Columbus's Fourth Voyage
Columbus made his fourth and last voyage in 1502, at fifty-one, having been stripped of the governorship of Hispaniola and forbidden by the crown to land there. He was permitted four small and worm-eaten ships and the title of Admiral, and was told to find a passage to the Indian Ocean. He crossed in twenty-one days, his fastest, and appeared at Santo Domingo asking shelter from a hurricane he had read in the sky. The governor refused him and sent out a treasure fleet of thirty ships. Twenty-odd sank with some five hundred lives, including Bobadilla, who had arrested him. His own ships survived in a sheltered river. He then coasted Central America from Honduras to Panama for months in appalling weather, looking for a strait. He heard from the Ngäbe of another ocean a few days' march inland and did not go and see it; the Isthmus of Panama was under ten days' walk from where he stood. He found gold in Veragua and tried to plant a settlement, which was destroyed. Shipworm reduced his remaining vessels to sinking, and he ran two of them aground on Jamaica in June 1503, where he and his crew were stranded for a year. He held the local Taíno by predicting a lunar eclipse from his almanac when they stopped supplying food. Rescue came in June 1504. He reached Spain in November, died in 1506, and never accepted that it was not Asia. Balboa crossed the isthmus and saw the Pacific nine years later, in 1513. The passage Columbus sought was found by Magellan in 1520, four thousand miles further south.
- Year: 1502 CE
