The Discovery of America Part 32

[Sidenote: The Nina.]

When he reached Palos in May, with royal orders for ships and men, there had like to have been a riot. Terrible dismay was felt at the prospect of launching out for such a voyage upon the Sea of Darkness. Groans and curses greeted the announcement of the forced contribution. But Martin Pinzon and his brothers were active in supporting the crown officials, and the work went on. To induce men to enlist, debts were forgiven and civil actions suspended. Criminals were released from jail on condition of serving. Three caravels were impressed into the service of the crown for a time unlimited; and the rent and maintenance of two of these vessels for two months was to be paid by the town. The largest caravel, called the Santa Maria or Capitana, belonged to Juan de La Cosa, a Biscayan mariner whose name was soon to become famous.[511] He now commanded her, with another consummate sailor, Sancho Ruiz, for his pilot. This single-decked craft, about ninety feet in length by twenty feet breadth of beam, was the Admiral's flag-ship. The second caravel, called the Pinta, a much swifter vessel, was commanded by Martin Pinzon.

She belonged to two citizens of Palos, Gomez Rascon and Cristobal Quintero, who were now in her crew, sulky and ready for mischief. The third and smallest caravel, the Nina ("Baby"), had for her commander Vicente Yanez Pinzon, the youngest of the brothers, now about thirty years of age. Neither the Pinta nor the Nina were decked amidships. On board the three caravels were just ninety persons.[512] And so they set sail from Palos on Friday, August 3, 1492, half an hour before sunrise, and by sunset had run due south five and forty geographical miles, when they shifted their course a couple of points to starboard and stood for the Canaries.

[Footnote 511: Navarrete, _Biblioteca maritima_, tom. ii. pp.

208, 209.]

[Footnote 512: The accounts of the armament are well summed up and discussed in Harrisse, tom. i. pp. 405-408. Eighty-seven names, out of the ninety, have been recovered, and the list is given below, Appendix C.]

[Sidenote: They go to the Canaries and are delayed there.]

No thought of Vinland is betrayed in these proceedings. Columbus was aiming at the northern end of c.i.p.ango (j.a.pan). Upon Toscanelli's map, which he carried with him, the great island of c.i.p.ango extends from 5 to about 28 north lat.i.tude. He evidently aimed at the northern end of c.i.p.ango as being directly on the route to Zaiton (Chang-chow) and other Chinese cities mentioned by Marco Polo. Accordingly he began by running down to the Canaries, in order that he might sail thence due west on the 28th parallel without shifting his course by a single point until he should see the coast of j.a.pan looming up before him.[513] On this preliminary run signs of mischief began already to show themselves. The Pinta's rudder was broken and unshipped, and Columbus suspected her two angry and chafing owners of having done it on purpose, in order that they and their vessel might be left behind. The Canaries at this juncture merited the name of Fortunate Islands; fortunately they, alone among African islands, were Spanish, so that Columbus could stop there and make repairs. While this was going on the sailors were scared out of their wits by an eruption of Teneriffe, which they deemed an omen of evil, and it was also reported that some Portuguese caravels were hovering in those waters, with intent to capture Columbus and carry him off to Lisbon.

[Footnote 513: "Para de alli tomar mi derrota, y navegar tanto que yo llegase a las Indias," he says in his journal, Navarrete, _Coleccion de viages_, tom. i.p. 3.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Martin Behaim's Globe, 1492,]

[Ill.u.s.tration: reduced to Mercator's projection.][514]

[Footnote 514: Martin Behaim was born at Nuremberg in 1436, and is said to have been a pupil of the celebrated astronomer, Regiomonta.n.u.s, author of the first almanac published in Europe, and of Ephemerides, of priceless value to navigators. He visited Portugal about 1480, invented a new kind of astrolabe, and sailed with it in 1484 as cosmographer in Diego Cam's voyage to the Congo. On his return to Lisbon he was knighted, and presently went to live on the island of Fayal, of which his wife's father was governor. He was a friend of Columbus. Toward 1492 he visited Nuremberg, to look after some family affairs, and while there "he gratified some of his townspeople by embodying in a globe the geographical views which prevailed in the maritime countries; and the globe was finished before Columbus had yet accomplished his voyage. The next year (1493) Behaim returned to Portugal; and after having been sent to the Low Countries on a diplomatic mission, he was captured by English cruisers and carried to England. Escaping finally, and reaching the Continent, he pa.s.ses from our view in 1494, and is scarcely heard of again." (Winsor, _Narr. and Crit. Hist._, ii.

