Christopher Columbus
Introduction
Christopher Columbus, Master Mariner and Navigator, was born in Genoa,
Italy, about
August/October 1451 and died at Valladolid, Spain, May 20, 1506. He was
the eldest son
of Domenico Colombo, a Genoese wool worker and small-time merchant, and
Susanna
Fontanarossa, his wife. Columbus is widely thought to have been the first
European to sail
across the Atlantic Ocean and make landfall on the American continent.
He made four
voyages across the Atlantic under the sponsorship of Ferdinand and Isabella,
the Catholic
Monarchs of Aragon, Castile, and Leon in Spain. On the first and second
voyages (Aug. 3,
1492-March 15, 1493, and Sept. 25, 1493-June 11, 1496) Columbus sighted
the
majority of the islands of the Caribbean and established a base in Hispaniola
(now divided
into Haiti and the Dominican Republic). On the third voyage (May 30, 1498-October
1500) he reached Trinidad and Venezuela and the Orinoco River delta. On
the fourth
(May 9, 1502-Nov. 7, 1504) he returned to South America and sailed from
Cape
Honduras to the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Veragua, and Panama.
Although at first full of hope and ambition, an ambition partly gratified
by his title "Admiral
of the Ocean Sea," awarded to him in April 1492, and by the grants enrolled
in the Book
of Privileges (a record of his titles and claims), Columbus died a disappointed
man. He
was removed from the governorship of Hispaniola in 1499, his chief patron,
Queen
Isabella, died in 1504, and his efforts to recover his governorship of
the "Indies" from King
Ferdinand were, in the end, unavailing. In 1542, however, the bones of
Columbus were
taken from Spain to the Cathedral of Santo Domingo in Hispaniola (now the
Dominican
Republic), where they may still lie. (see also Index: West Indies)
The period between the quatercentenary celebrations of Columbus' achievements
in
1892-93 and the quincentenary ones of 1992 saw great advances in Columbus
scholarship. A huge number of books about Columbus have appeared in the
1990s, and
the insights of archaeologists and anthropologists now complement those
of sailors and
historians. This effort has given rise, as might be expected, to considerable
debate. The
past few years have also seen a major shift in approach and interpretation;
the older
pro-European and imperialist understanding has given way to one shaped
from the
perspective of the inhabitants of the Americas themselves. According to
the older
understanding, the discovery of the Americas was a great triumph, one in
which Columbus
played the part of hero in accomplishing the four voyages, in being the
means of bringing
great material profit to Spain and to other European countries, and in
opening up the
Americas to European settlement. The second perspective, however, has concentrated
on
the destructive side of the European intrusions, emphasizing, for example,
the disastrous
impact of the slave trade and the ravages of imported disease on the native
peoples of the
Caribbean and the American continents. The sense of triumph has diminished
accordingly,
and the view of Columbus as hero has now been replaced, for many, by one
of a man
deeply flawed. While Columbus' abilities as a navigator are rarely doubted
in this second
perception, and his sincerity as a man sometimes allowed, he is emphatically
removed by it
from his position of honour. The further interventions of political activists
of all kinds have
hardly fostered the reconciliation of these so disparate views.
In an attempt at a balanced account attention will therefore first of all
be restored to the
nature and quantity of the surviving written and material sources about
Columbus. All
informed scholarly comment must depend primarily upon these. Then the admiral's
achievements and failures will be examined in light of recent research.
Finally, the focus will
briefly return to the debate, in the full recognition that it is far from
ended.
MAJOR WRITTEN SOURCES
The majority of the surviving primary sources for Columbus were written
to be read by
other people. There is, then, an element of manipulation about them. This
fact needs to be
borne fully in mind for their proper understanding. Foremost among these
sources are the
journals written by Columbus himself for his sovereigns--one for the first
voyage, now lost
but able partly to be reconstructed; one for the second, almost wholly
gone; and one for
the third, again accessible through reconstructions made by using later
quotations, like the
first. Each of the journals may be supplemented by letters and reports
to and from the
sovereigns and their trusted officials and friends, provisioning decrees
from the sovereigns,
and, in the case of the second voyage, letters and reports of letters from
fellow voyagers
(especially Michele da Cuneo, Diego Alvarez Chanca, and Guillermo Coma).
There is no
journal and only one letter from the fourth voyage, but a complete roster
and payroll
survive from this, alone of all the voyages, and Columbus' younger son
Ferdinand (b. c.
