Honors at Barcelona
The king and queen received Columbus at Barcelona. He remained at court for six months and was honored with the title "Admiral of the Ocean Sea," by which was meant the Atlantic west of the Azores. He had become governor of the new world or, as he put it himself, "viceroy and governor-general of the islands and lands of Asia and the Indies." Since rumor had it that John II of Portugal was fitting out a fleet to cross the Atlantic, Ferdinand appealed to Pope Alexander VI to fix Spain's rights over the "Ocean Sea." The Spanish pope, in a series of bulls (1493), assigned all non-Christian lands in the west to Spain, and all in the east to Portugal, along an imaginary line running north and south 435 kilometers west of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands (the book's figure).
The Treaty of Tordesillas
Portugal refused to accept this boundary, and war seemed certain, but by the Treaty of Tordesillas (June 7, 1494) the rival governments agreed that the line should pass 1,500 kilometers west of the Cape Verde Islands for earlier discoveries, and 2,220 kilometers west of those islands for later ones (the book's figures; other sources give a single line about 370 leagues west). The eastern end of Brazil falls east of the second line. In the papal bulls the new region was called the Indies (the West Indies); scholars such as Peter Martyr of Anghiera accepted Columbus's belief that he had reached Asia, and this notion lasted until Magellan circled the globe.
The Second Voyage and the Lost Settlement
Ferdinand and Isabella, hoping for gold, equipped Columbus with a fleet of seventeen ships, twelve hundred sailors and crewmen, many domestic animals to set up stock-raising in the West Indies, and five priests to shrive the Spaniards and baptize the natives, and sent him on a new voyage of exploration. The second voyage left Seville on September 25, 1493. Thirty-nine days later (against seventy on the first voyage) a lookout sighted an island that Columbus, because it was Sunday, named Dominica. The ships did not stop there, for the admiral was after bigger game. He passed through the strangest group of the Lesser Antilles and was so struck by their number that he called them "the eleven thousand virgins"; they are still known as the Virgin Islands. He went on to discover Puerto Rico, stopped there briefly, and then hurried on to learn what had become of the sailors he had left in Haiti ten months before. Not one remained. They had roamed the island and stolen the natives' women and gold; had set up a tropical paradise for themselves, each taking five women; some had quarreled and killed one another, and the rest had all fallen to enraged natives.
The fleet sailed east along the coast of Haiti. On January 2, 1494, the admiral landed his people and cargo to found another settlement, which he named Isabela. After overseeing the building of the town and the repair of the ships, he left to explore Cuba. Unable to sail around it, he became convinced that it was the continent of Asia, perhaps the Malay peninsula. He thought of circling it so as to have circled the globe, but his ships were not equipped for it. He returned to Haiti (October 29, 1494) not knowing how the settlers of the new colonies had fared.
Abuses and the Slave Trade
When he found that these settlers had behaved like their predecessors he was bitterly astonished: the Spaniards had abused native women, stolen supplies and seized boys for slavery, and the natives in retaliation had killed many Spaniards. The missionaries had made not the slightest effort to baptize and convert the natives. One of the priests, with some discontented sailors, had returned to Spain to give the king and queen a discouraging report on Haiti's resources. Columbus himself had now turned into a trader. He sent expeditions to hunt slaves on the island; fifteen hundred slaves were captured, four hundred were left with the European settlers there and five hundred were sent to Spain. Two hundred of them died on the way; the survivors were sold at Seville, but, unable to adapt to the cold climate or the savagery of civilization, they all perished within a few years (the book's account).
Back to Spain
Columbus left his brother Bartholomew with orders to move the settlers from Isabela to a better site, Santo Domingo (today Trujillo, the book says), and himself set out for Spain (March 10, 1496), reaching Cádiz after a hard voyage of ninety-three days. He presented the slaves and pieces of gold he had brought to the king and queen; though not much, they had the effect of dispelling doubts, for unreliable reports had troubled courtiers' minds and they thought pouring so much money into the Atlantic unwise. The admiral was ill at ease on land. The salt of the sea was mixed with his blood. He asked for at least eight ships for another voyage to try his luck. The king and queen consented, and in May 1498 he sailed again.
