Admiral of the Ocean Sea: Iii. The Last Voyage
I
IN his fifty-first year, already an aged man according to the notions of his day, Columbus embarked upon his most dangerous and least profitable voyage. El Alto Viaje (‘the High Voyage’), as the Admiral himself called it, offers a story of adventure which imagination could hardly invent, and a chronicle of courage, loyalty, and seamanship that cannot fail to interest those who love the sea and honor great navigators.
The main object of this Fourth Voyage was the same as that of the First — to discover a passage to India. Columbus claimed to have discovered Asia in 1492. He still believed that Cuba was the ‘Province of Mangi, Empire of Cathay,’ — i.e., southeastern China, — and that South America, which he had discovered in 1498, was a new continent that bore much the same relation to China as Australia does. Nobody had been back to Cuba since Columbus had explored its southern coast in 1494, for the very good reason that Cuba contained no gold; and no European had been further west along the Spanish Main than the Gulf of Darien. Everything in the Caribbean west of a line drawn from the further point of Cuba to the Gulf of Darien was still a blank. Somewhere in this yet undiscovered gulf, so Columbus believed, was the longsought passage to India. Assuming that Cuba was China, there must be a strait to the westward, since Marco Polo had sailed home that way. And along the shores of that strait gold and precious things innumerable might be found; for the Ophir of the Old Testament should be somewhere in that region.
The Sovereigns agreed to provide Columbus with ships and men, largely to get rid of him. They authorized him to discover and take possession of new lands on the Spanish side of the demarcation line, and to sail home around the world. Nobody in Europe as yet suspected the existence of the Pacific Ocean. And, if nature had been kind enough to provide a strait near the present Panama Canal, instead of in latitude 52° south, Columbus on this voyage might, theoretically, have anticipated Magellan.
The fleet provided by the Sovereigns consisted of four caravels. La Capitana, as the flagship was called, measured seventy tons. The Admiral and his young son Ferdinand sailed aboard her. Santiago de Palos was a little smaller than Capitana. The ‘Adelantado,’ Bartholomew Columbus, sailed aboard Santiago and acted as her virtual captain, without pay, for Francisco de Porras, her titular captain was a political appointee. La Gallega measured about sixty tons. Pedro de Tcrreros, her captain, had sailed on every one of Columbus’s voyages. Vizcaína, smallest of the fleet, measured fifty tons. She was commanded by Bartolomeo Fieschi, a young and adventurous member of a Genoese patrician family who had befriended the Colombos before Christopher was born. All told, there were about one hundred and thirty-five men and boys on the payroll. Of these about one quarter never returned.
The ocean crossing began at Maspalomas on the south side of the Grand Canary on the night of May 25, 1502, and on the following day a departure was taken from Ferro. Oueste, quarta del sudoeste, ‘West and by south,’ was the course set by the Admiral. After a quick and uneventful trade-wind passage of twenty-one days, the fastest ocean voyage that Columbus made, the fleet on June 15 reached Martinique. They got under way again on June 18, called at Dominica, ran down the chain of Leeward Islands that Columbus had discovered on his Second Voyage, passed along the south coast of Puerto Rico on the twenty-fourth, and five days later were off the Ozama River, beside the mouth of which lay Santo Domingo, the new capital of Hispaniola.
The Sovereigns had forbidden Columbus to visit his former viceroyalty. But the Admiral had very good reasons, besides his natural human curiosity to see how Ovando was getting along, for calling at Santo Domingo. He wished to send letters home by the fleet that was about to depart, and to induce some shipmaster of that fleet to make a trade for Santiago. She had proved to be crank and a dull sailer, unsuitable for exploration, although sound enough for a homeward passage in summer. Moreover, he sought refuge from a cyclonic storm that he saw was making up. Well he knew the signs, for he had ridden out a hurricane behind Saona Island in August 1494, and had witnessed a second when ashore on Hispaniola in October 1495: oily swell rolling in from the southeastward, abnormal tide, an oppressive feeling in the air, low-pressure twinges in his arthritic joints, veiled cirrus clouds tearing along in the upper air while light gusty winds blew on the surface of the water, gorgeous crimson sunset lighting up the whole sky; and, adds Las Casas, the large number of seals and dolphinfish on the surface of the ocean. Old salts still believe that strange denizens of the deep come to the surface before a hurricane.
