Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [106]
The fleet put in, and a lone Spanish scout, armed with a crossbow, went ashore in search of desperately needed water. During his search, he confronted the spectacle of a man dressed in a white tunic. At first, the scout thought he beheld a friar whom the Admiral had brought along. “Suddenly, from the woods he saw a whole group of about thirty so-clothed men coming,” Peter Martyr related. “He then turned around shouting and ran as fast as he could toward the ships. These men dressed in tunics clapped their hands at him and attempted to persuade him with all means not to be so fearful, but he kept running.” Stranger still, the men appeared to have complexions as light as those of the Spanish. From what tribe had they come? Were they lost Europeans? Emissaries of the legendary Prester John? And if so, had Columbus’s fleet finally reached the Indies?
Astonished by the apparition, Columbus sent a delegation “to see if they could talk with these people, for according to the crossbowman, they came not to do any harm but to speak with us.” They found no one, “which displeased me much because I wanted to speak with them since I had traversed so many lands without seeing people or villages.” Attempting to blaze a trail inland to the men, the Spanish “got themselves so entangled that they hardly made a mile,” let alone forty. They returned to the ships, exhausted and empty-handed.
Under way once again, the fleet proceeded ten leagues to the west, past “marsh and mire,” as Ferdinand put it, and within hailing distance of huts onshore. More canoes approached Columbus’s ships, with Indians bearing water and food, which the sailors were in no position to refuse. They paid in trinkets, over the protests of their Indian benefactors, who wanted nothing in return.
Columbus snatched one of the Indians, “telling him and the other Indians through an interpreter that he”—the Indian hostage—“would be released as soon as he had shown him the way and given him other information about that region.” The information Columbus received was exactly what he did not want to hear: Cuba, said the Indian, was an island, which meant that the fleet had not reached the outskirts of the Indies. Ferdinand is silent on his father’s reaction to this news, but the Admiral’s sense of bewilderment can be imagined, and it was compounded by the fleet’s having wandered into a dangerously shallow channel. In the effort to move to a deeper waterway, Columbus “had to kedge it with cables over a sandbank less than a fathom deep but two ship lengths in size.” Kedging meant dragging the ship from one small anchor to another.
The ship emerged at night into a sea that seemed to be covered from one end to the other with turtles. (Peter Martyr said the ships “had to slow down” just to get past them all.) At daybreak, cormorants took wing, “so numerous that they darkened the sun.” And the next day, “so many butterflies flew about the ships that they darkened the air till afternoon, when a heavy rain squall blew them off.”
Suffering from exhaustion and malnutrition, Columbus headed back to the safety of La Isabela after nearly three months’ absence. The prospect of security turned to peril when the fleet sailed into a channel that quickly narrowed. Before he could react, the ships were trapped in a bottleneck. As his men fought to overcome panic, Columbus, marshaling his inner resources, never appeared more confident than he did at this impasse. “He shrewdly put on a cheerful countenance,” Ferdinand noted. In fact, he loudly praised God for making him come by