CHAPTER 12
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.
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 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.
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 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!”
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.
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.
As 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.”
Relieved 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 Capitanaand 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.”
Propelled by the trades, excused from misfortune for the moment, Columbus’s diminished fleet reached Cape Tiburón, Colombia, on May 1, and stood northward, “with winds and currents easterly, always endeavoring to sail as close to the wind as possible.” Again, the pilots tried to tell the volatile Admiral “that we had passed eastward of the Caribbee Islands, but the Admiral feared he would not be able to fetch Hispaniola.” On May 10, a Wednesday, they espied tiny islands swarming with turtles—“as was all the sea thereabout, so that it seemed to be full of little rocks”—and named them Las Tortugas, now the Cayman Islands, which they soon put to stern.
May 13 found Columbus approaching Cuba in a desperate state. Ferdinand catalogued their miseries: “As we lay here at anchor, ten leagues from Cuba, suffering greatly from hunger because we had nothing to eat but biscuit and a little oil and vinegar, and exhausted by working three pumps day and night to keep the vessels afloat (for they were ready to sink from the holes made by the shipworms), there came on at night a great storm in which Bermuda, being unable to ride it out, fouled us and broke our stem”—the foremost part of the hull—“nor did she get off whole, but smashed her stern into the helm.” In the midst of wind and rain lashing the masts, sail, and rigging, while the ships rode heaving seas, the men managed to separate the two ships before they did more damage.
The storm had strained the cables running to the anchors to the limit. In the morning, the crew found only a single strand intact. If the storm had lasted just an hour longer, the men estimated, that strand would have parted, and the hull would have smashed into the rocks. But the ship held on by this slender thread. “It pleased God to deliver us then,” Ferdinand gratefully noted.
Throughout the storm, Columbus appeared to be in command of his faculties, but a letter that he wrote weeks later confirmed his pilots’ misgivings. He was half-mad, half-blind, and hearing voices. His biblically inspired geography insisted that he had, in his words, “reached the region of Mango, near Cathay.” Somehow he would have to find Hispaniola from that illusory location.
He fought on. If only he could reach a more northerly latitude, he could catch the trades to Spain and safety, but, he admitted, “the rough sea had the upper hand, and I had to turn back without sail. I threw out anchor at an island where I lost three anchors at a single stroke, and at midnight, when it seemed the world was about to disappear, the cables of the other ship gave way and it bore down on me, so that it was a wonder that we were not dashed into splinters; it was the anchor and the way it held that, after God, saved me.”
When the weather lifted slightly, the fragile fleet returned to the open sea, but, Columbus wailed, “with all the rigging lost, the ships more riddled with shipworms than a honeycomb, and the crew so frightened and depressed, I got a little farther than I had before.” Foul weather forced him to return to another harbor in the island he had just left—it is difficult to specify which island, because Columbus thought he was approaching China—where he languished for eight anxiety-ridden days, at last reaching Jamaica by the end of June, “always with contrary winds and with the ships in worse condition than ever.” The vessels took on water so quickly that even with three pumps operating, the crew could not prevent the water from rising; they resorted to bailing water with kettles and tubs, all to no avail. The ships appeared headed for certain disaster.
His misery was so intense, and prospects for surviving from one day to the next so uncertain, that as his ships nosed their way toward Hispaniola, he confessed, “I wished I had never set out.” The conditions were the most adverse that he had endured during his years in the Caribbean. “The other ship, half-submerged, hastened to find a harbor. I struggled against the sea in the midst of the storm. As my ship sank Our Lord miraculously brought me to land.” He stopped scratching his pen to reflect, “Who could believe what I am writing?”
Paraphrasing Marco Polo’s celebrated remark that his Travels did not contain even half of all that had occurred to him, Columbus claimed, “In this letter, I have reported but a hundredth of what happened. Those who were with the Admiral can bear witness to it.” Even if much of the tumult had occurred in his mind, it was nonetheless overwhelming.
In these dire conditions, Columbus changed course once again. Now the fleet stood for Jamaica because, Ferdinand explained, “the easterly winds and strong westward-running currents would have never let us make Hispaniola—especially since the ships were so riddled by shipworms.” The crew continued to work the three pumps morning, noon, and night, but by Midsummer Day’s eve, June 23, “the water in our ship rose so high that it was almost up to the deck.” The men clung to a floating wreck, capable of only rudimentary navigation. But the instinct to survive drove them on against overwhelming odds. “With great toil we continued in this state until daybreak when we made a harbor in Jamaica named Puerto Bueno” on the northern coast, later called Dry Harbour.
