Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [204]
In battle formation, they cried out “Kill! Kill!” as they attacked the Adelantado and his company. Five of the six would-be assassins fell before the loyalists.
The Adelantado responded with a fierce attack of his own, dispatching at least two men: Juan Sánchez, who had never lived down his reputation as the man who allowed the Quibián to escape, and Juan Barbara, who had initiated the scuffle with drawn sword. Others were wounded, and, most important of all, Francisco Porras was captured. The other mutineers, in Ferdinand’s words, “turned tail and ran away with all their might,” Bartholomew taking off after them, until his aides restrained his lust for vengeance, murmuring that “it was well to punish, but in moderation.”
If they slaughtered all their enemies, the many Indians who were observing the conflict might decide the moment had come to take on the loyalists. Bartholomew relented, and escorted Porras and the other prisoners to the beached ships, where Columbus received them gratefully, with prayers and “thanks to God for this great victory.” The loyalists, though victorious, did not escape unscathed. One of Columbus’s servants died, and the Adelantado was wounded in the hand, but recovered.
In the heat of battle, Pedro de Ledesma, the pilot turned rebel, tumbled unnoticed over a cliff, and hid until dark. Indians who discovered him were curious how he had survived the Europeans’ keen swords. They reopened his wounds with “little sticks,” examined a “cut on his head so deep one could see his brains,” and took note of other wounds that nearly severed his shoulder, cut his thigh to the bone, and sliced the sole of one foot from “heel to toe so it resembled a slipper.” Whenever the Indians approached, he shouted, “Beware, I can get up!” And they ran as if from a ghost.
Eventually the Spaniards rescued Ledesma, transporting him to a “palmthatched hut nearby, where the dampness and mosquitoes alone should have finished him off.” The ship’s surgeon spent eight days treating Ledesma’s wounds (“so terrible that it would defy the human imagination to devise any more horrible or grave,” as Las Casas would have it), until, against all expectations, he recovered. “I met him after all this in Seville, as fit and well as though nothing had ever happened,” said Las Casas, although, not long after, “I heard that he had been killed with a dagger.” In any event, the mutineers’ spirit had been broken.
On Monday, May 20, the dispirited band of rebels sent their own emissaries to Columbus to make amends and beg for mercy. They all confessed in writing to their insubordination and inhumanity, begged forgiveness from the Admiral, and expressed repentance. They swore loyalty anew “on a crucifix and missal,” and if they ever broke their word, no priest, no Christian of any kind, would hear their confession, and they would be considered to have renounced “the holy sacraments of the Church,” which meant that as wicked Christians they would be denied burial on consecrated ground, and instead be disposed of “in no man’s land as one does with heretics.”
Columbus read their pleas and confessions with satisfaction and relief. The renegades received full pardons, with the exception of Porras, who was held prisoner “that he might not be the cause of new disturbances.”
Now the question arose of where to billet the men. With space tight on the two shipwrecks housing the loyalists, and lingering tensions between the rebels and loyalists, Columbus assigned the former mutineers to a camp onshore, to wait for the ships that would carry them to Spain. They could “wander the island as he directed, bartering their trade goods, until the arrival of the ships,” according to Las Casas. “And God knows what damage this party inflicted on the Indians and what outrages they committed.”
Days later, the anniversary of their arrival came and went. His recent pledge of loyalty to Ovando forgotten, Columbus fumed at the delays