Forth Voyage

(The five dots before each pargapgh doesn't mean anything it's just the program wouldn't let me indent!)

....The winter and spring of 1501-02 were exceedingly busy. The four chosen ships were bought, fitted, and crewed, and some 20 of Columbus' extant letters and memoranda were written then, many in exculpation of Bobadilla's charges, others pressing even harder the nearness of the Earthly Paradise and the need to reconquer Jerusalem. Columbus took to calling himself "Christbearer" in his letters and to using a strange and mystical signature, never satisfactorily explained. He began also, with all these thoughts and pressures in mind, to compile both his Book of Privileges and his Book of Prophecies. The first, in defending the titles and financial claims of the Columbus family, seems oddly annexed to the Christian apocalypticism of the second; yet both were linked most closely in the admiral's own mind. He seems to have been certain that his mission was divinely guided. Thus, the loftiness of his spiritual aspirations increased as the threats to his personal ones mounted. In the midst of all these efforts and hazards, Columbus sailed from Cádiz on his fourth voyage on May 9, 1502.

.....The four ships allowed him contrasted sharply with the thirty granted to the governor of Hispaniola, Ovando. The confidence his sovereigns had formerly had in Columbus had now diminished, and there is much to suggest that pity mingled with hope in their support. His illnesses were worsening, and the hostility to his rule in Hispaniola was unabated. Thus, Ferdinand and Isabella forbade him to return there. He was to resume, instead, his interrupted exploration of the "other world" to the south that he had found on his third voyage and to look most particularly for gold and the strait to India. Columbus expected to meet the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama in the East, and the sovereigns instructed him on the appropriate courteous behaviour for such a meeting--another sign, perhaps, that they did not wholly trust him. They were right. He departed from Gran Canaria on the night of May 25, made landfall at Martinique on June 15 (after the fastest crossing to date), and was, by June 29, demanding entrance to Santo Domingo on Hispaniola. Only on being refused such entry by Ovando did he take to the farther west and the south. July to September 1502 saw him coasting Jamaica, the southern shore of Cuba, Honduras, and the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua. The feat of Caribbean transnavigation, which took him to Bonacca Island off Cape Honduras on July 30, deserves to be reckoned on a par, as to difficulty, with that of crossing the Atlantic, and the admiral was justly proud of it. Constantly probing for the strait, the fleet sailed round the Chiriquí Lagoon (in Panama) in October, then, searching for gold, along Veragua and Panama in the foulest of weather. In February 1503 Columbus attempted to establish a trading post at Santa María de Belén on the bank of the Belén (Bethlehem) River under the command of Bartholomew Columbus in order to exploit the promising gold yield he was beginning to find in Veragua. Indian hostility and the poor condition of his ships (of which only two now remained, and these fearfully holed by shipworm) determined him, however, to turn back to Hispaniola. On this voyage the ultimate disaster struck. Against Columbus' (right) judgment, the pilots turned the fleet north too soon. The ships could not make the distance and had to be beached on the coast of Jamaica. By June 1503 Columbus and his crews were castaways.

.....Columbus had hoped, as he said to his sovereigns, that "my hard and troublesome voyage may yet turn out to be my noblest"; it was in fact the most disappointing of all and the most unlucky. In its searches for the strait and for gold the fleet had missed discovering the Pacific and making contact with the great Mayan empire of Yucatán by the narrowest of margins. Also, though two of the men (Diego Méndez and Bartolomeo Fieschi, captains of the wrecked ships La Capitana and Vizcaíno, respectively) left about July 17 to get help for the castaways, traversing the 450-mile journey to Hispaniola safely by canoe, Ovando made no great haste to deliver that help. In the meantime, the admiral displayed his acumen once again by correctly predicting an eclipse of the Moon from his astronomical tables, thus frightening the natives into providing food; but it was June 1504 before rescue came, and Columbus and his men did not reach Hispaniola until August 13 of the same year. On November 7 he sailed back into Sanlúcar, to find that Queen Isabella had made her will and was dying.

.....It would be wrong to suppose that Columbus spent his final two years wholly in illness, poverty, and oblivion. His son Diego was well established at court, and the admiral himself lived in Seville in some style. His "tenth" of the gold diggings in Hispaniola, guaranteed in 1493, provided a substantial revenue (against which his Genoese bankers allowed him to draw), and one of the few ships to escape a hurricane off Hispaniola in 1502 (in which Bobadilla himself went down) was that carrying Columbus' gold. He felt himself ill-used and short-changed nonetheless, and these years were marred, for both him and King Ferdinand, by his constant pressing for redress. He followed the court from Segovia to Salamanca and Valladolid, attempting to gain an audience. He knew that his life was nearing its end, and in August 1505 he began to add codicils to his will. He died on May 20, 1506. First he was laid in the Franciscan friary in Valladolid, then taken to the family mausoleum established at the Carthusian monastery of Las Cuevas in Seville. Finally, by the will of his son Diego, Columbus' bones were laid with his own in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo, Hispaniola.

Voyage I.....Voyage II&III.....Voyage IV..... Letters..... Myths And Facts..... His Life..... His Ships.....Log.....Doors.....Bibilography.....Media.....