CHAPTER 13
Columbus fretted and hallucinated about his shattered career in the privacy of his quarters. The other men stranded on Jamaica, no less isolated and desperate, tormented themselves by imagining the favored few who had departed in canoes arriving to a royal welcome in Spain, where they would “enjoy the favor of Bishop Juan de Fonseca and the High Treasurer of Castile,” Ferdinand commented.
At this moment of maximum vulnerability, two of the castaways, Francisco Porras and his brother Diego, decided they could no longer endure Columbus’s infirmity and tyranny. Lives were at risk, and something had to be done as quickly as possible. They were an influential pair of traitors—one was Santiago’s captain, the other comptroller of the fleet—and together they cajoled forty-eight men to affix their signatures to the articles of mutiny. The uprising was scheduled to commence on the morning of January 2, 1504.
Captain Francisco Porras burst into Columbus’s makeshift cabin, demanding, “What do you mean by making no effort to get to Castile? Do you wish to keep us here to perish?”
As calmly as possible the Admiral said that no one wished to leave the island more than he did, but they needed a ship. If Porras had another plan, he should propose it to the other captains to consider; Columbus would convene them as often as needed. Talk of meetings merely annoyed Porras. Either Columbus decided to leave the island immediately, or the others would abandon him. He turned his back on the Admiral, a sign of profound disrespect, and shouted, “I’m for Castile. Who’s with me?”
The other mutineers cried out, “We’re with you!”
At that, they overran the makeshift cabins and roundtops, or masthead platforms, aboard the two shipwrecks, bellowing “Death to them!” and “To Castile! To Castile!”
A few loyalists, their voices drowned by the madmen, inquired, “Captain, what do we do now?”
Crippled by arthritis, Columbus was barely able to stand. Ferdinand reported that he “hobbled to the scene of the mutiny; but three or four honest fellows, his servants, fearing the mutineers might slay him, forced him with great difficulty to return to bed.”
With Columbus safe for the moment, the loyalists rushed to his brother the Adelantado, who was fighting off attackers with a lance. The loyalists relieved him of the weapon, and shut him in the cabin with Columbus. Then they pleaded with Porras to leave before he inspired a “murder which was bound to harm them all and for which he would certainly be punished.” If Porras complied, “none would seek to hinder him from going.”
As negotiations concluded, the mutiny lost some of its vehemence. Columbus had “scoured the islands to procure canoes” to prevent the Indians from using them. Porras and his men commandeered the canoes, and “they set out in them as gaily as if they were embarking from a harbor in Castile.” As they began to pull away, many others, “not mutineers but . . . desperate at the thought of being abandoned there by the greatest and healthiest part of the company also piled into the canoes”—much to the distress of the few remaining loyalists and of the sick, who with good reason believed they were “doomed to remain there.” The humiliating sight of nearly all of the men abandoning the Admiral who had brought them on this adventure remained with Ferdinand, who sadly noted, “If all had been in good health, I doubt that twenty of those people would have stayed with the Admiral.” Their morale lower than ever, those who stayed behind beheld the Admiral emerge unsteadily from his cabin to comfort and reassure his men as best he could. In fact, there was little consolation he could offer while Francisco Porras led the canoes laden with deserters to the same location on Jamaica’s easternmost shore from which Méndez and Fieschi had set out on their rescue mission.
Ferdinand painted an ugly picture of the deserters preparing to depart for Hispaniola: “Wherever they called, they inflicted outrages on the Indians, robbing their food and other possessions; they told the Indians to collect their pay from the Admiral and authorized them to kill him if he would not pay.” To feed the Indians’ disdain, Porras’s renegades explained that all the other Christians hated Columbus, that Columbus was the author of “all the misery of the Indians on Hispaniola,” and, if they failed to kill Columbus, he would “inflict the same suffering on them.”
Setting out from the Jamaican coast, they made uncertain progress toward their goal. After they had traversed four leagues, “the wind turned contrary,” and the men feared the rolling seas would swamp their overloaded craft. Before long, water was coming over the gunwales, and they resorted to tossing everything overboard, with the exception of their weapons and food for the return journey to the Jamaican coast from which they had departed. When the wind gained in strength, terrifying the renegades, they decided their only course of action was to kill the Indians and toss them overboard, as if they were excess supplies. Once they started killing Indians, the others jumped overboard, swimming away from the canoes until fatigue overcame them. In desperation, they returned to the canoes, holding on to the gunwales in a death grip, until the mutineers hacked off their hands.
Ferdinand acidly commented on the “Christians’” this was the Indians’ reward for listening to their false promises and their pleas for aid.”
The renegades returned to the marshy Jamaican shore, where they fell to arguing about what to do next. Some of the men aimed to flee to Cuba, thinking “the easterly currents and winds” would carry them to their destination; once in Cuba, they assumed it would be an “easy jump” to Hispaniola, without realizing that many miles separated the two islands. (Ferdinand recognized that Cuba was an island, even if his father clung to the belief that it was a promontory extending eastward from the “Indian” mainland.) Other renegades wanted to return to the relative safety of the wrecked ships they had recently abandoned. They could either make peace with the Admiral or attempt to confiscate his weapons. A third group advocated waiting to try for better weather and attempt to reach Hispaniola again, and eventually they prevailed.
The desperate rebels passed more than a month in a Jamaican village Ferdinand called Aomaquique, relied on the Indians for sustenance, and waited for a favorable wind. When they judged conditions were right, they tried again, failed again, and tried yet once more, defeated each time by contrary winds. Broken in spirit, they trudged back to the harbor where their ships and the remnants of the crew remained, living off the land and, when they could, stealing food from the Indians. The glorious voyage had come to this, a band of scavengers and robbers, unable to save their own skins, or souls, or those of anyone else.
In charge of the ruins of two beached ships, Columbus, though enfeebled, tended to the sick among his loyal men. At the same time, he made certain to give the Indians the respect needed to do business. The ailing loyalists, many of them, regained their strength, and the Indians continued to serve, until the system broke down under unequal requirements. “They are an indolent people who will not cultivate on a large scale,” Ferdinand wrote in a cruelly revealing passage, “and we consumed more in a day than they in twenty.”
Worse, as the Indians acquired goods from the Europeans in barter transactions, they “began to be influenced by the arguments of the mutineers” and brought fewer provisions to the visitors. As January 1504 gave way to February, the situation steadily deteriorated. The loyalists were faced with a dilemma: if they abandoned their makeshift dwellings to attack the Indians for more of the cassava, fruit, and water on which their lives depended, they would be “leaving the Admiral to face great danger in the ships.” The Europeans came to realize that the Indians, by starving the intruders by degrees, “believed they had us at their mercy.”
In all honesty, Ferdinand confessed, “we did not know what to do.”