Don Nicolas de Ovando, Knight Commander of Lares and Governor of Hispaniola, had arrived at Santo Domingo in April with a magnificent, armada of thirty sail. They were now anchored in the Ozama River, ready to depart on the homeward passage. Columbus, comingto off the harbor mouth but not anchoring, sent Captain Terreros of Gallega ashore with a note to the governor, requesting permission to enter, and urging that the homeward-bound fleet be detained in port until the storm had blown over. Ovando treated the request with insolent disdain, read the Admiral’s letter aloud to his heelers, who mocked at the Admiral ‘as a prophet and soothsayer’ in a manner that made honest Terreros long to knock them galley-west. The Governor refused Columbus access to the harbor, and, ignoring the storm warning, sent the homeward-bound fleet to sea forthwith.
Retribution was swift and terrible. This great and gallant fleet had just rounded into the Mona Passage, and had the wedge-shaped eastern end of Hispaniola under their lee, when a furious wind burst upon them from the northeastward, fairly tearing them apart — for the fleet was strung out along the track of the hurricane. Some ships foundered at sea; others that managed to heave-to in time were driven ashore and pounded to bits. Among those that went down with all hands was the flagship bearing Columbus’s enemy Bobadilla, a cargo containing $600,000 worth of gold, and the greatest gold nugget, worth $11,000, ever found in the West Indies. Nineteen other ships were lost with all hands, three or four weathered Saona Island and struggled into Santo Domingo in a sinking condition. Over five hundred lives were lost; and out of this once proud fleet only one ship, the Aguja, reached Spain. Because she had been reckoned the meanest, Ovando had assigned her to the Admiral’s factor, who was bringing home some $12,000 in gold that Bobadilla had been forced to disgorge; and this considerable sum safely reached the hands of Don Diego Colon in Spain. No wonder that Columbus’s enemies declared he had raised this hurricane by magic art!
The Admiral’s squadron escaped unscathed. It is not to be supposed that Columbus, three centuries ahead of his time, knew the law of cyclonic storms; but he knew what to do. Denied access to the harbor, with the wind coming almost due north off the shore, he sailed his fleet a few miles to the westward and anchored close under the land, where he had protection from the north and west — the men growling and grumbling, says Ferdinand, because they had been denied shore leave at the city. The fleet rode easily the next day, as the force of wind increased; but when night fell on June 30, and the storm devils began to shriek their loudest, only Capitana’s ground tackle held. Each of the other ships was torn loose from her anchorage by the fearful gusts that came off the hills of Hispaniola, and driven out into a wild and foaming sea. Through black night and howling hurricane each caravel fought gamely for her life, believing that the others were lost; while the Admiral, after causing every bit of ironmongery aboard to be frapped to Capitana’s cables, passed the night alternately cursing Ovando and praying to God. ‘What man ever born,’ he wrote, ‘not excepting Job, who would not have died of despair when, in such weather, seeking safety for my son, brother, shipmates and myself, we were forbidden the land and the harbors that I, by God’s will and sweating blood, had won for Spain?’
Yet, by God’s will and good seamanship, the fleet came through safely. Crank Santiago, the one Columbus had tried to get rid of by exchange, was almost snatched from him, since Captain Porras, the political appointee, was useless in anything but fair weather. Fortunately the Adelantado, whom his nephew calls the best seaman in the fleet, took charge, boldly sought sea room, and managed to save her whole. Gallega lost her boat, which was in the water when she slipped out to sea; it swamped and the painter had to be cut, but Captain Terreros saw his vessel through. Vizcaína seems to have made out all right, under her Genoese Captain Fieschi.
