The Last Voyage - 4

The Last Voyage - 4

The natives at this anchorage of Cariari were rather suspicious, but Columbus seized two

of them to act as guides in his journey further down the coast. Weighing anchor on

October 5th he worked along the Costa Rica shore, which here turns to the eastward

again, and soon found a tribe of natives who wore large ornaments of gold. They were

reluctant to part with the gold, but as usual pointed down the coast and said that there was

much more gold there; they even gave a name to the place where the gold could be

found—Veragua; and for once this country was found to have a real existence. The fleet

anchored there on October 17th, being greeted by defiant blasts of conch shells and

splashing of water from the indignant natives. Business was done, however: seventeen

gold discs in exchange for three hawks' bells.

Still Columbus went on in pursuit of his geographical chimera; even gold had no power

to detain him from the earnest search for this imaginary strait. Here and there along the

coast he saw increasing signs of civilisation—once a wall built of mud and stone, which

made him think of Cathay again. He now got it into his head that the region he was in

was ten days' journey from the Ganges, and that it was surrounded by water; which if it

means anything means that he thought he was on a large island ten days' sail to the

eastward of the coast of India. Altogether at sea as to the facts, poor Admiral, but with

heart and purpose steadfast and right enough.

They sailed a little farther along the coast, now between narrow islands that were like the

streets of Genoa, where the boughs of trees on either hand brushed the shrouds of the

ships; now past harbours where there were native fairs and markets, and where natives

were to be seen mounted on horses and armed with swords; now by long, lonely stretches

of the coast where there was nothing to be seen but the low green shore with the

mountains behind and the alligators basking at the river mouths. At last (November 2nd)

they arrived at the cape known as Nombre de Dios, which Ojeda had reached some time

before in his voyage to the West.

The coast of the mainland had thus been explored from the Bay of Honduras to Brazil,

and Columbus was obliged to admit that there was no strait. Having satisfied himself of

that he decided to turn back to Veragua, where he had seen the natives smelting gold, in

order to make some arrangement for establishing a colony there. The wind, however,

which had headed him almost all the way on his easterly voyage, headed him again now

and began to blow steadily from the west. He started on his return journey on the 5th of

December, and immediately fell into almost worse troubles than he had been in before.

The wood of the ships had been bored through and through by seaworms, so that they

leaked very badly; the crews were sick, provisions were spoilt, biscuits rotten. Young

Ferdinand Columbus, if he did not actually make notes of this voyage at the time,

preserved a very lively recollection of it, and it is to his Historie, which in its earlier

passages is of doubtful authenticity, that we owe some of the most human touches of

description relating to this voyage. Any passage in his work relating to food or animals at

this time has the true ring of boyish interest and observation, and is in sharp contrast to

the second-hand and artificial tone of the earlier chapters of his book. About the incident

of the howling monkey, which the Admiral's Irish hound would not face, Ferdinand

remarks that it "frighted a good dog that we had, but frighted one of our wild boars a

great deal more"; and as to the condition of the biscuits when they turned westward

again, he says that they were "so full of weevils that, as God shall help me, I saw many

that stayed till night to eat their sop for fear of seeing them."

After experiencing some terrible weather, in the course of which they had been obliged to

catch sharks for food and had once been nearly overwhelmed by a waterspout, they

entered a harbour where, in the words of young Ferdinand, "we saw the people living like

birds in the tops of the trees, laying sticks across from bough to bough and building their

huts upon them; and though we knew not the reason of the custom we guessed that it was

done for fear of their enemies, or of the griffins that are in this island." After further

experiences of bad weather they made what looked like a suitable harbour on the coast of

Veragua, which harbour, as they entered it on the day of the Epiphany (January 9, 1503),

they named Belem or Bethlehem. The river in the mouth of which they were anchored,

however, was subject to sudden spouts and gushes of water from the hills, one of which

occurred on January 24th and nearly swamped the caravels. This spout of water was

caused by the rainy season, which had begun in the mountains and presently came down

to the coast, where it rained continuously until the 14th of February. They had made

friends with the Quibian or chief of the country, and he had offered to conduct them to

the place where the gold mines were; so Bartholomew was sent off in the rain with a boat

party to find this territory. It turned out afterwards that the cunning Quibian had taken

them out of his own country and showed them the gold mined of a neighbouring chief,

which were not so rich as his own.