Experienced sailors of the fleet would have been pleased with the crossing, which at twenty-two days was the fastest westward passage Columbus had yet achieved. In just a few years the Admiral had, through his usual mixture of nautical skill and extraordinary luck, established sea routes between Europe and the Caribbean that were hard to better, and which would remain in use until the coming of steam. But the experience of three weeks without sight of land must have been an astonishing one for the novice Hernando. He would later write affectingly of the First Voyage’s experience of the featureless water, and though he may have been drawing on his father’s notes the description must also have brought back his own first crossing of 1502:
Because all the men on the fleet were new to this type of voyage and danger, and saw themselves so far from any help, they did not hold back from murmuring; and, seeing nothing but water and sky, they fixed on every sign that appeared to them, being men who were further from land than any had been till that time.
The moment of panic when considering the distance from land, unrelieved by any sight to break the flatness of the ocean, and the descent into paranoia, suspicion and conspiracy as the bored, scared and enervated mind scrabbles for something to interpret: these reactions are unavoidable among those at sea, and cannot have been entirely quelled by the fact of the routes being now well established and some of the crew experienced in Atlantic crossing. Columbus had, of course, also interpreted signs on his First Voyage – albeit in ways designed to confirm his pronouncements that they were nearing land – but Hernando would later recast his father as the exception to this rule, figuring his calm confidence in the threefold logic of his crossing (reason, authority, report) as what set him apart and allowed him to trust in his navigational measurements and projections rather than being pulled about by the promise of every flock of birds or knot of seaweed. Perhaps during his crossing Hernando first sensed the need for such a buttress against the paranoid imaginings of the mind at sea.3
The experienced sailors on Columbus’ voyages had little reason to share his confidence in his navigational measurements: in the absence of reliable methods for measuring longitude, the Admiral was almost entirely dependent on ‘dead reckoning’, using a compass, measurements of time and estimates of speed to chart the ship’s course. Though in retrospect Columbus was impressively accurate, the problems with this method meant there was no way to be completely sure how far west they were at any time: variable wind speeds and ocean currents made estimates of speed untrustworthy, and the hourglasses were not only often faulty but also relied on fallible human hands to turn them over at the right times. To make matters worse, even the compasses failed to work consistently during Atlantic crossings. Whereas Columbus and other European sailors would have been used to the compass needle pointing slightly to the east of the North Star, Polaris, the Admiral had noticed with alarm on the First Voyage that, after crossing a line approximately 100 leagues west of the Azores, the needle suddenly jumped a whole point, now falling to the west of Polaris. This phenomenon, incomprehensible without understanding magnetic variation and the difference between magnetic north and true north, deeply challenged contemporary understandings of how the world worked. While some evidence points towards knowledge of this magnetic variation before Columbus, scholars generally agree he was the first to record the phenomenon directly and to posit a cause, namely that the compass needle pointed not to the North Pole but to some other invisible point close to it. This explanation, the first to propose the concept of a magnetic north, is not, however, found in Columbus’ writings, but in Hernando’s biography of his father: indeed, as we have seen, Columbus believed at least as late as the Third Voyage that the variation of the compasses was caused by the bulging of a pear-shaped earth, and his theories hardly became less eccentric from that point on. As shall become clear, there may be good reasons to think this theory was first arrived at by Hernando – not Columbus – and only attributed to his father, one of the many revisions to Columbus’ ideas that later developments necessitated. Either way, the world as Hernando knew it tilted sideways as he crossed the Atlantic.4
Like the drawn-out process of leaving Europe, arriving on the western edge of the Atlantic may not have felt like the threshold crossing it was supposed to. Ocean faring was not an exact science, and once land was sighted the pilots had the complex task of orienting themselves before they could proceed to a known port. When the fleet spotted land on 15 June, they eventually recognised the island as one Columbus had sighted on the Second Voyage in 1493 but had not stopped at or named. They took the opportunity to name it now – ‘La Matinino’ or Martinica (modern-day Martinique) – and Hernando was witness to the strange transformation of the unknown to the familiar by the act of naming. From there they were able to follow the same dribble of islands that Columbus had on the Second Voyage, curving north and west like the side of a basin – Dominica, Guadeloupe, the Carib islands, Puerto Rico – up to Hispaniola.5
The tension must have been considerable when the Admiral’s four ships anchored off Santo Domingo on 29 June. On the one hand, Columbus was for the first time showing the chief town in the New World he had discovered to one of his sons, a place moreover named after the young boy’s grandfather. On the other hand, Hernando would probably have been aware the Monarchs, while encouraging Columbus to cross the ocean once more, had forbidden him to land on Hispaniola, fearing his presence there would reignite unrest among settlers for whom opposition to the Columbus brothers was still a rallying cry. Columbus had nevertheless decided the problems with the Bermuda, still not able to run under full sail without drawing dangerously low in the water, absolved him of this injunction and made it necessary for him to land at Santo Domingo to exchange the ship for a fitter one. While it is true that a fleet is held back by its weakest craft, and the Bermuda would certainly have struggled on the circumnavigation Columbus was planning if he found the passage to China, one suspects he could not resist the dramatic climax of seeking entry to Santo Domingo, either as triumphant founder or to be spurned by his own creation. In the event, the new governor Nicolás de Ovando – whom Hernando would have known from his days at the court of the Infante Juan, where Ovando was one of the Ten Choice Companions – refused to oblige Columbus in any way, and was even deaf to his pleas to be let into the harbour to shelter from the vast storm that was collecting over the Caribbean Sea. Even Job, Columbus would later write, would have pitied his state when the land for which he had sweated blood had closed its doors to him. Yet the local news was far more dire than even this: the Admiral would learn they had just missed another fleet of 28 ships departing on the return crossing, including a ship that carried Francisco de Bobadilla (who had unseated Columbus as governor), the leader of the 1498 rebellion Francisco Roldán, and a great many other settlers who had participated in the revolt against Columbus and his brothers. While the removal of Bobadilla by Ovando may have seemed a triumph, it may have given way to a greater catastrophe by allowing Columbus’ enemies to return in great numbers to the court and tell their side of the story in his absence, spurred on no doubt by the President of the Council of the Indies, Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, who was an implacable foe to Columbus. Ovando further ignored Columbus’ urgings to call this fleet back before the storm hit, though he might reasonably have suspected the motives for the Admiral’s advice. The hurricane – from the Taíno word for ‘storm’ – reached Hispaniola on Wednesday, 30 June.6
Hernando’s description of that night records how, in the immense darkness, their fleet was forced to separate, with each ship taking the measures its captain thought best, and each convinced the others had gone down in the storm. While the Capitana lay in close to shore to shelter in the lee of the island, the Bermuda ran out into the open sea to ride out the storm there. The captain of the Santo, returning from begging the obdurate Ovando to change his mind, was forced to cut loose the ship’s boat to prevent the swell from sending it like a battering ram into the hull. The crew of the Capitana gathered in the driving wind and rain to curse the Admiral, whom they blamed for their being turned away from Santo Domingo when even complete strangers would have been given merciful shelter. And at this moment Hernando