Chapter 28 Columbus by Rafael Sabatini
THE VOYAGE
For most of that first day they sailed south, and then altered the course to west, heading for the Canaries. But in his cabin Don Cristobal calmly commenced—in nomine D. N. Jesu Christi—to indite the voluminous detailed journal for the information of the Sovereigns and his own subsequent glory. He would keep it, he declares, after the model supplied him by the Commentaries of Caesar, in which conceit he affords you a glimpse of how profound was his own sense of the grandeur of his enterprise.
He was done with the intrigues, the treacheries and meannesses of men. With the less incalculable treachery of the sea he felt himself strong to deal, just as he accounted himself strong to deal with the hands if they should give trouble. Of this there was to be more than enough before all was done, and a perception of the possibility, considering the rascally lot aboard, made him anxious to reach and pass the Canaries, so that once he had committed his men irrevocably to the adventure, they would lie, as he supposed at his mercy, or, as he had once already expressed it, in the hollow of his hand. But until that first stage of the voyage was overpast, should the gloomy apprehensions shed over them in the farewell tears at Palos explode in a mutinous demand to return, he would be almost powerless to impose his will.
Hence it was of more than ordinary vexation to him when, on the third day out, the Pinta, which, as the swiftest vessel of the squadron, had held the lead under a towering spread of snowy canvas, was suddenly taking in sail and falling astern with a rudder that had snapped from its socket.
The wind was too fresh to permit them to go to her assistance. The experienced, resourceful Pinzon, however, standing in no need of it, set promptly about effecting a temporary repair with ropes. They had to stand hove to and wait until this was done, a delay to which the morrow added a worse when the repairs gave way. Again they had to shorten sail and wait whilst Pinzon contrived to rig a jury rudder on which to stagger into Grand Canary.
They reached it on the following Thursday, and there they careened the Pinta whilst a new rudder was being made and fitted. Since this further delay was imposed upon Colon, at least he profited by it to have the Niña’s rig altered to square, since with her lateen sails, which he had ever viewed with misgivings, she would be useless in close-hauled sailing.
Meanwhile, not trusting his crew ashore, he went on to Gomera, on the pretext still of perhaps finding another ship to replace the Pinta. Meeting with no such vessel there, he came back to Grand Canary to hasten the conclusion of the work.
Three weeks were thus lost. But at last all was ready, and on the 6th of September the voyage was resumed. They put in again at Gomera, for wood and water, and then, with the prows headed into the west, the real voyage began.
Even now, however, the start seemed to be little better than a false one. For three days they lay becalmed, scarcely crawling over a sea as smooth as the Guadalquivir, and with the land, of which Colon was so anxious to see the last, ever in sight.
At daybreak on the 9th the Island of Ferro was still visible, a vague grey mass, nine leagues away on the horizon astern. But at last a breeze sprang up, the sails filled, and with a welcome gurgle at the prows the ships began to go through the water. It quickened to a ten-knot breeze, and swiftly the way increased. The sea curled back in white plumes from their bows, and the coast-line of Ferro faded from their sight. They were launched at last into the unknown, and Colon’s mind knew peace.
Not so the minds of his crew. With the disappearance of land, with the line of empty sky meeting the line of empty sea on every side, a panic arose. It spread until boys and even men gave way to tears as they sat dejected on the hatchways. Lamentations resounded through the ship, and reached the ears of Colon in his cabin, to interrupt his calm recording.
It was not the mere fact that land was lost to sight that troubled those tough, hardy souls. Saving some odd hands and the few gentlemen adventurers, there was scarcely one of them who had not lost sight of land before and borne the loss with equanimity. But they had always known the land to be just abeam of them below the horizon, whereas now they were headed into the empty abyss of waters which no keels had ever ploughed, sailing right out of the world into a desert of ocean in which land might well have no existence outside of the untested dreams of the lunatic by whom they were committed to this dread gamble.
Whilst in some such terms they lamented and inveighed, hideously noisy, Colon made his appearance, calm and masterful, upon the quarter-deck, cross-staff in hand. He came forward to the rail with unhurried, measured step, bare-headed, the breeze ruffling his tawny mane.
The sight of him at that moment produced an explosion. A sudden angry roar went up from the men who crowded the waist. Those who had been squatting on the hatch-coamings or astride the bombards sprang to their feet in the vehemence of their protests.
He raised his hand for silence, and as it fell one shrill voice rang out to supply him with a cue.
“Whither do you lead us?”
“Out of misery into glory,” he answered. “Out of squalor into splendour. Out of hunger into plenty. That is whither I lead you.”
