Columbus

The Four Voyages

By Laurence Bergreen

Had Columbus relied on celestial navigation alone, he would have wandered off course, but he possessed another asset that made all the difference: an inborn sense of the sea, of wind and weather. Like other navigators of the day, Columbus did not refer to “true north” (the geographic north pole) or to the “north magnetic pole” (where the earth’s magnetic field suddenly points downward). Instead, he set his course, or direction, with reference to the winds, eight in all, each bearing a traditional Italian name. Tramontana indicated north, Greco northeast, Levante east, Sirocco southeast, Ostro or Auster south, Libeccio or Africo southwest, Ponente west, and Maestro northwest. Because these names referred to the familiar geography of the Mediterranean, Columbe and other navigators simplified this system into eight cardinal points – N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, and NW. As additional refinement, he included eight intermediate points – los medios vientos – or half winds. These were NNE, ENE, ESE, SSE, SSW, WSW, WNW, and NNW. There was a further subdivision as well, each point equivalent to 11¼ degrees, or one compass point.

Columbus remained silent concerning his truly remarkable gift: dead reckoning, that is, sailing by the seat of his pants, estimating time and distances with simple devices such as a rope or buoy or landmark. He was an intuitive master of the most ancient form of navigation. All his maps and charts and painfully acquired formal education – so impressive, yet so misleading – were of little use to him. He relied on his instincts and experience concerning tides and wind; the color of the sea and composition of clouds mattered more to him than the mathematical calculations of the era’s leading cosmographers. They had never gone to sea, but Columbus had. His dead reckoning proved so accurate that he had already sailed from Spain to the New World without incident the very first time, and incredibly, with no loss of life. And each time after that, he improved his course based on experience rather than theory.

(Bergreen 2011, pp.30)

The approaching rain portended three solid days of cloudbursts and downpours. “Blew hard from the NE,” he noted laconically, hard enough, in fact, to force the ships to drag their anchors, “at which the Admiral was surprised.” Again, his scouts saw signs of human habitation, but by the time they went ashore, the inhabitants had disappeared into the tropical forest. The image of a bewildered Columbus both entreating and frightening the indigenous people of the Caribbean is at odds with the storehouse of conventionally heroic images of the Admiral as divinely inspired, supremely confident, bringing Christianity and Spanish rule to untutored peoples. And it is at odds with the argument that he planned to exploit, enslave, degrade, or slaughter the timid, mostly unarmed Indians whose language he tried to learn, and whose seamanship he admired. At this juncture, he was neither a bringer of laws nor a spreader of disease, as centuries of commentators and portrait painters have represented him, but rather an earnest, fearless, and misguided navigator (and self-serving chronicler) who had difficulty impressing his sense of mission and self-importance on others, beginning with his own crew. Only the Indians who had never before seen his like were impressed, and they responded by taking flight. The more familiar they became with him and his men, the more they gravitated toward the explorer, partly because he deftly bribed them with trinkets, and partly because of an unspoken sense of a shared potential destiny between these two disparate groups. Their behavior, the way they clung to him like iron filings to a magnet, suggests that despite his confusion about where he was and his indecisiveness, his sense of high purpose communicated itself to his hosts. At the same time, he was also the cunning merchant of Genoa, looking for resources to trade and exploit.

(Bergreen 2011, pp.41)

On April 2, 1513, Ponce de Leon would encounter a landmass he took to be an island. He called it La Florida because of its luxuriant foliage, and because it was Eastertide, observed in Spain as Pascua Florida, Festival of Flowers.

Two other members of the fleet’s roster went on to win renown. Juan de la Cosa, aboard Mariagalante, had sailed on the first voyage as the owner and master of Santa Maria, Columbus’s flagship, and he would sail with Columbus on the third voyage; after that, he went to sea with Columbus’s sometime rival Amerigo Vespucci. Juan de la Cosa fashioned the celebrated Mappa Mundi of 1500, considered the first European cartographic representation of the New World, and the sole surviving map of Columbus’ voyages made by a participant. (His map is on display at the Museo Naval in Madrid.)

Then there was the charming and ambitious soldier of fortune, Juan Ponce de Leon, who later rose to become the first governor of Puerto Rico, by order of the Spanish government. Only eleven years after participating as a gentleman passenger on the second voyage, he financed his own expedition, a feat that not even Columbus at the height of his influence managed to accomplish. On April 2, 1513, Ponce de Leon would encounter a landmass he took to be an island. He called it La Florida because of its luxuriant foliage, and because it was Eastertide, observed in Spain as Pascua Florida, Festival of Flowers. He had landed somewhere in North America, and that alone was a significant accomplishment. Columbus, in all his voyaging, never touched, and never even knew, that the North American landmass existed.