Throughout his years of exploring, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, Columbus had revealed a genius for survival, whether shipwrecked off the coast of Portugal, pleading for support from the Sovereigns, fending off mutineers, or trying to reclaim his legacy from rivals. Now, with no ships at his disposal, Indians slowly starving him, his men reduced to a paltry few, and his health so poor that he could barely stand, he faced his greatest challenge, and to meet it, he devised a supreme ruse in which he virtually became the sorcerer that others had feared he always was. They held that the Admiral of the Ocean Sea could command the tides and even the weather; now, in the name of survival, he plotted to demonstrate that he controlled the heavens themselves.
Columbus’s hidden advantage had always been his sophisticated knowledge of navigation. Turning to his store of charts and books, he studied the Almanach perpetuum, compiled in 1496 by Rabbi Abraham Zacuto, the Sephardic Jewish astronomer and mathematician who had served João II after the Inquisition drove him from Spain. Portuguese captains often consulted this work, consisting of hundreds of pages of astronomical tables accurately predicting celestial phenomena. Columbus may also have relied on Regiomontanus’s Ephemerides astronomicae (1474), which conveniently enough included a table of lunar eclipses occurring between 1475 and 1540. In the past, he had relied on these reference works to calculate latitude and longitude, often with mixed results, and now he turned to them to save his life.
According to Regiomontanus, an auspicious event would occur on February 29, 1504: a lunar eclipse. In this eerie celestial spectacle, the moon passes through the earth’s umbral—or inner—shadow, turning ever deeper shades of orange, and eventually bloodred, before returning to normal. The sight was enough to spark foreboding in superstitious sailors and, Columbus hoped, in credulous Indians.
Regiomontanus included the dates of the eclipses, and diagrams of how completely the moon would dim, hour by hour. But the times of the occurrence differed across the globe, and Columbus could not reliably determine the local time in Jamaica. (Regiomontanus’s calculations applied to Nuremberg, Germany.) And he could not say how accurate Regiomontanus’s prediction for February 29, 1504, might be. He had no choice but to take his chances according to his best estimates. If he succeeded, he would demonstrate supernatural power to the Indians that would deeply influence their behavior. If he failed, he and his men would likely succumb to starvation or slaughter at the hands of the Indians.
He summoned the caciques of the region to a feast. Ferdinand recorded, “He told the gathering through an interpreter that we were Christians and believed in God, who . . . rewarded the good and punished the wicked, as he had punished the mutineers by not permitting them to cross over to Hispaniola, as Méndez and Fieschi had done, and by causing them to suffer many trials and dangers, as the Indians well knew.” Columbus warned the Indians that “God was very angry with them for neglecting to bring us food for which we had paid them by barter, and had determined to punish them with famine and pestilence.”
As the audience absorbed the import of the old Admiral’s words, laughter broke out, at first hesitant, then boldly derisive. He told the doubters, “God would send them a clear token from Heaven of the punishment they were about to receive. They should therefore attend that night the rising of the moon: She would arise inflamed with wrath, signifying the chastisement God would visit upon them.” He stopped, rested, and observed as “the Indians departed, some frightened and others scoffing at his threats.”
The eclipse commenced, as predicted. The earth’s shadow expanded and darkened until it covered the entire moon, turning it into a faint red disk suspended in the night sky. Most lunar eclipses are plainly visible to the naked eye, and based on Ferdinand’s account, the occurrence of February 29 was especially dramatic.
Under the influence of this magical transformation, Columbus’s immense power of suggestion took hold. He appeared to interpret, if not control, the heavens. “The Indians grew so frightened that with great howling and lamentation they came running from all directions to the ships, laden with provisions, and praying the Admiral to intercede with God that He might not vent His wrath upon them, and promising they would diligently supply all their needs in the future.”
Extracting as much benefit as possible from the moment, Columbus announced to the throng that he wished to have a word with God, and he disappeared into the depths of his ramshackle cabin, an old necromancer at the height of his powers. In the near darkness, the Indians cried and shrieked at the bloodred, malevolent moon waxing overhead. In seclusion, Columbus consulted an hourglass to calculate the time remaining para el eclipse lunar. “When the Admiral perceived that the crescent phase of the moon was finished and that it would soon shine forth clearly, he issued from his cabin, saying that he had appealed to his God and prayed for them and had promised Him in their name that henceforth they would be good and treat the Christians well”—and here was the crucial part—“bringing provisions and all else they needed.”
Drawing on his reserves of strength, Columbus informed the awestruck Indians that God had pardoned them, “in token of which they would soon see the moon’s anger and inflammation pass away.” They needed no more persuading, and unified by terror and relief, they paid tribute to the Admiral and offered prayers to God, who had spared them. “From that time forward,” Ferdinand intoned, “they were diligent in providing us with all we needed, and were loud in praise of the Christian God.” It was apparent to the young man, as to the other marooned Europeans, that the Indians feared eclipses and, at the same time, “were ignorant of their cause.” It did not occur to them that “men living on earth could know what was happening in the sky.” It never troubled Columbus, his son, or any of their company that the Admiral had practiced a grand deception in the name of God. They were safe, and that was all that mattered. God would forgive them.
It had been eight months since Fieschi and Méndez set off to Santo Domingo on their rescue mission. By this time they should have returned or sent word of their whereabouts, but there was nothing—no canoe, no Indian, no Spanish survivor of the mission, and no sail on the horizon to indicate their fate. Rumors spread that they had drowned, or been slaughtered by Indians, or, in Ferdinand’s words, had “died on the way from sickness and hardships. They knew that from the eastern end of Jamaica to the town of Santo Domingo in Hispaniola stretched over one hundred leagues of very difficult navigation by sea on account of contrary winds and currents and of travel over very rugged mountains by land.” Indians whispered about a ghostly shipwreck that had been spotted “drifting down the coast of Jamaica,” but its substance remained a mystery.
Yet another mutiny broke out, this time led by an unlikely candidate, the apothecary Vernal. It grew unchecked until late March 1504, when a sail appeared on the horizon. The ship, a little caravel, had been dispatched by Nicolás de Ovando, and it anchored close to the hulks of Columbus’s shattered flotilla.
“The captain, Diego de Escobar, came aboard and informed the Admiral that the Knight Commander of Lares, the Governor of Hispaniola, sent his compliments and regretted that he had no ship large enough to take off all the Admiral’s men.” He hoped to send one soon, and as a token of his goodwill, Captain Escobar gave Columbus a “barrel of wine and slab of salt pork,” both welcome luxuries in this isolated outpost, before returning to his vessel, raising anchor, and sailing that night “without even taking letters from anyone.”