From the deck of his sinking ship, the broad harbor appeared benign, but no source of fresh water was apparent, nor did they see an Indian village where they could replenish themselves. Risking one more day aboard the flimsy ship, Columbus sailed eastward to a haven that he named Santa Gloria, now St. Ann’s Bay, a sequence of shallow bay, alluvial fan, and marsh. Approaching the shore, Columbus and his men beheld aromatic cedar, rosewood, ebony, mahogany, palmetto palm, coconut palm, and blue mahoe, which grows to sixty feet, whose wood contains blue, green, and yellow tints and whose flowers change color from yellow to orange to dark red. Through the trees, the men caught sight of showy parrots, iridescent hummingbirds, and cuckoos. Plump little todies, similar in shape to kingfisher birds, with green wings and crimson gorgets, flitted nervously from branch to branch.
The crew angled the boats toward the beach. “Since we were no longer able to keep the ships afloat, we ran them ashore as far as we could, grounding them both close together board and board, and shoring them up on both sides so they could not budge.” When beached, the ships were nearly swamped at high tide, but they were alive and safe—for now.
Having exhausted their usefulness at sea, the ships became makeshift fortresses. On the fore and stern castles, the exhausted men cobbled together cabins, “making our position as strong as possible so the Indians could do us no harm; for at that time the island was not yet inhabited or subdued by Christians.” A sense of loneliness and stillness descended, relieved only by the fluttering wind, the muffled crash of distant surf, and faint birdcalls. Stranded in these rotting structures only a “crossbow shot from land,” Columbus, Ferdinand, and the other crew members faced another test of survival.
“The Indians of that country, who proved to be a kind and gentle people, presently came in canoes to barter their wares and provisions,” Ferdinand remarked. Columbus designated two of his men to monitor the trading for food with the eager hosts. To keep track of his small band of survivors, and prevent mischief, Columbus endeavored to keep his men aboard the beached shipwrecks rather than wander into the woods. As he knew from experience, “Our people by nature being disrespectful, no punishment or order could have stopped them from running about the country and into the Indians’ huts to steal what they found and commit outrages on their wives and children, whence would have arisen disputes and quarrels that would have made enemies of them.” The Admiral confined the men aboard ship, and required them to sign out if they intended to go ashore. The Indians appeared so grateful for the protocol that they offered everything the sailors needed “in exchange for our things.” Colored beads, or lace, a red cap, hawk’s bells, scissors, and small mirrors fetched hutias and substantial cassava cakes for the hungry seamen.
With their most pressing needs provided for, Columbus and his men convened repeatedly to discuss their return to Spain. No ship was likely to appear on the horizon to carry them away, and they lacked the means to build a new vessel or to repair the wrecks sheltering them. A raft, or juryrigged ship, would not suffice, not with the weather and winds and currents they had to face on the return journey. “We had neither the implements nor the artisans needed for the task.”
Columbus decided to send messengers back to Hispaniola with an urgent request for a rescue ship with provisions and ammunition. The bearers of that news would have to contend with Columbus’s nemesis, Nicolás de Ovando, who would no doubt be pleased to learn that the Admiral of the Ocean Sea was stranded on Jamaica, desperate and powerless, but the castaways had no other choice but to seek help; they could not go on trading with the Indians indefinitely.
For now, the bay enclosed and protected them. The days offered reassuring breezes, calm seas, and radiant vistas. The nights revealed the immensity of the heavens, and their suspension in the sea of infinity. Like all sailors, they gazed on the flickering stars and the moon’s spectral countenance, and traced the trajectory of the occasional meteor streaking across the night sky. Beyond the harbor, moonlight glistened across the swell. The celestial spectacle revealed their insignificance in the scheme of things; God ordained their place, and Columbus urged them toward their homeland, more distant than ever. They had food for now, but if the Indians became distracted or hostile, the shipwrecked Spaniards faced the prospect of starvation on the pristine sands of a beach found on no map. Their bleached bones might be discovered a hundred years later, or never; they and their little expedition to the edge of nowhere would be memorialized, celebrated by partisans and condemned by rivals, and soon forgotten. Only by the trick of survival could they fend off the inevitable for a while, and live out the span of years left to them.
“None of my people realize the danger of our situation,” Columbus confided to his chief clerk, Diego Méndez de Segura. “We are very few, these savage Indians are very many, and we cannot be certain that their mood will not change. One day, when the mood strikes them, they may come and burn us here in these two ships.” With their straw roofs, the structures would instantly catch fire “and roast us alive.”
