The Last Voyage - 3
This was in August and the first half of September—six weeks of the worst weather that
Columbus had ever experienced. It was the more unfortunate that his illness made it
impossible for him to get actively about the ship; and he had to have a small cabin or tent
rigged up on deck, in which he could lie and direct the navigation. It is bad enough to be
as ill as he was in a comfortable bed ashore; it is a thousand times worse amid the
discomforts of a small boat at sea; but what must it have been thus to have one's sick-bed
on the deck of a cockle-shell which was being buffeted and smashed in unknown seas,
and to have to think and act not for oneself alone but for the whole of a suffering little
fleet! No wonder the Admiral's distress of mind was great; but oddly enough his
anxieties, as he recorded them in a letter, were not so much on his own account as on
behalf of others. The terrified seamen making vows to the Virgin and promises of
pilgrimages between their mad rushes to the sheets and furious clinging and hauling; his
son Ferdinand, who was only fourteen, but who had to endure the same pain and fatigue
as the rest of them, and who was enduring it with such pluck that "it was as if he had been
at sea eighty years"; the dangers of Bartholomew, who had not wanted to come on this
voyage at all, but was now in the thick of it in the worst ship of the squadron, and
fighting for his life amid tempests and treacherous seas; Diego at home, likely to be left
an orphan and at the mercy of fickle and doubtful friends—these were the chief causes of
the Admiral's anxiety. All he said about himself was that "by my misfortune the twenty
years of service which I gave with so much fatigue and danger have profited me so little
that to-day I have in Castile no roof, and if I wished to dine or sup or sleep I have only
the tavern for my last refuge, and for that, most of the time, I would be unable to pay the
score." Not cheerful reflections, these, to add to the pangs of acute gout and the
consuming anxieties of seamanship under such circumstances. Dreadful to him, these
things, but not dreadful to us; for they show us an Admiral restored to his true temper and
vocation, something of the old sea hero breaking out in him at last through all these
misfortunes, like the sun through the hurrying clouds of a stormy afternoon.
Forty days of passage through this wilderness of water were endured before the sea-worn
mariners, rounding a cape on September 12th, saw stretching before them to the
southward a long coast of plain and mountain which they were able to follow with a fair
wind. Gradually the sea went down; the current which had opposed them here aided
them, and they were able to recover a little from the terrible strain of the last six weeks.
The cape was called by Columbus 'Gracios de Dios'; and on the 16th of September they
landed at the entrance to a river to take in water. The boat which was sent ashore,
however, capsized on the sandy bar of the entrance, two men being drowned, and the
river was given the name of Rio de Desastre. They found a better anchorage, where they
rested for ten days, overhauled their stores, and had some intercourse with the natives and
exploration on shore. Some incidents occurred which can best be described in the
Admiral's own language as he recorded them in his letter to the Sovereigns.
" . . When I reached there, they immediately sent me two young girls dressed in rich
garments. The older one might not have been more than eleven years of age and the other
seven; both with so much experience, so much manner, and so much appearance as
would have been sufficient if they had been public women for twenty years. They bore
with them magic powder and other things belonging to their art. When they arrived I gave
orders that they should be adorned with our things and sent them immediately ashore.
There I saw a tomb within the mountain as large as a house and finely worked with great
artifice, and a corpse stood thereon uncovered, and, looking within it, it seemed as if he
stood upright. Of the other arts they told me that there was excellence. Great and little
animals are there in quantities, and very different from ours; among which I saw boars of
frightful form so that a dog of the Irish breed dared not face them. With a cross-bow I had
wounded an animal which exactly resembles a baboon only that it was much larger and
has a face like a human being. I had pierced it with an arrow from one side to the other,
entering in the breast and going out near the tail, and because it was very ferocious I cut
off one of the fore feet which rather seemed to be a hand, and one of the hind feet. The
boars seeing this commenced to set up their bristles and fled with great fear, seeing the
blood of the other animal. When I saw this I caused to be thrown them the 'uegare,'—
[Peccary]—certain animals they call so, where it stood, and approaching him, near as he
was to death, and the arrow still sticking in his body, he wound his tail around his snout
and held it fast, and with the other hand which remained free, seized him by the neck as
an enemy. This act, so magnificent and novel, together with the fine country and hunting
of wild beasts, made me write this to your Majesties."
