Chapter 26 Columbus by Rafael Sabatini
THE SEAMEN OF PALOS
After years of flexibility, of bending to every influence that might prosper him, it was by inflexibility that Colon prevailed in the end. His very intransigence had made his victory complete, had brought the Sovereigns to a surrender reasonably near to his demands.
Word of it reached him at dusk, when he was already some three leagues upon his disconsolate way. As he approached the Bridge of Pinos there was a pounding of fast hooves behind him. A posse of alguaziles, led by an officer of the Queen’s household, overtook him with her Highness’s command that he return at once to Santa Fé. It was not an order that he would have dared to disregard; but with it the officer handed him a note: three brief lines over Santangel’s signature to inform him that he had triumphed.
On the morrow, after the felicitations of Santangel and Cabrera, and after being almost wept over by the Marchioness of Moya, he was received in audience, to be benignly chided by the Queen for his abrupt and unceremonious departure without leave, and tolerantly used by the King, who had been manœuvred, after all, by his astute Chancellor into at least a partial participation in the venture. The Queen woman-like, having stifled her misgivings, gave herself to the matter with an unstinting enthusiasm. From a stingy doling of favour, she adopted, now that she was committed, a lavish prodigality.
The needy suitor, who for so long had been an object of scarcely veiled derision at the Court of Ferdinand and Isabel, emerged from that audience as Don Cristobal Colon, Lord Admiral to be of the Ocean-Sea, who might ruffle it on even terms with the best blood in Spain.
The journey had been long and arduous, but at last he stood in the place to which he considered that his deserts entitled him; and if his destiny could not be accounted fulfilled until it had stood the test of that voyage into the unknown, yet in his mind there was no doubt of its fulfilment.
Preparations followed, still slowly it is true, but the season of the year was not one that called for haste, and at last, by the end of April they were sufficiently advanced to permit of his departure from Santa Fé with the capitulations setting forth the terms on which he undertook this service.
By the odd operation of circumstances it was in the very port of Palos, where his Spanish adventure had begun, that it was to reach its consummation. For some misdemeanour of its inhabitants Palos stood condemned to furnish to the crown two armed caravels for one year. Thrifty King Ferdinand had opportunely perceived how the employment of those two caravels might diminish the sum of the maravedis which his treasury of Aragon had been manœuvred into lending to Castile.
Thus to Palos Cristobal Colon came again in early May.
Even had this not been his port of sailing, he must still have visited it before departing, for there was his son to be disposed of. Not the least sign of the favour into which he was come, was the appointment by the Queen of little Diego Colon to be a page to her son the Prince Don Juan. Pursuing her policy of giving with both hands now that she was resolved to give, she bestowed here a gift that normally fell only to the highest in the land.
By the track through the pines Colon rode to the convent, no longer the needy wayfarer likening himself to Cartaphilus, who knocked at the convent gate to beg a little bread and water for his child, but Don Cristobal, the bearer of a royal commission and royal powers by which he might count confidently upon climbing to quasi-royal rank.
Here in this tranquil backwater of the world nothing had changed. The same lay-brother opened to his knock and wondered what could be the business at La Rabida of this great lord in the travelling cloak of dark blue velvet and the long boots of fine Cordovan leather, who dismounted from the tall black Andalusian mare.
He was startled to hear himself addressed by name. “God save you, Brother Innocencio. Bear word to the Reverend Prior that Don Cristobal Colon is here.”
“Don Cristobal!” the little brother’s mouth fell agape at the title, at the authority of voice and person, at so much magnificence evolved out of a remembered neediness. “God save your worship,” he faltered at last in his turn, not daring to revert to the old, familiar terms.
But the awe-inspiring air was suddenly cast off, the lay-brother’s shoulder was vigorously slapped and a hand was proffered. “Have you no warmer welcome for an old friend, Brother Innocencio?”
Thereupon the little man wriggled and giggled and almost pranced ahead of him like an affectionate dog, in conducting him to the convent parlour, a gaunt whitewashed room, smelling of wax and dominated by a great melancholy portrait of the Poor Man of Assisi.
