Читать книгу The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library - Edward Wilson-Lee - Страница 21

The fleet that left from Cadiz on 9 May 1502 consisted of four ships, each of which would become a character in the months ahead. References to them can sometimes be hard to sort, given that those on the voyage called them by different names, some proper to the ships themselves, some related to their point of origin and some related to their crew. These four square-rigged caravels were: the Capitana, referred to as such because it was the flagship that carried Columbus and Hernando – its proper name, if it ever had one, is lost to history; the Vizcaína, from Biscay; the Santo or Gallega, from Galicia; and the Bermuda or Santiago de Palos, from Andalusia. Only three of the four ships could carry a full complement of supplies, as the Bermuda (captained by Bartholomew Columbus) drew so low in the water that waves washed on to the deck under full sail. A shipping manifest survives, giving a list of what was stocked for the crew of 140-odd men:

2000 arrobas of wine (c. 5,000 gallons)

800 quintals of hardtack (ship’s biscuit, c. 36 tons)

200 pork bellies

8 pipes of oil

8 tuns of vinegar

24 cows’ worth salt beef

960 fillets of salted mullet

720 other salted fish

2,000 wheels of cheese

12 cahizes of chickpeas (c. 340kg)

8 cahizes of beans (c. 225kg)

mustard

rocket

garlic

onions

4 fishing nets, plus lines and hooks

20 quintals of tallow (c. 900kg)

10 quintals of pitch (c. 450kg)

10,000 nails

20,000 carded goods (blankets, caulking oakum, hemp)

To these, listed roughly in descending order of volume, can be added a few things we deduce from later references: maps, nautical instruments, paper for logs and letters, and the Book of Prophecies. These swiftly dwindling supplies would be the only familiar things to populate Hernando’s world over the coming months and years, and they were slowly replaced with new and unheard-of things accumulated along the way. The superbly detailed account of this journey he later wrote was no longer simply reliant on the documents and reports he could gather: this was a record of personal experience, which, as the exquisite observations and interpretations show, laid new foundations of thought in the thirteen-year-old boy and would later shape the order he would bring to the world around him.1

If Hernando expected to leave the familiar behind after weighing anchor at Cadiz he must have been disappointed. The fleet stopped first at Santa Catalina then crossed in front of the Pillars of Hercules (also known as the Strait of Gibraltar) to north Africa, where they coasted along until they reached the town of Arcila, in modern Morocco. Hernando may have imagined himself on the verge of a chivalric encounter when approaching this place, as Columbus had intended to provide aid to the Portuguese besieged there, relieving them from the onslaught of the Barbary Moors. Sadly for Hernando, by the time they reached Arcila the siege had been lifted, and the whitewashed town rising up a hillside from behind its cove and sea wall may have seemed little different to the many settlements the Muslims had built along the facing coast of Spain. Hernando did briefly disembark to visit the town’s wounded captain, only to find himself surrounded by Portuguese relatives of Columbus’ first wife, Filipa Moniz. From Arcila the fleet crossed to the Canary Islands, passing Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, then docking at Maspalomas on Gran Canaria for the customary final resupply of wood and water, before pushing out into the open ocean. Finally, on the night of 24 May 1502, they set sail on the west-southwesterly course that by now Columbus had mastered.2

Experienced sailors of the fleet would have been pleased with the crossing, which at twenty-two days was the fastest westward passage Columbus had yet achieved. In just a few years the Admiral had, through his usual mixture of nautical skill and extraordinary luck, established sea routes between Europe and the Caribbean that were hard to better, and which would remain in use until the coming of steam. But the experience of three weeks without sight of land must have been an astonishing one for the novice Hernando. He would later write affectingly of the First Voyage’s experience of the featureless water, and though he may have been drawing on his father’s notes the description must also have brought back his own first crossing of 1502:

Because all the men on the fleet were new to this type of voyage and danger, and saw themselves so far from any help, they did not hold back from murmuring; and, seeing nothing but water and sky, they fixed on every sign that appeared to them, being men who were further from land than any had been till that time.