Though in the view of the Sovereigns his title of Admiral was yet to be earned, to the crews of this squadron he was in fact the Admiral already, and as their Admiral they should know him.
Dominant there above them, an incarnation of scornful strength and confidence, he awed them into attention.
“You mutter of a gamble. And if it were? What is it that you set upon the board? Your empty bellies, your crawling poverty, your bitter hardships, your unrewarded toil. Behold your stakes. Are they stakes that you need grudge to set against the chance of fortune and ease? What are your lives worth so lived that you do not count yourselves fortunate indeed to be given this stupendous chance of soaring out of them? Chance, do I say? This is no chance, no gamble. I know what I do, whither I go. Had I not persuaded the Sovereigns of that, and shamed the witlings who opposed me, do you think that their Highnesses would have entrusted me with these ships?
“Out there, seven hundred leagues to westward, whither we are steering, the incalculable treasures of Zipangu await you, to make you the envied of all Spain on your return.”
Such was the spell he wove by his words and the assurance of his tone and manner that as he ceased he was actually answered by a cheer from some of those who but a moment since had been prostrate in dejection.
Content, he raised the cross-staff and laid his eye to the end of it to take the height of the sun. To most of them it was a mysterious operation, impressive by its suggestion of power and skill to find a pathway across the trackless wastes of water.
Then he turned away to give attention to the helmsman, and to rate him for allowing the head to fall away to the north. He summoned Cosa for a stern injunction to be watchful that the westerly course be maintained. After that he went back to his cabin, to mark the position of the ship on the chart which he was making as they proceeded. In estimating this he depended upon dead reckoning; and it now occurred to him to provide for possible error in his estimate of the distance to Zipangu. He had asserted with such confidence that it lay seven hundred leagues ahead, that trouble would almost inevitably follow if when that distance had been sailed they should still have made no landfall. He must leave himself a margin for error. To this end he now began to falsify the log, attributing to the ship a daily run of a score or so of leagues less than the actual. The true distances traversed were secretly noted in his journal. From time to time the Pinzons, from the other two ships, would pass their charts across to him at the end of a line, so that he should mark their position upon them. Whilst his figures might not agree with the reckonings on the Pinta and the Niña, yet they were adopted out of trust in his greater skill in computation.
Graver, and calling for deeper trickery, was a variation of the compass by which they were surprised at the end of a week’s sailing, by when they were some two hundred leagues west of Ferro.
The gloom which Colon’s harangue had once dispelled, had been descending again upon the crew ever since the Santa Maria, two days ago, had passed a drifting mast, which by its size must have belonged to a ship of at least an equal tonnage. It had been remarked with an apprehension which the more timorous had vigorously fanned. If storms were to overtake them, they complained they would be utterly at their mercy here in this vast desert of water, with no land within reach to which they might hope to run for shelter. When, in addition, the variation of the needle became known, even the stouter souls were infected by the alarm. Nor was the uneasiness that of ignorant sailors only. Colon, himself, was the first to discover that instead of pointing to the North Star, the needle was pointing several degrees west of it. Prepared as he was for every risk rather than admit defeat or doubt, he would have concealed the fact had it depended only upon himself. But there were others aboard to observe it. One night Rata, the quartermaster, consulted about it by an intelligent steersman, went in his turn to consult Cosa. Others, overhearing the discussion, spread the alarm. Like a ripple over water it ran to pervade the whole of that uneasy ship, and the explosion that followed awoke the sleeping Admiral.
He sat up in bed for a moment listening. Then, already suspecting the source of this fresh trouble, he flung back the coverlet and rose. He thrust his feet into slippers, groped for a robe, and pulling it about him came out upon the quarter-deck. Below, about the binnacle, the faces of the foremost faintly lighted by the glow of its lantern, he beheld the dark mass of turbulent men. In a moment he was elbowing his way through that noisy press.
“What is happening here?” he demanded, to add a sharp injunction to the steersman. “Steady your helm, man. We are luffing alee. What is this?”
“It’s the needle, Admiral,” Cosa answered him, and instantly the clamour died down, so that men might hear his answer.
“The needle? What ails the needle? What do you mean, the needle?”
“It’s no longer true.”
Still Colon chose not to understand. “Not true? How can it not be true?”
A hard-bitten, middle-aged seaman named Ires, said to be an Irishman, who claimed to have sailed all the waters of the known world, stood truculently forward to answer him.
“It’s lost its power. It’s lost its power. Here be we adrift in unknown seas without even the poor guidance of the compass.”
“That’s the fact, Admiral,” said Rata grimly.