104.) He died in May, 1506. A ridiculous story that he antic.i.p.ated Columbus in the discovery of America originated in the misunderstanding of an interpolated pa.s.sage in the Latin text of Schedel's _Registrum_, Nuremberg, 1498, p. 290 (the so-called _Nuremberg Chronicle_). See Winsor, _op. cit._ ii.

34; Major's _Prince Henry_, p. 326; Humboldt, _Examen critique_, tom. i.p. 256; Murr, _Diplomatische Geschichte des Ritters Behaim_, Nuremberg, 1778; Cladera, _Investigaciones historicas_, Madrid, 1794; Harrisse, _Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima_, pp. 37-43.--The globe made by Behaim may now be seen in the city hall at Nuremberg. It "is made of _papier-mache_, covered with gypsum, and over this a parchment surface received the drawing; it is twenty inches in diameter."

(Winsor, _op. cit._ ii. 105.) The portion west of the 330th meridian is evidently copied from Toscanelli's map. I give below (p. 429) a sketch (from Winsor, after Ruge's _Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen_, p. 230) of Behaim's ocean, with the outline of the American continent superimposed in the proper place.]

[Sidenote: Columbus starts for j.a.pan, Sept. 6, 1492.]

At length, on the 6th of September, they set sail from Gomera, but were becalmed and had made only thirty miles by the night of the 8th. The breeze then freshened, and when next day the sh.o.r.es of Ferro, the last of the Canaries, sank from sight on the eastern horizon, many of the sailors loudly lamented their unseemly fate, and cried and sobbed like children. Columbus well understood the difficulty of dealing with these men. He provided against one chief source of discontent by keeping two different reckonings, a true one for himself and a false one for his officers and crews. He was shrewd enough not to overdo it and awaken distrust. Thus after a twenty-four hours' run of 180 miles on September 10, he reported it as 144 miles; next day the run was 120 miles and he announced it as 108, and so on. But for this prudent if somewhat questionable device, it is not unlikely that the first week of October would have witnessed a mutiny in which Columbus would have been either thrown overboard or forced to turn back.

[Sidenote: Deflection of the needle.]

The weather was delicious, and but for the bug-a-boos that worried those poor sailors it would have been a most pleasant voyage. Chief among the imaginary terrors were three which deserve especial mention. At nightfall on September 13 the ships had crossed the magnetic line of no variation, and Columbus was astonished to see that the compa.s.s-needle, instead of pointing a little to the right of the pole-star, began to sway toward the left, and next day this deviation increased. It was impossible to hide such a fact from the sharp eyes of the pilots, and all were seized with alarm at the suspicion that this witch instrument was beginning to play them some foul trick in punishment of their temerity; but Columbus was ready with an ingenious astronomical explanation, and their faith in the profundity of his knowledge prevailed over their terrors.

[Sidenote: The Sarga.s.so Sea.]

The second alarm came on September 16, when they struck into vast meadows of floating seaweeds and gra.s.ses, abounding in tunny fish and crabs. They had now come more than 800 miles from Ferro and were entering the wonderful Sarga.s.so Sea, that region of the Atlantic six times as large as France, where vast tangles of vegetation grow upon the surface of water that is more than 2,000 fathoms deep, and furnish sustenance for an untold wealth of fishy life.[515] To the eye of the mariner the Sarga.s.so Sea presents somewhat the appearance of an endless green prairie, but modern ships plough through it with ease and so did the caravels of Columbus at first. After two or three days, however, the wind being light, their progress was somewhat impeded. It was not strange that the crews were frightened at such a sight. It seemed uncanny and weird, and revived ancient fancies about mysterious impa.s.sable seas and overbold mariners whose ships had been stuck fast in them. The more practical spirits were afraid of running aground upon submerged shoals, but all were somewhat rea.s.sured on this point when it was found that their longest plummet-lines failed to find bottom.

[Footnote 515: The situation of this Sarga.s.so region in mid-ocean seems to be determined by its character as a quiet neutral ground between the great ocean-currents that flow past it on every side. Sarga.s.so plants are found elsewhere upon the surface of the waves, but nowhere else do they congregate as here. There are reasons for supposing that in ancient times this region extended nearer to the African coast. Skylax (_Periplus_, cap. 109) says that beyond Kerne, at the mouth of Rio d' Ouro the sea cannot be navigated on account of the mud and seaweed. Sataspes, on his return to Persia, B. C. 470, told King Xerxes that his voyage failed because his ship stopped or was stuck fast. (Herodotus, iv. 43.) Festus Avienus mentions vast quant.i.ties of seaweed in the ocean west of the Pillars of Hercules:--

Exsuperat autem gurgitem fucus frequens Atque impeditur aestus ex uligine....

