Columbus

by Laurence Bergreen

  No one could be found who was willing to chain the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, said Las Casas, except for the lowly cook, Espinosa, who attached the manacles “as if he were serving him some plates of new and precious foods.” His punishment would mean enduring weeks in a dark, stuffy, sweltering, swaying hold, vulnerable to the elements and to the unpredictable behavior of the crew, who would be tempted to vent their frustration on their two prisoners.

  The sails of La Gorda slipped below the horizon one day in early October. The Admiral of the Ocean Sea was now a prisoner on his own vessel, waiting to be judged by his Sovereigns.

  At sea, the shipmaster offered to strike the chains binding Columbus’s wrists and ankles, but Ferdinand reported that his father “would not permit it, saying only that they had been put on him by royal authority and only the Sovereigns could order them struck off.” He drew strength from this humiliation, becoming stronger in defeat than in victory. The explorer in chains represented the ideal tableau to express his sense of martyrdom, and he would sustain it as long as possible. Columbus knew the dynamics of redemption, and played his part, even as he resented it. Said his son, “He was resolved to keep those chains as a keepsake of how well he had been rewarded for his many services.” Columbus never forgot the ordeal. “I always saw those irons in his bedroom,” Ferdinand revealed, “which he demanded be buried with his bones.”

  On landing in Cadiz, Columbus chose to exhibit himself in chains to elicit sympathy from the curious crowds that had gathered there to watch him and who were duly impressed by the sight of the great explorer humbled. Later, when the chains were finally removed, he would substitute the habit of a Franciscan friar, keeping the sleeves short enough to reveal the marks made by manacles on his wrists as signs of mortification. The spectacle he made of himself was not as bizarre as it sounded, not in a country in which pilgrims on bare, bloody knees paraded through the streets of Seville as part of their Easter observance. Columbus knew what notes to strike with his public acts of penance, and to appear both pious and loyal.

  Still manacled, Columbus arrived at the monastery of Santa María de las Cuevas, a fortress of faith on the island of La Cartuja, near Seville. According to legend, an image of the Virgin had appeared in a cueva, or cave, beneath the monastery in the thirteenth century.

  On December 12, Ferdinand and Isabella ordered Columbus freed from his shackles, provided him with funds, and invited him to court, located, for the moment, at Granada.

  Five days later, Christopher, Bartholomew, and Diego Columbus received a cordial reception by the Sovereigns. They let it be known they had not ordered the Admiral to be imprisoned; responsibility belonged to Bobadilla, who had exceeded his authority. Throughout the poignant tableau, “the most serene queen was the one who excelled in consoling him about this and assuring him of her pain for, in truth, she was always the one who favored and defended him more than the king.” It was no wonder that “the Admiral placed all of his hope in her.”

  Columbus’s emotions, held in check for months, suddenly burst forth. He knelt before the queen, sobbing. At length, the Sovereigns commanded him to rise, and in a halting voice he conveyed his “deep love and desire to serve them with all the faithfulness that he had always had.” He avowed that he had never done anything to give them offense, echoing a letter he had written to them in which he declared, “I swear . . . that I have been more diligent in serving Your Highnesses than in gaining paradise.”

  In this act of mutual absolution, Columbus acknowledged that he had permitted the misdeeds exposed by Bobadilla’s investigation, revealed the pain of being shackled and publicly humiliated, professed his undying love for and loyalty to the Sovereigns, excusing his lapses and abuses on the basis of excessive zeal rather than malice, and begged forgiveness, thereby setting the stage for the possibility of a fourth voyage, as unlikely as that seemed after the lapses of the previous three. His honor was at stake, as were his titles, riches, and role in the Enterprise of the Indies, and he wished to redeem them all before it was too late.

  Ferdinand and Isabella undid the work of Bobadilla and restored the Admiral’s rights and privileges, at least on paper, by forcing the investigator to disgorge the items he had confiscated. “We command that there be returned and restored to him all the furniture of his person and household, and provisions of bread and wine which the Comendador Bobadilla took from him, or their just value, without our receiving any part thereof,” ran part of the Royal Mandate, dated September 27, 1501. The same principle applied to the gold nuggets of Hispaniola (confiscated by Bobadilla), to livestock, expenses, and wages. Columbus’s loyal paymaster, Alonso Sánchez de Carvajal, would remain at his post. His books and records would be returned. Most important of all, the Admiral’s share of the island’s wealth—an eighth of the total, and in some cases a tenth—would remain in his hands.