It had been agreed before the storm struck home that in case they were separated a rendezvous would be made in an excellent little landlocked harbor that Columbus knew, Puerto Escondido (now Puerto Viejo de Azua) at the head of Ocoa Bay. On Sunday, July 3, each member of this battered fleet of four in succession crawled into Azua and came safely to anchor. The captains could not have done better if each had carried a meteorologist and a Bowditch.
From Azua the fleet rounded Beata Island and the Alta Vela rock, and put in at the roadstead of Jacmel to avoid another impending storm. That threat passed, they set sail on July 14 into the yet unknown western half of the Caribbean. On July 31 they sighted a fine high island ahead. This was Bonacca, one of the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras.
II
Bonacca is a handsome island about eight miles long and rising to twelve hundred feet, surrounded by a line of coral reefs through which it is easy to pick out channels into protected waters. Bartholomew went ashore with two boats, met a crowd of Indians, and showed them pearls and grains of gold; but the natives were so ignorant of these precious things that they offered to buy instead of producing more for sale.
It was early August when Columbus stood in toward the mainland, visible from Bonacca and about thirty miles distant. The fleet made terra firma at Cape Honduras, which Columbus named Punta Caxinas, from the Arawak name of a tree that they found there.
Now began a long beat to windward. On Sunday, August 14, the caravels anchored off the mouth of a river which Columbus named Rio de la Posesión, because he there took formal possession of the mainland for his Sovereigns, and Fray Alexander celebrated Mass. The country, wrote Ferdinand, was ‘verdant, and beautiful, although low, and there were many pines, oaks, seven kinds of palms. . . . They have an abundance of pumas, deer, and gazelles.’ These last were the small red deer which are much hunted on that coast today.
Hundreds of Indians came down to view the taking possession, and a lively trade followed with hawks’ bells, beads, and the usual truck. The Indians brought ‘fowls of the country, which are better than ours, roasted fish, red and white beans,’ and other commodities like those of Hispaniola. They were darker in color and more low-browed than the Arawaks, mostly naked, their bodies tattooed or painted with designs like lions, deer, and lurreted castles, ‘and their faces painted red and black to appear beautiful, but really they look like devils.’ Their ears were bored with holes large enough to insert a hen’s egg; Columbus therefore named the region La Costa de las Orejas, ‘the Coast of the Ears.’ These were either the Paya or the Jicaque Indians, flesh-eating emigrants from a forested portion of South America.
Along the Miskito Coast of Honduras from the Rio Romano to Cape Gracias á Dios, the fleet, bucked head winds and foul weather continuously for twentyeight days, beating offshore by day and anchoring close to the land every night. ‘It was one continual rain, thunder, and lightning,’ wrote Columbus. ‘The ships lay exposed to the weather, with sails torn, and anchors, rigging, cables, boats, and many of the stores lost; the people exhausted and so down in the mouth that they were all the time making vows to be good, to go on pilgrimages and all that; yea, even hearing one another’s confessions! Other tempests I have seen, but none that lasted so long or so grim as this. Many old hands whom we looked on as stout fellows lost their courage. What griped me most were the sufferings of my son; to think that so young a lad, only thirteen, should go through so much. But Our Lord lent him such courage that he even heartened the rest , and he worked as though he had been to sea all of a long life. That comforted me. I was sick and many times lay at death’s door, but gave orders from a dog-house that the people clapped together for me on the poop deck. My brother was in the worst of the ships, the crank one, and I felt terribly, having persuaded him to come against his will.'