Sic nulla late flabra propellunt ratem, Sic segnis humor aequoris pigri stupet.

Adjicit et illud, plurimum inter gurgites Exstare fuc.u.m, et saepe virgulti vice Retinere puppim, etc.

Avienus, _Ora Maritima_, 108, 117.

See also Aristotle, _Meteorol._, ii. 1, 14; Pseudo-Aristotle, _De Mirab. Auscult._, p. 106; Theophrastus, _Historia plantarum_, iv. 7 Jornandes, _De rebus Geticis_, apud Muratori, tom. i.p. 191; according to Strabo (iii. 2, - 7) tunny fish were caught in abundance in the ocean west of Spain, and were highly valued for the table on account of their fatness which was due to submarine vegetables on which they fed. Possibly the reports of these Sarga.s.so meadows may have had some share in suggesting to Plato his notion of a huge submerged island Atlantis (_Timaeus_, 25; _Kritias_, 108; cf. the notion of a viscous sea in Plutarch, _De facie in Orbe Luna_, 26), Plato's fancy has furnished a theme for much wild speculation. See, for example, Bailly, _Lettres sur l'Atlantide de Platon_, Paris, 1779. The belief that there can ever have been such an island in that part of the Atlantic is disposed of by the fact that the ocean there is nowhere less than two miles in depth. See the beautiful map of the Atlantic sea-bottom in Alexander Aga.s.siz's _Three Cruises of the Blake_, Boston, 1888, vol. i.p.

108, and compare chap. vi. of that n.o.ble work, on "The Permanence of Continents and of Oceanic Basins;" see also Wallace's _Island Life_, chap. vi. It was formerly supposed that the Sarga.s.so plants grow on the sea-bottom, and becoming detached rise to the surface (Peter Martyr, _De rebus oceanicis_, dec. iii. lib. v. p. 53; Humboldt, _Personal Narrative_, book i. chap, i.); but it is now known that they are simply rooted in the surface water itself. "L'acc.u.mulation de ces plantes marines est l'exemple le plus frappant de plantes congeneres reunies sur le meme point. Ni les forets colossales de l'Himalaya, ni les graminees qui s'etendent a perte de vue dans les savanes americaines ou les steppes siberiens ne rivalisent avec ces prairies oceaniques. Jamais sur un es.p.a.ce aussi etendu, ne se rencontrent de telles ma.s.ses de plantes semblables. Quand on a vu la mer des Sarga.s.ses, on n'oublie point un pareil spectacle." Paul Gaffarel, "La Mer des Sarga.s.ses," _Bulletin de Geographie_, Paris, 1872, 6e serie, tom. iv. p. 622.]

[Sidenote: The trade wind.]

On September 22 the journal reports "no more gra.s.s." They were in clear water again, and more than 1,400 geographical miles from the Canaries.

A third source of alarm had already begun to disturb the sailors. They were discovering much more than they had bargained for. They were in the belt of the trade winds, and as the gentle but unfailing breeze wafted them steadily westward, doubts began to arise as to whether it would ever be possible to return. Fortunately soon after this question began to be discussed, the wind, jealous of its character for capriciousness even there, veered into the southwest.

[Sidenote: Impatience of the crews.]

By September 25 the Admiral's chief difficulty had come to be the impatience of his crews at not finding land. On that day there was a mirage, or some such illusion, which Columbus and all hands supposed to be a coast in front of them, and hymns of praise were sung, but at dawn next day they were cruelly undeceived. Flights of strange birds and other signs of land kept raising hopes which were presently dashed again, and the men pa.s.sed through alternately hot and cold fits of exultation and dejection. Such mockery seemed to show that they were entering a realm of enchantment. Somebody, perhaps one of the released jail-birds, hinted that if a stealthy thrust should happen some night to push the Admiral overboard, it could be plausibly said that he had slipped and fallen while star-gazing. His situation grew daily more perilous, and the fact that he was an Italian commanding Spaniards did not help him. Perhaps what saved him was their vague belief in his superior knowledge; they may have felt that they should need him in going back.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Martin Behaim's Atlantic Ocean (with outline of American continent superimposed).]

[Sidenote: Change of course from W. to W. S. W.]

