Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [205]
Days later, Diego Méndez’s caravel dropped anchor in the bay. After their struggles to survive and their battles with one another, the men who had been stranded, without hope, were more relieved than ebullient to board the vessel that would take them away. “In this ship we embarked, friends and enemies alike,” Ferdinand laconically recalled. It was June 28, 1504.
Winds and currents remained contrary throughout the crossing from Jamaica to Santo Domingo, where they did not arrive until August 13. When they reached the island of Beata, off the coast of Hispaniola, they encountered currents that defeated their progress. As he did in times of enforced idleness, Columbus unburdened himself. In a letter to Ovando, he described the actions taken to end the mutiny, singling out the Porras brothers for their evil deeds. Columbus again swore loyalty to the governor, and concluded the letter with his distinctive, and cryptic, signature:
which, in his private language, meant “Columbus, the Christ-bearer.” He adopted this signature as his special imprimatur. His heirs, he urged, should also “sign with my signature which I now employ which is an X with an S over it and an M with a Roman A over it, and then an S and then a Greek Y with an S over it, preserving the relations of the lines and points.” Despite these highly specific instructions, the full meaning of the signature, the product of Columbus’s fertile spiritual imagination, has yet to be fully decoded, but it likely includes biblical as well as maritime references. In its shape, some see a ship’s mast, others a cross, and still others cryptic references to invocations and hymns.
On arrival in Santo Domingo, to his great surprise, Columbus received a welcome distinguished by “great honor and hospitality” (said Las Casas) from an unlikely source: Nicolás de Ovando. After a year of living in the shadow of obscurity, Columbus had emerged into the dazzling sunlight of prominence. The governor’s unexpected goodwill extended to sheltering Columbus in the newly built governor’s residence, “with orders that he was to be accorded every consideration.”
The show of hospitality concealed persistent conflicts between the present and former governor of Hispaniola. Columbus was quick to take offense at perceived slights; these unnamed actions he “regarded as insulting and as affronts to his dignity,” Las Casas learned. Ferdinand took Ovando’s hypocritical behavior as “a scorpion’s kiss.” The concealed poison within the kiss consisted of Ovando’s freeing Francisco Porras, the acknowledged “ringleader of the mutiny,” in the presence of Columbus himself, in a gesture designed to humiliate his predecessor. “He even proposed to punish those who had taken up arms to defend the Admiral.” Later, Columbus muttered darkly to his son Diego about the Porras brothers, “They did such bad things, with such raw cruelty as was never heard before. If the King and Queen leave them unpunished I do not know who will dare take more people out in their service.” Their mutiny forgiven and forgotten, the Porras brothers received their back pay, positions, and titles.
In the same spirit, Ovando excluded the Admiral of the Ocean Sea from official dealings with Ferdinand and Isabella. With that, Columbus realized he was more prisoner than honored guest, disgraced and endangered by Ovando, who refused to recognize the Admiral’s credentials as the “captain general” of the fleet. The bona fides, declared Ovando, were none of his business. It is difficult to imagine Columbus, a man of soaring vanity, reduced to the status of a vassal in the capital of the empire he had discovered as Ovando went about humiliating him, but he had no choice. It was left to Ferdinand to express indignation on his behalf.
A month later, on September 12, Columbus, his son Ferdinand, and servants sailed for Spain in a chartered caravel