It was indeed a disheartening experience, much worse than being in deep water, where you can lay-to in such weather. Every morning at daylight the wind makes up from the eastward. Wolf a cold breakfast, heave up the anchor, hoist the yards on which the smallest sails in the locker are bent, claw offshore on the starboard tack in a smother of shoal-water waves that roll you down to leeward, under a rain so heavy that one ship cannot see the rest, and at times so torrential that each scupper is a waterfall and all distinction between sea and sky seems lost. Around noon the Admiral chooses an open spell and signals the fleet to wear. Around they come, dancing down-wind for a few brief moments, then hauled up sharp on the port tack and slogging in toward shore. No rest for anyone; watch below has to keep bailing, thirty fathom of sodden cable must be flaked in readiness for anchoring. More rain and thundersqualls, water shoaling, low coastline coming up at you, heave the lead, Admiral signals ‘Come to an anchor,’ hard down helm (four hands on tiller), let go the hook, and strike all sail but the mizzen. Anchor drags, pay out more scope, stand by to make sail if need be; finally she bites, and the caravel rides in comparative safety. At this point some forecastle pessimist casts an eye ashore and growls out, ‘There’s that same blasted tree we left this morning!’ Everything is soaked, can’t get the fire going on the hearth, so you grab a wormy biscuit and a hunk of salt horse and roll up anywhere in your wet clothes while the caravel pitches and splashes and groans and creaks and rattles, and then the wind moderates and the mosquitoes fly out from the mangroves to gorge themselves on the blood of Spaniards too tired to brush them off.
During the twenty-eight days that this kept up, the fleet made good only 165 to 170 miles. It is another example of Columbus’s fortitude that he refused to declare himself beaten, change his plan, and slide down-wind to the land of gold and silver that he had heard about. What seaman, struggling in the teeth of wind and sea, tossed on a groaning and straining vessel, showered with spray, soaked by torrential rains, half drowned in breaking seas, exhausted by hauling on lines and working pumps, has not dreamed of that voluptuous pleasure that no landsman ever knows, changing from a foul to a fair wind? A simple order— ‘Stand by braces! Up with the helm! Easy now!’—and Columbus’s fleet would have passed from hell to heaven inside two minutes, the tempest would have seemed a fair brisk gale, and the ships would have sailed fast and gayly before the wind without fuss or strain. But the Admiral of the Ocean Sea must seek the strait. That’s what he came for. He could not afford to keep the sea at night, since that part of the Caribbean was still unexplored, might have been full of reefs and islands; and layingto at night in the westerly current would have lost too much distance. Besides, the Admiral feared missing something; he was hoping and praying that God would soon spend His wrath; that some afternoon as the fleet approached this coast the sky would clear, the wind change; and, as the Red Sea parted for Moses, so here these sodden shores would seem to fly apart, the strait open up ahead, and the fleet go roaring through to the Indian Ocean, the Spice Islands, and everlasting glory.
Strait there was none to reward all this effort and anguish. But, as seamen say, foul weather must end, luck must change; and so on September 14 the fleet found the coast trending southerly and rounded a cape beyond which the land actually fell away slightly to the westward; now the good Lord gave them favorable winds and currents. So the Admiral named this cape Gracias á Dios. Seamen who frequent that coast, have asked me why so low and ill-favored a headland should bear so gracious a name. The Admiral’s story is sufficient explanation; it was ‘Thanks be to God!’ for a southward-trending coastline, and a chance to sail off the wind.
Having rounded Cape Gracias á Dios, the fleet coasted southward along the eastern shore of the present Republic of Nicaragua. On September 25 they reached a region which the Indians called Cariai, and spent ten days anchored behind a pretty wooded island which the Indians called Quiriviri, and the Admiral named La Huerta, ‘The Garden.’ This island was probably Uva, and the place the modern Puerto Limón, Costa Rica.
