardhearted Spaniards treated the innocent captives on their ship, it was hardly surprising that the Indians onshore responded in self-defense.

 

A
s the siege continued on land, the Spaniards realized that the men trapped in the makeshift fort had to be rescued, or they would be murdered. A few able-bodied seamen offered to be rowed in the boat—now the sole remaining launch for the entire fleet—that would take them to the bar. Columbus had little choice but to “accept the offer,” and
Bermuda
’s boat took them to “within a musket shot of land; closer than that they could not come because of the waves that broke on the beach.” Upon reaching this point, Pedro de Ledesma, the pilot from Seville, “boldly leapt overboard and swam across the bar to the settlement.” On arrival, he listened to the men stranded there beg for deliverance from their “hopeless situation; they begged the Admiral to take them aboard, for to leave them behind was to condemn them to death.” Some threatened mutiny; they were prepared to steal a canoe from the Indians and return to the ships that way, if need be, preferring to “risk their lives in this way rather than wait for death at the hands of those cruel butchers, the Indians.”

Considering the pitiful story brought back by Ledesma and the others, together with the threat of mutiny, the Admiral softened a bit, and decided he would grant their pleas, even if it meant “lying off the coast with no possibility of saving them or himself if the weather grew worse.” After eight days “at the mercy of the prow cables,” by which Ferdinand meant that a single anchor stood between the ship and disaster, the weather lifted, and the stranded Europeans began to “transport themselves and their gear over the bar, using their single boat and two large canoes lashed together so as not to overturn.” The transfer took two agonizing days, after which “nothing remained ashore, except the worm-eaten hulk of
Gallega
.”

 

R
elieved to the point of euphoria, the survivors set sail on April 16, 1503, on an easterly course along the coast. A navigational dispute arose. The pilots, relying on their crude charts, believed that Hispaniola lay to the north, whereas the Columbus brothers “knew it was necessary to sail a good space along the coast before crossing the sea that lies between the mainland and Hispaniola.” Their decision prompted ominous grumbling among the sailors, convinced that “the Admiral intended to sail a direct route to Spain with unfit and ill-provisioned ships.”

The tiny fleet held its course until returning to Puerto Bello, where “we had to abandon
Vizcaína
because she was drawing much water and because her planking was completely riddled by shipworms.” Retracing the fleet’s route, the remaining ships,
La Capitana
and
Bermuda
, bypassed Retrete, and the Archipelago of Las Mulatas—130 miles east of Puerto Bello—to sail toward a mottled promontory that Columbus called Marmóreo, Portuguese for “marbled.”