Columbus: Shipwreck and the Mission from God
The Final Voyage and Death of Christopher Columbus
Welcome to Cosmographia — histories of the earth and the stars. For the full map of posts, see here.
This post is the sixth in a series on Christopher Columbus. If you missed them, read Part I here, Part II here, Part III here, Part IV here, and Part V here.
Columbus was always a self-pitying malcontent. So when he was manacled and led down into the hold of the La Gorda,1 the caravel shipping him from the Caribbean back to Spain, he took great pains to wallow in his despair as much as possible. The captain of the ship offered to remove his chains; Columbus refused, wanting to arrive in Spain in the state that would most shock the court. He spent the weeks at sea writing a long, whining letter to Juana de la Torres, a former governess to the royal children, and his best contact in the Spanish court. In it he rages against Bobadilla (the man who arrested him), against his accusers, against the ingratitude of the crown. He compares himself to a loyal servant betrayed by a wicked steward. He insists that everything he did was for the glory of God and the enrichment of Spain. He shows no awareness whatsoever that his own cruelty and incompetence had brought him to this impasse. The letter reads like the ravings of a man who has lost contact with the reality of his own actions. He had sailed west as an explorer and returned as a tyrant, and yet in his own mind the narrative remained the same: he was the hero, chosen by God, persecuted by lesser men.
Here is a just a small sample of his self-pity:
They judge me over there as they would a governor who had gone to Sicily, or to a city or town placed under regular government, and where the laws can be observed in their entirety without fear of ruining everything; and I am greatly injured thereby. I ought to be judged as a captain who went from Spain to the Indies to conquer a numerous and warlike people, whose customs and religion are very contrary to ours; who live in rocks and mountains, without fixed settlements, and not like ourselves; and where, by the divine will, I have placed under the dominion of the King and Queen, our sovereigns, another world, through which Spain, which was reckoned a poor country, has become the richest. I ought to be judged as a captain who for such a long time up to this day has borne arms without laying them aside for an hour, and by gentlemen adventurers and by customs and not by letters, unless they were Greeks or Romans, or others of modern times of whom there are so many and such noble examples in Spain; or otherwise I receive great injury, because in the Indies there is neither town nor settlement.
Elsewhere in his letter, Columbus claims to have opened “the gate to gold and pearls”, to have secured “precious stones, spices, and a thousand other things.” As we have seen, all he had mustered was a few small nuggets of poor quality gold alloy and a handful of pearls. Columbus also claims to have resolved “never to touch a hair of anybody’s head”. This from the man that hanged Europeans who rebelled against his governorship, that cut off the hands of the native Taíno who did not proffer the required gold quota, that cut out the tongue of a woman and forced her to parade around the colony naked,2 that cut off the nose and ears of a starving man who dared eat some of the corn he had picked. And when he talks of his fellow colonists, he sounds like a whining schoolboy, complaining to his teachers in language drenched in cavil sycophancy. He refers to the colony (that he oversaw!) as a “den of thieves”, his men as “a dissolute people, who fear neither God, nor their King and Queen, being full of vices and wickedness.”
When the ship docked at Cádiz, the spectacle of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea being led ashore in chains caused a public scandal. The man who had ridden at the King’s bridle, who had been saluted as a grandee, who had sat in the presence of royalty — here he was, shuffling off a gangplank like a common criminal. Ferdinand and Isabela, whatever they privately thought of Columbus’ governorship, were embarrassed. They had wanted him removed from power, not humiliated. They ordered him freed after six weeks in jail, summoned him to the Alhambra Palace in Granada, and expressed their displeasure at Bobadilla’s heavy-handedness.
Columbus appeared before the monarchs with his sleeves rolled up so the marks from the irons were visible on his wrists. He wept (of course he wept). He begged forgiveness. He admitted his faults — or at least, he admitted to allowing himself to be a victim to other people’s faults. The sovereigns restored his freedom and his wealth. They did not restore his governorship. That was gone forever. Nicolás de Ovando would sail as the new governor of the Indies.3 Columbus could keep his titles of Admiral and Viceroy, but they would be empty offices. The man who had discovered the New World would have no authority over it.
Despite this setback, Columbus petitioned for funding for another voyage. The Monarchs demurred, unsure about sending so controversial a man back to the Indies. While he waited for a verdict, Columbus retreated to a monastery. There, his religious mania, his conviction that God had selected him for a special purpose, began to manifest itself in a frenzied study of scripture. Over the course of several years, he compiled a manuscript that has come to be known as the Book of Prophecies. It was a collection of biblical passages, prophecies, and theological speculations that Columbus believed demonstrated his divine mission. He had become convinced — utterly, unshakeably convinced — that his voyages were foretold in scripture, and that the gold he would find in the Indies was destined to fund a new Crusade to retake Jerusalem. Once the Holy City was liberated, the Second Coming of Christ would follow. Columbus envisioned himself as far more than just an explorer; he was herald of the Apocalypse. The Taíno might well have agreed.
He had also taken to signing his name in a strange, coded manner — a pyramidal arrangement of letters that scholars have never fully decoded. And he now called himself Christo Ferens, the Christ-Bearer, identifying himself with his namesake Saint Christopher, who carried Christ across a river. The woolweaver’s son from Genoa now saw himself as a figure of eschatological importance.
In the last post in this series, I compared Columbus to Kurtz, the character from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Here was a man who had gone into the wilderness with grand ambitions and emerged transformed — not into something greater, but something twisted and broken. The parallels are imperfect but hard to ignore. Like Kurtz, Columbus had gone to the edge of the known world. Like Kurtz, he had found not the riches and glory he sought, but something far darker. Like Kurtz, he had become the tyrant of a remote colony, dispensing arbitrary justice, mutilating the natives, losing his grip on reason. And like Kurtz, he had wrapped his descent into savagery in the language of civilisation and mission.
In his bizarre and self-serving prophetic writings, we see Columbus attempting to justify all that he had done. Even more than that, he was trying to prove that he was the real victim in all this, and that his enemies, by conspiring against him, were going against the will of God.4
The fourth voyage departed Cádiz on 9th May 1502. Four ships, about 140 men. Among the crew were Columbus’ brother Bartholomew and his thirteen-year-old son Ferdinand, whose account of the voyage would later become one of the most important sources for his father’s life. Columbus was fifty-one, arthritic, half-blind from ophthalmia, and consumed by a millenarian fervour that alarmed even those who cared about him. But he was still, when it came to the practical business of sailing, an extraordinary seaman.
