Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [16]
If Martín Alonso Pinzón took exception to this strategy, or suffered doubts about the wisdom of their navigational choices, Columbus did not record it. The challenge lent a sense of drama to a voyage that was in danger of losing its raison d’être, and it offered a chance to prove his mettle. He gravitated toward the crisis as if it were a manifestation of divine will. He had made a career thus far out of proving others wrong, not because he had better theories or answers, but because he was more resilient. He was confident that he could put the renegade captain in his place. But first, Columbus had to catch him.
In fact, he faced challenges from all three Pinzón brothers.
The first was Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, a part owner of both Niña and Pinta, both caravels—ships combining Western rigging with an Eastern, or lateen, sail for better maneuverability. Columbus’s flagship, Santa María, was known simply by the generic term nao; it was round, stable, broad-beamed, and most likely built according to time-honored methods by Basque shipwrights. Juan de la Cosa, who also served as the ship’s master, owned her. And the second brother was Francisco Martín Pinzón, who served as captain of Niña.
So Columbus was surrounded by Pinzón brothers, whose support had been critical in his overcoming skepticism for the voyage from the seamen of Palos, from which the fleet had sailed, and from nearby Huelva and Moguer. To the practical seamen, Columbus appeared as a wild-eyed dreamer and foreigner who spoke of crossing a sea that no one to their knowledge had succeeded in crossing before—Mar Tenebroso, it was sometimes called, “Dark Sea,” practically synonymous with death itself—to reach fantastic kingdoms such as China and Japan that might not exist, except in the minds of dreamers and scholars, and now Columbus was asking them to trust him with their lives in his unlikely quest. He met with stiff resistance, until Martín Alonso Pinzón urged them to join with these words: “Friends, come away with us on this voyage. You are living here in misery. Come with us on this voyage, and to my certain knowledge we shall find houses roofed with gold and all of you will return prosperous and happy.” Pinzón’s words and reputation and example won the seamen over to Columbus’s side. “It was because of this assurance of prosperity and the general trust in him that so many agreed to go with him,” said one of his listeners.
Actually, he had done even more than that for Columbus. According to his son, Arias Pérez Pinzón, his father happened to have a friend, a cosmographer, or celestial mapmaker, who worked in the Vatican Library and who passed on a copy of a chart showing that one could sail westward across the Atlantic to Japan. (Without knowledge of the New World and the Pacific Ocean, such speculation ran rampant.) Martín Alonso, his son said, decided to mount a voyage of his own, but met with rebuffs in Portugal and Spain. In search of safe haven, spiritual support, and scholarly advice, Columbus retreated to the Monasterio de Santa María de la Rábida, a dramatically situated Franciscan friary in the town of Palos de la Frontera. There he encountered Martín Alonso Pinzón, who displayed a copy of the chart. Columbus was on the verge of abandoning Spain for France in his search for backing, but once equipped with this crucial document, he was finally able to win the support of the Spanish Sovereigns.
So the sudden, unexplained disappearance of Martín Alonso Pinzón on November 22 signified more than an ordinary