Columbus was no bumbling fool . ... Take a look at his voyaging. He was a visionary, but also one of the great navigators of all time and a seaman of remarkable resolve and skills. finally picking up the westerlies when he reached the Azores, to arrive in Cadiz in June after a two-month passage.
Another World The second voyage was distinctly not a success: China had not been found, and the Spanish colony on Hispaniola had not produced much gold or anything else but discord and misery. Nonetheless, Columbus was able to talk the Catholic Sovereigns into a third voyage and set sail for Hispaniola in January 1498. Samuel Eliot Morison feels that the court was stimulated to tum Columbus loose again because of the outfitting of Vasco da Gama's voyage in Portugal, and Cabot's in England. Disappointing as the Americas had proved, it behooved Spain to secure her foothold and explore further for more rewarding lands. Accordingly, Columbus shaped his course well to the south, and encountered what he recognized to be a new continent, another world ("otro mondo") behind the island of Trinidad. This made him rejoice. He prophetically foretold that the wealth of the new land would make Spain the leading power of Europe. But, on this voyage we begin to see Columbus's grip on reality slipping; he has visions and believes the land he has come upon borders not on China but on Paradise. And from this voyage he returned in chains. He had gathered family and friends around him, people he could trust like his boyhood chum Cuneo, and his two brothers Bartholemew and Diegobut he could not govern Hispaniola effectively, and a new governor, Francisco de Bobadilla, was sent out with full authority to clean up the mess. The three Columbus brothers were arrested and sent home under guard. Columbus refused to take off his fetters until they were removed by the sovereigns under whose authority they had been put on him. He was received at court and consoled, but while the sovereigns let him retain his titles of Viceroy and Admiral, he was never trusted with governing authority again. But, they did authorize him to go on a fourth voyage. In this voyage, which lasted 1502-4, Columbus explored much of the coast of Central America, and Indians ' tales of a great sea across the hills to the westward confirmed him in his belief that he was on the Malay Peninsula, with the Gulf of Siam and India on the other side. Weather conditions were atrocious, there was much exhausting work driving the ships to windward through rain and storm, and finally the ships themselves began to fail, their planking eaten through by the shipworm which flourishes in these tropical seas. Finally, Columbus beached his two surviving ships on the north coast of Jamaica, unable to go further. There he stayed for one terrible year, mastering difficulties with the Indians and mutinies among the men (led by the hidalgos who were sailing with him) before at last the Spanish authorities in Hispaniola sent a ship for him and he came home again to Spain, broken in health but defiant in spirit. His protectress Queen Isabella died three weeks after his return; the King, understandably in view of the administrative record, wanted nothing more to do with him. His income from the new lands was paid to him, making him a wealthy man (though not on the scale he felt he was entitled to); his two sons occupied favored positions at court-but all this was not enough. He died on 20 May 1506 in the inland town of Valladolid, with his family by him, resigned, perhaps, but not content. His death passed unnoticed. The world, including the New World he had discovered, had new concerns and had virtually forgotten him in the thirteen years since his return in triumph from his fust, epochal voyage. SEA HISTORY 63, AUTUMN 1992
It was not clear to anyone just what lands Columbus and those who sailed in his wake had come upon. Peter Martyr, while admiring Columbus's feat, did not share his belief that the islands he had sailed through were in the China Seas. He believed the world to be much larger than Columbus thought and, of course, he was right. But other seasoned geographers and navigators shared Col um bus's view, and for years to come maps were published showing the developing coastlines of the Americas as joining up with the Asian landmass on whose fringes Columbus believed he had been sailing. Vicente Yafiez Pinzon and Amerigo Vespucci-for whom the Americas were named-sailed their important follow-up voyages in that belief. Whatever the shape of the lands on the far side of the Ocean Sea, the Spanish moved swiftly to have their claim to them confirmed, on the same exclusive basis that the Portuguese had successfully claimed their discoveries south along the coast of Africa. Within weeks of Columbus's return, on May 3, 1493, Pope Alexander VI (who owed his office to Ferdinand and Isabella) had issued a papal bull dividing the world along a line drawn one hundred leagues (a little over 300 miles) west of the Azores. Lands discovered to the east of this line were to go to Portugal, lands to the west to Spain. A year later, in June 1494, the arrangement was confirmed in the Treaty of Tordesillas. By then, the Portuguese had succeeded in pushing the line to 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands-which was to give them the right to Brazil. These arrangements seem astounding to modem eyes: How could the world beyond the seas be divided between two nations sending forth ships from the Iberian Peninsula? But in the medieval scheme of things, with kings holding the only legitimate authority from God, through the hands of the Pope, it all made sense. And when in the next hundred years other maritime nations burst on this divinely ordained scenenotably the heretic English and Dutch-the reaction of the Spanish and Portuguese was one of genuine outrage.
Columbus and His World We 've seen enough of Columbus by now to get a pretty clear picture of the man in action, in his world, in his time. It is clear that the discourse of this 500th anniversary year of Columbus's great voyage has done much to obscure the realities of the man and the world he lived in, though some important new perspectives have been opened up. Let's clear the decks of ideologically oriented or merely noisy "protests" that do little to bring us closer to the person or his times. In brief, then: • Columbus was no bumbling fool, as has been claimed. Take a look at his voyaging. He was a visionary, but also one of the great navigators of all time and a seaman of remarkable resolve and skills. • His world picture wasn't insane as has been represented. It was the picture people had of the world in his time, as shown by maps published in centers of learning. If he was crazy, then so was Toscanelli and other leading lights of the Italian Renaissance. • He did not introduce war and slavery to the Americas. The gentle Taino he first encountered were systematically killed and enslaved by Caribs whom they feared far more than they feared the Spanish. • The Spanish incursion was no "conquest of paradise." Native peoples generally rushed forward to greet the Europeans and speedily adopted everything they could of their ways, tools and weapons. 13