Columbus proposed sending “someone”—Méndez knew whom the Admiral meant—to make the risky crossing to Hispaniola in a canoe, purchase a ship, return to Jamaica in her, and rescue them all. The dutiful Méndez envisioned playing a heroic role in this assignment; he could emerge as the savior of Columbus and the voyage. Méndez aired his doubts, as Columbus listened patiently, and “firmly persuaded me that I was the man to undertake the voyage.”
Méndez worried that the other men resented him because “Your Lordship entrusts all the most honorable responsibilities to me.” He suggested that Columbus assemble his men to see if anyone else would undertake it—which Méndez doubted—“and if they all hold back, as they will, I shall risk my life once more in your service.”
When Columbus explained the mission to the others, no one came forward to offer his services and his life, and several were overheard to say that crossing forty leagues of open ocean in rough weather in a canoe was impossible. Then Méndez rose to his feet. “My Lord,” he said, “I have but one life, but I will risk it in Your Lordship’s service and for the good of all here present.”
Columbus approached him, kissed him on both cheeks, and declared, “I knew very well that nobody here except you would dare to undertake this mission.” That was how Méndez chose to remember the event; more likely, Columbus chose that moment to assign twelve or fourteen men to the rescue mission. They would occupy two canoes in all, one under the command of Diego Méndez, and the other under the command of Bartolomeo Fieschi, the Admiral’s comrade from Genoa.
Méndez set about readying the fragile craft that would carry them to rescue or disaster. He affixed false keels to the canoe for stability in the open water, covered the hull with pitch and grease, and “nailed some boards to the prow and stern to prevent water from coming in, which it might, owing to the low freeboard”—the narrow portion of the hull above the waterline. Other modifications included the addition of a simple mast and sail, and stores. Each canoe would carry six Spaniards, in addition to several Indian paddlers. They would cover approximately 124 miles.
After bidding farewell to the Admiral and putting to sea, Méndez reached the easternmost end of Jamaica. Lingering at the cape, waiting for a calm sea before commencing the crossing to Hispaniola, Méndez saw that Indians had assembled “with the intention of killing me and taking my canoe and its contents.” They even “drew lots for my life” to decide who would carry out the deed. He and his men quietly reclaimed their canoes, beached several miles away, raised sail, and returned to Dry Harbour, where Columbus was stationed.
Relieved that Méndez and his men had escaped slaughter, the Admiral sent them all back to the cape, accompanied by seventy men under the direction of the Adelantado. The squadron waited four days for favorable seas. “When I saw the seas growing calm I very sadly took leave of my escorts and they of me,” Méndez recalled.
Ferdinand remembered watching the Indians deftly settling into the canoes with gourds of water and “native food” as the brave Spaniards took their places, carrying “swords, shields, and foods.” They launched into the sea, Bartholomew escorting them to the island’s eastern end to ward off Indian attacks. None materialized. The Adelantado waited until dark as the canoes became specks on the horizon. When they had vanished, he walked back to his men, “urging the Indians he encountered on the way to be friends and trade with us.”
The men in the canoes commenced paddling for five days and four nights. Méndez recalled “never taking my hand off the oar and steering the canoe while all my companions rowed.” They were rowing for their lives, and those of the men they left behind with Columbus. For the last two days of this marathon, with their stores of food and drink exhausted, the men aboard the canoes neither ate nor drank.
On arrival in Hispaniola, Méndez was to move on to Santo Domingo, the tiny capital, to beseech Ovando for help, and Fieschi was to return to Jamaica forthwith “to spare us worry that and fear that he might have perished.” As Ferdinand knew, “this could easily happen with such flimsy craft if the sea turned at all rough.” In fact, they were setting off on a journey of great hardship.
The two canoes proceeded eastward along the coast, the Indians diligently paddling, encountering “only little islands or rocks along the whole course.” The final leg from that island to Hispaniola, eight leagues of open water, proved to be the most uncertain. “They had to wait for a perfect calm before starting to cross that great space in such frail craft.” As if by divine will, the sea turned to glass for them.
After the rescue mission had departed, those left behind languished in their improvised fortresses in Jamaica. In the enforced idleness, morale deteriorated at an alarming rate; the men, barely loyal to Columbus at the voyage’s outset, complained and conspired. They wove elaborate theories about their enigmatic, unstable Admiral, designed to prove that he had no intention of returning to Hispaniola, where he had been forbidden to land. In this scenario, Méndez and Fieschi would return to Spain and secure Columbus’s fortune with the Sovereigns. To fit this theory, they persuaded themselves that Columbus was content to remain “in exile right there,” on a splendid broad beach with Indians doing his bidding until matters at home were settled to his liking.