The moment of panic when considering the distance from land, unrelieved by any sight to break the flatness of the ocean, and the descent into paranoia, suspicion and conspiracy as the bored, scared and enervated mind scrabbles for something to interpret: these reactions are unavoidable among those at sea, and cannot have been entirely quelled by the fact of the routes being now well established and some of the crew experienced in Atlantic crossing. Columbus had, of course, also interpreted signs on his First Voyage – albeit in ways designed to confirm his pronouncements that they were nearing land – but Hernando would later recast his father as the exception to this rule, figuring his calm confidence in the threefold logic of his crossing (reason, authority, report) as what set him apart and allowed him to trust in his navigational measurements and projections rather than being pulled about by the promise of every flock of birds or knot of seaweed. Perhaps during his crossing Hernando first sensed the need for such a buttress against the paranoid imaginings of the mind at sea.3

The experienced sailors on Columbus’ voyages had little reason to share his confidence in his navigational measurements: in the absence of reliable methods for measuring longitude, the Admiral was almost entirely dependent on ‘dead reckoning’, using a compass, measurements of time and estimates of speed to chart the ship’s course. Though in retrospect Columbus was impressively accurate, the problems with this method meant there was no way to be completely sure how far west they were at any time: variable wind speeds and ocean currents made estimates of speed untrustworthy, and the hourglasses were not only often faulty but also relied on fallible human hands to turn them over at the right times. To make matters worse, even the compasses failed to work consistently during Atlantic crossings. Whereas Columbus and other European sailors would have been used to the compass needle pointing slightly to the east of the North Star, Polaris, the Admiral had noticed with alarm on the First Voyage that, after crossing a line approximately 100 leagues west of the Azores, the needle suddenly jumped a whole point, now falling to the west of Polaris. This phenomenon, incomprehensible without understanding magnetic variation and the difference between magnetic north and true north, deeply challenged contemporary understandings of how the world worked. While some evidence points towards knowledge of this magnetic variation before Columbus, scholars generally agree he was the first to record the phenomenon directly and to posit a cause, namely that the compass needle pointed not to the North Pole but to some other invisible point close to it. This explanation, the first to propose the concept of a magnetic north, is not, however, found in Columbus’ writings, but in Hernando’s biography of his father: indeed, as we have seen, Columbus believed at least as late as the Third Voyage that the variation of the compasses was caused by the bulging of a pear-shaped earth, and his theories hardly became less eccentric from that point on. As shall become clear, there may be good reasons to think this theory was first arrived at by Hernando – not Columbus – and only attributed to his father, one of the many revisions to Columbus’ ideas that later developments necessitated. Either way, the world as Hernando knew it tilted sideways as he crossed the Atlantic.4

Like the drawn-out process of leaving Europe, arriving on the western edge of the Atlantic may not have felt like the threshold crossing it was supposed to. Ocean faring was not an exact science, and once land was sighted the pilots had the complex task of orienting themselves before they could proceed to a known port. When the fleet spotted land on 15 June, they eventually recognised the island as one Columbus had sighted on the Second Voyage in 1493 but had not stopped at or named. They took the opportunity to name it now – ‘La Matinino’ or Martinica (modern-day Martinique) – and Hernando was witness to the strange transformation of the unknown to the familiar by the act of naming. From there they were able to follow the same dribble of islands that Columbus had on the Second Voyage, curving north and west like the side of a basin – Dominica, Guadeloupe, the Carib islands, Puerto Rico – up to Hispaniola.5

