To the end of his days, Columbus remained convinced that he sailed for, and eventually arrived at, the outskirts of Asia. His unshakeable Chinese delusion motivated his entire subsequent career in exploration. No comparable figure in the age of discovery was so mistaken as to his whereabouts. Had Columbus been the one to name his discovery, he might well have called it “Asia” rather than “America.”
Obsessed with his God-given task of finding Asia, Columbus undertook four voyages within the span of a decade, each very different, each designed to demonstrate that he could sail to China within a matter of weeks and convert those he found there to Christianity. But as the voyages grew in complexity and sophistication, and as Columbus failed to reconcile his often violent experiences as a captain and provincial governor with the demands of his faith, he became progressively less rational and more extreme, until it seemed as if he lived more in his glorious illusions than in the grueling reality his voyages laid bare. If the first voyage illustrates the rewards of exploration, the subsequent three voyages illustrate the costs—political, moral, and economic.
The celebrated first voyage (1492–93) illustrated the discovery of a New World and all its promise, and portended much trouble to come. After this triumph, matters darkened considerably during the hastily assembled second voyage (1493–96). Columbus intended to solidify his navigational accomplishments of the previous year, colonize the New World, and locate China once and for all. But because of his inability to control the men of this vastly expanded fleet, and his inability to solve the China puzzle, he came close to squandering everything he had attained.
The grim third voyage (1498–1500) was entirely different in character, taking Columbus farther south than ever before. Although he kept up a brave pretense of finding China, he was forced to acknowledge that he might have stumbled across a separate and distinct “new world.” Meanwhile, his management of the fledgling Spanish empire, and his quest for gold, devolved into cruel mistreatment of the Indians. The master of navigation became the victim on land of his lack of administrative ability.
As the voyage proceeded, Columbus became increasingly detached from reality, losing himself in extended mystical reveries. At one point, he persuaded himself he had located the entrance to paradise. Throughout his quest, the rational, in the form of maritime expertise, and the mystical occasionally blended into harmonious action, but more often were at odds, resulting in conflicts extending from the natural world to the supernatural. Despite his web of delusions, Columbus discovered so many lands that if he had succeeded in retaining control of all he had explored, with the right to pass on his titles to his heirs—as Ferdinand and Isabella had once promised—he and his new dynasty would have ruled over a kingdom larger and more powerful than Spain itself. So Ferdinand and Isabella decided to replace him with a lesser official, but, playing to his vanity, they permitted him to retain empty titles such as admiral and viceroy.
Ever resilient, Columbus beseeched his Sovereigns for the means to make one more voyage to the New World. His wish was soon granted, and why not? It was more convenient to send Columbus away than to keep him at home.
The wild fourth voyage (1502–4), often called the High Voyage, was a family enterprise, and Columbus included his young son Ferdinand to help secure the family legacy. Ferdinand’s account of his father’s life is an often overlooked trove of information and observations about Columbus, not as history has judged him, but as his intimates saw him—the story of a father and son caught in the grip of imperial ambition. What began as a journey of personal vindication of his honor ended as a Robinson Crusoe–like adventure of shipwreck and rescue imperiling the lives of all who participated. No wonder it was Columbus’s favorite of his four voyages.
At close range, Columbus’s accomplishments seem anything but foreordained or clear-cut. An aura of chaos hovers over his entire life and adventures, against which he tries to impose his remarkably serene will. But as his son Ferdinand makes clear, his father is always vulnerable—to the whims of monarchs, to tides and storms, and to the moods of the sailors serving under him. He emerges 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.
A NOTE ON DISTANCES AND DATES
Nautical mile: approximately 6,080 feet
Fathom: traditionally the distance between the fingertips of a person’s outstretched arms, or six feet
League: approximately three nautical miles
With minor exceptions, dates are given in the Julian calendar, which had been in effect since 45 BC, and was the calendar Columbus used.
In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII initiated a new calendar, still in use today, to compensate for accumulated errors in the Julian calendar. Ten days were omitted, so October 5, 1582, became October 15.
Thus, the eclipse Columbus experienced in Jamaica on February 29, 1504, corresponds to March 10, 1504, in the Gregorian calendar.
PART ONE
Discovery
CHAPTER 1
Thirty-three Days
On Friday morning, October 12, Columbus ventured ashore, followed by the Pinzón brothers: Martín Alonso, Pinta’s captain, and Vicente Yáñez, Niña’s captain. Only hours before, these two contentious brothers had been ready to mutiny against Columbus, believing that he was leading them to certain destruction; now they were walking on land inhabited by well-meaning people. It was the moment of first contact.
Soon the two parties from separate hemispheres were engrossed in the most basic of rites, trade. The tawny-skinned inhabitants offered squawking, blinking parrots and skeins of cotton thread, for which they received tiny hawk’s bells, used to track birds in falconry, and glass beads from the pallid visitors. The officers unfurled the royal standard, while Columbus, seeking to validate his discovery, summoned the fleet’s secretary and comptroller to “witness that I was taking possession of this Island for the King and Queen.” In so doing, he claimed a modest coral island in the Bahamas, now generally assumed to be San Salvador.