There Frey Juan Perez, having hurried to enfold him in a warm embrace, held him off to consider him.
“My son, you do not need to tell me that you prosper. Nor yet,” he added, closely scanning the handsome face, “that you have suffered. The way has been long and steep, and at times your hopes may well have fainted. But there,” he broke off with his jovial laugh. “I talk instead of listening. I guess instead of hearing. Garrulity is the sin of age. I’ve sent for Diego. It is he, of course, who brings you back to us.”
“I should be an ungrateful dog if that were all. I come, too, to return thanks to you for having set my feet on the path that has led me at last to my goal. And I come, too, because it is from Palos that I am ordered by the Sovereigns to sail upon my voyage of discovery.”
All was told, all but the details which were to follow later; for now the Prior’s happy rejoicings were interrupted by the entrance of the fair, slim lad in a fustian tunic and grey stockings, who stared in some awe at the lordly figure of his sire until Colon went down on one knee with inviting arms flung wide. Within them Diego was strained to that aching yet dauntless heart.
“I have been long gone, Diego. I waited to return until I could come to you with full hands.” And now, still holding the child, he told him of the great destiny awaiting him as a page to Prince Juan, and in so doing added much to the little that he had already told the Prior.
He took up his quarters at La Rabida for the time in which he should be making ready for sea.
It was to prove longer than he supposed. Obstacles unsuspected which not all the royal powers of which he was the bearer or which might yet be evoked, could suffice to overcome.
At noon on the morrow, accompanied by the Prior and by the Alcalde of Palos, a swarthy frog-faced man named Diego Rodriguez Prieto, with a notary, and a trumpeter to serve as herald, and with a half-dozen attendant alguaziles to lend consequence, Colon appeared in the porch of the grey Church of St. George.
An earlier proclamation by the town-crier of what was to take place had filled the square with a motley crowd, representative of every class that inhabited that thriving busy seaport: mariners, fishermen, shipwrights, caulkers, rope-weavers and the like, with a sprinkling of their women, some men of substance, merchants, shipowners and master mariners, and a background of the riff-raff of every port.
A flourish of the trumpet produced a silence, not indeed of discipline, but of curiosity, and the notary, in a rusty black gown, stepped forward to read the royal order.
It called for the supply within ten days of two armed caravels to Don Cristobal Colon, for a voyage he was undertaking in the service of the Sovereigns. The crews of these ships were to receive the ordinary wages earned in armed vessels and to be paid four months in advance. There followed an order to all concerned for the furnishing of supplies at the ordinary rates, and the proclamation closed on a recital of the penalties that would fall upon any who failed in obedience to these commands.
If the owners of vessels within the description stood in sullen resentment of the possible requisitioning of their ships, a cheer was raised by the mariners at the prospect of a four-months’ advance of pay, and swelled by the riff-raff from the sheer love of clamour.
Deceived by this enthusiasm, Colon went back in good spirits to dinner at La Rabida.
The afternoon brought him two visitors. The first was a stalwart fellow of thirty, rudely clad, but of an engaging easy frankness of bearing. He gave his name as Vasco Aranda, announced himself as part-owner of a vessel lately wrecked, whereby he had suffered the loss of almost all that he possessed. He had followed the sea for the last ten years, having served five of these as a fighting seaman on the war galleys of Spain in actions against the Algerian corsairs. In this service he had risen to a command, and this had brought him the means to acquire his half-share in the round ship now lost. The loss left him in quest of employment, but it must be of such a nature as to hold out to him the prospect of building himself up anew, and in such case he was prepared for any danger.
Favourably impressed by the man’s bearing, Colon was more favourably impressed still by the readiness with which he offered himself once the nature of the enterprise ahead had been disclosed to him.
“I accept the risks,” he said. “For who risks nothing, gains nothing, and for great gains, great risks are necessary. If you can employ me, I am your worship’s man, and there are six lads of mine here in Palos who were shipwrecked with me and who would follow me to Hell.”
