Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [134]
The exploration squadron under his command consisted of three ships: Santa María, the flagship; El Correo (“the Courier”), a caravel owned by Columbus and his Sovereigns; and La Vaqueños, thought to be leased to the expedition by a widow in Palos, Spain. Columbus planned to sail along a southerly course to the Cape Verde Islands, an archipelago often islets off the coast of West Africa. Known, if not well understood, since antiquity, they had been rediscovered by António de Noli of Genoa, who had sailed for Prince Henry the Navigator. King Alfonso V of Portugal later appointed António de Noli as the first governor of Cape Verde.
The Cape Verde Islands proved drab and bereft of the luxurious vegetation of other landmasses. Columbus declared the name “absolutely false . . . because they are so arid that I saw nothing green on them.”
Heading into uncharted waters, he planned to go farther south than ever before, in the belief that the closer to the equator he came, the more valuable his discoveries would be. This notion circulated among cosmographers such as Jaime Ferrer, who had advised Columbus that near the equator “great and precious things such as gems and gold and spicery and drugs” could be found. According to Ferrer, Indians, Arabs, and Ethiopians agreed “the majority of precious things come from a very hot region where the inhabitants are black or tan.” Therefore, wherever Columbus found such people he would find the precious items he sought.
He set sail at the height of midsummer, June 21, bound for Hierro, on the western edge of the Canary Islands, where during the brief hours of darkness he and his two accompanying vessels bade farewell to the supply fleet bound for Hispaniola. He dropped anchor in a bay near barren Boa Vista—the name roughly equivalent to “land ahoy!” in Portuguese—an island known for its leper colony. The Portuguese notary-in-charge, Rodrigo Alonso, told the Admiral that lepers came to Boa Vista in the belief that eating the meat of turtles and washing in their blood cured the affliction. The islanders caught the turtles by night, first by looking for their tracks with the help of lantern light. When they found one of the sleeping creatures, they flipped it onto its back, rendering it helpless, and then they turned over the next, and the next after that, before butchering the lot.
On Saturday, June 30, 1498, Columbus set sail for nearby São Tiago, the largest of all the islands in Cape Verde. Fog accumulated even in the intense heat, obscuring the sun by day and stars by night. Despite this obstacle, the little fleet departed on a southerly course on July 4, with the Admiral determined to test the boundaries of the recently modified Treaty of Tordesillas. He was, finally, bound for the Indies.
In search of a shortcut, as always, he sailed as far south as he dared, to the latitude of Sierra Leone, 8º30’ north of the equator, before heading west to the island of Hispaniola. On Friday, July 13, Columbus’s fleet entered a convergence zone where winds from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres flow together. The wind died, the ocean’s surface became ominously flat, and the temperature shot up. They had arrived at the Doldrums, a region that few Europeans, Columbus included, had ever explored, let alone survived.
“I entered a zone of heat so high and intense that I believed that the ships and crews would be burnt up,” he confided. “The heat came so unexpectedly and so out of measure that not a single man dared go below deck to salvage barrels of drink and victuals.” Becalmed, afflicted by melancholia, Columbus reeled with dread. In the “intense heat,” said Las Casas, “he feared that the ships would burn and the men perish.” The temperature was already