The Voyage To Cuba - 3

The Voyage To Cuba - 3

The reason why Columbus kept returning to the coast of Cuba was that he believed it to

be the mainland of Asia. The unlettered natives, who had never read Marco Polo, told

him that it was an island, although no man had ever seen the end of it; but Columbus did

not believe them, and sailed westward in the belief that he would presently come upon

the country and city of Cathay. Soon he found himself in the wonderful labyrinth of islets

and sandbanks off the south coast; and because of the wonderful colours of their flowers

and climbing plants he called them Jardin de la Reina or Queen's Garden. Dangerous as

the navigation through these islands was, he preferred to risk the shoals and sandbanks

rather than round them out at sea to the southward, for he believed them to be the islands

which, according to Marco Polo, lay in masses along the coast of Cathay. In this

adventure he had a very hard time of it; the lead had to be used all the time, the ships

often had to be towed, the wind veered round from every quarter of the compass, and

there were squalls and tempests, and currents that threatened to set them ashore. By great

good fortune, however, they managed to get through the Archipelago without mishap. By

June 3rd they were sailing along the coast again, and Columbus had some conversation

with an old cacique who told him of a province called Mangon (or so Columbus

understood him) that lay to the west. Sir John Mandeville had described the province of

Mangi as being the richest in Cathay; and of course, thought the Admiral, this must be the

place. He went westward past the Gulf of Xagua and got into the shallow sandy waters,

now known as the Jardinillos Bank, where the sea was whitened with particles of sand.

When he had got clear of this shoal water he stood across a broad bay towards a native

settlement where he was able to take in yams, fruit, fish, and fresh water.

But this excitement and hard work were telling on the Admiral, and when a native told

him that there was a tribe close by with long tails, he believed him; and later, when one of

his men, coming back from a shore expedition, reported that he had seen some figures in

a forest wearing white robes, Columbus believed that they were the people with the tails,

who wore a long garment to conceal them.

He was moving in a world of enchantment; the weather was like no weather in any

known part of the world; there were fogs, black and thick, which blew down suddenly

from the low marshy land, and blew away again as suddenly; the sea was sometimes

white as milk, sometimes black as pitch, sometimes purple, sometimes green; scarlet

cranes stood looking at them as they slid past the low sandbanks; the warm foggy air

smelt of roses; shoals of turtles covered the waters, black butterflies circled in the mist;

and the fever that was beginning to work in the Admiral's blood mounted to his brain, so

that in this land of bad dreams his fixed ideas began to dominate all his other faculties,

and he decided that he must certainly be on the coast of Cathay, in the magic land

described by Marco Polo.

There is nothing which illustrates the arbitrary and despotic government of sea life so

well as the nautical phrase "make it so." The very hours of the day, slipping westward

under the keel of an east-going ship, are "made" by rigid decree; the captain takes his

observation of sun or stars, and announces the position of the ship to be at a certain spot

on the surface of the globe; any errors of judgment or deficiencies of method are covered

by the words "make it so." And in all the elusive phenomena surrounding him the fevered

brain of the Admiral discerned evidence that he was really upon the coast of Asia,

although there was no method by which he could place the matter beyond a doubt. The

word Asia was not printed upon the sands of Cuba, as it might be upon a map; the lines of

longitude did not lie visibly across the surface of the sea; there was nothing but sea and

land, the Admiral's charts, and his own conviction. Therefore Columbus decided to

"make it so." If there was no other way of being sure that this was the coast of Cathay, he

would decree it to be the coast of Cathay by a legal document and by oaths and affidavits.

He would force upon the members of his expedition a conviction at least equal to his

own; and instead of pursuing any further the coast that stretched interminably west and

south-west, he decided to say, in effect, and once and for all, "Let this be the mainland of

Asia."

He called his secretary to him and made him draw up a form of oath or testament, to

which every member of the expedition was required to subscribe, affirming that the land

off which they were then lying (12th June 1494), was the mainland of the Indies and that

it was possible to return to Spain by land from that place; and every officer who should

ever deny it in the future was laid under a penalty of ten thousand maravedis, and every

ship's boy or seaman under a penalty of one hundred lashes; and in addition, any member

of the expedition denying it in the future was to have his tongue cut out.

No one will pretend that this was the action of a sane man; neither will any one wonder

that Columbus was something less than sane after all he had gone through, and with the

beginnings of a serious illness already in his blood. His achievement was slipping from

his grasp; the gold had not been found, the wonders of the East had not been discovered;

and it was his instinct to secure something from the general wreck that seemed to be

falling about him, and to force his own dreams to come true, that caused him to cut this

grim and fantastic legal caper off the coast of Cuba. He thought it at the time unlikely,

seeing the difficulties of navigation that he had gone through, which he might be

pardoned for regarding as insuperable to a less skilful mariner, that any one should ever

come that way again; even he himself said that he would never risk his life again in such

a place. He wished his journey, therefore, not to have been made in vain; and as he

himself believed that he had stood on the mainland of Asia he took care to take back with

him the only kind of evidence that was possible namely, the sworn affidavits of the ships'

crews.