[Sidenote: Land ahead! Oct. 12 (N. S. 21), 1492.]

By October 4 there were ominous symptoms of mutiny, and the anxiety of Columbus was evinced in the extent of his bold understatement of that day's run,--138 miles instead of the true figure 189. For some days his pilots had been begging him to change his course; perhaps they had pa.s.sed between islands. Anything for a change! On the 7th at sunrise, they had come 2,724 geographical miles from the Canaries, which was farther than the Admiral's estimate of the distance to c.i.p.ango; but according to his false statement of the runs, it appeared that they had come scarcely 2,200 miles. This leads one to suspect that in stating the length of the voyage, as he had so often done, at 700 leagues, he may have purposely made it out somewhat shorter than he really believed it to be. But now after coming more than 2,500 miles he began to fear that he might be sailing past c.i.p.ango on the north, and so he shifted his course two points to larboard, or west-southwest. If a secret knowledge of Vinland had been his guiding-star he surely would not have turned his helm that way; but a glance at the Toscanelli map shows what was in his mind. Numerous flights of small birds confirmed his belief that land at the southwest was not far off. The change of direction was probably fortunate. If he had persisted in keeping on the parallel, 720 miles would have brought him to the coast of Florida, a little south of Cape Malabar. After the change he had but 505 miles of water before him, and the temper of the sailors was growing more dangerous with every mile,[516]--until October 11, when the signs of land became unmistakable, and the wildest excitement prevailed. A reward of 10,000 maravedis had been promised to the person who should first discover land, and ninety pair of eyes were strained that night with looking.

About ten o'clock the Admiral, standing on the tower-like p.o.o.p of his vessel, saw a distant light moving as if somebody were running along the sh.o.r.e with a torch. This interpretation was doubted, but a few hours later a sailor on the Pinta saw land distinctly, and soon it was visible to all, a long low coast about five miles distant. This was at two in the morning of Friday, October 12,[517]--just ten weeks since they had sailed from Palos, just thirty-three days since they had lost sight of the coast of Ferro. The sails were now taken in, and the ships lay to, awaiting the dawn.

[Footnote 516: The often-repeated story that a day or two before the end of the voyage Columbus capitulated with his crew, promising to turn back if land were not seen within three days, rests upon the single and relatively inferior authority of Oviedo. It is not mentioned by Las Casas or Bernaldez or Peter Martyr or Ferdinand Columbus, and it is discredited by the tone of the Admiral's journal, which shows as unconquerable determination on the last day of the voyage as on any previous day. Cf. Irving, vol. i. p. 187.]

[Footnote 517: Applying the Gregorian Calendar, or "new style,"

it becomes the 21st. The four hundredth anniversary will properly fall on October 21, 1892.]

[Sidenote: The crews go ash.o.r.e.]

At daybreak the boats were lowered and Columbus, with a large part of his company, went ash.o.r.e. Upon every side were trees of unknown kinds, and the landscape seemed exceedingly beautiful. Confident that they must have attained the object for which they had set sail, the crews were wild with exultation. Their heads were dazed with fancies of princely fortunes close at hand. The officers embraced Columbus or kissed his hands, while the sailors threw themselves at his feet, craving pardon and favour.

[Sidenote: The astonished natives.]

[Sidenote: Guanahani: where was it?]

These proceedings were watched with unutterable amazement and awe by a mult.i.tude of men, women, and children of cinnamon hue, different from any kind of people the Spaniards had ever seen. All were stark naked and most of them were more or less greased and painted. They thought that the ships were sea-monsters and the white men supernatural creatures descended from the sky.[518] At first they fled in terror as these formidable beings came ash.o.r.e, but presently, as they found themselves unmolested, curiosity began to overcome fear, and they slowly approached the Spaniards, stopping at every few paces to prostrate themselves in adoration. After a time, as the Spaniards received them with encouraging nods and smiles, they waxed bold enough to come close to the visitors and pa.s.s their hands over them, doubtless to make sure that all this marvel was a reality and not a mere vision. Experiences in Africa had revealed the eagerness of barbarians to trade off their possessions for trinkets, and now the Spaniards began exchanging gla.s.s beads and hawks'

