University of Virginia Library

26. CHAPTER XXVI.
ARRIVAL AT TERRA FIRMA—LAST DAYS OF OJEDA.

When he had been some days at sea, the fugitive Vasco
Nunez, impatient to behold once more the waters over
which he sped, and feel the sense of that freedom which
he had been so long denied, emerged from his place of
concealment in the hold of the vessel. The surprise of
the Bachelor Enciso at beholding this unlooked-for apparition
was only exceeded by his rage at being thus outwitted.
But even his anger gave way to a sentiment of
exultation as he reflected that he now had in his power
the man whom he most detested, one whose flight from
justice had put him fairly without the pale and protection
of the laws, and whom he might therefore subject to any
fate without himself incurring either the charge or the consequences
of cruelty. Bending his eyes, therefore, on the
placid countenance of the cavalier, with a smile of bitter
meaning, he addressed him in language which at once apprised
the latter of the cause of his hostility, and prepared
him to expect all the vengeance of a mind capable of harbouring
a hatred which, at another time and under other
circumstances, he had never had the boldness to express.

“This, truly, is an unexpected honour, Señor Vasco.
It is not now as when I first sought you with fair proffers
to unite our fortunes. You are no longer the great captain,
with a noble vessel and a gallant armament. Since
that time you have lost ship and crew, and have become a
fugitive from justice. Think you I am ready now to help
you in your flight from Santo Domingo, when you received
my proffer with scorn, and met all my advances with a
haughty indifference. Shall I, remembering the proud
contumely of your carriage to me in times past, give you

aid now to avoid the stroke of justice which awaits you in
Española.”

The insolent language of the Bachelor aroused nothing
but indignation in the bosom of the cavalier, and though
Micer Codro, Valdivia and his few other friends on board
the vessel drew nigh in anxiety and apprehension, and
prayed him to yield to the press of circumstances and
speak fairly to one who had him so completely in his
power, they failed to produce in his mind that conviction
of the necessity of any such course, which, to a less excitable
temper, would have seemed obvious enough. He
answered the haughty speech of the bachelor with equal
haughtiness, and advancing a pace while he spoke, he
showed by his carriage a disposition to make any issue
with his enemy rather than bow to one whom he had long
since learned only to despise.

“And my words and carriage are like to be no less
scornful to you now, Hernando de Enciso—now that I am
a fugitive and threatened by the laws, than when I had
ship and seamen at command. It is the base spirit only
that crouches to the storm, and swaggers and swells in the
day of its prosperity. I am still the same Vasco Nunez
now that you found me when you made me your pitiful
offers of which you speak, and which I should again scorn
as I then did, considering not so much the value of your
proposal, as the worthless source from which it came.
Were you a noble cavalier, I should give you other language—I
should have asked your own privity to my flight
at first, confident to have obtained without pause, from a
soldier and a man, that favour, which, it is well known by
all, had never been accorded without price in gold, by a
slavish, trading spirit, such as thine. Thou thinkest, that,
as I am in thy vessel, I am at thy mercy; but thou
hast yet to learn, that a brave man with arms in his hands,
and confident of his soul's honesty, can match weapons
with a dozen of the base slaves who may strive against
him at thy command. Nor do I doubt that there are many
in thy bark—many brave soldiers and generous seamen,
who would feel shame to behold a noble gentleman beset
by numbers. If thou hast the soul of manhood in thee,
revenge thy own quarrel. We are both armed—take to
thy weapon, and St. John of Jerusalem look down upon
the fight.”

The face of the bachelor grew absolutely livid as he
listened to this scornful language. The foam gathered
upon his lips, his frame trembled, his arms were stretched
forth, and his hands shaken in fruitless rage, at the
fearless cavalier who stood in calm defiance before him.
Sudden he strode away from the spot, and paced twice or
thrice to and fro, in the forward part of the vessel. At
length he returned to the place of quarrel, and with features
which, though they had lost their turbulence, were
perhaps, from this very cause, more entirely those of malignity
and dire hate, he again gazed upon the fugitive.

