says: "Here he began to have high seas and stormy weather, and he says that if the caravel were not very stout and well prepared, he would fear being lost." Later entries record the ship running "with much trouble and danger," and the night of February 13 finds him running before the blast under bare poles, without a scrap of sail set. A few days later a new wind comes in , raising a wicked cross sea that jostles the vessel about, "and the waves broke upon her. " In all this the Nifta lost sight of the Pinta. They were not to regain touch during the voyage, each at least half-convinced that the other had been sunk in the atrocious weather. The men, Columbus said in a later account, "cursed their coming and regretted that they had let me cajole or coerce them into sailing on, when they had so often wished to tum back." He himself was in no better case, agonized by the thought that he would not live to deliver news of hi s di scovery, and ultimately comforted only by a message which seemed to come to him of "the things of great wonder which God had performed in him and through him. " Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, a sensiti ve student steeped in the Catholic and Spanish culture of the period, feels that Columbus went through a momentous religious experience in these great storms. But, this is not really uncommmon or surpri sing. The foundations of reality seem to change when "deep calls unto deep" in a great storm at sea. Joseph Conrad, master mariner and the greatest sea writer in our language, wrote simply: " If you would know the age of the earth, look at the face of the sea in a storm ." These terrifying but, perhaps, also ultimately liberating experiences were interrupted when between storms the Nifta came upon Santa Maria, the southernmost of the Azores, as Columbus had hoped to do, without knowing which of the Azores he would fetch. Here, painful farce took over the scene, when the Portuguese governor arrested most of the ship 's crew when they were ashore at prayer, claiming that they had been on an illicit voyage to Africa-a trade awarded to Portugal, the leading Atlantic power, in a treaty signed with Spain some years before. The weather turned rotten again, and the Nifta was blown offshore after parting her cables and losing her anchors. Columbus, the ship 's master and three seamen, plus maybe six Indian passengers unable to be much help, had to fight their way back to recover their crew . The men were ultimately released back to their ship, a move undoubtedly expedited by Columbus 's enormous pride and presence. His majestic invocation of the power of the Catholic monarchs of Spain even secured them fresh provi sions, and the long, hard voyage home resumed on February 24. Cape St. Vincent was 800 miles away, an easy week's sail. But it was to be the toughest week of the whole passage. Calm at first, butwithrisingwindand sea, there came a blow that nearly wrecked them as they were driven down on the rockbound coast of Portugal. Soon after sunset on Sunday, March 3, a violent squall split the sails, and they drove on into the night under bare poles, thinking they "were lost because of the winds and the seas that came at them from two directions and seemed to lift the caravel in the air." Soon after midnight, amid driving rain and lightning flashes, they sighted land , and Columbus "set the mainsail because he had no other recourse and made his way somewhat, although with great danger, heading out to sea." God watched over them, the Diario continues, and after SEA HISTORY 62, SUMMER 1992
"infinite trouble and fright" Columbus recognized the distinctive Rock of Sintra, at the entrance of Lisbon 's Tagus River, looming through the spume along the wave-lashed coast the Nifta had come upon . It takes a sailor to appreciate the scene, and Morison draws it well; Columbus, he says, had "performed the difficult maneuver, well known to every old-time seaman, of 'clawi ng off' a lee shore. The coast ran north and south , the wind blew from the northwest, so they set one little square fo resai l that had been saved intact, wore ship in a smother of foam, and shaped a course south .... " Mori son feels they would have broad-reached under foresail, to keep the ship 's head off, as they quartered the rushing seas that broke ruinously on the rugged shoreline just to leeward. The foresail , indeed, seems a more likely sail than the mainsail , whose force would tend constantly to drive the ship up on the wind at imminent risk of being hove down and smothered in the steep-breaking seas. Mori son concludes: "No wonder Nifta became the Admiral's favorite vessel, to stand all that beating and respond to this difficult maneuver without broaching." Driving in over the bar at the mouth of the river on Monday morning, March 4, the sea-worn caravel came to anchor in the shelter of the hills at the ri ver-mouth portofCascais. The long, incredibly arduous and ri sky voyage was over. They learned from ships gathered in the river that no one had put to sea that winter, in weather that seemed impossible for navigation. The people of the town, who had spent the morning praying for the lonely vessel they had spied off their coast, "came to see them and to marvel at how they had escaped." But now Columbus was in another world, whose affairs intruded insistently. The captain of a Portuguese warship anchored nearby demanded that he present himself aboard the warship and explain hi s mi ssion . Columbus wisely refused; he had already sent word ashore that he wished an audience with King John II, who was holding court inland. He went to John 's court, where he was received with extreme courtesy and offered passage inland over the mountain trails to Spain. This he refused, and after thoroughly refitting his battered Nifta, he set sail from Lisbon on March 13. After an uneventful passage south around Cape St. Vincent, the caravel entered the River Saltes to anchor at Palos on March 15. Close on her heels appeared the Pinta. She had come round from the northern port of Bayona where she had taken refuge from the gales. She had escaped the worst of the storms that nearl y destroyed the Nifta. We know nothing, today, of what passed between her captain, Martin Alonso Pinzon, and Columbus, if indeed anything did. Pinzon apparently went directly ashore, undoubtedly chagrined to see the Nifta home before him , and a few days later he died, possibly worn down by the bitter winter sailing he' d been through. Columbus, we may imagine, was exhausted and shaken by all that had transpired, but also exalted by the completion of hi s mi ssion. He rode into Seville on Palm Sunday, the day honoring Christ's entry into Jerusalem, when the people threw down palm leaves to pave hi s way. This date had special mean ing for Columbus, who never forgot that he was named for St. Christopher, the Christ-bearer. From Seville he was summoned by his sovereigns to Barcelona, where they made much of him , hi s men, and the native Americans he had brought with him. D 11