Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [104]
To his surprise, he heard rumors of himself. The Indians had been expecting the man with the large black ships to return.
Within the embrace of Cape Cruz lay an Indian village, where Columbus encountered the cacique, who explained through an interpreter that he had conferred with other Indian leaders, who remembered Columbus from his previous voyage. The Indians had acquired a surprising amount of intelligence about the fleet. They knew that the Indian interpreter was a convert to Christianity, and they were familiar with Columbus’s need for provisions, especially water, his noisy but ineffectual firearms, and his obsession with gold.
After reaffirming his good intentions to the Indian sentinels of Cape Cruz, Columbus departed, plying a northeastern route that took the fleet along what is now the Balandras Channel to the Gulf of Guacanayabo. Although the Admiral seemed to have reoriented himself now that he was back in Cuba, he remained befuddled about his global whereabouts, and as reliant as ever on spurious sources, especially Sir John Mandeville.
The fair weather held, revealing a sparkling still life edged with dew. “Next day at sunrise,” wrote Bernáldez, “they looked out from the masthead and saw the sea full of islands in all four quarters, and all green and full of trees, the fairest that eyes beheld.” Columbus desired to pass to the south of the islands, but he recalled Mandeville, who claimed there were more than five thousand islands in the Indies, and decided instead to sail along the coast of “Juana, and to see whether it was an island or not.” Columbus bet that Cuba was part of the mainland.
They sailed on, Columbus anxious to avoid the slightest contact with razor-edged coral reefs and sinister sandbars. From the Gulf of Guacanayabo on May 15, he sailed gingerly to the west, probably past an archipelago off Santa Cruz del Sur, into the Rancho Viejo Channel (as it is now called) and the Pingue Channel, into a gulf guarded by a blockade of islands with the alarming name of Laberinto de las Doce Leguas, Labyrinth of Twelve Leagues. It was but one more maze that Columbus had entered, some geographical, others conceptual, combining to mislead him into exploring dead ends and arriving at false conclusions. He was saved from folly or disaster by his remarkable navigational intuition and his instinct for self-preservation as storms buffeted his ships when they were trapped and vulnerable in the channels. Daily tempests forced him into impossible navigational quandaries in tight spaces—whether to spread sail or take it in, to drop anchor or not to drop anchor—and he often violated his own cardinal rule by scraping the bottom of the channels he explored. The worst transgression occurred when Santa Clara ran aground, and for many anxious hours he was unable to dislodge her. Eventually he and his crew freed her, and he regained the freedom of the sea.
As Columbus resumed his exploration of the southern coast of Cuba, he arrived at the massive incursion known as the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs). Always persuaded that he was on the verge of reaching India, he suspected that he had located—at last!—a passage from Juana to the mainland. The navigator in him eventually realized that he was in fact exploring a spacious gulf, as he later described to Bernáldez, “on the edge of the sea, close by a great grove of palms that seemed to reach the sky” shielding two gushing springs. “The water was so cold and of such goodness and so sweet that no better could be found in the world.” Never had he sounded more charmed by his surroundings. For once Columbus gave himself up to rapt contemplation of the vistas before him.
Departing the bay, Columbus led his fleet past Cayo Piedras and the Gulf of Cazones. All at once, he told Bernáldez, the ships “entered a white sea, as white as milk, and as thick as the water in which tanners treat their skins.” Then they