The people of the island visited by Columbus were the Taínos, a widely distributed ethnic group, skilled at cultivating corn and yams, and making pottery. Despite their peaceful manner, they could be fierce warriors, but they had met their match. The arrival of the Spaniards in the New World heralded the extinction of the Taíno culture, but for now, the tribe possessed a blend of sophistication and innocence that Columbus tried to capture in his diary:All that I saw were young men, none of them more than 30 years old, very well built, of very handsome bodies and very fine faces; their hair coarse, almost like the hair of a horse’s tail, and short, the hair they wear over their eyebrows, except for a hank behind that they wear long and never cut. Some of them paint themselves black (and they are of the color of the Canary Islanders, neither black nor white), and others paint themselves white, and some red, and others with what they find. And some paint their faces, others the body, some the eyes only, others only the nose. They bear no arms, nor know thereof; for I showed them swords and they grasped them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance. They have no iron. Their darts are a kind of rod without iron, and some have at the end a fish’s tooth and other things.
The Spaniards had come all this way, across the Ocean Sea, expecting to confront a superior civilization. How disconcerting to be confronted with “naked people” who were “very poor in everything.” Columbus and his men would have to be careful not to hurt them, rather than the other way around. “I saw some who had marks of wounds on their bodies, and made signs to them to ask what it was, and they showed me that people of other islands which are near came there and wished to capture them, and they defended themselves. And I believe that people do come here from the mainland to take them as slaves.”
Slaves. The idea instantly struck Columbus as plausible, even desirable. “They ought to be good servants,” he continued, “and of good skill, for I see they repeat very quickly whatever was said t
o them.” And, in the same breath, he judged that “they would easily be made Christians, because it seemed to me that they belonged to no religion.” He planned to present six of these nameless, naked individuals to his royal sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella, “that they may learn to speak.”
In the morning, masses of Indians crowded the beach to gape at the three ships from afar. Others arrived by dugout (“fashioned like a long boat from the trunk of a tree”) carrying forty or fifty men, who propelled themselves with a curious object that the European sailors, despite their lifelong acquaintance with the ocean, had never before seen. Having no word for it, Columbus called it a “thing like a baker’s peel,” a broad, mostly flat blade attached to a long handle. We know it as a canoe paddle.
They brought additional gifts for Columbus, who dismissed them as “trifles too tedious to describe.” It was gold that he—and Spain—wanted, not trinkets or parrots. He glimpsed tiny amounts in the form of jewelry piercing their noses, and immediately began asking for the source of this precious metal. If his instincts were correct, the gold came from Çipango—Japan. “I intend to go and see if I can find the Island of Çipango,” he emphasized. He was confident that the gentle people in their dugout canoes would direct him to the island.
After this first encounter, Columbus’s fleet skirted the coast of San Salvador. Wherever they went, excitement erupted onshore. Some of the startled inhabitants offered food and drink, and others, both men and women, hastened into their boats shouting, “Come and see the men who come from the sky!” It seemed to Columbus that those ashore were giving thanks to God as they threw themselves on the ground.
He would have made other landfalls, but his nautical instinct warned him away from a “great reef of rocks which surrounded the whole of this island.” Infuriatingly, “inside this reef there are some shoal spots, but the sea moves no more than within a well,” and so he sailed on, and on, overwhelmed by the splendor of the Caribbean, its cobalt waters, cottony clouds, and periwinkle skies. To flatter Ferdinand and Isabella, he compared the spectacle to the countryside around Seville in the months of April and May, but in fact the pellucid ocean in which he found himself was even more gorgeous and beguiling. Columbus said that he “saw so many islands that I could not decide where to go first; and those men whom I had captured made signs to me that they were so many that they could not be counted, and called by their names more than a hundred.” He eventually decided to make for the largest landmass, estimating that it lay five leagues from the island he designated San Salvador.
Exhilarated and distracted, he did not linger at his new anchorage. “When from this island I saw another bigger one to the West, I made sail to navigate all that day until nightfall because otherwise I would not have been able to reach the western cape.” He called it Santa María de la Concepción, and dropped anchor there at sunset. The island is often assumed to be Rum Cay, to use its more mundane modern name, and one hardly befitting Columbus’s exalted sense of mission.
Driven by the search for gold, he had allowed his wily captives to lead him to this spot because those who dwelled there “wore very big bracelets of gold on their legs and arms.” When the ships approached the shore, the hostages escaped one by one, and Columbus belatedly realized he had been deceived. Irritated, he would have sailed on, but, he stated, “it was my wish to bypass no island without taking possession,” and so he did in the name of Castile, even though “having taken one you can claim all.” Such were the rules of exploration and empire as he understood them.
He dispatched several seamen in hot pursuit of the fugitives, chasing them ashore, but, as he ruefully noted, “they all fled like chickens.” When another dugout canoe innocently approached “with a man who came to trade a skein of cotton, some of the sailors jumped into the sea because he wouldn’t come aboard,” and seized the poor fellow as a replacement detainee. Observing from his vantage point on the poop deck, Columbus “sent for him and gave him a red cap and some little beads of green glass which I placed on his arm, and two hawk’s bells which I placed on his ears”—that is, the standard-issue trinkets of little value—“and I ordered him back to his dugout.”
