Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (58 page)

After bidding farewell to the Admiral and putting to sea, Méndez reached the easternmost end of Jamaica. Lingering at the cape, waiting for a calm sea before commencing the crossing to Hispaniola, Méndez saw that Indians had assembled “with the intention of killing me and taking my canoe and its contents.” They even “drew lots for my life” to decide who would carry out the deed. He and his men quietly reclaimed their canoes, beached several miles away, raised sail, and returned to Dry Harbour, where Columbus was stationed.

Relieved that Méndez and his men had escaped slaughter, the Admiral sent them all back to the cape, accompanied by seventy men under the direction of the Adelantado. The squadron waited four days for favorable seas. “When I saw the seas growing calm I very sadly took leave of my escorts and they of me,” Méndez recalled.

Ferdinand remembered watching the Indians deftly settling into the canoes with gourds of water and “native food” as the brave Spaniards took their places, carrying “swords, shields, and foods.” They launched into the sea, Bartholomew escorting them to the island’s eastern end to ward off Indian attacks. None materialized. The Adelantado waited until dark as the canoes became specks on the horizon. When they had vanished, he walked back to his men, “urging the Indians he encountered on the way to be friends and trade with us.”

 

T
he men in the canoes commenced paddling for five days and four nights. Méndez recalled “never taking my hand off the oar and steering the canoe while all my companions rowed.” They were rowing for their lives, and those of the men they left behind with Columbus. For the last two days of this marathon, with their stores of food and drink exhausted, the men aboard the canoes neither ate nor drank.

On arrival in Hispaniola, Méndez was to move on to Santo Domingo, the tiny capital, to beseech Ovando for help, and Fieschi was to return to Jamaica forthwith “to spare us worry that and fear that he might have perished.” As Ferdinand knew, “this could easily happen with such flimsy craft if the sea turned at all rough.” In fact, they were setting off on a journey of great hardship.

The two canoes proceeded eastward along the coast, the Indians diligently paddling, encountering “only little islands or rocks along the whole course.” The final leg from that island to Hispaniola, eight leagues of open water, proved to be the most uncertain. “They had to wait for a perfect calm before starting to cross that great space in such frail craft.” As if by divine will, the sea turned to glass for them.

 

A
fter the rescue mission had departed, those left behind languished in their improvised fortresses in Jamaica. In the enforced idleness, morale deteriorated at an alarming rate; the men, barely loyal to Columbus at the voyage’s outset, complained and conspired. They wove elaborate theories about their enigmatic, unstable Admiral, designed to prove that he had no intention of returning to Hispaniola, where he had been forbidden to land. In this scenario, Méndez and Fieschi would return to Spain and secure Columbus’s fortune with the Sovereigns. To fit this theory, they persuaded themselves that Columbus was content to remain “in exile right there,” on a splendid broad beach with Indians doing his bidding until matters at home were settled to his liking.

The empty days passed. Where was Fieschi? He should have returned by this time. What if he had perished at sea? What if Méndez had perished? What if Fieschi and Méndez had
both
perished? Dependent for the moment on the Indians for survival, the forgotten castaways on Jamaica lost all hope of rescue.

Sequestered on his wrecked ship, an apt symbol of his mind and body, the Admiral afforded the men scant confidence. He could hardly get out of bed, much less endure the hardships of a canoe voyage to Hispaniola. He was broken in body, and damaged in spirit, preparing to make his final voyage, from which there would be no return. He had demonstrated that the world was a more varied and richer place than any in Christendom had suspected, but now he confronted the limits of mortality.

In July, he composed an epistle to the Sovereigns laying bare his regret, self-pity, and recrimination. “I cannot recall Hispaniola, Paria, and the other lands without crying,” he wrote of his miscarried adventures. “I used to believe that their example could serve for these others; on the contrary, they are in a depressed state: though they are not dying, their illness is incurable and prolonged. Let them who reduced them to this state come forward with the remedy, if he can or knows how. Everyone is a master at destruction,” except himself, of course. “Those who left the Indies, shirking work and speaking of the Indies and me, later returned with appointments; the same will now happen with Veragua.” He had seen it all coming, and had tried to govern “in your royal name. You accepted that,” he forcefully reminded them at this great distance, “granting it with privileges and by agreement, with seal and oath; you named me Viceroy, Admiral, and Governor General of all, and you assigned me a boundary 100 leagues from the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, with a line running from pole to pole, and over all that I might discover later you gave me full powers.”

Now they, or those around them, were stripping him of those powers, despite his accomplishments. “Seven years ago I was at your royal court,” he said, at a time when “all who heard of this undertaking agreed it was foolishness.” He had given them new lands, new riches, and a new world. But they had rewarded him by ending his monopoly, creating an absurd state of affairs. “Now even tailors want to make discoveries,” he groused. “One is led to believe they go to make clothes; they are given permission and make a profit, greatly prejudicing my honor and severely damaging the economy.” Columbus believed he deserved to be treated more respectfully, and generously, than a merchant. The lands he discovered “are vaster and richer than any other in Christendom,” and he had been the one who placed them “under your royal and eminent rule, and in a position to render tremendous profits.” On the beach at Jamaica, he relived the trauma of his confinement for the benefit of the Sovereigns, for whom he had arranged to receive “tremendous profits” from ships that were “victorious and with great news of gold,” while he, their Admiral, “full of faith and joy,” was suddenly, without warning, “arrested, and thrown in a ship with two of my brothers, brought in irons, naked and mistreated”—here he was stretching a point, for he had insisted in keeping the chains when his captors wished to remove them—“without being summoned or charged by the law.”

