The more he questioned his Indian guides on the exact whereabouts of this island, the vaguer they became about its location, their evasions intensifying his interest in the matter. Columbus was never more zealous than when in pursuit of an illusion. He considered making exploratory gestures, but, he recorded, he “didn’t care to tarry,” not to mention the way this nautical detour into venery would be portrayed at home by his enemies and rivals. Fair weather and brisk wind encouraged Columbus to put aside thoughts of the Sirens of the Caribbean and to pursue his northing and easting toward Spain. By sunset, he reported, the breeze began to die down.

Columbus’s system for marking the days was eccentric, even by maritime standards. Mariners generally began their days at noon rather than at midnight, but Columbus preferred to commence his days at sunrise, at least for the outward-bound voyage. On the inbound voyage, such as this one, he marked his days from sunset to sunset. These variations meant that calculations of his fleet’s day-to-day progress were often irregular, and did not always agree.

Similar discrepancies and irregularities marked timekeeping aboard Columbus’s ships. His pilots kept time with a capacious hand-operated hourglass known as the ampolleta. On fair days, he was able to correct timekeeping errors by observing the moment the sun reached the zenith, that is, the highest point overhead. Then, for a few hours, all was regulated, but at sea, nothing stayed the same for very long. On heaven and on earth, everything was in motion.

Never completely breaking free of his medieval frame of mind, Columbus relied on a traditional canonical schedule, even at sea. Prime, or daybreak, occurred at 6:00 a.m., Terce at 9:00 a.m., Sext at noon, Nones at 3:00 p.m., Vespers at 6:00 p.m., and Compline at 9:00 p.m. These hours were occasionally elastic, with Prime, usually indicating dawn, observed whenever it occurred, Vespers in late afternoon or early evening, and Compline before the men went to sleep. At Vespers, when circumstances permitted, Columbus called all hands, who read or looked on while prayers were uttered, and the men of the day watch gave way to the evening guard.

It was then, in the dying light of day, he saw a remarkable sight, a booby, the awkward-looking seabird whose name was based on the Spanish word for “dunce,” known to oceangoing sailors everywhere. Soon another booby appeared, and then seaweed: hints and promises of land.

He varied his course between north, north northeast, “and at times did northeast by north,” making up so much time that soon Niña was bearing down on Pinta “in order to speak to her,” by which he meant to apprise himself of Pinzón’s latest intentions. Suddenly the air turned chill, and he expected more cooling as he proceeded north, “and also the nights were very much longer from the narrowing of the sphere.” This observation is but one of many made by Columbus that demonstrate that he fully understood and appreciated that the earth was round, or nearly so, and certainly not flat.

More birds appeared, including petrels, and still more seaweed, “but not so many fishes, because the water was colder.” Yet there was no sign of land, and he had scant idea of his whereabouts in the Ocean Sea or in relation to his outgoing voyage. Amid the unease, the wind died down the following day, and with nothing better to do, the ship’s Indian passengers went swimming in the briny deep, as their more cautious European keepers looked on from the deck of the Niña.

That night, a revived but variable wind teased Niña to life, but Columbus and his crew resisted the temptation to proceed. They were waiting for Pinta to catch up, yet she appeared crippled. “She sailed badly close-hauled,” Columbus noted, “because she had little help from the mizzen owing to the mast not being sound.” For that lapse, the Admiral blamed his subversive rival. “If her captain, Martín Alonso Pinzón, had taken as much care to provide a good mast to the Indies,” he scolded, “where there were so many and of that sort, as he was greedy in leaving them, thinking to fill the ship with them, he would have done well.”

Columbus took comfort in the fact that the ocean remained “always very smooth as in a river,” for which he thanked God, who apparently still favored him above all others.

Columbus hoped to take the altitude of the North Star to ascertain his location, but failed. He blamed rough water, or, as he put it, “the rolling wouldn’t permit it.” Yet his previous sentence notes that the sea was “very smooth.” More likely, he was frustrated by his lack of skill in handling the devices, even in calm weather. A sophisticated dead-reckoning navigator who could read currents and clouds and wind with uncanny precision, Columbus lacked mastery of these instruments. In due course he gave up on the quadrant and astrolabe, and relied on his senses, especially his keen eyesight. For all his visionary qualities, Columbus remained the pragmatic Genoese sea captain, impatient with the latest navigational technology.