  Ferdinand and Isabella had rehabilitated Columbus, but not enough to suit his taste and vanity. He compiled his personal Book of Privileges in which he listed all the properties, titles, rights, awards, and offices that he believed he was still owed, but his grievance went unrecognized. The Sovereigns were in a difficult position as a consequence of the sprawling realm discovered by Columbus. To neutralize the threat he posed, Ferdinand and Isabella cut him down to size.

  On September 3, 1501, they declared that he would not be able to return in triumph to Hispaniola, after all. In his place, they chose a younger man, Nicolás de Ovando, as the next governor and chief justice. The appointment meant Columbus no longer ruled the realm he had discovered. Playing to his vanity, they permitted him to retain hollow titles such as admiral and viceroy, and he was allowed to keep the money confiscated by Bobadilla. On one hand, the Sovereigns had honored Columbus; on the other, they had replaced him.

  He entered a dark period. His health was declining, his eyesight failing, his body tormented by rheumatoid arthritis. His moods alternated among grandiose ambition, paranoia, and lucid intervals—all because he had lost control of the brave enterprise he had begun, and earned a reputation as a scoundrel rather than the hero of his imaginings.

  Despite everything, the third voyage provided important results. Columbus had once again demonstrated his peerless navigational ability, crossing the Atlantic with such efficiency that the accomplishment, all but unthinkable before his first voyage, was becoming commonplace. He had survived a terrible tsunami. And he had finally located the mainland, touching Venezuela, the Orinoco, and the island of Trinidad, and found a region rich in valuable pearl fisheries.

  But Ferdinand and Isabella had, in effect, sent the Admiral of the Ocean Sea into retirement. It seemed that his seafaring days were over, and the next shore he reached would be death.

  His work done, Francisco de Bobadilla, Columbus’s nemesis, embarked on a passage home to Spain, sailing with a convoy of thirty vessels in June 1502. Aboard his ship were Francisco Roldán, the former rebel, now rotated back to Spain; Guarionex, the fierce cacique who had once challenged Columbus, soon to be presented to the Sovereigns as a trophy of the Indies; and the Admiral’s steadfast ally Antonio de Torres, the captain. In her hold, the ship carried 200,000 castellanos of gold, equivalent to 87,000,000 maravedís (more than ten million dollars), and a nugget said to be the biggest in the Indies, valued at 3,600 pesos.

  Considered the least seaworthy of all the ships in the fleet was little Aguja (“Needle”), carrying Columbus’s personal store of gold, disgorged by Bobadilla. It was worth 4,000 pesos.

  Conditions were forbidding on the day of departure; a swell, aceitoso y maloliente, rolled in from the southeast, where hurricanes often formed. A low-pressure system sapped the air of vitality. Shreds of high-altitude cirrus caught fire at sunset, but sea-level breezes did little to dispel the disquieting mood. Dolphins skimming the surface added to the sense of impending mayhem.

  On July 11, the fleet was negotiating the Mona Passage, a strait running between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. With its extensive sandbanks and riptides,
the strait was difficult to navigate even in fair weather. On this occasion, wind from the northeast gathered strength until it attained hurricane force, scattering the fleet throughout the passage. There was nothing that anyone aboard these luckless ships could do except to give themselves up to the elements and pray. The flimsy wood and thatch buildings of little Santo Domingo blew apart. The hurricane drove ships ashore, where they broke up. A few shattered craft eventually limped to Santo Domingo, where they sank in the harbor. Twenty other ships foundered at sea, taking all hands to the bottom. More than five hundred colonists and caciques, criminals and nobles, Spaniards and Indians, drowned.

  Torres the captain, Guarionex the Indian, Roldán the mutineer, and Bobadilla the judicial investigator all went down with their gold-laden ship.

