Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [178]
Bartholomew attempted to learn more about the region’s resources. But his inexperienced interpreter, a native of Hispaniola, failed to comprehend the local language. At least the Indians took pleasure in the gifts from the visitors from afar, and repaid the hospitality the following day, when “more than two hundred others came to the same spot, bringing food of various kinds: chickens that were better-tasting than ours, geese, roast fish, red and white beans resembling kidney beans, and other commodities.” The gifts echoed the land’s abundance, its pumas, stags, and roe deer patrolling the hills, and its waters teeming with fish.
The Admiral led the fleet from the Honduran coast in an ordeal of beating to windward. Ferdinand reported that “it took them seventy days of sailing to make the sixty leagues from Point Caxinas to that Cape, now tacking toward the sea and again toward land, often gaining with the wind and as often losing, according to whether the wind was strong or weak when they came about.”
Columbus recalled the passage as a prolonged test of both his maritime skills and his sanity. “I found myself going against the wind and terrible contrary current. Against them I struggled for sixty days, after which I barely managed to cover a little over seventy leagues. In all this time I did not enter any port, nor could I, nor did the storm from heaven leave me; rain, tremendous thunder and lightning came continuously so that it seemed like the end of the world.” More than ever, he believed he was traversing a biblical universe of primordial awe. He took his trial at sea personally; the elements became mortal enemies, determined to claim the lives of everyone on board his ships. His suffering, coupled with piety, validated his discoveries.
For eighty-eight days the frightening storm did not leave me, to the point that while at sea I saw neither sun nor stars to act as a guide; my ships were devastated, sails torn away, anchor, rigging, and cables lost, as were the boats and much of the provisions; the men were sick to death, all of them contrite, many vowing to devote themselves to religious life, and none neglected to make vows and promise to undertake pilgrimages. Many times they reached the point of making confessions to each other.
Other storms had been experienced, but none ever lasted as long or had been as frightening. Many whom we considered courageous lost all hope time and again.
In the midst of the storm, facing a near-death experience, he was most concerned about the fate of at least one member of the fleet:
Anxiety for my son, who was with me, wrung at my heart, the more so since I saw him so young, thirteen, struggling so long with such travails. Our Lord gave him such courage that he inspired the others, and he worked as if he had been sailing for fifty years. It was he who consoled me. I had taken ill, and at various times I reached the point of death; from a small cabin that I had ordered built on deck I was directing the course. My brother was in the worst and most dangerous ship. My anxiety was actually greater, because I had brought him with me against his will. Another sorrow lacerated the heart in my breast, and that was for my son Don Diego, whom I had left in Spain, almost an orphan.
On September 12, the fleet arrived at a cape, which Columbus named Gracias á Dios after the gratitude