“I trust we shall not be sailing quite so far.”
“But as far as you go, I’ll answer for these lads. I am known to most of the shipowners here in Palos, and they will speak for me.”
It occurred to Colon that here was a likely recruiting-officer with the nucleus of a crew already at his heels. For the rest he could trust his own judgment as well as the word of any man, and so he bestowed upon Aranda this temporary office with the promise of a more permanent one when they put to sea.
He was uplifted by what he took to be a sign of the eagerness to join him that must be aroused in the hearts of all good seafaring men when his second visitor presented himself. This was the prosperous, enterprising Martin Alonso Pinzon.
“Here,” Frey Juan announced him, “is an old friend, who wishes you well and whom you may find of great service.”
“You have been long gone,” said Pinzon as they shook hands, “but it has not been time wasted, to judge by the powers with which you return.”
The Prior retained him to supper in the convent refectory, and at table he was affable, congratulatory and ingratiating. They lingered on at the Prior’s table after the brethren had departed, and it was not until then that Martin Alonso came really to the matter in his mind. He approached it deviously.
“If I may venture a criticism of your plans,” he said, “it is that I find an unnecessary temerity in the number of ships with which you propose to face the unknown.”
“I must be content with what I can obtain.”
“Yet only two ships!” Pinzon thoughtfully wagged his head. “It is fraught with risk. If one were lost, but one would remain upon which to depend. It is too narrow a margin for prudence. It may even deter men from sailing with you.”
But Colon, made confident by the prompt enlistment of Aranda, could not share the doubt. “I expect no difficulty in getting my crews together. There are perquisites beside the pay, a chance of wealth such as does not come the way of sailors in a thousand years.”
“You may be right. Yet I should have fewer misgivings if you had more ships; even one more would sensibly diminish the hazard.”
“I agree. But as you have heard, two ships are all that their Highnesses concede me.”
“Why should you not, yourself, supplement them?”
Colon was reminded of what had passed between Pinzon and himself when last he was at La Rabida. Actually there was a clause in the capitulations by virtue of which Colon had power to add to the equipment up to one-eighth of the total outlay in return for one-eighth share in the yield of the expedition. It was a clause put in to salve his pride which had been ruffled by the taunt that in this gamble he set no pieces on the board. But the reasons which earlier had prompted his cold reception of Pinzon’s importunities, still governed him. The very masterfulness which he detected in this prosperous shipowning merchant was in itself a danger signal. To admit such a man to a share in the venture would be to risk his appropriation of a part of the glory. And of glory Colon was not only avaricious, but he reasonably held the view that the whole of it belonged to the man who had conceived the enterprise.
Because he perceived that utter frankness on the subject of the capitulations must lay him open to further importunities, he did not practise it. “To do that would entail subtracting something from the total yield which belongs to the Sovereigns.”
“To be sure it would. But need the Sovereigns begrudge this, considering the increase in the chances of success which another ship would bring?”
“It is possible that they might begrudge it,” Colon evaded. If he knew King Ferdinand at all, he thought it was not possible, but certain.
“Even so, you have still to think of yourself,” Pinzon urged. “You are gambling your life on this; add another vessel to your squadron and your life to that extent is further secured.”
“That is sound sense, Don Cristobal,” put in the Prior. “I think you would do well to heed Master Pinzon.”
“Oh, I am heeding him, grateful for his interest. But it is hardly in my power to alter the dispositions of the Sovereigns.”
“That I cannot believe. It needs but to be represented to them,” Pinzon insisted. “You remember what faith I expressed in your project. It is undiminished, and I have the very ship for you, a trim, sound little caravel that is equal to all the hazards of the sea. You have but to say the word, and I place her at your disposal with a reliable crew of men who have sailed with me before and who will be ready to follow me now.”
There was almost an anxiety in the intensely blue eyes that watched Colon from under the black beetling brows.
“I am touched by your faith in me,” Colon answered with mechanical courtesy. “Nothing could be of greater encouragement. It is regrettable that the circumstances will not allow me to accept a proposal that would otherwise be welcome.”