“Look!” he exclaimed after a brief pause in which his
eyes had striven, though vainly, to daunt those of his fearless
enemy. His finger pointed to a bald, black speck—a
solitary island that rose along their path, one of the hundred
that stud the entrance of the Caribbean Sea.

“I will not slay thee, Vasco Nunez—I will shed no
blood of thine, though thy insolence might well justify me
in such use of my power upon thee, and thy cruel murder
of Jorge Garabito might well deserve it. But, thou shalt
neither offend my person with thy audacious presence, nor
cumber my vessel with thy bloody fortunes. On that rock
will I leave thee—there, it shall be seen what destiny
heaven appoints to thy sins, for to its winds and waves will
I surrender thee, and thus rid me of all charge or trouble
of one, whose boast it is that no misfortune can humble,
and no dangers make him afraid. Thy wits and valour will
avail thee against the sea-bird and the shark, and that bright
star which Micer Codro hath chosen for thee from among
the rest, it will guide thee, I trust, to richer treasures of the
deep than any that ever I may hope to gather on the
shores of Veragua. Ho! there—man a boat for the Senor
Vasco.”

The cavalier drew his sword, and at the glitter of its
polished blade the brave dog Leonchico started to his side.
The bachelor also drew his weapon, but he sank back a
pace, so as to place his person within the protection of a
group of his officers.

“Thou shalt find it somewhat to thy cost, Senor Hernando,
what thou doest, for by the blessed Saint John of
the wilderness, I will not suffer hand upon my person that
is not lifted in amity.”

“Ho! there!” cried the now furious bachelor to his

soldiers, some of whom were gathering about the capstan;
“get your matches lighted.”

With the utterance of this command, springing forward
like a vulture upon his prey, Vasco Nunez, at a single
bound, threw himself upon his enemy and before he could
lift weapon, or issue a second order, drew him apart from
his men, he, struggling with a feeble fury all the while,
but unable to escape from the vigorous and unyielding
grasp which his threatened victim had set upon him. This
sudden and resolute movement produced a startling sensation
on board the ship. The friends of the two parties at
once placed themselves in readiness for a regular fight à
outrance, and a few of the more forward followers of the
bachelor prepared to advance upon the cavalier. But a
timely warning from the latter made them pause, as, receding
from the centre of the ship, he placed his back
against the bulwark and drawing after him the still struggling
Enciso, as if he had been an infant in his grasp, he
bade them beware, that another hostile movement would
ensure the death of their commander. It was in this state
of things that some of the less heated minds on board of
the vessel interposed to prevent the fatal mischiefs that
were threatened by the affair. They remembered the great
valour and experience of Vasco Nunez, and looked upon
his appearance on board, however equivocally obtained,
as an event too fortunate to be disregarded, and as a happy
augury of success for their enterprise.

“It were a pity,” said they among themselves, “if Hernando
de Enciso be suffered to work his will upon so noble
a cavalier; and even though he succeed in his desire to
destroy him, yet, armed as he is, and brave to desperation,
could not this be done without great peril to many others.
Besides, who so well acquainted as Vasco Nunez with all
the shores of Terra Firma, which he traversed with Rodrigo
de Bastides, from Cape de la Vela even to Nombre
de Dios. It were a blind casting away of God's blessed
providence, if we reject the counsel and service of such a
man.”

Armed with these considerations, which, to the selfish
mind of the bachelor, they well knew would not require
any great or persuasive argument to make of due force and
efficacy, they interposed in the affray at the very moment

