Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 33

[Sidenote: 1494. June 3.]

[Sidenote: Men with tails.]

Columbus now pa.s.sed out from among these islands and steered towards a mountainous region, where he again landed and opened intercourse with a pacific tribe on June 3. An old cacique repeated the same story of the illimitable land, and referred to the province of Mangon as lying farther west. This name was enough to rekindle the imagination of the Admiral. Was not Mangi the richest of the provinces that Sir John Mandeville had spoken of? He learned also that a people with tails lived there, just as that veracious narrator had described, and they wore long garments to conceal that appendage. What a sight a procession of these Asiatics would make in another reception at the Spanish Court!

[Sidenote: Gulf of Xagua.]

[Sidenote: White-robed men.]

There was nothing now to impede the progress of the caravels, and on the vessels went in their westward course. Every day the crews got fresh fruits from the friendly canoes. They paid nothing for the balmy odors from the land. They next came to the Gulf of Xagua, and pa.s.sing this they again sailed into shallow waters, whitened with the floating sand, which the waves kept in suspension. The course of the s.h.i.+ps was tortuous among the bars, and they felt relieved when at last they found a place where their anchors would hold. To make sure that a way through this labyrinth could be found, Columbus sent his smallest caravel ahead, and then following her guidance, the little fleet, with great difficulty, and not without much danger at times, came out into clearer water.

Later, he saw a deep bay on his right, and tacking across the opening he lay his course for some distant mountains. Here he anch.o.r.ed to replenish his water-casks. An archer straying into the forest came back on the run, saying that he had seen white-robed people. Here, then, thought Columbus, were the people who were concealing their tails! He sent out two parties to reconnoitre. They found nothing but a tangled wilderness.

It has been suggested that the timorous and credulous archer had got half a sight of a flock of white cranes feeding in a savanna. Such is the interpretation of this story by Irving, and Humboldt tells us there is enough in his experience with the habits of these birds to make it certain that the interpretation is warranted.

[Sidenote: Columbus believes he sees the Golden Chersonesus,]

Still the Admiral went on westerly, opening communication occasionally with the sh.o.r.e, but to little advantage in gathering information, for the expedition had gone beyond the range of dialects where the Lucayan interpreter could be of service. The sh.o.r.e people continued to point west, and the most that could be made of their signs was that a powerful king reigned in that direction, and that he wore white robes. This is the story as Bernaldez gives it; and Columbus very likely thought it a premonition of Prester John. The coast still stretched to the setting sun, if Columbus divined the native signs aright, but no one could tell how far. The sea again became shallow, and the keels of the caravels stirred up the bottom. The accounts speak of wonderful crowds of tortoises covering the water, pigeons darkening the sky, and gaudy b.u.t.terflies sweeping about in clouds. The sh.o.r.e was too low for habitation; but they saw smoke and other signs of life in the high lands of the interior. When the coast line began to trend to the southwest,--it was Marco Polo who said it would,--there could be little doubt that the Golden Chersonesus of the ancients, which we know to-day as the Malacca peninsula, must be beyond.

[Sidenote: by which he would return to Spain.]

What next? was the thought which pa.s.sed through the fevered brain of the Admiral. He had an answer in his mind, and it would make a new sensation for his poor colony at Isabella to hear of him in Spain. Pa.s.sing the Golden Chersonesus, had he not the alternative of steering homeward by way of Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope, and so astound the Portuguese more than he did when he entered the Tagus? Or, abandoning the Indian Ocean and entering the Red Sea, could he not proceed to its northern extremity, and there, deserting his s.h.i.+ps, join a caravan pa.s.sing through Jerusalem and Jaffa, and so embark again on the Mediterranean and sail into Barcelona, a more wonderful explorer than before?

These were the sublimating thoughts that now buoyed the Admiral, as he looked along the far-stretching coast,--or at least his friend Bernaldez got this impression from his intercourse with Columbus after his return to Spain.

[Sidenote: His crew rebel.]

If the compliant spirit of his crew had not been exhausted, he would perhaps have gone on, and would have been forced by developments to a revision of his geographical faith. His vessels, unfortunately, were strained in all their seams. Their leaks had spoiled his provisions.

Incessant labor had begun to tell upon the health of the crew. They much preferred the chances of a return to Isabella, with all its hazards, than a sight of Jaffa and the Mediterranean, with the untold dangers of getting there.

The Admiral, however, still pursued his course for a few days more to a point, as Humboldt holds, opposite the St. Philip Keys, when, finding the coast trending sharply to the southwest, and his crew becoming clamorous, he determined to go no farther.

[Sidenote: 1494. June 12. He turns back.]

It was now the 12th of June, 1494, and if we had nothing but the _Historie_ to guide us, we should be ignorant of the singular turn which affairs took. Whoever wrote that book had, by the time it was written, become conscious that obliviousness was sometimes necessary to preserve the reputation of the Admiral. The strange doc.u.ment which interests us, however, has not been lost, and we can read it in Navarrete.

