Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [182]
The sight of hundreds of Indians gathering on the shore, wearing gold pendants in their ears and noses, proved unnerving rather than welcoming. By Saturday, November 26, the fleet was under sail again, squeezing into a cramped harbor that the men called Retrete, that is, “closet,” or possibly “toilet,” “because it was so small that it would not hold more than five or six ships” negotiating an entrance barely more than seventy feet wide, “with rocks as sharp as the points of a diamond sticking up on either side.” The vessels negotiating their way through had so little room that a man could easily jump from the deck to the shore.
“In this harbor we stayed nine days, with miserable weather,” Ferdinand mournfully recalled. As before, Indians came to trade, but this time they observed sailors “sneaking ashore from the ships.” The moment they saw the intruders, the Indians returned to their dwellings, as this “greedy and dissolute set of men committed innumerable outrages.” The Indians lost patience, “and some fights occurred between the two sides” as the Indians circled the fleet trapped in the harbor’s confines. Too late, “the Admiral tried to placate them by patience and civility,” without success. To teach them a lesson, or, as Ferdinand put it, “to temper their pride and teach them not to scorn Christians,” Columbus ordered his artillery to fire at a crowd of Indians on an exposed hilltop. The cannonball fell to earth among them, letting them know “that this thunder concealed a thunderbolt.” This time, the show of force worked, and “after that, they hardly dared peep out at us from behind the hills.”
In this incident, Las Casas saw the tragedy and folly of the Enterprise of the Indies, for which he blamed one man: Columbus. “Had these people been treated right from the moment they were discovered in a fashion both loving and just, as natural reason dictates they should have been,” he explained, “and especially if this had been done in a Christian manner, we should have been able to obtain from these people all the gold and riches that they enjoyed in such profusion in exchange for our worthless baubles, and it is clear that there could have reigned between us such peace and love that their conversion to Christ would, as a consequence, have been both easy and certain.” But once again, the Admiral had only made things worse.
Meanwhile, the harbor teemed with “large lizards or crocodiles that came out to sleep ashore and gave out an odor as strong as if all the musk”—popularly known as an aphrodisiac—“ in the world were collected together.” The sight was understandably unsettling, even terrifying. “They are so ravenous and cruel that if they find a man asleep they will drag him into the water to eat him, but they are cowardly and flee when attacked.” The following night, the monsters and their stench returned, as they did each night.
Menaced by man and beast alike, Columbus fled northward on December 5, retracing his route.
“Never was seen more unsettled weather,” Ferdinand insisted. “Now the wind was fair for Veragua; now it whipped about and drove us back to Puerto Bello. And just as we were most hopeful of making port, the wind would change again, sometimes with such terrible thunder and lightning that the men dared not open their eyes and it seemed the ships were sinking and the heavens coming down.” At times, the booming thunder persisted to the point where “we were sure some ship of the fleet was firing signals for help.” Torrential rains soaked the sails and swept the decks. Vicious storms occur regularly in this region, off the coast of Nicaragua, and survival itself was at stake. “All suffered greatly and were in despair, for they could not get even a half hour’s rest, being wet through for days on end, sometimes running one way and sometimes another, struggling with all the elements and dreading them all.” There was much to fear: “The fire