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set out for the Monastery of the Vertudes, with rain delaying his arrival until evening. The lavish reception he received was calculated to allay his suspicions, and he proudly noted that the king “received him with much honor and showed him much favor.” After the honeyed words came the hard bargaining. It was a very impressive discovery that Columbus had made, as everyone acknowledged, but in the process, he had violated the Treaty of Alcáçovas—was he not aware of that? In this agreement, made in 1479 with just this possibility in mind, Portugal exercised rights along Africa’s west coast and the Cape Verde Islands, while Spain exercised hegemony over the Canary Islands. And so Columbus’s discoveries belonged to King João II, not Ferdinand and Isabella, and certainly not to the Admiral, who suddenly found himself ensnared in negotiations as perilous as the tempests he had recently survived.

Columbus replied that he had never seen the treaty and knew nothing of its provisions. He deferred to the Sovereigns, whose orders to avoid Guinea he had scrupulously followed. Realizing perhaps the impossibility of verifying where Columbus had or had not gone on his voyage, and pleased that the Admiral’s answer acknowledged Portugal’s right, King João appeared to relent, and replied that he was sure there would be no need for arbitrators in this matter. The king tried his best to draw out Columbus about his voyage. What countries had he visited, and who were the inhabitants? Had he found gold, pearls, and other precious gems? According to Las Casas, the king inquired “always with a pleasant face, dissembling the grief that he had in his heart.” Columbus boasted wildly about his accomplishments, without realizing the effect his claims had on the jealous king.

Rui da Pina, a Portuguese court historian who might have witnessed the interview, remarked that the “king blamed himself for negligence in dismissing him for want of credit and authority in regard to this discovery for which he first came to make request of him.” So ran the official version. Behind the mask of humility, King João meditated on a chilling solution to the problem of the turncoat explorer. He could execute Columbus; or rather, he could let it seem that others wished him to be killed. And the deed could be carried out discreetly, with blame attributed to some lapse committed by the explorer. In the end, the king instead treated Columbus honorably before booting him out of the country.

On March 15, 1493, Niña entered the harbor from which she had departed on August 3, 1492, with Pinta following close behind, borne “by a light wind.”

Columbus had completed his mission, as he understood it, and expected to be treated with the greatest respect. At last the journey was done, and a glorious future lay before him and Spain. After the years of waiting, the discovery had been accomplished quickly, in a little over seven months, with virtually no bloodshed and with no loss of life, incredibly enough—nothing except a sunken ship from which all hands had been rescued, and bruised feelings on the part of the renegade Martín Alonso Pinzón. Even the threat he posed to Columbus sputtered out when Pinzón turned up in his hometown of Palos de la Frontera, seriously ill, and died within days of his return from the sea. The cause was believed to have been syphilis, and in that case, he might have caught the disease long before he sailed with Columbus, and it had lain dormant in his nervous system for years, until it emerged on the voyage as tertiary syphilis, which would account for his defiant, irrational behavior. He was, in short, going mad, more of a danger to himself than to anyone else.

For now, Columbus savored his achievement. The new lands that he had discovered were closer to Spain and, to hear Columbus tell it, more benign than Marco Polo’s version. The soil was fertile, the people nothing like the monsters he had expected to find. Only the fate of the men stationed at the fortress in Hispaniola remained unknown.

He planned to proceed to Barcelona “by sea, in which