Before long, Martín Pinzón was rowed across the scalloping water between the Pinta and the Santa María.
“The men can endure no more,” he said to Columbus as he climbed on board. Columbus did not reply but ordered a lombard signal to be fired. Soon after, Martín Pinzón’s brother Vicente Ya?ez Pinzón, captain of the Ni?a, appeared over the starboard bow. He clambered up a ladder and the three captains went into Columbus’s cabin and haken a tsheinik, argued and flosculated late into the night.
The following day, Columbus gathered the crew. “Three more days,” he said. “On the Third Day, He created Dry Land. I need only as much time as God.”
“What’s the difference between the great God Adonai and Columbus?” Moishe asked me.
“What?” I said, knowing the answer.
“God doesn’t think he’s on a mission from Columbus.”
And so we passed the time.
On the second day, the sky was dark. The feathered millions of a great forest were above us, their voices like storm. A twisting hurricane of birds, as if every leaf of a great continent—or the shadow of every leaf—had taken flight and was flying west-southwest. Where there are birds, there must be land. Columbus ordered an alteration of our course to follow this migration, to sail in its shadow.
Two nights later, we could hear more birds calling overhead in the darkness. I did not know these birds or their voices. A vast crowd muttering “watermelon” in a language I had never heard.
Then the crew of the Ni?a found a small branch bearing delicate blossoms and soon after, the men of the Pinta collected from the sea: a cane, a stick, a piece of board, a plant that clearly was born on land, and another little stick fashioned, it appeared, with iron, so intricate was its working. We, on the Santa María, found nothing but a vast collection of waves.
Early morning, October 10. Morning watch. Two bells. Columbus high on the forecastle as if he were about to present us—Aspirin-like—with the two tablets of the law. Instead, he announced that he would award a coat of silk to the first sailor to sight land.
Just what any wind-and-salt bitten sailor wants on the other side of the world: a shmancy silk shmatte to wear when swabbing and breaming and when hauling a shroud in a skin-luffing gale.
Later that afternoon at three bells of the watch, a sailor high up in the rigging shouting excitedly, “Tierra! Tierra!” Domingo de Lequeitio pointed in frenzy to the larboard-side horizon. A scurrying of the watch to the gunwale. The admiral striding out of his cabin in the forecastle. Men on deck coming to consciousness on their straw pallets, blinking in the light, fonfering the primeval waking thought, “Huh?” Moishe, too, awakening. In a moment, I was in the air then high on the foretop yardarm. Could it be that we were somewhere, or just before?
Eyes puckered under awnings of hand in the dazzle of bright light.
It didn’t look like land to me.
“That,” said Columbus looking toward where Domingo was pointing, “is a cloud.”
I heard Jacome abaft, muttering beyond the captain’s hearing, “A cloud be good land for us, for soon we be memberless as angels, our pizzles snapped like dead twigs from off a dried-out tree, else we find fresh water or solid land for our watering.”
The crew, as mocking angels, flapped their crooked arms like celestial chickens then made their groins shvantsless with shielding hands. “Tierra, tierra,” they jeered at Domingo de Lequeitio high up the foremast. The frivolity lasted only moments until, as a man, they had the realization that they yet remained landless.
Columbus had not appeared to notice this outbreak of heavenly poultry. He had installed himself on the bowsprit, straining his eyes into the Ouija-board distance, attempting, it seemed, to summon forth shore like a spirit from the Olam ha-Ba beyond. He remained like a figurehead, through three watches, willing land to appear, Columbus both dowser and dowsing stick, remembering Exodus. “ ‘We are in the wilderness, Lord, What shall we drink?’ Like Israelites, we seek ‘the twelve wells of water, the threescore-and-ten palm trees. We would encamp there by the waters. Lord, bring us land.’ ”
Later that night, seven bells into a dog watch, Domingo de Lequeitio, Columbus and Rodrigo Sanchez observed a dim flickering. I woke Moishe who was sleeping through some kind of illness, and he saw it, too. Though the moon was but a shtikl less than full, the light was not mere moonshine. There was the orange tinge of fireblaze, small and turbulent, a bonfire on a distant shore. The men on watch took note, whispering quietly to each other, but avoiding the ostentatious mekhaye hoo-hah of hope and celebration and the eventual disappointment of the previous afternoon.
Even Columbus, usually given to chisel-worthy pronouncements spoken in doughty capital letters, only nodded to the pilot, indicating, “Sail toward the light.”
The following night, two hours after midnight, after the fourth bell of the dog watch had sounded.