1488) traveled with the admiral and left an eyewitness account. The so-called
Pleitos de
Colón, judicial documents put forward by the Pinzón family
in 1515 against the claims of
Columbus' heirs, throw oblique further light upon the explorations. The
recent discovery of
a 16th-century copybook containing five narrative letters and two personal
ones from
Columbus, all previously unknown, as well as additional copies of two known
ones, may
allow one to believe that more may yet be found. In the meanwhile, Ferdinand
Columbus'
The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus, the Historia de los Reyes
Católicos
(c. 1500) of Andrés Bernáldez (a friend of Columbus' and
chaplain to the archbishop of
Seville), and the Historia de las Indias put together about 1550-63 by
Bartolomé de las
Casas (bishop of Chiapas and champion of the indigenous people of the Americas)
supplement the other narratives.
Further important material may be gleaned from the few books still extant
from the
admiral's own library. Some of these were extensively annotated, often
by the admiral and
sometimes by his brother Bartholomew. The readings and annotations from
Columbus'
copies of the Imago mundi by the 15th-century French theologian Pierre
d'Ailly (a
compendium containing a great number of cosmological and theological texts),
the Historia
rerum ubique gestarum of Pope Pius II, published in 1477, the version of
The Travels of
Marco Polo known as the De consuetudinibus et condicionibus orientalium
regionum
of Francesco Pipino (1483-85), Alfonso de Palencia's late 15th-century
Castilian
translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, and the 15th-century humanist
Cristoforo
Landino's Italian translation of the Natural History of Pliny the Elder
cast a most important
light on Columbus' intentions and presuppositions. So do the contents of
certain other
books known to have been in his possession, such as the Guide to Geography
of the
Greek astronomer and geographer Ptolemy, the Catholicon of the 15th-century
encyclopedist John of Genoa, and a popular handbook to confession, the
mid-15th-century Confessionale produced by the Dominican St. Antoninus
of Florence.
The whole shows that the admiral was adept in Latin, Castilian, and Italian,
if not expert in
all three. He annotated primarily in Latin and Spanish, very rarely in
Italian. He had
probably already read and annotated at least the first three named texts
before he set out
on his first voyage to the "Indies." His Christian interests are manifest.
He was plainly a
deeply religious and reflective man as well as a distinguished seaman,
and, being largely
self-taught, had a reverence for learning, especially, perhaps, the learning
of his most
influential Spanish supporters. The Book of Prophecies, a collection of
prophetic passages
and pronouncements, taken largely from the Bible and seeming to bear upon
his western
voyages, which seems largely to have been put together between September
1501 and
March 1502 (with additions until c. 1505) by Columbus and his friend the
Carthusian friar
Gaspar Gorricio, is a striking manifestation of these sensibilities and
seems to contain many
passages and extracts that were personally important to the admiral.
Direct material remains of Columbus' travels are few. Efforts to find the
Spaniards' first
settlement on Hispaniola (Haiti), at Navidad, have so far failed, but the
local chieftain's
settlement nearby has been identified, and the present-day fishing village
of Bord de Mer
de Limonade may be close to the original site. Concepción de la
Vega, which Columbus
also founded on Hispaniola, on the second voyage, may be the present La
Vega Vieja, in
the Dominican Republic. Remains at the site of La Isabela are still to
be fully excavated as
are those at Sevilla la Nueva, on Jamaica, where Columbus' two caravels
were beached
on the fourth voyage. The techniques of skeletal paleopathology and paleodemography
are
being applied with some success to determine the fates of the native populations.
LIFE
Early career and the first voyage.
Little is known of Columbus' early life. His career as a seaman began effectively
in the
Portuguese marine. After surviving a shipwreck off Cape St. Vincent at
the southwestern
point of Portugal in 1476, he based himself in Lisbon, together with his
brother
Bartholomew. Both were employed as chartmakers, but Columbus was principally
a
seagoing entrepreneur. In 1477 he sailed to Iceland and Ireland with the
marine, and in
1478 he was buying sugar in Madeira as an agent for the Genoese firm of
Centurioni. In
1479 he met and married Felipa Perestrello e Moniz, a member of an impoverished
noble
Portuguese family. Their son, Diego, was born in 1480. Between 1482 and
1485
Columbus traded along the Guinea coast and made at least one voyage to
the Portuguese
fortress of São Jorge da Mina on the Gold Coast of equatorial West
Africa, gaining
knowledge of Portuguese navigation and the Atlantic wind systems along
the way. His
search for support for an Atlantic crossing in both Portugal and Spain
has encouraged
conspiracy theorists to suspect a secret pact with King John II of Portugal,
but there is no
evidence of this. Felipa died in 1485, and Columbus took as his mistress
Beatriz Enríquez
de Harana of Córdoba, by whom he had his second son, Ferdinand.
By 1486 Columbus
was firmly in Spain, asking King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella for patronage.
