Mariner, do not ask whose tomb this may be, but go with good fortune: I wish you a kinder sea.
—PLATO
On a visit to Castile, after the Higuey campaign, I went to Valladolid to receive my Knighthood from King Ferdinand. I took time to meet the two men who, though opposed in their opinions, had given us a New World. Most interesting, both were foreigners: one a Genoese, the other Florentine. Oh, we’d supplied them and given them ships but it was they who took the risks: one to discover, the other to clarify. As a result one was vilified and left to feel failure, while the other was given glory beyond even his expectation. They were unique men, needless to say, and the world has yet to find many like them.
I met the first in a monastery. He’d retired there with his youngest son, Fernando, who was writing his father’s biography while battling the law to recover the rights taken from the old man. The Crown had reneged on its obligations to my mentor, Cristofero Columbus. The once ‘Admiral of the Ocean Sea’ was sick and wasted by then, reduced to a tortured soul embittered by what had been done him. It is difficult to write this, to tell this story of a man whom I worshipped for his vision, yet pitied his lack of practicality. In a way it is my own story as well.
One cannot say Columbus was not arrogant. It was that characteristic which, against so many odds, brought him to a new world. And that same flaw led to certain exaggerations of his discoveries in his reports to the Crown. He spoke of mountains of gold when there were but grains, of great civilizations which were mere native tribes, and, of course, he insisted he’d found the edge of the East when all know now he was wrong. Still, he was given what first had been promised him: the titles of Admiral over those waters and Viceroy in perpetuity to all his newly discovered lands; and ten percent of their revenues.
But that hubris which gave him such power made him a naive leader and others — mercenaries, courtiers and priests far more devious than he — plotted their own advancements. When Columbus insisted all men should contribute to the construction of the colony through manual labour, the nobles’ sons simply refused and the priests made clear it was beneath their dignity. He fought back. Demanded their work. There was a revolt. Several peers either died or were imprisoned. The innocent Genoese thought he’d done the right thing in bringing these troubles under control. Yet he’d only succeeded in making powerful enemies at the Court in Spain. Vengeful of this commoner’s treatment of their precious second sons, they acted.
A new Viceroy, Francisco de Bobadilla was named without Columbus’ knowledge and, when that fat bastard had landed with armoured troops and a writ rescinding the ‘Capitulations of Santa Fe’, the promise through which Columbus held power, the great man was sent in chains back to Spain. He was imprisoned, I am sure, to teach him humility and when he was released he emerged a changed man: sick, discouraged, reduced, embittered ... and forever refused his rightful remuneration.
When I met him it was at his request. He knew I had acquired the Governorships of Higuey and San Juan Bautista and, at that time, was favoured at Court. He thought I could do something for him. I recall our brief meeting quite clearly.
The monastery was a poor one, set on a rise above the ocean behind a long, sand beach. It was the very place where Columbus had housed himself and his family while he’d spent the years importuning the Portuguese and then Queen Isabella to finance his voyage of dreams. In a simple building of sandstone walls which surrounded a little courtyard, his small suite of rooms peered out through two windows. The rooms themselves were quite plain with only the roughest of furnishings, and in the second room were a rope bed and thin straw mattress. The rooms were dim; the only light coming through the narrow windows. The walls were bare but for a cross above his bed, and a well-used chart on a rough table beside him.
“You are good to see me, Don Juan,” he said softly, his voice matching the arid rooms he inhabited.
“Admiral, it is I who should be grateful to once again have your hand in mine!” I spoke airily, full of myself with my new positions, as I shook his parchment-dry hand.
“I no longer own that title, my friend. I’ve been discharged. Fernando here fights in the courts for me and Diego has installed himself with those in power.”
“I noticed him at Court. It was he who delivered me your note.”
“He’s a bright young man, as is Fernando.” Columbus smiled as he looked toward his youngest. “Fernando here is wrapped in the law’s tentacles. They seem endless. I see no way through them. I do have hopes for Diego, however. He has made certain connections, as you say, at the Royal Court. Even if I am refused my rights, he will come to be something. Just watch.”