The Third Voyage and Bobadilla
On the third voyage he ran east to the tenth parallel and then turned west. On July 31 the sailors saw a large island that the pious admiral named Trinidad; and on August 31, perhaps a year before or a year after Vespucci, he reached the land of South America (the book's phrasing). After exploring the Gulf of Paria he sailed northwest and reached Santo Domingo, again on August 31 (the book gives the same date twice). The colonists of this third settlement had survived, but a quarter of the five-hundred-man Spanish group he had left in 1496 suffered from syphilis, and they were divided into two hostile camps that threatened war at any moment. To quench the enmity Columbus gave each camp tracts of land and with them the natives living on them as slaves, and this became the law of the Spanish colonies. Hardship, despair, gout and eye pain had worn him down, and these difficulties now further shattered him. At times a dark cloud covered the sky of his mind; he became irritable, quarrelsome, harsh, greedy and cruel in his punishments, and many Spaniards, at least, resented being under an Italian and made claims against him. Columbus found that the problem of governing colonies did not suit his training and temperament. In October 1499 he sent two ships to Spain and asked Isabella and Ferdinand to send a royal officer to the island to assist him in government.
The sovereigns took him at his word and sent Francisco de Bobadilla, but went beyond the admiral's request and gave him full authority over everyone and everything, Columbus included. Bobadilla arrived at Santo Domingo while Columbus was away at sea and heard the people's complaints about the government of Christopher and his brothers Bartholomew and Diego over the island, now called Hispaniola. When Columbus returned, Bobadilla ordered him thrown into prison and put in irons. After further inquiry he sent the three brothers to Spain in chains (October 1, 1500). When they reached Cádiz, Columbus wrote a moving letter to his friends at court. It was seventeen years, he said, since he had entered the service of these princes to undertake the exploration of the western lands. Eight men had called him to discuss it and thought what he proposed a joke. Yet he persisted, and as a result he had brought under their rule a land larger than Africa and Europe together and 1,700 islands or more, all of it conquered in seven years by God's will. When he hoped for reward and longed for rest, he was unjustly imprisoned and sent here under the heavy weight of chains, accused out of malice on the slanders of rebels who wanted to seize everything. He begged them, as pure-hearted and zealous Christians trusted by the king and queen, to read his writings through and see how he, who had come from a distant land to serve these princes, had been deprived of honor and property at the end of his life, without cause, a thing neither just nor merciful.
Freed, but Not Restored
Ferdinand was busy dividing the kingdom of Naples with Louis XII; six weeks passed before he issued the order freeing Columbus and his brothers and summoned them to court. The king and queen received them at the Alhambra, consoled them, and gave them wealth and honor, but did not return their former position in the new world. Under the agreement made with them in 1492 the sovereigns had promised to make Columbus ruler of all the lands he discovered, but now they found him unfit for it. They named Don Nicolás de Ovando governor of the West Indies, but allowed the admiral to continue to enjoy his property and rights and the gold and commerce of Santo Domingo. For the rest of his life Columbus lived as a rich man.
The Fourth Voyage and the Hurricane
But he was not content. With great insistence he asked the king and queen to allow him another voyage. Though they still did not know whether "mastery of the West Indies" would profit them, they felt so indebted to him that they equipped him once more. On May 9, 1502, Columbus began his fourth voyage from Cádiz with four ships and a hundred and forty men, including his brother Bartholomew and his son Ferdinand. On June 15 he reached Martinique; on June 29 he felt a storm in the air and a pain in his joints, and took shelter at a point on the coast of Haiti near Santo Domingo. In the main harbor thirty ships were setting sail. Columbus sent word to the governor of the storm gathering in the sky and sea and said it would be better to delay the departure of the ships a little. Ovando did not heed the warning and sent the ships out. The storm came; Columbus's ships were slightly damaged, but all the governor's fleet except one was lost; five hundred lives, including Bobadilla's, were lost and an immense quantity of gold went into the sea.