The tension must have been considerable when the Admiral’s four ships anchored off Santo Domingo on 29 June. On the one hand, Columbus was for the first time showing the chief town in the New World he had discovered to one of his sons, a place moreover named after the young boy’s grandfather. On the other hand, Hernando would probably have been aware the Monarchs, while encouraging Columbus to cross the ocean once more, had forbidden him to land on Hispaniola, fearing his presence there would reignite unrest among settlers for whom opposition to the Columbus brothers was still a rallying cry. Columbus had nevertheless decided the problems with the Bermuda, still not able to run under full sail without drawing dangerously low in the water, absolved him of this injunction and made it necessary for him to land at Santo Domingo to exchange the ship for a fitter one. While it is true that a fleet is held back by its weakest craft, and the Bermuda would certainly have struggled on the circumnavigation Columbus was planning if he found the passage to China, one suspects he could not resist the dramatic climax of seeking entry to Santo Domingo, either as triumphant founder or to be spurned by his own creation. In the event, the new governor Nicolás de Ovando – whom Hernando would have known from his days at the court of the Infante Juan, where Ovando was one of the Ten Choice Companions – refused to oblige Columbus in any way, and was even deaf to his pleas to be let into the harbour to shelter from the vast storm that was collecting over the Caribbean Sea. Even Job, Columbus would later write, would have pitied his state when the land for which he had sweated blood had closed its doors to him. Yet the local news was far more dire than even this: the Admiral would learn they had just missed another fleet of 28 ships departing on the return crossing, including a ship that carried Francisco de Bobadilla (who had unseated Columbus as governor), the leader of the 1498 rebellion Francisco Roldán, and a great many other settlers who had participated in the revolt against Columbus and his brothers. While the removal of Bobadilla by Ovando may have seemed a triumph, it may have given way to a greater catastrophe by allowing Columbus’ enemies to return in great numbers to the court and tell their side of the story in his absence, spurred on no doubt by the President of the Council of the Indies, Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, who was an implacable foe to Columbus. Ovando further ignored Columbus’ urgings to call this fleet back before the storm hit, though he might reasonably have suspected the motives for the Admiral’s advice. The hurricane – from the Taíno word for ‘storm’ – reached Hispaniola on Wednesday, 30 June.6

Hernando’s description of that night records how, in the immense darkness, their fleet was forced to separate, with each ship taking the measures its captain thought best, and each convinced the others had gone down in the storm. While the Capitana lay in close to shore to shelter in the lee of the island, the Bermuda ran out into the open sea to ride out the storm there. The captain of the Santo, returning from begging the obdurate Ovando to change his mind, was forced to cut loose the ship’s boat to prevent the swell from sending it like a battering ram into the hull. The crew of the Capitana gathered in the driving wind and rain to curse the Admiral, whom they blamed for their being turned away from Santo Domingo when even complete strangers would have been given merciful shelter. And at this moment Hernando presumes to record, in a move unusual not only for his biography but for the very practice of life-writing at the time, his father’s unspoken experience of these events, saying that in his insides Columbus felt the misery of his crewmates, and indeed felt it worse than them, as the ingratitude and insult were thrown at him in a place he had given to Spain as an addition to its honour and splendour, and moreover at such a fatal time. In the panic and confusion of the storm Hernando had begun, perhaps without thinking, to speak on his father’s behalf.7

Columbus’ fleet finally began to reassemble four days later, on Sunday, at the port of Azúa further down the coast of Hispaniola, but a series of reports would transform relief into a rather different feeling. It suggested the nautical mastery of Columbus’ crew that all four of his ships had survived the storm without significant damage, even the Bermuda, the crippled ship that Bartholomew Columbus had brought safely through the hurricane to the great admiration of the other sailors. This began to seem like something more than skill, however, when it was discovered that the fleet heading east had been almost entirely destroyed, with the loss of nearly all of the 28 ships, including the flagship carrying Bobadilla and Roldán and 200,000 gold ducats on its way to Spain. Columbus may have turned with satisfaction to a passage in the Book of Prophecies, which predicted that God would ‘force a commander to cease his insolent conduct’ (Daniel 11). Columbus’ luck was almost too perfect: rumours began to circulate that he had caused the storm by sorcery to wreak revenge on his enemies, and they seemed to receive confirmation when reports emerged that the only ship to reach Castile, and the least seaworthy craft at that, was the one carrying 4,000 gold ducats belonging to Columbus. Even Hernando, who usually resisted unworldly explanations for worldly events, saw the hand of God in preventing his father’s enemies from exchanging their false witness for a heroes’ welcome at court.8

Native Americans ride on a Manatee, 1621.

