Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [17]
For his part, Martín Alonso Pinzón believed he was just as responsible for the voyage as Columbus. Yet it was Columbus, not Pinzón, who had negotiated the terms of the voyage with Ferdinand and Isabella, including the detailed and explicit series of capitulations, or agreements, about his obligations and entitlements. Lacking comparable credentials, Pinzón behaved as though he had been forced into a partnership with a hotheaded Genoese mystic named Christopher Columbus who was out to claim the glory for himself, if he did not get them all killed in encounters with storms, sea monsters, reefs, or starvation.
So far, he had managed an unprecedented feat in the history of exploration, sailing across the Atlantic without loss of life. In contrast, Martín Alonso Pinzón became ever more erratic.
“This night Martín Alonso followed the course to the East,” Columbus recorded on November 22 as he headed toward an island called Vaneque, lured by the promise of gold, or so the Indians said. Columbus passed the night sailing toward the island, and then, to his surprise, it seemed that Pinzón had changed course and was “coming toward him; and the night was very clear and the light wind favorable for coming to him, had he so wished.” Through weary eyes, the Admiral gradually realized that he had been mistaken; perhaps Pinzón had maneuvered toward the flagship but had changed his mind. The mystery of his motives and plans bedeviled Columbus as he shaped a course for the island he called Bohío, about which the Indians conveyed a familiar set of rumors concerning “people who had one eye in the forehead” and fearsome cannibals. When the Indians realized the course chosen by Columbus would lead to Bohío, he wrote, “they were speechless.” Columbus did not dismiss the rumors of cannibals entirely, remarking that he believed “there is something in this.” Bohío would have to wait.
In the predawn darkness of Sunday, November 25, Columbus went ashore at Cayo Moa Grande, located on Cuba’s northeastern coast. It was unusual to begin an expedition on the Lord’s Day, but he was operating on an instinct “that there should be a good river there.” His hunch seemed to pay off when he “went to the river and saw some stones shining in it, with some veins in them of the color of gold”—actually, they were iron pyrites, or fool’s gold—but Columbus convinced himself that he had discovered the genuine article. “He ordered some of these stones to be collected to bring to the Sovereigns.”
This investigation quickly led him to something less precious than gold, but of greater practical value: wood to repair and strengthen the ships. “Being there, the ship’s boys sang out that they saw pine trees; he looked toward the sierra and saw many great and such marvelous ones, that he could not exaggerate their height and straightness, like spindles, thick and elongated, when he realized that ships could be had, and planks without number, and masts for the best ships of Spain. He saw oaks and arbutus” or, rather, trees closely resembling them, “and a good river, and the means to build sawmills. He saw on the beach many other stones of the color of iron, and others that some said were from silver mines; all of which the river brought down. There he cut a lateen-yard and mast for the mizzen of the caravel Niña.” The neighboring cape was so capacious that “100 ships could lie without any cable or anchors.” He envisioned a large, productive shipyard busily engaged in harvesting sturdy pine trees to construct