“Of course he will,” I said in a voice even now I cringe at recalling. Its patronizing tone forced the intimacy of our meeting into another, more formal sphere.
“You’ve travelled a long way at my request. I thank you again, Don Juan,” Columbus said, appropriately subdued.
“Strange, isn’t it, that I should be given a title while you are relieved of yours?”
Columbus’ eyes widened; his mouth was hard set; his face formed the lines of that bitter resentment which was making him sick.
“And from what I hear of this character, Vespucci, he’s trying to take even my repute! He claims to be the actual founder does he not?” Columbus’ whisper had pushed to a furious rasp, then rough coughing. His son rushed across the room giving him watered wine to ease his throat.
“You see what I’ve become,” he said, the cough subsiding. “A shell, a nothing. They have reduced me, and now wish to eradicate me from the place in history I’ve earned.”
“I don’t think Vespucci is claiming anything, Admiral. He seems to be simply clarifying your discoveries with his maps.”
“You’ve read his letters?”
“Yes. He claims what you found is a continent.”
“But not the Indies!” Columbus snarled, taking a further sip of his watered wine.
“As I understand his writings, yes.”
“These new charts of his, they show something huge.”
“That river, just west of the Pope’s ‘inter caetera’ line, he claims, as you did, to contain so much fresh water emptying into the sea it must mean a continent upstream.”
“And that continent is the Indies! He says otherwise and so robs me of my discovery!”
“But remember, Vespucci works for the Medicis family. They control the banking which controls trade with Cathay. They want no new route to the east; thus his conclusions reflect their requirements.”
“Your interpretation, Don Juan. Others believe he’s found a true New World.” Columbus revealed his dejection. He said little more, so crestfallen was he at the turn of events brought about by Vespucci. We talked a while longer: small things as two old friends will do. Soon after he fell asleep. I rose to depart but was halted by a word from Fernando.
“Don Juan, my father has something he asked me to give you.” He produced a parchment which he presented to me as though it were the most valuable bauble in Spain. “He wants you to give this to the King. Queen Isabella is dead but surely the King will keep faith with my father.”
“I have little access,” I said quietly. “A simple knight amidst nobles. Why not give this to Diego? Have him deliver it. Your father said he’s worked his way into their ranks.”
“Alas, to feed his own mouth. I’m not so sure my brother wishes my father to regain anything, unless it comes under my brother’s possession.”
“Surely that cannot be true.”
“Will you take the missive?”
“Of course, I will try.”
“That is all I ask.”
“May I read it?”
“Of course.”
I untied the ribbon which held the parchment, as yet without a seal, and read, skimming the parts most dense with vitriol, finding the missive’s central theme.
It is now seventeen years since I came to serve these princes with the Enterprise of the Indies. They made me pass eight of them in discussion, and at the end rejected it as a thing of jest. Nevertheless I persisted therein ... Over there I have placed under their sovereignty more land than there is in Africa and Europe, and more than seventeen hundred islands ... In seven years I, by divine will, made that conquest. At a time when I was entitled to expect rewards and retirement I was incontinently arrested and sent home loaded with chains ... The accusation was brought out of malice on the basis of charges made by civilians who had revolted and wished to take possession on the land ... I beg your Graces, with the zeal of faithful Christians in whom their Highnesses have confidence, to read all my papers, and to consider how I, who came from so far to serve these princes ... now at the end of my days have been despoiled of my honour and my property without cause, where is neither justice nor mercy.
It was a desperate appeal. It made me aware of how much a man might be reduced by those things he cannot comprehend. I never thought of myself at the time. It seems I have ever been short-sighted. Instead, I promised to deliver the letter. Later, I gave it to Diego. He accepted it doubtfully and I made an enemy in the giving. If only I’d listened more carefully to young Fernando and learned more about his brother. Instead, I ignored reality and was conquered by Diego Colon who, as his brother had told me, was a selfish, sneaking, suckling villain.
