"Columbus and His Four Fateful Voyages"
 
by David Gelman
 
in "Newsweek" (Special Issue, Fall/Winter 1991, pp. 39-46)
 
	Marooned on Jamaica, ailing and out of favor, with perhaps
two embittered years of life remaining to him, Christopher
Columbus dispatched to his monarchs a rambling, semi-coherent
letter invoking at one point a tribute to himself, written as if
it were meant to be sung by angels:
 
     "When He saw thee of an age with which He was content,
     He caused thy name to sound marvellously in the land.
     The Indies, which are so rich a part of the world, He
     gave thee for thine own....  Of the barriers of the
     Ocean Sea, which were closed with such mighty chains,
     He gave thee the keys ..."
 
	It was an encomium he could no longer expect from the world.
Returning from his epic first voyage, Columbus had been welcomed
with honors, a triumphal march, a summons to dine with the king
and queen.  By the time he died 13 years later, many of his
rights and titles had been stripped away, and the crown barely
acknowledged his existence.  He had become an embarrassment,
blamed for instigating a ruthless slave trade in the New World
and making a botch of the settlements he established there.  To a
large extent, this extraordinary reversal of fortune was brought
on by his own blundering greed.  Yet the fault was not entirely
his.  Above all, perhaps, he was guilty of having been too
faithful to his mission, an endeavor launched "in the name of
Jesus," but more palpably driven by the quest for gold.  Columbus
was first and foremost a man of his time, the product of an ethos
shaped as much by commerce as by Christianity, in which it seemed
equally the work of the Lord to find the gold and propagate the
faith.
	It's easy enough to be cynical about him nowadays.  Over the
centuries, his reputation has tended to expand and deflate like
some unruly Thanksgiving Day parade balloon.  Yet in the broad
sweep of history, most scholars agree, Columbus is a figure of
unique importance.  If his landing on American soil was not the
first by a European (that distinction probably belongs to the
Norsemen, Leif Eriksson, who is believed to have touched
somewhere on the Newfoundland coast around 1000), it was the most
decisive.  It marked the beginning of sustained contact between
the Old World and the New--the beginning, really, of the world we
know.  "The likelihood of transatlantic voyages before Columbus
was so great, you can probably say it did happen, but there was
no impact, no consequence," says historian William McNeill.
"What makes Columbus's voyage important was the response of
Europe to the news of the discovery.  Europe was poised to follow
up."
	Europe had been seeking some such expansion of its horizons
for centuries.  By the Middle Ages, Europeans were already
beguiled by the opulent East, which remained, however, veiled in
mystery.  The elite could purchase precious silks, carpets and
spices from Genoese, Venetian or Pisan merchants, who got them
from Turkish traders at Alexandria, Aleppo or Damascus.  But, for
the most part, they were blocked from venturing any farther
eastward.  "This was the Iron Curtain of the late Middle Ages,"
writes Daniel Boorstin, "for a single century, from about 1250 to
about 1350, that curtain was lifted, and there was direct human
contact between Europe and China."
	The brief opening arose courtesy of Genghis Khan, who led
his Mongol armies down to Beijing in 1214 and spent the next 50
years expanding his empire across much of Eastern Asia and
Eastern Europe.  The khan may have been looked on as a barbarian,
but he and his heirs encouraged free commercial trade by offering
the Europeans well-policed roads with low customs fees.  One
taker was adventurous 17-year-old Venetian named Marco Polo, who
made the overland trek to China with his father and uncle and
returned 24 years later with tales of unbounded wealth and
luxury.  Observes Boorstin: "Without Marco Polo, who stirred the
European imagination with impatience to reach Cathay [the khans'
capital city], would there have been a Columbus?"
	The Chinese conquest of the Mongols in 1368 rang down the
curtain on land travel to the East again, shifting momentum to
the search for a sea route.  No one pushed this quest more
zealously than the Portuguese.  Historians believe the Portuguese
launched several forays westward on the Atlantic in the decades
before 1492, but their main thrust was toward the southern tip of
Africa.  Portuguese ships kept inching down the west coast of the
continent until a skipper named Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape
of Good Hope and confirmed the existence of a water connection to
the Indian Ocean.  Forced to turn back by his men in the face of
threatening seas, Dias returned to Lisbon with the news just in
time to squelch the patiently nurtured ambitions of a Genoese
named Columbus.
