by David Boyle
The ships were lying open to the skies, the sails broken, the anchors and shrouds lost, as were the cables… and so many supplies went overboard, the crew were all sick and all were repenting their sins and turning to God…The distress of my son, who was then with me, wracked my soul, for he was only thirteen years old…but the Lord gave him such courage that he cheered the others.
Finally on September 14—a week after Vespucci arrived back in Lisbon—they rounded Cape Gracias a Dios and found favorable winds and currents. Two days later they anchored in the mouth of the Rio Grande where disaster struck. Two of the sailors were drowned when their boat capsized in the surf. It was an omen for the voyage. For the next 130 miles, all the way to what is now Costa Rica, Columbus explored every channel, questioned every group of natives, and heard just what he wanted to hear—that they were in between two seas, just ten days from the Ganges. Certainly he was unable to grasp the truth, which was that the River Ganges lay far beyond the next sea, which was itself more vast than any other ocean on earth, almost halfway around the world again. Columbus was also now suffering from his old condition, confined to his cabin in La Capitana, bleeding from the eyes and in great pain in his joints and bladder, and he rarely went ashore. He was never good at looking at evidence objectively, but it was all the harder when that evidence was conveyed to him secondhand.
There was no strait. So on December 5 he gave up and turned the ships around. Now the winds that had helped them down the coast were against them again and once more there was torrential rain. The dreaded shipworms that bored little holes into the hulls of ships in this region, which had become such a nuisance to mariners in the Indies, were making the vessels leak and weevils had been at the ships biscuits. “God help me,” wrote Columbus’s son Ferdinand later. “I saw many wait until nightfall to eat the porridge made from it so as not to see the worms.”
On December 13 Columbus roused himself to rescue the fleet from a waterspout, reciting the gospel of St. John on the deck and drawing a protective circle with his sword around the fleet. Having escaped that hazard, the ships were then becalmed, running short of food and reduced to eating shark. It was a damp and miserable Christmas at the site of what is today the mouth of the Panama Canal.
On January 6, 1503, they finally anchored off a river they named Belén in western Panama, an area they knew as Veragua, where Columbus decided he would set up his trading settlement, squeezing over the sandbar at the river’s mouth. It was clear from what they saw and the locals they met that there was considerable gold in the area. But even here, the problems multiplied. It rained for a month, and the locals became increasingly threatening once they knew these visitors were intending to stay. As soon as the rain stopped, the river dropped so much that the sandbar prevented their escape. Worse, according to their interpreters, the locals were planning to attack. Diego Tristan, captain of La Capitana, was captured along with most of his crew and killed.
It was here that Ferdinand repeated the mysterious discovery made by Vespucci in the south: “The colonial chief and his dignitaries never neglect to put in their mouths a dry herb and to chew it, and sometimes they would use a certain powder, which they carried with the herb mentioned, which seems a very ugly thing.”
On Easter night they managed to get three of the ships over the sandbar and into deep water, but the Gallega was too ridden with shipworm and had to be abandoned. The other three were barely in better shape and the pumps had to be manned all day and all night just to keep the ships afloat. Near Puerto Bello, where Sir Francis Drake would eventually be buried at sea a century later, the Vizcaína had to be abandoned as well. They took off all the stores and she slowly sank.*
It was at this point, in the driving wind and rain, desperately trying to coax his remaining worm-eaten ships away from the coast, that Columbus had his most mystical experience yet. At the height of the storm, he painfully climbed the mast of La Capitana and begged God to stop tormenting him—and this time he believed he heard a response. “Be not afraid, but of good courage,” the voice said. “All our afflictions are engraved in letters of marble and there is a purpose behind them all.”
Yet the afflictions continued. It seemed highly unlikely that the other two ships could make it to Santo Domingo, let alone back across the Atlantic, especially when having reached Cuba on May 13, they collided with each other in a gale. This was the moment when it became clear that even Hispaniola was beyond them, and on June 23, the struggle became too much. The crews were exhausted from pumping and from lack of food. Columbus himself was in serious pain and nearly blind. He decided to run the ships aground on St. Ann’s Bay in Jamaica. They dragged the ships onto the beach and used the wood to build shelters with thatched roofs fore and aft.
