Columbus goes for four

THE LAST VOYAGE OF COLUMBUS

By Martin Dugard

Little, Brown, $24.95, 294 pages

There is something to be said for reading “The Last Voyage of Columbus: Being the Epic Tale of the Great Captain’s Fourth Expedition, Including Accounts of Swordfight, Mutiny, Shipwreck, Gold, War, Hurricane and Discovery,” during hurricane season. For the dramatic high point of this fine book is a standoff against a hurricane that swells and rages near Santo Domingo in 1502. How Christopher Columbus navigated his way to safety and saved the lives of many in its wake reveals much about the legendary seafarer’s skills — and Martin Dugard’s grasp of them.

Nevertheless, in Mr. Dugard’s telling, the story of the great (and controversial) explorer’s “forgotten” adventure does not open near or on the high seas. Readers meet Columbus (already elevated to “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” by the Spanish monarchy) as a broken man “alone in the bare cell” of a prison in Santo Domingo.

Mr. Dugard writes “It was eight years, almost to the hour, since he had discovered the New World. Armed guards stood outside the thick wooden door. His ankles and wrists had long ago been rubbed raw by iron shackles. Even lying flat on his back, he could feel their heaviness against his flesh and anticipate the manacles’ noisy clank as he threw his feet over the edge of the bed.” At the age of 49, the once red-haired Columbus was gray, pale, and afflicted with opthalmia (inflammation of the eyes) “from gazing too long at the sun.”

Mr. Dugard notes that Columbus’ problems began “ironically with his greatest success” in 1492. From that time, when he seized the lands of the New World and some of its riches under provisions called the Capitulations of Santa Fe, giving him control of lands “discovered or acquired by his labor and industry,” the jealous and the competitive started to circle the “cheerful and confident” Columbus and his acquisitions.

Columbus was, no doubt, an object of envy. He was also an Italian by birth doing business for the Spanish at a time in Spain when foreigners were suspect, to put it mildly. The Inquisition was in full bloom, with Jews and Moors coming under the harshest treatment by Torquemada and other priests. Not surprisingly, when Columbus was marched through the streets of Santo Domingo, colonists spat and jeered, calling him derisively a “Jew” and “Genovese spy.”

Ferdinand was indifferent to the abuses of power by the Church because it helped secure his own. Furthermore, Mr. Dugard writes “The Inquisition became so successful in the eyes of the Catholic Church that it lasted until 1834, embedding an environment of secrecy and fear in Spain’s already idiosyncratic culture.”

Idiosyncratic or not Columbus was glad to return to Spain in 1500s, where he was greeted warmly by Ferdinand and Isabella who claimed that his imprisonment was not of their doing. And while Mr. Dugard does not absolve the monarchs of all that happened during their reign, he paints a moving picture of a relieved and weeping Columbus at the feet of a not-unsympathetic queen who, herself is also moved to tears.

By this time, he had several accomplishments under his belt. As Mr. Dugard helpfully recites, “On his first voyage of discovery, he had found the New World. On his second he had begun its settlement. On his third he was expanding the known parameters of not just the new World, showing it to be more than a mere scattering of islands in the middle of a mighty sea, but of the entire earth.” His fourth, the subject of this book began after Ferdinand and Isabella, “worn down” by Columbus’ “constant pleas for recognition” consented when he asked to begin a voyage that would take him around the world and allow him to discover the western passage to India.

This swashbuckling tale makes for exciting reading and to some extent rehabilitates Columbus’ reputation. Mr. Dugard moves so briskly that there is little time to weigh the accusations that rained down on him in the 1990s (slaveholder and ravager of native cultures).The author is more concerned with presenting the facts of the Columbus’ fourth voyage, an event the author became intrigued with after reading about the discovery of La Vizcaino, a vessel found off the coast of Panama in 2002. Although “evidence points overwhelmingly toward the affirmative” that this was Columbus’ vessel, ” Mr. Dugard allows as how marine biologists are still divided over this issue. Nevertheless, what propels his story of how close Columbus actually came to achieving his goal of making it to the Pacific Ocean is the power of the writing. Mr. Dugard is generous in providing riveting accounts of ship life and foreign conquest.

There is also a remarkable human element to his story. Readers learn of Columbus’ attachment to his illegitimate son Fernando, whose journal entries provide some of the book’s most interesting material and his dealings with the native peoples, notably the Taino who, at first, seemed guileless and welcoming but later burned the colonists’ fort and massacred the “non-essential personnel — the master-at arms, ship’s boys, an interpreter, able seamen not pulling their weight, a painter, a secretary two surgeons” who Columbus had left behind.

Mr. Dugard also relates an interesting story of the Talaman who befriended Columbus and his men until they were frightened by the markings made by a scribe who put pen to paper.

But it is the sight of Columbus standing on deck of La Capitana, one of the four vessels that escaped (La Vizcaino was another) that remains with the reader long after the book is finished. He focused his attention on keeping the fleet together even though “the wind screamed like an armada of banshees” and “the sea swallowed some vessels outright.”

For lovers of a good adventure story and for a window on a time when brave men sought to make sense of the dimensions of a world that was new and uncharted, “The Last Voyage of Columbus” is a heady read, giving the back story to poet Joaquin Miller’s oft-recited words: “He gained a world, he gave that world/ Its grandest lesson: “On! Sail on!”