Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 by Laurence Bergreen Read Free Book Online

other things he had done and said to me.”
    Martín Alonso Pinzón’s unauthorized flight was troubling because the voyage had benefited from a professional collaboration between the two captains. A portrait of Pinta ’s captain (on display in Madrid’s Museo Naval) shows a studious young man who looks more like a scholar or an aide-decamp than a sea dog or mutineer. His melancholy gaze suggests that he is lost in contemplation or looking at a distant object. He had been born in Palos, which is to say, born to the sea, in 1441 and was now over fifty, experienced, even old for a captain.
    As recently as September 25, Columbus had written approvingly in his logbook about a chart “on which it seems the Admiral had depicted certain islands on that sea.” Martín Alonso expressed the opinion that the islands were nearby, and Columbus agreed, and the fleet’s inability to locate them could be attributed to the “currents which set the ships all the while to the NE.” Assuming this to be the case, Columbus asked Pinzón to return the chart for further study “with his pilot and mariners.”
    At sunset, “Martín Alonso came up on the poop of his ship, and with much joy shouted to the Admiral, claiming largesse”—a reward—“for sighting land.” What land? Columbus deliberately kept the name and location of the island vague so that his rivals would not be able to take advantage of the discovery.
    Before paying up, he “went down on his knees to give thanks to Our Lord, and Martín Alonso said the Gloria in excelsis Deo with his people.” Soon Niña ’s rigging groaned with the weight of sailors, who had scaled it to catch sight of land, only twenty-five leagues distant, by Columbus’s reckoning. He was wrong. The fleet sailed on that day, and the next, and a week later, the ships were still in search of land. In his journal, Columbus revealed that he had tinkered with the distances to reassure the crew that their goal was slowly but surely approaching, but he might have manufactured this excuse to disguise his miscalculation.
    If Martín Alonso Pinzón took exception to this strategy, or suffered doubts about the wisdom of their navigational choices, Columbus did not record it. The challenge lent a sense of drama to a voyage that was in danger of losing its raison d’être, and it offered a chance to prove his mettle. He gravitated toward the crisis as if it were a manifestation of divine will. He had made a career thus far out of proving others wrong, not because he had better theories or answers, but because he was more resilient. He was confident that he could put the renegade captain in his place. But first, Columbus had to catch him.
    In fact, he faced challenges from all three Pinzón brothers.
    The first was Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, a part owner of both Niña and Pinta , both caravels—ships combining Western rigging with an Eastern, or lateen, sail for better maneuverability. Columbus’s flagship, Santa María , was known simply by the generic term nao ; it was round, stable, broad-beamed, and most likely built according to time-honored methods by Basque shipwrights. Juan de la Cosa, who also served as the ship’s master, owned her. And the second brother was Francisco Martín Pinzón, who served as captain of Niña .
    So Columbus was surrounded by Pinzón brothers, whose support had been critical in his overcoming skepticism for the voyage from the seamen of Palos, from which the fleet had sailed, and from nearby Huelva and Moguer. To the practical seamen, Columbus appeared as a wild-eyed dreamer and foreigner who spoke of crossing a sea that no one to their knowledge had succeeded in crossing before—Mar Tenebroso, it was sometimes called, “Dark Sea,” practically synonymous with death itself—to reach fantastic kingdoms such as China and Japan that might not exist, except in the minds of dreamers and scholars, and now Columbus was asking them to trust him with their lives in his unlikely