Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [107]
“All these changes and the appearance of the sea caused great dread among the sailors, since they had never seen or experienced anything of the kind before and accordingly believed themselves to be irretrievably doomed,” said Las Casas. They anxiously traversed this sea, only to come to another, black as ink and five fathoms deep, and then, to Columbus’s great relief, the fleet made Cuba, where he turned east, negotiating the headwinds and in search of fresh water, safe harbor, and a brief respite from the toil of discovery.
The ships had taken a beating. Their keels had been battered and torn from repeated contact with the bottom. Their ropes and sails had rotted away. The food, sodden with seawater and fouled with vermin, had spoiled. As if these troubles were not enough, while Columbus was writing in his journal on June 30, he felt his ship run aground “with such force that they could not get her off by the stern with the anchors or by any other means; however, with God’s aid, they managed to pull her off by the prow, though she suffered considerable damage from the shock of the grounding.” Columbus found wind to sail away from the near disaster with as much speed as he could muster “through a sea that was always white and two fathoms deep,” and he kept going, enduring every evening at sunset “violent rainstorms which wore the men out,” said Las Casas, who continued, “The Admiral was in a state of extreme anxiety.”
Even Las Casas pitied Columbus at this point, evoking “the unparalleled suffering of the admiral on these voyages of discovery.” Reviewing the misfortunes plaguing the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the chronicler rose to a histrionic pitch, declaring, “His life was one long martyrdom, something which will lead others . . . to conclude that there is little to be gained and little rest to be enjoyed in this world for those who are not forever conferring with God.” Las Casas was unique in considering Columbus impious; from another perspective, the Admiral’s misfortunes, and those he caused others, could be traced to his tightly held spiritual convictions, which were both his inspiration and his undoing.
As if they were biblical plagues, Las Casas listed the afflictions: the “sudden squall that placed him in imminent and deadly danger” by “thrusting the neck of his vessel down beneath the waves so that it seemed that it was only by the grace of God that he was able to take in the sails and hold fast by using the heaviest of anchors.” That crisis was followed by “the great quantity of water the ship took on board,” the exhausted crew, and the lack of food, supplemented only by “the odd fish they managed to catch.” Columbus’s distress was made all the worse by his oppressive sense of responsibility for the others and for himself. No wonder that he felt moved to cry out to Ferdinand and Isabella: “Not a day goes by that I am not faced with the prospect of the certain death of us all.”
The Admiral returned, Ferdinand said, as if under his breath, to the “island of Cuba.” Whether island or peninsula, “the air was fragrant with the sweet scent of flowers.” Columbus’s men devoured fowl they thought resembled pigeons but were larger and tastier and which exhaled an aromatic odor. When their gullets were opened, they revealed partly digested bouquets of flowers.
While resting and overseeing repairs to the ships, Columbus went ashore to attend Mass on the beach; it was now July 7. There he was approached by an “eighty year old man,” said Peter Martyr, relying on Columbus, “a leader