The ships, run aground side by side, were little better than platforms on the open water, with not much room to pace before turning, submerged up to their decks at high tide and propped up at the flanks to keep them from keeling over when the tide went out. These shipwreck fortresses, with their cannons and the clear water between them and unfamiliar country, were still preferable to attempting to survive on land, with depleted supplies and no allies among the local tribes. The bay in which they were planted is sheltered by a reef from the open sea, entered on the western side into waters shallow enough that the white sand makes roads of aquamarine between banks covered by weed. The bay is cut in half by a sandy promontory that fans out into it, now covered by thick mangrove and the occasional shack where fishermen barbecue their catch at midday; a few steps from the beach the land drops off into a deeper lagoon, now a milkier blue. The Capitana and the Bermuda seem to have settled on the western side of this spit. After a shallow coastal plain, the land in front of where they were rises steeply, into hills serrated like those Hernando knew in Spain but forested with the tangled green that is everywhere in Jamaica. The effect is like an amphitheater, with the grounded ships on the flat stage of the water, looked down upon by the curve of hills to the south, where an unknown number of unseen eyes could watch their every move. Hernando and his father were to live together on this stage, in a cabin built on the poop deck of the Capitana—an area of roughly nine square meters—for a year, a month, and four days.2
Hernando later wrote how, in response to their desperate situation, Columbus had only a series of lesser evils from which to choose. The Admiral was anxious to prohibit the crew from creating enemies on shore and issued strict prohibitions against pillaging or raping the locals; and with their supplies dangerously low, he took to distributing by lottery what they gained from local trade every day, so those without enough to eat could at least feed themselves on the hope that the next day might be theirs. But these measures would barely sustain them, and their persistence had to depend on a realistic hope of rescue. It was agreed not simply to wait for a passing ship: Jamaica had as yet no European inhabitants, and vessels had no particular reason to pass that way. They also agreed there was no way to build a craft capable of the crossing from the materials they had. They decided then to send twelve Christians in two canoes from the most easterly point of Jamaica across to Hispaniola, with each canoe rowed by ten Jamaican Tainos. This in itself was a desperate measure, as the canoes were not built for the open sea, their sides barely a palm’s breadth above water when freighted down. Columbus hoped, nevertheless, that on reaching Hispaniola one of the canoes, “captained” by Bartholomeo Fieschi, would return to Jamaica to reassure those left there of the successful crossing, while the other, under Diego Méndez (who had been with Columbus since the First Voyage), would proceed to Santo Domingo to sound the alarm and prepare a rescue mission. They also carried with them a letter to the Monarchs reporting on what they had found so far, as well as one to Gaspar Gorricio. Bartholomew accompanied the canoes to the launching point at the eastern tip of Jamaica and watched them until they disappeared. Hispaniola was thirty leagues away (more than a hundred miles), with a single waterless rock to break the crossing eight leagues from the end.3
And then they waited. Hernando’s writings about the minutes, hours, days, and weeks of these first months are fairly sparse; while we might have expected him to have passed the time with conversations through which he would come to know his father better, his testimony records only the peculiar quality of the silence. Years later, lamenting that he had no fuller information on the mysterious earlier parts of his father’s life, Hernando reflected that Columbus died before Hernando had the courage to overcome his filial piety and ask his father about these things; reflecting further, he admits he had never even thought to ask these questions in his youth. This has a ring of truth: sharing memories is for those who have the necessary leisure for musing over the past. Those under a suspended death sentence, like the men on board the Capitana and the Bermuda were, must instead have spent their time in the intense and enervating attunement to each expanding plank, each eroding wave, each hardening and brittle cord. One of Hernando’s most vivid memories of this period was of the stormhead that every afternoon would build up over the eastern side of Cuba, threatening with its thunder and lightning an imminent deluge, just like Boina (the dark-serpent rain god of the Taino), only to dissipate as the moon rose. The many pulses must have been nearly unbearable in the silence.4
Faced with this yawning lacuna in the life of the explorer, many of those who later wrote epic accounts of Columbus’s life invented episodes to fill the void. In one of these, the Columbus by the eighteenth-century Jesuit poet Ubertino Carrara, Hernando is swept overboard during a mutiny and trapped in a tree at the bottom of the ocean, where a water nymph, Nerine, saves him. Carrara’s dense, baroque neo-Latin verse then tells of how the boy is led by the nymph through the Palace of Aletia, where all the types of truth are reflected in a thousand crystals and mirrors, and where he is taught the principles of Natural Philosophy relating to
the origins of rivers
the different states of water
the nature of wind and fire
the nature of volcanoes
the forming of minerals and gems
etc., etc.