After at least
two rejections, he at last obtained royal support in January 1492. This
was achieved chiefly
through the interventions of the Spanish treasurer, Luis de Santángel,
and of the Franciscan
friars of La Rábida, near Huelva, with whom Columbus had stayed
in the summer of
1491. Juan Pérez of La Rábida had been one of the queen's
confessors and perhaps
procured him the crucial audience. Royal patronage was finally advanced
in the euphoria
that followed the fall of Granada, the last stronghold of the Moors in
Spain, on Jan. 2,
1492.
Columbus had been present at the siege of Granada in January 1492. He was
in fact riding
back from it to La Rábida when he was recalled to court and the
vital royal audience.
Granada's fall encouraged Spanish Christians to believe that they might
indeed triumph over
Islam, albeit chiefly, perhaps, by the back way round the globe. In the
letter that prefaces
his journal of the first voyage, the admiral vividly evokes his own hopes
and binds them all
together with the conquest of the infidel, the victory of Christianity,
and the westward route
to discovery and Christian alliance:
. . . and I saw the Moorish king come out of the gates of the city and
kiss the
royal hands of Your Highnesses . . . and Your Highnesses, as Catholic
Christians . . . took thought to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the
said
parts of India, to see those princes and peoples and lands . . . and the
manner
which should be used to bring about their conversion to our holy faith,
and
ordained that I should not go by land to the eastward, by which way it
was
the custom to go, but by way of the west, by which down to this day we
do
not know certainly that anyone has passed; therefore, having driven out
all the
Jews from your realms and lordships in the same month of January, Your
Highnesses commanded me that, with a sufficient fleet, I should go to the
said
parts of India, and for this accorded me great rewards and ennobled me
so
that from that time henceforth I might style myself "Don" and be high admiral
of the Ocean Sea and perpetual Governor of the islands and continent which
I
should discover . . . and that my eldest son should succeed to the same
position, and so on from generation to generation.
Thus a great number of interests were involved in this great project, which
was, in essence,
the attempt to find a route to the rich continent of Cathay (or modern
China), to India, and
to the fabled gold and spice islands of the East by sailing westward over
what was
presumed to be open sea. Columbus himself clearly hoped to rise from his
humble
beginnings in this way, to accumulate riches for his family, and to join
the ranks of the
nobility of Spain. In a similar manner, but at a more exalted level, the
Catholic Monarchs
sought, through such an enterprise, to gain greater status among the monarchies
of Europe,
especially against their main rival, Portugal. Then, in alliance with the
papacy (in this case,
with the Borgia pope Alexander VI [1492-1503]), they might hope to take
the lead in the
Christian defense against the infidel. The power of the Ottomans and other
Islamic nations
of the eastern Mediterranean was growing at an alarming pace, threatening
the Christian
monarchies themselves. This power had also effectively closed the land
routes to the East,
via the Caspian Sea, Samarkand, and northern India, and made the sea route
south from
the Red Sea extremely hard to access.
At a more elevated level still, Franciscan preachers sought to prepare
for the end of the
world, as they interpreted the Book of Revelation to prophesy. According
to the
eschatological vision contained in Revelation, Jerusalem would be recaptured
by
Christendom and a Christian emperor installed in the Holy Land. These events
were a
precondition for the coming, and defeat, of Antichrist and the conversion
of the whole
human race and, ultimately, for the Last Judgment. The westward project
would, it was
hoped, help to finance a crusade to the East. It might also be another
arm of it, linking with
Christians such as Prester John, a legendary Christian ruler of the East,
and his
descendants, who, it was thought by many, still survived east of the lands
of the infidel. The
Great Khan of the Golden Horde was himself held to be interested in Christianity.
Columbus carefully carried a letter of friendship from his sovereigns to
the Great Khan
with him on his journeys. Finally, the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias
was known to
have pressed southward along the coast of West Africa, beyond São
Jorge da Mina, in an
effort to find an easterly route to Cathay and India by sea. It would never
do to allow the
Portuguese to find the sea route first.
Christian missionary fervour, the power of Castile and Aragon, the fear
of Portugal, the lust
for gold, the desire for adventure, the hope of conquests, and Europe's
genuine need for a
reliable supply of herbs and spices for cooking, preserving, and medicine
all combined to
produce that explosion of energy which launched the first voyage. Adventurous
emigration
may have been encouraged by the decree signed March 31, 1492, ordering
the expulsion
of the Jews from Spain.
