Juan de la Cosa, captain of the _Santa Maria_, was prowling about the
beach of Gomera in a thoroughly dissatisfied frame of mind. His own
ship, the _Gallego_ before the Admiral re-christened her and made her
his flagship, was riding trim as a mallard within sight of his eye. She
would never have kept the fleet waiting in the Canaries for a little
thing like a broken rudder.
It was the _Pinta_ that had done this, and it was the veteran pilot's
private opinion that she would behave much better if her owners, Gomez
Rascon and Christoval Quintero, had been left behind in Palos. But what
can you do when you have seized a ship for the service of the Crown, and
turned her over to a captain who is a rival ship-owner, and her owners
wish to serve in her crew and not elsewhere? They cannot be blamed for
liking to keep an eye on their property!
"Capitano!" piped a voice at his elbow. He looked around, and then he
looked down. An undersized urchin with not much on but a pair of ragged
breeches stared up at him boldly, hands behind his back. "Do you know
what ails your ship over there?" He nodded sideways at the disgraced
_Pinta_.
The accent was that of Bilbao in the captain's own native province,
Vizcaya. Ordinarily he would have cuffed the speaker heels over head for
impudence, but the dialect made him pause. Besides, he wanted to hear
something to confirm his suspicions.
"She is no ship of mine," he growled, "and anyway, what do you know
about it?"
"I know much more than they think I do. The calkers did not half do
their work before she left port. I'd like to sail in her if she were
properly looked after. But when a man goes out on the dolphins' track he
likes to come home again, you know."
"A man! Do babes take a ship round Bojador? And who may you call
yourself, zagallo (strong youth)?"
"I am Pedro, son of Pedro who was an escaladero (climber) at the siege
of Alhama. He was killed on the way home, and my mother died of grief,
so that I get my bread where the saints put it. People say that they
unlocked all the jails to get you your crew for the Indies, and now I
see that it is true."
Juan de la Cosa knew the untamable sauciness of the Vizcayan breed, and
knew as well the loyalty that went with it. "Son," he said seriously,
"what do you know of this matter?" The boy put aside his insolence and
spoke gravely.
"I know that these fellows who have been commanded to serve your Admiral
hate him, and will make him lose his venture if they can. I would sooner
put to sea in a meal-tub with myself that I can trust, than in a Cadiz
galley manned with plotters. When they hauled this fine ship up on the
beach I asked for a job, and the lazy fellows were glad enough of help.
I never minded doing their work if they hadn't kicked me. When I heard
them planning I said to myself, 'Pedro, mi hidalgo, a crow in hand is
worth two buzzards in the bush waiting to pick your bones.' Your
Admiral may have to go back to Castile and eat crow.
"They have agreed that they will sail seven hundred leagues and no more,
since that is the distance from here to the Indies if your map is true.
If the Admiral refuse to turn back in case land is not found they will
pitch him into the sea and tell the world that he was star-gazing and
fell overboard, being an old man and unused to perilous voyages. He
should get him another crew--if he can."
This was important information. Yet to go back might be more dangerous
than to go on. The expedition had already been delayed a fortnight with
making a rudder for the _Pinta_, stopping her leaks, and replacing the
lateen sails of the _Nina_ with square ones, that she might be able to
keep up with the others. Another week must pass before they could sail.
If they returned to Palos it was doubtful whether they could get any men
at all to replace the disloyal ones. Too much delay might cause the
withdrawal of Martin Pinzon and his brother Vicente, owners of the
_Nina_; and if they went, most of the seamen who were worth their salt
would go also. La Cosa himself in the Admiral's place would go on and
take the chance of mutiny, trusting in his own power to prevent or
subdue it.
"Pedro," he said, "have you told this to any one else?"
"Not a soul."
"Would you like to sail with us?"
"Will a wolf bite? Why do you suppose I told you all this?"
"Bite your tongue then, wolf-cub, until I have seen the Admiral. Where
shall I find you if I want you?"
"Tia Josefa over there lets me sleep in the courtyard."
"Very well--now, off with you."