Here the Admiral decided to spend some time in order to give the men a good rest; and the indications are that they enjoyed themselves thoroughly. A great concourse of Talamanca Indians gathered on the shore, some armed with bows and arrows, others with palm-tree spears tipped with fishbones, and others with clubs. The men wore their hair braided and wound about their heads, and both they and the women had ‘eagles’ of ‘guanin’ pendent around their necks, ‘as we wear an Agnus Dei or other reliquary.’ The Admiral kept his people aboard, fearing trouble; but the Indians were so eager to trade that they swam out to the ships carrying a line of cotton jumpers and guanin ornaments. Columbus, however, soon sized up the local business situation — that the Indians had no pure gold, only this guanin, an alloy of gold and copper. Consequently he refused to trade or to accept presents, but sent the visitors ashore laden with gifts. This appears to have offended them, as they left the truck tied together at the boat landing. The Indians then tried an ancient method of persuading visitors to trade. They sent aboard the flagship two girls, one about eight and the other about fourteen years old, not knowing how tender the Spaniards liked their maidens. ‘The damsels,’ says Ferdinand, ‘ showed great courage; for, although the Christians were complete strangers to them, they exhibited neither grief nor sorrow, but always looked pleasant and modest; hence they were well treated by the Admiral, who caused them to be clothed and fed, and sent them ashore, where the old man who had delivered them received them back with much satisfaction.’ Although the presence of the Admiral’s fourteenyear-old son, rather than respect for maidenly modesty, explains this abnormal continence of the mariners, it astonished the natives, and caused them to endow their visitors with supernatural attributes.
On the following day the Adelantado went ashore, attended by a secretary, in order to record what information he could obtain about Cariai. When he began to question two leading men who approached him as official greeters, and the scribe produced paper, pen, and inkhorn to note the answers, this writing apparatus struck the natives as a form of sorcery; they fled in terror, tossing a powdered herb in the air to dispel the magic of these gods for whom fresh young virgins offered no temptation.
On Wednesday, October 5, the fleet left Cariai and sailed alongshore in a southeasterly direction. Towards evening, when a little over fifty miles from the last anchorage, they found a channel opening into a great bay. The strait at last! But it was only another disappointment — the Boca del Dragón that leads into a great island-studded bay, now named Almirante. On the eastern side of this channel was an island now called Colón, but known to his two Indian guides as Carambaru.
Every explorer of the Atlantic coast of America from Davis Straits to the River Plate, and over a period of at least two centuries, was misled by the spacious gestures of Indians when pointing out the way. By spreading their arms and then touching their fingers, the Indians meant to convey the idea of a bay, lake, or widening of the river; but the sanguine European understood them to mean the Indian Ocean, the Great South Sea, or some ocean gateway thereto. On this occasion the Indians waved Columbus on to another great bay, Chiriqui Lagoon, which he understood to be the ocean. It was a strait, all right; the caravels sailed ‘as it were in streets between one island and another, the foliage of the trees brushing the cordage of the vessels.’
On January 14, 1940, we explored the passages in and between these two bays in a motor launch, seeking for one that would meet Ferdinand’s description; and in Split Hill Channel we found the strait. Here there is a narrow and tortuous passage between high banks fined with lofty trees; and the channel passes so close to one shore that we could well imagine the rigging of the four caravels being brushed by branches. Today there is only seven feet of water in Split Hill Channel; but an aged pilot informed us that before the earthquake of 1912, which heaved up the bottom, he had taken vessels drawing fourteen feet through there; and Capitana, Santiago, Gallega, and Vizcaíno needed much less water than that. All the same, it required nerve and fine seamanship to steer four square-rigged ships through so narrow a passage, with no pilot available for anything bigger than a dugout canoe. Columbus was taking big chances because of the great prize, should this prove to be the passage to India. He hoped in a few days to encounter Vasco da Gama’s fleet, beating against the trade wind or anchored in one of the Spice Islands, and to claim everything for the Sovereigns of Castile.
Again a disappointment. As the caravels issued from this narrow defile they entered a spacious landlocked bay some thirty miles long and fifteen across. Alburema, as Columbus named it, Chiriqui Lagoon as we call it today, is a beautiful sheet of peacock-hued water, an inland salt lake cupped within a verdure-clad cordillera that rises 11,000 feet above sea level. Compensations there were for the Admiral. On October 7 a landing was made on the coast, a brisk barter began in gold disks, ‘eagles,’ and provisions, ‘and from here he began to go trading along the coast.’ ‘The people were all painted on face and body in divers colors, white, black, and red,’ remembered Ferdinand, ‘only covering their genitals with a narrow clout of cotton.’
