FIFTEEN
It was almost inevitable that Queen Isabella, once she had secured the boundaries of her kingdom and dealt with tensions within it, would begin to turn her attention outward—even beyond the confines of Europe. A new age of global exploration was dawning.Spain and Portugal had been rivals within the narrow confines of the Iberian peninsula, but they were now also becoming rivals on a world stage as well, engaging in a fierce competition to secure overseas lands and trade routes. Discovery of new territories was becoming the great new entrepreneurial enterprise, and only a few countries, most notably Portugal and Castile, had recognized the magnitude of what was coming. Those that seized these opportunities would reap the profits and gain the glory. Those that didn’t would be left behind.
The Portuguese had pioneered this activity under Henrique, or Henry the Navigator, the prince most responsible for Portugal’s outward expansion southward and around the perimeter of Africa. What has been called the Illustrious Generation of Portugal’s royal family had introduced a whole new way of looking at the world—seeing the potential for acquiring distant lands by finding them, charting them, settling them, and taking possession of them. Portugal, consequently, was swelling with arrogance and newfound wealth.
The drive toward mercantile adventuring was a family interest for Queen Isabella. Her beloved grandmother, the Portuguese noblewoman Isabel of Barcelos, had been cousin and sister-in-law to Prince Henry the Navigator; Prince Henry was therefore Isabella’s great-uncle. In Isabella’s youth, between 1462 and 1487, while Castile had been engaged in debilitating civil wars, Portugal had commissioned eight separate maritime expeditions into the Atlantic Ocean, claiming more and more territory and outstripping Castile year by year.1
Isabella had come to the throne very conscious of these new developments at sea, for they had been at play in the peace negotiations with the Portuguese following the war of 1475 to 1479. The Treaty of Alcáçovas in 1479 had given her control of the Canary Islands but had forced her to concede to the Portuguese exclusive rights to any newly discovered lands on Africa’s West Coast, as well as the Cape Verde Islands. King João of Portugal had immediately set about increasing and consolidating power in those areas, strengthening the Portuguese trade routes and mercantile empire. He was intensely competitive with Castile and kept his explorers’ discoveries state secrets, but they were pushing further and further toward the Orient: first they went south by sea, discovering the Congo River in 1484 and rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; then they made forays into the interiors of India and Ethiopia by land.
Isabella, meanwhile, had asserted and consolidated Castilian control in the Canary Islands, making the island of Grand Canary a colony in 1480. These subtropical islands, located off the west coast of Africa, were inhabited by a native tribe known as theGuanches. Western Europeans had made their way there in ancient times, but regular visits by Spanish and Portuguese explorers started only in the early 1400s. Castile and Portugal had fought for possession of them, but after the Treaty of Alcáçovas, Castile was able to begin a more systematic settlement process. The Gaunches resisted Castilian domination but were subdued, partially due to the brutal and remorseless efforts of Beatriz de Bobadilla’s sultry exiled niece and her new husband, and the islands were incorporated into the Kingdom of Castile. The islands became prosperous colonies and provided a base for further exploration.
So when a charismatic and opportunistic seafarer from Portugal with an intriguing exploration proposal showed up at Isabella’s court in the mid-1480s, claiming he had links to her Portuguese grandparents, the queen was disposed to listen. This mariner, an Italian who had been living in Lisbon, was named Christopher Columbus. He had been married to Felipa Moniz, whose father had served in the household of Isabella’s grandfather, the Infante Don Juan of Portugal.2 The family of Felipa Moniz had also been associated with Prince Henry the Navigator and had participated in some of the early Portuguese explorations. When Columbus married into this family, his mother-in-law gave him some navigational instruments and maps that her husband had owned, which Columbus reportedly received with joy.3 Columbus’s wife Felipa had since died, and now the widowed explorer had formulated a plan for an audacious sea exploration that he avidly wished to pursue. Columbus, a single father with his young son Diego in tow, moved to Castile and began to propose his idea to the queen.
Christopher Columbus, or, as he was known in Spain, Cristóbal Colón, believed it was possible to sail westward around the globe to arrive at the Indies, bypassing the Turkish monopoly on silks and spices from the East. It was common knowledge then that the world was round, but nobody had yet been able to circumnavigate it because of the great distance across the open ocean with no stopping points along the way. Efforts to make such trips had been rumored, but none had been substantiated. Columbus believed he had the grit and sailing skills for the test. The expedition, he told the queen with passionate conviction, would allow the sovereigns to replenish their dwindling treasury, depleted by the war with Granada, and could perhaps even fund a new crusade to reconquerJerusalem from the Muslims. This, of course, was music to the queen’s ears.
Columbus’s pitch to the monarchs was more romantic than pragmatic. From the beginning he wooed them with a siren’s song, addressing them in letters as “King and Queen of the Islands of the Ocean.”4 Given Isabella’s background and knowledge, she was inclined to listen. Nevertheless, she was preoccupied with the war against Granada, she was raising five children, and much of the court regarded Columbus’s proposal with skepticism. It took some seven years of persistent persuasion before he was able to set off from Castile with his small squadron of three ships. Twice Isabella had referred the proposal to commissions for further study, a time-tested administrative technique for delaying a difficult decision, and twice the learned scholars had reported back that the trip was too risky, too unlikely to succeed.
Isabella nevertheless decided at some point that she would commission the trip and that Columbus would be a good choice to lead it. He seemed more than competent for the undertaking, for he had a kind of genius as a seafarer and navigator, and he had demonstrated his skills more prosaically to a land-bound court through the production of careful and detailed maps. But he was a bit vague, even oddly secretive, about the journey’s exact route. From his perspective, he was trying to preserve his good idea and keep others from poaching it, but some observers thought his ideas lacked specificity. Moreover, in an era when classical learning was viewed as the source of all wisdom, heated debates over the merits of his concept revolved around what the ancients had said about the topic thousands of years earlier.