Columbus died the next year: broken and in despair, his life a disappointment. And the world then lost some of its glory, and was somehow reduced.
Not long after I had presented Diego Colon with his father’s appeal, I attended a gathering in the house of Don Pedro Nunez de Guzman, my sponsor, where I met the man to whom Columbus had been so opposed ... the map maker Vespucci or, as he termed himself then at the summit of his status, ‘Americus Vespucius,’ which makes quite clear in itself the nature of the man.
He had completed his exploratory voyages by then, and received all the information and charts given him by the Casa de la Contratacion, which controlled everything about the New World. From these sources Vespucci had created an opus entitled “Mundus Novus”. His letters were addressed to the Casa but of course they were published. The King had an ego as well. He wanted the world to know what had been accomplished during his reign.
Vespucci was celebrated by every court in Europe for he had claimed that his research had placed in the hands of Castile and Aragon a completely new territory ripe for exploitation; not Cathay, not the Indies, but an entire New World.
I spoke to the man only for a moment as he swept past me in a whirl of black scholar’s robes. As I was introduced he paused an instant, stroked the long thinness of his beard and said: “Ah, de Leon. You are the man who gave me the coast of Florida, yes?”
As though I were somehow his retainer and my explorations mere footnotes in his grand work. I replied stonily in affirmation, incensed by his self-importance, and began to speak of my meeting with Columbus. Yet when he heard the old Admiral’s name, Vespucci turned and swept off amidst his adherents, one of whom was Diego Colon, who appeared not to want to hear of his father any more than the great Florentine. By this time Diego had changed his name, against his father’s wishes, to its Spanish version and was scheming even then to replace Nicolas de Ovando as Viceroy of the Indies; the name given it by Columbus and never altered, despite Vespucci’s protestations.
A year later a German cartographer named Waldseemuller produced his epic map of the world: an incomplete map, quickly shifting to blank space in the west where the German had placed the name ‘America’.
This is not an easy thing to face, nor an easy tale to tell. It is yet another reminder of what is to happen to me if I do not find the sacred fountain. Emasculation. I feel even now in the remains of my power that I, once governor of entire islands and captain-general of an army, once wealthy beyond my dreams, once worshipped at the Royal Court, would be reduced to this smattering of two small caravels in search of a promise.
Oh, this taxes my mind. I have sat up writing too late in the night. I go now to sleep with my witch.
Will I be Columbus, or Vespucci?
It was after four bells when Juan Ponce closed his journal and locked it away then undressed for bed. When he extinguished the lamp the only remaining glow was the moon: blue light drifting in through the transom. He lay down beside the woman. She seemed to be asleep so he settled on his back and tried to relax his way out of his thoughts. He breathed deeply, focusing on each tense muscle, allowing it to slacken until his body was lying still and calm. It was just then when she spoke to him. She had not been sleeping at all but buried within her own thoughts which now poured out despite his protestations.
“These men, before, when you talked with your friends; this Colon, who is he?” she said.
“Let me sleep, woman.”
“I heard you when I came back from the friar, I heard you say those Boriquenos were not your enemies yet you went out and warred on them. Why would you do that?”
“Orders from my leader.”
“Your Chief, that King?”
“No. Another. My King’s representative.”
“What is that?”
“A Viceroy, the hand of the King in these parts.”
“Yet he was your enemy.”
“Not that one. That one was Ovando. My enemy is the new Viceroy, Colon.”
“So you serve him now? Yet you hate him.”
“He’s stripped me of my titles and lands. I refuse to do his bidding.”
“Yet he still influences things. This voyage was done with his permission.”
“The voyage he thinks I am making. I am making another voyage, as you know.”
“To reach the sacred water.”
“Let me sleep.”
“What voyage does he believe you make?”
“To found a colony in your land.”
“If Calos allows it.”
“Sleep now. It’s late.”
