by Mike Ashley
It was a stormy session in Columbus’s cabin, but the Captain General had seen migrating birds flying above the ships. “We are near land!” he insisted. “I feel it in my bones, I see it in the sky! Three more days is all I ask!”
The Pinzon brothers exchanged glances. Martin Alanzo, captain of the Pinta, was in his late forties and eldest. His ship was usually in the lead. Vicente Yanez, the youngest of them, commanded the Niña, while a middle brother worked with Martin aboard the Pinta. It was Vicente who spoke now. “My men are restless. There is mutiny in the air and cockroaches on every deck. My ship is leaking so badly the morning watch can barely pump out the water.”
“We all have that trouble. Three days is all I ask. Then we will turn for home.” He knew they thought him obsessed with the idea of Japan, and perhaps he was, but he intended to complete this voyage successfully if at all possible.
The brothers returned reluctantly to their smaller caravels and Columbus sighed with relief. He had three days, until the twelfth. A great deal could happen in three days. But by late the following afternoon the easterly winds had picked up alarmingly, reawakening the crew’s fears that they might never return home.
“You must speak to them,” Paolo Romano advised. He was Columbus’s pilot, a sturdy man with a sensible attitude. “Talk of mutiny is never good on any ship.”
Columbus reluctantly agreed. A seaman since his youth, he had buried a wife, fathered two sons, one by another woman, been shipwrecked by pirates off the coast of Portugal, sailed north to Iceland, west to the Azores, south to the Gold Coast and east to Cyprus, yet was only forty-one years of age. He was not about to end up with a mutiny on the most challenging voyage of his career. “Assemble the men,” he said with a sigh. “I will address them from the poop deck.”
There were forty men and boys aboard the Santa Maria, and when Columbus stepped out on deck to speak to them, all but Romano, at the ship’s wheel, were there awaiting his words. “Turn back!” someone shouted from the rear, but he was heartened to note that none took up the cry.
“We are on a voyage to the Indies,” he began. “We are seeking new routes to old lands, attempting to prove that Japan and China can be reached by sailing west. We are doing the work of the Lord, and the Lord will guide us in our discovery. Already we have seen and heard flocks of birds that tell us land is not far away.”
“But what of the wind that blows from the east?” one of the more experienced crewmen asked. “Surely it will hinder our return.”
“As you must know, I met on board yesterday with the captains of the Niña and the Pinta. They agreed to maintain a generally westerly course for three days and to turn back if no land was sighted by that time. I only ask the same from you, just two more days, until the twelfth.”
There was more talk back and forth, and perhaps it would have gone on longer but for a providential flight of birds that passed high over the ship in a V formation. The crew members took this as a sign from God that land was truly near. Their leader, a boatswain named Juan Alagar, agreed they would wait two more days. The boatswain, whose duties included everything from stowage of cargo to preventing rats from eating the sails while in port, was highly respected among the others. Though he was younger than some, he was tougher than most.
Later Columbus’s page boy, a lad of sixteen named Luis who’d joined them just two days before they sailed from Palos bound for the Canary Islands, brought him supper prepared by his personal steward. “Is it true we are near land?” he asked.
“As true as I can judge,” Columbus told him. “If we are, you will be among the first to set foot on it.”
The youth’s face beamed at the news. The Captain General had first noticed him on the day they sailed, awkwardly taking communion with the rest of the crew at the Church of St George. He seemed to keep to himself rather than mingling with the handful of other youths in the ship’s company. Columbus had taken the ship’s master, de la Cosa, aside and told him he wanted Luis as his page-boy.
Originally planning to sail from Spain on 3 August, Columbus had delayed a day because of a decree by Ferdinand and Isabella expelling all Jews from the country by 2 August. Columbus did not wish to set sail in the unwanted company of crowded vessels chartered by the Jews for their exodus. Once on the open seas the three caravels with a total of ninety men and boys aboard encountered rough water and some rudder trouble on the Pinta, but still reached the Canaries in eight days. There Columbus hoped to find a replacement for the damaged Pinta, but finally the rudder was repaired and the ships began to take on the necessary supplies. They sailed from the islands on 8 September.
