The king himself had removed Colón from his post.
The king had ordered Colón shipped back to Spain in a cocoon of chains.
The king had condemned Colón to spend his final years haunting the streets of Seville, a quiet end—tragic, even—for a man who wanted to keep fighting with the Indians, digging for gold.
But Vespucci reads that the letter is not from Cristobal, but from his son, Fernando. And Vespucci sadly realizes that Fernando could only have one reason to write him.
…from gout on May 20 of this year, 1506. As you were his good friend and even patron I do not need to list for you the accomplishments of his life which, although an august fifty-four years, seems brief for a man of such potential…
The day is ending in a bath of golden light and birds swoop energetically close to the margin of land and sky, birds leaving trails across the blue: the coastline of the fields, the promontories of the hills, the isthmus of the solitary tower, the delta of the pine-choked valley. In his mind Vespucci sees the edges of the world gathered together like the corners of a sheet, he and Colón weaving them together. What had once been the broad, virginal Pacific is now threaded over by the paths of a dozen caravels crossing and crossing, so that the spume of one vessel is soon laced over by the wake of another. The world is now round. The world is now small. Vespucci had looked through a telescope, Colón down the length of a musket, but they had worked together—partners in a grand enterprise.
I was startled then by the high-pitched screech of a train on the track behind me. The two protesters were involved in a deep, tongue-probing kiss. Protest was, I suppose, sexy. They might have missed their train, but they didn’t seem to care. Did they care about anything, Columbus included? Columbus had willed Hispaniola into being, planting Europeans into the New World like saplings, leaving a bristling forest. Although he was old when he arrived at court—forty-two, his once red hair already drained of color—people believed in him. Hadn’t Isabella given him three ships? Hadn’t Vespucci used his ties with the Medici to finance part of his venture? Columbus’s faith in himself, in his dreams, was unshakable. Four days before the sighting of Hispaniola there was a rebellion. The men were terrified that they would go sailing off the edge of the earth. But Columbus had asked them to be patient, probably with a loaded musket, and they struck land. Who cared where it was—what it was—as long as it wasn’t populated by dragons, as long as it didn’t terminate in a bottomless, frothing waterfall?
Shouldn’t this be what we consider on Columbus Day?
A year before Colón’s death, he met with Vespucci and they shared a meal. This must have been an awkward dinner, because it followed yet another failed petition for the governorship of Hispaniola. This was the last time the two explorers met. I imagine that Colón did not look well. He had been suffering from gout for the past seven years. Perhaps Vespucci saw the end coming. Perhaps he saw it in Colón’s eyes, in his crumbling strength.
I imagine Colón eyeing Vespucci in a petulant way. He envies Vespucci’s position. “What have you been doing?” he asks.
“You know what I have been doing.”
“Maps and stars,” says Colón.
“Cosmography and astronomy,” corrects Vespucci.
“You bumped into the Indies because you were looking up at the sky. You didn’t see where you were going. You think, ‘What’s this doing here? Must be something new.’”
“The world is too large for that to be Asia,” says Vespucci.
“Because of your stars, you say that. But I say that the Indians make it clear that we have reached Asia.”
Then maybe Vespucci stops. He does not know what is kindness now. Should he argue to show that he still values what Colón has to say? Should he accept the explorer’s opinion out of respect? “I trust my equations,” says Vespucci. “You trust your eyes.”
“Who cares what is true?” says Colón. “You have the king’s ear.”
The two friends have differences that run deep. Vespucci, a Florentine, is a nobleman. Educated. Privileged. Urbane. Colón springs from Genoa, the son of a weaver. He is a self-made merchant from the city of commerce.
“You like paintings. You like poems. You like the stars. But I…” Here Colón thumps his chest with his fingers, “I sailed in the name of Spain.”
Vespucci looks at his friend, at the gravy on his shirt. “Cristóbal, I sailed in the name of Spain.”
“No, you sailed for yourself.”
“To learn. That’s not for myself. That’s for everyone.” Vespucci cannot understand Colón’s stubbornness. Cosmography is exploration. Knowledge isn’t any colder or deader than the stars burning and spitting in the black fabric of the night sky. Vespucci is a romantic himself. How could one not be in thrall to the progression of degrees, the web of longitude and latitude, the brief embrace of planet and star? His life is lived in fifteen degrees per hour, his interest in the ink divining land from water, the equatorial circumference of the earth. Circumference. At least both men believe in that, even though claiming that the new continent was the Indies meant the earth was sucked in at the waist, like a peanut.
“I didn’t sail for Spain,” says Colón. He laughs with Vespucci. “I sailed for me. To be the first.”
But what had they sailed for? Had they sailed to kill off the Indians? Had they sailed to make way for European-style commerce? From where I stood—subway platform, twenty-first century—it was not clear.
“We sailed for spices,” says Vespucci. “For money. We sailed because the Queen with her crazy Inquisition has driven all the Jews out of Spain and there are no more merchants. We sailed because the Turks slaughter our knights and we cannot go east by land.” Vespucci looks disdainfully at his friend’s pork. At the pigeon, which he has ordered but not touched. “We sailed because the meat we eat is rotten and we must mask this with cinnamon from Ceylon, pepper from India, and clove from Zanzibar.”
“Are you saying we sailed in the name of rotten meat?”
“Perhaps.” Vespucci smiles. “Rather than spice, let there be fresh meat in your Indies.”
And here I thought of an Indian skirted in leaves, a full head shorter than Vespucci, shown in neatly delineated (and anatomically impossible) profile offering the explorer a hot dog. Or perhaps a knish. Or a falafel. Some honeyed peanuts. A pretzel. Or perhaps a neoncolored bag of cotton candy. Because if nothing else, the New World was full of food. I could see the people in the train station shoving handfuls of the convenient fodder into their mouths. And I realized that this was one of the many definitions of American: one who can achieve the needs of his or her appetite. This is what exploration had opened up the door to. Not only widespread slaughter, but the necessary accompaniment of gorging. Of course there were no hot dogs at the time of Columbus and Vespucci, not on Hispaniola, not in Brazil, nowhere. In fact, the explorers brought famine along with them—the hunger of the Old World into seemingly abundant paradise.
“I ate lizards,” says Colón. “I ate a dog. It didn’t bark, but it was still a dog.” Colón smiles wryly. “But there is a kind of fresh meat.”
Vespucci laughs. “They eat their enemies. So what?”
“You told me,” says Colón, “that at the mouth of that great river, you spoke to a man who had eaten three hundred men.”
“He had many enemies.” Vespucci thinks. “And now they have more.”
“We are their enemies?” Colón waves Vespucci off. “They hate us now, but we will change their minds.”
“I have little faith in that,” says Vespucci. “Your Indians pepper us with their arrows. The drumsong and howling is hardly done in gratitude.”