And before Colon could answer, a grey-haired sinner named Nieves was excitedly adding: “It’s the proof that we’ve sailed out of the natural world that God intended man to inhabit.”
“We’re doomed, by Hell,” groaned another voice. “Lost and doomed.”
“May I die if I didn’t always know it would end thus,” raved Ires.
The words were as a torch in a powder-barrel. Uproar burst about Don Cristobal.
“Quiet!” he thundered. “Let me come.” He approached the binnacle, and the light from the lantern beating upon his long face showed it calm and stern. In silence now, almost holding their very breath, the men waited whilst he confirmed with his own eyes this dreadful portent. Only Cosa, at his elbow, spoke.
“See for yourself, sir. Look at the North Star yonder. The variation is at least of five degrees.”
If Colon looked, it was not, indeed, to inform himself; for, to his great secret uneasiness, he was already but too well aware of this. His pause, now that the matter was discovered to the entire ship, was to gain yet a moment for conjecture.
In the light of the lantern they saw the expression of his countenance change to one of derision. Suddenly his laughter startled them.
“You fools! You poor, lubberly fools! And even you, Cosa, even a seaman of your experience! You amaze me. How can you suppose the needle inconstant because it no longer points to the North Star?”
Cosa was bridling. “What else?” he demanded.
“Why, it’s the star that is inconstant. Not the needle.”
“The star? How can the——”
“Observe it.” He pointed upwards. “And see how it moves across the heavens. How should the needle guide us if it moved with it? Little service it would do us if it did not remain ever true to the invisible point that is the north.” Contemptuously he waved the hands away. “Be off with you to your quarters, and leave these matters to those that understand them.”
The authoritative firmness of his tone, the scientific truth that he appeared to state, the scorn that was to be read in every line of him, left them in a cowed persuasion as he turned away.
But at the foot of the companion he was stayed again by Cosa, a hand upon his arm. The pilot was not as those other unreasoning hinds. He spoke softly.
“I left it there, Admiral, so as not to provoke a riot. But . . .”
“That was wise.”
“But in all my years at sea I’ve never known——”
He was interrupted coldly. “You’ve never sailed this parallel, Juan.”
“Neither have you, sir,” was the prompt retort. “The experience is as new to you as it is to me. So how can you know——”
Again he was peremptorily cut short. “Just as I know that we are sailing to the Indies. Just as I know many things that lie outside man’s experience. And you’ll take my word for it unless you want a panic among those rats.” Colon patted his shoulder in friendly dismissal of the subject. “Good night, Juan,” he added, and left the pilot to scratch his head in perplexity, not knowing what to believe.
Upon the crew, however. Colon’s improvisation had sufficiently imposed, as it was to impose on the morrow upon Pinzon, to whom he communicated the same plausible reassurance. For a spell now he knew peace.
They were in the belt of the trade wind which flows between the tropics from east to west. So steadily did it blow that for days, with the ships ploughing evenly westward, they did not shift a sail.
The men took their ease. They gambled some of the time away at dice and cards. They bathed now and then in the tepid waters whilst the ships stood hove to for them. There were trials of strength and wrestling matches to while away the time, and one or two who had brought guitars would make indifferent music for their fellows. Every evening at sunset, by Colon’s orders, they would stand ranged in the waist, to raise their voices and intone the Salve Regina, as an evening prayer to Our Lady for protection.
Thus for a few days of calm sailing all was well. And then one night they were stirred to fresh alarms by the sight of a shower of meteors that filled the sky with fire. It awoke their superstition and the memory of dreadful tales of supernatural forces guarding the ocean spaces from presumptuous intrusion. But it proved no more than a transient alarm, as they sailed on from under clear skies into cloudy weather with drizzling rain and a diminished wind, and from that into sunshine once more and temperately warm airs, so that, in Colon’s own words, it was like Spring in Andalusia without the nightingales.
Presently they found themselves driving through vast and increasing patches of weed, some withered and yellow, and some so green and fresh as to suggest that it had drifted from some near land. Tunny fish came sporting about the ships, and so as to raise spirits that were again beginning to droop, Colon—who knew not, and knew that he knew not—informed them that tunny were never to be found far from land.
One or two of these great fish were caught from the Niña, and steaks of it roasted in the brick and iron galley in the waist, supplied welcome fare to men who had been nauseated by salt fish and bacon rendered tainted by the heat and damp of the hold. They found it toothsome, although in truth, as their cook dealt with it, it was of the texture of roast horse without the flavour.