The caravel’s appearance, to say nothing of the gifts of food and wine, so astonished the stranded mariners that the mutineers immediately “covered up the plot they had been hatching,” although the alacrity with which Captain Escobar departed inspired a new set of conspiracy theories. The men speculated that Nicolás de Ovando had no intention of rescuing his despised rival Columbus, whom he wanted to perish in his obscure Jamaican refuge. As Ferdinand saw matters, Ovando “feared the Admiral’s return to Castile,” and worried that the Sovereigns would “restore the Admiral to his office and deprive him (Ovando) of his government.” For this reason, Ferdinand theorized, Ovando had sent the little caravel not to assist the Admiral but “to spy on him and report how he might be totally destroyed.”
Another rumor, mentioned by Las Casas, held that Columbus was plotting a “rebellion against the king and queen with some notion of handing these Indies over to the Genoese or to some other country apart from Castile.” Even Las Casas dismissed the allegation as “false and invented and spread by his enemies as a wicked calumny,” but the chronicler could not resist discussing it, especially because the claim gained enough currency to reach the Sovereigns. Not knowing whether he would ever be rescued, or whether his words would ever reach Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus demolished this theory in a passionate self-defense: “Who could entertain the notion that a poor foreigner would, in such a place, dream of rebelling against Your Majesties, for no reason whatever, with no support from any foreign ruler, surrounded by your subjects and countrymen?”
Even if those arguments held the Sovereigns at bay, Columbus still had to assuage his rival Ovando, whom he tried to lobby and flatter in equal measure. “When I left Castile, I did so to the great rejoicing of Their Majesties, who also made me wonderful promises, and in particular that they would see all my assets restored and would heap still more honors on me; these promises they made both by word of mouth and in writing.” Having put Ovando on notice, Columbus shifted his argument. “I ask you, my lord, not to entertain any doubts on that score: please believe that I shall obey your orders and instructions in every particular.” Not only that, but Columbus had heard from Escobar “how well and how tirelessly you have looked after my affairs, and I acknowledge this, my lord, with a grateful heart.” Rising to heights of artful insincerity, Columbus sighed, “Ever since I met you and got to know you, I have always understood, my lord, deep in my heart, that you would do everything you could for me no matter what the circumstances.” He knew that Ovando would “hazard anything, even your own life, to rescue me.”
And if these words succeeded in calming Ovando sufficiently to spare Columbus death on a distant shore, the Admiral faced the fears of his own men, and had to persuade them all that he had ordered the caravel to depart without them—not as part of a devious plot to put them all at risk, but because it was simply too small to carry them. Either all went, or none.
Ovando’s caravel brought one other item of particular interest: a letter from the absent Méndez. The day after departing from Jamaica, Méndez’s letter began, he and Fieschi enjoyed a cruise through blissfully calm weather, “urging the Indians to paddle as hard as they could with the sticks they use for paddles.” In the heat, the Indians refreshed themselves by jumping into the water, and resuming their place. “By sunset, they had lost sight of land.” At night, half of the Indians continued paddling as the Spaniards aboard the canoes kept a vigil, and by dawn, everyone was exhausted. Even the captains took turns paddling, and with the dawn of the second day, the voyage continued without interruption, with “nothing but water and sky” surrounding them. As the day wore on, the Indians, thirsty from physical labor, depleted the canoes’ water supply. By noon, the sun tormented everyone. The sole respite from debilitating thirst came drop by drop from the captains’ “small water casks.” The trickle proved to be “just enough to sustain them till the cool of the evening.”
The canoes plowed through heavy seas, their diminutive masts and flickering paddles barely visible above the waterline, as their occupants, drenched and exhausted, hoped to raise the little island of Navassa, about eight leagues distant. Even with the benefit of the most determined paddling, these canoes could make no more than ten leagues against the current in a twenty-four-hour period.
The unending exertion put the paddlers at risk of dehydration, a common affliction in the Caribbean, even on the water. One Indian died on the second night, as others, prostrate with exhaustion, lay on the bottoms of the canoes, and still others tried to paddle but strained to move their arms. With one feeble stroke after another they made their way, dabbing salt water on their parched tongues. By the time night fell for the second time, they still had not reached land.
At moonrise, Ferdinand learned from Méndez’s letter, they raised the white cliffs of Navassa, all two square miles of it, shimmering above the frosted wave tops. The whiteness came from the exposed coral and limestone poking out beyond the uninhabited island’s grass cover. They were still one hundred miles south of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Nevertheless, Méndez “joyfully” pointed out Navassa, and carefully doled out water to the paddlers. By dawn they had reached the island.
What they found was “bare rock, half a league around.” No Indians greeted them with water, food, or counsel. After they hurriedly offered thanks to the Lord for their survival, they realized that Navassa was nearly treeless and, worse, appeared to lack the drinking water they needed so desperately. In search of streams, they clambered and crawled from one steep cliff to another, collecting trickles of precious water in gourds. Eventually they found enough to fill their stomachs despite warnings not to drink too much. Nevertheless, some of the Indians drank without restraint, and grew violently sick, or died.
The rest of the day passed in relative tranquillity, the men playing and “eating shellfish that they found on the shore and cooked, for Méndez had brought flint and steel for making fire.” But they could not tarry; foul weather could arrive at any time. That evening they pushed off for Cape San Miguel, the nearest point on Hispaniola, traveling throughout the night to arrive by dawn, the fourth day after leaving Jamaica. They arrived exhausted once again, and spent two days recuperating before facing the challenges ahead.
Fieschi wished to return to Columbus, as arranged, to report their safe arrival on Hispaniola, but his traveling companions, both Europeans and Indians, were “exhausted and ill from their labors and from drinking sea water,” and refused to accompany him, “for the Christians regarded themselves as having been delivered from the whale’s belly, their three days and nights corresponding to those of the prophet Jonah.”
But Méndez had a different idea. Despite suffering from “quartan ague,” an archaic term for malaria, he led his men inland “over wretched paths and rugged mountains” to the western province of Xaraguá, formerly the refuge of Roldán and his rebels, where Nicolás de Ovando busied himself putting down another Indian rebellion. The cold-blooded governor feigned delight when these emissaries from Columbus appeared from nowhere, and in keeping with his anti-Columbian agenda, delayed giving the exhausted travelers permission to trek the seventy leagues to Santo Domingo.
During the seven months they were detained at Xaraguá, Méndez witnessed the governor’s cruelty. “He burned or hanged eighty-four ruling caciques,” including Anacaona, “the greatest chieftain of the island, who is obeyed and served by all the others.” She was also known as a composer ofareítos, or narrative poems, and had been considered friendly to the Spaniards. At a feast in her honor organized by eight caciques, to which Ovando was invited, he set fire to the meetinghouse, arrested her and other Indian leaders, and executed all of them. Most were shot; Anacaona died by hanging. She was thirty-nine years old. Her husband, Caonabó, had been captured by Alonso de Ojeda, and died at sea en route to Spain. Even the Spaniards were appalled by Ovando’s brutality toward friendly Indians, but there was little they could do about it.