	Picture the Discoverer at this moment in his life: an
obscure navigator nearing 40, deeply in debt, sustained only by a
daring notion of sailing west to reach the East and a cockeyed
idea of how much ocean he must cross to get there.  When Dias's
storm-battered caravels limped into the harbor of Lisbon in
December 1488, Columbus is thought to have been in Portugal
trying for the second time to wangle King Joao II's backing for a
westward expedition.  With the eastward passage around Africa now
feasible, Columbus's project was judged superfluous.
	But the navigator was used to rejection.  Since 1484,
Columbus had devoted himself to promoting his "Enterprise of the
Indies," first in Portugal and then in Spain.  Now, like some
wild-eyed adventurer in a Robert Louis Stevenson novel, Columbus
petitioned Ferdinand and Isabella, flourishing a map that he had
modified with the dubious geographic calculations of Ptolemy and
Marco Polo.  In 1491, a special commission, headed by Isabella's
confessor, rendered an unfavorable opinion of the plan; in the
spring of 1492, a second commission dismissed it anew.  But after
10 years of war, Spain succeeded that spring in liberating
Granada from the Moors, freeing the monarchs to turn to other
matters.  A last-ditch effort by Columbus's supporter Luis de
Santangel, the king's financial adviser, convinced them that they
might gain huge influence from Columbus's venture at relatively
small cost.  After eight desperate years, the plan was at last
approved.
	On the whole, Columbus is probably given less credit than he
deserves for his almost fanatical persistence.  Given that he was
an impecunious foreigner with an uncertain grasp of geography, he
"had to have been a very convincing public-relations man," says
McNeill.  "That a foreigner would be able to sell that bill of
goods to the Spanish crown is really quite amazing."
	After all the struggle and refection, Columbus at last had a
contract in his pocket, signed by the Spanish monarchs.  In the
Capitulations of Santa Fe, as the document was called, the crown
agreed to grant him noble status, together with the offices of
admiral, viceroy and governor in all the islands and mainlands
that he might claim for Castile in the Atlantic.  As for profits
from the venture, one tenth, plus some investment options, would
go to Columbus and the rest to the crown.  "Here he was, an
outsider from Genoa who was promised one tenth of all the riches
and who managed to get himself classified as a noble in Spanish
society," noted McNeill.  "Columbus did extremely well for
himself."
	Finally, the great voyage of discovery got underway.  The
day before Columbus set sail was also the deadline for all Jews
to leave the country.  The same tide that bore him seaward
carried the last of Spain's estimated 100,000 Jews into
centuries-long exile.  Samuel Eliot Morison, the patrician
yachtsman-historian who wrote what has become the standard
reference work on Columbus, imagined the embarkation scene as it
might have been painted by El Greco: "One of those gray, calm
days" under motionless could masses, "when the sea is like a
mirror of burnished steel."  The three square-rigged sailing
vessels--the largest, the Santa Maria, was no bigger than a
tennis court--begin moving down the Saltes River at about
5:15 a.m.  It is Friday, Aug. 3, 1492.  Not a leaf stirs as the
men pull the oars.  Morison even hears the friars chanting their
morning prayer in the monastery of La Rabida on a cliff
overlooking the harbor: "The Captain General, who often had
joined in that hymn during his stay at La Rabida removes his hat;
seamen who are not working follow his example ..."  It's a scene
of hushed, poetic piety, one we almost want to believe--because
history, in fact, is about to take one of its great leaps.
	But between the embarkation and the sighting of land in the
Americas, there was almost no drama.  There were no storms or
prolonged calms; the winds were brisk and steady.  Compared with
what later befell explorers Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan,
or some of Columbus's own subsequent crossings, it was
practically a luxury cruise.  The days were balmy, the men went
swimming at times in the glassy sea; at night they slept on deck.
	Not all was serene, even so.  Columbus kept a detailed
journal of the voyage, which comes down to us in the form of an
abstract by a Dominican monk, Bartolome de Las Casas, sometimes
in Columbus's words, more often in his own.  From the journal and
other sources it emerges that, experienced though they were, the
crew were scarcely eager to sail off into a limitless sea.  It
was a measure of their uneasiness that little more than a week
after they left the Canary Islands the voyagers began seeing
signs of land on every side: "Friday, September 14th: The crew of
the Nina stated that they had seen a tern and a tropic bird; and
these birds never go more than twenty-five leagues from land."
	"Monday September 17th: They saw much vegetation and it was
very delicate and was weed from rocks....  They concluded that
they were near land."