The weed patches increased until now from the ships’ sides they seemed to be looking out upon wide meadows. Tangled in this, the ships laboured slowly on, and gradually alarm awoke once more in those uneasy minds. The cry now was that they were coming into shoal water, and that presently they would run aground or pile up upon hidden rocks and be held there to rot and perish.
Colon recalled Aristotle’s account of Cadiz ships blown westward to great fields of weed resembling islands, from which those ancient mariners had turned back in terror. But he was careful to say no word of it. Nor dared he suggest that it heralded the approach of land because of the disappointment that must follow, since, being only three hundred and sixty leagues from the Canaries, he could not account himself more than half-way to Zipangu. So as to allay their dread of shoal water, he ordered soundings to be taken, and when no bottom was found there was an end to murmurings.
At last they were clear of the weed fields, and sailing smoothly again, always under the same soft breezes from the east.
One of the adventurers on board, Sancho Gomez, a decayed but pretentious gentleman of Cadiz, of authoritative airs, declared that the water was growing fresher, and asserted this to be a positive indication that they were approaching land, the salt of the sea being diluted by the sweet waters of rivers. Others tasting the water were of divided opinions; the optimists yielded to the suggestion Gomez practised; the pessimists, led by Ires, violently denied any decrease in salinity.
Gomez, however, remained unshaken, and that evening, just after the Salve Regina had been sung, he startled the ship by raising the cry of “Land!” His outflung arm was pointing northward. “Now, you obstinate doubters, was I wrong?”
An irregular line, vague and misty, as of a mountainous coast-line, loomed on the horizon, the summits rose-tinted by the setting sun, the base already in gloom.
Colon was on the quarter-deck, where, with Cosa, Aranda, Escobar and some two or three others whom he regarded as his officers, he had been standing for the evening hymn. Startled by the cry, he swung with them to starboard, and scanned the horizon. It is conceivable that he might have yielded to the illusion had it been less opposed to his conviction of the quarter in which land would first appear.
“That is not land,” he cried, to quench their rising hopes. “Cloud masses. Nothing more.” And he laughed, attempting a jest so as to deflect the disappointment. “Eagerness to earn the reward, Sancho, lends your eyes a deceptive keenness.”
The allusion was to a pension for life of ten thousand maravedis promised by the Queen to the man who should first sight land.
But none laughed with him, and Sancho Gomez flung into angry insistence that he knew land when he saw it, with a resulting clamour presently from the waist that the helm be put over.
At this Colon grew stern. “You will save yourselves trouble if you will remember that there is one master aboard this ship, and that she will be steered as he thinks proper. The shape of that land of Master Gomez is already changing. But this I promise you, that if at dawn there should still be any such mass on the starboard beam, we’ll head for it.”
They bowed to his inflexible will, and the dawn, breaking clear, with nothing to darken the line where sky and water met, settled the conviction that cloud masses had deceived their eyes.
Nevertheless, the incident was harmful. Soaring hopes lead in their falsification to grim reactions, and the vanished mirage of land left behind it a renewal of misgivings. At first there were no more than mutterings, but Aranda, moving amongst the men, recognized these mutterings as the heralds of a storm, and was prompt to warn Colon.
Towards noon that day a couple of boobies alighted on the ship, whereupon Colon, whether he believed it or not, proclaimed such birds to be never more than twenty leagues from land. To lend colour to an assertion with which he hoped temporarily to pacify them, he ordered a leadsman into the forechains to take soundings. No bottom, however, was to be found at two hundred fathoms.
Later, when a flight of small birds passed overhead, flying in a south-westerly direction, Colon experienced his first misgivings. He knew what that flight portended. He was aware of the guidance which the Portuguese navigators had derived from the migration of birds, and he concluded that he was probably passing between islands. He kept the conclusion to himself, pondering it until nightfall. Then he decided that, nevertheless, he must continue to run before that ever steady wind from the east. He perceived that to turn aside might be fatal to his credit and power. Hitherto he had acted, and he had prevailed by acting, as one possessed of such sure knowledge of his goal, that doubt would be impossible to him. Let him now fumble, let him by turning aside in uncertain questing, admit a doubt, and there would be an end to his authority over his restive rabble of a crew.
So he held to his westward course in order to avoid trouble.
The trouble, nevertheless, was coming, black and heavy. The persistence with which the wind held in the same quarter began to be remarked. At first it was considered merely an oddness in the weather. Then, because something outside of the experience of any seaman aboard, it began to appear uncanny. At last the mutinous Ires suggested a terrifying explanation.