Columbus had first made his proposition to the Portuguese King João during the civil war following King Enrique’s death. Columbus had tried to persuade the Portuguese to fund his trip and fruitlessly negotiated with João over the terms. Columbus had entertained outlandishly inflated expectations for the rewards he should receive if the trip were successful. Bartolomé de Las Casas, the author of Historia de las Indias, recounted that Columbus had asked to be knighted, to be given the title “Don,” and to receive one-tenth of the king’s income from gold and other salable items found in the areas he discovered. King João, who by this time was experienced at managing these kinds of expeditions, laughed him off as an overreaching “fantasticist” whose claims would prove unfounded.5
Unwilling to make the financial pledges Columbus asked, the crafty king nonetheless used the information Columbus had provided him to dispatch an expedition in the direction described. But the sailors sent to sea failed to find land and came back complaining bitterly that Columbus was a mistaken fool. Columbus was enraged over this betrayal, suspecting that the Portuguese king had stolen his confidential material. In high dudgeon, he left Portugal and went to Castile to plead the same case. He sent his loyal brother, Bartholomew, on a similar mission to England, but according to fellow explorer and historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, King Henry VII “made fun of what Columbus said, and took his words to be in vain.”6
Columbus presented his idea personally in Castile, weaving a tale that mixed astronomy and navigation with mythological history and essays by the ancients. He had not come from a wealthy family, however; he was self-taught, and his incomplete and faulty grasp of classical learning quickly became apparent to the scholars at court. Two panels of experts, asked to analyze his proposal, rejected his premise, saying—correctly—that the globe was much larger than Columbus claimed and concluding that his trip was likely to be a costly and embarrassing failure that would lead to nothing but loss of life for the sailors.
But the intense and mystical foreigner mesmerized many others, including the queen, who decided to back the enterprise. They embarked on a kind of minuet. Columbus danced attendance at court for years, trying to show his enthusiasm for Castile’s interests, even volunteering as a soldier in the war against Granada. He had personal conferences with the queen, sometimes with both the king and queen, at least four times over these years, including meetings in the audience chamber at the Alcázar in Córdoba, at the sovereigns’ battlefield encampments at Baza and Málaga, and at Santa Fe, where they were conducting the siege of Granada. Some of these meetings became the stuff of legend—several times Columbus stalked away from court, only to be drawn back by someone who took his parting message to the queen, and she would call him back to tell her more. When he wasn’t at court, he was living at the monastery of La Rabida in Huelva, in the south, so a royal command meant that he appeared to be leaving monastic life to return to the world to discuss the business venture at hand. Of course, this was just the kind of approach tailored to attract the queen’s attention and respect. It does not mean, however, that Columbus was practicing priestly celibacy, for within a few years he acquired a second son, whom he named Ferdinand, through an extended out-of-wedlock love affair with a woman from Seville. He now had two children who depended on him for their sustenance.
Isabella strung Columbus along, giving him encouragement and just enough money, small though it was, to make him hope that she would endorse his project. She essentially had him on call for whenever she would be ready to send him off. Columbus was paid 3,000 maravedis from the Castilian treasury on May 5, 1487; the same amount again on July 3; 4,000 on August 27, when he was asked to go to the royal encampment in Málaga; the same amount on October 15; and then another 3,000 on June 16, 1488. In other words, he was given a retainer of about 12,000 maravedis a year, the approximate wage of “an able seaman” of the day, according to the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison.7
The amount was too meager for him to support himself at the peripatetic court, so he appears to have depended on charity at different times as well. He became increasingly threadbare in appearance, which would have undermined his credibility among the haughty and ostentatious Spanish courtiers.
The next year Isabella pushed off his expenses onto her other subjects, requiring tavern owners and innkeepers to help with his upkeep. On May 12, 1489, the sovereigns furnished him with an open letter to all municipal and local officials, ordering them to give food and lodging to “Cristóbal Colomo,” “who has come to our court.”8
Columbus’s hopes rose and fell with each new development. The queen was keeping him dangling, even as he received offers of funding from other sources. Two well-connected Spanish officials, the Duke of Medinaceli and the Aragonese financier Luis de Santángel, both said later that they had been willing to finance Columbus’s expedition. The Duke of Medinaceli said he had supported and housed Columbus for two years while the mariner was waiting for the Castilian commission, and that he had had three or four ships at the ready at his own facilities and could have sent Columbus on his voyage without delay. But he had informed the queen of his intention, and the queen had opted to keep the mission and its possible gains exclusive to Castile, something that irritated the duke, who later believed he had been one of the first to recognize the trip’s potential but had been waved off.
“But since I felt that this was a job for the Queen, our Lady, I wrote to her Highness about it from Rota, and she answered that I should send Columbus to her,” the duke later wrote to Cardinal Mendoza.
So I sent him to her, and besought her Highness, since I did not care to try it and was getting things set up for her [behalf], that she let me be given a piece of it, and that the ships be loaded, and [on their return] unloaded, at the Port. Her Highness received him and turned him over to Alonso de Quintanilla, who wrote to me on her behalf that she did not hold this business likely to come off; but that if it firmed up, she would graciously grant me a piece of it. But, after she had quizzed him, she decided to send him to the Indies [herself].9
From fairly early on, observers saw that Isabella and Columbus had a certain affinity; their conversations were such that people referred to them as “chatting.” They were almost the same age—they even resembled each other, with their reddish hair and pale skin, standing out in a realm where most residents were dark-haired and dark-eyed—and they shared a romantic fascination with exotic places, animals, plants, and people. They were curious about the world around them. A little less apparent, but clear to the intuition, both possessed a messianic sense of destiny, intermingled with intense religiosity. Both wanted to spread the Christian faith, and both thought earthly rewards would come their way for doing so. Without question, their motives were simultaneously material and spiritual. They sought worldly riches but did not want to be perceived as doing so.
