Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [191]
The tiny fleet held its course until returning to Puerto Bello, where “we had to abandon Vizcaína because she was drawing much water and because her planking was completely riddled by shipworms.” Retracing the fleet’s route, the remaining ships, La Capitana and Bermuda, bypassed Retrete, and the Archipelago of Las Mulatas—130 miles east of Puerto Bello—to sail toward a mottled promontory that Columbus called Marmóreo, Portuguese for “marbled.”
Propelled by the trades, excused from misfortune for the moment, Columbus’s diminished fleet reached Cape Tiburón, Colombia, on May 1, and stood northward, “with winds and currents easterly, always endeavoring to sail as close to the wind as possible.” Again, the pilots tried to tell the volatile Admiral “that we had passed eastward of the Caribbee Islands, but the Admiral feared he would not be able to fetch Hispaniola.” On May 10, a Wednesday, they espied tiny islands swarming with turtles—“as was all the sea thereabout, so that it seemed to be full of little rocks”—and named them Las Tortugas, now the Cayman Islands, which they soon put to stern.
May 13 found Columbus approaching Cuba in a desperate state. Ferdinand catalogued their miseries: “As we lay here at anchor, ten leagues from Cuba, suffering greatly from hunger because we had nothing to eat but biscuit and a little oil and vinegar, and exhausted by working three pumps day and night to keep the vessels afloat (for they were ready to sink from the holes made by the shipworms), there came on at night a great storm in which Bermuda, being unable to ride it out, fouled us and broke our stem”—the foremost part of the hull—“nor did she get off whole, but smashed her stern into the helm.” In the midst of wind and rain lashing the masts, sail, and rigging, while the ships rode heaving seas, the men managed to separate the two ships before they did more damage.
The storm had strained the cables running to the anchors to the limit. In the morning, the crew found only a single strand intact. If the storm had lasted just an hour longer, the men estimated, that strand would have parted, and the hull would have smashed into the rocks. But the ship held on by this slender thread. “It pleased God to deliver us then,” Ferdinand gratefully noted.
Throughout the storm, Columbus appeared to be in command of his faculties, but a letter that he wrote weeks later confirmed his pilots’ misgivings. He was half-mad, half-blind, and hearing voices. His biblically inspired geography insisted that he had, in his words, “reached the region of Mango, near Cathay.” Somehow he would have to find Hispaniola from that illusory location.
He fought on. If only he could reach a more northerly latitude, he could catch the trades to Spain and safety, but, he admitted, “the rough sea had the upper hand, and I had to turn back without sail. I threw out anchor at an island where I lost three anchors at a single stroke, and at midnight, when it seemed the world was about to disappear, the cables of the other ship gave way and it bore down on me, so that it was a wonder that we were not dashed into splinters; it was the anchor and the way it held that, after God, saved me.”
When the weather lifted slightly, the fragile fleet returned to the open sea, but, Columbus wailed, “with all the rigging lost, the ships more riddled with shipworms than a honeycomb, and the crew so frightened and depressed, I got a little farther than I had before.” Foul weather forced him to return to another harbor in the island he had just left—it is difficult to specify which island, because Columbus thought he was approaching China—where he languished for eight anxiety-ridden days, at last reaching Jamaica by the end of June, “always with contrary winds and with the ships in worse condition than ever.” The vessels took on water so quickly that even with three pumps operating, the crew could not prevent the water from