The fleet spent two weeks after the hurricane anchored in the port of Azúa, days given over to repairing damage to the ships and restoring the morale of the men, allowing them time to rest and to fish. But Hernando’s mind showed itself restless to interpret the new world in which he had found himself, and he records from this time two sights, one a source of pleasure and the other of astonishment. The first moment – of wonder – came when the Vizcaína’s boat began, unprompted, to jerk erratically across the water, moving first in one direction and then another as fast as a saetta (crossbow bolt). The ship’s crew must have thought themselves for a moment still in the sorcery of the storm. When the craft finally fell still, the mystery was revealed: an animal, ‘big as half a bed’, had become snagged on the bottom of the boat, and had dragged it around the bay as long as it was able. Hernando calls this creature a ‘schiavina’ because it looked like a cape, and indeed its modern name (manta ray) comes from the fact that it looks like a ‘mantle’ being drawn through the water. Hernando’s second observation was of another kind of ‘fish’ not known in Europe, which the Taíno called a manatee, the gentle sea-cow that has now been driven by industry from the Bay of Azúa but can still be found in the coasts and estuaries of the island. A story recorded by Peter Martyr even tells of a manatee tamed by a Taíno cacique, whom it would let ride on its back; but the manatee distrusted Christians, recognising them by their clothes, having once been mistreated by them. This maritime creature, Hernando noted, in many ways did not fit the definition of a fish: it was the size and shape of a calf and grazed like one in the shallows; moreover, it tasted like a calf – even better, because fattier – and resembled a cow more than a fish when cut open. Hernando was here following the classification system of Aristotelian zoology, which grouped animals on the basis of what they ate and how they reproduced. These physiological, anatomical and behavioural features lent weight, Hernando concluded, to those contemporary natural philosophers who believed that every land animal had its counterpart in the sea: the surface of the ocean, then, acted like an immense zoological mirror, with everything above water having its equivalent beneath.9

This theory was wrong of course, but the episodes of manatee and ray give a glimpse into the development of Hernando’s mind. While Columbus identified manatees as the ‘sirens’ of legend, noting with disappointment that they didn’t resemble human women, his apprentice Hernando is far more inductive, alert to the significance of what he saw before him. The mystery of the moving boat was a cautionary tale against relying on surface appearances, as it required awareness of the hidden depths for its explanation, and the pleasure this provoked is that of having a veil of ignorance torn away. The lesson seems to have been taken to heart as he observed the manatee: Hernando has not attributed to it fish-like qualities simply because it lives in the water, but has followed up the initial impression (that it looks like a calf) by studying its internal qualities (anatomy, taste) and its behaviour (grazing). While the grazing provided a false lead (there are, after all, plenty of grazing fish) the tissue and organ structure of the manatee allowed Hernando to reach the entirely correct conclusion that it was a mammal, even if there wasn’t yet a word for that. His speculation on the presence of this cow in the sea was wrong – the mystery of cetaceans’ return to the water would wait another 450 years for a solution – but it was not unreasonable: the manatee was evidence of some strange symmetry between land and sea, and as symmetry is one of nature’s most powerful organising forces Hernando understandably thought this pattern might extend further. Hernando’s father-and-son fishing trip was, then, reflexively absorbed into his obsession with order, in the manatee’s suggestion that land and sea animals could be put in two parallel and symmetrical lists.10