When the governor finally considered the pacification of Xaraguá complete, the indefatigable Méndez got permission to go on foot to the capital, all but forbidden to the Admiral himself. There he drew on Columbus’s “funds and resources” to buy and equip a caravel. “None had come for more than a year,” Méndez recalled, “but thanks be to God three arrived during my stay, one of which I bought and loaded with provisions: bread, wine, meat, hogs, sheep, fruit,” all now available, for a price, in this remote outpost of the Spanish empire.
He supervised provisioning the caravel for the voyage, and dispatched her to Jamaica in late May 1504, so that the Admiral “and all his men might come in it to Santo Domingo and from there return to Castile.” Méndez went ahead with two ships “to give the King and Queen an account of all that had happened on that voyage.” There would be much to tell.
At about this time, in Spain, Queen Isabella fell seriously ill at Medina del Campo, a city known for its trade fairs, a little more than twenty miles from Valladolid. “The doctors have lost all hope for her health,” wrote Peter Martyr in despair. “The illness spread throughout her veins and slowly the dropsy became apparent. A fever never abandoned her, penetrating her to the core. Day and night she had an insatiable thirst, while the sight of food gave her nausea. The mortal tumor grew fast between her skin and flesh.”
As her strength ebbed and her thoughts turned to eternity, she cut back drastically on official business coming before her.
As for Columbus and “all his companions,” having spent an entire year marooned in a lush, obscure, and troubled paradise on Jamaica, they “were highly delighted with the ship’s arrival.” When Méndez and Columbus later renewed their friendship in Spain and recalled the rescue, “His Lordship told me that in all his life he had never known so joyful a day, since he never expected to leave Jamaica alive.”
For the moment, Columbus still had to neutralize the mutineers led by the Porras brothers, who had little appreciation for Méndez’s heroics. To bring them around, he dispatched two representatives—Ferdinand described them only as “respected persons”—considered friendly to both parties; they came bearing a gift in the form of the mouthwatering salt pork that Ovando had sent to Columbus. Captain Porras warily conferred with the two envoys by himself, fearing that they “brought an offer of a general pardon that his men might be persuaded to accept.” Nothing, not even Porras, could keep them from learning about the arrival of the caravel and its promise of a safe return to Spain, and, eventually, of Columbus’s offer of clemency.
The mutineers made a counteroffer: if given another ship all their own, they would leave. Failing that, they might consider leaving if they were guaranteed half the space on the little caravel Ovando had sent. And they wanted access to Columbus’s stores, because they had lost all of theirs. Becoming impatient, Columbus’s envoys explained why these demands were “unreasonable and unacceptable,” whereupon Porras’s men declared that if they were not willingly given what they wanted, they would seize it. With that, they turned their backs on the envoys, and the promise of a peaceful resolution. They went back to their followers, decrying Columbus as a “cruel and vengeful man,” and they told the others not to be afraid, they had friends at court who would rally to their side against the Admiral. (Ferdinand Columbus reflected on Roldán’s recent rebellion: “And see how well their enterprise turned out; assuredly it would be the same with them”—that is, with Porras’s followers.)
Porras devised an argument to defeat the powerful presence of the caravel and Méndez’s return. Do not believe your eyes, he told them. The ship was not real. It was merely, as Ferdinand recalled, a “phantasm conjured up by the magic arts of which the Admiral was a master,” an image evoking Columbus’s striking fear into the Indians by appearing to conjure a menacing lunar eclipse. “Clearly, a real caravel would not have left so soon, with so little dealing between its crew and the Admiral’s men.” If it had been real, “the Admiral and his brother would have sailed away in it.”
Columbus’s behavior these past eleven months invited this kind of wild speculation. Confined to his cabin, grumbling orders, leading the Indians to believe that he controlled the heavens, he acquired the aura of a man possessed if not by supernatural skills then by the gifts of prophecy and revelation. Spain had come to regard him as the discoverer of new lands, but he believed himself an instrument of divine revelation. Others had come to accept that Columbus was making history, but he wanted to see his deeds emblazoned in Holy Scripture, glittering with fire, and, if need be, soaked in blood. Other explorers, especially those seeking to usurp him, wrote on water, while his accomplishments would stand as monuments, or so he believed. He created history as he went, as if time and place were two aspects of the same entity that he had chased for twelve years, guided by Marco Polo, inspired by the Bible, and driven by his lust for gold.
If not wholly convincing, Porras’s crude deception caused the mutineers to doubt what they could plainly see. So he strengthened the mutineers’ resolve, and prepared them to lay siege to all the ships, confiscate their contents, and even take the Admiral prisoner. Emboldened, they occupied an Indian village called Maima, close to the beached ships, to prepare an assault. As he had in similar situations, Columbus dispatched his brother Bartholomew “to bring them to their senses with soft words,” reinforced by fifty armed loyalists in waiting to repel an attack, if it materialized. On May 17, the Adelantado positioned himself on a hilltop “a crossbow shot” from the village and charged the two aides who had negotiated unsuccessfully with Porras to try again. The mutineers refused even to speak to the representatives. Six rebels conspired to slaughter Columbus’s brother, believing that once he was out of the way, the other loyalists would surrender.
In battle formation, they cried out “Kill! Kill!” as they attacked the Adelantado and his company. Five of the six would-be assassins fell before the loyalists.
The Adelantado responded with a fierce attack of his own, dispatching at least two men: Juan Sánchez, who had never lived down his reputation as the man who allowed the Quibián to escape, and Juan Barbara, who had initiated the scuffle with drawn sword. Others were wounded, and, most important of all, Francisco Porras was captured. The other mutineers, in Ferdinand’s words, “turned tail and ran away with all their might,” Bartholomew taking off after them, until his aides restrained his lust for vengeance, murmuring that “it was well to punish, but in moderation.”
If they slaughtered all their enemies, the many Indians who were observing the conflict might decide the moment had come to take on the loyalists. Bartholomew relented, and escorted Porras and the other prisoners to the beached ships, where Columbus received them gratefully, with prayers and “thanks to God for this great victory.” The loyalists, though victorious, did not escape unscathed. One of Columbus’s servants died, and the Adelantado was wounded in the hand, but recovered.
In the heat of battle, Pedro de Ledesma, the pilot turned rebel, tumbled unnoticed over a cliff, and hid until dark. Indians who discovered him were curious how he had survived the Europeans’ keen swords. They reopened his wounds with “little sticks,” examined a “cut on his head so deep one could see his brains,” and took note of other wounds that nearly severed his shoulder, cut his thigh to the bone, and sliced the sole of one foot from “heel to toe so it resembled a slipper.” Whenever the Indians approached, he shouted, “Beware, I can get up!” And they ran as if from a ghost.