The longer Columbus remained at sea, the greater the divergence between his actual and presumed locations, which meant the greater the danger. As the voyage unfolded, the ultimate test of his navigational abilities occurred not in the outward-bound journey—which was a demonstration of his vision, not his navigational accuracy, with any landfall in the New World considered a “discovery”—but on the return voyage, when he headed toward a specific destination, not a fanciful idea concocted by Marco Polo or the result of calculations based on inexact measurement. Not knowing where he was as he commenced the return leg of the voyage, and resolute in the belief that he was somewhere off the coast of “India,” he found himself at an enormous disadvantage as he attempted to retrace his course, and the problem became worse with every league he traversed. He was lost without realizing it, just as he had been since the day the soft outlines of the Canary Islands faded into the mist.

Columbus’s “Letter on the First Voyage” attempted to burnish the events of his first voyage. If his diary reads as a jumbled, frequently contradictory series of impressions made on the fly, his letter reveals his more considered impressions, those he expected to secure his place in the scheme of things. From start to finish, he was determined to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative aspects of his voyage. “Since I know you will be pleased at the great success with which the Lord has crowned my voyage,” he began, “I write to inform you how in thirty-three days I crossed from the Canary Islands to the Indies, with the fleet our most illustrious Sovereigns gave to me. And there I found many islands filled with people without number, and of them all have I taken possession for Their Highnesses, by proclamation and with the royal standard displayed, and nobody objected.”

Although he had no idea where he actually had gone, he proceeded to explain his taxonomy of discovery: “To the first island which I found I gave the name Saint Salvador, in recognition of His Heavenly Majesty, who marvelously hath given all this; the Indians call it Guanahani. To the second I gave the name Isla de Santa María de la Concepción; to the third, Fernandina ; to the fourth, Isabela, to the fifth, Juana, and so to each one I gave a new name.” How splendid it was to conjure and name a new world.

On a more troubling subject, he added, “When I reached Cuba, I followed its north coast westwards, and found it so extensive I thought this must be the mainland, the province of Cathay.” Here he rewrote his own history. As his logbook indicated, he initially believed that Cuba was a very large island, and if that were the case, it could not be connected to Cathay, or China, a result that would undercut his promises to the Sovereigns, the purpose of his expedition, and his cosmography. The explorer did not want to confront the consequences of his own discovery, and so he resorted to a convenient fiction, explaining that as he sailed along the Cuban coast, he saw only “small groups of houses whose inhabitants fled as soon as we approached,” and stayed on his course, “thinking I should undoubtedly come to some great towns or cities.” Worse, the “coast was bearing me northward,” and winter was approaching, not that he had any realistic expectation of encountering ice and snow in this subtropical climate, where persistent heat and humidity plagued Columbus and all the men as they went out in their wool and linen clothing, while the Indians went about nearly naked. Pretending that he was fleeing the cold—and how would the Sovereigns ever know the difference, unless they had actually traveled there?—he decided to journey south, but he did not want to carry on in that direction either, preferring to anchor in a “remarkable harbor that I had observed.” By the time he finished his little fable about fleeing the harsh Cuban winter, the Sovereigns (and their advisers) would have stopped wondering whether Cuba was an island, after all. More likely, it was some part of “India.”

Feigning curiosity when he was, in fact, avoiding a reasonable trajectory for his ships, he sent two men inland to look for “a king of great cities.” He dispatched two scouts to find centers of commerce and civilization, and three days of reconnoitering in the wild led only to “small villages and people without number, but nothing of importance.” More likely, Columbus deliberately altered parts of his log to conceal his precise whereabouts from his rivals, and it was possible that he was being similarly disingenuous about his half-completed exploration of Cuba.

Rather than pursuing geographical truth, he dashed away to another island, one that he named Hispaniola. Indians had told him about it, or so he said. His story was getting better with the telling, and so he continued to embellish, even when his journal, with its sense of wonder and ambiguity, contradicted his letter’s mythmaking.

He portrayed Hispaniola as an extraordinary opportunity for empire building. “It has many large harbors finer than any I know in Christian lands, and many large rivers. All this is marvelous.” In fact, everything there was “marvelous”—the plants, the trees, the fruit—and Hispaniola itself “is a wonder” replete with many “incredibly fine harbors” and “great rivers” containing gold (not really), “many spices” (not true), and “large mines of gold and other metals” (a flagrant exaggeration).