If Cabot or the Corte Real brothers had survived whatever had befallen their ships, they would have found themselves marooned on an unfamiliar coast with no hope of rescue. This was the nightmare of the transatlantic explorers. Without their ships, there was no way back, and the last of Columbus’s ships had been destroyed in the collision. But Columbus was in a different situation. There would be no passing ships, but it might just be possible that there would be a search that could bring him home.
That was the humiliating position in which he and his men found themselves. The only chance of rescue was to make the hazardous four-day journey by canoe over the sea-lane to Hispaniola, to walk to Santo Domingo, and to raise the alarm. Diego Méndez, chief clerk of the fleet, had managed to lead a small party into the bush, negotiate with the local villages, and agree to buy regular supplies of food. He now heroically volunteered to attempt the crossing—five hundred miles across the Windward Passage. Setting up a mast and sail, recruiting six Indian paddlers, and building high sides to the canoe, Méndez set out.
“I am wholly ruined,” wrote Columbus in one of the letters requesting help to the sovereigns that he pressed on Méndez as he left. “Hitherto I have wept for others. Now, may heaven have pity on me, may earth weep for me.”
In Italy the summer of 1503 was unusually hot. In early August of that year, Pope Alexander VI was dining in the garden belonging to Cardinal Adriano Castellesi, his former secretary and also Bishop of Hereford, and Carbonariis’s employer as papal collector back in England. Toward the end of the meal, Alexander was taken ill with a sudden fever. He was taken home and bled. He died on August 18, five days later. Poison was suspected, possibly even the pope’s own poison, intended for someone else. His notorious son, Cesare Borgia, who was also taken ill, was too sick to come to his father’s bedside, but he was able to send his trusted agent to the Vatican to seize the keys to the papal treasure house. He then used the money to pay troops loyal to him to occupy Rome and intimidate the cardinals as they gathered to choose the next pope.
As the cardinals struggled to agree, Alexander’s body lay unburied in the heat, his face blackened and swollen, his tongue lolling out. According to the Venetian ambassador at the funeral, it was “far more horrifying than anything he had ever seen or reported before.” One witness said that when the time finally came to deposit his remains in a coffin, they had to jump up and down on the corpse to force it in.
The cardinals chose as the new pope the Sienese church reformer Francesco Piccolomini. He took the name Pius III and refused to have mass said over his predecessor’s body. Less than a month later he was dead too, officially from a gangrenous ulcer on his leg but possibly also from poison. The exhausted cardinals were faced with another funeral and another conclave. This time they took no chances, within a few hours and almost unanimously, they elected the bitter enemy of the Borgias, Giuliano della Rovere. He became one of the most powerful popes of any age, Julius II, as at home in armor leading his troops into battle as he was behind the altar. Julius may have been the right man to sort out the diplomatic confusion of Italy, but he was the wrong man to unite a church that was already bitterly unpopular among laypeople all over Europe.* Between Alexander’s corruption and Julius’s ambition they have
been blamed for provoking the Reformation in the generation to come.
Cesare had negotiated an alliance with Julius, but it did not last. Giuliano della Rovere had devoted every waking moment to unseating the Borgias for more than a decade. He had Cesare arrested and shipped him to Spain, where he died in battle in Navarre in 1507.
Julius forged a military as well as a spiritual power. He founded the Swiss Guard to protect him, and they still protect the pope to this day. He forced the tyrants out of cities like Bologna, and he confronted Venetian rule over cities in the heart of Italy, which was now divided three ways: between French-dominated Milan in the north, Spanish-dominated Naples in the south, and the center of Italy, where the pope and the Venetians eyed each other with distrust. Over the next five years, Julius negotiated a new network of European alliances, which would allow him to take on Venice for this central belt of Italy. The League of Cambrai was eventually signed in 1508 by Margaret of Austria, the brilliant regent of the Netherlands, who had been the rejected child fiancée of Charles VIII of France, then the widow of young Juan, heir to Ferdinand and Isabella.