Pinzon’s expression hardened a little in disappointment. But not yet would he yield. “The circumstances might be shaped. I am persuaded of that. Think it over, Don Cristobal. I will not take this refusal as final. We will talk of it again. You may come to perceive that my participation could be of advantage.”
“That I perceive already,” answered Colon, courteous to the last; and then, so as to make an end, he added: “Well, well, we will see how things develop.”
“I am content that you should,” said Pinzon, and left the matter there with a smile in which Colon imagined a certain craftiness. “And I hope that they will develop as you would wish.”
The development, however, proved very far from this. In fact, things did not develop at all. When some two days later Colon sought the Alcalde of Palos to know what progress was being made in obtaining him the ships, the Alcalde, short, fat, and indolent, looking more like a frog than ever, met him with blank distress.
“The devil’s in it,” he protested. “The owners have got wind of the purpose to which the ships are to be put.”
Colon was haughty.
“What then? They have heard the royal proclamation.”
“To be sure they have. But they come to me protesting that the ships that Palos is under sentence to supply are to be supplied for ordinary occasions, and that the term of service is for one year only. Yours, they say, is no ordinary occasion, and that to send ships out into the unknown, from which there is little or no chance of their ever returning, is not service for a year, but the equivalent of confiscation. And that is far beyond what the sentence provides.”
“All this is idle. They have the proclamation, and the law compels their obedience. You, sir, administer the law here in Palos. I rely upon you.”
The Alcalde showed exasperation. “You don’t understand. What they answer me is good law. Excellent law. They invoke the very letter of it, and I have no rejoinder for them.”
“I think you have. Is it not also the law that if ships under such sentences are lost or not returned to their owners within the time prescribed the crown will pay compensation?”
The Alcalde’s forefinger combed a ragged beard. “In effect it is,” he was forced to admit.
“Then return them that answer, and if they are still recalcitrant take order to compel them.”
The Alcalde gave an ill-humoured consent. But when Colon returned two days later to know the result of the measure, he was told that there was still no progress.
“They answer me that even if they supply the ships you will find no crews to man them; that there are no fools in Palos to sail on such a voyage; and that, therefore, if we use constraint all that we shall accomplish will be to have the ships standing idle.”
Colon became profane, which was by no means his habit.
“No use to inveigh,” the Alcalde admonished him. “The fault lay in letting it be known so soon what is the voyage you intend.”
“Who let it be known? There was no word of it in the proclamation.”
“Nay, I can’t tell you. All I can say is that there’s not a mariner in Palos who isn’t aware of your intentions, and, therefore, not a man in Palos who’ll sail with you. So,” he ended, “what good are ships to you?”
“That you shall discover when you’ve secured them for me. Pray see to it, whatever the owners may say, or I’ll report to their Highnesses that you don’t assist me.”
He left him to think that over, and went off to the ship’s chandler where Aranda had established his office. But at the hands of that eager young seaman he received fresh disappointment.
“Will your worship tell me what ails these lubberly dogs in Palos? They’re all freshwater sailors by their behaviour. I’ve been labouring these four days without ever a recruit. I go from the quays to the taverns and from the taverns to the quays, and everywhere it’s the same. A shake of the head, and a go-with-God, that’s not the voyage for me. When I ask them if they would crawl in their misery all their days rather than take a chance of fortune, they just laugh at me. A worthless, craven pack of dogs! They were eager enough when first I told them of the venture, and now they begin to hang back. They talk of their wives, and those who haven’t wives talk of their mothers.”
Colon sat down on a barrel. “How did the town come to know of the voyage I am going? Did you tell anybody?”
“May I die if I breathed a word of it to a soul. Nor was there the need. They all know more about it than I do.”
Colon’s laugh was bitter. “I haven’t been thwarted by fools for years to be thwarted by cowards at the end,” he said. “I’ll find you recruits to spare.”
He went back to the Alcalde. “We must bestir,” he told him. “I’ll have these crews if I have to pick them from the gaols.”