As with his fear of the Cuban “winter,” only Columbus could verify these statements. He preferred to evoke “lofty” lands, sierras, and mountains. “All are most beautiful, of a thousand shapes, and all accessible, and filled with trees of a thousand kinds and tall, and they seemed to touch the sky.” Some flowered; others bore fruit, “and there were singing the nightingale and other little birds of a thousand kinds in the month of November.” He wrote on, telling of its rich red soil (true), its powdery beaches strewn with glassine sand (true), its cooperative populace, who seemed wholly of a piece with the soothing environment (hardly), and water of crystal clarity that he had seen nowhere else (for once, the absolute truth). “You could not believe it without seeing it,” he exclaimed. Even Marco Polo, also inclined toward hyperbole, had not remarked on such gentle and beguiling natural settings, and for the benefit of the Sovereigns, Columbus wondered if he were approaching the entrance to paradise. In Hispaniola, “the sierras and the mountains and the plains and the meadows and the lands are so beautiful and rich for planting and sowing, and for livestock of every sort, and for building towns and villages.” And so Columbus wrote on, soothed by the sound of the sea, encouraged by the prospect of his glorious return to Spain, storms and struggles all behind him as he evoked the magic isles of his voyage.

To begin, they all “go naked, men and women, as their mothers bore them, except that some women cover one place only with the leaf of a plant or with a net of cotton,” he warned, and appraised them as an avaricious Genoese might. “They have no iron or steel or weapons, nor are they capable of using them, although they are well-built people of handsome stature, because they are wondrous timid” and even refused to use the flimsy little sharp sticks they occasionally carried. When Columbus landed, “people without number” were drawn to the sight, only to flee. “Even a father would not stay for his son, and this was not because wrong had been done to anyone.” In all, they were “timid beyond cure.” And generous beyond reason. “Of anything they have, if you ask them for it, they never say no; rather they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as if they were giving their hearts; and whether the thing be of value or of small price.”

He described the efforts he made to prepare for their conversion to Christianity: “I gave them a thousand pretty things that I had brought, in order to gain their love and incline them to become Christians. I hoped to win them to the love and service of Their Highnesses and of the whole Spanish nation and to persuade them to collect and give us of the things which they possessed in abundance and which we needed”—such as their young women, he might have added, if he were to be completely truthful, which he was not. He boasted that he, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, received a “good reception everywhere, once they had overcome their fear . . . because they have never before seen men clothed or ships like these.”

He learned to communicate with them “either by speech or signs,” but no matter what passed between them, the Indians “believe very firmly that I, with these ships and people, came from the sky.” The conviction remained unshakeable, and ubiquitous. Wherever he journeyed, the startled inhabitants “went running from house to house and to the neighboring towns with loud cries of ‘Come! Come! See the people from the sky!’ ”

In fact, this was neither a town nor a citadel, as he implied; it was a modest stronghold cobbled together with timber salvaged from the scuttled Santa María and staffed by thirty-nine seamen ill equipped for survival in a strange environment. As the first European settlement in the New World, it served as a powerful symbol. In his Sovereigns’ imagination, it would appear as a castle with banners and battlements, a militant monastery in the midst of heathens. It was, in other words, an excellent selling point, secured by the hostages he had deposited there. Columbus insisted that they were not in any danger, and that they enjoyed the protection of the local king, who “took pride in calling me and treating me as a brother.” Even if the king underwent a change of heart, “neither he nor his people know the use of arms,” Columbus said.

One more thing: he wanted to assure the Sovereigns that “I have not found the human monsters that many people expected. On the contrary, the whole population is very well made.” He admitted to hearing reports concerning “a people who are regarded in all the islands as very ferocious and who eat human flesh”—the fierce Caribs, who marauded vulnerable islands and practiced ritual human sacrifice—“they have many canoes with which they range all the islands of India and pillage and take as much as they can,” but even these warriors “are no more malformed than the others, except that they have the custom of wearing their hair long like women.” Their ferocity derived from the cowardice of their victims. In other words, they were not to be taken seriously as combatants.