For ten days (October 6-16) the fleet idled about Chiriqui Lagoon, fishing, and visiting Indian villages to swop trading truck for gold and provisions. Much information was acquired through the interpreters from Cariai, who appear to have learned Castilian with surprising rapidity. They certainly performed the native interpreter’s function of telling white men exactly what they wished to hear, which in this instance included a certain amount of truth. From them Columbus for the first time definitely learned that he was on an isthmus between two seas, and that an Indian province called Ciguare lay on the ocean nine days’ march across the cordillera; he inferred that this was the Ciamba (Cochin-China) of Marco Polo. The Ciguareans had an immense quantity of gold and wore coral ornaments as well; and Columbus had read somewhere that in Ciamba coral bits were used as money. Obviously he was coasting along the Golden Chersonese, the Malay Peninsula, where Solomon sent Hiram for fine gold; he was near the centre of the earth’s greatest store of precious metal.
III
Ten days the fleet spent exploring this beautiful Chiriqui Lagoon, bartering for gold, and collecting tall tales of Ciguare. On October 17, choosing a day of westerly wind, the fleet passed out to sea by Tiger Channel. Turning southward toward the main, they anchored off the mouth of a river called Guaiga. Here began the region that the natives called Veragua — an important source of gold, so they informed the Spaniards, and in this they told the truth.
The fleet appears to have stayed several days at Guaiga in the hope of making contact with the natives; for the Indian villages of Veragua were situated in rivers some distance back from the coast. On October 20 the Spaniards had their wish, and found these Indians to be far more bellicose than any yet encountered on this voyage. Ferdinand tells how the boats going ashore found over a hundred Indians on the beach, who assaulted them furiously, running into the water up to their middles, brandishing spears, blowing horns, beating a drum, splashing water toward the Christians, and squirting from their mouths some nasty herb that they were chewing. The Spaniards tried to appease them, and with some success, since they managed to draw near enough to exchange sixteen ‘mirrors’of pure gold worth 150 ducats for two or three hawks’ bells apiece.
Columbus’s only interest in this coast was to locate the source of the golden ornaments worn by the Indians. Somewhere in that region, the interpreters informed him, were the mines whence came all this wealth. The fleet had probably reached a point somewhere near the mouth of the Rio Coclé, where the Indians from Cariai said that the ‘trading country’ ended. Columbus therefore proposed to return to the centre of auriferous activity near Veragua, and investigate further.
Two months elapsed before he could do so. The rainy season had set in, and an unusually boisterous one it was, with gusty northers and strong westerlies. ‘There arose so violent a storm that we were forced to go wherever it drove us,’ wrote the Admiral. ‘I ran before the wind wherever it took me, without power to resist.’ On drove the fleet past the entrance to the future Panama Canal, and providentially into a fine harbor that opened up just where he wanted it. The Admiral named this harbor Puerto Bello, ‘because it is quite large, fair, inhabited, and encompassed by a well-tilled country.’ The fleet entered it on November 2, ‘passing between two islands; within the harbor, vessels may lie close to shore, and beat out if they will. The country about this harbor is not very rough, but cultivated and full of houses only a stone’s throw or crossbow shot apart, pretty as a picture, the fairest thing you ever saw. During the seven days that we tarried there on account of the rain and foul weather, canoes came continually from the country round about to barter all sorts of eatables and skeins of well-spun cotton, which they gave for trifles of brass such as lace-points and tags.’
This description of Porto Bello still holds good, except that the jungle has grown up over the once well-tilled fields of the Cuna Cuna Indians. The harbor is so spacious, well-protected, and easily entered that the Spaniards later selected it as the Caribbean terminus of a mule track crossing the Isthmus of Panama. During the annual six weeks’ fair, when the galleons from Spain exchanged their cargoes for the treasure from Peru and the products of Darien, Porto Bello became the most thriving town in the Americas. Thomas Gage, who came there in 1637, reported seeing a train of two hundred mules come in laden with silver ingots, which were piled up in the market place like cordwood. In the eighteenth century, when the fairs ended, the town dwindled away almost to nothing; but the remains of several forts that once protected it, and the vast ruined customhouse, testify to the former grandeur of Columbus’s Puerto Bello.
