Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [65]
Thursday, February 21, found Columbus again battling rough seas and high winds as he tried without success to locate St. Michael, “owing to the mighty cloud-wrack and thick weather that the wind and sea raised.” Niña came close to foundering. The force of the storm “amazed” him; in all his experience sailing around the Azores and the Canary Islands he had never seen anything like it, and in the Indies, he had sailed “all that winter without anchoring,” or so it seemed in retrospect. (In reality, Caribbean storms had on occasion prompted him to ride at anchor until they abated.)
Sunrise failed to disclose any suggestion of his goal, St. Michael, and he decided to return to Santa María “to see if he could recover his people and the barge and the anchors and cables that he had left there.”
The small humiliations resumed as soon as he anchored. A functionary balancing on the rocks overlooking the harbor warned him not to leave. Then a barge bearing “five seamen and two priests and a scribe” boarded the ship. The seamen were armed. Columbus permitted them to spend the night on board, having no other choice. In the morning, they demanded to see signs of the authority conferred on Columbus by the “Sovereigns of Castile,” and a scuffle ensued. Columbus related that he broke the deadlock by persuading the intruders of his authority, and the Portuguese finally released all the pilgrims whom they had arrested.
Come Sunday, the unstable weather turned fair, and after taking on food, water, and much needed ballast, Columbus headed due east, toward Spain and the acclaim he expected. Yet the closer to home, the greater the danger he faced. Foul weather blew Niña off course. “It was very painful to have such a tempest when they were already at the doors of home,” he confided to his diary. On the evening of March 2, “a squall blew up which split all the sails and he found himself in great peril.”
As before, the beleaguered men drew lots to select a pilgrim to pray at Santa María de la Cinta, near Huelva, and once again the “the lot fell to the Admiral.” There was little time for discussion, as the storm’s intensity redoubled, and they found themselves blown not to Spain, as they intended, but toward the one place they did not wish to go: Lisbon.
And the storm grew still more violent.
“Last night,” Columbus wrote of the events of March 4, “they experienced so terrible a tempest that they thought they were lost from the seas that boarded them from two directions, and the winds, which seemed to raise the caravel into the air; and the water from the sky, and lightning flashes in many directions.” He had no time to consider the irony of his situation: he had gone all the way to the Indies and back, only to face his worst perils in European waters. Columbus’s many detractors later charged that the Admiral deliberately headed toward Lisbon under pretext of fleeing the storm in pursuit of a covert agenda influenced by Portugal. On the basis of his account, and others, of the severity of the weather, his agenda consisted solely of survival.
He “made some headway, although with great peril, keeping out to sea, and so God preserved them until day,” a task that Columbus said meant incurring “infinite toil and terror.” Taking on water, barely navigable, guided by her exhausted crew, Niña approached a landmark Columbus recognized: the Rock of Sintra, a peninsula north of the Tagus River, which flows into Lisbon. He had a choice: either attempt to veer off into the storm and the near certainty of oblivion, loss of life, and the failure of his Enterprise of the Indies, or enter the river, and so he did “because he could do nothing else.” He made for the fishing village of Cascais, near the mouth of the Tagus, and despite the tempest found anchorage.
The curious gathered onshore, wondering how the crew had survived the ferocious storm and offering prayers. Columbus heard from other seamen that “never had there been a winter with so great storms, and that 25 ships had been