Columbus possessed the same tangled view of world history as Isabella, mingling classical learning and mythology with recorded events in the recent past. He based his proposed trip on Ptolemy’s Geography, a book written in the second century that had been rediscovered in the 1400s. He anticipated finding certain people and places when he reached the Orient, based on the accounts of the Venetian Marco Polo, who had gone to Asia in the thirteenth century. Like the queen, he believed in the legend of Prester John, the mythical Christian king marooned among the Muslims or Mongols somewhere in East Asia. He promised to deliver to Isabella the kind of world that she had already commissioned Diego de Valera to write about in his Crónica.
But Columbus also had a streak of madness, which is perhaps why he was willing to undertake a trip that almost everyone thought would lead to his death. He had a wild imagination. He signed his name with a secret signature he had devised himself, an indecipherable combination of letters and images. Some people believe that it was his coded way of sharing his Jewish ancestry with his children. But writing in some kind of cipher was a popular fad at the time among intellectuals—a fellow Italian, Leo-nardo da Vinci, who was roughly the same age as Columbus, famously wrote in script that was readable only in a mirror. Columbus, like Leo-nardo, spent many hours developing his theories, writing feverishly in notebooks, journals, and in the margins of books he owned. In his copy of Plutarch’s Lives, he made special notations on ninety-nine pages where “auguries, portents and… forms of divination… [including] the conjuration of demons” were mentioned. He was particularly fascinated by accounts in which individuals, such as Marcus Caecius, heard “voices in the air.”10
Later he would claim that he heard such “voices in the air” himself. But this medieval preoccupation with angels and demons, and fears of them, haunted Isabella as well.
Columbus was a fascinating, contradictory, and inscrutable character. He was evasive about his origins, though Italians were confident that he was born in Genoa. He may have had Jewish blood. Some thought he was a spy for Portugal. He was probably born poor. He was undoubtedly motivated by a need for money and by a desire to transform himself, and his descendants, into members of the titled nobility. That may have been why he was vague about his considerably more humble lineage, and perhaps why he never married the mother of his son Ferdinand, who most likely also came from a lower social class.
At the same time, however, he was most certainly a devout Christian. His son Ferdinand later said his father was “so strict in matters of religion that for fasting and saying prayers he might have been taken for a member of a religious order.”11 Columbus seemed that way to others as well: when his pilot and sometime rival, Juan de la Cosa, depicted Columbus in an illustration, he depicted him as Saint Christopher, delivering Christianity to the masses in the New World.
Unraveling fact from fiction has been a challenge for Columbus’s biographers ever since, because he created so many fables about himself. After his fortunes faltered, for example, he began to view himself as a martyr, describing himself as having been alone and friendless in the Castilian court. In fact, however, as a result of his great personal charm and intriguing ideas, from a fairly early point he drew many and varied supporters to his side. He came to be admired by Cardinal Mendoza, whose counsels were greatly respected by Queen Isabella. The Castilian treasurer Alonso de Quintanilla backed Columbus financially, as did a group of Genoese merchants, and so did the two would-be patrons of the endeavor, the Duke of Medinaceli and the Aragonese financier Luis de Santángel. Several priests, including one of Isabella’s confessors and one of Prince Juan’s tutors, endorsed his effort. And Beatriz de Bobadilla, Isabella’s best friend, is known to have considered the expedition a risk worth taking.
The biggest and most influential cluster of Columbus’s supporters was the circle that comprised the court of Prince Juan, who was fourteen years old in the summer of 1492. These members of the sovereigns’ entourage were carefully selected, having been charged with the development, education, and moral guidance of the future king. Queen Isabella carefully monitored the upbringing that her beloved son was receiving. His confidants had her ear. Chief of the prince’s household, for example, was Gutierre de Cárdenas, the man who had carried the sword aloft during the ceremony when Isabella proclaimed herself queen. By this time, he had been a trusted adviser to the queen for more than twenty years, holding a variety of posts of increasing responsibility.
Another close associate of the queen was the humanist tutor to the young men at the court, including the prince. Peter Martyr grew friendly with Columbus and would become an early and prolific historian of the discoveries of the New World. Another influential supporter of Columbus was the prince’s governess, Juana de Torres y Ávila, who was close to the queen. Columbus wrote Juana a letter that suggested that he was a close and trusted friend of hers. Juana’s brother Antonio traveled with Columbus in his second voyage to the New World. When Columbus later needed to deliver a message to the Castilian court, and wanted to make sure it reached the queen, he put the missive into Antonio’s hands.