On November 9 the fleet left this pleasant place, sailed around Manzanillo Point, and made fifteen or twenty more miles easting; but on the tenth the wind came easterly again and forced them back thirteen miles, ‘and they put in among islets next the continent where Nombre de Dios now is: and because all these coasts and islets were full of maize, they called it Puerto de Bastimentos, Harbor of Provisions.’ There the fleet remained twelve days, repairing both the ships and the casks. Ferdinand reports an amusing incident of their stay. One of the ship’s boats, seeing an Indian canoe full of paddlers, decided to speak it; but the Indians, when they approached, jumped overboard and dived like waterfowl. Whenever an Indian came to the surface the boat tried to row him down, but he always dived and came up a bowshot or two distant in another direction. For hours the boat continued this futile chase, while the men aboard the ships roared with laughter at the rage of the hounds and the skill of the hares.
On November 23 they left Nombre de Dios. After making fifteen leagues ‘with great exertions’ to the eastward, the wind and current drove them back. ‘But in again making for the port which I had quitted, I found on the way another port, which I named Retrete, where I put in for shelter with great peril and regret, and very weary, both I, the ships, and my people.’ It was now November 26, 1502. The fleet lay-to outside while the boats sounded the entrance and the harbor. This boat’s crew brought back an over-favorable report of the place, because they were tired of being tossed about, wished to trade with the Indians, and found steep-to banks inside against which the ships would have to lie, as the harbor was so small; ‘it could not contain five or six ships together.’ The entrance was only seventy-five to one hundred feet wide with rocks ‘as sharp as diamonds’ sticking up on either side; but the channel was so deep that if you favored either side when entering you could jump ashore on the rocks. This tiny retired harbor was probably Puerto Escribanos, about twenty miles east of Nombre de Dios. Visible from seaward, the opening was a natural place for Columbus to send boats in the hope of finding shelter.
Retrete is the first place on this voyage where Ferdinand mentions alligators. ‘In the harbor were vast great lizards or crocodiles, which go out to sleep ashore and scatter a certain odor as if all the musk in the world were collected; but they are so ravenous and cruel that if they find a man asleep ashore they will drag him into the water to devour him, though they are cowardly and flee when attacked. These lizards are found in many other parts of the mainland, and some do declare that they are crocodiles like those of the Nile.’
Crocodiles — Nile — Terrestrial Paradise! So Columbus would have argued on his Third Voyage. But he was older now, and disillusioned. This Otro Mundo was no paradise, but a rough, wild shore where honest traders would find it hard to gain a living. If only a gap would appear in that eternal cordillera, and let him through to the Indian Ocean! He was so tired of beating along this rugged coast, had begun to believe there was no strait; you might dig one, perhaps, by enslaving the Indians, or build a road across the isthmus for pack mules — why not? Men travel daily from Genoa to Venice. But that would cost a mint of money, and Columbus very well knew the frown he would get from the Queen and the cutting, ungracious words from the King if he came home with no gold to speak of, only a plan for spending it. So the best course was to seek more gold; gold and pearls were the only things that talked in Castile. So farewell Strait, back to Veragua and exploit the mines.
‘On Monday, December 5, the Admiral, perceiving that the violence of the east and northeast winds abated not, and that no business could be done with these people, decided to turn back and verify what the Indians had said about the mines of Veragua, and therefore that day he went to sleep at Puerto Bello 10 leagues to westward.’ The next day, December 6, the fleet had proceeded on its course but a few miles when the wind whipped around into the west again; and for a month the caravels were batted back and forth between Puerto Bello and the Chagres River. The currents along this coast always run with the wind, as Ferdinand noted, and this was a winter wind; beating against it got you nowhere.
