Chapter 33 Columbus by Rafael Sabatini
HOMEWARD BOUND
The homeward voyage began in mid-January.
For a fortnight they steered a north-easterly course, perhaps in the hope of discovering that belt of easterly wind, the possibility of which Colon had been constrained to imagine so as to allay the anxieties of his crew before the persistent westerly direction of the wind on the outward voyage. Whether he considered the easterly wind which he eventually found in thirty-eight degrees of northern latitude as a proof that he had guessed correctly, or merely as a fortunate circumstance, we do not know. Anyway, he found it and took advantage of it, steering directly east.
Up to the moment of departure from Hispaniola, everything observed or learnt of the discovered regions went to confirm Colon’s conviction that these were the uttermost confines of Asia. Two additional pieces of evidence came from those who had sailed with Martin Alonso. They had heard of an island called Martinino which was inhabited solely by women, and of other islands tenanted by a race called Caribs or Canibs, who ate human flesh. Marco Polo told both of Amazons and of human-flesh eaters off the coast of Cathay.
He heard of other marvels not mentioned by the Venetian traveller, such as a race of men with tails, dwelling in a remote part of Hispaniola, and some fresh marvels he beheld for himself before he left the coast, such as mermaids who heaved themselves up in the water to view the ship from a distance. He was in no such danger from them, however, as that which compelled the Ithacan voyager to have himself lashed to the mast by sailors whose ears he had taken the precaution of stopping with wax. There were no songs of irresistible seduction from the sirens of the Caribbean, nor were they of a loveliness to cause men to hurl themselves into the sea so as to perish in their embraces. Indeed, we gather from him that Colon found these sea-cows—which is what, in effect, they were—of an almost repulsive aspect, for he naively expresses the opinion that the beauty of sirens had been greatly exaggerated by the ancients.
More welcome to the mariners were the abundant tunny, many of which they caught and took aboard for food, of which their store was none too plentiful.
In contrast with the outward voyage, which in the main had been so calm and pleasant, the return was to prove one long battle with elements that almost daily threatened their destruction.
For three days of mortal anxiety in the middle of February, when they drove through the worst of those persistent storms, with poles bare of all but a trysail for steering-way, they expected every moment to be their last. At every pounding surge of the mountainous seas that broke over the frail and leaky little Niña the forty men who were crowded aboard her looked to see her founder under their feet. Great as was their faith in the uncanny seamanship of which Colon had given proof, they felt, as he felt himself, that for their deliverance from these perils something more was needed. So vows were made, of pilgrimages to be undertaken should they survive, and Our Lady’s protection was invoked by an offering to go in procession in their shirts, candle in hand, to attend a Mass of thanksgiving at Santa Clara de Moguer, near the port of Palos.
Colon’s earlier anxieties touching the loss to Spain of the fruits of his discovery and the fate of the men left at La Navidad were now acutely revived. What he could do to ensure against it he did. He contrived, despite the tossing and rocking of the little ship, to write a brief account, containing no more than the essentials. He enclosed it in a waxed cloth, this in a cake of wax, and this again in a barrel which was cast overboard, with a prayer that it might somewhere reach land, and so eventually come to the hands of the Sovereigns, to whom it was addressed. In it he prayed their Highnesses that since he himself would be beyond the reach of reward, they should apply such recompense as they accounted that he deserved in accordance with the direction he had left with Don Luis de Santangel in provision for the eventuality of his death. The pension which should come to him as the first man of the expedition to have sighted land he desired should go to Beatriz Enriquez.
With a conscience eased by the thought that he had now done all that lay within his power, he resumed control of the navigation in the hope of yet riding that crazy little ship through the raging storm.
Aboard the Pinta Martin Alonso was applying all his skill to that same grim task. As darkness descended on the evening of the 14th of February, such was the fury of the wind and the wildness of the water that he had little hope of surviving the night. A half-mile or so astern of him he could still descry the Niña in the waning light. He watched the smaller ship as she faced each steep acclivity of dark water, paused shuddering on the crest, and then went lurching down into the trough in a flying spume of the waves that broke over her.
Thus until the curtain of night, black and starless, had blotted her completely from his view. He clung to a life-line, swaying to the heave of the deck under his feet, and spoke to his brother who was beside him. He shouted into his ear, so as to be heard above the howling of the wind through the shrouds and the crash and roar of waters against her timbers.
“I doubt we’ve seen the last of the Niña.”
The younger Pinzon was confirmed in the gloomy need to make his soul as best he could without the help of a priest. “D’ye not think we’ll live the night, then?”
“Only by a miracle, and God knows I can think of having done nothing to deserve one. But my mind is on the Niña and Vicente. The miracle with her is that she has not already gone to pieces. Leaking like a basket, every buffet of these cursed waves must be starting a fresh seam in her. She’ll be at the bottom before dawn. God help Vicente.”
“God send you’re wrong,” Francisco answered him. “Besides Vicente, there’s a deal of gold aboard her.”
“The Admiral will need it to buy water in Hell.”
And so it seemed when daylight came again. The Pinta was still afloat, though waterlogged, with the men taking turns at the pumps and toiling at them like galley-slaves. But on all that wide waste of grey-green water there was no sign of the Niña.
Martin Alonso, heavy-eyed and haggard, his garments sodden and stiff with brine, had never left the deck throughout that awful night, and had kept his brother beside him, thinking perhaps that drowning would be easier for them in company.
“I was no false prophet,” he gloomed, when the light was strong enough to enable them to scan the sea. “The Admiral’s gone, and he’s taken our Vicente with him. God rest their souls!”
“Is it impossible that we should have been driven apart?” asked Francisco.
