Chapter Seven - The Other Voyages

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Other Voyages

YOU’D THINK AFTER the first voyage, the slavery, the mutilations, and the total failure to find India, they’d pull the plug.

But they didn’t.

They sent him back.

Not once. Not twice. Three more times.

Because Columbus was selling a dream. And Europe? Europe was buying.

Gold. Spices. Souls. Territory.
Even as reality collapsed under the weight of his brutality, the myth was too profitable to kill.

So the ships kept coming.

The second voyage (1493-1496) was the real switch.

He returned not as a curious sailor, but as a conqueror.
Seventeen ships. Over 1,200 men. Horses. Weapons. Priests.
This wasn’t exploration. It was invasion.

He came back to the Caribbean like it belonged to him.
He started building permanent colonies. Fortresses. Churches.
And when he found the settlement at La Navidad destroyed, probably from local rebellion against all the rape and plunder, he used it as justification to go scorched earth.

Villages were wiped out.
Reprisals were brutal.
And the slave trade kicked into overdrive.

The mission wasn’t discovery anymore.
It was harvest.

By the third voyage (1498-1500), Columbus was unraveling.

He reached the coast of South America and still thought it might be India.
The geography made no sense. He started rambling in letters about the Garden of Eden, about mystical rivers, about divine signs.

His men were starving. The colonies were crumbling. The gold wasn’t flowing.

And people were beginning to talk.

Colonists wrote to the Crown, begging for help.
They described Columbus as paranoid, delusional, and violent.
They accused him of hoarding supplies. Torturing dissenters.
Of ruling like a tyrant and punishing like a lunatic.

Spain couldn’t ignore it anymore.

They sent an investigator.

And when he arrived, what he found was so damning that he arrested Columbus on the spot. He clapped him in chains and put him on a ship back to Spain.

And yet…

They. Still. Let. Him. Go. Back. This is voyage #4 (1502-1504).

He wasn’t here to govern. This time, he was stripped of his titles.
But he begged. Claimed he had one last shot.
Said he’d find a strait to Asia. Said he had visions.

Spain let him sail again, but with no official authority.
A broken man clinging to prophecy.

He ran into storms. Disease. Hostile shores.
Shipwrecked in Jamaica.
Had to trick the locals with an eclipse to avoid starvation.

It was a disaster.
He came home defeated.
No new route. No new riches.
Just wreckage.

The voyages were over.
But the damage?

That had only begun.

Because Columbus didn’t just fail.
He left a blueprint.
A system. A method. A model.

And everyone else, Spain, Portugal, England, and France, would follow it.

Blood in, profit out.