when the conflict seemed inevitable, and by dint of promise
and entreaty effected an amnesty. Enciso gave a sullen
consent to an arrangement by which Vasco Nunez became
a sort of recruit in his service—though it galled the
proud spirit of the latter to concede as much—with the full
permission, however, should it please him better, to pursue
that course, to leave the armament of Enciso for that
of Nicuesa, or any other cavalier whom fortune might send
upon his path. The friends of Vasco Nunez congratulated
themselves on having achieved so much, but he himself
looked upon the service as one calculated rather to do him
hurt than benefit, and, perhaps, to restrain his own progress,
by an engagement to which he could not himself
incline, and which he greatly feared might defeat other
more hopeful purposes. He well knew that his only hope
had lain in the momentary command which he had obtained
perforce of the person of his enemy; and did not
cease to fear that availing himself of a more convenient
season, the base-spirited commander would not fail to employ
his emissaries to destroy a person who had exposed
him to such shame and peril. But, though sullen and unfriendly,
Enciso made no farther attempts to do his enemy
harm, and the armament reached the port of Carthagena,
where Ojeda had had his first encounter with the natives,
without farther subject of difference between the parties.

Here, the intelligence which awaited them, soon superseded,
by its pressing and painful importance, the farther
consideration of their quarrel in the minds of all parties.
The story of Ojeda was nearly at an end. He himself had
departed, desperate in fortune and despairing of the future,
on his perilous return to Santo Domingo; and from the
lips of the afterwards renowned Pizarro, the conqueror of
Peru, whom he had left in charge of his government, the
bachelor Enciso listened to a narrative which made him
forget for a while that he had any worse foe than the fortune
which had so far beguiled him from the peaceful, if
inglorious, occupations of the law. It appeared that the
restless Alonzo de Ojeda, after he had founded his capital,
proceeded to invade the surrounding country in search of
gold, but he fell into frequent ambuscades, his followers
were slain in numbers around him with poisoned arrows,
and he himself wounded by the same envenomed weapons.

Borne back to his fortress in equal anguish of mind and
body, he had now only to contemplate his approaching
fate, by the horrible death of agony under which his companions
had perished in raving torments. But the courageous
warrior was capable of a degree of endurance, to
which he himself would never have subjected them; and
one of the peculiar symptoms of this poison from which
he suffered—a cold shooting thrill that passed at moments
through the wounded part—suggested to him a remedy
which seemed scarcely less desperate than his hurts. He
caused two plates of iron to be made red-hot, and applied
in that state to the wound. This terrible application he
endured without murmuring or shrinking, having refused
to be tied down under the operation. The desperate remedy
succeeded—“the cold poison, in the language of
Las Casas, being consumed by the vivid fire.” Incapable
of farther enterprises, until he was recovered from his
wound, he resolved to return to Santo Domingo, to procure
supplies and assistance for his colony. It will not be
necessary to our purpose to trace farther the history of
this rash but courageous adventurer. It is enough to say
that he reached Española, after a series of vicissitudes and
dangers which savour of romance, and under which most
persons would have perished. He had failed to realize
his own expectations or confirm the glowing promises to
his creditors and the public, with which he set forth from
Santo Domingo. A cloud rested on his fortunes which
never dispersed, and he died finally, in utter obscurity, of
a broken heart. Such was the humility, in his last moments,
of one who in his day of prosperity was the most
imperious of men, that his latest prayer is said to have
been that his body might be buried in the very portal of
the monastery of San Franciso, so “that all who entered
might tread upon his grave.” It is to be hoped, for his
soul's sake, that the humility which came too late for the
succour of his early fortunes, and which, coupled with his
noble courage, great skill, and singular hardihood alike of
mind and body, might have distinguished his adventures
by a success worthy of these noble qualities—was yet in
season for that final struggle in which, though death be
the victor, he is yet only the agent of a greater, with whom
to conquer is to reward, and to take prisoner and secure,
is to bind with cords of love, and enthral only in a realm
the very atmosphere of which is spiritual and intellectual
freedom. Happy had it been for Alonzo de Ojeda, if this
humility, which only came with baffled fortunes, long disease,
and the world's scorn and contumely, had but filled his
mind a few years before it was unavailing for his earthly
prosperity. Then had the lives of hundreds, whom his
rash and headstrong enthusiasm led to an untimely and
horrid death, been spared, perhaps for more useful and
successful labours, and a calmer and better end.