Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [156]
Even as Ojeda explored Venezuela, others were challenging Columbus and outdoing his exploits. There seemed to be endless new worlds to discover, conquer, and exploit. In May 1499, Peralonso Niño, who had sailed with Columbus on the first voyage, mounted his own expedition in search of the margaritas—pearls—of Venezuela. He navigated the Atlantic with reasonable efficiency for both the outbound and inbound voyages, returning to Spain with a king’s ransom in pearls. Charged with cheating the Sovereigns of their share of the bounty, he was arrested and his property seized. He died before his trial concluded.
Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, who had sailed with Columbus on the first and second voyages, arrived at the northern boundary of Brazil on January 26, 1500. Pinzón disembarked on the magnificently desolate beach now known as Praia do Paraíso, in the present-day state of Pernambuco. He returned to Spain on June 23, 1500, having lost many men on the voyage, and taking many slaves to replace them.
Pinzón was followed by the Spanish navigator Diego de Lepe, on a copycat mission. He, too, reached Brazil, off-limits to Spain, according to the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas.
At about the same time, Rodrigo de Bastidas, a wellborn notary from Seville, still in his twenties, sailed with two ships, San Antón and Santa María de Gracía. He was accompanied by Columbus’s mapmaker, Juan de la Cosa, and Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who was later celebrated as the first European to glimpse the Pacific Ocean. After cruising along the coast of South America, and visiting Panama’s coast, Bastidas was forced to head north to Hispaniola to repair his shipworn fleet. Shipwrecked off the coast of Xaraguá, he was charged with trading with Indians without permission and sent back to Spain for trial. Acquitted, he later became known as the “Noblest Conquistador” in recognition of the respect he accorded the Indians, who were, in any case, rapidly dying out.
Each of these expeditions both validated and threatened Columbus’s voyages of exploration. They demonstrated that it was not so difficult, after all, to sail west from Spain or Portugal across the Atlantic and, thanks to the Gulf Stream and the trade winds, land somewhere in the Americas. Locating a specific island, in this era of primitive navigation, was next to impossible, as even the Admiral of the Ocean Sea learned. With all its promise and challenges, the enterprise he had begun gradually overtook him, like the giant tsunami, irresistible and all-encompassing.
On his voyage, Ojeda brought along a forty-five-year-old Florentine named Amerigo Vespucci, the most enigmatic explorer of his era. By writing or inspiring a letter about a mythical “first voyage” of 1497 preceding his actual debut as an explorer, Vespucci guaranteed himself a controversial reputation. Las Casas, for instance, held him responsible for giving the impression that “Amerigo alone, with no other and before anyone else, had discovered it”—the mainland that came to be known, for no good reason, as America. As a result of Amerigo’s “very great fraud,” Las Casas acidly observed, “it is apparent then how much injustice was done to the admiral Christopher Columbus.” Attempting to right the balance, the chronicler noted, “It was more his due that the mainland be called Columbus, de Colón, or Colombo, after the man who discovered it, or Tierra Santa or Tierra de Gracia, which he himself named it, and not America after