How to Draw a Map. Malcolm Swanston

Isabella imposed a regime of strict security, issuing a few sketchy orders to the communities and individuals involved.

      Cristóbal, together with his friend and agent Friar Juan Pérez, began preparations to equip and man his small fleet in Palos de la Frontera. In order to fulfil their share of the contract, Ferdinand and Isabella issued orders instructing the town of Palos to provide Cristóbal with two ships for a period of one year, which turned out to be two caravel sailing ships named Nina and Pinta, owned by members of the Pinzón family. Cristóbal, for his part, put together his fleet of three ships and at his own cost chartered a cargo carrier named Santa Maria, which was owned by Juan de la Cosa, who would accompany his ship on the voyage. The total cost of Cristóbal’s fleet was some 4 million maravedis, of which Cristóbal and his financial partner, the Florentine merchant Juanoto Berardi, provided 500,000 maravedis. Cristóbal persuaded members of the Pinzón family to provide captains for the fleet, and the languages spoken within the fleet were Portuguese, several dialects of southern Spain, Basque (mainly spoken by the men from the Santa Maria), north Italian and Latin. To this mixture Cristóbal added two translators of Arab origin, assuming that in sailing westwards he would reach the eastern lands of the Indies and Cathay. Instead, he actually bumped into an entirely new world.

      Cristóbal’s small fleet slipped their moorings on 3 August 1492. They headed southwest towards the Canary Islands, the westernmost Spanish possession. He dropped anchor off Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where he was delayed for some four weeks by the need for a refit and by calm winds. He eventually left the island of La Gomera on 6 September 1492. However, his ships were becalmed again within sight of the western island of El Hierro until 8 September when, once again, they could make headway. Cristóbal had calculated that the voyage should take about four weeks; however, that estimate came and went without the sighting of any land. The crews of all the ships became restless as the onboard water and food supplies ran down to the halfway point. Some of the more nervous souls argued for a return to Spain, so Cristóbal made a deal with his crews on 10 October that if no land was sighted within the next three days they would turn back for Spain.

      On 12 October, just two hours past midnight, land was sighted from aboard the Pinta by a sailor called Rodrigo de Triana. The captain signalled the sighting by a cannon shot to Cristóbal on the Santa Maria, who claimed to have spotted a light on this possible landfall two hours previously. We should note here, however, that the thoughtful king had provided a small pension for the first man to sight land across the ocean; no doubt thinking of the amount of money he had borrowed from various backers, Cristóbal claimed the pension for himself and the hawk-eyed Rodrigo de Triana got nothing.

      The next morning the fleet dropped anchor off the island and Cristóbal went ashore with a small landing party. He named the island San Salvador, though the natives knew it as Guanahami. The exact identity of this island is still in dispute, but the most likely candidate is one of the Plana Cays in the Bahamas. While on the island, Cristóbal met, and traded with, Native Americans belonging to the Lucayan tribe, alas now extinct. He took several members of this tribe prisoner to act as guides. After taking on water and such provisions as he could obtain, he set sail two days later. Over the next two weeks he explored a number of nearby islands, which he named Santa Maria de la Concepción, Fernandina and Isabella. These are known today as the Crooked and Acklins Islands, Long Island and Fortune Island. Before leaving the Bahamas, he visited the Ragged Islands, which he named Islas de Arena. Acting on the directions given by his native guides, he eventually arrived at Bariay Bay, Cuba, on 28 October, which he named Juana.

      Thinking that he had possibly arrived on the coast of Cathay (China), Cristóbal spent many weeks in search of the Chinese civilisation familiar to him from the works of Marco Polo. He coasted as far west as Cayo Cruz by 31 October. Here, north winds, together with a sense of utter frustration, instigated a change of plan. He had learned from his kidnapped native guides that gold might be found on another island further to the east. Therefore, he reversed course, sailing back along the north coast of Cuba. On 22 November, the Pinta, under the command of Martín Alonso Pinzón, left the fleet without permission, setting off on a search under the direction of his own native guide, looking for an island, possibly called Babeque, where he had been told that large amounts of gold could be found.

       Map 19. Columbus always believed he had found a way to the East Indies and that China lay just beyond.

      Meanwhile, Cristóbal continued his explorations with the Santa Maria and Nina, eventually arriving at the island of Hispaniola (which today comprises the two states of Haiti and the Dominican Republic), which he called Española, on 5 December. However, the flagship Santa Maria ran aground on a reef near Cap-Haïtien on Christmas Eve, sinking the next day. Cristóbal got his crew ashore without loss, and used the remains of his ship to build a fort on the nearby shore, which he named La Navidad (Christmas). It immediately became clear that the small caravel, Nina, would be unable to hold all the combined crews of the two ships. This forced a difficult decision to leave behind around 40 men to await Cristóbal’s return from Spain. These men stood on the beach on 2 January 1493 and watched as the Nina