‘Well, that created a storm, but the arrogant Colón brothers, and they were Italians, mind you, refused to obey him, and again Bobadilla was all patience, but on the next day he had the notary read his third letter, which gave him power over all military establishments in the island, and under this edict he began to assemble power about him. But it was the reading of his fourth letter, on the next day, that gave him the power to strangle the three Colóns. Again I hear the notary’s voice, for its message affected me personally: “Our loyal and trusted friend and brother, Francisco de Bobadilla, shall have the power to pay all loyal subjects who have wages coming to them but have had them sequestered.” You can see what this meant. Men like me would now get, immediately that we applied to Bobadilla, all the money that the Great Admiral had kept from us. Naturally, we became outspoken supporters of Bobadilla, and when Colón finally returned to the town, all were against him.
‘And then came the crushing blow, for with this support behind him, Bobadilla revealed the most powerful letter of all, the one which gave him complete power to make whatever changes in administration and arrests he saw fit. And before its words had died in the tropic air, the three Colón brothers were grabbed by Bobadilla’s police, thrown into jail, and forced to undergo the indignity of holding out their arms and ankles while the blacksmith fastened iron fetters about their extremities, with heavy chains linking wrist to wrist, leg to leg.’
At this point the licenciado interrupted: ‘You mean like common criminals? Like robbers or smugglers or murderers?’
‘The same.’
‘Not the admiral?’
‘Especially the admiral, and in that condition the three were unceremoniously dragged down to the waterfront, tossed onto a small ship, and sent off to trial in Spain.’
Here Carvajal paused, looked at his interrogator and made a cruel and telling point: ‘I was commissioned by Bobadilla to accompany the Colóns to Spain and see that they were delivered over to the proper authorities, and on my own responsibility, as soon as the ship had left the shadow of Española, I took into the hold, where the Great Admiral huddled against the rough planking, my blacksmith, and I said: “Admiral, it’s not proper that a man of your dignity, a viceroy no less, should remain in chains during this long voyage. Pedro here will strike them off and we’ll replace them just as we arrive in Sevilla.” But with difficulty Colón rose and said: “These chains were thrown upon me by the king and queen, and I shall wear them until they personally give the order to have them removed,” and he refused to allow Pedro to touch them. When he sank once more onto the floor, his chains clanking as he did so, tears came to my eyes, and when he saw them he told me: “You do well to weep, Don Paolo, for you see the man whose courage alone gave Spain all of Japan and China, wealth unmeasured for all time. And his reward?” He held up his manacled arms and cried: “These chains! This great indignity!”
‘I visited with him often on that long trip and in time I became accustomed to seeing him in his bondage, for he wore the chains as a badge of honor, and I developed immense respect for this fighting hero. One thing, however, perplexed me, and still does.’
Ocampo, much moved by this portrait of a stubborn hero fighting the world, said: ‘Don Paolo, you speak of him as if you loved him.’ And Carvajal reflected on this before answering, which he did in slow, carefully chosen words: ‘Love is not the word you’d use for him, because lovable he was not.’ He stopped, then started brightly, as if opening a wholly new conversation: ‘One noon when I took him his bowl of gruel he pushed it away and said almost pleadingly, as if eager to convince me who needed no convincing: “They never understood, Carvajal. They didn’t send me to serve as viceroy in Sicily, settled for a thousand years with roads and men who could reason. No! I was sent to where no man had ever been before.” And I protested: “The Indians were here, of course,” and he snapped: “I was speaking of Christians.” ’
When this revealing narrative ended, Ocampo and Carvajal sat in silence, staring at the floor as if afraid to look at each other and acknowledge the terrible wrong that had been done Cristóbal Colón, discoverer of new worlds, new opportunities and new ideas. After a while, Ocampo said: ‘Strange how fate teases us. As I prepared the final pages of my report last night I was haunted by what had happened to Bobadilla when he finished his report back in 1500. It was voluminous and supported by sheaves of documents and individual statements. They tell me that it took three men to carry the whole affair onto the ship bound for Spain. But the ship had barely left harbor, when it sank, taking Bobadilla and all his papers to the bottom of the sea. That might have been God’s judgment on the whole sad affair.’