Foremost among Columbus’s supporters, however, was the queen herself, according to observers. She alone saw the big picture of what he was offering to Castile—an opportunity that might change its fortunes for years to come. Her husband showed barely any interest at all, always being more preoccupied with the Mediterranean world than with the Atlantic Ocean. “She always aided and favored him,” Columbus’s son wrote later, “while the King he always found somewhat reserved and unsympathetic to his projects.”12
By the summer of 1491, with the war against Granada still under way, Columbus was discouraged and had lost faith that he would ever get the go-ahead from the queen. He went to La Rabida to collect his son, Diego, intending to head to France to seek the backing of King Charles VIII. Juan Pérez, chief friar of the monastery and formerly a confessor to the queen, offered to intercede with her. Pérez sent her a letter and two weeks later got a response. Isabella told Pérez to come to court himself, and the friar set off for Granada on a mule that Columbus had rented for him. When he arrived, Pérez reminded Isabella of Columbus’s proposal and informed her of his penury, and she sent for Columbus once more, this time including a sum of 20,000 maravedis so that he should arrive appropriately garbed.13
So Columbus, at Isabella’s expense, was at Granada when the city finally fell to the Christians. He thought the final hurdle had been surmounted. But the court scholars once again rejected Columbus’s proposal as unsound. Downcast, he saddled his mule and packed up, setting off with Pérez for Córdoba and points north. That had been the final straw. “Columbus resented this treatment all his life long,” writes Morison.14
But Columbus now found himself with a new advocate, one who was finally able to bring good fortune. The converso Luis de Santángel, keeper of the privy purse for the king, decided to intervene. Santángel
went to find the queen, and with words which his keen desire to persuade her suggested, told her that he was astonished to see that her Highness, who had always shown a resolute spirit in matters of great pith and consequence, should lack it now for an enterprise of so little risk, yet which could prove of so great service to God and to the exaltation of his church, not to speak of very great increase and glory for her realms and crown; an enterprise of such nature that if any other prince should undertake what the Admiral offered to her, it would be a very great damage to the crown, and a grave reproach to her.15
Santángel said, moreover, that he would pay for the fleet himself. Isabella said she would reconsider and perhaps pledge her jewels for the expense, which Santángel quickly assured her would not be necessary. The queen sent a messenger after Columbus, and the servant caught up with him at the village of Pinos Puente, about ten miles from Granada. At last the trip was approved.
The long series of delays and disappointments for Columbus may have been partly caused by the audacity of his personal requests—that if he succeeded, he be named “Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” which would be a very high rank in Castilian nobility; that he be named viceroy and governor over all the islands and mainland; that he have absolute authority to appoint and remove officials; and that he appoint the judges to oversee the affairs in each port. He also demanded a tenth of all the value of the goods bought, bartered, or produced in the lands to be discovered.16 His requests were extraordinary—but so was the risk he was undertaking. Sailing west from Europe into uncharted seas was likely to prove fatal, it was thought. The Portuguese, in their own explorations, were hugging the coast of Africa.
The complexity of his demands made for extensive paperwork, and the terms would become matters of intensive scrutiny in later years. Columbus and Isabella worked up a set of contracts to confirm the terms of the arrangement, and documents to ease his way. Columbus was given official royal permission to make the journey, an agreement as to the titles and compensation he would receive if the trip succeeded, and a passport and official letters of introduction to give to the foreign potentates he would no doubt meet when he got to Asia.
Isabella agreed to pay for the expenses of his trip. They were not, all in all, particularly great, just three ships, and salaries and provisions for a crew of about ninety men. The total cost was about 2 million maravedis,17 or about approximately “the annual income of a middling provincial aristocrat,” writes the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “but the enterprise was risky, the pundits were derisive and in time of war cash was short.”18
From the beginning, Isabella stressed that the expedition was a purely Castilian endeavor. Among the promises Columbus made to her, according to explorers Bartolomé de Las Casas and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, was that the crew would be Castilian. Of the ninety men and boys who signed on, eighty-five were Castilians from Huelva and Andalusia, one was Portuguese, and four, including Columbus, were Italian.19 None were from Aragon.
Though the queen claimed the entire venture was a royal prerogative, she did not advance the money for the trip. Perennially cash-strapped, she ordered the town of Palos to provide two ships for Columbus as repayment for a fine that the crown had previously levied against it. Town officials were ordered to provide the fully equipped ships “within ten days of receiving Our letter, without further notice from us, without deliberation or delay,” and were warned that if they failed to comply, they would risk “forfeiting Our favor” and would be fined 10,000 maravedis each.20 They jumped into action and soon provided two sailing ships, the Niña and the Pinta.
Luis de Santángel and a Genoese named Francesco Pinelli advanced the additional funds needed, reportedly by borrowing money from the treasury of the Santa Hermandad. They were later reimbursed “from the sale of indulgences,” writes Fernández-Armesto, who adds that the money was “all recovered in due course from the proceeds of the sales in a poor diocese of Extremadura,” a dry and dusty province where most residents eked out a marginal existence.21 It was ironic that such a poor district financed the expedition. And it was also ironic, and perhaps not at all coincidental, that many of the explorers who would risk their lives by following in Columbus’s footsteps in the centuries ahead would hail from Extremadura.
Even with the queen’s specific support, however, organizing the trip wasn’t easy. Many sailors thought it a pointless and potentially lethal journey, heading west into the boundless and pitiless ocean. “It was difficult to find sailors willing to sail more than a day without sighting land,” wrote Las Casas later, “because, in those days, losing sight of the coast was considered a frightening and horrible experience no sailor would undertake.”22
Anticipating that problem and hoping to encourage volunteers to sign on, the queen ordered that any criminals who joined the expedition would be released from punishment. Four men joined the crew to take advantage of that get-out-of-jail-free card.23
Columbus had a stroke of luck when the three Pinzón brothers, excellent mariners who were well known in maritime circles in Castile, signed on in leadership positions. Martín Alonso Pinzón, the eldest, served as captain of the Pinta, while Francisco signed on as master; Vicente Yáñez, the youngest, served as captain of the Niña. Other sailors then signed on for the trip out of respect for the Pinzóns and in recognition of their talents and competence. Another prominent maritime family, the Niños, from the town of Niebla, also came along and persuaded still more to join as well.
A key volunteer was ship captain Juan de la Cosa, who brought to the venture his own ship, the Santa María, the largest vessel of the three, and served as master of it. Columbus, leading the expedition, sailed with him aboard the Santa María.
The recruitment effort was assisted by rumors swirling in the seafaring community that ancient accounts or secret documents substantiated Columbus’s theory. A story made the rounds that among the “tools and maps” that Columbus had received from his mother-in-law were a set of documents known as a “rutter,” a maritime handbook containing written sailing directions. These documents were considered so valuable that in Portugal they were kept as state secrets and divulging them was a criminal offense. Nevertheless, despite the core of competent officers, the group that assembled for duty in early August 1492 seems to have been a bit ragtag.