He finally bestowed a designation on the people he discovered: they were Indios, a term derived from the misconception that they inhabited India. No matter, they were rich in resources that Spain needed: not only gold, but mastic, “which up to now, has only been found in Greece, on the island of Chios”—as Columbus knew from personal experience during his arduous apprenticeship as a Genoese seaman—together with aloe, rhubarb, cinnamon, and a “thousand other things of value.” This appeared to be an impressive tally, but a skeptic predisposed to dislike Columbus would read between the lines and realize that much was lacking, chiefly gold, the most important item on the Sovereigns’ agenda. Had Columbus found abundant gold, he would have emphasized it above all. And, of course, he had not found the Grand Khan or his empire, no matter how vigorously he pretended that it lay just over the horizon. And the inhabitants, who today would be called indigenous peoples, were not the highly advanced civilization described by Marco Polo; they lacked the technological, mathematical, artistic, and military abilities catalogued by the Venetian. Columbus tried to turn their lack of technological prowess to his advantage; if they did not have sophisticated weapons, they must be docile. No matter how he couched his description of them, it was apparent they lacked the makings of sophisticated trading partners. He had found little of immediate use to the Sovereigns and their plans for empire. Nevertheless, his voyage triggered an unstoppable impulse for exploration, empire building, and greed.

At the time he wrote this summary, he could not, nor could anyone else, have imagined the immediate consequences or the long-term implications of this voyage. To him, it was the fulfillment of a divine prophecy. To his Sovereigns and their ministers, it was intended as a landgrab and a way to plunder gold. Instead, it became, through forces Columbus inadvertently set in motion and only dimly understood, the most important voyage of its kind ever made.

Columbus signed the document: “Done on board the caravel,” as he called sturdy little Niña, “off the Canary Islands, on the fifteenth of February, year 1493. At your service. The Admiral.” He knew that he was off Santa María island in the Azores that day, rather than in the Canaries, but his habit of obscuring his location remained so ingrained that he could not help but perform this legerdemain even when reporting to his Sovereigns.

By the time the ink dried, his little ship was engulfed in yet another tempest.

Birds glided past, leading him to believe he must be near land. Instead, on Tuesday, he experienced “high seas and tempest, and if the caravel had not been . . . very staunch and well-prepared, he would have been afraid of being lost.” The day’s sailing involved some of the nastiest weather Columbus encountered on the entire voyage, with lightning bolts shattering the sky. He hauled in his sheets and “proceeded most of the night under bare poles” sustaining only a “scrap of sail” into rougher seas. “The ocean made up something terrible, and the waves crossed each other, which strained the vessels.”

By Thursday, they were somewhere west of the Azores, a group of islands that lay a thousand miles west of the Portuguese coast. As the gale lasted into Thursday, February 14, the fortunes of errant Pinta became a source of great anxiety, as Columbus related in one of the most emotional entries in his diary: “That night the wind increased and the waves were frightful, running counter to one another, and so crossed and embarrassed the ship that she couldn’t make headway or get out from between them, and they broke over her.” Even for an experienced sailor, few spectacles are as intimidating, or predictive of drowning, as the sight of towering waves breaking overhead, as if the turbulent sea were engulfing the ship. In response, Columbus ordered the mainsail’s yardarm lowered as far as it could go without its sail being shredded or carried away by seawater roaring across the deck. When that strategy failed, and the seas became even more formidable, Columbus “began to scud”—that is, to run before the storm with practically no sail—“since there was nothing else to be done. Then the caravel Pinta, in which Martín Alonso [Pinzón] went, also began to scud before it, and disappeared, although all night the Admiral made flares, and the other replied, until it appeared that he could do no more from the force of the tempest, and because he found himself very far from the Admiral’s course.” That was Columbus’s last sight of Pinta. Ships disappeared all the time in violent storms such as these, among surging seas and stinging rain, blown sideways between tall waves, and disappearing into a watery trench.

Oblivious to Pinta’s destiny, the Admiral’s main concern was to survive the night. “At sunrise the wind and sea made up more, sea crossing more terribly,” and proceeded with the “main course only, and low, to enable her to rise above the cross-swell, that it might not swamp her.” He headed northeast by east for six exhausting hours, traversing seven and a half leagues, or about thirty miles. Columbus vowed that if they survived the ordeal, they would make a grateful pilgrimage to Santa María de Guadalupe, the renowned, inaccessible shrine in Extremadura, Spain, known as the Powerful Lady of Silence, fashioned of wood from Asia. They would “carry a candle of five pounds of wax and . . . all vow that on whomever fell the lot should fulfill the pilgrimage.” For them, the ritual was a matter of life and death.