Eventually the Spaniards rescued Ledesma, transporting him to a “palmthatched hut nearby, where the dampness and mosquitoes alone should have finished him off.” The ship’s surgeon spent eight days treating Ledesma’s wounds (“so terrible that it would defy the human imagination to devise any more horrible or grave,” as Las Casas would have it), until, against all expectations, he recovered. “I met him after all this in Seville, as fit and well as though nothing had ever happened,” said Las Casas, although, not long after, “I heard that he had been killed with a dagger.” In any event, the mutineers’ spirit had been broken.
On Monday, May 20, the dispirited band of rebels sent their own emissaries to Columbus to make amends and beg for mercy. They all confessed in writing to their insubordination and inhumanity, begged forgiveness from the Admiral, and expressed repentance. They swore loyalty anew “on a crucifix and missal,” and if they ever broke their word, no priest, no Christian of any kind, would hear their confession, and they would be considered to have renounced “the holy sacraments of the Church,” which meant that as wicked Christians they would be denied burial on consecrated ground, and instead be disposed of “in no man’s land as one does with heretics.”
Columbus read their pleas and confessions with satisfaction and relief. The renegades received full pardons, with the exception of Porras, who was held prisoner “that he might not be the cause of new disturbances.”
Now the question arose of where to billet the men. With space tight on the two shipwrecks housing the loyalists, and lingering tensions between the rebels and loyalists, Columbus assigned the former mutineers to a camp onshore, to wait for the ships that would carry them to Spain. They could “wander the island as he directed, bartering their trade goods, until the arrival of the ships,” according to Las Casas. “And God knows what damage this party inflicted on the Indians and what outrages they committed.”
Days later, the anniversary of their arrival came and went. His recent pledge of loyalty to Ovando forgotten, Columbus fumed at the delays he had been forced to endure, “asserting that the delay was deliberate, and occasioned by [Ovando’s] hope that the Admiral would die there.” But he had not died. He had survived, intent on vindication.
Days later, Diego Méndez’s caravel dropped anchor in the bay. After their struggles to survive and their battles with one another, the men who had been stranded, without hope, were more relieved than ebullient to board the vessel that would take them away. “In this ship we embarked, friends and enemies alike,” Ferdinand laconically recalled. It was June 28, 1504.
Winds and currents remained contrary throughout the crossing from Jamaica to Santo Domingo, where they did not arrive until August 13. When they reached the island of Beata, off the coast of Hispaniola, they encountered currents that defeated their progress. As he did in times of enforced idleness, Columbus unburdened himself. In a letter to Ovando, he described the actions taken to end the mutiny, singling out the Porras brothers for their evil deeds. Columbus again swore loyalty to the governor, and concluded the letter with his distinctive, and cryptic, signature:
which, in his private language, meant “Columbus, the Christ-bearer.” He adopted this signature as his special imprimatur. His heirs, he urged, should also “sign with my signature which I now employ which is an X with an S over it and an M with a Roman A over it, and then an S and then a Greek Y with an S over it, preserving the relations of the lines and points.” Despite these highly specific instructions, the full meaning of the signature, the product of Columbus’s fertile spiritual imagination, has yet to be fully decoded, but it likely includes biblical as well as maritime references. In its shape, some see a ship’s mast, others a cross, and still others cryptic references to invocations and hymns.
On arrival in Santo Domingo, to his great surprise, Columbus received a welcome distinguished by “great honor and hospitality” (said Las Casas) from an unlikely source: Nicolás de Ovando. After a year of living in the shadow of obscurity, Columbus had emerged into the dazzling sunlight of prominence. The governor’s unexpected goodwill extended to sheltering Columbus in the newly built governor’s residence, “with orders that he was to be accorded every consideration.”
The show of hospitality concealed persistent conflicts between the present and former governor of Hispaniola. Columbus was quick to take offense at perceived slights; these unnamed actions he “regarded as insulting and as affronts to his dignity,” Las Casas learned. Ferdinand took Ovando’s hypocritical behavior as “a scorpion’s kiss.” The concealed poison within the kiss consisted of Ovando’s freeing Francisco Porras, the acknowledged “ringleader of the mutiny,” in the presence of Columbus himself, in a gesture designed to humiliate his predecessor. “He even proposed to punish those who had taken up arms to defend the Admiral.” Later, Columbus muttered darkly to his son Diego about the Porras brothers, “They did such bad things, with such raw cruelty as was never heard before. If the King and Queen leave them unpunished I do not know who will dare take more people out in their service.” Their mutiny forgiven and forgotten, the Porras brothers received their back pay, positions, and titles.
In the same spirit, Ovando excluded the Admiral of the Ocean Sea from official dealings with Ferdinand and Isabella. With that, Columbus realized he was more prisoner than honored guest, disgraced and endangered by Ovando, who refused to recognize the Admiral’s credentials as the “captain general” of the fleet. The bona fides, declared Ovando, were none of his business. It is difficult to imagine Columbus, a man of soaring vanity, reduced to the status of a vassal in the capital of the empire he had discovered as Ovando went about humiliating him, but he had no choice. It was left to Ferdinand to express indignation on his behalf.
A month later, on September 12, Columbus, his son Ferdinand, and servants sailed for Spain in a chartered caravel accompanied by one other ship. The rest of Columbus’s crew, the men who had endured a harrowing year on the beach in Jamaica, stayed behind on the island of Hispaniola. Of those men, many former mutineers, Las Casas noted in passing, “some of them later crossed over to Puerto Rico to settle the island—or, to put it more accurately, to destroy it.”
The weather turned fierce. Two leagues offshore, the mainmast of one of the ships in Columbus’s little fleet split “right down to the deck,” most likely the result of heavy winds. Columbus ordered the damaged vessel to return to Santo Domingo, and he resumed the journey to Castile in the accompanying vessel. But “after sailing with fair weather for almost a third part of our course,” Ferdinand reported, “we had a terrible storm that placed us in great jeopardy.” That was October 19. The following day, the ship’s mainmast “broke in four pieces,” precipitating still another emergency.
Ferdinand ascribed their survival to the “valor of the Adelantado and the ingenuity of the Admiral, who could not rise from bed on account of his gout.” Nevertheless, the two brothers “contrived a jury mast”—that is, a replacement—“out of a lateen yard”—a triangular sail’s spar—“which we secured firmly about the middle with ropes and planks taken from the stern and forecastles, which we tore down.” The ship remained seaworthy, so long as the weather did not trouble them.
Presently another storm descended, cracking the mast.
After more repairs, the ship made the final seven hundred leagues to the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, in southern Spain, last seen by Columbus two and a half years earlier. Frail and vulnerable, he had survived, and so long as he lived, the promise of a Columbian empire—sanctioned by the Sovereigns, of course—remained alive. Despite the tranquil splendor of Dry Harbour, Jamaica, his time there had been extraordinarily dispiriting, time spent tending to his physical and psychic wounds. His year on the beach had been no idyll; there was no coming to terms with himself, or with the “Indies.” It was, at best, a refuge.