The time has come to lay to rest, finally and for good, the ghost of the
notion that
Columbus had ever thought that the world was flat. Europeans had known
that the Earth
was spherical in shape ever since the spread of the popular Etymologies
of St. Isidore of
Seville, produced (in Spain) in the early 7th century. Columbus' miscalculations,
such as
they were, lay in quite other areas. First, his estimate of the sea distance
to be crossed to
Cathay was wildly inaccurate. A chart (now lost) supplied by the Florentine
mathematician
and geographer Paolo Toscanelli, together with Columbus' preference for
the calculations
of the ancient Greek geographer Marinus of Tyre, encouraged him to reject
Ptolemy's
estimate of the journey from West to East overland and to substitute a
far longer one.
Again, on the authority, primarily, of the 13th-14th-century Venetian Marco
Polo's
Travels, he conceived the idea that the lands of the East stretched out
far around the back
of the globe, with the island of Cipango, or Japan, located a further 1,500
miles from the
mainland of Cathay and itself surrounded by islands. This cluster of islands
might, then,
almost touch, he seems to have argued, the islands of the Azores. Columbus'
reading of
the seer Salathiel-Ezra in the books of Esdras, from the Apocrypha (especially
II Esdras
6:42, in which the prophet states that the Earth is six parts land to one
of water) reinforced
these ideas of the proportion of land- to sea-crossing, and the mistake
was compounded
by his idiosyncratic view of the length of a degree of geographic latitude.
The degree,
according to Arabic calculators, consisted of 56 2/3 Arab miles, and an
Arab mile
measured 1,975.5 metres. Given the fact that a nautical mile measures 1,852
metres, this
degree, then, amounts to approximately 60.45 nautical miles. Columbus,
however, used
the Italian mile of 1,477.5 metres for his calculations and thus arrived
at a calculation of
approximately 45 nautical miles to a degree. This shortened the distance
across the sea
westward yet again. According to this reckoning, Zaiton, Marco Polo's great
port of
Cathay, would have lain a little to the east of present-day San Diego,
Calif., U.S., and
Cipango (Japan) on the meridian of the Virgin Islands. The latter were,
of course,
surprisingly, and confusingly, close to where Columbus actually made his
landfalls.
The miscalculation of distance may have been willful on Columbus' part
and made with an
eye to his sponsors. The first journal suggests that Columbus may have
been aware of his
inaccuracy, for he consistently concealed from his sailors the number of
actual miles they
had covered, lest they become fearful for the journey back. Such economies
with the truth
may be evidence rather of bravery and the need to inspire confidence than
of simple
dishonesty or error. Columbus' other miscalculations were a little more
serious, however.
He declined, for instance, ever to admit that he had not found the true
Indies and Cathay.
Perhaps he genuinely believed that he had been there; but, at all events,
this refusal to
accept that he had discovered a brand new world in the Caribbean, in the
face of mounting
evidence that he had, both prevented his adapting his preformed plans and
ideas to his
actual experiences and dented his later reputation. Last, Columbus was
autocratic to his
sailors and remote from his companions and intending emigrants. He was
thus a poor judge
of the ambitions, and perhaps the failings, of those who sailed with him.
This combination
was to prove fatal to almost all of his hopes.
The ships for the first voyage, the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María,
were fitted out at Palos,
on the Tinto River in southern Spain. Santángel and Columbus' collaborators
and suppliers
in Palos (led by the shipowner Martín Alonso Pinzón, captain
of the Pinta) provided at
least 1,140,000 maravedis, and Columbus supplied more than a third of the
sum
contributed by the king and queen. Queen Isabella did not, then, have to
pawn her jewels
(a myth first put about by Las Casas). The little fleet left on Aug. 3,
1492. The admiral's
navigational genius showed itself immediately, for they dropped down to
the Canary
Islands, off the northwest African mainland, rather than sailing due west
to the Azores. The
westerlies prevailing in the Azores had defeated previous sailors to the
west, but in the
Canaries they could pick up the northeast trade winds, trusting to the
westerlies for their
return. After nearly a month in the Canaries the ships set out from San
Sebastián de la
Gomera on September 6. On October 12 land was sighted from the Pinta (though
Columbus, on the Niña, later meanly claimed the privilege for himself).
The place of the
first Caribbean landfall is hotly disputed, but San Salvador, or Watling,
Island is currently
preferred to Samana Cay, Rum Cay, the Plana Cays, or the Turks and Caicos
Islands.
Beyond planting the royal banner, however, Columbus spent little time there,
being
anxious to press on to Cipango. He thought, on October 24, he had found
it in Cuba, but
by his journal entry of November 1 he had convinced himself that Cuba was
the mainland
of Cathay, though so far without evidence of great cities. Thus, on December
5, he turned
back southeastward to search for the fabled city of Zaiton, missing Florida
through this
decision and, as it turned out, his sole chance of setting foot on the
North American
continent.