When returning him to shore, the submarine goddesses are on the point of presenting Hernando with a telescope when they are told the invention is reserved for Galileo Galilei. Carrara’s underwater allegory rather pleasingly constructs a heroic beginning for Hernando’s life of dividing and collecting the many kinds of truth like a refracting crystal, even if there is no basis for any of it in fact. Hernando himself would later experience the great temptation to construct backstories worthy of the monumental figures they describe.5
The only true part of Carrara’s story is the mutiny. As was perhaps inevitable, after the party dispatched to Hispaniola had not been heard from in four, five, six months, rumors began to swirl. Hernando recalled mutterings among the men that Columbus didn’t even want to return to Spain, where he was in disgrace, or to Hispaniola, from which he had been banished, and that he had sent Méndez and Fieschi not to secure their rescue but rather to restore his damaged reputation with the Monarchs. Alternatively, some argued the canoes had sunk on the way to Hispaniola and the bed-bound, gout-ridden Columbus was no longer in a position to lead them in a second bid to cross the strait; instead, they imagined themselves winning the favor of the Admiral’s enemies at court if they overthrew him presently. As was perhaps also inevitable, opposition to Columbus coalesced around the head man of the Bermuda, Francisco Porras, whose brother Diego was the comptroller of the fleet, assigned by Ferdinand and Isabella to ensure they received their share of the valuable things found on the expedition. Porras brought matters to a head on 2 January 1504, when he presented himself in the Admiral’s cabin on the Capitana as leader of forty-eight mutineers. Hernando quotes Porras’s words in his account of the scene, something he reserves only for the most painful moments of his past:
Sir, what does it mean that you do not wish to return to Castile, but would rather stay here after everything has been lost?
To this the Admiral could only reply that he did not know a way of returning to Castile other than the one they had already tried, and that if Porras disagreed, he should call a meeting of the senior officers to discuss how to proceed. Porras refused to be put off, however, and instead signaled to his followers to begin the mutiny. Brandishing their arms against a nonexistent opposition, they hastened to secure the castles and the roundtops on the mainmasts. In response, Columbus left his bed with some difficulty and hobbled around the deck, attempting to reassert control over the men, who paid him no attention. He was eventually coaxed back to bed by his few remaining friends, who pleaded with the mutineers to take what they wished but to leave the old Admiral unharmed. Finally the mutineers departed in canoes they had taken from the Taino, heading east in a
triumphal mood to attempt another crossing from the eastern cape of Jamaica to Hispaniola. Most of the crew who had until that point remained loyal now joined the mutineers, for fear of being left behind by the healthiest part of the company. Hernando later grimly mused that had it not been for infirmity, he doubted whether twenty men would have stayed behind on the Capitana.6
Once the vitalizing action was past, Hernando had time to observe his father’s response to this desperate situation. Trade with the local tribes had already dwindled as the region became saturated with the goods they had to offer; there were only so many hawksbells, copper points, and glass beads that any curious Taino could want. But worse than this indifference was the growing suspicion of the Admiral’s weakness, which received confirmation when the greater part of his men abandoned him, proclaiming their disdain along the way to any Jamaican who would listen. The few inhabitants of the Capitana considered going ashore to take food by force, but how long could they hope to hold out against the gathering opposition?
