Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [68]
He had been shrewd, he had been tough, and he had been wily, but most of all, he had been spectacularly lucky. He had been wrong at least as often as he had been right, most blatantly about his destination, but he had also been nimble, capable of reversing himself when it served his purpose. His words, as recorded in his diary, were emphatic, but his strategy was flexible and opportunistic.
“Since I know that you will be pleased at the great success with which the Lord has crowned my voyage,” said Columbus in the famous letter to his Sovereigns at the conclusion of his first voyage, “I write to inform you how in thirty-three days I crossed from the Canary Islands to the Indies”—in reality, an island in the Caribbean—“with the fleet which our most illustrious Sovereigns gave to me. I found very many islands with large populations and took possession of them all for Your Highnesses; this I did by proclamation and unfurled the royal standard.”
His initial contacts with the inhabitants of the New World were tentative and respectful, even heartening, he claimed. “I hoped to win them to the love and service of Your Highnesses and of the whole Spanish nation,” he wrote. “They have no religion, and are not idolaters; but all believe that power and goodness dwell in the sky and they are firmly convinced that I have come from the sky with these ships and people. . . . This is not because they are stupid—far from it, they are men of great intelligence, for they give a marvelously good account of everything—but because they have never before seen men clothed or ships like these.”
Still convinced he had reached India, Columbus tailored his understanding of another major discovery, the island of Cuba, to suit his purposes. At first, he accurately labeled it as an island in his journal; later, when he realized he was bound to demonstrate to Ferdinand and Isabella that he had reached the East, he recast it as “the mainland,” that is, China, and its inhabitants as subjects of the Grand Khan. Ferdinand and Isabella appointed Columbus as viceroy of these lands without realizing they were creating a monarch potentially more powerful than any in Europe.
PART TWO
Conquest
CHAPTER 5
River of Blood
To Columbus, one question took precedence on his return: the fate of the thirty-nine men left behind at La Navidad. He had placed their lives, and Spain’s honor, at risk. And he would have to return to “India” to rescue them, or to discover what befell these hostages to his ambition.
His first voyage had been a qualified success. That he returned with his fleet and its men alive, reasonably healthy, and intact was itself miraculous. He contended that his accomplishment was divinely inspired. Exactly what he had discovered or explored was subject to human interpretation and so less certain. He claimed the dozens of islands he had visited comprised a western extension of India, or China; that the figure of the Grand Khan and the trading possibilities that he offered lurked somewhere to the north and west of the turquoise waters over which his tiny fleet had sailed. He offered his journal as evidence, bolstered by the testimony of the others who had accompanied him, in the hope of claiming the riches and titles and glory to which he believed he was entitled, even divinely ordained, to have. Carefully embellished and edited to meet Ferdinand and Isabella’s expectations and his contractual obligations to them, that journal purported to demonstrate that he had accomplished and even exceeded his mission to the point of establishing a Spanish outpost in the islands he had discovered on his way to