In the midst of the endless storm, Columbus, driven by piety, and possibly driven mad, said that he “ordered as many chickpeas,” or garbanzo beans, “to be brought as were people in the ship, and that one [chickpea] should be marked with a knife, making a cross, and placed in a cap, wellshaken.” Columbus, ever the child of destiny, went first, placing his hand in the cap, and he “drew the chickpea with the cross, and so the lot fell on him, and henceforth he regarded himself as a pilgrim and bound to go to fulfill the vow.” The terrified sailors devised still more schemes to perform acts of religious devotion as a way of improving their chances of survival, their reception in the afterlife, or as distraction from their plight, which became more grave by the hour.

“After that, the Admiral and all the people made a vow that, upon reaching the first land, they would all go in their shirts in procession to make a prayer in a church that was dedicated to Our Lady. Beside the general or common vows, everyone made his special vow, because nobody expected to escape, holding themselves all for lost, owing to the terrible tempest that they were experiencing.” Second-guessing himself, Columbus wished, too late, that he had stowed more provisions, more water and wine, if only to have the benefit of their weight on tiny Niña at this moment, but he had been distracted by his quest for the Isle of Women, where he had persuaded himself he could take on those precious items. “The remedy that he found for this necessity was, when they were able, to fill with seawater the pipes that were found empty with water and wine; and with this they supplied the need.”

Columbus became convinced that “Our Lord wished him to perish.” At the same time, he reminded himself of his mission and the news of his exploits that he was bringing to Ferdinand and Isabella. The more important the news became in his mind, the more fearful he became that he would not be able to deliver it, and that all his discoveries and sacrifices would be for naught, “and that every mosquito might interrupt and prevent it.” He reflected on his lack of faith, and yet it had been sufficient to bring him to Spain, to win royal patronage, and to enable him to overcome adversity to reach this point, the difficulty of dealing with the sailors, and their mutiny against him. He had managed, with the Lord’s help, to prevail. If only he could outlast adversity a little longer.

To leave some record of his accomplishments, he frantically grabbed “a parchment and wrote upon it all that he could of everything that he had found, earnestly requesting whoever might find it to carry it to the Sovereigns. This parchment he enclosed in a waxed cloth, very well secured, and ordered a great wooden barrel to be brought and placed it inside, without anyone knowing what it was, unless they supposed that it was some act of devotion, and so he ordered it to be cast into the sea,” his version of a message in a bottle, his testament for posterity, to be washed up on the shores of history. (The barrel was never found.)

As Niña helplessly scudded before the wind, heaving and lurching to the northeast, his fervent prayers were not enough to bring him confidence that he would survive the night, let alone succeed in his mission, or, as he put it, his “weakness and anxiety . . . would not allow my spirit to be soothed.”

And then, after sunset, “the sky began to show clear in the western quarter.” The shift in the wind’s direction offered a shred of hope that he might, after all, survive. “Sea somewhat high,” he noted, “but somewhat abating.” Several hours later, after sunrise, the crew sighted a ghostly apparition that gradually coalesced into a distant landform. Guessing correctly for once, Columbus concluded they had arrived in the vicinity of the Azores, while “the pilots and seamen found themselves already in the country of Castile.”

On Sunday evening, when the seas moderated, Columbus rallied and circumnavigated the sanctuary. Niña dropped anchor, and “promptly lost” the equipment while the Admiral attempted to hail someone on land. He had no choice but to raise sail and stand offshore throughout the night. In the morning, he anchored off the northern coast of the island, “and ascertained that it was Santa María, one of the Azores.” He was safe, at least for the present.

After mooring securely in the harbor, and explaining how he came to be there, Columbus heard that “the people of the island said that never had they seen such a tempest as there had been these fifteen days past,” and they wondered how Columbus had escaped the storm’s fury. The apparently innocent question concealed suspicion. Was Columbus telling them the truth?

To impress his audience, the Admiral blurted out his marvelous discovery of the Indies. He proceeded to boast that “this navigation of his had been very exact”—far from the truth—“and that he had laid down his route well,” except for exaggerating his speed and, as a result, the distance he had covered. At least his guess that he had arrived in the Azores proved correct.