After speaking to his crew, Columbus slept uneasily that night. He could feel the ship’s tossing as the winds increased to gale force, and he feared what they might see, or not see, when the sun rose. As he made his way to the deck on the morning of the eleventh, he was disheartened that no land had been sighted. It was young Luis who lifted his spirits by producing a green branch with a little flower attached. “I plucked it from the sea,” the page boy told him. “Surely it is a sign of land.”
“It is indeed!”
And more signs were forthcoming. The other ships hauled up pieces of driftwood as well, and with each new sighting the crew’s spirits rose. Still, with every man watching the horizon as the sun set that afternoon, no land was spotted. It was about five-thirty, though time was kept at sea by a system of sandglasses which had to be turned each half-hour by a boy assigned to the chore. If the boy dozed for a few minutes, a seaman’s watch of four hours on duty could be lengthened. Columbus often wished for a more accurate system to help with navigation at sea, but he was forced to put up with it.
As usual at sunset, all hands were summoned on deck and evening prayers were said. Columbus led them in singing the traditional Salve Regina and then spoke a few hopeful words. “By this time tomorrow, the good Lord willing, we will sing his hymn on solid ground.”
That night only the boys managed any sleep at all. The men of the crew, led by Columbus and the ship’s master and the pilot Paolo Romano, remained at their posts, scanning the night for any flash of light. All that could be seen was the flame in the big iron brazier at the rear of Pinta, leading the way as usual. Then, about ten o’clock, there was something else. “Paolo!” Columbus shouted to the pilot. “Did you see it? The light at our rear, like a little flash of fire!”
“You saw the moon,” Romano suggested.
“At ten o’clock? The moon does not rise this night until eleven. Surely our sandglasses could not be that far off. Might the Niña have been trying to signal us?” Torches of pine pitch were sometimes used to signal between the ships at night. One or two had been lit on their ship earlier, but all was darkness behind them.
“Surely they would have kept signalling,” the pilot said.
That was when someone shouted, “A light! Land!”
“Did you see it?” Columbus asked. He recognized Diego Quierdo, a bearded translator skilled in Hebrew and Arabic. If it was truly the mother of all languages as some believed, a knowledge of Arabic could be helpful anywhere, but he had not taken an immediate liking to Diego, a man who advocated a ninth crusade to take back the Holy Land from the Muslims and Jews.
“I saw a light, that was all. Is it land, Captain?”
“I don’t know.”
For now all was darkness again, except for the Pinta’s iron brazier up ahead. Most of the men stayed on deck, scanning the horizon as the moon rose, but after a time Columbus started down to his cabin. He almost tripped over a limp form at the bottom of the steps. Hurrying to get an oil lamp from the cabin, he lit it and gasped at the sight before him.
It was his page-boy, Luis, the side of his head covered with blood. He was dead.
While more lamps were brought in to illuminate the scene, the ship’s surgeon, Garcia Gibaro, was summoned to examine the body. “The boy is dead,” he pronounced. “The fall down the steps killed him.”
Alagar, the boatswain, ask
ed, “Shall I prepare for a burial at sea?”
But Columbus shook his head. “He would want to be buried on land if possible. Wrap him in sailcloth until we see what tomorrow brings.”
He sat brooding in his cabin after that, shocked and unbelieving that a vigorous young man’s life could be snuffed out so easily. When his personal steward Pedro brought him something to eat, he pushed it aside. “Are the men still on deck?” he asked.
“Many of them, Captain. They search for land by the light of the moon.”
The Captain General sighed. “The land will appear when it is ready.”
“You should eat something.”
Pedro was tall and slender, a doting servant who had been with Columbus on previous voyages. “Food is for daytime, drink is for night, yet I dare not avail myself of the wine you so graciously provided. Tell me, Pedro, you have known young Luis for two months now, since we sailed from Palos. Was he not a limber lad?”
“He was indeed, sire.”