The fleet departed from Port Azúa on 14 July, sheltering from another storm at Port Brazil further west along the south coast of Hispaniola, before striking out for Jamaica, where they encountered a string of sandy islets. To these they gave the name Pozze – ‘puddles’ – because though the islets had no freshwater springs the crew still managed to get water on them by digging in the sand. Heading further west they encountered another island (Guanaja) where the Bermuda was able to capture a gigantic canoe, made of a single trunk but nonetheless eight feet wide and as long as a galley. It carried twenty-five men from the island, as well as women, children and baggage, all sheltering under a palm-leaf awning; though they did not know it at the time, the people they had encountered were the tribe that came to be known as the Mayans. To Columbus’ delight, the canoe contained a gazette of the products of the region, causing him to thank God that so much had been revealed to him at once. The canoe held

cotton blankets,

sleeveless shirts,

loincloths,

shawls – all in different colours and designs;

long wooden swords with flint edges;

hatchets and

hawksbells – made of copper, with crucibles for melting;

roots,

grains,

chica (maize wine),

mandorle (cocoa beans)

Again, in describing this encounter it seems Hernando cannot help attempting to impose some order on what he is seeing, something he achieves by sorting the sights into the common and the unique. So the palm-leaf awning of the canoe is very like the felzi or awning of a gondola in Venice, the shawls worn by the women are similar to the veils worn by Moorish women in Granada and the maize wine is like the beer drunk in England. (Some of these ‘shawls’ may, in fact, have been made of bark cloth and inscribed with Mayan characters, a form of book but too alien for Hernando to recognise as such.) On the other hand, there are many things in the canoe for which he can find no equivalent, such as the ponchos and swords, and in these instances he simply resorts to description.11

A page showing an eclipse from the Mayan Dresden Codex.

But the most interesting discovery seems to fit neither category. While the mandorle or cocoa beans were not remarkable in themselves, Hernando notes his surprise that when one of the men from the canoe dropped a bean, he forgot his fear of the Europeans at once and (in a phrase recalling the legend of Perseus), scrabbled around the deck after it as if he had lost an eye. In an astonishing moment of insight, Hernando realises the beans must serve as currency for these people: after all, what else is a currency if not an object to which we assign a value greater than its intrinsic worth, in order that it can serve as a medium of exchange? Though the great value placed upon these beans by the people of Guanaja helps Hernando to think in the abstract about monetary systems, he also sees in it a more general lesson about human nature, in which we forget the merely symbolic value of currency and come to value it more than our own physical safety. This, Hernando remarks laconically, is called greed.12

What is in many ways more fascinating than Hernando’s observations as he travels through these islands – manatees in Azúa, freshwater puddles in the Pozze, chocolate money in Guanaja – is the principle of organisation that is hidden from even Hernando himself: every island, every landing point, is defined for him and his readers by the unique lesson it has to teach the explorers. The idea that one would record what is distinct about a place seems so obvious, so natural, we might easily miss the fact that doing so belongs within a particular, and particularly European, tradition of thought. In part this was a practice made necessary by the lack of accurate measures of longitude: if a landmass could not be assigned specific spatial coordinates, it could only be identified by its unique human or landscape features. But this had unintended consequences: if each island must present a new experience to the observer, the map becomes little more than a record of the order in which the world is revealed to that observer.

This habit had taken up residence in the European mind at least as long ago as Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus’ ten-year homeward voyage from Troy takes him to a succession of islands, and a distinct lesson is learned on each: the dangers of self-indulgence and oblivion on the Island of the Lotus Eaters, the dangers of greed on Circe’s island, the threat posed by carnal enjoyment on Callisto’s island, and so on. The tendency can also be seen in medieval maps, where the remote regions of the world were filled in with dog-headed men, cannibals and wonders, never the same thing twice as the drive was less to describe a place and more to define it, to give it a unique property that could then be listed and ordered. The habit would remain, as we will see, deeply embedded in European thought, with narratives from Rabelais’ Quart livre to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels featuring a sequence of islands, each of which poses a distinct challenge. This was not limited to the stories Europe told about the world. Several projects were begun in the 1520s (one with links to Hernando) to compile Isolarii, geographical encyclopedias of every island in the world – even down, as Hernando would later note, to the Pozze sandbars off Jamaica – noting the distinct features of each. The desire to order the world by splitting it into distinct landmasses that could then be put in particular orders was so strong that imaginary islands were often created, in explorers’ narratives and in the most famous Isolario (by Bordone), to play host to particular experiences. The physical world, threatening to the European mind in its incomprehensible complexity, becomes more manageable when it is an archipelago of different experiences that can be put in order.13