The Storm Off Central America
Now Columbus began the hardest part of his voyage without the least anxiety. He sailed west until he reached Honduras and explored the coast of Nicaragua and Costa Rica in hope of finding a strait around the globe. On December 5, 1502, he was caught in a storm of wind and rain whose maddening force can be clearly felt in his writings: for nine whole days he was like one who is lost, with no hope of surviving. He had never seen the waves so terrible or the sea so angry and covered in fog. The wind not only would not let them go forward, it would not even let them near land to shelter anywhere; they had to stay in that bloody ocean, boiling and churning like a pot. He had never seen the sky so frightful; for a night and a day it was like a blazing furnace; lightning fell so fiercely that he thought it would break his masts and sails, and flashed on the ships as if to shatter them. All the while water poured from the sky; it was not rain, for truly another Flood had come. His men were so worn and battered that, to escape their sufferings, they longed for death.
A waterspout fell near the ships, as if to add to the terror of wind, rain and lightning and the danger of nearby reefs, and then, "the revolving fountain lifted the water to the breast of the clouds." Columbus took out the Bible, read from it the story of Christ calming the storm at Capernaum, and then traced a cross in the sky with his sword to drive the evil spirits out of the column of the waterspout, and, wonder of wonders, they say the column of water collapsed at once. After twelve fearful days the wrath of sky and sea subsided and Columbus's fleet anchored near the eastern end of the present Panama Canal. There, with great sorrow, they kept Christmas of 1502 and New Year's Day of 1503, not knowing that the Pacific Ocean was only sixty-four kilometers from them.
Marooned at Jamaica
Other misfortunes followed. Thirteen sailors who had gone up the mouth of a river in the flagship's boat to look for fresh water were attacked by natives; all but one Spaniard were killed and the boat was destroyed. Two of the fleet's ships were so worm-eaten that they had to be abandoned, and the other two had such cracks that their pumps worked day and night to throw out the water; in the end the worms proved stronger than men, and the ships had to be run aground on a Jamaican beach (June 25, 1503). There the luckless sailors and crewmen remained a year and five days, dependent for food on the unreliable friendship of natives who had barely enough to eat themselves. Diego Méndez, whose calm courage kept Columbus from sinking into total despair, volunteered to go to Santo Domingo for help in a canoe made from a hollowed tree trunk, with six Christians and ten natives. The distance from Jamaica to Santo Domingo was 732 kilometers, and 130 of them were entirely out of sight of land. On this dangerous journey their water ran out and several natives died. Méndez reached his destination, but Ovando could not send a ship to rescue the admiral until May 1504.
In February the Jamaican natives cut down so much on the food they were giving the sailors that the Spaniards nearly starved. Columbus had with him Regiomontanus's almanac, which predicted an eclipse on February 29. So he called the native chiefs together and warned them that because they had refused to give his men enough food, God was angry and meant to make the moon vanish from the sky. They laughed at his words, but when the eclipse occurred they hurried to bring food and provisions to the ships. Columbus assured them that he would pray to God's court to make the moon appear again and would say that the natives from now on would feed the Christians well; the moon appeared again in the sky.
The End
Four months passed before help arrived, and the ship Ovando sent had so many splits and cracks that it could only just get back to Santo Domingo. Columbus, with his brother and son, in a stronger ship, after a long and stormy voyage, reached Spain on November 7. The king and queen were displeased that he had found neither more gold nor a route to the Indian Ocean. Neither Ferdinand nor Isabella, who was near death, had time to receive the white-haired admiral, who had at last come home from the sea. The tenth of his revenue from Haiti still came in, and he was safe from poverty; what tormented him was gout. At last, when Ferdinand was willing to summon him, Columbus, who looked older than his fifty-eight years, could barely bear the hardship of the long journey to court as far as Segovia. He demanded from the king all the titles, rights and revenues promised him in 1492. Ferdinand objected to his demands and granted him a lucrative estate in Castile. Columbus refused, and went with the court to Salamanca and Valladolid, where, worn out and heartbroken, he died on May 20, 1506. No one has ever changed the map of the world as he did.