In this condition the Admiral turned again to his old sorcery, this time in the form of a pamphlet in his cabin that had magical properties. Summoning the principal men of the island to a feast, he declared to them that his God was a wrathful god who rewarded the good and punished the bad, and who would visit pestilence and famine upon them in revenge for their failure to trade fairly with the Christians. In token of this, Columbus prophesied, the moon would that very evening be consumed by wrath. Hernando remembered the Taino leaders scoffing at this as they retired, but even Columbus and his crew must have tensed with the fear that the almanac might have been wrong in its prediction of a lunar eclipse for that evening. The volume in question was almost certainly the Ephemerides, or Perpetual Almanac, of “Abraham Zacuto” (Abraham bar Samuel bar Abraham Zacut), a great Jewish synthesizer of Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin astronomical traditions. Zacuto had been Spanish until the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, when he was among those whose exodus had crossed paths with Columbus in Lisbon at the end of the First Voyage. During a brief residence in the safe haven of Portugal, Zacuto had published his great work of astronomy, before being moved on to North Africa and eventually Jerusalem. Zacuto’s Almanac—which survives as item 3139 of Hernando’s library—provided 11,325 consecutive daily positions of the moon and led Columbus to believe there would be a lunar eclipse on 29 February of that year, 1504, that would last for a total of three hours and thirty-two minutes. The crew may also have worried they no longer really knew what the date was, almost two years after leaving Spain and having weathered all manner of catastrophes, and the formula Hernando wrote into the volume of Zacuto, for calculating which weekday fell at the beginning of each month, may have been a way of double-checking this was indeed the Thursday on which Zacuto predicted the eclipse would fall. Their nerves could hardly have been settled by the uncanny feeling always produced by 29 February, a leap day that does not seem to fit properly into time. But there was a bigger problem even than this. Zacuto’s tables were designed to predict the time of eclipses at Salamanca, and while it is now an easy matter to convert these for different time zones, that calculation requires a knowledge of the longitudinal position of the observer—something neither Columbus nor anyone of his day had. Columbus’s performance, then, was a nerve-racking gamble: if they were farther west than he thought, the eclipse scheduled to reach its apex at midnight in Spain might not be visible from Jamaica, ruining the intended dramatic effect.7
One wonders if Columbus showed any signs of self-doubt in the moments before the moon rose that evening, perfectly succumbing to the earth’s penumbra just as dusk fell and engulfing the island in darkness. Hernando recalls the great howl that went up over the islands, and the gathering of Tainos begging the Admiral to intercede with his God on their behalf. Columbus agreed to speak to God for them, and let the charade continue until the midpoint of the eclipse, emerging then to announce that he had entered a covenant on their behalf whereby God would protect them if they supplied the Christians with victuals as needed. If Columbus’s ruse was a parody of his usual claims to divine inspiration, turning his nautical know-how into a kind of parlor trick, it was nevertheless put to great use in geographical terms: whereas predicting the exact time of the eclipse was impossible without a measure of longitude, the reverse calculation was quite easy and would allow Columbus to use the time difference between the end of the eclipse in Spain and in Jamaica to demonstrate the precise longitude of his present location. On a page of The Book of Prophecies, the following entry nestles his cartographic science among the pages of apocalyptic prophecy:
Thursday, February 29, 1504, being in the Indies on the Island of Janahica, in the port called Santa Gloria, which is almost in the center of the island on the north part, there was an eclipse of the moon. Because it began before the sun set, I was only able to note the time when the moon had returned to full brightness. This was clearly noted: two hours and a half after nightfall, or exactly five hourglasses.
The difference from the island of Janahica in the Indies to the island of Cadiz in Spain is seven hours and fifteen minutes, so that the sun sets in Cadiz seven hours and fifteen minutes before it does in Janahica. See the Almanac.