Every man on board was required to confess his sins and receive communion before departing from Palos. They set sail on August 3, 1492, a half hour before sunrise. They passed the monastery at La Rabida, where Columbus had spent many hours among friends, and from the vessels they heard the friars chanting the ancient liturgy for the hour of Prime.24 Then they headed out in the direction of the newly colonized Canary Islands, west of Africa.
The trio of tiny sailing ships, none longer than sixty feet, dropped anchor briefly in the Canaries, and then set sail again on September 6. By nightfall, all trace of land had been left behind, and Columbus and his crew were sailing into an uncharted sea. A month passed, day after day. At some point Columbus began doctoring the logbook so he could minimize to the crew the great distance they were sailing away from known land.
Mariners who traveled on that first voyage later said that as they traveled “across the great ocean sea,” their terror mounted, and that “each hour the fear in them grew as their hope of seeing the land they were seeking waned.” The crews grew restive, and some began “murmuring” questions about Columbus’s competence at navigation. They feared they had been tricked into joining the trip and that they would be lost at sea; they wondered whether the king and queen were cruelly risking their lives for an uncertain outcome. And “they discussed among themselves whether to throw Columbus in the sea.” Columbus comforted the mutinous crew with “sweet words,” telling them they would win glory and good fortune by persevering. “He promised that within a few days there would be an end to the fatigue and travel, with much and undoubtable prosperity.”25
Then the ships’ officers too began questioning Columbus’s leadership. Sometime in the first week of October, Columbus and Martín Alonso Pinzón had an “acrimonious interview,” where they fought over the direction they should be heading. Columbus thought Pinzón was rebelling against his authority and resented it, but the men agreed to continue on the course Columbus was plotting.26
Some of the stress lifted in early October, when the sailors spotted bits of drifting vegetation that suggested they were near a coastline. Then very early on the morning of October 12, after they had been sailing in the open sea for five weeks, a shout rang out: “Land!”
The sailor who made the first sighting was Rodrigo de Triana, aboard the fastest of the ships, the Pinta. This was a great coup for him, because the first to spot land was to receive a silk jacket and a reward of 10,000 maravedis from the queen.
“When the Admiral saw the land, he fell to his knees, and it brought tears to his eyes with the extreme pleasure he felt,” and he began to sing Te Deum Laudamus.27 The men embraced one another with joy. But Rodrigo de Triana did not receive the promised gifts. Columbus soon claimed that he had been the first to spot land because he had noticed lights on the horizon the night before and pointed them out to a ship’s officer. Saying the reward belonged to him was not the most effective way to build good morale among people who were being asked to risk their lives, and it was an omen of what would come later.
The three ships landed on an island somewhere in the Caribbean, probably in the Bahamas, although no one knows which one precisely. Columbus’s changes in his logbook during the trip complicated the task for later scholars who tried to replicate his voyage. In addition, copies of his original seaboard diary mysteriously disappeared. They were perhaps stolen because the information had become valuable, a kind of treasure map to the Americas. Or they may have been discarded in a careless purge of family books and papers in Seville after Columbus’s sons died, or been dumped by Castilian courtiers eager to lighten the load while the king and queen moved from palace to palace. But Bartolomé de Las Casas, through friendship with Columbus’s children, obtained access to an early version and transcribed large sections of it, and his account remains the single most important source of information about this world-changing voyage.
The men saw before them a beautiful tropical isle, with palm trees and flowering bushes waving in the wind. At home the weather was growing cold and blustery, but here in this new place, the balmy breezes made it feel like an eternal spring. They saw strange and exotic plants and animals they had never encountered before, including delightful, brightly colored parrots. They groped to describe what they saw, and as many travelers to the Caribbean do, they likened it to paradise.
They were dazzled by the colors—all brighter and somehow lighter than the hues of Europe. The sands of the beaches, made up of particles of coral, were glistening white, quite unlike the dark stones of Spain. The waters near the shore took on this same coloration from the sandy bottom and showed up as an impossibly light blue, almost turquoise, scarcely blue at all. Even the sky was somehow a lighter, brighter shade of blue than elsewhere.
This world looked gentle and welcoming. The jagged reefs of coral might have been dangerous, but once the sailors were safely ashore, the islands seemed to hold few threats. The waters at the beach, inside the sheltering reef, were serene and calm. The winds, so often filled in Europe with clouds and rain and cold, blew here only as a warm, steady breeze that caressed and soothed the skin.
Pelicans circled steadily along the shore, plummeting into the waters at intervals in search of their next meal and soon finding it. Bright fish swarmed in the shallows. Fruit could be had from the trees for the taking. And the most pleasing of these trees—the palm—grew everywhere along the shoreline, sometimes in groves, sometimes as single trees leaning out over the water, giving a picturesque quality to the view and the welcome prospects of shade and building materials.
Columbus was most struck by the first thing he saw: naked people. On the beach were a group of islanders, almost all of them men, wearing almost nothing. Within a few days, the sailors had seen women, too, beautiful women also nude, physically agile and casually proud of their strong and shapely bodies.
The lack of clothing made sense for people living in a place with constant moderate temperatures. October’s weather averaged in the eighties Fahrenheit by day and in the seventies at night, making clothing essentially unnecessary. This was a revelation for Europeans, who were bound most of their lives in heavy woolen garments that protected them from the elements but that also confined them to the social caste and class within which they had been born.