“Odd?” he chuckled in evil fear to the group about him. “There’s naught odd about it. What sailor ever heard tell of the wind blowing steadily from the same quarter for four weeks? I’ll make oath it’s never been known. I’ve never known it. Not till I came on this damned voyage. Don’t you see what it means, my lads? Why it means that here, in these seas, the wind blows the same way all the time. That’s what it means, by Hell! And what I ask you is: How are we ever to sail back against it?”
It was a staggering question.
One swore in sudden affright, “Jesus Maria!” and another, “By all the fiends!” and in a moment, with an explosion of oaths, mostly of that morphological variety, in the invention of which the Spaniard has no rival, the men in the knot about him were violently giving him reason. Others came to join them, drawn by the hubbub.
Ires, swollen with the consequence of a discoverer, leaned back against the cock-boat, where it rested on its booms amidships. “Now you begin to see the pestilent plight we’re in. This wind is blowing us right out of the world. Right into Hell. That’s what’s happening to us, my lads. And the farther we go, the stronger the wind gets. Haven’t you remarked it?”
Assent flavoured with more blasphemy was the instant answer.
“Then every day we keep to this damned course, the less is our chance of ever seeing Spain again.”
Through the clamour of agreement pierced the voice of Rodrigo Ximenes, another of the impoverished gentlemen adventurers, a native of Segovia. “God rot your tongue, you chattering jay! What are you? A sailor or a tinker? Have you never seen a ship beat to windward?”
“Beat to windward! Ohé!” crowed Ires. “Listen to the landlubber turned mariner. And how many years shall we be beating to windward if we go much farther? And where’s the victuals and water to come from whiles we’re doing it? As it is, victuals is running low and rotting in that hold. A lot you know about the sea, my Segovian hidalgo!”
Jeers overwhelmed Ximenes; applause encouraged the Irishman; and with the applause came a demand for action, an exhortation to Ires to lead them.
The sounds of that swelling tumult reached Colon in his cabin, where he was busy upon his charts, even before Aranda came to warn him of the trouble.
“They are noisy down there,” he greeted his master-at-arms.
Aranda’s brief reply was such as to bring him instantly to his feet and out of the cabin. He reached the rail an instant before Ires, who came storming up from the waist, the leader of a rowdy following.
Thus suddenly confronted by the Admiral, the fellow lost some impetus, and hung hesitating.
“Down! Off my quarter-deck!” Colon rasped at him, much as he might have spoken to a dog.
Ires, committed to that leadership, dared be no other than bold and truculent. “We have something to say to you, Don Cristobal.”
“Say it from below there. Down with you!”
But Ires did not budge. He could not without loss of authority. Within the black hairiness of his face his skin was livid. His hand slid to his waist, behind, where his sheath-knife was hung. He conceived that seeing him armed the Admiral would abate his peremptoriness. What happened was the opposite. Scarcely had his hand begun its journey than Colon had gripped him by the breast of his greasy doublet, lifted him off his feet and hurled him from the companion. But for those behind and below him upon whom he hurtled, there might have been broken bones for Guillerme Ires.
“Speak to me now,” Colon permitted.
It was, however, Gomez who, whilst Ires spluttered invective, made himself the spokesman of the angry crew, briefly stating their conclusions. “And because of this, Don Cristobal,” he ended, “we demand to put about and return to Spain before it is too late.”
“You demand it? Oh, you demand it. Silence, there, and listen. These ships were entrusted to me by their Highnesses for the purpose of sailing to the Indies, and to the Indies we will sail. So quiet you in that conviction, or I’ll make an example of one or two of you, patient man though I be.”
“Admiral,” cried Gomez, “we have made up our minds. We go no farther.”
“Over the side with you, then, you and those who think like you. I give you leave. You may swim back to Spain. But this ship does not go about.”
There was fresh uproar, out of which one voice soared in an angry whine. “You are carrying us to our death, Admiral. There can be no returning against winds that blow ever westward.”
Thus was Colon made aware at last of the source of this trouble. He perceived that if he was to quiet the alarm, he must have recourse to another of his extemporizations, and again explain something which he, himself, did not understand. He found the answer promptly, and it was so logical as to make him afterwards suspect that he had stumbled upon a discovery.
“God give me patience with such wits. Need you be told that for a belt of wind that blows from one quarter, there must on another parallel be a compensating belt that blows from the opposite? That is the belt by which we shall return. But only after having reached the Indies. So let me hear no more of it.”
On that contemptuous dismissal he left them, dumbfounded by an answer to their fears so plausible that they could not but accept it.