The Admiral said exactly what the pilot had thought he would say. He
knew himself to be looked upon with envy and dislike, as a Genoese, and
the Spaniards who made up his three crews had been collected as with a
rake from the unwilling Andalusian seaports. It was decided that the
mutinous sailors should be scattered so that they could not easily act
together. Pedro was taken on as cabin-boy, for he was thirteen, and
wiser than his age.
On that May day when Christoval Colón,[1] the hare-brained foreigner
whom the King and Queen had made an Admiral, read the royal orders in
the Church of San Jorge in Palos, there was amazement, wrath and horror
in that small seaport. Queen Ysabel had indeed been so rash as to pledge
her jewels to meet the cost of this expedition; but the royal
treasurers, looking over their accounts, noted that Palos owed a fine to
the Crown which had never been paid. Very good; let Palos contribute the
use and maintenance of two ships for two months, and let the magistrates
of the Andalusian ports hunt up shipmasters and crews and supplies. The
officers of the government came with Colón to enforce this order.
In vain did the Pinzon brothers, who had really been convinced by the
arguments of Colón, use all their influence to secure him a proper
equipment. Even after they had themselves enlisted as captains, with
their own ship the _Nina_, they could not get men enough to go on so
doubtful a venture. The royal officers finally took to the reckless
course of pardoning all prisoners guilty of any crime short of murder or
treason, on condition of their shipping for the voyage. At least half
the sailors of the three ships were pressed men.
The _Santa Maria_, largest of the three caravels, was ninety feet long
and twenty broad. She was a decked ship; the others had only the tiny
cabin and forecastle. A caravel was never intended for long voyages into
unknown seas. Her builders designed her for coasting trade, not for a
quick voyage independent of wind and tide; but on the other hand she was
cheaper to build and to sail than a Genoese galley. The Admiral believed
that in the end the smallness of the ships would be no disadvantage.
Among the estuaries, bays and groups of islands which he expected to
find, they could go anywhere. Including shipmasters, pilots and crews
the fleet carried eighty-seven men and three ship-boys, besides the
personal servants of the Admiral, a physician, a surgeon, an interpreter
and a few adventurers. The interpreter was a converted Jew who could
speak not only several European languages but Arabic and Chaldean.
"A retinue of servants indeed!" observed Fonseca, the bishop, when the
door had closed upon the Admiral of the Indies. "Since all enlisted in
the expedition are at his service, why does he demand lackeys?"
But the head of the Genoese navigator had not been turned by his honors.
No man cared less for display than he did, personally. He knew very
well, however, that unless he maintained his own dignity the rabble
under his command might be emboldened to cut his throat, seize the ships
and become pirates. The men whom he could trust were altogether too few
to control those he could not, if it came to an open fight,--but it must
not be allowed to come to that. It was not agreeable to squabble with
Fonseca about the number of servants he was allowed to have, but he
must have personal attendants who were not discharged convicts.
On the open seas, removed from their lamenting and despondent relatives,
the crews gradually subsided into a state of discipline. The
quarter-deck is perhaps the severest test of character known. Despite
themselves the sailors began to feel the serene and kindly strength of
the man who was their master.
With a tact and understanding as great as his courage and self-command
Colón told his men more than they had ever known of the Indies. The East
had for generations been the enchanted treasure-house of Europe. Arabic,
Venetian, Genoese and Portuguese traders had brought from it spices,
rare woods, gold, diamonds, pearls, silk, and other foreign luxuries.
But the wide and varied reading of the Admiral had given him more
definite information. He told of the gilded temples of Cipangu, the
porcelain towers of Cathay, rajahs' elephants in gilded and jeweled
trappings, golden idols with eyes of great glowing gems, thrones of
ebony inlaid with patterns of diamonds, emeralds and rubies, rich
cargoes of spices, dyewood, fine cotton and silk, pearl fisheries, the
White Feast of Cambalu and the Khan's great hall where six thousand
courtiers gathered. Portugal already was reaching out toward these
Indies, groping her way around the African coast. Were they, Spaniards
and Christians, to be outdone by Portuguese and Arab traders? No men
ever had so great a future. Not only the wealth of the Indies, but the
glory of winning heathen empires to abandon their idols for the
Christian faith, was the adventure to which they were pledged; and he
strove to kindle their spirits from his own.