“Then how do we explain his death in such a freakish accident? Any of us could have fallen down those steps with no more than a bruise to show for it.”
Pedro shrugged. “The ways of the Lord are strange at times.”
When he was alone Columbus pondered the death of this youth he’d barely known. He could hear some of the men returning to their quarters, the exhilaration of the night dampened by Luis’s fatal accident. Presently he took up one of the oil lamps and made his way to the main crew quarters. “Where did Luis sleep, Diego?” he asked Quierdo, the translator.
The bearded man motioned toward one of the soft planks that served as beds for the crew. In the rolling and pitching waters, a skilled seaman was able to brace himself well enough to get a little sleep. “Over there, by the bulkhead.”
Alagar, the boatswain, who also slept there, shook his head sadly. “I will miss his nighttime mutterings.”
“He talked in his sleep?”
“Nothing that anyone could understand. Just the dreams in a strange tongue of a lad far from home.”
“Where are his belongings?” Columbus asked.
The boatswain frowned and started to search about as Diego Quierdo joined him. “The youth had few possessions,” the translator said. “Nothing anyone would steal.”
Yet they were not to be found. Columbus decided they could search better in daylight. In any event there were more important matters at hand. At around two a.m. he returned topside. The waters were calmer now, though a brisk trade wind still blew. The moon, past full, was in the port quarter where it bathed the ships’ sails in silver. Pinta was still in the lead where it would be first to reach land or, in the words of one old sckeptic, first to sail off the edge of the earth.
Suddenly from the lead ship came the sound of the lombard being fired, the large cannon each ship kept loaded and primed to announce the sighting of land. Already the Pinta was shortening her sails to await the flagship. Presently Columbus drew alongside and called out, “Señor Martin Alonso, you have found land!”
Indeed it was true. The lookout on Pinta’s forecastle had seen something like a white sandy cliff glowing in the moonlight. Noting it in his journal, Columbus allowed the three ships to drift until dawn in a south-southwest direction. Then they sailed due west along the southern fringe of the island they’d sighted. It seemed too small to be Japan, and he decided it must be an island in the Indies. By the morning’s light they turned north. Halfway up the west side of the island they saw a gap in the reefs and a good anchorage, with naked copper-skinned people awaiting them on the beach, and Columbus went ashore with the translator and a party of armed men in the ship’s boat, flying the royal standard. The two Pinzon brothers likewise came ashore in boats off the Niña and the Pinta.
They knelt on the shore to thank God, and Columbus gave the island the name of San Salvador, taking possession of it in the name of the Catholic sovereigns Ferdinand and Isabella. The natives seemed friendly enough, although Quierdo could not translate their words. Both males and females were naked, some with their bodies and faces painted. Columbus presented them with red caps and glass beads that they put around their necks. They seemed to want to give something in return, and after a time returned with some parrots and cotton thread, along with darts for hunting. The darts had fire-hardened wooden points, but a limited range. These handsome young savages knew little of other weapons, and when he showed one his sword the native grasped it by the blade, cutting himself.
“What else do we have to give them?” Columbus asked, and one of the crewmen produced some hawks’ bells that greatly intrigued the natives. “Since we surely are in the Indies, I will call these people Indians,” he decided.
They investigated the flora and fauna of their landing place. The island was big and mostly level, with green trees and many small bodies of water. Small lizards ran freely. In the trees he could hear woodpeckers at work. Finally, when it was time for return to the ships, Columbus led the men in singing Salve Regina as he had promised. He felt that their first day in this new world had gone well. But he had not forgotten the unpleasant task before him. Luis’s body still lay wrapped in sailcloth awaiting burial.
Columbus was up at dawn the following morning, Saturday the thirteenth, having barely slept after the excitement of the previous day. By daylight he searched through the crew’s quarters but no sign of Luis’s meagre belongings could be found. Then he went with the surgeon to examine the body once more before burial. As he uncovered the head for the first time by daylight, Columbus noticed something that had been hidden by the darkness.
“Look here,” he said to Gibaro, calling attention to a singed portion of the dead youth’s hair, just above the terrible fatal head wound. “What do you make of that?”
