Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [201]
And if these words succeeded in calming Ovando sufficiently to spare Columbus death on a distant shore, the Admiral faced the fears of his own men, and had to persuade them all that he had ordered the caravel to depart without them—not as part of a devious plot to put them all at risk, but because it was simply too small to carry them. Either all went, or none.
Ovando’s caravel brought one other item of particular interest: a letter from the absent Méndez. The day after departing from Jamaica, Méndez’s letter began, he and Fieschi enjoyed a cruise through blissfully calm weather, “urging the Indians to paddle as hard as they could with the sticks they use for paddles.” In the heat, the Indians refreshed themselves by jumping into the water, and resuming their place. “By sunset, they had lost sight of land.” At night, half of the Indians continued paddling as the Spaniards aboard the canoes kept a vigil, and by dawn, everyone was exhausted. Even the captains took turns paddling, and with the dawn of the second day, the voyage continued without interruption, with “nothing but water and sky” surrounding them. As the day wore on, the Indians, thirsty from physical labor, depleted the canoes’ water supply. By noon, the sun tormented everyone. The sole respite from debilitating thirst came drop by drop from the captains’ “small water casks.” The trickle proved to be “just enough to sustain them till the cool of the evening.”
The canoes plowed through heavy seas, their diminutive masts and flickering paddles barely visible above the waterline, as their occupants, drenched and exhausted, hoped to raise the little island of Navassa, about eight leagues distant. Even with the benefit of the most determined paddling, these canoes could make no more than ten leagues against the current in a twenty-four-hour period.
The unending exertion put the paddlers at risk of dehydration, a common affliction in the Caribbean, even on the water. One Indian died on the second night, as others, prostrate with exhaustion, lay on the bottoms of the canoes, and still others tried to paddle but strained to move their arms. With one feeble stroke after another they made their way, dabbing salt water on their parched tongues. By the time night fell for the second time, they still had not reached land.
At moonrise, Ferdinand learned from Méndez’s letter, they raised the white cliffs of Navassa, all two square miles of it, shimmering above the frosted wave tops. The whiteness came from the exposed coral and limestone poking out beyond the uninhabited island’s grass cover. They were still one hundred miles south of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Nevertheless, Méndez “joyfully” pointed out Navassa, and carefully doled out water to the paddlers. By dawn they had reached the island.
What they found was “bare rock, half a league around.” No Indians greeted them with water, food, or counsel. After they hurriedly offered thanks to the Lord for their survival, they realized that Navassa was nearly treeless and, worse, appeared to lack the drinking water they needed so desperately. In search of streams, they clambered and crawled from one steep cliff to another, collecting trickles of precious water in gourds. Eventually they found enough to fill their stomachs despite warnings not to drink too much. Nevertheless, some of the Indians drank without restraint, and grew violently sick, or died.
The rest of the day passed in relative tranquillity, the men playing and “eating shellfish that they found on the shore and cooked, for Méndez had brought flint and steel for making fire.” But they could not tarry;