Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [55]
Thick mats of seaweed clogged the harbor, he noticed. He had seen it before, “in the gulf when they came upon the discovery,” and in his experience it grew only in shallow waters near land. “If so,” he guessed, “these Indies were very near the Canary Islands,” his jumping-off point before heading out to the uncharted Atlantic, which he called the Ocean Sea, “and for that reason he believed that they were less than 400 leagues distant.” In fact, he would have to traverse more than twice that distance.
The ever-present drifting seaweed was the brown algae, commonly called gulfweed, or sargassum, from which the huge Sargasso Sea takes its name. His fleet had silently and unwittingly entered a sea like no other, stretching two thousand miles east from Bermuda. The water of the Sargasso Sea was intensely blue, so clear that he could gaze two hundred feet into its depths. The sea extends fifteen thousand feet—nearly three miles—to the ocean’s floor. This strange, shoreless sea is defined by the confluence of four currents known as the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre. (In oceanography, a gyre denotes a system of rotating ocean currents generated by large-scale wind movements.) When Columbus sailed through the Sargasso Sea, he experienced a unique combination of wind and water and plant life in the form of sargassum.
Like many sailors, he feared the thick, floating mats would snarl his ships and lead to disaster. In reality, sargassum is too fragile to act as a barrier. It consists of miniature floats containing oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen for buoyancy, and it derives its name from these little structures, which reminded Portuguese sailors of a grape they called salgazo. The designation evolved into the word sargaço, or seaweed, and later the floating mats of seaweed were classified as the genus Sargassum. (There are six species of Sargassum, with two, Sargassum natans and Sargassum fuitans, predominating.) Columbus called it, simply, “weed,” and it was ubiquitous, covering a million square miles, or more, of the Sargasso Sea and Atlantic Ocean. From time to time storms scattered sargassum into the Caribbean Basin, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Gulf Stream, which carried it to the north, along the Atlantic Coast. In time, the Gulf Stream nudged it ashore, or swept it back into the vortex of the Sargasso Sea. So Columbus encountered its feathery stems wherever he went.
The homeward passage commenced three hours before dawn, on January 16, before a moderate offshore breeze. Relying on his four Indian guides, he headed in the general direction of the Caribs, “the people whom all those islands hold in so great fear, because it is said that with their countless canoes they range over all those seas, and it is said that they eat the men whom they can take.”
After traveling sixty-four miles, according to his dead reckoning, the Indian guides indicated that their destination would “lie to the southeast.” Instead, he trimmed the sails, proceeded another two leagues, and Niña caught what he considered a wind capable of bearing the ship all the way to Spain.
His confidence surged. He had survived the voyage, outlasted a partial mutiny, and discovered a previously unknown part of the world. He had even established and staffed a fort in this remote outpost. Nor did his achievements end there. He had demonstrated the validity of his “grand design” to himself, and soon enough, he would do the same for Ferdinand and Isabella. Nothing could alter those achievements, with the possible exception of Pinzón’s malice or divine intervention.
The two surviving ships of the little fleet (Pinta was not far behind) headed out to the open sea with all its hazards. What awaited him on the Iberian Peninsula would be far more uncertain and dangerous than anything he had faced in the mild waters and on the powdery white beaches of the Caribbean.
CHAPTER 4
“The People from the Sky”
Symptoms of prolonged isolation from women crept into Columbus’s