[Sidenote: Enforces an oath upon his men]

It is not difficult to understand the disquietude of Columbus's mind. He had determined to find Cathay as a counterpoise to the troubled conditions at Isabella, both to a.s.suage the gloomy forebodings of the colonists and to rea.s.sure the public mind in Spain, which might receive, as he knew, a shock by the reports which Torres's fleet had carried to Europe. He had been forced by a mutinous crew to a determination to turn back, but his discontented companions might be complacent enough to express an opinion, if not complacent enough to run farther hazards. So Columbus committed himself to the last resort of deluded minds, when dealing with geographical or historical problems,--that of seeking to establish the truth by building monuments, placing inscriptions, and certifications under oath. He caused the eighty men who const.i.tuted the crew of his little squadron--and we find their name in Duro's _Colon y Pinzon_--to swear before a notary that it was possible to go from Cuba to Spain by land, across Asia.

[Sidenote: that Cuba is a continent.]

It was solemnly affirmed by this official that if any should swerve from this belief, the miserable skeptic, if an officer, should be fined 10,000 maravedis; and if a sailor, he should receive a hundred lashes and have his tongue pulled out. Such were the scarcely heroic measures that Columbus thought it necessary to employ if he would dispel any belief that all these islands of the Indies were but an ocean archipelago after all, and that the width of the unknown void between Europe and Asia, which he was so confident he had traversed, was yet undetermined. To make Cuba a continent by affidavit was easy; to make it appear the identical kingdom of the Great Khan, he hoped would follow.

During his first voyage, so far as he could make out an intelligible statement from what the natives indicated, he was of the opinion that Cuba was an island. It is to be feared that he had now reached a state of mind in which he did not dare to think it an island.

If we believe the _Historie_,--or some pa.s.sages in it, at least,--written, as we know, after the geography of the New World was fairly understood, and if we accept the evidence of the copyist, Herrera, Columbus never really supposed he was in Asia. If this is true, he took marvelous pains to deceive others by appearing to be deceived himself, as this notarial exhibition and his solemn a.s.severation to the Pope in 1502 show. The writers just cited say that he simply juggled the world by giving the name India to these regions, as better suited to allure emigration. Such testimony, if accepted, establishes the fraudulent character of these notarial proceedings. It is fair to say, however, that he wrote to Peter Martyr, just after the return of the caravels to Isabella, expressing a confident belief in his having come near to the region of the Ganges; and divesting the testimony of all the jugglery with which others have invested it, there seems little doubt that in this belief, at least, Columbus was sincere.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Ma.s.s ON Sh.o.r.e.

[From Philoponus's _Nova Typis Transacta Navigatio_.]]

[Sidenote: 1494. June 13.]

[Sidenote: 1494. June 30.]

[Sidenote: 1494. July 7.]

On the next day, Columbus, standing to the southeast, reached a large island, the present Isle of Pines, which he called Evangelista. In endeavoring to skirt it on the south, he was entangled once more in a way that made him abandon the hope of a directer pa.s.sage to Espanola that way, and to resolve to follow the coast back as he had come. He lost ten days in these uncertain efforts, which, with his provisions rapidly diminis.h.i.+ng, did not conduce to rea.s.sure his crew. On June 30, trying to follow the intricacies of the channels which had perplexed him before, the Admiral's s.h.i.+p got a severe thump on the bottom, which for a while threatened disaster. She was pulled through, however, by main force, and after a while was speeding east in clear water. They had now sailed beyond those marshy reaches of the coast, where they were cut off from intercourse with the sh.o.r.e, and hoped soon to find a harbor, where food and rest might restore the strength of the crew. Their daily allowance had been reduced to a pound of mouldy bread and a swallow or two of wine. It was the 7th of July when they anch.o.r.ed in an acceptable harbor. Here they landed, and interchanged the customary pledges of amity with a cacique who presented himself on the sh.o.r.e. Men having been sent to cut down some trees, a large cross was made, and erected in a grove, and on this spot, with a crowd of natives looking on, the Spaniard celebrated high ma.s.s. A venerable Indian, who watched all the ceremonials with close attention, divining their religious nature, made known to the Admiral, through the Lucayan interpreter, something of the sustaining belief of his own people, in words that were impressive.

Columbus's confidence in the incapacity of the native mind for such high conceptions as this poor Indian manifested received a grateful shock when the old man, grave in his manner and unconscious in his dignity, pictured the opposite rewards of the good and bad in another world. Then turning to the Admiral, he reminded him that wrong upon the unoffending was no pa.s.sport to the blessings of the future. The historian who tells us this story, and recounts how it impressed the Admiral, does not say that its warnings troubled him much in the times to come, when the unoffending were grievously wronged. Perhaps there was something of this forgetful spirit in the taking of a young Indian away from his friends, as the chroniclers say he did, in this very harbor.

[Sidenote: 1494. July 16.]

[Sidenote: 1494. July 18.]

[Sidenote: On the coast of Jamaica.]