Columbus writes of this dreadful month briefly but eloquently: ‘The tempest arose and wearied me so that I knew not where to turn; my old wound opened up, and for nine days I wars as lost without hope of life; eyes never beheld the sea so high, angry, and covered with foam. The wind not only prevented our progress, but rendered it dangerous to run into any headland for shelter, hence we were forced to keep out in this bloody ocean, seething like a pot on a hot fire. Never did the sky look more terrible; for one whole day and night it lightened continually, so that I was constantly watching in the flashes, and each time marveled that the spars and sails were not lifted off me; the flashes came with such fury and frightfulness that all thought the ships would be blasted. All this time the water never ceased to fall from the sky; I don’t say it rained, because it was like another deluge. The people were so worn out that they longed for death to end their so great sufferings.'
Ferdinand tells us of the frightful thunder and lightning, the torrential rain sluicing down, the men wet through for days on end, never getting half an hour’s rest, ‘struggling with all the elements, and dreading them all; for in such terrible storms they dread the fire in lightning flashes, the air for its fury, the water for the waves, and the earth for the reefs and rocks of that unknown coast which sometimes come up at a man near the haven where he would be and, not knowing the entrance, he chooses rather to contend with the other elements. . . . Besides these so divers terrors there occurred one no less dangerous and wonderful, a waterspout which on Tuesday, December 13, passed by the ships, the which had they not dissolved by reciting the Gospel according to St. John, it would have swamped whatever it struck without a doubt; for it draws the water up to the clouds in a column thicker than a water-butt, twisting it about like a whirlwind.’ The Admiral exorcised the waterspout. From his Bible he read an account of that famous tempest off Capernaum, concluding, ‘Fear not, it is I!’ Then, clasping the Bible in his left hand, with drawn sword he traced a cross in the sky and a circle around his whole fleet.
That same night Vizcaíno, lost sight of the other three, but had the good fortune to encounter them again after three very dark and dreadful days, during which she lost her boat and once anchored, but had to cut the cable. There followed two days of calm, which for the superstitious were almost as horrible as the tempest; for the caravels were surrounded by great schools of sharks. The men took and killed them by hook and chain, until they wearied of the bloody sport; and though some regarded shark meat as of evil omen, all were so ravenous and their stores so spent that fresh shark steak was a welcome feast. By this time, says Ferdinand, ‘what with the heat and dampness, our ship biscuit had become so wormy that, God help me, I saw many who waited for darkness to eat the porridge made of it, that they might not see the maggots; and others were so used to eating them that they didn’t even trouble to pick them out, because they might lose their supper had they been so nice.’
Finally the fleet put in at a port called by the Indians Huiva. ‘And here we stayed from the second day of the feast of the Nativity (December 20) to the third day of January, 1503.’ This must have been either Limón Bay, now the harbor of the Canal Zone port of Cristóbal, or the adjacent Manzanilla Bay, which makes a harbor for the Panamanian city of Colon. So Columbus’s fleet kept Christmas 1502 and New Year 1503 riding at anchor off the site of our Coco Solo naval base, or within sight of the Panama Canal entrance at Cristóbal, while Gallega was hovedown on a near-by beach, her bottom being graved and her seams payed with pitch.
It is sad to consider what Columbus missed. Had he now been so keen about the strait as he was for gold, had he questioned the Indians closely here as he had in Chiriqui, he might have sent his boats five miles around Toro Point and up the Chagres, and proceeded by dugout canoe to a point only ten or twelve miles distant from the Pacific tides. One can well understand why he did not. There are times when, after a terrible buffeting at sea, a seaman can only lie in port like a dog licking his wounds after a bear fight. Columbus was so exhausted and humbled that he had no energy for exploration, and his officers and men were only too glad to relax. So it was left for Vasco Núñez de Balboa to gaze with ‘wild surmise’ on the Pacific, from a height in Darien.