Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [206]
The weather turned fierce. Two leagues offshore, the mainmast of one of the ships in Columbus’s little fleet split “right down to the deck,” most likely the result of heavy winds. Columbus ordered the damaged vessel to return to Santo Domingo, and he resumed the journey to Castile in the accompanying vessel. But “after sailing with fair weather for almost a third part of our course,” Ferdinand reported, “we had a terrible storm that placed us in great jeopardy.” That was October 19. The following day, the ship’s mainmast “broke in four pieces,” precipitating still another emergency.
Ferdinand ascribed their survival to the “valor of the Adelantado and the ingenuity of the Admiral, who could not rise from bed on account of his gout.” Nevertheless, the two brothers “contrived a jury mast”—that is, a replacement—“out of a lateen yard”—a triangular sail’s spar—“which we secured firmly about the middle with ropes and planks taken from the stern and forecastles, which we tore down.” The ship remained seaworthy, so long as the weather did not trouble them.
Presently another storm descended, cracking the mast.
After more repairs, the ship made the final seven hundred leagues to the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, in southern Spain, last seen by Columbus two and a half years earlier. Frail and vulnerable, he had survived, and so long as he lived, the promise of a Columbian empire—sanctioned by the Sovereigns, of course—remained alive. Despite the tranquil splendor of Dry Harbour, Jamaica, his time there had been extraordinarily dispiriting, time spent tending to his physical and psychic wounds. His year on the beach had been no idyll; there was no coming to terms with himself, or with the “Indies.” It was, at best, a refuge.
Many of the 140 men who had set out with Columbus did not live to see the end of the voyage. Several deserted at Hispaniola. Thirty succumbed to disease, or drowned, or died in battles with the Indians or with mutineers. Columbus, confronting disease, mutineers, hostile Indians, and his own delusions, was among those who survived, as were his son and brother.
Despite his extensive reconnoitering of the coast of what is now Panama and Costa Rica, he never grasped where in the world he had been. Yet Columbus realized he had found some great entity that seemed to expand the more he explored it, a place without clearly defined borders, poorly understood or described by the writers of antiquity, to which even the Bible made scant reference, simultaneously concealing and revealing incalculable riches. He later claimed part of its wealth as his own, even while he devoted the whole of his time in Spain not in palaces or brothels but in austere monasteries or tottering on muleback along steep mountain trails, driven by the twin demons of vanity and duty.
To his loyal son, Columbus’s accomplishments were anything but foreordained or clear-cut. An aura of chaos hovered over his entire life and adventures, against which he tried to impose his will. In Ferdinand’s retelling of events, his father was always vulnerable—to the whims of monarchs, the caprices of Indians, the power of tides and storms, and the moods of the impressionable men serving under him. He emerged as a hostage to fortune in the high-stakes game of European expansion; time and again, his exploits could have gone one way or another, were it not for his singular vision, or so Ferdinand would have his readers believe. The adventure gave impetus to his imagination and intellect for the rest of his days.
For Columbus’s brother Bartholomew, the Adelantado, the journey had been the occasion for acts of heroism, at least in the eyes of the Spanish. If not for his vigilance, Columbus and his band of loyalists