Caribbean (19 page)

“How did you escape?” Ocampo asked, and the sailor said: “Only through the courage of the admiral. He never flagged. Each new day he’d assure us: ‘Somehow we’ll be rescued,’ and when we were starving, he promised: ‘Somehow we’ll find food,’ and he led us in making clever traps for catching fish. Also, he himself tested new kinds of fruit to determine which were safe to eat. He was tireless in driving us to build better huts.”

“Huts! How many days were you marooned on Jamaica?”

Aghast, the sailor simply stared at his interrogator: “Days? Excellency, it was months, June of one year to March of another. Excellency, we were at the end of the world. Nobody could know where we were. In Española they thought we were dead, and some said ‘Good riddance,’ because the admiral could be a difficult man, especially where young nobles were concerned.” Wiping his nose with his left forefinger, he leaned close to Ocampo and said: “Excellency, we were all dead. The last months was special hell.”

“How?”

The sailor hesitated, uncertain as to how to explain that terrible isolation and loss of hope. Then he cleared his throat: “If ever you get into trouble, you’ll need no friend more trustworthy than Diego Méndez,” and he spoke the name with such reverence that Ocampo was driven to ask: “And who was he?” and the sailor said: “Our savior,” and Ocampo said: “Tell me.”

The sailor did not answer directly, for he had important things to say about Méndez and did not propose to be diverted: “Most young noblemen who shipped with us were swine, especially when handing out orders to the likes of me, but Méndez once said to me: ‘Those leaks have to be caulked, so let’s caulk them,’ and in the worst days, when we seemed about to sink, he worked the pumps as long as any of us.”

Ocampo nodded in respect for an unknown young nobleman who seemed to have been a paragon, and what the seaman said next proved that he was.

“Méndez was a man without fear. When the rest of us failed to invent some way of escape, he built a canoe. You wouldn’t cross a river in it. And he told us: ‘I will sail it to Española and bring back a ship to save you,’ and in this little craft he did just that. Storms, waves, bad luck on the first try, threatened by Indians, this man Méndez paddled on in his little canoe.” The sailor stopped, crossed himself, and said: ‘With God’s aid he saved us after our nine months on Jamaica, where we had been sure we would die unknown and unmissed.” He paused again, wiped his eyes, and concluded: “The Great Admiral, saved from an unmarked grave by the heroism of one man. Because Méndez did paddle all the way to this island and he did find a big ship and he did sail back to Jamaica, where, when he landed, Admiral Colón and the rest of us embraced him.”

In the silence that followed, Ocampo looked not at the sailor, whose emotions overwhelmed him, but at the priest the sailor had brought with him: “And what brings you here, Father?”

“While the Great Admiral was marooned on Jamaica, convinced that he would die there without ever reporting on his last voyage, he wrote a very long letter to the king and queen, telling them of his adventures and reviewing the high points of his later life. It was the kind of testimonial a good man imagines writing when he is dying and wants his children to know the outlines of his career, a truly remarkable document.”

“Why do you tell me?” Ocampo asked, and the priest said: “Because a copy of that letter, signed 7 July 1503, was left by Colón when he returned to this island from Jamaica, and I think that before you write your report you ought to know what Colón at the door of death thought about himself. When all the brawling about his errors here and there are forgotten, this is the Cristóbal Colón who will live.”

The priest took a breath and began by giving in his own words an account of an unbelievable affront thrown in Colón’s face by the governor of Santo Domingo, the port at which he himself had once been viceroy: “Seeing that a storm we call the
hurricano
was brewing, Colón sent a message ashore advising two actions: ‘Let me come into your harbor and anchor. Do not dispatch to Spain the fleet that appears ready to sail.’ Both suggestions were denied, probably because the acting viceroy feared he might lose his sinecure if Colón came ashore. The result? Listen to the Great Admiral’s report of that hurricane.”

The document the priest read covered many pages, and in reading, he skipped long portions, but the words of certain passages reverberated in the air of Ocampo’s office like the ringing of some fine bronze bell:

At the phrase about even tailors begging for licenses to explore, Ocampo snapped his fingers and said: “He’s right, I’ve seen them. A score of ne’er-do-wells who couldn’t sail a ship or build a shed presuming when they got here to follow in Colón’s footsteps.” And the priest waited before reading the solemn, pleading close to this remarkable document written at the edge of the grave:

With that cry from the depths, the priest finished, and for a while no one spoke, for the words so clearly evoked the embattled spirit of Cristóbal Colón that his presence seemed to have entered the room, but then Ocampo broke into a quiet laugh: “Extraordinary, really! Here is the poor man, marooned, facing death, but he still writes first about his brother and a son. He was Colón to the end.” Then, abruptly, he reached for the letter and read aloud the reference to the pilgrimage: “Here he is, not home from one disastrous trip and already planning another.” He tapped the letter, leaned back, and looked up at the ceiling: “I can see him now. Him and his two brothers and his two sons and six or seven nephews, trailing as pilgrims all over Europe and the Holy Lands and complaining about everything.” And he handed back the letter and thanked both the sailor and the priest.