	By Oct. 8, they did seem to be nearing something.  "Thanks
be to God," wrote Columbus, "the breezes were softer than in
April at Seville ... they are so laden with scent."  And still
there was no land.  "Here the men could now bear no more; they
complained of the long voyage."  By some accounts, the crew
wanted to turn back, but Columbus pleaded, if they didn't reach
land in two or three days, "cut off my head and you shall
return."
	It was not until two hours past midnight on Oct. 12 that a
lookout on the Pinta actually saw what looked like a line of
white cliffs to the west.  Ten weeks after he embarked from Palos
de la Frontera, Columbus landed on an island he christened San
Salvador.  Scholars still debate whether this was Samana Cay, San
Salvador (Watlings Island) or any of a number of small islands in
the Bahamas.  What we do know is that after Columbus landed, his
explorations took him to several other islands, including Cuba
and Hispaniola (today, the Dominican Republic and Haiti).  On
Christmas Eve, 1492, the Santa Maria ran aground on shoals off
Haiti's coast and had to be abandoned.  Columbus had to leave 39
men behind in a colony he named La Navidad (for Christmas).  Not
to waste an opportunity, he ordered them to trade goods with the
natives in exchange for gold.
	The hope of finding some putative mother lode of gold drove
Columbus relentlessly through the islands.  Gold danced before
his eyes, in the necklaces, bracelets and nose rings the natives
wore: "October 13th: ... So I resolved to go to the south-west to
seek the gold and precious stones."  "October 23rd: I did not
delay longer here [on Cabo del Isleo] since I see that here there
is no gold mine."  In "The Conquest of Paradise," author
Kirkpatrick Sale, a dedicated Columbus revisionist, counts no
fewer than 140 uses of the word oro (gold) in Columbus's journal
of the first voyage.  He apparently could not admire the lush
beauty of the islands without also estimating their potential
value.  "Here was a true son of Renaissance materialism," Sale
snorts.  Historian Carla Phillips demurs.  Columbus, she argues,
was desperate to justify the costs of the enterprise.  "It's
important for him to find vast harbors and rich mines in order to
confirm his theories about what is out there."
	Toward the natives, Columbus behaved with a kind of schizoid
duplicity.  From the moment he beheld them he saw an attractive,
peaceable and friendly people who would make good Christians and
"good servants."  He rewarded their generosity with hawk bells,
glass beads and other "trifles of small value," and periodically
took them captive.  And sometimes he dropped all pretense of good
will: "... these people are very unskilled in arms ... when Your
Highnesses so command, they can all be carried off to Castile or
held captive in the island itself, since with fifty men they
would be all kept in subjection and forced to do whatever may be
wished."  Given the attitude of their visitors, it's not
surprising the natives grew hostile--so that before he left for
home, Columbus felt obliged to fortify La Navidad settlement,
which was nevertheless wiped out to the last man by the
islanders.
	Meanwhile, Columbus grew increasingly anxious about finding
the mainland.  He still seemed to believe Cipango (Japan) or
Cathay (China) was just around the next cove.  But there were
only more islands.  (On his second voyage, still thwarted in the
search, he would take depositions from his crew declaring Cuba to
be part of the Asia mainland.)  He sailed home, finally, aboard
the Nina, picking up the westerlies he needed by heading north
from Hispaniola, and arriving on March 15, 1493, 32 weeks after
he left, without having lost a man at sea.  "He was a very
competent seaman," says McNeill.
	When Leif Eriksson reached the North American continent the
news fell like a tree in the forest; almost no one heard it.
When Columbus announced his discovery, in a letter to Luis de
Santangel written during his return voyage, the word spread
quickly, thanks to an already vigorous printing industry.  Though
some challenged Columbus's assertion that he had reached the
Indies, the impact on European imagination was profound,
providing a forward thrust to the whole enterprise of New World
exploration.
	In response, to his famous missive, Columbus received a
letter from Ferdinand and Isabella, commanding him to court and
addressing him as "Don Cristobal Colon, their Admiral of the
Ocean Sea, Viceroy and Governor of the Islands that he hath
discovered in the Indies."  He would never again experience
anything like the grand reception he was accorded, first at
Cordoba, then at Barcelona, where he created a sensation by
presenting to the monarchs seven natives of "the Indies," along
with gold artifacts and samples of allegedly rare spices.  "It
would have been well for him had he then taken his profits and
retired with honor, leaving to others the responsibility of
colonization," observes Morison.  Instead, he embarked westward
again, this time in panoply of 17 ships, with 1,500 crewmen,
soldiers and colonists and the requisite plants, domestic animals
and tools for a permanent settlement.  But the cresting hopes
that rode with him were doomed to failure.  From the moment of
his return, the arc of the admiral's career sweeps downward.  His
relations with the natives rapidly descended into a kind of
Kurtzian darkness.