To save face and avoid the appearance of accidentally washing up on Santa María, he “pretended to have gone further than he had in order to confuse the pilots and seamen who pricked off”—that is, marked with pins—“the chart, in order to remain master of that route to the Indies.”

His hosts were not convinced, but they cloaked their skepticism with hospitality. The island’s captain, Juan de Castañeda (or perhaps his deputy), sent messengers with refreshments to the ship. In response, “the Admiral ordered much courtesy shown to the messengers, ordering that they be given bunks to sleep in that night, because it was evening and the village was far.” In the midst of these diplomatic maneuvers, Columbus recalled the vows he had made on Thursday, “when he was in the anguish of the tempest,” and asked the priest of Nossa Senhora dos Anjos, Our Lady of the Angels, to say Mass. The fulfillment of this religious obligation led to a diplomatic contretemps. As the men prayed, the whole town “fell upon them and took them all prisoners.”

Unaware of the outrage, Columbus impatiently awaited the return of his men. By 11:00 a.m., they still had not arrived, and he suspected they had been detained. He ordered Niña to weigh anchor, and sailed toward the chapel, where a company of armed horsemen dismounted and prepared to arrest him. At the same time, the island’s captain “stood up in the barge and asked for safe conduct from the Admiral [Columbus],” who agreed to allow him aboard Niña, “and do all that he wished.”

Displaying unusual patience and presence of mind after his ordeal at sea, Columbus “tried with fair words to hold him, so as to recover his people, not believing that it would break his word in giving him safe conduct, because he [the captain], having offered peace and security, had broken his word.”

As the standoff turned acrimonious, Columbus demanded to know why his men had been seized, and in the midst of a pilgrimage, no less. He claimed that the captain’s rude behavior would “offend the king of Portugal,” whereas in Spain, the Portuguese were “received with much courtesy and entered and were safe as in Lisbon.” He offered to show the official letters he carried from Ferdinand and Isabella naming him “their Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy of the Indies, which now belonged to Their Highnesses.” He had the signatures, he had the seals, and to prove his point he flourished them at a safe distance. If the captain chose not to release the sailors, Columbus argued, he would sail on to Seville, where, the captain could be certain, the outrage would be reported and his people would be punished.

Santa María’s captain replied that he knew nothing about the Sovereigns of Castile, was not impressed by Columbus’s letters, and as far as he was concerned, Columbus should consider himself in Portugal. His manner, according to the diary, was “somewhat threatening,” and Columbus speculated whether a rupture between the two nations had occurred during his voyage. The two of them, captain and Admiral, continued to posture, with Columbus at one point threatening to carry “a hundred Portuguese to Castile and depopulate that whole island.” Columbus returned to his flagship without the hostages to ride out yet another storm.

The latest tempest proved powerful enough to part the ship’s cables. After making repairs and filling pipes with seawater as ballast, Columbus decided to weigh anchor at the first opportunity. Soon Niña was headed away from Santa María and all its troubles toward St. Michael. If he could not find better anchorage—and a better reception—at the neighboring island, “he had no recourse but to flee seaward.”

It seemed that he could discover a New World with ease, but he negotiated the Azores only with difficulty. He wanted only to declare his feat, but he could not find anyone who would listen. To the Portuguese inhabitants of the Azores, Columbus was more of a trespasser than an explorer. Only Ferdinand and Isabella, his sponsors, would properly appreciate and validate his accomplishments, once he freed himself from the flytrap hospitality of the Portuguese.

Sunrise failed to disclose any suggestion of his goal, St. Michael, and he decided to return to Santa María “to see if he could recover his people and the barge and the anchors and cables that he had left there.”

The small humiliations resumed as soon as he anchored. A functionary balancing on the rocks overlooking the harbor warned him not to leave. Then a barge bearing “five seamen and two priests and a scribe” boarded the ship. The seamen were armed. Columbus permitted them to spend the night on board, having no other choice. In the morning, they demanded to see signs of the authority conferred on Columbus by the “Sovereigns of Castile,” and a scuffle ensued. Columbus related that he broke the deadlock by persuading the intruders of his authority, and the Portuguese finally released all the pilgrims whom they had arrested.