  Of the entire fleet, only fragile Aguja, carrying Columbus’s treasure, survived the hurricane, a sign of divine favor if there ever was one. The foes of Columbus believed that he had conjured the tempest to vanquish his enemies.

  PART FOUR

  Recovery

  CHAPTER 11

  El Alto Viaje

  In later life, Columbus’s son Ferdinand, whose mother, Beatriz de Arana, never married the Admiral, ascended to wealth and prominence in Spain. Over time, he exhibited patience and a steady temperament—two characteristics for which his histrionic father was not known—and won recognition as a scholar and collector of books. With a significant portion of the fortune he inherited from his father, blood money to be sure, he acquired a library consisting of fifteen thousand volumes, an extravagant amount by the standards of his day. There had always been a bookish side to Columbus, who spent years absorbing arcane learning; his brother Bartholomew shared this passion, dealing in books and maps before his brother appointed him the Adelantado. For the last thirty years of his life, 1509 to 1539, Ferdinand Columbus’s renowned library attracted scholars from across Spain and the Continent, including Desiderius Erasmus, the Dutch humanist and Catholic priest.

  Ferdinand doted on his book collection. Each carefully chosen volume contained personal notations and the price paid for it. Perhaps the most radical decision he made as a collector was his preference for the newly available technology of printed books rather than gorgeously illustrated manuscripts. He acquired over a thousand priceless examples of incunabula (“swaddling clothes” from the Latin): books dating from the earliest years of the printing press, prior to 1501. His library also included books and papers that had belonged to the Admiral himself, complete with marginal notes, a comprehensive archive of Columbus’s intellectual universe. Before his death, Ferdinand inscribed in each volume a statement to the effect that Don Fernando Columbus, son of Don Cristóbal Columbus, the Admiral who discovered India, left this book for the use and benefit of all. Today, a fair portion of the library’s inventory, seven thousand volumes, survives intact as the Biblioteca Colombina, lodged in the Seville Cathedral.

  Years before, as a boy of thirteen, the studious Ferdinand took the voyage of his life, sailing with his father, the Admiral, and an amalgam of thieves, gentlemen, ambitious enthusiasts, murderers, mutineers, and able-bodied seamen, priests, and pilots. They explored the Caribbean, Central America, and the island of Jamaica, where they passed an entire year in Robinson Crusoe–like desolation on a deserted beach.

  It was a journey that no one expected Columbus to make—except for the Admiral himself, that is—and one that evolved into the wildest, most reckless, and grimmest voyage of them all. It was both the culmination and undoing of everything he had tried to accomplish on behalf of Ferdinand and Isabella in the previous twelve years. Responding to the allure of his apparently limitless empire, the Admiral felt impelled to return, as if summoned by the drumbeats of the mayohuacán and maguey, to distant shores. No other location on the map, real or imagined, would do, not even Marco Polo’s dominion. Otro mundo—the “other world”—barely hinted at the mingled splendor and terror of what he had found. A perpetual exile and pilgrim, he no longer belonged to Italy, or Portugal, or even Spain. He belonged to Hispaniola, even though he had been banished from the realm by his replacement, Nicolás de Ovando.

  But that was a temporary aberration, to Columbus’s way of thinking, and he was determined to set matters right.

  Now fifty-one, Columbus had become an old man, half-blind, afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis and fits of “paludal poison,” or malarial fever. He was more volatile and spiritually intense than ever. He had returned to the Carthusian monastery of Santa María de las Cuevas, where he led an austere, eremitical existence in a solitary cell.

  In a Carthusian monastery, the hermit eats in his cell, twice a day or, during days of fasting, only once a day. Meals and other necessities are passed through a small turntable to the occupant, so he does not meet or even see the person who has delivered the items. Anything else he needs—bread, for instance—he may request by means of written communication. Speech is not permitted, even on feast days.