(Bergreen 2011, pp.127)

Indians were not the innocents of his imagination; they had been slaveholders long before the Europeans arrived.

Recounting this policy, Las Casas howled with indignation. “Some complied,” he noted, “and for others it was impossible, and so, falling into the most wretched way of living, some took refuge in the mountains whilst others, since the violence and provocation and injuries on the part of the Christians never ceased, killed some Christians for special damages and tortures that they suffered.” The Christians responded by murdering and torturing their antagonists, “not respecting the human and divine justice and natural law under whose authority they did it.” There is no denying the force of Las Casas’s outrage, but Indians were not the innocents of his imagination; they had been slaveholders long before the Europeans arrived. Fernandex de Oviedo noted that in war, contesting Indian tribes “take captives whom they brand and keep as slaves. Each master has his own brand and some masters pull out one front tooth of their slaves as a mark of ownership.”

(Bergreen 2011, pp.204)

“It was more his due that the mainland be called Columbus, do Colon, or Colombo, after the man who discovered it, or Tierra Santa or Tierra de Gracia, which he himself named it, and not America after Amerigo.”
Las Casas

On his voyage, Ojeda brought along a forty-five-year-old Florentine named Amerigo Vespucci, the most enigmatic explorer of his era. By writing or inspiring a letter about a mythical “first voyage” of 1497 preceding his actual debut as an explorer, Vespucci guaranteed himself a controversial reputation. Las Casas, for instance, held him responsible for giving the impression that “Amerigo alone, with no other and before anyone else, had discovered it” – the mainland that came to be known, for no good reason, as America. As a result of Amerigo’s “very great fraud,” Las Casas acidly observed, “it is apparent then how much injustice was done to the admiral Christopher Columbus.” Attempting to right the balance, the chronicler noted, “It was more his due that the mainland be called Columbus, do Colon, or Colombo, after the man who discovered it, or Tierra Santa or Tierra de Gracia, which he himself named it, and not America after Amerigo.” But it was not to be. The name “America” stuck to the continent, beginning with the huge, composite Universalis cosmographia, a printed wall map of the world by Martin Waldseemuller, published in April 1507, the same year that the cartographer made corresponding globe gores – flat, approximately triangular sections designed to wrap around a ball. This is the first map to include the name “America.” For it, Waldeemuller and his assistant, Matthias Ringmann, drew several sources, including Columbus, for their depiction of the world at the height of the age of exploration, but they decided to award Vespucci preeminence. When it became apparent that Vespucci’s role had been vastly overstated, Waldseemuller revised his map and renamed parts of it Terra Incognita; by this time, about a thousand copies of the original had been distributed, too late to correct the missimpression.

Although he gave his name to the continent that Columbus visited before him, Amerigo Vespucci’s exploits did not obliterate his predecessor’s contribution. Columbus had made such a large impression on the events of his time, and was so well known, if not admired, that the name “America” does not summon the legacy of Vespucci, but the exploits of Columbus.

(Bergreen 2011, pp.269-270)

Columbus’s journals reveal that he had an inkling that he had stumbled across a powerful and ancient civilization, but ultimately the Maya failed to engage his interest for one overriding reason: they were not Chinese. The only aspects of the Maya that Columbus did appreciate were their seamanship and their long, agile, canoe like craft. Given their prowess on the water, it is worth asking why the advanced Maya did not discover Europe long before Columbus arrived on their shores. The answer has to do with the trade winds, which blow steadily south and west, defeating attempts to sail against them. Columbus benefited greatly from these prevailing winds, which at the same time kept Maya mariner hugging the shore.

(Bergreen 2011, pp.305)

The drastic devaluation of Columbus seems a recent phenomenon, but it originated at the time of his voyages. The Spanish judicial investigator, Francisco de Bobadilla, sent him home in chains. King Ferdinand disdained him. Bishop Fonseca’s intense dislike for Columbus was widely known. Amerigo Vespucci fostered the impression that he, rather than Columbus, had discovered a New World, and gave his name to the continent. His former lieutenant, Alonso do Ojeda, laid claim to territories first visited Columbus. Nicolas de Ovando, who succeeded Columbus as governor of Hisaniola, endangered his life and mocked him. The Porras brothers, Fancisco Roldan, and others who sailed with Columbus staged mutinies with little or not retribution.

The most lasting damage to Colubus’s reputation came from the pen of Bartolome de Las Casas. Arriving in Hispaniola with the new governor, Nicolas de Ovando, in 1502, Las Casas began as a slave owner. In 1510, he became the first priest to be ordained in the Americas, often called the Apostle to the Indians.” In his influential jeremiad, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Brevisima relacion de la destruccion de las Indias), written in 1542, he laid out the torture and genocidal practices fo the Spanish colonialists who followed Columbus.