Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [188]
Although Columbus had repeatedly shown masterful command of the Atlantic, resulting in swift, safe crossings, the ships seemed to be in constant peril from the start, and the men had to load and then unload the ballast to lighten the ships sufficiently to skim pass the shifting sandbars. Even Ferdinand, who placed all his trust in his father’s seamanship, began to have doubts. When “we reached the open coast,” he recalled, “a league from the mouth of the river, and were about to depart, God put it into the Admiral’s mind to send the flagship’s boat ashore to take on a supply of water . . . whereby the boat was lost but many men were saved both on land and sea.” What could his father have been thinking?
After this lapse in judgment, things were never the same.
“When the Indians and the Quibián saw that the caravels had sailed,” Ferdinand wrote, “and we could not help the men who remained behind, they attacked the Christian town at the very time the ship’s boat was approaching the shore. The dense woods allowed the Indians to creep up unobserved to within fifty feet of the huts; they attacked with loud cries, hurling darts at every Christian they saw.” Stunned, Columbus’s men fought back for their lives, led by Bartholomew, who had increasingly filled the leadership void left by his infirm brother.
Seizing a lance, the Adelantado, having found new sources of courage, charged the Indians, who retreated into the forest bordering their dwellings. Both sides hurled their darts, or spears, at the other, as if “in a game of jousts,” Ferdinand commented. The Spaniards repelled the Indians “by the edge of the sword and by a dog who pursued them furiously.” The toll: “one Christian dead and seven wounded, one being the Adelantado, who received a dart wound in the chest.” But he would survive.
Ferdinand, close to the action, appeared satisfied with the outcome, but Las Casas sputtered with rage as he considered this latest example of Spanish barbarism: “As ever, it is the poor naked and defenseless Indians who come off the worse while the Spaniards are free to butcher them with their swords, lopping off their legs and arms, ripping open their bellies, and decapitating them, and then setting their dogs on them to hunt them down and tear them to shreds.” Las Casas might have been grimly satisfied to note that the Indian darts later claimed many Spanish victims attempting to flee the warriors in their canoes. One of the survivors, a cooper from Seville named Juan de Noya, escaped by swimming underwater to the riverbank, running to safety in the jungle, and eventually reaching the tiny European settlement, where he warned the others about the attack and casualties. “At this news, our men were beside themselves with fear,” said Ferdinand. They were vastly outnumbered, many of their comrades were dead, and “the Admiral was at sea without a boat and unable to send them aid.”
They had no choice but to flee the settlement before they, too, were killed. “They would have done this, too, in a disorderly, mutinous fashion, if not prevented by the closing of a river through the onset of bad weather.” They could not launch the caravel set aside for them, and “they could not even send a boat to inform the Admiral of what happened because the sea broke so heavily over the bar.” They were stranded, castaways in paradise. The “India” that Columbus had sought so eagerly, and explored so thoroughly, had ensnared him. With no seaworthy ship, and no prospect of rescue, they were bound to perish in utter obscurity. In desperation, they resorted to mutiny, “crowding into the ship with the intention of making their way out into the open sea, only to find their way blocked by a sandbank.” The rough, buffeting seas prevented their sending a vessel to Columbus with a message.
The Admiral was also imperiled, anchored off an extremely rocky coast, without a ship’s boat, and with his force decimated by the Indians. Worse, the