“The first and most unusual of the high points of my life is that I was born in this century in which the whole world became known.”—Girolamo Cardano, an Italian doctor writing of his boyhood in the sixteenth century
Palos de la Frontera, Spain, 1492
Twelve-year-old Diego Bermúdez sailed with Columbus aboard the Santa Maria in 1492. He was one of about twenty boys in their teens or younger who sailed west from Spain to find the Indies and gold. Most were poor boys from small fishing villages along the Spanish coast. Those who made it back to Spain returned with some of the most amazing stories anyone had ever lived to tell.
THE INDIES
China, Japan, and the islands of Indonesia were known to Europeans as the Indies. Spaniards and other Europeans had been trading there for many years. The big prizes were gold, silks, and spices like nutmeg and cinnamon that livened up bland-tasting food and masked the horrible taste of spoiled meat. Many, including Columbus, had read a book by the thirteenth-century Italian explorer Marco Polo. He wrote of Japan: “The king of the island hath a mighty palace all roofed with the finest gold … The windows are decorated with gold; the floors of the halls and of many chambers are paved with golden plates, each plate a good two fingers thick.”
But by 1492, Muslim armies hostile to Christians blocked the old land routes through Asia. So Portugal and Spain were racing to find a new sea route to the Indies. Portugal’s idea was to sail around the south of Africa, and it was steadily getting closer to its goal. Columbus convinced Ferdinand and Isabella—king and queen of Spain—that Spain could win by taking the most direct route: straight west across the Ocean Sea to Japan.
Diego Bermúdez probably heard about Columbus’s voyage from the booming voice of Martín Alonso Pinzón, leader of the best-known sailing family in the Spanish town of Palos de la Frontera. A crowd gathered around Pinzón as he stood in the dusty town square one afternoon, trying to make himself heard. According to a sailor, this is what Pinzón shouted:
“Friends, come on, make this journey with us, instead of moping around being miserable; make this journey, for with the help of God we will discover land, for according to rumor we will find houses roofed with gold and everyone will become rich and fortunate.”
Pinzón was recruiting sailors for a white-haired, Italian-born captain named Cristóbal Colón, known to us as Christopher Columbus. Townspeople listened, though many thought the idea was crazy. Columbus proposed to sail west all the way across the Ocean Sea to Cipango (Japan), Cathay (China), and the Spice Islands, now part of Indonesia. It had never been done before. Columbus was confident the journey would take only about a month. They’d all be back in less than a year, he said.
Diego Bermúdez was part of a large family of sailors, but many of the other boys who sailed with Columbus were homeless orphans who begged for or stole what food they could. Some found work on the boats, scrubbing the decks or repairing ropes. Most couldn’t read or write, since there was no public school in Palos. They liked to gather around the docks, listening to sailors tell stories of giant fish, gold, waterspouts, and battles at sea.
Sailors feared that monsters awaited them in the unexplored Ocean Sea. This sixteenth-century woodcut was called The Sea of Darkness.
Columbus and Pinzón needed boys for three jobs. Older boys—usually teenagers—would be gromets, or apprentice seamen. They would scramble up the ropes high above the deck to rig and change the sails. They would also repair ropes and row the ships’ officers to and from the shore. In storms and heavy seas they’d cling one-armed to the masts, lashing the sails to their wooden frames while the wind tore at their fingers. They had to learn dozens of knots and hitches. Each gromet carried a knife at all times and wore a belt with a supply of rope sections around his waist. Captains hired teenagers partly because they showed little fear and partly because, unlike many of the old sailors, most boys still had both arms and legs.
A few boys, usually from wealthy families, were hired as criados, the personal servants of the ships’ officers. Columbus’s devoted criado was sixteen-year-old Pedro de Salcedo. Columbus grew to like him so much that years later he arranged for Pedro to get profits from the sale of all soap in much of the New World.
Younger boys, like Diego Bermúdez, served as pages, the lowest-ranking crew members. Pages kept track of everyone’s watch duty and did work that no one else wanted to do, like cooking one hot meal per day, washing fire-blackened pots, and scrubbing the decks.