The fleet was carried by adverse winds to Ayti (Haiti) on December 6, which
Columbus
renamed La Isla Española, or Hispaniola. He seems to have thought
that Haiti might be
Cipango or, if not Cipango, then perhaps one of the rich isles from which
King Solomon's
triennial fleet set sail so long ago, bringing gold and gems and spices
back to Jerusalem for
the king (I Kings 10:11, 22), or the biblical lands Sheba and Seba, confused
by some
commentators with the Tharsis and the isles of Psalm 71:10-11 in the Vulgate.
Columbus
found there at least enough gold and prosperity to save him from ridicule
on his return to
Spain. With the help of a cacique, or local Taino Indian chief, Guacanagarí,
he set up a
stockade on the northern coast of the island, named it La Navidad, and
posted 39 men to
guard it against his return. The accidental running aground of the Santa
María provided
additional planks and provisions for the garrison.
On Jan. 16, 1493, Columbus left with his remaining two ships for Spain.
The journey back
was a nightmare. Although the westerlies did indeed direct them homeward,
in
mid-February a terrible storm engulfed the fleet. The Niña was driven
to seek harbour at
Santa Maria in the Azores, and then, still storm-bound, to limp on to Lisbon.
In Santa
Maria a pilgrimage of thanksgiving to the shrine of the Virgin led to the
temporary capture
of 10 sailors by the hostile Portuguese authorities. An unavoidable interview
with King John
II in Lisbon left Columbus under the suspicion of collaborating with Spain's
enemies.
These events cast a shadow on his return to Palos.
Many of the tensions endemic to all Columbus' succeeding efforts had already
made
themselves felt on this first voyage. First and perhaps most damaging of
all were those
engendered by the incompatibility between the admiral's apparently high
religious and even
mystical aspirations and the realities of trading, competition, and colonization.
Columbus
never openly acknowledged this gulf and so was quite incapable of bridging
it. He chose,
for instance, in his reports, to interpret the grounding of the Santa María
and the
establishing of his fortress as events decreed by God. They were in fact
deliberate and
radical departures from the original simple project of exploration and
contact, but
Columbus preferred to justify them on religious rather than rational or
economic grounds.
(The admiral had begun even now to adopt a mode of sanctification in retrospect
and
validation through sheer force of autocratic personality that would make
him so many
enemies in the future.) Also, there had been looting, violence, and kidnapping,
especially on
Hispaniola. Columbus did control excesses, but he was determined to take
back both
material and human cargo to his sovereigns and for himself. This blunted
his ability to retain
the high moral ground. Further, the latent doubts about the foreigner Columbus'
total
loyalty to Spain had been revived, and, last, there were clear divisions
in the ranks of
Columbus' companions. Pinzón had disputed the route as the fleet
reached the Bahamas
and had sailed away from Cuba, and Columbus, on November 21. He rejoined
him, with
lame excuses, only on January 6. The Pinta made port at Bayona on its homeward
journey, separately from Columbus and the Niña. Had Pinzón
not died so soon after his
return, Columbus' command of the second voyage might have been less than
assured. As
it was, the Pinzón family became now his rivals for reward.
The second and third voyages.
The gold, parrots, spices, and human captives Columbus displayed for his
sovereigns at
Barcelona convinced all of the need for a rapid second voyage. Columbus
was now at the
height of his popularity, and at least 17 ships set out from Cádiz
on Sept. 25, 1493.
Colonization and Christian evangelization were openly included this time
in the plans, and a
group of friars shipped with him. The presence of some 1,300 salaried men
with perhaps
200 private investors and a small troop of cavalry are testimony to the
expectations
invested in the expedition. The confiscated properties of expelled Jews
had swelled the
royal coffers and probably largely financed it.
Sailing again via Gomera in the Canaries, the fleet took a more southerly
course than on the
first voyage and reached Dominica in the Lesser Antilles on Nov. 3, 1493.
After sighting
the Virgin Islands, it entered Samaná Bay in Hispaniola on November
23. Cuneo, deeply
impressed by this unerring return, remarked that "since Genoa was Genoa
there was never
born a man so well equipped and expert in navigation as the said lord Admiral."
An
expedition to Navidad four days later, however, was shocked to find the
fortress
destroyed and the men dead. Here was a clear sign that native resistance
had gathered
strength. More fortified places were rapidly built, including a city, founded
on January 2
and named La Isabela after the queen. On February 2 Antonio de Torres left
La Isabela
with 12 ships, a little gold, spices, parrots, captives (most of whom died
en route), the bad
news about Navidad, and some complaints about Columbus' methods of government.