As he was regaining his cabin, still accompanied by Aranda, he overheard the voice of Ximenes. “Now, Master Ires, which of us is the tinker? Which of us knows the ocean and its ways?”
He closed the door, and crossed to the press in quest of a sheet of paper. It was his intent, with the charts that were to be passed back to the Pinzons, to send a note to Martin Alonso, informing him of the disturbance and how he had met it, so that he might be armed with an answer in like case. There was less likelihood of it on the other ships, however, for the Pinzons were more fortunate in their crews. Aboard each of their caravels there was that majority of steady men who had sailed with them before and had learnt by experience to trust them. These would suffice to encourage timorous spirits and discourage mutinous ones.
“We are well out of that trouble, Admiral,” said Aranda. “It was fortunate that you could answer their misgivings.”
“Yes. A fortunate conjecture,” Colon answered him, still rummaging in the press.
“Conjecture? Was the belt of easterly wind a conjecture?”
Colon turned, smiling. “What is amiss with conjecture so that it be intelligent?”
“I see.” Aranda moved a pace or two away from the table by which he had been standing. His face was darkened with thought. “Do your Indies, too, happen to be a conjecture?”
Colon stared at him for a silent moment. “Sound mathematical deduction is something higher than conjecture, Vasco.”
“You relieve me. For a moment you set me wondering whether this voyage is just the gamble that men call it in their grumbling.”
“The only gamble is in what it shall profit us. That we shall make this landfall is as certain as anything in this uncertain life can be. But why these doubts?”
Aranda pointed to the chart that had remained spread upon the table. Colon took a quick step forward, startled. “Ah!” he said, and his glance was steady, questioning, almost defiant.
“I do not spy,” Aranda explained himself. “I saw it without intent to look. Our position as you mark it there is fifty leagues beyond the point of your land of Zipangu.”
“True. But what, after all, is an error of fifty leagues in such a computation?”
“We are not yet at Zipangu, which perhaps matters little. What matters more is that our position is not that which you have marked on Pinzon’s chart. Him you delude about that, as you deluded the men about the wind.”
Colon’s answer came, after a moment, with a sigh and a faint smile. “What choice have I? If I am to prevail I must stifle doubts as best I can. But on the main issue, Vasco, I tell you again I neither cheat nor gamble. I know. As surely as I know that I am living.”
Aranda looked into his eyes, and there was a pause before he replied.
“Forgive me,” he said at last. “So that your faith is honestly held, as I believe it to be, I shall never regret having sailed with you, come what may.”
“I trust, indeed, that you never shall, Vasco,” Colon answered him, and sat down to write.
When Aranda had left him to see the note and the charts passed across to the Pinta, the Admiral sat on grimly considering all the artifice that lay behind him and might still lie ahead for the accomplishment of his high mission, if, indeed, accomplishment were to attend it. For whilst he had been unusually frank with Aranda, he had not been entirely so. This was the 6th of October. They were nearly a month out from Gomera, and the fifty leagues by which already his computations had been exceeded was no such trifle in his view as he had represented it. On the contrary it was the source of a secret uneasiness that for all his boasted confidence was now gnawing him.
As lately as that very morning Martin Alonso, marking a flight of birds, had bawled across the water a suggestion that they alter course and steer for the south-west. Colon had peremptorily refused, again because to have yielded would have betrayed his misgivings and sapped the authority which only assurance could maintain.
That night, pacing the poop alone with his growing anxiety, which was shaping itself into a fear that he might have missed and overshot Zipangu, he heard the flight of birds again, steadily and continuously passing to the south-west.
He paced on, his obstinacy in conflict with his reason which told him that if anywhere in this waste of waters there was a landward course it must be the course the birds were following.
From the break of the poop he looked down into the waist. There a score or so of the men lay huddled in sleep, forms dimly visible in the moonlight, about the hatches and in the shelter of the cooking-galley and of the cock-boat. When the moon set they were lost to sight in a pit of blackness, for no lights were permitted below, save that of the binnacle, invisible from the waist.
At the summit of the poop, above the after rail, glowed the big lantern within whose mica panes a wreathed rope that had been steeped in pitch was burning. By the yellow light of it anyone awake in the waist might have seen the black silhouette of the Admiral as he paced there through most of that night in his mental travail. He was still there at dawn, when the men began to awaken and stretch and yawn with a noise as of bellowing steers.
Cosa, emerging from the forecastle, where he kept his quarters, saw him, and came up to him.
“It’s the birds, Admiral. All night I heard them passing in flight to the south.”
“And then?” quoth the Admiral glumly.
