Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [48]
Alarmed, Columbus surveyed the scene: his own men abandoning his ship, the water becoming shallower as the sea drove the hull ever higher onto the fatal reef, and the ship beginning to list precariously, as if preparing her death throes. He “ordered the mainmast to be cut away and the ship to be lightened as much as they could, to see if they could get her off [the reef],” but Santa María persisted in driving up the reef until “she lay on her beam ends across the sea (although there was little or no sea running), and the planking opened.”
In this desperate situation, Columbus, overwrought, lay to until daylight. When it became possible to see beyond the beach and into the deep forest, he dispatched Diego de Arana, listed as “marshal of the fleet,” and Pedro Gutiérrez, “butler of the royal household,” to seek help from Guacanagarí, the Indian leader who had regarded the Spaniards as supernatural beings.
The Admiral, meanwhile, said that he “wept,” a remarkable confession. Officers normally commanded, or disciplined, or set an example for others. But the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, overwhelmed, terrified, and possibly disgraced, shed tears. He was Christopher Columbus, the Christ-bearer, as he thought of himself. How could this disaster be happening?
The Indians rushed to the Spaniards’ rescue, emptying Santa María of her precious cargo. “He cleared the decks in a very short time, such was the great haste and care that the king gave.” Columbus noted through his tears that the Indians exercised the same care to secure everything on land that they had removed from the ship. Nor did the king’s services and sensitivity toward the afflicted mariners end there. “From time to time he sent one of his relatives to the weeping Admiral to console him, telling him that he must not be troubled or annoyed; that he would give him whatever he had.”
As the sun rose over the scene of wreck and recovery, Columbus surveyed the possessions and reflected that not even in Spain would they have been safer, or treated better, than they were here. And he continued to weep, perhaps more with gratitude and relief than with sheer terror, recording the histrionics in his journal for posterity. “He and all the people wept,” he observed once more, adding a curious footnote, open to various interpretations : “All are people of love and without greed, and suitable for every purpose. I assure Your Highnesses”—the distant but all-seeing Ferdinand and Isabella—“that in all the world there is no better people nor better country. They love their neighbors as themselves, and have the sweetest talk in the world, and gentle, and always with a smile.” Even though they went about as naked “as their mothers bore them,” he advised, they maintained “very good manners.” The king exercised such admirable self-restraint “that it is a pleasure to see all of it.” Perhaps it was the suddenness of the shipwreck, or the aftereffects of the drinking (if it occurred), or the emotional connotations of the holiday—whatever the reason, the wreck of Santa María and the rescue of her contents and crew had the makings of a Christmas miracle to his way of thinking. By means of this cognitive shift, he devised an ambitious scheme to salvage the voyage, his honor, and that of Spain from disaster.
On the day after Christmas, while still drying his tears and expressing his gratitude to his Indian saviors, and his Sovereigns, he began to formulate his rejoinder to the Indians’ altruistic impulses: a Spanish empire across the sea, and loyal slaves to maintain it. It seemed to Columbus that the Indians were prepared to assume this role; indeed, with their show of subservience they were practically auditioning for it. This was, of course, his assumption, not theirs, and it had its roots in his long experience with slavery, especially female slavery, in Genoa, where slaves