For a brief time she lay quietly, but then leaned up on one elbow, her hair tumbling down past her shoulders to fall on his chest. He could not see her face for the shadow of her hair. Still, when she lay like this he knew she was puzzled. He awaited her next question and when it came, it shocked him.
“Why not just kill him, this Colon?”
“What?”
“You do it with others. Why not this one? Take him out of your way.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Calos would. If enemies stand in his path, he sweeps them down as a surging tide.”
“All this time among us and you still don’t understand civilization?”
“What do you mean?”
“There are laws. There is morality.”
“And this Colon, does he have morality?”
“No. Or at least no honour.”
“Then kill him. He is your enemy. If he were my enemy, he would die.”
“Why should you have enemies? And if you did, I think they’d be unreachable, far above and beyond your vengeance.”
“There are ways, and ways,” she muttered.
“Tell me of them. Your enemies. Who? Of course, friar Bartolome! You hate him, don’t you? You refuse Christianity when it would make things so much simpler for you. And you won’t even use the Christian name I gave you. Why would you do that? What is a name?”
“Yet this Colon is the son of a man who would not use that name,” she replied. “Why would he not? And why would his son?”
“His son wishes to control part of the Spanish empire; to do that he must appear to be Spanish. Columbus came from a different nation.”
“As am I, different, not Spanish. Now do you understand?”
“Tell me more. Your enemies. They must be my servants, though I haven’t heard of any of them murdered in their beds.” He taunted her jovially, the distraction driving his troubles away.
“But we are talking of your enemy, Colon,” she replied. “You should have killed him, yet you ran away from him with these ships, on this voyage.”
“And you know why. After I reach the water you speak of I will return. Diego Colon will be swept aside. And have you a plan for your enemies?”
He was too close, she realized. She should not have led him in this direction. He might get ideas, this foolish old man, with his vengeance. Mayaimi went quiet, turned over, and lay with her back to him, her eyes open to the dark.
“You don’t, do you? Have a plan, I mean,” the big Spaniard said, chuckling.
She said nothing.
I have had no sleep this night. The witch and her questions have brought me nightmares. I drift off for a moment only to be jarred awake by another thought of another enemy from another time. I have made too many of them. She has made me think of death as well. Life can be taken so easily. I know this. I have taken enough. Each one was its own story. I was merely its end.
How will I end? Clawing and kicking in battle or suffering silently from some disease? Welcoming death or terrified of it? I cannot know.
In Toledo I attended an ‘auto da fe’: a burning in the public square, ordered by the Inquisition, just below the cathedral steps. I was with Archbishop Fonseca at the time and so followed along as he stood on his dais above the crowd of snarling, drunk peasants for whom this was to be an entertainment.
That day a man and two women were tied to posts awaiting their fates atop a pile of oiled sticks. I have no idea if they were unrepentant Jews, Moors, Mariscos or Gypsies or simply innocents betrayed by grasping neighbours.
Inquisition is a harsh creed. These people had been named heretics so no quarter was spared them. All three were barely conscious from their tortures. As the servitors floated about in their cassocks preparing for fire, notaries stood by ready to record any final confessions. A confession would allow the penitent strangulation; thus release from the agonies of the flames. Two of them, a man and a woman, kissed the cross, spoke the words of admission, and were garrotted. An ugly death but a quick one.
The third, a woman, would not recant. She stared out above the roiling crowd at something beyond it. When the kindling was lit and the fire began to lick upward through her clothing, burning it away along with her flesh, she never screamed, never grimaced, never even acknowledged her suffering. Whatever her god, she’d accepted her death and went willingly. Her story ended in heroism.
The crowd was disappointed. They’d come for anguish. But I was proud of that woman. Of course I could say nothing; yet I have ever revered her. I recall her now when I think of the witch. She is much like that woman. She will not succumb to our culture. She sees something beyond.
Yet she is a savage. If she has no soul, as the Church seems to think, then she is animal. Animals do not have a conscience. I wonder what she could possibly mean when she says she has enemies.
I admit, I do not understand her; this woman without a name.