Cosa showed that he, too, knew the inference. “They were small birds. Land birds. They will be flying landwards. There will be land to the south.”
“So there may be, but not the land I seek. That lies ahead.”
Cosa looked as if he would protest, but quailed under the sternness of Colon’s glance. He compromised, deflecting to the crew some of the censure that might follow. “Some of the hands have remarked it, too. They draw the same conclusion. It strains their patience, Admiral.”
“Let them strain mine no further, or by St. Ferdinand I’ll hang one or two from the yard-arm as an example to the rest. Let it be known. I’ve been patient enough with their unruliness.”
“It’s seeking trouble, Admiral,” the pilot warned him.
“Sometimes that is the way to avoid it.”
Cosa departed muttering in his sandy beard, and Colon went to break his fast on salt fish that was rank and biscuit that was mouldy, to which only the wholesomeness of the wine supplied an antidote. Afterwards, wearied by the night’s vigil, he lay on his red-draped bed and fell asleep.
Whilst he slept mutiny again reared its head aboard. Cosa had fired the train in passing, by a hint of the Admiral’s warning. Its effect was the opposite to that intended, and again the ringleader was Ires, his rancour in a simmer ever since the rude handling he had received.
“Hang one or two of us, would he?” Ires spat contemptuously. “Faith, it might be a mercy to shorten the agony of some of us. For there’s never a one of us’ll see home again if we let him have his way.”
He stood bare-legged, arms akimbo, his hairy face inflamed, addressing a half-score men and a couple of boys who squatted on the coaming of one of the hatches. Behind him Gomez, lean and sardonic, in the threadbare finery of a gentleman, leaned against the bulwarks listening.
“By God, Guillerme,” he flung in, “I agree with you.”
“Is there a fool aboard who doesn’t?” wondered Ires. “This rascal, this madman, is gambling away his worthless life on a blind chance of glory. His life’s his own, and he may stake it as he pleases. But is he to stake yours? Are we to go sailing on to Hell through this emptiness, seeking land that no living man can say exists? If we endure it longer we must be as mad as he is.”
“How can we help ourselves now?” asked one.
“Aye. Tell us that,” another mocked him.
“Do as I advised before. Put the ship about and steer for home.”
“Isn’t it too late?” asked Gomez. “Aren’t the poisonous victuals already too low to last a return voyage?”
“We’ll have to make them last. Better an empty belly for awhile than to perish altogether.”
That elderly mariner named Nieves, sitting immediately before Ires, looked up at him and spoke softly. “Faith, I’m entirely of your mind. But how should we be received in Spain?”
“What’s to fear?” retorted Ires, and then Gomez came forward into the group.
“Nothing on that score,” he asserted. “This upstart, let me tell you, counts for nothing among the great or the learned. Indeed, it’s in my knowledge that they pushed advice against this expedition as far as they could with their Highnesses. If we go empty home all the world will say that it’s what was to be expected.”
“Maybe, maybe,” said Nieves. “But I’ve not followed the sea these years without coming to know what happens to mutineers, be they right or be they wrong.” He shook an untidy grey head. “It’s a hanging matter, my lads. Don’t be forgetting it.”
“Isn’t he threatening to hang some of us?” another voice demanded.
Gomez edged closer amongst them. The lean, sallow face that hard living had prematurely aged was slyly wicked. His voice fell to a murmur. “There’s a simpler way. If in the dark of the night, when he comes on the poop to take the stars with his astrolabe, this Jonah were to fall overboard, what else could we do but go about and return home? The Pinzons would never go on once we had lost the guidance of the only man who pretends to know where we are going.”
There was a silence. All faces were upturned to look at him, and there was dread in the eyes of some. But not in the eyes of Ires. He bent his knee, and brought down his hand with a resounding smack upon his thigh.
“A cup of water to poor souls in Hell. That’s what you bring us, hidalgo.”
Aranda, emerging from the forecastle, overheard the words in their setting of raucous laughter. The sudden silence produced by his approach quickened his suspicions. He halted by the group.
“What cup of water is that?”
There was a stir of embarrassment. But Gomez was not of those who shared it. He remained at ease, smiling.
“I was cheering them with the promise that by Sunday we shall be ashore. Maybe hearing Mass.”
“Aye, just that, sir,” leered Ires. “Cheered us mightily it did.”
This confirmation strengthened Aranda’s conviction that Gomez lied. He dissembled. “It’s no reason, anyway, to leave the ship in the foul state she is while you sit chattering. Get the buckets and swabs, and scour me this deck.”
He passed on, leaving the seamen to shamble off upon the duty assigned them. It was not, however, until some hours later that Colon received from him the day’s second warning.