Before Ocampo left Española with his amazingly even-handed report on the behaviors and misbehaviors of the Great Admiral, he had two additional interviews, each accidental, each compelling. The first involved an ordinary sailor, an illiterate, who brought with him his priest, who could read, a man Ocampo had not seen before. And the sailor said: ‘I heard people were telling you bad things about the admiral and I was afraid you might take them as truth. I wanted you to hear the real truth. Colón was a sailor, first and last, and a better never sailed. I was with him on two voyages, but the one I’ll never forget, nor none of us, was the last, after he got out of his chains, that was.’
‘No one has told me of that,’ the licenciado said, leaning forward as he always did when he suspected that something he was about to hear might be of more than usual interest, and the sailor said: ‘It was a disappointing sail. Nothing new in the little islands, but when we reached the shores of Asia‖ we did find some gold but hardly worth the trip, and we lost a lot of men in the fighting.’
It was a dreary tale of meaningless forays and repeated disappointments, and Ocampo, losing interest, began to fidget and seek some way to get the sailor out of there, but then the narrative caught fire, and in its blaze the licenciado saw the ghostly figure of the real admiral: ‘On the way back to this island, with little to show for our troubles, we were seized by violent storms that seemed never to relent and that punished our two old and creaking ships, driving their timbers apart and allowing great waves to wash aboard. Only by the most diligent effort did the admiral keep us afloat and together, and in this pitiful condition we staggered onto the north shore of Jamaica, an island we had discovered years earlier on his second trip, but still settled only by Indians. There we beached the two ships and built over them a kind of roof to protect us from sun and storms. Dreadful situation, for we now had no means of sailing on, since the ships were beyond repair. What made it worse, there was no way by which anyone on Española could know that we had been marooned or where we were, and each morning when we woke someone would lament: “How will we ever get out of here?” and we could think of no way.
‘To tell the truth, Excellency, I thought we’d perish there and that no one would ever know how we died, for no ships would come to Jamaica.’
‘How did you escape?’ Ocampo asked, and the sailor said: ‘Only through the courage of the admiral. He never flagged. Each new day he’d assure us: “Somehow we’ll be rescued,” and when we were starving, he promised: “Somehow we’ll find food,” and he led us in making clever traps for catching fish. Also, he himself tested new kinds of fruit to determine which were safe to eat. He was tireless in driving us to build better huts.’
‘Huts! How many days were you marooned on Jamaica?’
Aghast, the sailor simply stared at his interrogator: ‘Days? Excellency, it was months, June of one year to March of another. Excellency, we were at the end of the world. Nobody could know where we were. In Española they thought we were dead, and some said “Good riddance,” because the admiral could be a difficult man, especially where young nobles were concerned.’ Wiping his nose with his left forefinger, he leaned close to Ocampo and said: ‘Excellency, we were all dead. The last months was special hell.’
‘How?’
The sailor hesitated, uncertain as to how to explain that terrible isolati
on and loss of hope. Then he cleared his throat: ‘If ever you get into trouble, you’ll need no friend more trustworthy than Diego Méndez,’ and he spoke the name with such reverence that Ocampo was driven to ask: ‘And who was he?’ and the sailor said: ‘Our savior,’ and Ocampo said: ‘Tell me.’
The sailor did not answer directly, for he had important things to say about Méndez and did not propose to be diverted: ‘Most young noblemen who shipped with us were swine, especially when handing out orders to the likes of me, but Méndez once said to me: “Those leaks have to be caulked, so let’s caulk them,” and in the worst days, when we seemed about to sink, he worked the pumps as long as any of us.’
Ocampo nodded in respect for an unknown young nobleman who seemed to have been a paragon, and what the seaman said next proved that he was.