Come Sunday, the unstable weather turned fair, and after taking on food, water, and much needed ballast, Columbus headed due east, toward Spain and the acclaim he expected. Yet the closer to home, the greater the danger he faced. Foul weather blew Niña off course. “It was very painful to have such a tempest when they were already at the doors of home,” he confided to his diary. On the evening of March 2, “a squall blew up which split all the sails and he found himself in great peril.”

As before, the beleaguered men drew lots to select a pilgrim to pray at Santa María de la Cinta, near Huelva, and once again the “the lot fell to the Admiral.” There was little time for discussion, as the storm’s intensity redoubled, and they found themselves blown not to Spain, as they intended, but toward the one place they did not wish to go: Lisbon.

And the storm grew still more violent.

He “made some headway, although with great peril, keeping out to sea, and so God preserved them until day,” a task that Columbus said meant incurring “infinite toil and terror.” Taking on water, barely navigable, guided by her exhausted crew, Niña approached a landmark Columbus recognized: the Rock of Sintra, a peninsula north of the Tagus River, which flows into Lisbon. He had a choice: either attempt to veer off into the storm and the near certainty of oblivion, loss of life, and the failure of his Enterprise of the Indies, or enter the river, and so he did “because he could do nothing else.” He made for the fishing village of Cascais, near the mouth of the Tagus, and despite the tempest found anchorage.

The curious gathered onshore, wondering how the crew had survived the ferocious storm and offering prayers. Columbus heard from other seamen that “never had there been a winter with so great storms, and that 25 ships had been lost in Flanders,” a frequent destination for ships leaving Lisbon, “and that other ships had been lying there for 4 months without being able to get out.” Against this background, Niña’s survival seemed miraculous.

Columbus’s first thoughts were of King João, but there was no satisfaction in proving the disdainful Portuguese monarch wrong. Instead, the Admiral invoked Ferdinand and Isabella, explaining that they had “ordered him not to avoid entering the harbors of His Highness to ask for what was necessary, in return for pay.” When the weather cleared, he would be eager to sail to Lisbon “because some ruffians, thinking he carried much gold, were planning to commit some rascality.” It would require all his tact and diplomacy to persuade the Portuguese that he had not been raiding their protected interests on the Guinea coast—which Spain had promised to avoid—but was actually returning from the Indies. Either explanation would incite the wrath of King João.

All the more surprising, then, was the appearance of the “master of the great ship of the King of Portugal,” riding at anchor nearby: Bartolomeu Dias. When last seen by Columbus in 1488, this courageous navigator was making his triumphal return to Lisbon after the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope. At the time, he enjoyed the great favor of the king who had refused to back Columbus’s scheme to find a water route to the Indies. But four and a half years had wrought changes. No longer a captain, Dias was now second-in-command, or master, of a modest vessel in the service of the king. And Columbus, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, had successfully completed his visionary if misunderstood mission, an accomplishment that further jeopardized his relationship with this deeply suspicious king.

Dias impudently drew alongside Niña “and told the Admiral to enter the gig to come and give an account to the king’s factors and the captain.”

No, Columbus replied, he would do no such thing, “unless by compulsion of being unable to resist armed force.” Dias proposed a compromise: Columbus could elect to send his second-in-command, but stubborn Genoese that he was, he insisted he would only go if forced, and “that it was the custom of the Admirals of the sovereigns of Castile to die before they yielded themselves or their people.”

Faced with this bravado, Dias relented slightly, requesting to see the letters of authorization from Ferdinand and Isabella, which Columbus had initially offered to show. This he did, and having examined them, Dias returned in the gig to his ship to explain the situation to his own captain, who, “with a great noise of drums, trumpets, and pipes, came aboard the caravel [Niña], spoke with the Admiral, and offered to do all he commanded.”

Nevertheless, he clinched his argument that he had journeyed to China by displaying the Indian passengers he had brought with him, persuading both himself and his public of the veracity of his claims. He reported, “So many people came from the city of Lisbon today to see him and the Indians, that it was astonishing, and they were all full of wonder, giving thanks to Our Lord.”

At long last a letter came from King João II, inviting Columbus to a royal audience at a monastery. The beleaguered discoverer preferred to remain with his ship for the sake of form and for personal security, but he had no choice but to comply with the request, “to disarm suspicion.” As an inducement, “The King gave orders to his factors that everything the Admiral and his people and the caravel [Niña] stood in need of he would supply without pay.”