It so happened that among the powers with which he was invested was an authority, which he now disclosed, to offer an amnesty to persons under sentence who might choose to embark with him.
“You’ll be pleased to proclaim that at once. It will also be a sufficient answer to the shipowners.”
Conceiving that he had played a master-card, he departed in better humour, and on the quayside, just outside the Alcalde’s office, he ran into Pinzon, who had with him his brother Vicente.
Martin Alonso hailed him pleasantly with a friendly lift of the hand. He presented his brother, and hoped that Colon’s preparations made good progress.
“So far they have made none at all. Your seamen of Palos have no appetite for discovery. A poor spiritless lot who prefer safe squalor to adventure.”
The Pinzons looked grave. “I swear, sir, you do them an injustice,” cried Vicente.
“Yet I can understand it,” said Martin Alonso, thoughtfully. “After all, you labour under the disadvantage of being a stranger among them. Men are slow to face high risks unless they know all about their leader. You should consider that, and not judge these poor devils too harshly.” He smiled as he spoke, with a flash of his strong white teeth behind the dense black beard.
“It may be so,” Colon agreed. “But I think we shall move more briskly now,” and he told him of the proclamation to be made.
Pinzon’s face was overspread with dismay, confirming Colon’s growing suspicion that he had this man to thank for the obstacles he was meeting. “You don’t approve?” he questioned with the faintest suspicion of mockery.
Martin Alonso was downright in his answer. “I don’t. It seems a mad folly to sail with a crew of cut-throats and bandits. What can you look for but trouble?”
“They’ll be neither cut-throats nor bandits once they’re on the high seas with me. They’ll lie in the hollow of my hand, for their lives will depend on mine. You hadn’t thought of that.”
Pinzon remained grave. “It’s not for me to school you, sir. All I know is that not all the wealth of the Indies would induce me to put to sea with such a crew as that.”
This, too, was the view of Frey Juan when back at La Rabida that evening Colon told him what he had done.
“Sail with a pack of criminals!” The Prior was aghast. “It is a terrifying prospect.”
But neither he nor Martin Alonso need have wasted emotion upon the plan, for such appeared to be the fear of the unknown upon ignorant, superstitious minds that not even the gaol-birds would purchase at such a price their deliverance from the misery in which they languished. They laughed the proclamation to scorn when it was published in the prison. Like the seafaring men of Palos they appeared to be well-informed of the nature of the voyage, although it remained a mystery how the information could have reached them.
Weeks sped in waiting during the best season of the year, and Palos broiling in the sunshine of high summer remained inert in the matter of the royal command. Colon could no longer show himself in the streets of the town without being conscious that he was an object of sly derision. This seemed to be his fate. He had endured it from the nobles at Court, during the weary season of his solicitations, and must endure it now from the scourings of the quayside.
Even Vasco Aranda’s loyalty began to suffer strain.
“There are influences at work against us, Don Cristobal,” he complained one day.
“I’ve noticed it,” said Cristobal, with a hard laugh. “Have you discovered whence it springs?”
“The talk in the wine-shops is all that this venture is foredoomed, that none who sails on it will ever come back. I’ve fought it hard. I tell them that the Sovereigns would never support it unless they knew it to be sound. I’ve told them of houses tiled with gold, as your worship said, and of pearls and rubies common as pebbles in Andalusia, and of how a single voyage may make them so rich that they’ll never need to go to sea again. Again and again I’ve got men to swear they’ll take a chance and sail. But when next I meet them they’ve altered course again, whilst of the few who have actually enlisted, taken the oath and made their mark, there’s scarcely one that hasn’t since disappeared. I’ll stake my soul that someone else talks to them when I’ve done. Look to it, Don Cristobal. You’ve an enemy, burrowing underground like a mole.”
Glooming in his room at La Rabida, Colon sat listening to his recruiting-officer who had sought him there to relieve his mind of these suspicions. The lad’s steadfastness and high courage in the face of difficulties warmed him a little.