‘Méndez was a man without fear. When the rest of us failed to invent some way of escape, he built a canoe. You wouldn’t cross a river in it. And he told us: “I will sail it to Española and bring back a ship to save you,” and in this little craft he did just that. Storms, waves, bad luck on the first try, threatened by Indians, this man Méndez paddled on in his little canoe.’ The sailor stopped, crossed himself, and said: “With God’s aid he saved us after our nine months on Jamaica, where we had been sure we would die unknown and unmissed.’ He paused again, wiped his eyes, and concluded: ‘The Great Admiral, saved from an unmarked grave by the heroism of one man. Because Méndez did paddle all the way to this island and he did find a big ship and he did sail back to Jamaica, where, when he landed, Admiral Colón and the rest of us embraced him.’
In the silence that followed, Ocampo looked not at the sailor, whose emotions overwhelmed him, but at the priest the sailor had brought with him: ‘And what brings you here, Father?’
‘While the Great Admiral was marooned on Jamaica, convinced that he would die there without ever reporting on his last voyage, he wrote a very long letter to the king and queen, telling them of his adventures and reviewing the high points of his later life. It was the kind of testimonial a good man imagines writing when he is dying and wants his children to know the outlines of his career, a truly remarkable document.’
‘Why do you tell me?’ Ocampo asked, and the priest said: ‘Because a copy of that letter, signed 7 July 1503, was left by Colón when he returned to this island from Jamaica, and I think that before you write your report you ought to know what Colón at the door of death thought about himself. When all the brawling about his errors here and there are forgotten, this is the Cristóbal Colón who will live.’
The priest took a breath and began by giving in his own words an account of an unbelievable affront thrown in Colón’s face by the governor of Santo Domingo, the port at which he himself had once been viceroy: ‘Seeing that a storm we call the hurricano was brewing, Colón sent a message ashore advising two actions: “Let me come into your harbor and anchor. Do not dispatch to Spain the fleet that appears ready to sail.” Both suggestions were denied, probably because the acting viceroy feared he might lose his sinecure if Colón came ashore. The result? Listen to the Great Admiral’s report of that hurricane.’
The document the priest read covered many pages, and in reading, he skipped long portions, but the words of certain passages reverberated in the air of Ocampo’s office like the ringing of some fine bronze bell:
‘The tempest was terrible throughout the night, all the ships were separated, and each one driven to the last extremity, without hope of anything but death; each of them also looked upon the loss of the rest as a matter of certainty. What man was ever born, excepting not even Job, who would not have been ready to die of despair at finding himself as I then was, yet refused permission either to land or put into the harbor which I by God’s mercy had gained for Spain …
‘The distress of my son grieved me to the soul, and the more when I considered his tender age, for he was but thirteen years old, and he enduring so much for so long a time. Our Lord, however, gave him such strength that he encouraged the others, and he worked as if he had been at sea for eighty years …
‘My brother was also in the ship that was in the worst condition and the most exposed to danger; and my grief on this account was the greater because I had brought him with me against his will. I have gained no profit from my twenty years of service and toil and danger, and at this moment I do not possess a roof in Spain that I can call my own; if I wish to eat or sleep, I have nowhere to go but some inn or tavern, and most times lack wherewithal to pay the bill …
‘Let those who are accustomed to slander and aspersion ask, while they sit in the security of their home: “Why didst thou do so-and-so under such circumstances?” I wish they were now embarked upon this voyage. Verily I believe that another journey of another kind awaits them, if there is any reliance to be placed upon our Holy Faith …
‘When I discovered the Indies, I said that they composed the richest lordship in the world. I told you of gold and pearls and precious stones, of spices and the traffic that might be carried on in them. But because these riches were not forthcoming at once I was abused. That punishment now causes me to refrain from relating anything but what the natives tell me. But in this land of Veraguasa I have seen more signs of gold in the first two days than in Española in four years, and that the lands of this country cannot be more beautiful or better tilled …
