Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [17]
Columbus had at least three good, practical, defensible reasons for what he did next: First, the departing convoy presented an excellent opportunity for getting mail from his own little fleet promptly back to Spain. Second, he wanted to trade one of his ships, a poor performer, for something a bit more spry. Third, the weather had taken an ominous turn, exhibiting the usual troika of storm signs: oily swells, oppressive heat, a red sky.
For all these good, practical, and defensible reasons, Columbus sent one of his captains ashore with a request to permit his fleet to enter the harbor, a clear violation of the sovereigns’ orders.
The new governor, Don Nicolas de Ovando, only laughed.
Stung, Columbus led his ships to the leeward side of Hispaniola to place the mass of the island between the ships and the rising storm. He instructed his captains that if they became separated by the storm to meet in a harbor on Ocoa Bay, near what later became Puerto Viejo de Azua.
Meanwhile, with great fanfare—trumpets blaring, cannon roaring, banners streaming—the thirty-ship convoy ferrying Bobadilla and Columbus’s gold sailed from Ozama and made for the Mona Passage, the strait between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico that connects the Caribbean to the Atlantic.
The storm was a full-fledged hurricane. Columbus’s fleet, sheltered in the lee of Hispaniola, caught a glancing blow that nonetheless topped anything in severity that Columbus had so far confronted. “The storm was terrible,” he wrote, “and on that night the ships were parted from me. Each one of them was reduced to an extremity expecting nothing save death; each one of them was certain the others were lost.”
In a maneuver that went against customary marine practice, Columbus did not strike for open sea but instead brought his ship closer to shore to leverage further the windbreak afforded by the mountains of Hispaniola. His ship survived. On Sunday, July 3, he sailed his caravel into Ocoa Bay, the designated meeting place. He saw no sign of the others.
As his ship rocked gently in the gorgeous blue, its decks quiet but for the sounds of repair, Columbus watched the entrance to the bay through thermals of humid air.
A lookout would have spotted it first as a glint of white against the settling sea. He cried out, then perhaps wished he had not, as the glint disappeared and the ship eased back into the turquoise quiet.
But another spark followed, a true sign now. Sails and finally a ship. Followed by another. And, impossibly, yet another.
All safe.
And what of Bobadilla?
The hurricane caught the convoy in the Mona Passage head-on, the eye passing close, perhaps directly overhead. It drove twenty of the gold ships to the bottom with all hands. One of these carried Bobadilla. In all, five hundred mariners lost their lives. A few ships, gravely wounded, fought their way back to Santo Domingo.
Only one ship of the original thirty made it to Spain: the puny little Aguja, carrying Columbus’s gold.
THE ENIGMA OF air continued to command the attention of the world’s greatest minds. In 1638, Galileo tried a variation of Aristotle’s leather-bag experiment. He constructed an apparatus consisting of a glass bulb with an airtight valve. He weighed the bulb. Next he forced air into the bulb until it contained much more than its normal volume. Now when he weighed it he found a measurable difference.
So air did have weight.
In Galileo’s time this was astonishing news. Air was invisible, yet it had weight. It was everywhere, piled high over the world. Therefore it must exert a force on every man, rock, and tree. The meteorological significance escaped Galileo, but five years later his discovery led to a famous series of experiments by Evangelista Torricelli, an Italian physicist who opened the single most important window into the forces that drive the world’s weather.
He too began with a glass bulb, but attached to it a tube some “two cubits” long, a cubit being a vague unit of measurement equivalent to the distance between a