Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [172]
Having paid their respects, the fleet called at Grand Canary on May 20, and began taking on “water and wood for the voyage” for the next four days, according to Columbus’s custom. “The next night we set course for the Indies,” said Ferdinand. Although ailing, Columbus performed a navigational marvel on this crossing by catching the trade winds, or easterlies. By the morning of June 15, “with a rather rough sea and wind,” they had arrived at Martinique, in the Caribbean Sea north of Trinidad, having crossed the Atlantic in only twenty days, a time frame that even a modern-day sailor would be hard-pressed to equal. If proof was needed that Columbus had not lost his navigational skill and weather eye, this feat surely provided it.
For all his skill, Columbus could not have expected to arrive precisely at this tiny speck, a little over four hundred square miles of sand and scrub at 14°40΄ 0˝ N, 61°0΄0˝ W. As his previous crossings had demonstrated, sailing west from the Canaries, with a push from the easterlies above and from the Gulf Stream below, he was bound to arrive somewhere in the Americas. But locating a specific port or island was highly unlikely. Except for a storm, little occurred in the open ocean that would affect a ship’s course, but coastal navigation was a different story, hit or miss. So it was that he discovered the diminutive island by chance.
On arrival, the men attended to chores, taking on water and wood, and washing their fetid clothing. On Saturday, they sailed the ten leagues to the island of Dominica. “Till I reached there I had as good weather as I could have wished for,” the Admiral noted some months and many disasters later, “but on the night of my arrival there was a great storm, and I have been dogged by bad weather ever since.” For a novice sailor like Las Casas, the misery of rolling and pitching in the ocean’s vastness was even greater, and it was all that he and his shipmates could do to endure the traumatic crossing. “The crew was so worn down, shaken, ill and overcome by such bitterness that they wanted to die rather than to live, seeing how the four elements working against them were cruelly torturing them,” he complained, having had a taste of the peril and misery that Columbus and his veteran crew members had endured for years at sea.
Outlasting the storms, Columbus reached Puerto Rico and finally Santo Domingo in Hispaniola. Stripped of his status, he was not supposed to be there at all, having been replaced by Nicolás de Ovando, the new governor and widely known as a Columbus detractor. As Ferdinand carefully explained, Columbus urgently needed to avail himself of Santo Domingo’s safe harbor “to trade one of his ships for another because she was a crank and a dull sailor; not only was she slow but could not load sails without bringing the side of the ship almost under water.” If not for the need to replace the ship, said Ferdinand, Columbus would have been on his way to “reconnoiter the coast of Paria and cruise down it until he came to the strait” and so on his way to India, at last. (The discovery of the rumored strait, several thousand miles to the south, would have to wait for another eighteen years, until 1520, when Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese sailing for Spain, battling mutinies and rivals in a manner that Columbus would have recognized, finally reached it.)
Instead, Ferdinand said, Columbus sailed directly into a confrontation with Nicolás de Ovando, “the Knight Commander of Lares, governor of the island, who had been sent by the Catholic Sovereigns to hold an inquest into Bobadilla’s administration,