To Pedro the cabin-boy, listening in silence, it was like an entrance
into another world. When he asked to be taken on he had been moved
simply by a boy's desire to go where he had not been before. Now he
served a demigod, who led men where none had dared go. The Admiral might
have the glory of rediscovering the western route to the Indies; his
cabin-boy was discovering him.
The sea was beautifully calm, and there was time for talk and
speculation. A drifting mast, to which nobody would have given two
thoughts anywhere else, was pointed out as an evil omen. Pedro grinned
cheerfully and elevated his nose.
"Do you not believe in omens, Pedro?" asked the Admiral, somewhat
amused. He had not found many Spaniards who did not.
"One does not believe all one hears, my lord," the youngster answered,
coolly. "Tia Josefa saw ill omens a dozen times a week, all sure death;
and she is ninety years old. A mast drifting with the current is usual.
When I see one drifting against it I will begin to worry."
The jumpy nerves of the sailors were easily upset. They might have been
calmer if the sea had been less calm. It is hard for Spanish blood to
endure inaction and suspense together. Day after day a soft strong wind
wafted them westward. Ruiz, one of the pilots, bluntly declared that he
did not see how they could ever sail back to Spain against this wind,
whether they reached the Indies or not.
"Pedro," said the Admiral quietly, "what do you think?"
Pedro hesitated only an instant. "My lord," he answered boldly, "if we
cannot go back we must go on--around the world."
"So we can," smiled the Admiral. "But it will not come to that." And
Ruiz, reassured and rather ashamed of his fears, told the other
grumblers if they had seen as much rough weather as he had they would
know when they were well off.
But after a time even the pilots took fright. The compass needle no
longer pointed to the North Star, but half a point or more to the
northwest of it. They had visions of the fleet helplessly drifting
without a guide upon a vast unknown sea. It was not then known that the
action of the magnetic pole upon the needle varies in different parts of
the earth, but the quick mind of the Admiral found an explanation which
quieted their fears. He told them that the real north pole was a fixed
point indeed, but not necessarily the North Star. While this star might
be in line with the pole when seen from the coast of Spain, it would
not, of course, be in the same relative position when seen from a point
hundreds of miles to the west.
On September 15 a meteor fell, which might be another omen--nobody could
say exactly what it meant. Then about three hundred and sixty leagues
from the Canaries the ships began to encounter patches of floating
yellow-green sea-weed, which grew more numerous until the fleet was
sailing in a vast level expanse of green like an ocean meadow. Tuna fish
played in the waters; on one of the patches of floating weed rested a
live crab. A white tropical bird of a kind never known to sleep upon the
sea came flying toward them, alighting for a moment in the rigging. The
owners of the _Pinta_ predicted that they would all be caught in this
ocean morass to starve, or die of thirst, for the light winds were not
strong enough to drive the ships through it as easily as they had sailed
at first. The Admiral, quite undisturbed, suggested that in his
experience land-birds usually meant land not very far away.
Colón always answered frankly the questions put to him, but there was
one secret which he kept to himself from the beginning. Knowing that he
would be likely to have trouble when he reached the seven-hundred-league
limit his crews had set for him, he kept two reckonings. One was for his
private journal, the other was for all to see. He took the actual
figures of each day's run as set down in his private record, subtracted
from them a certain percentage and gave out this revised reckoning to
the fleet. He, and he alone, knew that they were nearly seven hundred
leagues from Palos already, instead of five hundred and fifty. According
to Toscanelli's calculation, by sailing west from the Canaries along the
thirtieth parallel of latitude he should land somewhere on the coast of
Cipangu; but the map of Toscanelli might be incorrect. If the ocean
should prove to be a hundred or more leagues wider than the chart showed
it, they would have to go on, all the same.