‘For seven years I was at your royal court, and everyone to whom my enterprise was mentioned treated it as ridiculous, but now there is not a man, including even tailors, who does not beg you to be allowed to go discovering. There is reason to believe that they make the voyage only for plunder, and the licenses they get are to the great disparagement of my honor and the detriment to the undertaking itself …’
At the phrase about even tailors begging for licenses to explore, Ocampo snapped his fingers and said: ‘He’s right, I’ve seen them. A score of ne’er-do-wells who couldn’t sail a ship or build a shed presuming when they got here to follow in Colón’s footsteps.’ And the priest waited before reading the solemn, pleading close to this remarkable document written at the edge of the grave:
‘I was twenty-eight years old when I came to Your Highnesses’ service, and now I have not a hair upon me that is not gray; my body is infirm and all that was left to me, as well as my brothers, has been taken away and sold, even to the cloak that I wore, to my great dishonor. I hope that was done without your Royal knowledge …
‘I am ruined. Hitherto I have wept for others. May Heaven now have mercy upon me, and may the earth weep. With regard to temporal things, I have not even a blancab to offer for prayers, and here in the Indies, I am unable to follow the prescribed forms of religion. Solitary in my troubles, sick and in daily expectation of death, surrounded by millions of hostile savages full of cruelty, I fear my soul will be forgotten if it be separated from my body in this alien land. Weep for me, whoever has charity, truth and justice …
‘I did not come out on this voyage to gain to myself honor or wealth; all hope for such was dead. I came to Your Highnesses with honest purpose of heart and zeal in Your cause. I humbly beseech You that if it please God to rescue me from this place, you will graciously sanction my pilgrimage to Rome and other Holy Places …’c
With that cry from the depths, the priest finished, and for a while no one spoke, for the words so clearly evoked the embattled spirit of Cristóbal Colón that his presence seemed to have entered the room, but then Ocampo broke into a quiet laugh: ‘Extraordinary, really! Here is the poor man, marooned, facing death, but he still writes first about his brother and a son. He was Colón to the end.’ Then, abruptly, he reached for the letter and read aloud the reference to the pilgrimage: ‘Here he is, not home from one disastrous trip and already planning another.’ He tapped the letter, leaned back, and looked up at the ceiling: ‘I can see him now. Him and his two brothers and his two sons and six or seven nephews, trailing as pilgrims all over Europe and the Holy Lands and complaining about everything.’ And h
e handed back the letter and thanked both the sailor and the priest.
On the night before he left Española, with his documents in order and his conclusions about the Great Admiral carefully phrased, Ocampo was visited in his quarters once again by Señora Pimentel, whom he hurried forward to greet: ‘This is an elegant way to end my long visit. You do me honor, but if I’m any judge, you want to confide some last-minute revelation.’
‘Yes. I perceive that your report and the welfare of the numerous Colón hangers-on who are laying claims to whatever fortune he left and his titles will depend on what you say about Bobadilla, so I think you should know two additional facts. When Colón arrived here in 1502 at the start of his final voyage, he arrived with his four little ships off our anchorage out there, and Bobadilla, eager to keep Colón from coming ashore to contest his authority, refused to allow him entrance to our harbor.
‘My husband, a stalwart man, protested: “Excellency, a storm is brewing, and if it develops into a hurricane, his ships really must be allowed entrance.” But the viceroy was adamant, and poor Colón was forced to remain outside, and that very night, as my husband had warned, a tremendous hurricane struck. Have you ever seen one of our hurricanes? They can be terrifying.
‘And what do you suppose happened? A major fleet headed for Spain, for which Bobadilla was responsible, was torn apart by the storm—thirty vessels in peril and thirteen lost with five hundred sailors and all their cargoes.’
‘What happened to Colón’s little four?’
‘Great navigator that he was, he maneuvered his ships majestically, right in the teeth of the hurricane, and saved every one. But even after that display, Bobadilla refused to allow him entrance, so off Colón sailed to his final burst of exploration. He found nothing, and ended on the beach in Jamaica, no gold, no ships, no hopes, no assignments in the future, with death staring him in the face each day for nearly a year.’