Nine against the unknown

NINE AGAINST THE UNKNOWN
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§ 13
But the shell of the poet-explorer cannot pass beyond our
horizon without a glance of interest. From that southern
anchorage at Cuba, Columbus, despairing of making His¬
paniola, crossed the straits of Jamaica and ran his ships on
shore, embedding them in the sand. Then he sat down and
wrote letters to Ferdinand and the Governor of Hispaniola,
asking for aid and describing the wonders of Panama in the
usual terms of overflowing optimism and exaggeration.
These letters were carried by his lieutenant, Mendez,
after numerous encounters and flights and fights and travails,
to San Domingo. Months went by and no news of relief came
to the two ships stranded off Jamaica. The natives grew less
friendly, suffering from the depredations of a scoundrelly
Spaniard, Porras, who had quarrelled with the Admiral.
Porras finally decided to seize the ships for himself and his
fellow-mutineers. He attacked from the woods and a pitched
battle on the sands was witnessed by the asembled Indians.
Porras was defeated and captured, mainly through the
instrumentality of brother Bartholomew, and on the 28th
of June two caravels arrived from San Domingo to carry the
shipwrecked sailors from Jamaica. Columbus, with a happy
disregard of the actual situation from which he had been
rescued, sailed in apparent confidence that in Hispaniola
Ovando the Governor would give way to the superior authority
of the Viceroy.
Ovando displayed no such inclination. There followed a
month of wrangling, the haughty and ageing Genoese opposed
to the cool and dried Ovando, a typical Spanish Grandee.
Then Columbus took ship from the Indies, and never saw
them again.
Even on this last voyage misfortune dogged him. The
Atlantic was swept with storms and great seas beat on the
deck of his ship. Ill with a fever which came with gout,
Columbus lay in his cabin and listened to the thunder of the
weather and turned a weary head to seek rest again, disillusion¬
ment at last upon him.
Nor was that unwarranted. The court sent no summons
for him to appear. He had wasted the fortunes of the fourth
expedition, he returned with no news of the imagined strait