On July 16, Columbus left the harbor, and steering off sh.o.r.e to escape the intricate channels of the Queen's Gardens which he was now re-approaching, he soon found searoom, and bore away toward Espanola. A gale coming on, the caravels were forced in sh.o.r.e, and discovered an anchorage under Cabo de Cruz. Here they remained for three days, but the wind still blowing from the east, Columbus thought it a good opportunity to complete the circuit of Jamaica. He accordingly stood across towards that island. He was a month in beating to the eastward along its southern coast, for the winds were very capricious. Every night he anch.o.r.ed under the land, and the natives supplied him with provisions. At one place, a cacique presented himself in much feathered finery, accompanied by his wife and relatives, with a retinue bedizened in the native fas.h.i.+on, and doing homage to the Admiral. It was shown how effective the Lucayan's pictures of Spanish glory and prowess had been, when the cacique proposed to put himself and all his train in the Admiral's charge for pa.s.sage to the great country of the Spanish King.

The offer was rather embarra.s.sing to the Admiral, with his provisions running low, and his s.h.i.+ps not of the largest. He relieved himself by promising to conform to the wishes of the cacique at a more opportune moment.

[Sidenote: 1494. August 19.]

[Sidenote: Espanola.]

[Sidenote: 1494. August 23.]

[Sidenote: Alto Velo.]

By the 19th of August, Columbus had pa.s.sed the easternmost extremity of Jamaica, and on the next day he was skirting the long peninsula which juts from the southwestern angle of Espanola. He was not, however, aware of his position till on the 23d a cacique came off to the caravels, and addressed Columbus by his t.i.tle, with some words of Castilian interlarded in his speech. It was now made clear that the s.h.i.+ps had nearly reached their goal, and nothing was left but to follow the circuit of the island. It was no easy task to do so with a wornout crew and crazy s.h.i.+ps. The little fleet was separated in a gale, and when Columbus made the lofty rocky island which is now known as Alto Velo, resembling as it does in outline a tall s.h.i.+p under sail, he ran under its lee, and sent a boat ash.o.r.e, with orders for the men to scale its heights, to learn if the missing caravels were anywhere to be seen. This endeavor was without result, but it was not long before the fleet was reunited. Further on, the Admiral learned from the natives that some of the Spaniards had been in that part of the island, coming from the other side. Finding thus through the native reports that all was quiet at Isabella, he landed nine men to push across the island and report his coming. Somewhat further to the east, a storm impending, he found a harbor, where the weather forced him to remain for eight days. The Admiral's vessel had succeeded in entering a roadstead, but the others lay outside, buffeting the storm,--naturally a source of constant anxiety to him.

[Sidenote: Columbus observes eclipse of the moon.]

It was while in this suspense that Columbus took advantage of an eclipse of the moon, to ascertain his longitude. His calculations made him five hours and a half west of Seville,--an hour and a quarter too much, making an error of eighteen degrees. This mistake was quite as likely owing to the rudeness of his method as to the pardonable errors of the lunar tables of Regiomonta.n.u.s (Venice, 1492), then in use. These tables followed methods which had more or less controlled calculations from the time of Hipparchus.

The error of Columbus is not surprising. Even a century later, when Robert Hues published his treatise on the Molineaux globe (1592), the difficulties were in large part uncontrollable. "The most certain of all for this purpose," says this mathematician, "is confessed by all writers to be by eclipses of the moon. But now these eclipses happen but seldom, but are more seldom seen, yet most seldom and in very few places observed by the skillful artists in this science. So that there are but few longitudes of places designed out by this means. But this is an uncertain and ticklish way, and subject to many difficulties. Others have gone other ways to work, as, namely, by observing the s.p.a.ce of the equinoctial hours betwixt the meridians of two places, which they conceive may be taken by the help of sundials, or clocks, or hourgla.s.ses, either with water or sand or the like. But all these conceits, long since devised, having been more strictly and accurately examined, have been disallowed and rejected by all learned men--at least those of riper judgments--as being altogether unable to perform that which is required of them. I shall not stand here to discover the errors and uncertainties of these instruments. Away with all such trifling, cheating rascals!"

[Sidenote: 1494. September 24.]

[Sidenote: Columbus reaches Isabella.]

The weather moderating, Columbus stood out of the channel of Saona on September 24, and meeting the other caravels, which had weathered the storm, he still steered to the east. They reached the farthest end of Espanola opposite Porto Rico, and ran out to the island of Mona, in the channel between the two larger islands. Shortly after leaving Mona, Columbus, worn with the anxieties of a five months' voyage, in which his nervous excitement and high hopes had sustained him wonderfully, began to feel the reaction. His near approach to Isabella accelerated this recoil, till his whole system suddenly succ.u.mbed. He lay in a stupor, knowing little, remembering nothing, his eyes dim and vitality oozing.

Under other command, the little fleet sorrowfully, but gladly, entered the harbor of Isabella.

Our most effective source for the history of this striking cruise is the work of Bernaldez, already referred to.

CHAPTER XIV.