“Great as are your powers, they are not great enough, my lord,” Aranda continued, for thus already he addressed a man who was to be Admiral, and was the better liked for it. “What you need is a royal order to impress the ships and the men.”
There was, Colon agreed, nothing else that would meet the case. So he wrote a letter to Santangel, and when it was written chose Aranda for his messenger.
“Out of your knowledge of what is taking place here, Vasco, you will be able to furnish any fuller information that may be required.”
Aranda went off to Santa Fé, and more weeks of fretful inactive waiting followed.
When, at last he returned, however, he brought not only the order, but a brisk officer of the royal household to see that the Alcalde put it into instant execution.
A tumult followed, and Colon venturing forth at the height of it, with intent to address the people, was suddenly and angrily beset. Under the leadership of a man named Rascon, who owned a caravel which the authorities had been examining with Colon, they set upon him in the public square before the Church of St. George, with cries of “Down with the adventurer! Break the bones of his body! Throw him in the harbour! Death to the devil’s mariner!”
Colon put his back to the church wall and brought out his sword.
“Devil’s mariner, is it?” he roared. “By St. Ferdinand I’ll pilot some of you into hell.”
With a sweeping flourish of his blade he cleared a space about him into which they hesitated to venture being armed with no more than knives. But it must have gone ill with him in the end, and he might have found his last adventure there in the square of Palos but for Vasco Aranda and his lads who rallied to him.
Thanks to that bodyguard he came unscathed out of the press, followed by the jeers and curses of the mob he had raised.
It looked like defeat, and gloomily he admitted as much to Vasco; but the buoyant lad scorned the notion.
“In Palos perhaps. But Palos is not the only port in Spain. Elsewhere we’ll find better hearts and less intrigue.”
“But we’ll not find a sentence to supply two caravels.” He did not add his fears that unless they came by ships on such cheap terms, a thriftily cautious King might yet persuade the Queen to abandon an undertaking to which there was so much manifest opposition. Considering this he came to dread the effect upon the Sovereigns of the admission of failure which a fresh appeal to them must entail.
He was discussing this that same afternoon with Frey Juan, when Martin Alonso came to pay them one of his periodic visits. They sat at a table of pine-logs that bore a dish of olives and a jug of wine, set under a trellis of vines that made a cool arbour of the little esplanade before the convent. In the river below a fishing fleet was homing with the flow of the tide, and from where they sat they commanded a view of the port of Palos, on the right, crowded with shipping, about which there was a brisk activity. It was a sight to fill Colon with the heartache of a caged bird, and it had brought him to this fresh unburdening of himself.
“Just as I hold myself to be but an instrument in the hand of God for opening up the hidden parts of the world to receive His Holy Word, so I believe that it is Satan who labours at every step to thwart me. Each almost proves the other.”
“If this is not just rhetoric,” said Frey Juan, “if you sincerely believe it, my son, then you should take heart, for you must believe also that in the end God will prevail.”
“In the end. But where is the end?”
“In God’s own time.”
It was at this moment that Pinzon came into view, emerging by the road through the pinewood.
The prosperous merchant, in a dark wine-coloured surcoat of fine camlet, which he wore with almost courtly grace, displayed a heat of indignation at the treatment Colon had received that morning and the danger in which he had stood.
“A superstition-ridden herd of dolts, these seamen of Palos,” he condemned them. He pulled out a stool, and sat down at the little rustic table. “They imagine that the paths to Hell lie across the oceans; they people the wastes of it with fiends and goblins and basilisks, who guard them against intruders. Idle to reason with them. Idle to ask them, as I have done, who has ever seen and reported these things to warrant such beliefs. What would you?” He shrugged his broad shoulders and spread his short, square hands. “They answer me by asking why, if I believe these seas are safe, I don’t sail them myself.”
“To which,” said Frey Juan, “the answer is that you can’t sail a ship without a crew.”
“That is what I have answered them. But they mock me with the retort that I could find a crew if I were to declare myself ready to sail on such a venture in a caravel of my own.”
“Are they to be believed?” the Prior asked.