“How could it be possible? We have been driving before the same wind with bare poles. There’s no hope. If she were still above water we must still be together.”
They looked at each other in dejection, their grief at the loss of their brother mitigated perhaps in the perception that a like fate might still await themselves in this raging gale.
But the Pinta, if small, was of a solidity of build and in good seaworthy condition saving her mizzen mast, which in any case they would not tax with sail whilst the wind held any strength. She rode out the tempest, and when two days later in weather grown comparatively calm, the Pinzons took stock of their position, they began to discover compensations for the loss sustained; so much compensation, indeed, that if they had not had a brother to mourn, they must have counted it a gain rather than a loss.
“Since the Niña has gone,” said Francisco, “the discovery of the Indies becomes our own.” He made it as a plain statement without any hint of exultation.
“It had occurred to me,” Martin Alonso admitted, with the same restraint.
“It is lucky that we have a couple of Indians aboard, a goodly amount of gold and some other odds and ends to show them in Spain.”
Martin Alonso nodded. “All the evidence we need.”
This was all that passed between them on the subject until a fortnight later, when the Pinta came safely to anchor in the waters of Bayona. It was by no means a happy landfall, and they might have done better had not Martin Alonso been ailing in those days, and forced in most of them to keep his cabin. The less experienced Francisco had held too far to the west, and so had missed his way.
Now, however, that they were safe and snug in this Galician harbour, Martin Alonso could look fortune in the face, and see how benignly it smiled upon him. Cheered by the prospect, he seemed to recover some of the vigour which had been wasted in battling with the stormy seas and further impaired since by the racking, exhausting cough with which it had left him. The glories that had been Colon’s were now within his grasp. As the surviving partner of that world-shaking expedition, he was heir to the honour due to the discoverer of the New World. For him now the office of Lord High Admiral of the Ocean-Sea and Viceroy of the Indies, and elevation to the ranks of the hidalguia of Spain.
There might be arguments about it. King Ferdinand was too thrifty a man to dispense gifts without demurring. But after all, that close fist could be prized open. The power was Martin Alonso’s. For his were all the secrets of the discovery, knowledge of the way to the Indies and the charts so gradually and laboriously drawn. A fresh expedition must be sent out to exploit the discoveries made and to add to them, to gather the wealth of which they now brought definite tokens. It was not an expedition that would consist of three poor ships, like the first that had crossed the ocean. A mighty armament would be employed, with that liberality of expenditure justified by the assurance of a rich return. It was no longer a question of chasing a dream, but of pursuing an established reality, and to this it was now Martin Alonso who held the keys.
“I shall be needed, Francisco,” said Martin Alonso, in summing up the discussion with his brother. “If their Highnesses should prove stingy of rewards, why I must look to make my profit of their need of me. And I shall see to it that my profit is not less than would have been Colon’s. God rest him.”
“God rest him, indeed,” said Francisco. “All considered, it’s a mercy he was taken. Had he lived, his arrogance might have found ways to deny you what is justly yours.”
“Be sure it would. We had proof of it. A judgment has overtaken him; a punishment for his overweening pride and grasping greed.” His vehemence brought on a fit of coughing that almost choked him. When at last he recovered breath to resume, he went more quietly. “And justice has been done to me, too. After all, was it not I who made this discovery possible? Was it not my faith in the project that sent Frey Juan Perez to persuade the Queen? Was it not the credit that I pledged that found him a crew to sail with him? Without me there would have been no discovery. Therefore the fruits of it belong to me.”
“And Heaven,” Francisco agreed, “has seen fit to ordain that they shall come to you. Yet, Martin, there are men so wicked as not to believe in Divine Justice.”
Thus the Pinzons argued their consciences into approval of the opportunism of which Martin Alonso was being guilty, and by the time he sat down at Bayona to write his letter to the Sovereigns announcing his return from the Indies, he did so in the conviction that all had occurred so as to single him out for a mark of Divine Favour.
He supplied in that letter of his a brief account of the lands discovered, alluded in enthusiastic terms to their extent and wealth, and deplored in passing the loss of the Niña and Colon on the homeward voyage. He contrived to convey that the expedition, rendered possible by his own munificence and credit, could hardly have succeeded so signally but for the skill and prudence he had brought to it, and he begged their Highnesses’ leave to come and lay before them a fuller relation of the great dominions it was his honour to have added to their crown.
Having dispatched that carefully indited letter by a courier to their Highnesses at Barcelona, where he learnt that they then were, he weighed anchor again, and put to sea for Palos.
The sea-worn Pinta ran down the coast of Portugal before the blustering winds of March, rounded Cape St. Vincent in the forenoon of the 14th, and by the evening of the 15th she was crossing the Bar of Saltes and heading up the Tinto.
Martin Alonso’s condition had by then grown worse. But if weak in body, he went sustained in spirit by the thought of the glory that was coming to him.
In that high confidence he sailed into the port of Palos, and he was about to order the gunner who waited, blowing upon his match, to fire a salute whose reverberations should go thundering across Spain, when a sight met his eyes which drained his face of the little blood disease had left in it.
There, before him, at anchor, with bare poles and sails clewed down, rode a battered but familiar hulk.
Francisco Pinzon laid a fierce, shaking hand upon his arm.
“The Niña!” he cried, and in anger, forgetting for the moment that this meant the survival of their own brother, he added: “How the devil comes she here?”
“By the devil’s aid,” rasped Martin Alonso. He waved away the gunner, whose lighted match was become a mockery. “Take that to Hell,” he raged at him, and reeled, faint and sick and shaken by coughs, into his brother’s arms.
The surviving strength ebbed out of him. His faith in Divine Justice was shattered. His heart was broken.
He was carried ashore and up to his fine house, and there he died within the week.