“Admiral, there’s mischief afoot.”
“So Cosa tells me.” Colon was cool.
“I’ld be none too sure of Cosa, himself.”
“What? Well, well! Let it brew until it boils over and scalds them.”
But Aranda would not treat it so lightly. “It may be beyond mending when that happens. Ires and that rakehell Gomez are too close, and they’ve gathered a bunch of cut-throats about them. Give the order, Admiral, and I’ll have the pair of them in irons and under hatches before the mischief spreads further.”
Chin in hand Colon considered. “You’ld need good grounds for that. Something more than suspicion.”
Aranda laughed. “I’ld soon make the grounds. A harsh order or two would do it in their present humour. I might set Ires to boy’s work: cleaning out the forecastle quarters; and order Gomez to lend a hand in swabbing the decks. That should be enough to give me grounds.”
“And those whom you think they’ve already seduced? What if they should revolt?”
“There should be still enough loyal ones to help subdue them.”
“A risk.”
“But if we do nothing we may face a certainty.”
Colon rose in silence, still thoughtful. He took Aranda by the arm and drew him out of the cabin. From the break of the poop they saw the rebels, fully a score of them by now, gathered about the hatchway. Ires was addressing them in a subdued voice, but with a vehemence manifest in his gestures.
“It’s the moment,” said Aranda. “I ordered them to swab, and they’ve never moved to it. That’s reason enough for action. I’ll go and scatter them to it with a belaying-pin, and make Ires the scapegoat.”
His foot was already on the companion when the thunder of a gun startled every soul aboard. There was a rush for the starboard bulwarks, whilst men came tumbling out of the forecastle to swell the numbers in the waist and stare across the blue water at the Pinta, a couple of cables’ length away. A pillar of yellowish smoke from one of her bombards was wreathing her shrouds and trailing astern. On the high sterncastle Martin Alonso stood waving.
“Land! Land!” he bawled. “I claim the reward.”
The cry altered the direction of their gaze. Again there was a scurrying rush, and now it was for the ratlines. Up they swarmed, and in a moment the rigging as high as the fighting-top on the mainmast was black with excited chattering seamen.
Away on the southern horizon they beheld the hazy outline of the mountainous range Martin Alonso had been the first to descry. They judged it to be about a score of leagues away.
“Praise God!” said Colon in devout thankfulness.
His relief at this eleventh-hour deliverance from the dangers that must attend any attempt to suppress the incipient mutiny, left him indifferent to the fact that he was proven wrong in his expectations by the quarter in which the land appeared.
As he dispatched Aranda to the helmsman, to alter course, the sounds of the Gloria in excelsis, chanted in chorus by the crew of the Pinta, came to the Santa Maria across the water. Her own crew joined in it, and a heartbeat later so did the men of the Niña, until the thunders of that paean of thanksgiving hung like an incense above the empty sea.
At sunset there was more than the usual fervour in the singing of the Salve Regina. That, too, from the prayer that it had been, became this evening a hymn of gratitude to the Virgin for having brought them safely through the perils of the deep.
No longer did lowering looks greet Colon when he went amongst them. Instead he was met by friendly eyes and smiling lips, and once there was a rousing cheer. “Long live the Admiral!”
The Admiral! Oh yes, Admiral and Viceroy. These were no longer shadowy, anticipatory titles. Yonder in that hazy coast-line lay the substance that made them real by the letter of the capitulations.
Back in his cabin he went down on his knees before the Madonna on the brass panel, to return thanks for a success which he attributed to her favour, and with his devotion in that supreme hour forming part of it almost, was the thought of Beatriz, of the pride and share that should be hers in this triumph, and of the blessings which out of the power and wealth now almost in his grasp he would shower upon her when he returned, by when she surely would have been found. If he saw himself already the greatest man in Spain under the King, he saw her set high by him and by association with him. It brought an added exultation to the hour.
His mind overheated, he spent a restless night, whilst the Santa Maria resounded with the rejoicings, the carolling and laughter of the men.
Towards dawn, by when the hands, grown weary of merrymaking, were dropping off at last to sleep, the ship was quiet again. Colon rose, and half-dressed came forth as one of the boys was extinguishing the poop lantern.
He stepped out upon the deck as upon another Pisgah, to rejoice in the sight at nearer quarters of the Promised Land.
Looking forth, the exultation oozed from him, and in a nausea of dismay he clutched the rail. The horizon was empty. Cloud masses which had melted in the night had duped them once again, and Zipangu was still as much to seek as ever.