  With the cooperation of a Carthusian monk by the name of Gaspar Gorricio, Columbus assembled a work known as Libro de las profecías, or Book of Prophecies, an idiosyncratic amalgam of biblical texts, commentary, and observations gleaned from ancient authorities, in both Latin and Spanish. It is difficult to know how much of it was composed by Columbus himself—it was written primarily in the monk’s hand, with additional entries by his son Ferdinand—but the result was intended to reflect Columbus’s spiritual vision of his life’s work and destiny. In the explorer’s words, it gathered together the “sources, statements, opinions, and prophecies on the subject of the recovery of God’s Holy City and Mount Zion and on the discovery and evangelization of the islands of the Indies and of all other peoples and nations,” all with Columbus playing a leading, and divinely ordained, role. In it, he appears not as the explorer preoccupied with gold, pearls, and other tokens of greed, nor with titles and his share of the fruits of the Indians’ arduous labor, but as a devout servant of the Lord. “The Lord opened my mind to the fact it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies,” he reflected, “and He opened my will to desire to accomplish the project.”

  Columbus portrayed himself as a man who earned scorn and ridicule for his vision from rival mariners, bureaucrats, scientists, and scholars. Only the Sovereigns, to their undying glory, heeded his call. Buttressing his message with biblical citations, he entertained the notion that the time had come to launch a new Crusade to recapture the Holy Sepulchre and spark conversions to Christianity around the world. “I believe that there is evidence that our Lord is hastening things,” he declared. According to his calculations, there were only 150 years before the end of the world.

  The Book of Prophecies reflected Columbus’s circumstances of the moment, serving as an apologia pro vita sua, and announcing to his critics at court and to posterity that everything he did, all the violence, all the lives lost, was done according to a larger plan. Even in his most ascetic frame of mind, he courted grandeur. Having prepared himself, he yearned for an endeavor he might never live to complete: a fourth voyage.

  Inspired by Marco Polo’s voyage across Asia with his father and uncle, Columbus decided to bring his son Ferdinand on the fourth voyage to the New World. Polo was about seventeen years old at the time he embarked on his journey, and Ferdinand Columbus only a few years younger, thirteen years old. By voyaging with their families, both Ferdinand and Polo amassed a lifetime of experience and secured their dynastic legacies.

  In maturity, Ferdinand recognized that as a young man he had been lucky enough to participate in one of the great events of his era, the exploration of a new world. But he was not merely a propagandist. As a scholar and amateur historian, he portrayed his father as a man determined to make and remake history. He generally avoided passing judgment on his father, and subtly censored some of his worst excesses. When matters went awry, as they did time and again throughout this voyage, Ferdinand preferred to blame disreputable Spaniards on board the ship rather than acknowledge his f
ather’s failings. Although intended to vindicate the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the Historie Concerning the Life and Deeds of the Admiral Don Christopher Columbus can also be read as an indictment of the Spanish colonial enterprise in all its cruelty and absurdity.

  Columbus’s fleet consisted of just four ordinary ships leased by the Sovereigns. The flagship was known as La Capitana, under the command of Diego Tristán, a Columbus loyalist who received 4,000 maravedís a month for his labors. Ambrosio Sánchez served as master, his brother Juan as chief pilot, each receiving exactly half the captain’s salary. They supervised a crew of thirty-four, including fourteen sailors, who received 1,000 maravedís per month, and twenty ship’s boys. Specialists included a cooper (to protect barrels holding water and wine), a caulker, a carpenter, a pair of trumpeters to sound alarms and perform music appropriate to maritime events, and two gunners. Afflicted with gout and the poor vision that tormented him on his previous voyage, Columbus assumed a less definite role in the enterprise, in case he again became incapacitated, but he was unquestionably its most important personage.

  Santiago de Palos, nicknamed Bermuda after her owner, Francisco Bermúdez, was a more compact vessel. Bartholomew Columbus functioned as her captain, without pay, while the nominal captain, Francisco Porras, earned a salary of 3,666 maravedís per month. His brother Diego Porras earned slightly less, serving as the crown’s comptroller and representative on board ship. Columbus had not wanted either Porras brother on the voyage, but he was compelled to take them along by the crown’s treasurer, Alonso de Castile, who maintained the Porrases’ sister as his mistress. This ship’s crew consisted of eleven sailors, a boatswain (in charge of the crew and equipment), a dozen or so cabin boys, along with a cooper, caulker, carpenter, and gunner, and six escuderos (gentlemen)—volunteers motivated by a combination of greed, lust, and thirst for adventure.