The importance of this underlying order becomes apparent in the pains Hernando took to correct a later map that had reproduced the Guanaja islands twice – treating their visit of 1502 and a subsequent sighting of the islands as evidence of two separate landmasses. The problem this created was not simply that it deprived Columbus of the honour due him as the sole discoverer of the Guanajas (he was, after all, ‘discoverer’ of hundreds of islands), nor even the usefulness of a map as a navigational chart, as until the development of accurate observations of longitude these maps were of limited use in that respect anyway. Rather, the danger of duplicate islands was that they threw into doubt the entire system of organisation, creating the prospect of a map filled with infinite shadow islands, each one produced by a different person’s experience of them.14

Despite the great wealth contained in the canoe from Guanaja, Columbus was determined not to be distracted from continuing in his search for a passage through to the East. They parted from these traders, nevertheless ‘detaining’ one of them, an old man named Yumbe who acted as translator in the coming months and who seems to have become a firm favourite with the crew. Their ultimate destination was the region north of Paria, which Columbus had visited on the Third Voyage, where he felt sure the passage to the East would be found. Finding this region, however, was easier said than done, and after reaching the mainland they were forced simply to turn south and coast along ‘like a man groping in the dark’, stopping only to note the local particularities: Caixinas Point, named after the Paradise plum trees that grew plentifully there, where the locals wore armour of woven cotton capable of deflecting a sword stroke; the Costa de las Orejas, where the dark-skinned people ate raw fish and flesh, wore no clothes, painted themselves with ‘Moorish’ designs as well as lions and turreted castles, and stretched holes in their earlobes (orejas) large enough to fit a hen’s egg; Cape Gracias a Dios, which they were thankful to reach after progressing just seventy leagues in sixty days, where the land curved south and the winds turned favourable; the Rio de los Desastres, where there were canes as thick as a man’s thigh and where a ship’s boat was pulled under by a current.

At Cariay, ‘verdant as a field of basil’, and its adjacent island of Quiribiri, the fleet first began to encounter the guanín pendants that Columbus had seen around Paria: golden discs polished to such a sheen the sailors took to referring to them as ‘mirrors’. In an attempt to win the favour of this people, Columbus ordered presents be distributed among them, only to find them resistant to such obligation; the fleet found all of the gifts on the beach the next morning, tied into a bundle. The following day the natives of Cariay presented them with two young girls of eight and fourteen, naked but covered in guanín pendants. While Columbus’ memory of the meeting with these girls was vile in the extreme – despite their youth, he would later write, the most practised whores could not have been more experienced at enticement – this is likely to have been more a projection of the lustful desires of the adult sailors; Hernando, with the bashful nobility of adolescent sexuality, recalled only their braveness among strangers. Columbus clothed them and sent them back to their tribe. Bartholomew captured two natives to act as guides as they progressed down the coast, in response to which the natives sent two wild pigs (peccaries) as ransom, but Columbus insisted on paying for the pigs with gifts. To add to the considerable confusion, one of the peccaries got loose on deck and careened around, only to be attacked by a local cat-like creature that one of the sailors had wounded and brought aboard. Hernando concluded from the encounter between the wild pig and the cat that the cats must be used as hunting animals much like greyhounds in Spain, though it becomes clear from his description the ‘cat’ was actually a spider monkey.15

During the painfully slow passage along this coast Hernando was drawn even closer to his father by the fever that struck them both down. Columbus later wrote that the suffering of his son, only thirteen at the time, racked his soul, which sank to see Hernando so fatigued. This despair was transformed to boundless feelings of parental pride, however, as the Admiral watched the boy from his sickbed on deck: despite his illness the young Hernando worked so hard that it gave spirit to the other men, and tended to the comfort of his father all the while. It was as if, Columbus said of his son, he had been a sailor for eighty years. This was the kind of intuitive nautical genius Columbus only ever attributed to himself, a testimony of shared character that was cherished as the centrepiece of Hernando’s self-image for all his life.16