Using his observations of the eclipse in conjunction with Zacuto’s calculation in the Almanac, then, had allowed Columbus to make the most accurate measurement of the longitude of the Caribbean to date, and by extension to establish more certainly the breadth of the Atlantic. Perhaps he comforted himself for his cheap conjuring by remembering the beautiful words of Psalm 18 recorded in The Book of Prophecies:
The heavens tell the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims the works of his hand. Day speaks the word to day, and night reveals knowledge to night.
Columbus’s night-knowledge had, at least for the time being, saved him and his son from the righteous anger of the disillusioned Taino.8
* * *
It is not clear at what point Hernando and the others on the Capitana became aware that Porras and his fellow mutineers had failed in their attempt to cross to Hispaniola after their departure in January 1504. As it happened, they had managed to get no more than four leagues from Jamaica before turning back, and Hernando suggests that when the seas became rough, they threw their Taino oarsmen overboard to lighten the load. They made two more failed attempts before heading back toward the shipwreck-fortresses in Santa Gloria Bay, where they reappeared in April. It seems there must have been contact between the mutineers and those still with Columbus during this time, as Hernando accused Porras of spreading rumors that an upended canoe was seen floating along the coast, leaving the paranoid survivors to assume the alarm had never been raised in Hispaniola. Whatever the reason, mutiny began to brew again even among the handful of crewmen who had remained on the Capitana.
Then, just when Hernando must have been braced for the final coup de grâce that would put the wounded god he called a father out of his suffering, a caravel appeared on the horizon. As the ship came closer and so evaporated the inevitable fear of the marooned, that the passing ship will fail to see them, those around Columbus must have marveled once more at the strange trick of destiny that always seemed to pull the Admiral back from the brink. But Columbus’s luck was never simple. When the ship stood by the Capitana, it emerged, like some grotesque joke, that it had not come on them by chance, yet also had no intention of taking them back to Hispaniola. Instead the captain brought Governor Ovando’s apologies that he did not, at that time, have any ships available suited to the task of rescuing them. The visiting ship presented Columbus with a side of salted pork and a single barrel of wine and left before anyone on the Capitana could write any message to send on.
The residents of the Capitana may have felt some comfort in the knowledge that their cry for help carried by Diego Méndez had indeed reached Hispaniola, and that they were not lost without a trace. But the letter the ship had brought back from Méndez gave little comfort. When the Jamaican canoes reached Hispaniola—their crews near
ly dying of thirst and panic, being saved from both only by a rising moon that picked out the stopping point between Jamaica and Hispaniola in silhouette—Méndez had made his way overland with a raging quartan fever to find Ovando in the western province of Yaragua. None of the Tainos from Jamaica were well enough to bring back news of the successful crossing, and even the seeming miracle of their survival turned dark when Ovando, feigning pleasure at the news of the Admiral’s safety, nevertheless showed no urgency in responding to his call for help.
Whatever stay of execution had been granted to the residents of the Capitana by the arrival of the caravel was short-lived. While the on-board mutiny seemed to dissipate for the time being, Columbus’s attempt to outmaneuver Porras by sending him some of the salted pork, as a peace offering and a reminder that after the impending rescue they would be tried as mutineers, was unsuccessful. Porras cannily refused to allow Columbus or his emissaries to address the shore company directly and rejected a general pardon for the mutineers, countering with a suggestion they be given a sectioned-off half of a rescue ship if one came—something that would allow Porras to keep his followers close for the moment when they landed in Hispaniola and the accusations began. When Columbus’s emissaries balked, Porras, in Hernando’s later recollection, countered by asking his followers whether the caravel had really been there at all. Would a real ship have simply come and gone, leaving Christians stranded in a strange land, without even taking away the Admiral himself and his beloved son? Perhaps the ship was simply a phantasm, conjured by the sorcerer Columbus, who had been known to do such things. It was clear neither side could afford to allow the other to reach Hispaniola and control the narrative of what had happened during their lost year. With the endgame clearly at hand, both sides prepared for battle.9
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 11