bells for cotton yarn, tame parrots, and small gold ornaments. Some sort of conversation in dumb show went on, and Columbus naturally interpreted everything in such wise as to fit his theories. Whether the natives understood him or not when he asked them where they got their gold, at any rate they pointed to the south, and thus confirmed Columbus in his suspicion that he had come to some island a little to the north of the opulent c.i.p.ango. He soon found that it was a small island, and he understood the name of it to be Guanahani. He took formal possession of it for Castile, just as the discoverers of the Cape Verde islands and the Guinea coasts had taken possession of those places for Portugal; and he gave it a Christian name, San Salvador. That name has since the seventeenth century been given to Cat island, but perhaps in pursuance of a false theory of map-makers; it is not proved that Cat island is the Guanahani of Columbus. All that can positively be a.s.serted of Guanahani is that it was one of the Bahamas: there has been endless discussion as to which one, and the question is not easy to settle. Perhaps the theory of Captain Gustavus Fox, of the United States navy, is on the whole best supported. Captain Fox maintains that the true Guanahani was the little island now known as Samana or Atwood's Cay.[519] The problem well ill.u.s.trates the difficulty in identifying any route from even a good description of landmarks, without the help of persistent proper names, especially after the lapse of time has somewhat altered the landmarks.

From this point of view it is a very interesting problem and has its lessons for us; otherwise it is of no importance.

[Footnote 518: This is a common notion among barbarians. "The Polynesians imagine that the sky descends at the horizon and encloses the earth. Hence they call foreigners _papalangi_, or 'heaven-bursters,' as having broken in from another world outside." Max Muller, _Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. ii.

p. 268.]

[Footnote 519: "An Attempt to solve the Problem of the First Landing Place of Columbus in the New World," in _United States Coast and Geodetic Survey--Report for 1880--Appendix 18_, Washington, 1882.]

[Sidenote: Groping for c.i.p.ango and the route to Quinsay.]

A cruise of ten days among the Bahamas, with visits to four of the islands, satisfied Columbus that he was in the ocean just east of Cathay, for Marco Polo had described it as studded with thousands of spice-bearing islands, and the Catalan map shows that some of these were supposed to be inhabited by naked savages. To be sure, he could not find any spices or valuable drugs, but the air was full of fragrance and the trees and herbs were strange in aspect and might mean anything; so for a while he was ready to take the spices on trust. Upon inquiries about gold the natives always pointed to the south, apparently meaning c.i.p.ango; and in that direction Columbus steered on the 25th of October, intending to stay in that wealthy island long enough to obtain all needful information concerning its arts and commerce. Thence a sail of less than ten days would bring him to the Chinese coast, along which he might comfortably cruise northwesterly as far as Quinsay and deliver to the Great Khan a friendly letter with which Ferdinand and Isabella had provided him. Alas, poor Columbus--unconscious prince of discoverers--groping here in Cuban waters for the way to a city on the other side of the globe and to a sovereign whose race had more than a century since been driven from the throne and expelled from the very soil of Cathay! Could anything be more pathetic, or better ill.u.s.trate the profound irony with which our universe seems to be governed?

[Sidenote: Columbus reaches Cuba, and sends envoys to find a certain Asiatic prince.]

On reaching Cuba the Admiral was charmed with the marvellous beauty of the landscape,--a point in which he seems to have been unusually sensitive. He found pearl oysters along the sh.o.r.e, and although no splendid cities as yet appeared, he did not doubt that he had reached c.i.p.ango. But his attempts at talking with the amazed natives only served to darken counsel. He understood them to say that Cuba was part of the Asiatic continent, and that there was a king in the neighbourhood who was at war with the Great Khan! So he sent two messengers to seek this refractory potentate,--one of them a converted Jew acquainted with Arabic, a language sometimes heard far eastward in Asia, as Columbus must have known. These envoys found pleasant villages, with large houses, surrounded with fields of such unknown vegetables as maize, potatoes, and tobacco; they saw men and women smoking cigars,[520] and little dreamed that in that fragrant and soothing herb there was a richer source of revenue than the spices of the East. They pa.s.sed acres of growing cotton and saw in the houses piles of yarn waiting to be woven into rude cloth or twisted into nets for hammocks. But they found neither cities nor kings, neither gold nor spices, and after a tedious quest returned, somewhat disappointed, to the coast.

[Footnote 520: The first recorded mention of tobacco is in Columbus's diary for November 20, 1492:--"Hallaron los dos cristianos por el camino mucha gente que atravesaba a sus pueblos, mugeres y hombres con un tizon en la mano, yerbas para tomar sus sahumerios que acostumbraban," i. e. "the two Christians met on the road a great many people going to their villages, men and women with brands in their hands, made of herbs for taking their customary smoke." Navarrete, tom. i. p.

51.]