This woodcut from the illustrated edition of Columbus’s 1493 letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella shows a ship similar to the Santa Maria. The high poop deck, from which pages bellowed their prayers and songs, is seen in the foreground.
GROMETS, PAGES, AND CRIADOS WHO SAILED WITH COLUMBUS
Garcia Alonso—18, a gromet
Pedro de Arcos—12, a page
Pedro de Salcedo—16, a criado
Diego Leal—a gromet
Diego Bermúdez—12, a page from Palos de la Frontera
Fernando Medel—a gromet
Fernando de Triana—a gromet, probably aboard the Niña
Francisco Medel—a gromet from Huelva
Juan—the servant of Juan Buen Año
Juan Arias—a gromet aboard the Pinta
Juan Quadrado—a gromet aboard the Pinta
Martin de Urtubia—a gromet aboard the Santa Maria. Died at La Navidad
Miguel de Soria—a gromet and servant of Diego de Lepe
Pedro de Lepe—died at La Navidad
Pedro Tegero—a gromet
Pedro de Terreros—18 or 19. Went on all four of Columbus’s voyages
Rodrigo Gallegos—a gromet
Diego Bermúdez may well have had very mixed feelings about the chance to go on such an adventure. On the one hand, there was the possibility of discovering gold and winning fame. Even if that didn’t happen, Columbus had raised enough money to offer every sailor four months’ advance pay. This was a fortune to most families of Palos. On the other hand, Diego might well have been worried. Maps of the time showed that huge, dragonlike monsters lurked in the Ocean Sea. Were they really out there? Even if the sailors made it to the Indies, how could they ever get back home against the stiff wind that blew west from the coast of Spain? And how could Columbus and Pinzón really know that you could reach the Indies by sailing west?
Diego signed on aboard the Santa María—with Columbus himself as captain. Early on the morning of August 3, 1492, the whole town gathered to send off the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María. Some boys got married just before they sailed, promising their brides that they would return as wealthy husbands.
The ships sailed south to the Canary Islands, where they loaded supplies on board, and then, on September 6, they cast off into the unknown for the West and Cipango. When land disappeared from sight three days later, some sailors burst into tears.
The Niña and the Pinta were tiny floating universes, each deck about the size of a modern tennis court. The Santa María was a little bigger than the other two ships. The Niña and the Pinta each carried about twenty-five men and boys, the Santa María about forty. The crews had to quickly learn to work as a team on the rocking, slippery decks.
Diego, like the other crew members, labored in his bare feet and wore the same clothes every day—a loose-fitting poncho pulled over a shirt, trousers tied with a drawstring, and a red woolen cap jammed onto his head. He bathed by dumping a bucket of seawater over his body. The toilet was a seat called the “garden” that dangled out over the edge of the ship. He slept in his soggy clothes on a thin mattress below deck, where you couldn’t stand up without bumping your head. The crew ate small loaves of twice-baked bread called hardtack along with pea stews and salted meat or fish. Even the youngest boys washed their food down with strong white wine.
Diego’s most important job was to function as a singing clock. Everyone on ship—even Columbus—had to stand watch for four hours once a day to look out for weather changes or enemy ships. Sailors couldn’t wait to get off watch. Every half hour the crew relied on the sound of a page’s voice to tell them how much of their shift remained.
Diego and the other pages kept time with a glass called an ampolleta, filled with a half hour’s supply of sand. When all the sand ran to the bottom, the page on duty turned the glass over and sprinted up to the poop deck—a little landing above the main deck. There he rang a bell, filled his lungs with air, and sang out a prayer loudly enough for everyone to hear. Pages had to memorize sixteen different prayers in all, each for a particular time of day.
They got in trouble if they were caught rubbing the glass between their hands to warm it up and make the sand run faster. That led to the utterance of Columbus’s favorite oath, “By San Fernando!” and sometimes a thrashing. Pages also helped measure how fast their ships were going by throwing a piece of wood out onto the water and counting how many seconds it took the object to pass between two marks on the ship’s rail.
All in all, it was a hard, busy life for boys at sea, but it wasn’t all work. Columbus had to remind his officers to keep the boys from “skylarking”—goofing off. His journal tells of keen-eyed boys who were “posted aloft” to look for land. Once he described a group of boys clustered at the rail of the Santa María, laughing and throwing stones from the cooking box at some seabirds near the ship.
