Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [101]
Columbus was not the only explorer to have caught a glimpse of a larger, previously unimaginable truth only to retreat to the security of conventional wisdom. A half-dozen years earlier, Bartolomeu Dias had insisted that his men swear oaths when he was exploring the African coast. Columbus had witnessed his return to Lisbon, and might have become aware of the pact, and employed it now to protect the integrity of the voyage as originally conceived. The world was what Columbus said it was.
To enforce his view, he instructed Fernand Pérez de Luna, the official on board concerned with certification of documents, to take depositions from all the men aboard the fleet’s vessels. Placing loyalty above the truth, each swore that Cuba was longer than any island with which they were familiar, so it had to be an extension of a continent. Thus, there was no need to explore it any further. Those who dared to violate the oath faced penalties: a fine often thousand maravedís and having their tongues slashed. Columbus felt so strongly about the matter that he required the boys among the crew to sign the oath. Any lad who spoke out against it would suffer one hundred lashes, a potentially fatal punishment. Even the expert cartographer Juan de la Cosa signed, although his map of 1500 would show that Cuba was, in fact, an island.
If Columbus hoped the oath would silence debate on this sensitive subject of Cuba, he was disappointed. When the learned abbot of Lucerna arrived in Hispaniola several months later, he declared that, as everyone knew, Cuba “was only a very big island, in which judgment, considering the character of our navigation, most of us others concurred.” Columbus had not succeeded in fooling anyone, except, perhaps, himself. Worse, he sowed suspicion that he was manipulating the data to support promises he could not keep.
On Thursday, April 24, Columbus “set sail with three ships,” bound for Hispaniola’s Monte Cristi. The next day he entered a nearby harbor where he expected to find his Indian ally Guacanagarí.
When the three black caravels appeared, Guacanagarí, as volatile as ever, took flight, “though his people pretended he would soon return.” Columbus waited, but by Saturday, he realized that Guacanagarí was unlikely to reappear, and he set a westerly course for the nearby island of Tortuga. The journey meant enduring a sleepless night of choppy seas and a frustrating lack of wind. In the morning, he took his ships in the opposite direction, to the east, dropped anchor near the entrance to the Río Guadalquivir, as he called it, “to await a wind that would enable him to make way against the current.” It blew up eventually, and Thursday, April 29, found the three caravels approaching the southern coast of Cuba, where Columbus located a bay “with a mouth of great depth and one hundred fifty feet wide.” He named it Puerto Grande, dropped anchor, and by evening he and his men were devouring freshly caught fish roasted over a fire and sampling plump, eighteen-inchlong rodents known as hutias (Isolobodon portoricencis), “which the Indians had in abundance.”
By May 1, Columbus was sailing through weed-choked waters, “encountering commodious harbors, lovely rivers, and very high mountains,” and waving at locals who believed the black ships had descended from heaven. The well-wishers offered tributes of fish and cassava bread, asking nothing in return. As before, Columbus bestowed hawk’s bells and glass beads on his supplicants, “wishing to send them away happy.” And with that altruistic gesture, he resumed the crucial task of finding gold. In Ferdinand’s worshipful view, the quick departure demonstrated his father’s resolve, but Columbus himself took a more pragmatic view. “The wind was fresh and I was using it, because things at sea are never certain, and many times an entire trip is lost because of a single day.”
After two days and two nights of “excellent weather” Columbus beheld a view of the island