Even after they were out of the seaweed there was something weird and
unnatural in the sluggish calm of the sea. Light winds blew from the
west and southwest, but there were no waves, as by all marine experience
there should have been. On September 25 the sea heaved silently in a
mysterious heavy swell, without any wind. Then the wind once more
shifted to the east, and carried them on so smoothly that they could
talk from one ship to another. Martin Pinzon borrowed the Admiral's
chart, and it seemed to him that according to this they must be near
Cipangu. He tossed the chart back to the flagship on the end of a cord,
and gave himself to scanning the horizon. Ten thousand maravedis had
been promised by the sovereigns to the first man who actually saw land.
Suddenly Pinzon shouted, "Tierra! Tierra!" There was a low bank of what
seemed to be land, about twenty-five leagues away to the southwest. Even
for this Colón hesitated to turn from his pre-arranged course, but at
last he yielded to the chorus of pleading and protest which arose from
his officers, set his helm southwest and found--a cloud-bank.
Again and again during the following days the eager eyes and strained
nerves of the seamen led to similar disappointments. Land birds
appeared; some alighted fearlessly on the rigging and sang. Dolphins
frolicked about the keels. Flying-fish, pursued by their enemy the
bonito (mackerel), rose from the water in rainbow argosies, and fell
sometimes inside the caravels. A heron, a pelican and a duck passed,
flying southwest. By the true reckoning the fleet had sailed seven
hundred and fifty leagues. Colón wondered whether there could be an
error in the map, or whether by swerving from their course they had
passed between islands into the southern sea. Pedro, as sensitive as a
dog to the moods of his master, watched the Admiral's face as he came
and went, and wondered in his turn.
The pilots and shipmasters were cautious in expressing their fears
within hearing of the sailors, for by this time every one in authority
knew that open mutiny might break out at any moment. On the evening of
October 10 a delegation of anxious officers came to explain to the
Admiral that they could not hold the panic-stricken crews. If no land
appeared within a week their provisions would not last until they
reached home; they had not enough water to last through the homeward
voyage even now. The Admiral knew as well as they the horrors of thirst
and famine at sea, particularly with a crew of the kind they had been
obliged to ship. What did he intend to do?
The Admiral, seated at his table, finished the sentence he was adding in
his neat, legible hand to his log, put it aside, put the pen in the case
which hung at his belt, closed his ink-horn. His quiet eyes rested
fearlessly on their uneasy faces.
"This expedition," he said calmly, "has been sent out to look for the
Indies. With God's blessing we shall continue to look for them until we
find them. Say to the men, however, that if they will wait two or three
days I think they will see land."
Next morning Pedro was engaged in polishing his master's steel corslet
and casque, while near by two or three sailors conferred in low tones.
"We have had enough of promises," growled one. "As Rascon says, we are
like Fray Agostino's donkey, that went over the mountain at a trot,
trying to reach the bunch of carrots hung on a staff in front of his
nose."
There was a half-hearted snicker, and one of the men pointed a warning
thumb at Pedro.
"Oh!" said the speaker. "You heard, you little beggar?"
"I did," said Pedro.
"Well?"
"Well, I was waiting for the end of the story. As I heard it the Abbot
charged the old friar with deceiving the dumb beast, and he said he had
to, because he was dealing with a donkey!"
Pedro slung the pieces of gleaming plate-mail to his shoulder and added
as he turned to go, "You need not be afraid that I shall tell the
Admiral what you were saying. I am not a fool, and he knows how scared
you are, already."
More signs of land appeared--river weeds, a thorny branch with fresh
berries like rose-hips, a reed, a piece of wood, a carved staff. As
always, the vesper hymn to the Virgin was sung on the deck of the
flagship, and after service the Admiral briefly addressed the men. He
reminded them of the singular favor of God in granting them so quiet and
safe a voyage, and recalled his statement made on leaving the Canaries,
that after they had made seven hundred leagues he expected to be so near
land that they should not make sail after midnight. He told them that in
his belief they might find land before morning.
