Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [190]
One night, the sailors who slept on deck neglected to secure the hatch cover with chains. Below, the Indians gathered the ship’s ballast, loose stones, into a mound. Balancing precariously on it, they pushed their shoulders against the underside of the hatch, sending the sailors asleep on it sprawling, and quickly, before the other Europeans aboard ship could react, several of their leaders climbed out and leaped to freedom. When they awoke and realized what had happened, the sailors closed the hatch, this time with a chain, and realized they had better not fall asleep again while on watch.
The Indians below deck lost all hope of regaining their freedom. They might drown or suffocate, far from their ancestral lands. In despair, they gathered ropes and, one by one, hanged themselves from the deck beams, “bending their knees because they had not enough headroom to hang themselves properly,” said Ferdinand. By the time they were discovered, it was too late to rescue them.
Ferdinand callously assumed that “their death was no great loss to us of the fleet, but seriously worsened the plight of the men ashore.” He believed that holding the Quibián’s children hostage had kept the cacique at bay, but now that their hostages had killed themselves, the Europeans on land and sea were vulnerable to retaliation by the Indians. The Admiral’s son lamented not the deaths of the Indians but these “misfortunes and vexations, with our lives hanging by the anchor cables, and ourselves completely in the dark on the state of affairs ashore.” Given the way the hardhearted Spaniards treated the innocent captives on their ship, it was hardly surprising that the Indians onshore responded in self-defense.
As the siege continued on land, the Spaniards realized that the men trapped in the makeshift fort had to be rescued, or they would be murdered. A few able-bodied seamen offered to be rowed in the boat—now the sole remaining launch for the entire fleet—that would take them to the bar. Columbus had little choice but to “accept the offer,” and Bermuda’s boat took them to “within a musket shot of land; closer than that they could not come because of the waves that broke on the beach.” Upon reaching this point, Pedro de Ledesma, the pilot from Seville, “boldly leapt overboard and swam across the bar to the settlement.” On arrival, he listened to the men stranded there beg for deliverance from their “hopeless situation; they begged the Admiral to take them aboard, for to leave them behind was to condemn them to death.” Some threatened mutiny; they were prepared to steal a canoe from the Indians and return to the ships that way, if need be, preferring to “risk their lives in this way rather than wait for death at the hands of those cruel butchers, the Indians.”
Considering the pitiful story brought back by Ledesma and the others, together with the threat of mutiny, the Admiral softened a bit, and decided he would grant their pleas, even if it meant “lying off the coast with no possibility of saving them or himself if the weather grew worse.” After eight days “at the mercy of the prow cables,” by which Ferdinand meant that a single anchor stood between the ship and disaster, the weather lifted, and the stranded Europeans began to “transport themselves and their gear over the bar, using their single boat and two large canoes lashed together so as not to overturn.” The transfer took two agonizing days, after which “nothing remained ashore, except the worm-eaten hulk of Gallega.”
Relieved to the point of euphoria, the survivors set sail on April 16, 1503, on an easterly course along the coast. A navigational dispute arose. The pilots, relying on their crude charts, believed that Hispaniola lay to the north, whereas the Columbus brothers “knew it was necessary to sail a good space along the coast before crossing the sea that lies between the mainland and Hispaniola.” Their