The Great Divide

Japan. So far it had not been a difficult voyage, though the rudder of one of the two accompanying ships, the Niña (the other was the Pinta ), had come adrift twice, causing delays, which more than one sceptic has put down to sabotage on the part of those in the crew who were reluctant to sail into the unknown. By the same token, the fact that Columbus calculated one distance travelled each day, but gave the men a smaller figure, has been attributed to his need to pretend that they were less distant from Spain than in fact they were. This ‘subterfuge’ is now generally discounted: a medieval league was the distance a ship could sail in one hour – say seven to twelve miles – and Italian leagues (Columbus was Genoese) were smaller than Spanish ones. The Spanish figures would have meant more to his men than the Italian variety.
    Nonetheless, Columbus was anxious to reach land. His expedition had experienced several days without much wind, causing the men to doubt whether they could, in such circumstances, expect ever to return home.
    In his journal as early as Sunday, 16 September – nearly a month before – they had been keenly interpreting signs that they were near land. On that day they encountered some ‘deep green seaweed which (so it seemed to him) had only recently been torn from land’. 1 They saw a good deal more weed as the days passed. At other times the sea water seemed less salty, as if they were nearing the mouth of a large fresh-water river; they saw large flocks of birds flying west (as if towards land), plus gannets and terns, species which ‘sleep on land and in the morning fly out to sea to look for food and do not go further than 20 leagues’. At still other times they saw birds, including ducks, which they took to be river birds; or else it rained with a kind of ‘drizzle without wind, which is a sure sign of land’. 2 The smaller ships were faster than Columbus’s own and, during the day, they often became separated. (The Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, had offered a lifelong pension to the first man to spot land.) But the three ships were instructed to keep together at sunrise and sunset, ‘because at those times the atmosphere was such as to allow them to see furthest’. 3 In fact, land had been ‘spotted’ twice before but each time it proved illusory.
    On 11 October, however, the crew of the Pinta encountered a stalk and a twig and fished out from the sea another stick, ‘carved with iron by the looks of it, and a piece of cane and other vegetation that grows on land, and a small plank’. 4
    They sailed on as the sun set that day and, at around ten in the evening, Columbus himself claimed to have seen a light. According to Bartolomé de las Casas, the sympathetic historian whose father travelled with Columbus on his second voyage, Rodrigo Sánches de Segovia, whom the king and queen had sent as comptroller, did not agree with Columbus though other crew members did. Later scholars have calculated that if Columbus did see a light, it must have been some sort of fire but it would have to have been a very large fire, because the Santa María , we now know, was then some 50 miles off land.
    In fact, the first undisputed sighting of land took place in darkness, at two o’clock the next morning, Friday, 12 October, the identification being made by a sailor whose name was given by Las Casas, in his summary of Columbus’s Journal , as Rodrigo de Triana. But since this name does not appear in the crew lists, scholars have concluded he must have been Juan Rodríguez Bermejo, a native of the town of Molinos. 5 The land was about two leagues – fifteen to twenty miles – away.
    Columbus ordered his men to ‘lay to’ that night, taking down some of the sails, waiting for dawn. The next morning the captains of the three ships – Columbus, Martin Alonso Pinzón and his brother, Vicente Yáñez – went ashore in a small armed boat, accompanied by the comptroller, and they together witnessed Columbus claim the island in the name of the King and Queen of Spain. He called it San Salvador.
    Soon, however, many islanders gathered round. ‘In order to win their good will,’ Columbus wrote in his journal that night, ‘because I could see that they were a people who could more easily be won over and converted to our holy faith by kindness than by force, I gave some of them red hats and glass beads that they put round their necks, and many other things of little value, with