When people in cold, windy Europe read the seamen’s descriptions of this place, it sounded like heaven. That people walked around nude was a titillating detail. It also carried connotations that echoed across Europe: the simplicity recalled an easier, less complicated, and less materialistic time; the purity resembled that of Saint Francis, who had spurned rich clothing and renounced material possessions; and the suggestion of unbridled and unrestricted sexuality stood at odds with conventional European morality. But Columbus was not alone in highlighting the nudity—it was the one single thing emphasized in every report from the first European men who landed in the New World.
Columbus added to the sensation by describing the islanders as a “gentle and peaceful people and of great simplicity,” to whom he gave trinkets of little red caps and glass beads that they hung around their necks.28 In exchange, he said, they gave him gold.
The first interactions with the Indians were amiable. They were friendly and seemed eager to cooperate with their surprising new visitors. No doubt they were repulsed by the men’s body odors and fascinated by their bearded hairiness, for the islanders kept themselves very clean and removed their body hair, but they were too polite to share those thoughts. They were curious about the newcomers, and some seemed to wonder whether they came from earth or from the sky.
Columbus immediately began thinking about how best to enslave them, according to entries in his logbook, which he intended to share with Isabella and Ferdinand upon his return to Castile. On the first day, October 12, 1492, he noted that they learned quickly and “ought to make good servants.” On October 13 he began to press them to look for gold, though they were not much inclined to do so. On the third day, he noted that they were so unskilled in arms that “with 50 men they could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished.” Soon the Spaniards picked up some Indians and took them along in the ships, without noting whether the Indians had protested.29
Columbus and his men sailed on through what is believed to have been the Bahamas, observing the flora and fauna. Columbus, who believed he had landed among islands on the coast of Asia or India, took careful note of the characteristics of the islands. He waxed more and more poetical about the beauties of the landscape because he was not finding anything that looked like an advanced mercantile civilization and he was collecting only small amounts of gold, mostly by bartering trinkets for jewelry that the natives were wearing on their bodies or attached to their noses.
He gave each island a name as he reached it. To thank God, he named the first island San Salvador, or Holy Savior, the second he named Santa María de Concepción, the third he named for the king, calling it Fernandina, and the fourth he reserved for the queen, calling it La Isabela.
Disconcertingly, on November 20 Martín Alonso Pinzón, master of the Pinta, sailed off with his ship without warning. He may have been fighting with Columbus, or perhaps he decided to hunt for gold, but it was frightening for the officers and crews of the two other ships to be alone thousands of miles from home. They were irritated at their departed comrades but also worried about them. All they could do was continue without them.
In early December, Columbus arrived at the island of Hispaniola, or as the inhabitants called it, Haiti, and took possession of it for Ferdinand and Isabella. He was told that there were gold-bearing regions in the interior, and that more gold was to be had in neighboring islands.
On December 20, Columbus received an invitation to visit from a tribal chief, or cacique, who held sway over a large part of the island. As a welcoming gift, the cacique, whose name was Guacanagari, sent a beautiful garment of woven cotton and multicolored fishbones with an ornamental mask in the middle made of a large, stiff piece of hammered gold. Baskets of food and presents were delivered next. The timing for the meeting seemed propitious—Christmas Eve 1492.
That night, however, Columbus must have let his guard down. In the early morning hours, everyone was fast asleep on the Santa María, and the watchman on duty had dozed off. The ship, their largest vessel and the one carrying most of their provisions, slid onto a sandbar and became stranded. The tides pushed it onto coral reefs at the edge of the island, the ship’s bottom began to shred, and the hull took on water. Some of the crew panicked, jumped into a rowboat, and paddled to the Niña, abandoning ship.
The men quickly realized that the ship could not be saved, but they also realized they must do all they could to remove its cargo and equipment, so essential to their survival in an alien land. The cacique Guacanagari appeared just at this point, when the Castilians were at their most vulnerable. He mobilized all his people to help the Europeans transport their goods to shore, commiserating with them over the loss and ensuring that the items were safely removed and stored. Gaucanagari told them not to worry, that he would give them two large houses in which to live now that they had no place to stay. More Indians soon came bearing additional gifts of gold, and that night the cacique treated the Christians to an elaborate feast with many delicacies, including yams and lobsters and bread made from the cassava plant.
Columbus believed that he had a real friendship with this man, and he made a momentous decision. The Pinta had not reappeared—perhaps it was gone forever. The remaining men were too many to fit on the Niña, the smallest of the three. So he told himself it was God’s will that the Santa María had gone aground, because he was destined to build a fortress there and make the place a European colony. He would leave a contingent of men behind on the island, and because it was Christmas, he named the new settlement La Navidad.
A small fort was built securely with the planks and timbers from the Santa María. There was bread and biscuit for a year, and wine and ammunition, in addition to the abundant food sources available on the island. Columbus told himself the men would be fine. He picked thirty-nine people to stay behind, including a ship carpenter, a man with medical skills, a gunner who was also an engineer, a tailor, and a number of sailors. No accounts as to how this was decided survive. Some of the men may have wanted to stay. A few of the colonists were upper-class, including one who had served on the king’s staff and another who was nephew to a prominent cleric, so this duty may not have been seen as a punishment. Perhaps some wanted the opportunity to be first to collect the available gold on the island. Others may have been charmed by the area’s beautiful and generous-spirited women. But it also seems safe to say that some members of Columbus’s team were not thrilled to learn they had been chosen to remain behind.