England’s Henry VII did not join this holy league of Cambrai. He offered to mediate between Venice and the pope, but it was too late. In 1509 the French marched into Venetian territory, accompanied by two archbishops, three cardinals, five bishops, and an abbot, and divided it between other members of the league, culminating in the decisive battle of Agnadello. Venetian power, which had dominated the eastern Mediterranean for centuries, battered by the loss of Constantinople and the new spice routes to Lisbon, never really recovered.
When Vespucci arrived back in Seville, he was reunited with his nephew Giovanni and his fiancée, Maria, and he finally took the opportunity to marry. Maria Cerezo is a mysterious figure who may have been the illegitimate daughter of El Gran Capitan, Gonzalo Fernández de Cordoba, Ferdinand’s brilliant general in the Naples campaign, but this has never been proven. If so, Vespucci was marrying into influential but dangerous company: Ferdinand was jealous of El Gran Capitan’s success.
Yet Vespucci had learned the art of diplomacy at the feet of his mentor, Guido Antonio, one of the foremost diplomats of the age, and he had learned well. Few other navigators could have returned to Castile, having effectively disappeared and shipped out with their great rivals in Portugal, and found his way back into royal favor. Unfortunately the process took time, and his business life had long since disappeared in Seville. He had made careful arrangements so that the voyage would be scrupulously fair, keeping from the Portuguese the details of coastline on the Castilian side of the Tordesillas line and vice versa, and that was a foundation on which renewed trust could be built. He explained that although he had made the voyage partly in the name of science and partly, of course, for glory, it was primarily to protect the peace between Castile and Portugal.
Even so, with the Medici family dead and gone, and with no obvious future in Seville, this was not going to be an easy period. “Amerigo Vespucci will be arriving here in a few days,” wrote one Florentine from Seville. “He has undergone great hardships and has derived small profit.” Exactly what these hardships were, apart from his recurring malaria, has never been clear, but it seems likely that he had little or no money and was bitter about his treatment by the Portuguese. Even so, he began to regain the good opinion of the sovereigns because they trusted his judgment and were impressed with his prestidigitation with instruments. Vespucci was consulted by them in their attempts to regulate the business of the Indies. So in January 1503, while Columbus was still at sea, they decided to set up an institution that could manage these issues, based in Seville, which, although it was a hundred miles from the sea, was becoming the source of most decision-making about the Indies. Isabella was now ill, and the order was signed instead by her daughter and heir, Juana.
It was called the Casa de Contratación, and it would act partly as a registry of ships, licensing the voyages and captains, partly as a mint for coins for the New World, partly as a center for information about routes and navigation, and partly as a training organization. It would be both customhouse and courthouse. It had wide powers, including the power to arrest and imprison those who disobeyed. It was, in effect, the institution that would extend the role that Bishop Fonseca had done hitherto. To confirm this, Fonseca’s associate Jimeno de Bribiesca, the royal treasurer who Columbus had assaulted shortly before sailing on his third voyage, was appointed as the first notary. For the next two centuries, the Casa de Contratación would rule over business with the Spanish empire, based in the old arsenal in Seville, firing a cannon whenever a ship bound for the Indies was ready to sail. It enforced Seville’s domination over the Atlantic trade and made the city what it was to become: the proud, overcrowded melting pot of different cultures, home to both the indescribably wealthy and the most hellish and degrading vices.
The Casa’s first task was to set up its own postal service, so that news and instructions could be exchanged with the royal court within forty-eight hours, wherever it happened to be. Its second task was to forbid the importation of African slaves to the Indies. The few that had already been sent to Hispaniola had been involved in a small revolt.
The Casa also had to deal with complaints, and there was no shortage of those from Hispaniola. One of the most common was now about the quality of the goods that were being sent there for them to buy. Why, for example, in such a hot climate, were they being sent thick woolen cloth from England? The Casa, backed by the sovereigns, decided it was time to open up trade to the Indies to all Spaniards. From the summer of 1503 they would be allowed to export anything they wanted, and bring back anything except brazilwood. Columbus was now marooned on the coast of Jamaica, but this might have been designed to infuriate him. It flew in the face of the privileges he had been promised in 1492.