While Torres headed for Spain, two of Columbus' subordinates, Alonso de
Ojeda and
Pedro Margarit, took revenge for the massacre at Navidad and captured slaves,
both
seemingly with the admiral's full connivance. In March Columbus explored
Cibao (thought
to be the gold-bearing region of the island) and established the fortress
of St. Thomas
there. Then, late in April, three ships, led by Columbus in the Niña,
explored the Cuban
coastline and searched for gold in Jamaica, only to conclude that Hispaniola
promised the
richest spoils for the settlers. It was, the admiral decided, indeed the
biblical Seba (Saba in
the Vulgate), and Cuba was the mainland of Cathay. On June 12, 1494, Columbus
insisted on a sworn declaration to that effect--a sure indication that,
though not all of the
company agreed with him, he was bent on insisting to his sovereign that
he had reached
Cathay.
The year 1495 saw the determined conquest of the island of Hispaniola and
the beginning
of troubles for the Taino Indians. There is evidence, especially in the
objections of a friar,
Bernardo Buil, that Columbus' methods remained harsh. The admiral's brothers,
Bartholomew and Diego, were left in charge of the settlement when, on March
10, 1496,
the admiral left La Isabela for Spain. He reached Cádiz on June
11 and immediately
pressed his plans for a third voyage upon his sovereigns, at Burgos. Spain
was at war now
with France and in need of buying allies; moreover, the yield from the
second voyage had
fallen well short of the investment. But Portugal still threatened, and,
though the two
nations, in the Treaty of Tordesillas (June 7, 1494), had divided the Atlantic
conveniently
between themselves, they had as yet made no agreement about rights in the
East.
According to the treaty Spain might take all discovered land west of a
line drawn from pole
to pole 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands and Portugal that to
the east of the
line; but what about the other side of the world, where West met East?
Also, there might
be a previously undiscovered antipodean continent; who, then, should be
trusted to draw
the line there? Ferdinand and Isabella therefore made a cautious further
investment. Six
ships left Sanlúcar de Barrameda on May 30, 1498, three filled with
explorers and three
with provisions for the settlement on Hispaniola. It was clear now that
Columbus was
expected both to find great prizes and to establish the flag of Spain firmly
in the East.
Certainly he found prizes, but not, sadly, quite of the kind his sponsors
required. The aim
this time was to explore to the south of the existing discoveries, in the
hope of finding both
a strait from Cuba/Cathay to India and, perhaps, the unknown antipodean
continent. Thus,
on June 21, the provision ships left Gomera for Hispaniola, while the explorers
headed
south for the Cape Verde Islands. Columbus began the Atlantic crossing
on July 4, 1498,
from São Tiago Island in Cape Verde. He discovered the principle
of compass variation
(the variation at any point on the Earth's surface between the direction
to magnetic and
geographic north), for which he made brilliant allowance on the journey
from Margarita
Island to Hispaniola on the later leg of this voyage, and he also observed,
though
misunderstood, the diurnal rotation of the Pole Star. After stopping at
Trinidad (named
after the Holy Trinity, whose protection he had invoked for the voyage),
Columbus
entered the Gulf of Paria and planted the Spanish flag on the Paria Peninsula
in Venezuela.
He sent the caravel El Corréo southward to investigate the mouth
of the Rio Grande (the
northern branch of the Orinoco), and by Aug. 15, 1498, knew by the great
floods of fresh
water flowing into the Gulf of Paria that he had discovered another continent--"another
world." But he did not find the strait to India, nor did he find those
mines of King
Solomon's gold his reading had led him and his sovereigns to expect in
these latitudes; and
he made only disastrous discoveries when he returned to Hispaniola. (see
also Index:
Trinidad and Tobago, Orinoco River)
The rule of his brothers, Bartholomew and Diego, had been resented there,
by both the
native inhabitants and the immigrants. A rebellion by the alcalde (mayor)
of La Isabela,
Francisco Roldán, had led to appeals to the Spanish court, and,
even as Columbus
attempted to restore order (partly, it must be said, by hangings), the
Spanish chief justice,
Francisco de Bobadilla, was on his way out to the colony with a commission
from the
sovereigns to investigate all the complaints. It is hard to explain exactly
what the trouble
was. Columbus' report to his sovereigns from the second voyage, taken back
by Torres
and so known as the Torres Memorandum, speaks of sickness, poor provisioning,
recalcitrant natives, and undisciplined hidalgos (gentry). It may be that
these problems had
intensified. But the Columbus family's repressive policies must be held
at least partly
responsible, intent as it undoubtedly now was on enslaving the native population,
both to
work the placer mines of Hispaniola and for export to Europe. The adelantado
(governor)
Bartholomew Columbus had replaced Columbus' original system of gold production,
whereby the local chiefs had been in charge of delivering gold on a loose
per capita basis,
by direct exploitation through favoured Spaniards, and this had caused
widespread dissent
among both unfavoured Spaniards and indigenous chiefs. Certainly Bobadilla
found against
the Columbus family when he arrived in Hispaniola. He clapped Columbus
and his two
brothers in irons and sent them promptly back, on the La Gorda, to Cádiz.