On January 2, 1493, exactly one year after the surrender at Granada, the explorers held a farewell party. Columbus was anxious to be on his way for fear that Martín Alonso Pinzón would get to back Spain ahead of him and perhaps tell false tales that would put Columbus in a bad light. Leaving the colonists behind seemed like a reasonable decision, as relations between the Indians and the new colonists were splendid. “The cacique showed the Admiral much love, and great grief at his parting, especially when he saw him embark,” according to Columbus.30
Columbus started to make his way back home, winding his way back through the Caribbean islands. On January 6 Martín Alonso Pinzón and the Niña suddenly reappeared, and Pinzón told Columbus that his departure had been unintentional. Columbus had an angry confrontation with him, saying that Pinzón was lying and had left the other ships out of “insolence and greed.” He accused Pinzón of disloyalty and bitterly called his actions “the evil works of Satan, who wished to hinder that voyage, as he had done up to that time.”31
Columbus had some justification for making these charges. Pinzón reportedly gathered up a good quantity of gold for himself and his crew. But Pinzón, for his part, was disturbed that Columbus had left thirty-nine people behind. The clash widened, and now Columbus seemed to be at odds with all the Pinzón brothers.
Another jarring event occurred on January 13. As the two remaining ships were continuing home, the winds died down, and they ended up in an exposed harbor. Columbus sent some men ashore to collect yams for eating, and they encountered some Indian warriors unlike any they had seen to date. They were very fierce in appearance, and their charcoal-painted faces gave them a ghoulish appearance. Columbus and his men conjectured that they might be the fearsome cannibals that the more peaceful Indians had mentioned with dread. They engaged in some barter, but these Indians suddenly turned and attacked them with bows and arrows. The Spanish defended themselves, wounding two of the Indians, and the rest of the group quickly fled, disappearing into the forest. It was the first violent clash between Europeans and Indians in the New World.
It made Columbus and his men even more eager to get home. They made some repairs to the ships, then set sail to the east. They took samples of the foodstuffs they had found, parrots, gold objects, and a small group of natives they had captured. The return journey took about two months. They hit bad weather, and Pinzón was driven toward Galicia, in northern Spain, and then had to turn back south.
Oddly, however, Columbus did not sail directly to Spain. Instead, providing grist for those who suspected he was secretly a spy for Portugal, he landed first on islands near Portugal, in late February 1493. He claimed he had later been blown into the port of Lisbon by a powerful storm that he had been unable to resist. It was from Lisbon that he wrote to Queen Isabella about his discovery. While there, however, he had at least three separate private conversations with King João. Columbus almost certainly gloated, given that he had once sought financial support from Portugal and been rejected.
King João, who had frequently been outmaneuvered by Queen Isabella already, was seriously out of sorts when he got the news of Columbus’s discovery. According to his courtiers, he considered killing Columbus as a traitor who had probably stolen navigational secrets from the state. But he decided instead to turn to diplomacy to protect his interests.
Columbus was greeted with great fanfare in Lisbon. People mobbed the streets to see the marvelous objects he had brought back and the Indians in his entourage. Many in the crowd that day remembered it for years to come, fueling a groundswell of desire on the Iberian peninsula to set out on maritime adventures. Among the people employed at the Portuguese court at that time, for example, was a fourteen-year-old page named Ferdinand Magellan.
King João opted to let Columbus go, with a stern warning that the Treaty of Alcáçovas had given the Portuguese the rights to the lands Columbus was claiming. He vowed to take up the question with the queen in Castile.
So Columbus was permitted to depart. In Palos he caught up with the rebellious captain Pinzón, but only briefly. Pinzón had contracted a mysterious ailment and died within days of his arrival home. This removed a potential rival and a man who had been a thorn in Columbus’s side. But reports soon began to circulate that the Pinzón brothers had been most responsible for the successful voyage, while Columbus had wanted to turn around. Later on, after everyone realized the immense value of the lands they had reached, the matter would become the subject of a protracted legal dispute.
The queen immediately understood the importance of Columbus’s discovery. She urged him to hurry to see her in Barcelona, where the sovereigns were living while tending to domestic issues that had been put off for years during the war with Granada. On April 7, Columbus received a letter from the sovereigns addressed to Don Cristóbal Colón, underscoring his new honorific title.32 Isabella clearly wanted to move immediately to follow up with further expeditions:
We have seen your letters and we have taken much pleasure in learning whereof you write and that God gave so good a result to your labors, and well guided you in what you commenced, whereof He will be well served and we also, and our realms receive so much advantage. It will please God that, beyond that wherein you serve him, you should receive from us many favors.… Inasmuch that which you have commenced with the aid of God be continued and furthered, and we desire that you come here forthwith, therefore for our service make the best haste you can in your coming, so that you may be timely provided with everything you need; and because as you see the summer has begun, and you must not delay in going back there, see if something cannot be prepared in Seville or in other districts for your returning to the land which you have discovered. And write to us at once in this mail which departs presently, so that things may be provided as well as may be, while you are coming and returning, in such manner that when you return hence, all will be ready.33
As Columbus was passing triumphantly through Seville, an excited young boy, standing near the ancient Church of St. Nicholas, watched his arrival. He was Bartolomé de Las Casas, who would become an explorer in the Indies, a colonist, a priest, and an activist for Indian rights in the decades ahead. Columbus was creating paroxysms of enthusiasm for overseas exploration, parading through the streets with beautiful green parrots, Indians in exotic regalia, chunks of gold, and face masks made of precious stones and fishbones. “The news spread over Castile like fire,” Las Casas later recalled, “that a land called the Indies had been discovered, that it was full of people and things so diverse and new, and that the discoverer himself was to take such and such a route accompanied by some of the Indians. They flocked from all directions to see him; the roads swelled with throngs come to welcome him in the towns through which he passed.”34
In Barcelona his reception was even more splendid, and the sovereigns listened to his story with rapt attention. Columbus’s son recalled:
This news caused them great joy and happiness; and they ordered a solemn reception be held for him as befitted one who had rendered them so great a service. All the Court and the city came out to meet him; and the Catholic Sovereigns received him in public, seated with all majesty and grandeur on rich thrones under a canopy of cloth of gold. When he came forward to kiss their hands, they rose from their thrones as if he were a great lord, and would not let him kiss their hands but made him sit down beside them.35
In Barcelona, another excited boy was in the crowd, the future explorer Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, who was employed as a court page. He remembered the excitement, the presents of gold, the odd foods and new spices, the jewel-toned birds, and the fascinating and strangely garbed people: “And then came the Admiral, don Cristóbal Colón, with the first Indians from those parts that arrived on the first voyage of discovery,”36 Oviedo wrote.