The first attempt by Columbus’s crews to escape Jamaica by canoe ended in a skirmish with natives at the other end of the island. But Méndez set out on a second attempt, using another canoe, together with the Genoese captain of the Vizcaína, Bartholomew Fieschi. On the first day, their Indian paddlers drank their whole water supply, and by the third day some of them were beginning to die of thirst. But on the fourth day, the exhausted occupants reached an island off the tip of Hispaniola and made the short crossing to finish the journey. The indefatigable Méndez then set off on foot, first to Santo Domingo, and then—because Ovando was absent—to the western peninsula of Jaragua, the former stronghold of Roldán and his supporters.
Ovando was organizing a new kind of administration for Hispaniola. He was struggling under an epidemic of syphilis among the new settlers, nearly a thousand of whom had died in the first year of their arrival. He had ordered cattle for the pastures, which were taking the place of the island’s plummeting Taino population. He had ordered mulberry trees to start a silk industry and sent back samples of rubber and a new kind of root that he thought would yield madder, the ingredient used in making red dye. When Méndez finally caught up with him, Ovando was in no hurry to see the return of his predecessor to Hispaniola. For seven long months, he kept Méndez by his side in Jaragua, as he continued to press his case for rescue.
Ovando was also launching a policy of ferocious pacification across the island, starting with Jaragua, where Méndez was forced to witness one of the most notorious massacres in the history of the New World. Ovando had brought a powerful force with him to see Queen Anacoana, the widow of Caonabo, the last independent chief on the island. She held a three-day fiesta in his honor, with dancing and music. As always, this enjoyment accompanied rumors among Ovando’s men of a conspiracy to take them by surprise. So he offered a display of arms, to Anacoana’s delight, but when he put his hand on the gold cross around his neck, it was a prearranged signal for the soldiers to open fire on the villagers. Anacoana was captured and hanged and the other local chiefs gathered there were surrounded in a house and burned alive.
So it was a thoughtful Méndez who accompanied Ovando back to S
anto Domingo, to pursue his punitive policies in the east of Hispaniola. Ovando had promised to deal with the marooned Columbus on his return but, when he got back, he changed his mind and refused to let Méndez use the small ship in the harbor there to mount a rescue. There was no alternative but to use Columbus’s own money on the island to hire the next ship that arrived.
By then Columbus and his brother had faced down their first revolt by those crewmen who were already deeply suspicious of him. On January 2, 1504, Francisco de Porras, the captain of the Santiago de Palos, burst into his cabin and accused Columbus of not trying to get home. He led about half the remaining crew on what was left of the masts of the beached ships, shouting “For Castile!” They then seized some canoes that Columbus had bought from the locals, burned the nearest villages, and took some of the locals by force to paddle them to Hispaniola.
But the seas rose and the waves began washing over the sides, and Porras and his men panicked, throwing their captive native paddlers into the sea to lighten the canoes. Eighteen of them drowned. Then the mutineers struggled back to the bay, and set up an alternative camp near the beach, continuing to harry the local villagers, who had been supplying the crews with food. Unsurprisingly, both sides found that the food supply dried up very rapidly.
The situation was becoming desperate. Without some kind of food, there was no doubt that the crews would die, but getting food depended on good relations with the locals. At this point, Columbus had one of his most brilliant ideas. He had brought an astronomical almanac with him, presumably to measure longitude using the method that Vespucci had set out. In this, he discovered that there was an eclipse of the moon due on February 29. Bartholomew therefore summoned all the chiefs nearby to meet them that night and, when they had arrived, Columbus told them that if no more food was forthcoming, God would punish them by making the moon disappear. Right on cue, the shadow began to cover the moon and the villagers begged him for forgiveness. Timing his response carefully, he said it would only reappear if they promised to bring regular supplies of food. The supplies began again the following day.