On the night before he left Española, with his documents in order and his conclusions about the Great Admiral carefully phrased, Ocampo was visited in his quarters once again by Señora Pimentel, whom he hurried forward to greet: “This is an elegant way to end my long visit. You do me honor, but if I’m any judge, you want to confide some last-minute revelation.”

“Yes. I perceive that your report and the welfare of the numerous Colón hangers-on who are laying claims to whatever fortune he left and his titles will depend on what you say about Bobadilla, so I think you should know two additional facts. When Colón arrived here in 1502 at the start of his final voyage, he arrived with his four little
ships off our anchorage out there, and Bobadilla, eager to keep Colón from coming ashore to contest his authority, refused to allow him entrance to our harbor.

“My husband, a stalwart man, protested: ‘Excellency, a storm is brewing, and if it develops into a hurricane, his ships really must be allowed entrance.’ But the viceroy was adamant, and poor Colón was forced to remain outside, and that very night, as my husband had warned, a tremendous hurricane struck. Have you ever seen one of our hurricanes? They can be terrifying.

“And what do you suppose happened? A major fleet headed for Spain, for which Bobadilla was responsible, was torn apart by the storm—thirty vessels in peril and thirteen lost with five hundred sailors and all their cargoes.”

“What happened to Colón’s little four?”

“Great navigator that he was, he maneuvered his ships majestically, right in the teeth of the hurricane, and saved every one. But even after that display, Bobadilla refused to allow him entrance, so off Colón sailed to his final burst of exploration. He found nothing, and ended on the beach in Jamaica, no gold, no ships, no hopes, no assignments in the future, with death staring him in the face each day for nearly a year.”

Ocampo, awed by her sagacity and mature judgment, asked if he might seek her guidance on two nagging questions, and she, grateful for his treating her as an intellectual equal, nodded, so he asked: “Did the petty nobles accuse him because he was Italian?” and she replied with vigor: “Yes, a few presumptuous idiots. But that was ridiculous, for he wasn’t really an Italian any longer. Pure Spanish all the way. So far as we know, he never wrote one word in Italian, because Spanish was his only language, Spain his only home, and good men like my husband were proud to serve under him as their leader.”

“Was he a Jew?”

“Not when I knew him.”

“Was he, perhaps, a renegade
converso
, living in danger of the stake?”

“When he lived with us after his rescue from the shipwreck in Jamaica, he went to Mass every day to give thanks.”

That was all she cared to say, but after the
licenciado
offered her a final cup of coffee from beans grown and roasted on the island, she said: “He was truly great, that one.” And then, as they were about to part, she stood in the doorway and said: “One of your misunderstandings
really must be corrected. You’ve been completely misled about Bobadilla. What they told you was popular legend. He wasn’t a nobleman. He was never a member of the military Order of Calatrava. That was another man, same name, who died in 1496, four years before our Bobadilla got here.”

“Even so,” Ocampo said, “it’s rather pleasant in a gruesome way to know that your Bobadilla did drown right out there in the harbor from which he had barred the admiral during that hurricane.”

“More local legend. The ship did sink, as we all remember, but he wasn’t on it.”

“Where is he?”

“Back in Spain. One of my cousins saw him in Sevilla, large as life and awaiting a new assignment from the king.”

After Señora Pimentel left the room and Ocampo could see her walking sedately along the waterfront on her way home, he said to his scribes: “There goes the soul of Spain. A woman who brings the best of our land to the Colonies. Her home, the one you saw, is a beacon of civilization in this sea.” Before he finished speaking, his scribes began to laugh, and when he asked, visibly irritated, what they thought amusing about his reflections, the senior one explained: “That night while you were feasting with the Pimentels in the big room, we were talking with his people in the kitchen, and we began to hear hints—no accusations, you understand—that his finances would not stand scrutiny. His fine house seems to have been built solely with money belonging to the king. His stonemasons were supposed to work for the government, not for him. He uses the king’s ships for carrying on his own trading, and when we asked a few quiet questions we began to discern that he is completely corrupt.”

Ocampo was appalled by these facts, which he should himself have uncovered, but before he could say anything, his junior scribe struck a hard blow: “Pimentel is a thief, but the members of his wife’s family are worse. Real bandits, and she encourages them.”