	With La Navidad destroyed, Columbus founded a new colony at
La Isabela, closer to the rumored source of gold.  But it was
plagued by illness and rebellion.  The admiral had no gift for
administration; he could not control hundreds of Spaniards avid
for conquest.  There were repeated episodes of rape, pillage and
murder by marauding bands of Spaniards.  Returning from a trip to
find a mutiny brewing, Columbus placed all munitions on board his
flagship under command of his younger brother Diego.  But when
Columbus was away, the violence erupted again.  Later, several of
the troublemakers seized some caravels that Columbus's other
brother Bartolome had brought from Spain and sailed home, where
they circulated slanders against the Columbus brothers.
	Historians say Columbus may have made a fatal mistake at
this point when he ignored a summons from Ferdinand and Isabella
to come home.  Instead of appeasing the monarchs and silencing
the slanders, he decided to deal with the turbulent situation at
La Isabela and try to begin regular exports to Spain.  As a first
step, he rounded up about 1,600 Tainos who had been resisting the
Spaniards and crammed 500 of them aboard four ships, to be
transported home as slaves.  Then he and his brothers set about
subjugating all of Hispaniola to reap its gold, with the use of
slave labor.
	They did, finally, find a rich vein of gold in the southern
part of the island; eventually, the gold strike made Columbus
rich and repaid the crown some of its initial investment.  He
nevertheless returned home under a cloud, still having failed to
establish a stable colony.  What's more, he had angered the
monarchs by enslaving people now regarded as Spanish subjects.
It was more than a year before the crown would outfit another
voyage.  On this third crossing, he managed at last to reach
mainland America--Venezuela, as it happened.  Ill at the time and
slipping into what some historians think was a half-mad
mysticism, he speculated that he had found the Garden of Eden
itself.  Phillips insists he was sane.  "He had a very firm
belief that he was chosen by God," she argues.  "His whole mental
map was Biblical."
	Meanwhile, conditions on Hispaniola had grown worse under
Diego, who had been left in charge.  Because of the negative
reports filtering back, Ferdinand and Isabella ordered an
investigation, which ended with all three Columbus brothers
shipped home in chains.  The monarchs appointed a new governor of
the islands, Nicolas de Oviendo, who set sail with a fleet twice
the size of Columbus's largest.  When Columbus embarked on his
fourth and final voyage in 1502, still hoping to find a direct
passage from Cuba to Asia, he was reduced to four small ships and
a kind of renegade status, barred from the colony of Santo
Domingo.  His worm-eaten boats, barely afloat, had to be grounded
on a Jamaican reef.  A caravel rescued the expedition a year
later, but after his return to Spain in November 1504, the
admiral never sailed again.
	Columbus spent the rest of his life lobbying to have his
grants and titles restored.  On May 20, 1506, he died at 55,
feeling betrayed by the monarchs he thought he had served with
the steadfastness of a Job.  The glory passed to those who came
after him.  After Amerigo Vespucci reached the mainland of the
New World, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller named in
America on his famous map of 1507, in Vespucci's honor.  Europe,
at any rate, remained less interested in settling the Americas
than finding ways around them.  Just before the end of the 15th
century, a Portuguese named Vasco da Gama completed the trip that
Bartolomeu Dias had begun, sailing around the tip of Africa to
Calicut, on the southwest coast of India.  By 1515, the treasures
of India, China and Japan were coming to Europe around the Cape
of Good Hope on Portuguese ships.
	In 1513, another explorer searching for gold in the
Americas, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, climbed a peak on the Panamanian
isthmus and beheld the might Pacific, the first European to do
so.  And in 1519, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese of
aristocratic birth, sailing for the Spanish crown, undertook the
most extraordinary voyage of all.  Setting out with five barely
seaworthy ships, racked by violent storms, near starvation and a
mutiny, he managed to find a passage from the east coast of South
America to the Pacific through the straits that now bear his
name.  His ships, or what was left of them, then completed a
three-year circumnavigation of the globe that Magellan himself
did not survive.
	Yet it is the comparatively idyllic first voyage of Columbus
that has come down to us, in almost folkloric colors, as the
great voyage of discovery.  We know little of what the Vikings
felt as they sailed to Vinland in the icy dawn of modern history.
But it is Columbus, pressing confidently into uncharted seas,
leaning forward to catch the first spice-laden scent of a
continent he never doubted he would find, who speaks to the
voyager in all of us.