Later, on Monday, October 15, his ships urged on by a southeasterly wind, Columbus cautiously navigated to another island, in all its features as described by Columbus consistent with Long Island, Bahamas. The island is eighty miles long and only four miles wide, and appears as a jagged pile of sand and rock rising above the surface of the ocean, which varies in hues from lush aubergine to sparkling white surrounded by a light blue corona.
Columbus kept his head about him as he gaped at the display and diligently recorded instructions for future navigators: “You must keep your eyes peeled when you wish to anchor, and not anchor near the shore, although the water is always very clear and you see the bottom. And among all these islands at a distance of two lombard—or cannon—shots off-shore there is so much depth that you can’t find the bottom”: advice for navigating Long Island that holds as true today as it did five centuries ago.
He was now almost as far north as he would go on this voyage, and once again his thoughts turned toward India. Columbus would have stayed to admire the setting—“very green and fertile and the air very balmy, and there may be many things that I don’t know”—but he was on a mission “to find gold” and the Grand Khan.
Complicating his task, he had entered into one of the most intricate mazes of islands and isthmuses on the planet. From the vantage point of the thermosphere, hundreds of miles above, the islands appear as scattered, burnished leaves flecked with gold and floating on liquid sapphire, slowly churning, blossoming, and fluorescing. From sea level, as Columbus and his men saw them, they were no less striking, seeming to rise from the heaving surface of the sea like apparitions, or fragments of stars or asteroids fallen to earth.
The people he encountered appeared to be participating in a timeless pageant, and Columbus, ever curious, jotted down his impressions. In the channel running between Santa María and Long Island, he came upon a man alone in a dugout canoe, paddling from one island to the other. “He carried a bit of his bread that would be about the size of your fist, and a calabash of water, and a lump of bright red earth powdered and then kneaded, and some dry leaves which must be something much valued among them, since they offered me some . . . as a gift.” The dry leaves happened to be among the oldest crops known to humanity, yet it was virtually unknown in Europe. Apparently, the leaves had been cured, and their pungent scent lingered in the air and imbued the pores of every one who handled it and inhaled its smoke. The leaves belonged to genus Nicotiana: the tobacco plant.
The man came alongside Santa María and gestured that he wished to come aboard. Columbus granted the request and “had his dugout hoisted on deck, and all he brought guarded, and ordered him to be given bread and honey and drink.” The Admiral vowed to “give him back all his stuff, that he may give a good account of us” and report that he was given all he needed by the emissary of the beneficent Sovereigns of Spain.
Late on October 16, Columbus’s modest altruistic gesture paid generous dividends. The fleet happened to be in search of anchorage, frustrated by the inability of soft coral reefs to provide a reliable stay against the agitation of the sea. The man whom he had given water, nourishment, and transport noticed the situation. “He had given such a good account of us that all this night aboard the ship [that] there was no want of dugouts, which brought us water and what they had. I ordered each to be given something, if only a few beads, 10 or 12 glass ones on a thread, and some brass jingles, such as are worth in Castile a maravedí each”—a Spanish coin worth about twelve cents.
Overcoming his reluctance to disembark, Columbus went ashore on Long Island, and was pleasantly surprised by the inhabitants, “a somewhat more domestic people, and tractable, and more subtle, because I observe that in bringing cotton to the ship and other things, they know better how to drive a bargain than the others.” To his relief, the islanders wore
clothing, which seemed to reflect their sophistication and civility. “I saw clothes of cotton made like short cloaks, and the people are better disposed, and the women wear in front of their bodies a small piece of cotton which barely covers their genitals.”
Lush, dark vegetation blanketed the island. Impenetrable mangroves overhung ledges, casting dismal shadows. Spiky beach plums obstructed the way to the island’s interior. Those able to hack a path through the brush might come upon a basin of murky water swaying within a deep blue hole. In another part of the island, caves tempted the bravest or most foolhardy to explore their depths. It was all strange and different from anything the men had ever witnessed. “I saw many trees very unlike ours,” Columbus marveled, “and many of them have their branches of different kinds, and all on one trunk, and one twig is of one kind and another of another, and so unlike that it is the greatest wonder of the world. How great is the diversity of one kind from the other!” He had stumbled across flora following a separate evolutionary path from its European counterparts. Catching his breath, he resumed, “For instance, one branch has leaves like a cane, others like mastic; and thus on one tree five or six kinds, and all so different.” How could this be? They were not grafted by human hands, “for one can say the grafting is spontaneous.” No matter what plant Columbus was describing, his astonishment was apparent. The same wild proliferation could be found among fish—“so unlike ours that it is marvelous; they have some like dories, of the brightest colors in the world, blue, yellow, red, and of all colors, and others painted in a thousand ways; and the colors are so bright, that there is no man would not marvel and would not take great delight in seeing them; also there are whales.” Sheer surprise and enchantment hijacked his grandiose agenda. Or were the snares of this world leading him fatally astray?
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