Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [195]
The empty days passed. Where was Fieschi? He should have returned by this time. What if he had perished at sea? What if Méndez had perished? What if Fieschi and Méndez had both perished? Dependent for the moment on the Indians for survival, the forgotten castaways on Jamaica lost all hope of rescue.
Sequestered on his wrecked ship, an apt symbol of his mind and body, the Admiral afforded the men scant confidence. He could hardly get out of bed, much less endure the hardships of a canoe voyage to Hispaniola. He was broken in body, and damaged in spirit, preparing to make his final voyage, from which there would be no return. He had demonstrated that the world was a more varied and richer place than any in Christendom had suspected, but now he confronted the limits of mortality.
In July, he composed an epistle to the Sovereigns laying bare his regret, self-pity, and recrimination. “I cannot recall Hispaniola, Paria, and the other lands without crying,” he wrote of his miscarried adventures. “I used to believe that their example could serve for these others; on the contrary, they are in a depressed state: though they are not dying, their illness is incurable and prolonged. Let them who reduced them to this state come forward with the remedy, if he can or knows how. Everyone is a master at destruction,” except himself, of course. “Those who left the Indies, shirking work and speaking of the Indies and me, later returned with appointments; the same will now happen with Veragua.” He had seen it all coming, and had tried to govern “in your royal name. You accepted that,” he forcefully reminded them at this great distance, “granting it with privileges and by agreement, with seal and oath; you named me Viceroy, Admiral, and Governor General of all, and you assigned me a boundary 100 leagues from the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, with a line running from pole to pole, and over all that I might discover later you gave me full powers.”
Now they, or those around them, were stripping him of those powers, despite his accomplishments. “Seven years ago I was at your royal court,” he said, at a time when “all who heard of this undertaking agreed it was foolishness.” He had given them new lands, new riches, and a new world. But they had rewarded him by ending his monopoly, creating an absurd state of affairs. “Now even tailors want to make discoveries,” he groused. “One is led to believe they go to make clothes; they are given permission and make a profit, greatly prejudicing my honor and severely damaging the economy.” Columbus believed he deserved to be treated more respectfully, and generously, than a merchant. The lands he discovered “are vaster and richer than any other in Christendom,” and he had been the one who placed them “under your royal and eminent rule, and in a position to render tremendous profits.” On the beach at Jamaica, he relived the trauma of his confinement for the benefit of the Sovereigns, for whom he had arranged to receive “tremendous profits” from ships that were “victorious and with great news of gold,” while he, their Admiral, “full of faith and joy,” was suddenly, without warning, “arrested, and thrown in a ship with two of my brothers, brought in irons, naked and mistreated”—here he was stretching a point, for he had insisted in keeping the chains when his captors wished to remove them—“without being summoned or charged by the law.”
He gave vent to the roaring in his head:
Who would believe that a poor foreigner could rebel under such circumstances against Your Highnesses without cause or the aid of another prince, alone in the world,