The empty days passed. Where was Fieschi? He should have returned by this time. What if he had perished at sea? What if Méndez had perished? What if Fieschi and Méndez had both perished? Dependent for the moment on the Indians for survival, the forgotten castaways on Jamaica lost all hope of rescue.
Sequestered on his wrecked ship, an apt symbol of his mind and body, the Admiral afforded the men scant confidence. He could hardly get out of bed, much less endure the hardships of a canoe voyage to Hispaniola. He was broken in body, and damaged in spirit, preparing to make his final voyage, from which there would be no return. He had demonstrated that the world was a more varied and richer place than any in Christendom had suspected, but now he confronted the limits of mortality.
In July, he composed an epistle to the Sovereigns laying bare his regret, self-pity, and recrimination. “I cannot recall Hispaniola, Paria, and the other lands without crying,” he wrote of his miscarried adventures. “I used to believe that their example could serve for these others; on the contrary, they are in a depressed state: though they are not dying, their illness is incurable and prolonged. Let them who reduced them to this state come forward with the remedy, if he can or knows how. Everyone is a master at destruction,” except himself, of course. “Those who left the Indies, shirking work and speaking of the Indies and me, later returned with appointments; the same will now happen with Veragua.” He had seen it all coming, and had tried to govern “in your royal name. You accepted that,” he forcefully reminded them at this great distance, “granting it with privileges and by agreement, with seal and oath; you named me Viceroy, Admiral, and Governor General of all, and you assigned me a boundary 100 leagues from the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, with a line running from pole to pole, and over all that I might discover later you gave me full powers.”
Now they, or those around them, were stripping him of those powers, despite his accomplishments. “Seven years ago I was at your royal court,” he said, at a time when “all who heard of this undertaking agreed it was foolishness.” He had given them new lands, new riches, and a new world. But they had rewarded him by ending his monopoly, creating an absurd state of affairs. “Now even tailors want to make discoveries,” he groused. “One is led to believe they go to make clothes; they are given permission and make a profit, greatly prejudicing my honor and severely damaging the economy.” Columbus believed he deserved to be treated more respectfully, and generously, than a merchant. The lands he discovered “are vaster and richer than any other in Christendom,” and he had been the one who placed them “under your royal and eminent rule, and in a position to render tremendous profits.” On the beach at Jamaica, he relived the trauma of his confinement for the benefit of the Sovereigns, for whom he had arranged to receive “tremendous profits” from ships that were “victorious and with great news of gold,” while he, their Admiral, “full of faith and joy,” was suddenly, without warning, “arrested, and thrown in a ship with two of my brothers, brought in irons, naked and mistreated”—here he was stretching a point, for he had insisted in keeping the chains when his captors wished to remove them—“without being summoned or charged by the law.”
He gave vent to the roaring in his head:
Who would believe that a poor foreigner could rebel under such circumstances against Your Highnesses without cause or the aid of another prince, alone in the world, surrounded by your vassals and subjects and having my sons at your royal court? I came to serve at the age of 28, and now I have not a single hair left that is not white, and my body is infirm and broken; all that belonged to me was taken and sold—and from my brothers, even their clothes—without my being heard or received, to my great dishonor. One has to trust that these things were not done by your royal order.
They could redeem themselves, Columbus told his Sovereigns, by punishing “those who did this and stole my pearls”—a blatant reference to the turncoat Alonso de Ojeda, who poached on the pearl fisheries that Columbus had discovered off the coast of Venezuela. If the Sovereigns put matters right, “the greatest virtue and exemplary fame would redound” to them. Descending into melodrama, he confided, “I am desperate.”
I used to weep for others; now may heaven show me mercy, and the earth weep for me. As for temporal things, I do not possess even a penny to give to charity; as for spirituality, I have been stranded here in the Indies . . . isolated in this torment, sick, expecting death every day and encircled by a million savages—filled with cruelty, our enemies—so far from the holy sacraments and Holy Church that she would forget this soul if it were separated from the body here. May whoever possesses charity, truth, and justice weep for me. I did not set out on this voyage to earn honors and riches; that is certain because hope of that is already dead. I came to Your Highnesses with an honest intention and good zeal, and I am not lying. Humbly I beseech Your Highnesses, if God be pleased to release me from here, to permit me to go to Rome and other places of pilgrimage. May the most Holy Trinity preserve and increase your life and high state.
—Written in the Indies on the island of Jamaica, July 7, 1503.