Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [75]
Columbus had successfully completed his second outbound transatlantic crossing, this time with seventeen ships, all of them avoiding serious accidents, over a distance of eight hundred leagues—about 2,400 miles—from the island of Gomera, in just twenty days. Relying on his judgment, instincts, and favorable winds, he had hit upon the optimal route between Gomera and the Leeward Islands, and demonstrated he could lead a transatlantic crossing without the Pinzón brothers; in fact, he surpassed them at this game. Of course, he was nowhere near his previous landfalls in the Indies, particularly the men stranded at La Navidad. Nevertheless, his men were safe, and the second voyage was off to an auspicious start.
He attempted to moor at Dominica’s eastern shore, but found no anchorage. “The sea was heavy and a storm and mist were approaching,” he later explained to Ferdinand and Isabella. Trouble was just starting. “I turned back toward the fleet that was quite scattered and brought them all together. Then I dispatched the best equipped caravel to the point in the north,” but he ignored her progress. “I was preoccupied because of the bad weather that was raging.” Reefing sail and summoning the other ships, he “made for another island ten leagues distant from Dominica.” Columbus swallowed his disappointment without realizing he had just been spared encountering cannibals said to be dwelling there. In the years to come, so the story goes, Europeans who fetched up on this island had a rough time of it—that is, until the day the cannibals became so ill after devouring a friar that they avoided anyone dressed as a cleric. For that reason, when Spanish ships from across the Atlantic had no choice but to forage on Dominica for food or water, they assigned a friar, or a sailor who dressed as one, to the task.
Unable to secure anchorage, Columbus ordered his fleet to a nearby island; the predatory Caribs called it Aichi, and the Taínos, their prey, knew it as Touloukaera. Heedless of the island’s contentious history, he christened this inviting speck of land Marie Galante, after his flagship. He dropped anchor, ventured ashore, and, in the words of his son, “with suitable solemnities renewed possession that in the name of the Catholic Sovereigns he had taken of all the islands and mainland of the Indies on his first voyage.” More powerful than ever, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea had returned to his demesne.
The expedition’s physician, Diego Alvarez Chanca, wrote of the landfall with wonder: “On this island there were woods so dense that it was amazing to look at them and especially stupefying were the many species of trees unknown to everyone—some with fruits, others with flowers, and all was green,” while the trees in Spain showed only bare gray branches at this time of year. Here, the very air seemed to tremble with magic. “We found a tree whose leaves had the most pleasant clove scent I ever before smelled,” he marveled. Tempted, several crew members tasted the unfamiliar fruit. Instantly, “their faces swelled up and they developed such a strong burning and pain to appear seized with rabies, which could not be cured by any means of cold things.” Two hours later, the visitors from Spain, tongues afire, departed in their ships.
Just nine leagues to the north, the fleet arrived at a spectacularly lofty island. “This island,” Columbus wrote, “is shaped like the point of a diamond, so high that it is a marvel, and from its summit gushes out a tremendous spring that scatters water on every side of the mountain; from where I stood other streams were flowing in on the other side, one of them so big its sharp, high drop made it resemble water gushing out of a barrel, all white, and we could not believe it was water and not a vein of white rock.” The sailors wagered: rock or water? When they dropped anchor, they had their answer: it was water, on an island filled with abundant streams. “Upon reaching the island I named it Santa María de Guadalupe,” he wrote, referring to a monastery in Santa María de Guadalupe de Extremadura,