Columbus replied that he had never seen the treaty and knew nothing of its provisions. He deferred to the Sovereigns, whose orders to avoid Guinea he had scrupulously followed. Realizing perhaps the impossibility of verifying where Columbus had or had not gone on his voyage, and pleased that the Admiral’s answer acknowledged Portugal’s right, King João appeared to relent, and replied that he was sure there would be no need for arbitrators in this matter. The king tried his best to draw out Columbus about his voyage. What countries had he visited, and who were the inhabitants? Had he found gold, pearls, and other precious gems? According to Las Casas, the king inquired “always with a pleasant face, dissembling the grief that he had in his heart.” Columbus boasted wildly about his accomplishments, without realizing the effect his claims had on the jealous king.

Rui da Pina, a Portuguese court historian who might have witnessed the interview, remarked that the “king blamed himself for negligence in dismissing him for want of credit and authority in regard to this discovery for which he first came to make request of him.” So ran the official version. Behind the mask of humility, King João meditated on a chilling solution to the problem of the turncoat explorer. He could execute Columbus; or rather, he could let it seem that others wished him to be killed. And the deed could be carried out discreetly, with blame attributed to some lapse committed by the explorer. In the end, the king instead treated Columbus honorably before booting him out of the country.

Columbus had completed his mission, as he understood it, and expected to be treated with the greatest respect. At last the journey was done, and a glorious future lay before him and Spain. After the years of waiting, the discovery had been accomplished quickly, in a little over seven months, with virtually no bloodshed and with no loss of life, incredibly enough—nothing except a sunken ship from which all hands had been rescued, and bruised feelings on the part of the renegade Martín Alonso Pinzón. Even the threat he posed to Columbus sputtered out when Pinzón turned up in his hometown of Palos de la Frontera, seriously ill, and died within days of his return from the sea. The cause was believed to have been syphilis, and in that case, he might have caught the disease long before he sailed with Columbus, and it had lain dormant in his nervous system for years, until it emerged on the voyage as tertiary syphilis, which would account for his defiant, irrational behavior. He was, in short, going mad, more of a danger to himself than to anyone else.

He planned to proceed to Barcelona “by sea, in which city he had news that Their Highnesses were, and thus to give them the story of his entire voyage that Our Lord had permitted him to perform.” He reminisced briefly about the opposition he had faced when planning his voyage, and the “opinion of so many high personages . . . who were all against me, alleging this undertaking to be folly.” Perhaps his critics, like the king of Portugal and his advisers, would see how mistaken they had been.

He had been shrewd, he had been tough, and he had been wily, but most of all, he had been spectacularly lucky. He had been wrong at least as often as he had been right, most blatantly about his destination, but he had also been nimble, capable of reversing himself when it served his purpose. His words, as recorded in his diary, were emphatic, but his strategy was flexible and opportunistic.

“Since I know that you will be pleased at the great success with which the Lord has crowned my voyage,” said Columbus in the famous letter to his Sovereigns at the conclusion of his first voyage, “I write to inform you how in thirty-three days I crossed from the Canary Islands to the Indies”—in reality, an island in the Caribbean—“with the fleet which our most illustrious Sovereigns gave to me. I found very many islands with large populations and took possession of them all for Your Highnesses; this I did by proclamation and unfurled the royal standard.”

His initial contacts with the inhabitants of the New World were tentative and respectful, even heartening, he claimed. “I hoped to win them to the love and service of Your Highnesses and of the whole Spanish nation,” he wrote. “They have no religion, and are not idolaters; but all believe that power and goodness dwell in the sky and they are firmly convinced that I have come from the sky with these ships and people. . . . This is not because they are stupid—far from it, they are men of great intelligence, for they give a marvelously good account of everything—but because they have never before seen men clothed or ships like these.”

Still convinced he had reached India, Columbus tailored his understanding of another major discovery, the island of Cuba, to suit his purposes. At first, he accurately labeled it as an island in his journal; later, when he realized he was bound to demonstrate to Ferdinand and Isabella that he had reached the East, he recast it as “the mainland,” that is, China, and its inhabitants as subjects of the Grand Khan. Ferdinand and Isabella appointed Columbus as viceroy of these lands without realizing they were creating a monarch potentially more powerful than any in Europe.