From Cariay onwards the avalanche of local customs and curiosities is simplified into records of the steadily increasing numbers of gold guanín mirrors the fleet was able to acquire for very little in return, a sure sign for Columbus that they were nearing the gold-rich region for which he had been searching since 1492 and which might also be the beginnings of the realm of Cathay. At Cerabora among the narrow channels a gold mirror weighing ten ducats (paid – three hawks’ bells); at Alburema, a mirror weighing fourteen ducats and an eagle pendant of twenty-two, whose owners were taken captive after they refused to trade; at Alburema, the herb-spitting, horn-blowing inhabitants were eventually persuaded to trade for sixteen mirrors weighing in at a total of 150 ducats; and at Cateba they took twenty mirrors for a few hawk’s bells apiece. Also at Cateba they found the first evidence of masonry, in the form of a massive wall made of stone and lime mortar, and further on they encountered the estuary of Veragua, where five villages of the prettiest houses imaginable were surrounded by cultivated fields.

Then, just when it seemed they must be nearing their Promised Land, the trail went cold. Beyond Veragua the weather turned against them, forcing them eventually to put into a little inlet they named Retrete, where the opening pleasantries with local residents soon turned to hostility. Columbus was able to keep them away from the ships with cannon blasts, bringing to pass the scene foretold in the Book, in which

the inhabitants of the islands are stupefied before you, and all their kings are shocked by the thunder (Ezekiel 28).

Despite the natives having an appearance attractive to Hernando, the shore was littered with giant lizard-like crocodiles that smelled ‘as though all the musk in the world had been gathered’ and which would eat any man they found sleeping. With the signs clearly becoming less favourable Columbus reluctantly decided they should return to the region of Veragua where the trail was last warm, but this volte-face came too late. The climate had turned against them and they were stranded aboard their ships amid thunder and lightning so intense the sailors closed their eyes, feeling the ships sinking beneath them and the sky collapsing upon them. In the sleeplessness caused by constant rain, Hernando noted they began to hear phantom distress signals from the other ships, and the endless parade of fears rose once again into their minds: fire from the lightning, wind and waves that might capsize the ship, reefs and rocks along unfamiliar coastline. On 13 December the horror increased when a waterspout arose and passed between two of the ships, in a column as thick as a drum and churning like a whirlwind. During the storm they were separated from the Vizcaína, and though they managed to find her a few days later, they had in the meantime been surrounded by sharks, an encounter that allowed Hernando to describe the sight of a bite from one of these creatures and to record they found, in the sharks’ bellies, a whole turtle and the head of another shark. This might seem impossible, Hernando observed, were it not for the fact that the shark’s mouth reaches from the tip of its olive-shaped head almost down to its stomach. They caught and ate a number of the sharks, which provided a welcome relief from the worm-riddled porridge made of ship’s biscuit. The humidity had made it so thick with insects, Hernando writes, that he saw many of the crew wait until after nightfall to eat so they didn’t have to face the sight of their food; they had long since given up trying to pick the worms out, as this simply meant throwing away one’s dinner.17

On the Feast of the Epiphany, 6 January, the fleet finally regained the position they had held two months earlier, among the estuary mouths in Veragua. The name of Belén (Bethlehem) was chosen for the river called Yebra in the local tongue, in honour of the day on which the Magi found Jesus. While the river mouth provided some protection from the storms that continued to trouble the open ocean, it was not without its own dangers. The ships were barely able to enter the shallow inlet, which was no more than four fathoms deep, and although safe from the waves once inside they soon realised they faced a threat from another direction. Shortly after they arrived in Belén a flash flood swept down from the mountains a little way inland, snapped loose one of the Capitana