Admiral of the ocean sea : a life of Christopher Columbus by Morison Samuel Eliot 1887-1976

Author:Morison, Samuel Eliot, 1887-1976
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Columbus, Christopher, Colomb, Christophe, ca 1451-1506, COLON, CRISTOBAL, ca. 1451-1506, Columbus, Christopher, Ontdekkingsreizen
Publisher: Boston, Little, Brown and Co.
Published: 1942-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

cold front overtook Nina with a violent squall "which split all the sails, and he found himself in great peril." She could hardly have been under more than one lower course at the time; the squall must have blown the other course and mizzen out of their gaskets and stripped them off the yards.

On she drove under bare poles, rolling and pitching frightfully in a dangerous cross sea. Peas were shaken up in a cap for another shirt-clad pilgrimage, this time to the church of Santa Maria de la Cinta near Huelva, and as usual Columbus drew the marked pea. The seamen then vowed to spend their first Saturday night ashore fasting on bread and water, instead of feasting and carousing. A desperate state of things, indeed!

March 3 was the worst day of the entire voyage. The cold front, the squall line which Nina had crossed, seems to have extended almost parallel to and southward of her course, so it was almost as if she had a hostile fleet firing at her from just under the horizon. Wind rose to at least force 10 on Beaufort scale, and (in Dr. Brooks's opinion) to hurricane strength in the squalls. It was some consolation that it blew from the NW, so Nina drove ahead to the eastward; but the coast was coming dangerously near, and there was the same terrible cross sea as in the earlier tempest. As the dark afternoon waned, anxiety became intense; for Columbus knew by his dead-reckoning and the look of things that he was very near the land, driving toward the ironbound coast of Portugal.

Sun set at six on March 3, and shortly afterward the cyclone delivered her last tail-lashing. The wind rose to "so terrible a tempest that they thought they were lost from the seas that came aboard from two directions, and the winds which seemed to raise the caravel into the air, and the water from the sky and lightning flashes in many directions." Fortunately it was the night of full moon, which sent enough light through the storm clouds so that at 7 p.m., when the first night watch was set, the seamen sighted land dead ahead. That was a moment for quick thinking. "In order not to approach the land until he had recognized it, to see if he could pick up some port or roadstead where he could save himself," Co-

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