Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [197]
As negotiations concluded, the mutiny lost some of its vehemence. Columbus had “scoured the islands to procure canoes” to prevent the Indians from using them. Porras and his men commandeered the canoes, and “they set out in them as gaily as if they were embarking from a harbor in Castile.” As they began to pull away, many others, “not mutineers but . . . desperate at the thought of being abandoned there by the greatest and healthiest part of the company also piled into the canoes”—much to the distress of the few remaining loyalists and of the sick, who with good reason believed they were “doomed to remain there.” The humiliating sight of nearly all of the men abandoning the Admiral who had brought them on this adventure remained with Ferdinand, who sadly noted, “If all had been in good health, I doubt that twenty of those people would have stayed with the Admiral.” Their morale lower than ever, those who stayed behind beheld the Admiral emerge unsteadily from his cabin to comfort and reassure his men as best he could. In fact, there was little consolation he could offer while Francisco Porras led the canoes laden with deserters to the same location on Jamaica’s easternmost shore from which Méndez and Fieschi had set out on their rescue mission.
Ferdinand painted an ugly picture of the deserters preparing to depart for Hispaniola: “Wherever they called, they inflicted outrages on the Indians, robbing their food and other possessions; they told the Indians to collect their pay from the Admiral and authorized them to kill him if he would not pay.” To feed the Indians’ disdain, Porras’s renegades explained that all the other Christians hated Columbus, that Columbus was the author of “all the misery of the Indians on Hispaniola,” and, if they failed to kill Columbus, he would “inflict the same suffering on them.”
Setting out from the Jamaican coast, they made uncertain progress toward their goal. After they had traversed four leagues, “the wind turned contrary,” and the men feared the rolling seas would swamp their overloaded craft. Before long, water was coming over the gunwales, and they resorted to tossing everything overboard, with the exception of their weapons and food for the return journey to the Jamaican coast from which they had departed. When the wind gained in strength, terrifying the renegades, they decided their only course of action was to kill the Indians and toss them overboard, as if they were excess supplies. Once they started killing Indians, the others jumped overboard, swimming away from the canoes until fatigue overcame them. In desperation, they returned to the canoes, holding on to the gunwales in a death grip, until the mutineers hacked off their hands.
Ferdinand acidly commented on the “Christians’” behavior: “They killed eighteen this way, sparing only a few needed to steer the canoes; this was the Indians’ reward for listening to their false promises and their pleas for aid.”
The renegades returned to the marshy Jamaican shore, where they fell to arguing about what to do next. Some of the men aimed to flee to Cuba, thinking “the easterly currents and winds” would carry them to their destination; once in Cuba, they assumed it would be an “easy jump” to Hispaniola, without realizing that many miles separated the two islands. (Ferdinand recognized that Cuba was an island, even if his father clung to the belief that it was a promontory extending eastward from the “Indian” mainland.) Other renegades wanted to return to the relative safety of the wrecked ships they had recently abandoned. They could either make peace with the Admiral or attempt to confiscate his weapons. A third group advocated waiting to try for better