“Who knows? I cannot be certain until I have put it to the test, and I hesitate to boast. Yet my opinion is that I could raise the men to follow me.” He spoke casually, selecting an olive from the dish.
Colon was not deceived. This was Pinzon’s none too subtle method of reopening the question of a partnership in the venture. Not only was he certainly an opportunist in his choice of the moment, but possibly also the creator of the opportunity, for Colon regarded it as more than likely that this merchant-mariner of such influence among the men of Palos was the hidden enemy of whom Aranda had spoken, and very possibly that it was he who had prompted the morning’s violence.
The more ingenuous Frey Juan, however, harboured no such suspicions. All that he perceived was how Pinzon might offer Colon a way out of the deadlock that was fretting him. In haste he spat out a couple of olive stones, so that he might be free to speak.
“You remind me, Master Pinzon, that when first we talked of this, you spoke of bringing a ship to it at your own charges. What should you say, Don Cristobal, if he were still of the same mind?”
Colon went cautiously, his face inscrutable. “But are you of that mind, sir?”
Pinzon trod delicately in his turn. He raised his brows, as if the question took him by surprise. He appeared to reflect. Behind his black beard his red lips parted, his white teeth appeared in a slow smile. “Who knows? It is no longer as easy as it was. Difficulties have been created. To-day’s explosion was a sign of them.” He left it there, his blue eyes meeting Colon’s, the smile still lingering on his lips.
Colon perfectly understood that Pinzon retreated so as to be pursued; and reluctant though he might be to pursue him, yet the developments no longer left him any choice.
“The question is,” he said slowly, “do you think that your influence in Palos could overcome these difficulties?”
Again there was that “Who knows?” He paused before continuing. “I must not be understood to speak with certainty. But I do believe that if I were to declare for the adventure, there are enough men in Palos with faith in me to supply the crews we should need. You understand that this is no more than an opinion.”
“Will you put it to the test?”
“I should be willing,” was the slow answer, “if you mean that my association would be welcomed, and always provided that the dispositions you have made, or could make, would give me an adequate return.”
“That is the difficulty, as I think I have mentioned,” said Colon. “All that I have faculty to do under the capitulations is to provide up to one-eighth of the cost of the expedition, taking in that event one-eighth of the yield.”
“One-eighth? But to provide another ship would be to provide a third.”
“True. But there is no need to provide one; no need to provide more than one-eighth of the cost of the whole expedition; and for that I have power to grant one-eighth of the profit. That, under the capitulations, is the utmost I can divert from the crown. The crown, you see,” he added cunningly, “is reluctant to part with any of the profit it expects, and even this eighth was grudgingly conceded me, just as I should grudgingly concede it again.”
“But you are prepared to concede it?”
“Unless I should decide to petition the Sovereigns to let me seek my equipment somewhere else. After all, Palos scarcely deserves the benefits that should result from this expedition.”
Thus Colon, as shrewd as any man in the ways of bargaining, startled Pinzon into the fear that the chance so ardently desired and only half offered to him now, might be definitely snatched away again if he were not quick to settle.
Pinzon stroked his beard. “At what,” he asked, “would you compute an eighth share in the venture?”
Here Colon smiled and shook his head. “Do you ask me that? Must I really tell you that the yield will be either nothing or else wealth incalculable? But it will be nothing only if I am wrong; and I do not believe that I am wrong, nor, I think, do you, Master Pinzon.”
Martin Alonso took his chin in his hand, and was sunk in thought. “I will consider,” he said at last. “We will talk of it again. Perhaps to-morrow.”
He spoke of sounding some of the seamen of the port, so as to test his belief that he could find men to ship with him, and on that presently he took his leave, a certain satisfaction in his air.
“I think,” said Frey Juan, when he was alone with Colon once more, “that this may be the end of your difficulties, and that he will make up his mind to join you.”
“And I think,” Colon answered, “that he has made it up already; that he had made it up before he came; that he made it up, in fact, before he created the difficulties that will now vanish.”
Frey Juan expressed horror that any man could build idle suspicions into opinions so unflattering to another’s probity.