He gave vent to the roaring in his head:

They could redeem themselves, Columbus told his Sovereigns, by punishing “those who did this and stole my pearls”—a blatant reference to the turncoat Alonso de Ojeda, who poached on the pearl fisheries that Columbus had discovered off the coast of Venezuela. If the Sovereigns put matters right, “the greatest virtue and exemplary fame would redound” to them. Descending into melodrama, he confided, “I am desperate.”

Columbus fretted and hallucinated about his shattered career in the privacy of his quarters. The other men stranded on Jamaica, no less isolated and desperate, tormented themselves by imagining the favored few who had departed in canoes arriving to a royal welcome in Spain, where they would “enjoy the favor of Bishop Juan de Fonseca and the High Treasurer of Castile,” Ferdinand commented.

At this moment of maximum vulnerability, two of the castaways, Francisco Porras and his brother Diego, decided they could no longer endure Columbus’s infirmity and tyranny. Lives were at risk, and something had to be done as quickly as possible. They were an influential pair of traitors—one was
Santiago
’s captain, the other comptroller of the fleet—and together they cajoled forty-eight men to affix their signatures to the articles of mutiny. The uprising was scheduled to commence on the morning of January 2, 1504.

 

C
aptain Francisco Porras burst into Columbus’s makeshift cabin, demanding, “What do you mean by making no effort to get to Castile? Do you wish to keep us here to perish?”

As calmly as possible the Admiral said that no one wished to leave the island more than he did, but they needed a ship. If Porras had another plan, he should propose it to the other captains to consider; Columbus would convene them as often as needed. Talk of meetings merely annoyed Porras. Either Columbus decided to leave the island immediately, or the others would abandon him. He turned his back on the Admiral, a sign of profound disrespect, and shouted, “I’m for Castile. Who’s with me?”

The other mutineers cried out, “We’re with you!”

At that, they overran the makeshift cabins and roundtops, or masthead platforms, aboard the two shipwrecks, bellowing “Death to them!” and “To Castile! To Castile!”

A few loyalists, their voices drowned by the madmen, inquired, “Captain, what do we do now?”

Crippled by arthritis, Columbus was barely able to stand. Ferdinand reported that he “hobbled to the scene of the mutiny; but three or four honest fellows, his servants, fearing the mutineers might slay him, forced him with great difficulty to return to bed.”

With Columbus safe for the moment, the loyalists rushed to his brother the Adelantado, who was fighting off attackers with a lance. The loyalists relieved him of the weapon, and shut him in the cabin with Columbus. Then they pleaded with Porras to leave before he inspired a “murder which was bound to harm them all and for which he would certainly be punished.” If Porras complied, “none would seek to hinder him from going.”

As negotiations concluded, the mutiny lost some of its vehemence. Columbus had “scoured the islands to procure canoes” to prevent the Indians from using them. Porras and his men commandeered the canoes, and “they set out in them as gaily as if they were embarking from a harbor in Castile.” As they began to pull away, many others, “not mutineers but . . . desperate at the thought of being abandoned there by the greatest and healthiest part of the company also piled into the canoes”—much to the distress of the few remaining loyalists and of the sick, who with good reason believed they were “doomed to remain there.” The humiliating sight of nearly all of the men abandoning the Admiral who had brought them on this adventure remained with Ferdinand, who sadly noted, “If all had been in good health, I doubt that twenty of those people would have stayed with the Admiral.” Their morale lower than ever, those who stayed behind beheld the Admiral emerge unsteadily from his cabin to comfort and reassure his men as best he could. In fact, there was little consolation he could offer while Francisco Porras led the canoes laden with deserters to the same location on Jamaica’s easternmost shore from which Méndez and Fieschi had set out on their rescue mission.

 

F
erdinand painted an ugly picture of the deserters preparing to depart for Hispaniola: “Wherever they called, they inflicted outrages on the Indians, robbing their food and other possessions; they told the Indians to collect their pay from the Admiral and authorized them to kill him if he would not pay.” To feed the Indians’ disdain, Porras’s renegades explained that all the other Christians hated Columbus, that Columbus was the author of “all the misery of the Indians on Hispaniola,” and, if they failed to kill Columbus, he would “inflict the same suffering on them.”

Setting out from the Jamaican coast, they made uncertain progress toward their goal. After they had traversed four leagues, “the wind turned contrary,” and the men feared the rolling seas would swamp their overloaded craft. Before long, water was coming over the gunwales, and they resorted to tossing everything overboard, with the exception of their weapons and food for the return journey to the Jamaican coast from which they had departed. When the wind gained in strength, terrifying the renegades, they decided their only course of action was to kill the Indians and toss them overboard, as if they were excess supplies. Once they started killing Indians, the others jumped overboard, swimming away from the canoes until fatigue overcame them. In desperation, they returned to the canoes, holding on to the gunwales in a death grip, until the mutineers hacked off their hands.