Columbus in the Americas
Chapter One
The First Voyage
one
The stillness of that predawn Friday belied what was
about to transpire. On August the third, the Tinto River,
lying as unruffled as the air, gave no suggestion that the
world was about to be remade-deeply, widely, powerfully,
and at times violently. Every beginning has a thousand
beginnings and those beginnings have a thousand
more, so that all inceptions carry unnumbered
antecedents. To say of anything, "At that moment and in
that place, it all began," is shortsighted, but within such
shortsightedness, the European remaking of America
and the American remaking of Europe began on a sluggish
and undistinguished Spanish river near the commensurately
undistinguished town of Palos not far from
the Portuguese border. The King of Portugal, the greatest
sea-faring nation of the day, had turned down an
expedition like the one of three ships about to catch the
tide half an hour before the summer sunrise and be
pulled toward the sea.
Christopher Columbus, the Captain General of the
fleet, took communion in a chapel nearby before boarding
his flagship and, "in the name of Jesus," giving the command
to weigh anchors of the woode ... read full excerpt from Columbus in the Americas ebook
