Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [63]
To leave some record of his accomplishments, he frantically grabbed “a parchment and wrote upon it all that he could of everything that he had found, earnestly requesting whoever might find it to carry it to the Sovereigns. This parchment he enclosed in a waxed cloth, very well secured, and ordered a great wooden barrel to be brought and placed it inside, without anyone knowing what it was, unless they supposed that it was some act of devotion, and so he ordered it to be cast into the sea,” his version of a message in a bottle, his testament for posterity, to be washed up on the shores of history. (The barrel was never found.)
As Niña helplessly scudded before the wind, heaving and lurching to the northeast, his fervent prayers were not enough to bring him confidence that he would survive the night, let alone succeed in his mission, or, as he put it, his “weakness and anxiety . . . would not allow my spirit to be soothed.”
And then, after sunset, “the sky began to show clear in the western quarter.” The shift in the wind’s direction offered a shred of hope that he might, after all, survive. “Sea somewhat high,” he noted, “but somewhat abating.” Several hours later, after sunrise, the crew sighted a ghostly apparition that gradually coalesced into a distant landform. Guessing correctly for once, Columbus concluded they had arrived in the vicinity of the Azores, while “the pilots and seamen found themselves already in the country of Castile.”
“All this night went beating to windward to close the land,” Columbus wrote on February 16, after the worst of the nightmare seemed to have passed, “which was already recognized to be an island.” He tacked to the northeast, and then a bit farther north to north northeast, and at sunrise tacked southward, to reach the mysterious island, now cloaked in a “great cloudmass,” and then, to what could only have been his profound relief, he “sighted another island” lying perhaps eight leagues, or fifty miles, away. This was, in all likelihood, São Miguel (St. Michael), with a stiff headwind frustrating his approach. Undeterred, Columbus laboriously tacked upwind all day until, at nightfall, “some saw a light to leeward.” Perhaps it emanated from the island they had first seen—Columbus’s diary is not clear on this point—and Niña spent the night beating to windward. At this moment, Columbus’s strength gave out. He had not slept for three or four days, had been living under terrible strain, with little food, “and he was much crippled in the legs from always being exposed to cold and to water.”
On Sunday evening, when the seas moderated, Columbus rallied and circumnavigated the sanctuary. Niña dropped anchor, and “promptly lost” the equipment while the Admiral attempted to hail someone on land. He had no choice but to raise sail and stand offshore throughout the night. In the morning, he anchored off the northern coast of the island, “and ascertained that it was Santa María, one of the Azores.” He was safe, at least for the present.
After mooring securely in the harbor, and explaining how he came to be there, Columbus heard that “the people of the island said that never had they seen such a tempest as there had been these fifteen days past,” and they wondered how Columbus had escaped the storm’s fury. The apparently innocent question concealed suspicion. Was Columbus telling them the truth?
To impress his audience, the Admiral blurted out his marvelous discovery of the Indies. He proceeded to boast that “this navigation of his had been very exact”—far from the truth—“and that he had laid down his route well,” except for exaggerating his speed and, as a result, the distance he had covered. At least his guess that he