Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [138]
The massive displacement of water snapped the cable securing La Vaqueños’s anchor, carrying her to an impossible height. Riding “atop the swell,” Columbus marveled that he had never experienced anything approaching this wild and potentially disastrous ride. According to Las Casas, Columbus declared that “if they escaped from here, they could tell stories about how they escaped from the Dragon’s Mouth. And because of this, the name stuck, and with good reason.” It was one of the few names that did; Las Casas, whose life span overlapped that of Columbus, noted that Columbus generally wrote on water. “Of all the names that he gave to islands and capes of the mainland, which he knew as Isla de Gracia, none remain or are known today except the island of Trinidad, the Dragon’s Mouth, the Testigos, and Margarita.”
As the wave passed, the ship plummeted toward the ocean floor, coming so close that the men could glimpse the bottom. And then the turmoil ended. He had survived his encounter with the Dragon’s Mouth. Months later, the memory of the traumatic event still shook him. “Even today,” he later informed Ferdinand and Isabella, “I have fear in my body, for it could have capsized the ship when it came under her.”
The monstrous surge was most likely a tidal wave, or tsunami, caused by a significant undersea earthquake: 7.5 magnitude or greater. A tsunami occurs when the earth’s crust, or tectonic plate, below the ocean shifts abruptly and vertically dislocates water. The sudden change generates giant, fastmoving waves that propagate in all directions.
Narrowly escaping disaster, Columbus sailed on until he made landfall on Venezuela’s Paria Peninsula, August 5, 1498. He sent men to find sweet water, which they soon did. “Since this was a mountainous area,” he reasoned, “I thought that farther on, to the west, the land would be flatter for that very reason, possibly more populated.” Or so he hoped. He raised anchor and skirted the coastline “to the low edge of this mountain and anchored in a river.”
All at once, “many people came and told me they called this land Paria, and farther west there were still more people.” There is some doubt about when Columbus himself went ashore. His young page, Andrés de Corral, later testified that the Admiral’s inflamed eyes confined him aboard ship. In this version, one of the fleet’s captains, Pedro de Terreros, took possession on behalf of the Admiral, and raised a large cross to mark the occasion. Another captain, Hernán Pérez, claimed that he arrived first on the mainland. Others agreed that Columbus did not go ashore at this time.
Later, said Pérez, “the Admiral with about fifty men landed in the country of Paria and took a sword in one hand and a banner in the other, saying that in the name of Their Highnesses, he took possession of the province.” Once ashore, he carefully observed the inhabitants who greeted him. “They are the color of all the others in the Indies; some of them wear their hair very long, others like us, but none have cut it as in Spain and the other lands. They are of very fair stature, and all well grown.” And, he said, “they wear their genital member tied and covered, and the women all go naked as their mothers bore them.”
Taking four Indians as hostage guides, Columbus sailed west for another eight leagues, past a point that he named Punta del Aguja, where the enthralling panoramas (“the prettiest in the world,” he enthused) convinced him to drop anchor once more, and go ashore and “see these people.” As soon as they saw him approach, they jumped into their canoes, paddled furiously to his ship, and, as he remembered it, “beseeched me, in the name of their king, to go ashore.”
Columbus briefly