Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [74]
Despite the local uproar over her behavior, she remarried, and soon found herself embroiled in a territorial dispute with a political rival, Fernán Muñoz, whom she also ordered to be hanged. She eventually ended her life by poison.
Those terrible events lay several years in the future. Now the huntress wanted Columbus, at the beginning of his second voyage, to stay with her on Gomera. Columbus dallied, and did his best to impress her. One of his gossipy friends, Michele de Cuneo of Savona, who had come along on the voyage, rolled his eyes at the number of “festivities, salvoes, and salutes we performed in that place . . . all for the sake of the lady of the place, for whom, in a former time, our Admiral had been smitten with love.” One account insists that she wished him to remain there permanently as her husband, and to refrain from sailing and exploring. This he was unwilling to do, for her or for anyone else.
On Monday, October 7, 1494, having settled his affairs and accounts on Gomera, Columbus and his fleet of seventeen ships shaped a course for the Indies.
At departure, Columbus gave sealed orders to the captain of each ship, not to be opened unless weather forced a change of course. He insisted on secrecy because he did not want others, especially the Portuguese, to be privy to his route.
By Thursday, October 24, 1494, he had run more than four hundred leagues west, concerned that he had not encountered seaweed, although by this point in his first voyage he had seen quantities. Then, “to the surprise of all,” a swallow appeared that day and for two days thereafter. The next day, “[t]he waves rolled high, darkness prevailed everywhere, and black night covered the sea, except where lightning flashed and the thunder echoed. There is nothing more perilous than a shipwreck under these circumstances,” Guillermo Coma recalled. The rain and wind blasted the ships with such force that “the yards snapped, the sails were torn to shreds, and the ropes parted. The planks creaked and the gangways were awash, while some [ships] found themselves hanging on the crest of the waves and others saw the waters spread apart and lay bare the floor of the sea.” The vessels threatened to collide like toys in a pond.
Amid the turmoil, St. Elmo’s fire appeared in their midst. Named for St. Erasmus of Formiae, or St. Elmo, the patron saint of Mediterranean sailors, St. Elmo’s fire displays glowing blue or violet air that has been ionized, or electrified, by a thunderstorm, often accompanied by buzzing or hissing. Superstitious sailors, dependent on omens to guide their lives at sea, regarded St. Elmo’s fire as a sign of divine favor.
November 2 found Columbus studying the skies, observing “dark, threatening clouds ahead, which convinced him that land was near.” He lowered sail, kept watch, and by daybreak on November 3 was rewarded with the sight of a mountainous island called Charis by its isolated inhabitants since time immemorial. No more. Having arrived on a Sunday, he christened it Dominica, as if converting the island itself.
Word of the landfall spread from one ship to another quickly.
¡Albricias!
¡Que tenemos tierra!
The reward! We have land!
He spotted another island, and another, four in all, now known as the Leeward Islands—the northernmost islands of the Lesser Antilles, located at the confluence of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. (“Leeward” refers to the prevailing winds in the region; the islands are downwind, or leeward, of the Windward Islands, situated to meet the trade winds. The Leeward Islands include the U.S. and British Virgin Islands, Nevis, Saint Kitts, Saint-Barthélemy, Antigua, and Guadeloupe.) The miraculous appearance of these isles cheered all the men, who appeared on deck to intone prayers and hymns of gratitude and relief. As they did, the animals they carried with them, the chickens, the roosters, and especially the horses, raised an excited