The king and queen treated Columbus as a grand gentleman: “He was very benevolently and graciously received by the King and by the Queen.” Then he gave a long account of all that had transpired and of the riches that were there. They also talked of the millions of lives that were at risk of damnation if they were not evangelized and saved, for troublingly, the expedition had found signs of “idolatry, and diabolical sacrifices, and rites that gave reverence to Satan.”37
The sovereigns listened “with profound attention and, raising their hands in prayer, sank to their knees in deep gratitude to God,” Las Casas wrote.
The singers of the royal chapel sang Te Deum Laudamus while the wind instruments gave the response and indeed, it seemed a moment of communion with all the celestial joys. Who could describe the tears shed by the King, Queen and noblemen? What jubilation, what joy, what happiness in all hearts! How everybody began to encourage each other with plans of settling in the new land and converting people! They could tell how the Sovereigns, especially Queen Isabella, valued the propagation of the Faith by showing such words and actions that their principal source of pleasure was having found such favor in the eyes of God as to have been allowed to support and finance (though with mighty few funds) the discovery of so many infidels ready for conversion.38
Meanwhile Cardinal Mendoza, a nobleman of such high stature, and so admired by Isabella, that he was known as the third king of Spain, hosted Columbus at a great dinner, another extraordinary mark of favor. The mariner was seated at the “most eminent place next” to the churchman, and “for the first time, Columbus was served a full course dinner with covered dishes and a food taster,” amid an atmosphere of pomp and festivity. “The rulers showered honor upon honor on the Admiral.”39
The greatest honor of all was that the queen ordered the mariner’s two sons, Diego and Ferdinand, to come live at court among the prince’s entourage, as pages to the prince. There they would receive the same education given to the young aristocrats at court. Columbus’s sons, in effect, were raised among the children of the queen and became particular friends of Prince Juan, serving him as pages. The two young men were “favored, and stayed in [the] house” of the prince even after the prince grew to adulthood.40
And so for the next voyage, Columbus was sent to sea in style. He was ordered to return to these new lands, lavishly equipped, with seventeen ships and a horde of passengers. Many people of wealth and position elbowed each other for the chance to journey to this wonderful land, this paradise, where gold nuggets could be found on the ground. There was an air of great expectation, of wealth just readily at hand. Within six months, Columbus set off once again.
In the years ahead, as a result of his second, third, and fourth trips, Columbus’s fortunes would wax and wane. He would steadfastly cling to his belief, against a growing mountain of proof, that he had found a path to India, even as the evidence increasingly suggested he had discovered a land previously unknown to the European world.
Columbus would always believe that his single most stalwart supporter, his most reliable defender, was the queen. Their relationship at that point was at its zenith. He spoke to her in the terms of courtly love permitted to her top-ranked courtiers. “The keys of my desires I gave to you in Barcelona,” he told her in a letter. “If you try a taste of my good will, you will find its scent and savour have only increased since then.… I dedicated myself to your Highness in Barcelona without holding back any part of me, and as it was with my spirit, so it was with my honour and estate.”41
Even as Columbus was acknowledging the importance of Isabella’s sponsorship, however, the memory of her role was being erased elsewhere in Europe. On February 15, after he had landed in Portugal, Columbus had composed a letter about his journey to Luis de Santángel, the Aragonese financier who had helped back the expedition, wrapping it within a letter meant for the crown. He described the beauty of the islands, their rich natural resources, the attractive naked people he had seen, “men and women, as their mothers bore them,” the easy availability of gold, and the presence of “ferocious” cannibals.42 All this was given in triumph to the “most illustrious King and Queen,” he wrote, “and to their renowned realms, for this all Christendom ought to feel joyful and make celebrations and give solemn thanks to the Holy Trinity with many solemn prayers for the great exaltation that it will have, in the turning of so many peoples to our holy faith, and afterwards for material benefits.”43
The letter to Luis de Santángel, bearing these new and sensational tidings, was soon widely circulated and became a publishing phenomenon, reproduced all over Europe, thanks to the new printing press. Sixteen separate editions, published in Latin, German, Spanish, and Italian, were produced in Antwerp, Basel, Paris, Rome, Florence, Strasbourg, and Valladolid. A strange thing happened, though. Columbus’s text mentioned the queen as well as the king, and the trip had been an entirely Castilian undertaking sponsored by Isabella, yet almost all the printed versions named or depicted Ferdinand as the trip’s patron and sponsor. Some versions even included woodcuts of Ferdinand dressed in armor. None gave any credit to the queen, observes Columbus biographer Morison, finding the omissions “curious.”44 And when they mentioned the islands that Columbus had named, they specified Fernandina and the others; but the island he had named for the queen, La Isabela, was unaccountably renamed La Ysla Bella, or the Beautiful Island.
If Isabella reacted to these embarrassing slights, or if Ferdinand sought to set the record straight, it is unrecorded. Perhaps the new discoveries were more comfortable for everyone if they believed a man had been author of them. That perception allowed Isabella to focus on the work at hand. The task ahead was immense: she had to find a way to ensure that the benefits of the expedition would accrue to her kingdom and her people. She had to make sure the lands would belong to Castile, and she had to be able to appeal for final judgment to the highest kind of arbiter.
And so once again, she reached out to Rome, to the Vatican, where her ally, the Spaniard Rodrigo Borgia, had just been enthroned as pope and had taken the name Alexander VI.