Many of the 140 men who had set out with Columbus did not live to see the end of the voyage. Several deserted at Hispaniola. Thirty succumbed to disease, or drowned, or died in battles with the Indians or with mutineers. Columbus, confronting disease, mutineers, hostile Indians, and his own delusions, was among those who survived, as were his son and brother.
Despite his extensive reconnoitering of the coast of what is now Panama and Costa Rica, he never grasped where in the world he had been. Yet Columbus realized he had found some great entity that seemed to expand the more he explored it, a place without clearly defined borders, poorly understood or described by the writers of antiquity, to which even the Bible made scant reference, simultaneously concealing and revealing incalculable riches. He later claimed part of its wealth as his own, even while he devoted the whole of his time in Spain not in palaces or brothels but in austere monasteries or tottering on muleback along steep mountain trails, driven by the twin demons of vanity and duty.
To his loyal son, Columbus’s accomplishments were anything but foreordained or clear-cut. An aura of chaos hovered over his entire life and adventures, against which he tried to impose his will. In Ferdinand’s retelling of events, his father was always vulnerable—to the whims of monarchs, the caprices of Indians, the power of tides and storms, and the moods of the impressionable men serving under him. He emerged as a hostage to fortune in the high-stakes game of European expansion; time and again, his exploits could have gone one way or another, were it not for his singular vision, or so Ferdinand would have his readers believe. The adventure gave impetus to his imagination and intellect for the rest of his days.
For Columbus’s brother Bartholomew, the Adelantado, the journey had been the occasion for acts of heroism, at least in the eyes of the Spanish. If not for his vigilance, Columbus and his band of loyalists would not have lasted a year on the beach. Yet the most heroic acts of all had been performed not by his brothers, but by the self-effacing Diego Méndez, who had survived a perilous journey in an open boat and a year in the realm of Nicolás de Ovando to bring the caravel to Jamaica to rescue Columbus and his men.
Despite these hardships and frustrations, Columbus retained a particular affection for El Alto Viaje—the High Voyage—perhaps because it gave him a chance to show off his navigational skills as never before, and to accomplish feats that would make less accomplished explorers gasp in wonder. Or perhaps because the hardships of the voyage, its reversals and privations and narrow escapes, brought him closer to God, to his son Ferdinand, and to his sense of mission.
It was now November 7, 1504. He planned to return to Seville to recover his health, and then journey once again, this time to make amends with the queen who had backed his voyages for a dozen years. As with many of his expectations, it was not to be.
Queen Isabella, still at Medina del Campo, continued her decline. Only weeks before, on October 4, she signed her will, in which she exhorted her husband and daughter to conquer Africa—considered by some to belong to the Spanish empire—and to complete the Crusade. There were other requests: she would be buried in a habit of St. Francis, and she appointed her daughter, Juana, her “universal heir.” As for King Ferdinand, she was thankful for his labors, and he would receive half the income flowing to Spain from the empire that Columbus discovered for them both—the Indies.
Beyond that, a codicil to her will maintained that “our main aim was to arrange the introduction there of our holy Catholic faith and to ensure that the people there accepted it, and also to send prelates, monks, priests, and other learned people who fear God to instruct the people in the faith and to teach and indoctrinate them with good customs.”
By this time she had given her blessing to a new mission to the Indies, led not by Columbus or one of his brothers, but by Juan de la Cosa, the mapmaker. Later, she assigned Alonso de Ojeda, whom Columbus considered a poacher on his demesne, as the governor of the bay of Urabá, between today’s Colombia and Panama. Although the mission, backed by an amalgam of conversos and nobles, was slow to start, its mere existence was enough to alarm the Admiral, who complained that “nobles of the realm now sharpened their teeth as if they had been wild boar, in the expectation of a great mutation of the state.”
Although Columbus was already sketching out another voyage in his fevered imagination, it was apparent that his remaining strength would not be equal to the demands of life at sea. He had deteriorated badly, like one of his ships too riddled with shipworms to endure another squall.
On November 26, nineteen days after Columbus had arrived in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Isabella I, Queen of Castile and Léon, died in Medina del Campo. She was fifty-three years old. With her went Columbus’s hopes of obtaining backing for another voyage. For all her reign’s brutality, she had been a powerful leader, bringing the nobility under control and a semblance of order to Castile. Reflecting the conventional opinion of the era, Peter Martyr described her as “the mirror of virtues, refuge of good things, scourge of evil.” But she would always be remembered as the sponsor of the Inquisition—and of the voyages of Christopher Columbus.
“Her death caused the Admiral much grief,” wrote his son, “for she had always aided and favored him, while the King he always found somewhat reserved and unsympathetic to his projects.” Ferdinand was not the only observer who noticed the disparity in the way the two monarchs treated Columbus. “The Catholic king,” Las Casas observed, “I know not why nor with what motive, not only failed to show him any material sign of gratitude but also, while very complimentary in what he said, did his level best to ensure that [Columbus’s] route to advancement was blocked.” The chronicler shook his head in wonder, and suddenly came to the defense of the man he had devoted volumes to condemning. “I never managed to get to the bottom of this dislike,” he admitted, “unless it was that the king paid more attention than was warranted to the false witness brought against the Admiral by those at court who were jealous of him.” The whispering campaign against Columbus continued unabated.
It is painful to contemplate Columbus entering into his final round of negotiations with King Ferdinand. Like Nicolás de Ovando, the king acknowledged the explorer’s accomplishments and service to the crown, without promising anything for the future. Refusing to recognize this reality, Columbus persisted in beseeching his Sovereign for confirmation of his titles, and even for backing of future voyages, although he was barely capable of traveling overland, let alone over the Ocean Sea. He had lived long enough to see his moment pass, all too briefly. Now he bargained with the king as with death itself for more time, money, and glory. Columbus regained enough strength to plan a visit to the movable Spanish court, guessing that it was at Valladolid. He proposed to travel aboard the ornate palanquin once used to transport a cardinal’s corpse to be interred at the Seville Cathedral, but put the plan aside in favor of journeying as he did so often overland, on the back of a mule.
After many delays, he finally set out, accompanied by his brother Bartholomew, in May 1505. It was imperative to persuade the Sovereign one last time to clear his name and to restore his privileges, his wealth, and his honor. He bluntly outlined his intentions in a letter that he wrote to the king the following month: “The government and the position that I had was the height of my honor”—the concept had become an obsession with him—“I was unjustly expelled from there; very humbly I beg Your Highness that you give orders to put my son in possession of the government I once had.”
When they met, the king “received him courteously and professed to restore all his rights and privileges, but it was his real design to take them all away,” his son observed, “and this he would have done but for his sense of shame, which is a powerful force to noble souls.” Now that the Indies, discovered by Columbus, were beginning to fulfill their promise, “the Catholic King begrudged the Admiral the very large share he had in them by virtue of his capitulations with the Crown.”