PAGE’S PRAYER
Blessed be the hour God came to
earth,
Holy Mary who gave him birth,
And St. John who saw his worth.
The guard is posted,
The watchglass filling,
We’ll have good voyage,
If God be willing.
earth,
Holy Mary who gave him birth,
And St. John who saw his worth.
The guard is posted,
The watchglass filling,
We’ll have good voyage,
If God be willing.
—The blessing the boys sang at the end of the day
The strong westerly wind pushed the ships as far as 180 miles in a single day, but after three weeks at sea with no sight of land, sailors began to panic. In the fourth week, a group of crew members threatened to throw Columbus overboard if he didn’t turn back. But three days later a sailor high atop the mast of the Pinta cried out, “¡Tierra!” He had spotted land. Just as Columbus had said, about a month had passed by. Surely they had reached Cipango.
On the morning of October 12, 1492, the younger boys watched from the rails of the three ships as gromets rowed Columbus and his officers toward the beach of a green, low-lying island. Columbus splashed ashore and jammed a pole bearing Spain’s flag into the sand, claiming the land in the name of the Spanish king and queen. A group of about thirty naked, painted people watched cautiously from a distance before edging out slowly to inspect—and then greet—the Spaniards.
In this sixteenth-century engraving Europeans splash ashore in the New World. Of the Tainos who greeted him Columbus wrote, “They … believe that I come from heaven.”
Columbus and the crew spent a few weeks exploring what are now the Bahamas, Cuba, and an island they called Hispaniola—now the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Columbus wrote that the boys discovered pine trees and other new plants, and that one of them found “certain stones that appear to contain gold.”
On Christmas Eve 1492, Columbus returned to the Santa María to catch some sleep after three days on shore. He instructed the pilot to steer the boat toward a goldfield the “Indians” (as he had decided to call the people who lived on the islands) had told him about and then stumbled, exhausted, into his cabin. But the pilot was tired, too. He spotted a boy sleeping on deck, shook him awake, and ordered him to take over the ship. That boy may have been Diego Bermúdez, for he was one of the few young boys on the Santa María’s crew, but Columbus’s journal doesn’t name him. Then the pilot, too, fell asleep.
Whoever the boy was, he must have thought he was still dreaming. Everyone knew that boys were strictly forbidden from taking the wheel of any of the ships. Columbus’s log tells what happened next:
“The currents carried the ship upon one of these [sand] banks … The ship went upon the bank so quietly that it was hardly noticeable. When the boy felt the rudder ground and felt the noise of the sea, he cried out. I jumped up instantly; no one else had yet felt that we were aground. Then the master of the ship, Juan de la Cosa, who was on watch, came out. I ordered him to rouse the crew.”
The next day Spaniards and Indians alike tried to free the ship, but it was no use. The only choice was to tear apart the Santa María and build a fort with the timbers. They called it La Navidad, meaning Christmas. One boy’s bad luck had turned into the first Spanish settlement in North America.
Little is known. Records show that he made it back to Spain. He did not return to the New World on any of Columbus’s other three voyages, but his brother Juan did. In 1515 Juan stopped to explore a group of islands and left behind a few pigs. Later, when British explorers found the islands, they were overrun with the pigs’ wild descendants. The Bermuda Islands are named after Diego’s brother Juan.
THE BOYS’ VOYAGE
Columbus made four voyages to the New World. His final trip could well be called the “boys’ voyage,” since fifty-six of the ninety-nine crew members were eighteen or younger. Some historians think he took boys and teens because he was tired of stubborn old sailors. Others say that the experienced sailors had been hired on other boats bound for the New World. Among the sailors on the final trip was Columbus’s own thirteen-year-old son, Ferdinand. This entry in Columbus’s journal, written shortly after they had endured a violent storm, shows clearly that he was very proud of Ferdinand:
“Many old hands whom we looked on as stout fellows lost their courage. What griped me most were the sufferings of my son; to think that so young a lad, only thirteen, should go through so much. But our Lord lent him such courage that he heartened the rest, and he worked as though he had been to sea all his life.”