Nobody slept that night. About ten o'clock the Admiral, gazing from the
top of the castle built up on the poop of the _Santa Maria_, thought
that far away in the warm darkness he saw a glancing light.
"Pedro," he said to the boy near him, "do you see a light out there?
Yes? Call Señor Gutierrez and we will see what he makes of it. I have
come to the pass where I do not trust my own eyes."
Gutierrez saw it, but when Sanchez of Segovia came up, the light had
vanished. It seemed to come and go as if it were a torch in a
fishing-boat or in the hand of some one walking. But at two in the
morning a gun boomed from the _Pinta_. Rodrigo de Triana, one of the
seamen, had seen land from the mast-head.
The sudden sunrise of the tropics revealed a green Paradise lapped in
tranquil seas. The ships must have come up toward it between sunset and
midnight. No one had been able to imagine with any certainty what
morning would show. But this was no seaport, or coast of any civilized
land. People were coming down to the shore to watch the approach of the
ships, but they were wild people, naked and brown, and the sight was
evidently perfectly new to them.
The Admiral ordered the ships to cast anchor, and the boats were manned
and armed. He himself in a rich uniform of scarlet held the royal banner
of Castile, while the brothers Pinzon, commanders of the _Pinta_ and the
_Nina_, in their boats, had each a banner emblazoned with a green cross
and the crowned initials of the sovereigns, Fernando and Ysabel. The air
was clear and soft, the sea was almost transparent, and strange and
beautiful fruits could be seen among the rich foliage of the trees along
the shore. The Admiral landed, knelt and kissed the earth, offering
thanks to God, with tears in his eyes; and the other captains followed
his example. Then rising, he drew his sword, and calling upon all who
gathered around him to witness his action, took possession of the
newly-discovered island in the name of his sovereigns, and gave it the
name of San Salvador (Holy Savior).
The wild people, terrified at the sight of men coming toward them from
these great white-winged birds, as they took the ships to be, ran away
to the woods, but they presently returned, drawn by irresistible
curiosity. They had no weapons of iron, and one of them innocently took
hold of a sword by the edge. They were delighted with the colored caps,
glass beads, hawk-bells and other trifles which were given to them, and
brought the strangers great balls of spun cotton, cakes of cassava
bread, fruits, and tame parrots. Pedro went everywhere, and saw
everything, as only a boy could. Later, when the flagship was cruising
among the islands, and the Admiral, worn out by long anxiety, lay asleep
in his cabin, the helmsman, smothering a mighty yawn, called Pedro to
him.
"See here, young chap," he said, "we are running along the shore of this
island and there is no difficulty--take my place will you, while I get a
nap?"
The boy hesitated. He would have asked his master, but his master was
asleep, and must not be awakened. This helmsman, moreover, was one of
the men who had been kind to him, ready to answer his questions
regarding navigation, and loyal to the Admiral. Moreover it was not
quite the first time that Pedro had been allowed to take this
responsibility. He accepted it now. The man staggered away and lost
himself in heavy sleep almost before he lay down.
It was one of the still, breathless nights of the tropic seas. Pedro's
small strong hands had not grasped the helm for a half-hour before the
wind freshened, and then a tremendous gust swept down upon the flagship
hurling her right upon the unknown shore. Pedro strove desperately with
the fearful odds, but before the half-awakened sailors heard his call
the _Santa Maria_ was past repair. No lives were lost, but the Admiral
decided that it would be necessary to leave a part of the men on shore
as the beginning of a settlement. He would not have chosen to do this
but for the disaster, for the men who made up these crews were not
promising material for a colony in a wild land. But he had no choice in
the matter. The two smaller ships would not hold them all. Pedro,
shaken with sobs, cast himself at the feet of his master and begged
forgiveness.
"No one blames you, my son," said the Admiral, more touched than he had
been for a long time. "Be not so full of sorrow for what cannot be
helped. The wild people are friendly, the land is kind, and when we have
sailed back to Spain with our news there will be no difficulty in
returning with as many ships as we may need. Nay, I will not leave thee
here, Pedro. I think that now I could not do without thee."