Chapter 30 Columbus by Rafael Sabatini
THE LANDFALL
It was high noon of the morrow before Colon awakened from that long sleep of utter exhaustion. But at least he returned to consciousness restored in vigour.
From the stern windows he could view the sea flooded now with sunshine and once more calm.
Garcia, the steward, brought him food, and he broke his long fast, his hunger mitigating the unsavouriness of the fare.
Soon Cosa came seeking him, so that they might plot their position, and convey it to the other ships. It had to be largely a matter of guesswork, for during the storm there had been no dead reckoning.
Coming afterwards on deck, he found the air balmy, with a steady breeze that droned in the full spread of sail. Aboard all was quiet. Order had been restored in the gear above deck which the storm had battered and smashed, whilst some that had been lost had already been replaced from their store of spares. That had been the work of the boatswain and carpenter with their crews. Other repairs had called for the skill of the barber-surgeon, for between the storm and the fight that had preceded it a good deal of human gear had suffered damage.
The western horizon, towards which they continued to steer, remained as empty as ever, which now exercised Colon more than the hands. These had fallen into a sullen listlessness, as if the endurance of the tempest and the emotions stirred in them had left them too exhausted even for resentment.
Tunny were again sporting about the ship and again a flight of small birds passed overhead, going ever in the same south-westerly direction. Don Rodrigo Ximenes, coming to the companion, drew the Admiral’s attention to them.
“If we had not seen so many already,” said the hidalgo, “I should guess that we were nearing land.”
“You may guess it with confidence,” the Admiral answered him. “For there goes a heron, and that’s a bird that never strays far out to sea.”
He stated as a fact what was no more than another guess, although based upon a reasonable probability. Certainly he could not recall having seen a heron out of sight of land on any previous voyage.
His answer reached the ears of three or four men who were busy splicing rope, and set them staring in excitement at the slow, rhythmic flight of the great grey bird.
Later that day they saw a pelican, and later again the quick, flapping flight of a duck, which they regarded as a still more definite harbinger of land. But a more positive sign than any was a green bough laden with berries which a man fished out of the sea that afternoon with a boat-hook. At about the same time in the boat from the Pinta, which had been hove to so as to allow the flagship to overtake her, Martin Alonso came across bringing a length of cedar which he had picked up. He was bluffly affable and able to render a good account of his ship after the storm, and in the conviction, from the signs, that land must be near, he renewed his plea that they should stand more to the south-west.
Still, however, Colon would not yield. Zipangu, he insisted, lay ahead to westward. He asserted it ever as if with definite knowledge, and after Martin Alonso had ill-humouredly yielded to his obstinacy and departed again, Aranda, who was with the Admiral on the poop, ventured to ask him upon what he based his certainty.
“Certainty?” Colon laughed, using with Aranda that frankness into which none other could draw him. “My only certainty is that if I go zig-zagging about the ocean I may miss every island it contains. A straight course at least holds out the promise that sooner or later we must make a landfall somewhere.”
“Let me pray then,” said Aranda, “that it may be sooner rather than later; for the hands are only temporarily pacified. These signs have raised their hopes again. God help us if they should again prove to be delusions.”
The sun went down that evening in a golden glory and into an empty sea, and the Salve Regina, intoned as usual aboard, was rendered with all the melancholy of a Miserere.
Afterwards in the starlit night the crew below could see Colon’s tall figure intermittently appearing in black silhouette against the poop lantern, as he paced restlessly to and fro.
Suddenly he checked, stepped to the rail, and gripped it, peering forward into the gloom. Immediately below him shadows were moving.
“Olé!” he called down to them.
“What is it, Don Cristobal?” It was the voice of Ximenes that answered him.
“Come up here.” Excitement vibrated in his voice. “Who is that with you? Come up here, both of you.”
Ximenes came up promptly, followed by his companion, that Sanchez who once had been a gentleman of the King’s bedchamber.
Colon’s grip was like steel upon the arm of Don Rodrigo. “Look yonder. Straight ahead. In line with the bowsprit. Tell me what you see.”
Peering forward, Ximenes beheld in the distance a point of light, and said so.
“Ha! Yes. A light. I was afraid to trust my eyes. It is either a lantern or a torch. It is being waved up and down. Do you see?”
“I see. I see.”
Colon turned. His habitual calm had entirely left him. He was trembling with excitement. His voice quavered. “See, Sanchez! See! Look!”
He was pointing in the direction of the waving light. It vanished, however, in that instant, and Sanchez was too late to see it.
“But it was there, as Don Rodrigo saw,” Colon insisted. “And that light was on land. On land! Do you understand?”
“Assuredly,” Ximenes agreed. “It must be so.”
“Land at last,” the Admiral panted. Then he commanded himself, and sent his voice reverberating down the ship in the stillness of the night. “Land! Land ahead!”
The Santa Maria awakened to the cry. Sleepers in the waist began to stir, and the gradually rising hum grew swiftly into a clamour, in which men demanded more precise news. Ximenes and Sanchez went down to tell them what had been seen. There was no more sleep that night aboard the flagship. There was excitement and there was hope, but there was little faith. Too often already had they been deluded, as the rancorous Ires, nursing his broken head, actively reminded them.
“A light, forsooth,” he mocked. “And a moving light that vanished! To the devil with that. Why, one night the whole sky blazed with lights, and no one was fool enough to suppose they shone on land. Don’t chatter to me of land. We’ve done with land. We’ll never see land again this side of Hell; not so much of it as will bury us true Christians.”
There were too many who gave heed to him. But with the rising of the moon, some two hours after midnight, came revelation. They were roused to observation by the booming of a gun from the Pinta, and there ahead of them, not more than two leagues distant, they beheld in the silvery radiance the unmistakable dark loom of a coast-line that filled the horizon.
Upon a silence of fearful incredulity followed a roaring cheer that was mingled presently with hysterical laughter and even with sobs. Land which so many of them had thought never to see again had, as it were, crept upon them stealthily in the night.
Then pilot and boatswain passing briskly amongst them summoned hands to obey the Admiral’s order to take in sail so that they might lie hove to until daylight.
On the poop Colon, with a swelling heart, kept a tireless watch, impatient for the coming of day, to disclose to him whether this was the Zipangu of his quest where gold was used for roof-tiles, or some island outpost of that auriferous land. In the need for companionship, which great joy like great sorrow, demanding to be shared, imposes upon a man, he had summoned Aranda to his side.
“Whatever land this may be,” he said, “I am vindicated. That which the wiseacres and doctors in Spain accounted a dream is proven a reality. To find it I have been for years the scoff of sages, constrained by ignorant mockery to sue cap in hand, like a beggar in a church porch, for the alms that would enable me to enrich a crown by great possessions. But longest laughs he, Vasco, who laughs last; and future ages shall laugh with me at the Salamanca doctors who pronounced me an impostor.”
He spoke in high, boyish glee, his normal reserve cast off in a joyous excitement such as comes to few men once early youth is overpast.
“To-morrow, Vasco—nay, this very day—I shall fully have earned my title of High Admiral of the Ocean-Sea and my viceroyalty of lands of which the coast-line is yonder. They shall abate their scorn and bend their necks to me, those gentlemen of Spain who accounted me a needy foreign mountebank.”
Then his eyes suddenly clouded with wistfulness at the thought of Beatriz, and from his soul he sent up a silent prayer that Destiny might crown his triumph by permitting him to bear it to her.