At the time of the original capitulation, Columbus had promised to find a maritime equivalent to Marco Polo’s trading route, and to establish trading relations with the Grand Khan, to Spain’s benefit. Dominion over the lands he might discover en route, and the wealth thereof, were granted to Columbus almost as an afterthought, a by-product of his voyage of commercial discovery, but the Admiral placed an entirely different emphasis on the Enterprise of the Indies, seeing himself as fulfilling a mission inspired and even directed by God. Under these auspices, Columbus believed himself the recipient of a great and lasting honor, one that extended beyond the laws and memories of mortals.
Once the Sovereigns became aware of his failure to deliver what he had originally promised and the overwhelming extent of all that he had discovered, they changed the terms of the agreement to ensure that Columbus remained in his place, as their servant rather than a rival. From their point of view, they were entitled to treat him as they wished; from his perspective, the Sovereigns had unaccountably breached their contract. Columbus rallied, and tried to persuade Ferdinand to maintain Columbus’s status and entitlements. “I shall serve you all the remaining days of my life, few though these may be,” and according to Las Casas he vowed that in the future, his service “will prove a hundred times more illustrious than I have done Your Highness to date.”
These promises restarted negotiations between Ferdinand and his tarnished Admiral, whose son realized that the king “wished to regain absolute control” over the Indies and “dispose as he pleased of the offices that were only the Admiral’s to grant.” Acknowledging that Columbus still had some life in him, and some claim to his discoveries in the Indies, the king offered a new capitulation and requested the name of an arbiter to bring this about; Columbus, taking the bait, put forward the name of his friend at court Diego Deza, a former Franciscan friar who was now the archbishop of Seville and the successor to Tomás de Torquemada as the Grand Inquisitor for all Spain, and whom the pope himself later reprimanded for being overzealous. The archbishop affirmed that Columbus was entitled to the governorship but referred the entire business to lawyers to sort out. In exceptionally strong language, Las Casas wrote, “The king proceeded to prevaricate on this issue and so the Admiral again petitioned him, reminding His Majesty of the service he had done him, the unjust imprisonment he had suffered, and the unwarranted way he had been stripped of the dignities, rank, and honors Their Majesties had bestowed on him.”
Later, in Seville, Columbus, as persistent as ever, told the king that “he had no desire to go to law or argue his case before judges. He simply wanted His Majesty . . . to give him that which he thought fit.” The Admiral explained that he was “weary to the bone and simply wanted to go off somewhere on his own and rest.” Fruitless meetings exhausted his patience and strength. Growing weaker, Columbus wrote a formal petition, concluding, “I do believe that it is the pain caused by the delay in dealing with my business that is responsible for my being as crippled as I am.”
He filled the idle hours fretting about his lost income from the Indies, explaining that the Indians “were and are the island’s real wealth.” They grew the food, baked the bread, and excavated the gold on which the “Christians” all depended, yet he was disturbed to hear that “six out of every seven Indians has died as a direct result of the inhuman treatment meted out to them: some hacked to pieces with swords, others clubbed to death, and yet others succumbing from abuse, hunger, and the appalling conditions under which they had been forced to exist.” This expression of regret did not lead to a mea culpa, as might be expected. Rather, the dire situation meant that a great deal of income had been lost—Spain’s income, and his.
He offered a similarly shallow excuse for his sending ships filled with slaves back to Spain. It was purely a temporary measure, he now explained. He had intended them to convert to the holy faith, and to learn Spanish customs and skills, and then return to Hispaniola, where they could pass all they had learned to their kin.
The debates and petitions continued without respite. Even Columbus came to realize he had run out of options, out of luck, and out of time. His persistence would get him nowhere. From his sickbed, he wrote to the archbishop of Seville that since the king seemed determined not to honor “the promises he had made along with the Queen (God rest her soul) both by word of mouth and in writing, I feel that it would be like banging my head against a brick wall for a simple countryman like myself to continue the battle.”
The death of Queen Isabella reverberated throughout Spain and its expanding empire, threatening political instability and even civil war. Juana, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, had married Philip the Fair. Mentally unstable, she became known as “Juana la Loca”—Juana the Mad. Supported by the nobility, her husband, Philip, became king of Castile, replacing his father-in-law. For a time it appeared that Juana was destined to rule, despite her infirmity, with the understanding that Ferdinand would become permanent regent. To make this plan a reality, Ferdinand struck coins with the impression “Ferdinand and Juana, King and Queen of Castile, León, and Aragón,” the control of currency being the fastest route to control of government. At the same time, Philip sought to form an alliance with Juana la Loca to fend off Ferdinand. In the fall of 1505, the failure of the harvest, driving the price of wheat to unconscionable levels, added to the sense of chaos afflicting Spain.
The crisis deepened when Ferdinand arranged to marry Germaine de Foix, all of eighteen years of age, compared with Ferdinand’s ripe fifty-four, and, even more unsettling, the niece of the king of France, long persona non grata in Spanish diplomatic circles. Given Germaine’s age, the prospect of heirs suddenly loomed, and the old order of Ferdinand and Isabella, and the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, and the stability and grandeur that they had represented, appeared to fade into the chronicles of the past.
On March 22, 1506, Ferdinand married his young bride, setting the stage for civil war. Philip and Juana made every effort to assert their authority. Then, one day in September, Philip overexerted himself while playing a Spanish ball game called pelota, but appeared to recover. A few days later, on September 25, he exercised again, fell ill, and by nightfall he was dead. Poison was suspected as the agent of Philip’s demise, and King Ferdinand the culprit, but nothing was ever proved. The death prompted riots and pushed fragile Juana la Loca, now in her late twenties, into a profoundly affectless state in which she refused to speak or eat. Ferdinand and his newly acquired queen Germaine rebounded, having won the support of—or at least not alienating—the necessary church authorities. He remained in place as regent.
Against this tumultuous background, Columbus sought to have his rights, as he saw them, restored and confirmed for all time.
King Ferdinand left Valladolid to call on Columbus, who, his son explained, was “much afflicted by the gout and by grief at seeing himself fallen from his high estate, as well as by other ills.” The old navigator, out of favor if not actually in disgrace, still mattered enough for the king to display concern. They had a long history, beginning with Isabella’s sponsoring the first voyage, and continuing with both of Columbus’s sons serving as pages in the royal court.
It had taken Columbus years to win standing at court. For all his ambition and desire to impose himself on Spain and its rulers, there was something profoundly otherworldly about him, something that went well beyond conventional piety and mysticism, something that drove and tormented rather than comforted him. His faith brought him no peace. He had driven himself well past the limits of endurance, and had little strength left.
