THE CAPE HORN ROAD, PART VIII:
Columbus Opens the Americas to the World by Peter Stanford
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t first you could make out only dim flashes where the tall seas broke. But as the light grew toward daybreak the rearing crests following the Bloodhound gleamed white with Alpine splendor. We sat quiet in the cockpit, awed by the scene and breathing deep of the salt air, cool and crisp just before the dawn, as the hurrying yawl drove on, beating out her own frosty track across the sea. The waves move, but the water they're composed of stays still, so a ship leaves its track on the face of the water, while the waves roll by, traveling faster than any ship. One steers with an eye out for the breaking wave-where all at once the water itself gets into avalanching motion. Or as Joseph Conrad said of Singleton at the helm of the ship Narcissus in like case: "He steered with care." Judy Wyatt, our helmsman aboard the Bloodhound, was entranced with the frothing bubbles that raced by when a wave broke astern of us. "It's like sailing in champagne!" Then all at once a taller sea reared up among these steep moving hills of water, a black obsidian shape against the eastern sky. As it neared it grew taller and its top became a brilliant icy greenthe light was shining right through it. "Judy," I said, "hang on. This one's not going to miss." And then it was upon us, a sudden blackness, and roaring in one's ears, and a giddy weightlessness---one forgot where one was. One didn't seem to feel the wetness of the water; its total embrace knocked one's sensory systems out of kilter, and I found myself picturing the placid green fields of England which we had left only a few weeks before. We seemed to be dealing with ultimate things, and as light and breath returned, sprawled at an uncomfortable angle against a sheet winch, I found myself smiling: I believed, and believe today, I had found the answer to the scholarly question of why it was reported of the dying Falstaff that he "babbled of green fields." This was not such fun for Judy ' s mother, in the cabin just below us. The sea had roared down through the partly open cabin hatch and on down the companionway steps to flood the after cabin, where the vessel narrows toward the stem, so that Dot Wyatt jumped out of her bunk into sea water-surely the Bloodhound, with her daughter aboard, was on her way to the bottom of the ocean! The weight of the sea that climbed aboard had pressed down the yawl's stem so that all the water that went below sluiced around into the after cabin. There was no real danger; it was just a playful slap of the lion ' s paw. Columbus Went This Way The Genoese Christopher Columbus, taking his departure from the Canary Islands for his transAtlantic voyage of 1492, as we had for our voyage of 1952, encountered the same pileup of seas to leeward of the islands, where crosswinds and currents meet. The condensed version of his journal we have, made by Columbus's not uncritical friend Bartolome de las Casas, a bishop who became the first historian of the West Indies, records that Columbus ran into seas that came in over the bows of his ship Santa Maria , shortly after setting out from the Canaries on his epochal voyage. Evidently, the same toppling seas met by the Bloodhound pursued the plump Santa Maria, slapping her full stem and lifting it upward till her bows buried-that is, the bows of the ship's actual hull, not the lofty structure of the forecastle head. Once clear of this odd comer of the ocean world, the Santa
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Maria and her consorts , the caravels Nifia and Pinta, began to stretch their legs running before the fair winds of the Northeast Trades. Trade Wind sailing is a glorious experience; aboard Bloodhound we breakfasted on flying fish that landed on deck in the night watches and enjoyed the company of dolphins frolicking about our forward-plunging hull, evidently a great attraction to these warmblooded creatures. We may safely imagine Columbus's little squadron, driven by swelling, fullcut sails, beating out a frothy track across the sunlit seas while argosies of Trade Wind cloud sail by overhead, outpacing the rolling wooden hulls in the race to the unknown far shore. ¡ "The savor of the mornings was a great delight," Columbus noted when he was ten days into the voyage, in midSeptember 1492. That particular day, Sunday, 16 September, particularly pleased him; he went on to say that "nothing was lacking but to hear the nightingales, and the weather was like that in April in Andalusia." Later that day the fleet encountered the edge of the Sargasso Sea, a floating prairie of marine vegetation. This caused no particular alarm, since it had been discovered years before by Portuguese sailors, but it did stir up thoughts of land, possibly one of the mythical islands that crowded everyone's charts of the Atlantic, on the far shores of which China was thought to lie. But Columbus was bent on reaching the mainland which, as he noted, lay "further ahead." On 25 September Columbus's restive second-in-command, Martin Alonso Pinzon on the Pinta, sighted land, which others saw also when he pointed it out. But what he saw, and made others see, turned out to be a chimera of his own mind projected on a cloud bank on the horizon. In a world where people lived much more in the open than we do today, what happened in the sky was full of special meai:iings, practical and mystical. This was more true, perhaps, for Columbus than for anyone in the fleet-a fact that did not affect his impeccable navigation, but rather his sense of mission, his sense that a river of purpose was bearing him onward. He continued to revel in the voyage and, on the day following Martin Alonso's mistaken landfall, Columbus wrote: "The sea was like a river, the breezes sweet and soft." There was some unrest among the ships' crews in the next two weeks of the voyage, in which Pinzon may have played either a mediating or a stormy petrel role-or perhaps a bit of each. The ships ' people were understandably alarmed at the almost continuous fair winds, which would be head winds if they tried to return home the way they'd come. Columbus himself had run out his time for reaching China, or at least Japan. His answer to both these problems-with the crews and with his own reckoning-was to crack on sail and press forward. In this he was aided by some strong favoring winds as the fleet closed in on land, which the people at last knew was close ahead when they saw branches with fresh vegetation in the water. On Tuesday night, 11 October, as the ships rushed along on a wild moonlit ride, Columbus thought he saw a light dancing across the water. And four hours later, at 2AM on 12 October, Rodrigo de Triana, lookout aboard the Pinta, spotted the beaches of an island gleaming before them. In the morning, having stood off and on through the night, the Europeans landed on the island. They received an awed and joyous welcome from the local Taino people. Taino beliefs told them that the gods lived as they themselves did, on islands-cloud islands in the sky. The Taino had never seen SEA HISTORY 78, SUMMER 1996