They arrived
there in late October 1500.
The long letter Columbus composed on the journey back and sent to his sovereigns
immediately on his return is one of the most extraordinary he wrote, and
one of the most
informative. One part of its exalted, almost mystical, quality may be attributed
to the
humiliations the admiral had endured (humiliations he compounded by refusing
to allow the
captain of the La Gorda to remove his chains during the voyage) and another
to the fact
that he was now suffering severely from sleeplessness, eyestrain, and a
form of rheumatoid
arthritis, which may have hastened his death. Much of what he said in the
letter, however,
seems genuinely to have expressed his beliefs. One can learn from it that
Columbus had
absolute faith in his navigational abilities, his seaman's sense of the
weather, his eyes, and
his reading. The last is apparent in his conviction that he had reached
the outer region of the
Earthly Paradise. Thus, as he approached Trinidad and the Paria Peninsula,
the rotation of
the Pole Star gave him, he wrote, the impression that the fleet was climbing.
The weather
had become extremely mild, and the flow of fresh water into the Gulf of
Paria was, as he
saw, enormous. All this could have one explanation only--they had mounted
toward the
temperate heights of the Earthly Paradise, heights from which the rivers
of Paradise ran into
the sea. Columbus had found all such signs of the outer regions of the
Earthly Paradise in
his reading, and indeed they were widely known. He was, then, on this estimate,
close to
the realms of gold that lay near Paradise. He had not found the gold yet,
to be sure; but he
knew now where it was. Columbus' expectations thus allowed him again to
interpret his
discoveries in terms of biblical and classical sources and to do so in
a manner that would
be comprehensible to his sponsors and favourable to himself.
This letter, desperate though it was, convinced the sovereigns that, even
if he had not yet
found the prize, he had been close to it after all. They ordered his release
and gave him
audience at Granada in late December 1500. They accepted that, although
Columbus'
capacities as governor were wanting (on Sept. 3, 1501, they appointed Nicolás
de
Ovando, not Columbus, to succeed Bobadilla to the governorship), those
as navigator and
explorer were not. Columbus, even ill and importunate, was a better investment
than the
many adventurers and profiteers who had meantime been licensed to compete
with him,
and there was always the danger (revealed in some of the letters of this
period) that he
would offer his services to his native Genoa. In October 1501, then, Columbus
went to
Seville to make ready his fourth and final expedition.
The fourth voyage and death of the admiral.
The winter and spring of 1501-02 were exceedingly busy. The four chosen
ships were
bought, fitted, and crewed, and some 20 of Columbus' extant letters and
memoranda
were written then, many in exculpation of Bobadilla's charges, others pressing
even harder
the nearness of the Earthly Paradise and the need to reconquer Jerusalem.
Columbus took
to calling himself "Christbearer" in his letters and to using a strange
and mystical signature,
never satisfactorily explained. He began also, with all these thoughts
and pressures in mind,
to compile both his Book of Privileges and his Book of Prophecies. The
first, in defending
the titles and financial claims of the Columbus family, seems oddly annexed
to the Christian
apocalypticism of the second; yet both were linked most closely in the
admiral's own mind.
He seems to have been certain that his mission was divinely guided. Thus,
the loftiness of
his spiritual aspirations increased as the threats to his personal ones
mounted. In the midst
of all these efforts and hazards, Columbus sailed from Cádiz on
his fourth voyage on May
9, 1502.
The four ships allowed him contrasted sharply with the thirty granted to
the governor of
Hispaniola, Ovando. The confidence his sovereigns had formerly had in Columbus
had
now diminished, and there is much to suggest that pity mingled with hope
in their support.
His illnesses were worsening, and the hostility to his rule in Hispaniola
was unabated. Thus,
Ferdinand and Isabella forbade him to return there. He was to resume, instead,
his
interrupted exploration of the "other world" to the south that he had found
on his third
voyage and to look most particularly for gold and the strait to India.
Columbus expected
to meet the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama in the East, and the sovereigns
instructed
him on the appropriate courteous behaviour for such a meeting--another
sign, perhaps, that
they did not wholly trust him. They were right. He departed from Gran Canaria
on the night
of May 25, made landfall at Martinique on June 15 (after the fastest crossing
to date), and
was, by June 29, demanding entrance to Santo Domingo on Hispaniola. Only
on being
refused such entry by Ovando did he take to the farther west and the south.