Columbus felt too weak to rise from his bed to greet the king; in his place, he sent his reliable brother Bartholomew, who carried a letter in which Columbus, “in adverse and distressing circumstances,” apologized for being unable to greet the king.
Ferdinand intended to rescue his father’s reputation from the conspiracies arrayed against him, but his account revealed the ancient mariner in rapid decline, dwelling on his reputation and entitlements rather than the tasks of discovery, all the while needlessly endangering the lives of those who served him. He had created crises in order to demonstrate his ability to escape them, or to show his martyrdom to the world. In the name of discovery, or divine will, or the Sovereigns, he concocted confrontations, or persisted in misunderstanding his pilots or the Indians, cajoling them through the force of his personality into telling him what he wished to hear. Only in the midst of a crisis, stranded on a beach, or in the grip of a deadly storm did Columbus steadily focus on the tasks necessary for survival; otherwise, he indulged his grandiose fantasies and half consciously looked for occasions to place himself in harm’s way, to tempt the devil and then loudly praise God for rescuing him from disaster. His fertile psyche devised great problems, as well as the great discoveries for which he became known.
Although Columbus’s voyages had resulted in monumental discoveries, he took scant delight in them. He remained convinced that China lay just over the horizon, that paradise was accessible from the ocean, and that he had sailed to the outskirts of “India.” His morality remained absolutely fixed. It could be said that over the course of his four voyages, he had discovered everything, but learned nothing. His preconceptions might have been tested and stretched a bit by his experiences, but they remained intact, an edifice of faith and will in a world that he had helped to change.
The world, in fact, was already moving beyond him, taking his discoveries into a new realm in which the “other world” became known as the New World. He was credited with discovering a continent that he had never recognized and that was named for someone else—Amerigo Vespucci. Discoveries happen in that capricious and convoluted way; often as not, credit is arbitrary.
Columbus languished in his humble lodgings in Valladolid, but, contrary to legend, he was neither isolated nor impoverished. His sons Ferdinand and Diego were in attendance, as were several of his companions on recent voyages, notably the heroic Diego Méndez. It was apparent to all that he was dying.
The ills afflicting him at the end of his life have been the subject of much speculation. The symptoms he reported, and which others confirmed, are consistent with crippling and painful arthritis—which Columbus called “gout”—and with malaria, caused by a parasite transmitted by the anopheles mosquito, marked by the high fevers, shaking chills, and anemia afflicting him. Headache, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea are common symptoms, and if he suffered from malaria, as he likely did, he was often miserable. Reviewing his symptoms, some modern doctors have diagnosed a form of reactive arthritis formerly known as Reiter’s syndrome. Caused by infection, this condition can lead to severe inflammation of the eyes (such as conjunctivitis) and painful swelling of the joints, both of which had tormented Columbus for years. If he had contracted reactive arthritis, he might well have suffered from genitourinary and gastrointestinal inflammations. Many of these conditions came and went over time, but there is no doubt that he suffered mightily from their combined effects.
After a winter spent in steady decline, Columbus dictated his will on May 19. In it, he appointed his son Diego executor, and included provisions for his son Ferdinand’s mother, Beatriz de Arana, who “weighs heavily on my conscience.” But he refused to elaborate: “The reason for this I am not permitted to explain.”
On May 20, 1506, Columbus died in Valladolid, “having received with much devotion all the sacraments of the Church and said these last words, in manus tuas, Domine, commenda spiritum meum, God, in His great mercy and goodness, assuredly received him into his glory. Ad quem nos cum eo perducat. Amen.”
He was fifty-four years old.
Las Casas commented, “And so it was that a man who had, by his own efforts, discovered another world greater than the one we knew before and far more blessed, departed this life in a state of distress and bitterness and poverty without, as he put it himself, so much as a roof he could call his own where he might shelter from the rain and rest from his labors. He died, dispossessed and stripped of the position and honors he had earned by his tireless and heroic efforts and by risking his life over and over again.”
Columbus’s modest funeral procession wound its way through Valladolid to a Franciscan monastery, where his mortal remains were buried in a crypt. That was not to be his final resting place; rather, it marked the beginning of an endlessly unfolding and often bitterly contested saga of his remains and his legacy.
In 1509, three years after his death, his remains were removed to the Chapel of Santa Ana in the monastery of Santa María de Las Cuevas, near Seville, where he had spent the years in retreat and reflection between his third and fourth voyages. His son Diego, who became the second admiral, died in 1526, and he was also buried at Las Cuevas. A decade later, in 1536, the third admiral, Luís Columbus, transferred the remains of father and son, along with those of his brother Bartholomew and his wife, Felipa Moñiz, to the Cathedral of Santa María la Menor in Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola.
Several years after that, Luís Columbus, who had given up his family’s administrative responsibilities in exchange for a title—Duke of Veragua—and an annuity, was convicted of bigamy, and sentenced to ten years’ military service in North Africa. Even when confined to remote outposts, Luís Columbus, who had a long history of entanglements with women, bribed his guards, found a mistress, and married her, although his three previous wives were all living. He was exiled again, this time to Oran, a large port city in Algeria, where he died at age fifty, in 1572. He was interred in what had become the Columbus family burial place in the cathedral of Santo Domingo.
In 1697, Spain ceded part of Hispaniola, now Haiti, to France, and later the rest of the island. To prevent the remains of the Columbus family from going to the French, they were shipped to Havana, Cuba, in 1795, where they were entombed in another cathedral, apparently for all time. But it was not meant to be. In 1877, a priest in the cathedral at Santo Domingo uncovered a lead casket filled with bones, several legends identifying the “Discoverer of America, First Admiral,” and a lead bullet. A year later, further excavations yielded another sign, this one reading “Last of the remains of the first admiral, Sire Christopher Columbus, discoverer.” It could not be established who had placed the signs there, or the significance of the bullet.
It was later determined that the remains in Havana were actually those of Diego Columbus, the Admiral’s son, and that Columbus himself was still buried in the cathedral of Santo Domingo. In 1879, a report compiled by the Spanish Royal Academy of History listed no less than five burial places for Columbus. After the Spanish-American War in 1898, Spain transported what appeared to be Columbus’s remains in a lead casket to Cadiz, and then up the Guadalquivir River. On January 19, 1899, the lead casket was reburied in the Seville Cathedral, the third cathedral to host the Admiral. As he did in life, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea simultaneously unites and divides three countries and two continents.
Today, Spain considers Seville the final resting place for Columbus’s remains. The Dominican Republic insists that Columbus and his errant grandson Luís are buried in Santo Domingo, and that Seville has only the remains of his son Diego. DNA tests on the remains proved inconclusive. The controversy is not likely to be resolved anytime soon. And no one knows what to make of the lead bullet found with Columbus’s remains. The exhumations and re-interments of his remains evoke the unquiet soul of a voyager with no final resting place, fated to haunt the shores he explored in his lifetime.