The surgeon peered closer. “It seems burnt, and there is a mark of soot here. What could have caused that?”
“Nothing on those steps or below deck. He was hit with something, possibly one of our pine pitch torches.” Suddenly he remembered the flash of light he’d seen that night. Not the moon or a signal from the Niña, but a torch on board their own ship being quickly swung at its target. “Garcia, my friend, this lad was murdered.”
“How is that possible? Who would murder a boy of sixteen? And why?”
“I do not know,” Columbus muttered, more to himself than to the surgeon. He began to strip off the dead youth’s pants in preparation for burial, then suddenly stopped, pulling them up again. “He will be buried in his clothes, on the beach of San Salvador before we leave.”
Before he could organize his thoughts there was a shout from the morning watch on deck. “Boats approaching!”
Columbus hurried on deck and saw a swarm of canoes of all sizes bearing down upon them. Word of their arrival had spread across the island, and the natives paddled back and forth, circling the ships and waving their greeting from craft apparently carved from the trunks of trees. A bit later he went ashore with Gibaro and Quierdo the translator. The surgeon was interested in inspecting the native huts, while Columbus found a quarry of stones that might be suitable for building a church on the island. A native youth showed him the proper method of throwing their hunting darts.
Quierdo proved of no use as an interpreter and Columbus was forced to gather what information he could through signs and gestures. He was anxious to press on to Japan, but decided that San Salvador should be explored more carefully before their departure. On Sunday morning he organized a party made up of crewmen from all three vessels, using their ships’ boats to take them to the north end of the island. There they found three more villages. Columbus was reluctant to land because of the reefs, but some natives swam out to greet them with food, urging them to come ashore. They seemed to think these strangely clad Castilians had come from heaven.
“We will take six Indians with us as guides and interpreters,” Columbus told his pilot. “Prepare to sail this afternoon.”
* * *
Back on board the Santa Maria, Alagar the boats
wain asked, “What will be done with the body of your page-boy?”
“He will be buried on shore before we sail.” He went below to his cabin, removed his sword and stretched out on the bed, thinking of what he had to do.
It was Diego Quierdo, the translator, who found him there that noon when he’d heard the news that six Indians would be travelling with them. “I do not trust those savages, Admiral,” he said. Some of the men had taken to calling him that, and it was a title he much preferred. He imagined someday being Admiral of the Indies, Admiral of this land he’d discovered.
Columbus sat up on his narrow bed. “They are peaceful men, Diego. They will not harm us.”
“Take them if you wish, and sell them to the first slaver we encounter.”
Columbus’s eyes hardened. “Would you kill them, good Diego, as you killed my page-boy Luis?”
“I never harmed the lad,” the translator replied, turning away.
“You killed him because he was a Jew.”
Diego Quierdo turned back toward Columbus, his eyes ablaze. “You are a devil! How could you know of this?”
“When I was undressing him for burial I saw that he had been circumcised, and I remembered the edict ordering all Jews out of Spain the day before we sailed. He passed as a Christian in order to sail with us, but that was why he kept to himself as much as possible.”
Quierdo’s face was flushed with an anger Columbus had never seen before. “He blasphemed by taking Communion with us!” the translator shouted, and with those words Columbus remembered the boy’s awkwardness in accepting the sacrament.
“Only to save his own life. What else could he do under the circumstances?”
Quierdo answered with another question. “How could you have known that I killed him?”
“I know now that the ten o’clock moon I saw was a burst of light when you struck Luis’s head with one of the pine torches, yet a few minutes later you claimed to have seen the light too. That would have been impossible. You simply wanted to announce your position far away from the stairs where the lad’s body lay. Then there was the matter of his speaking a strange language in his sleep, a language none of the others could understand. But it wouldn’t have been strange to you since you know Hebrew. That was what told you he was Jewish, wasn’t it? And you could have confirmed it when you saw him naked. After you killed him you threw his belongings into the ocean in fear that they might reveal him as a Jew and provide a motive for the crime.”