July to
September 1502 saw him coasting Jamaica, the southern shore of Cuba, Honduras,
and
the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua. The feat of Caribbean transnavigation,
which took him
to Bonacca Island off Cape Honduras on July 30, deserves to be reckoned
on a par, as to
difficulty, with that of crossing the Atlantic, and the admiral was justly
proud of it.
Constantly probing for the strait, the fleet sailed round the Chiriquí
Lagoon (in Panama) in
October, then, searching for gold, along Veragua and Panama in the foulest
of weather. In
February 1503 Columbus attempted to establish a trading post at Santa María
de Belén
on the bank of the Belén (Bethlehem) River under the command of
Bartholomew
Columbus in order to exploit the promising gold yield he was beginning
to find in Veragua.
Indian hostility and the poor condition of his ships (of which only two
now remained, and
these fearfully holed by shipworm) determined him, however, to turn back
to Hispaniola.
On this voyage the ultimate disaster struck. Against Columbus' (right)
judgment, the pilots
turned the fleet north too soon. The ships could not make the distance
and had to be
beached on the coast of Jamaica. By June 1503 Columbus and his crews were
castaways.
Columbus had hoped, as he said to his sovereigns, that "my hard and troublesome
voyage
may yet turn out to be my noblest"; it was in fact the most disappointing
of all and the most
unlucky. In its searches for the strait and for gold the fleet had missed
discovering the
Pacific and making contact with the great Mayan empire of Yucatán
by the narrowest of
margins. Also, though two of the men (Diego Méndez and Bartolomeo
Fieschi, captains of
the wrecked ships La Capitana and Vizcaíno, respectively) left about
July 17 to get help
for the castaways, traversing the 450-mile journey to Hispaniola safely
by canoe, Ovando
made no great haste to deliver that help. In the meantime, the admiral
displayed his acumen
once again by correctly predicting an eclipse of the Moon from his astronomical
tables,
thus frightening the natives into providing food; but it was June 1504
before rescue came,
and Columbus and his men did not reach Hispaniola until August 13 of the
same year. On
November 7 he sailed back into Sanlúcar, to find that Queen Isabella
had made her will
and was dying.
It would be wrong to suppose that Columbus spent his final two years wholly
in illness,
poverty, and oblivion. His son Diego was well established at court, and
the admiral himself
lived in Seville in some style. His "tenth" of the gold diggings in Hispaniola,
guaranteed in
1493, provided a substantial revenue (against which his Genoese bankers
allowed him to
draw), and one of the few ships to escape a hurricane off Hispaniola in
1502 (in which
Bobadilla himself went down) was that carrying Columbus' gold. He felt
himself ill-used
and short-changed nonetheless, and these years were marred, for both him
and King
Ferdinand, by his constant pressing for redress. He followed the court
from Segovia to
Salamanca and Valladolid, attempting to gain an audience. He knew that
his life was
nearing its end, and in August 1505 he began to add codicils to his will.
He died on May
20, 1506. First he was laid in the Franciscan friary in Valladolid, then
taken to the family
mausoleum established at the Carthusian monastery of Las Cuevas in Seville.
Finally, by
the will of his son Diego, Columbus' bones were laid with his own in the
Cathedral of
Santo Domingo, Hispaniola.
THE DEBATE
The debate about Columbus' character and achievements began at least as
early as the
first rebellion of the Taino Indians and continued with Roldán,
Bobadilla, and Ovando. It
has been revived periodically (notably by Las Casas and Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
ever
since. The Columbus quincentenary of 1992 rekindled the intensity of this
early
questioning and redirected its aims, often profitably. The word "encounter"
is now
preferred to "discovery" when describing the contacts between the Old World
and the
New, and more attention has come to be paid to the fate of the Native American
peoples
and to the sensibilities of non-Christians. Enlightening discoveries have
been made about
the diseases that reached the New World through Columbus' agency as well
as those his
sailors took back with them to the Old. The pendulum may, however, now
have swung too
far. Columbus has been made a whipping boy for events far beyond his own
reach or
knowledge and a means to an agenda of condemnation that far outstrips his
own guilt.
Thus, too little attention has recently been paid to the historical circumstances
that
conditioned him. His obsessions with lineage and imperialism, his seemingly
bizarre
Christian beliefs, and his apparently brutal behaviour come from a world
remote from that
of modern democratic ideas, it is true; but it was the world to which he
belonged. The
forces of European expansion, with their slaving and search for gold, had
been unleashed
before him and were at his time quite beyond his control. Columbus simply
decided to be
in the vanguard of them. He succeeded. Columbus' towering stature as a
seaman and
navigator, the sheer power of his religious convictions (self-delusory
as they sometimes
were), his personal magnetism, his courage, his endurance, his determination,
and, above
all, his achievements as an explorer, should continue to be recognized.