CHAPTER 3
“That night the wind blew hard from the east northeast,” Columbus noted on or about December 17, 1492, grateful that Tortuga sheltered their small craft. In the morning, he ordered his crew to put their nets out to fish, and while they did, the inhabitants—now invariably termed “Indians”—frolicked with them and, more interestingly, offered arrows said to have been fashioned by the unseen but ever-present cannibals. These weapons were long, slender “spikes of canes, fire-hardened and sharp.” The Indians pointed to a couple of men whose bodies had been mauled and “gave them to understand that the cannibals had eaten them by mouthfuls.” If the Indians were seeking to form an alliance with their visitors against this dreaded enemy, Columbus the skeptical Genoese mariner remained unconvinced, and he resumed bartering for gold as he praised the intelligence of the Indians who cooperated.
In the evening, he recorded, a large canoe bearing forty men approached from Tortuga. When the canoe-borne warriors landed on the beach, the local chieftain angrily commanded them to return whence they came, hurling seawater and stones after them. After they shoved off in their canoes, the same chieftain took one pebble and, rather than throwing it at the Spaniards, calmly placed it in the hand of the Spaniards’ marshal as a gesture of peace.
When the canoe, and the threat it posed, vanished from sight, the chieftain described—through interpreters—their life in Tortuga. Was there gold? More in Tortuga than in Hispaniola, but no gold mines to speak of. Nevertheless, the “country was so rich that there is no need to work much to sustain life or be clothed, since they go naked.” Heedless of these details, which signified the Indians’ sinful indolence, Columbus stubbornly persisted in his search for gold, learning that a source could be found within a journey of four days overland, or “one day of fair weather.”
With that, the wind died, and Columbus and his men retreated to their ships to prepare for the observance of a feast day, which he called the Commemoration of the Annunciation (now known as Our Lady’s Expectation), December 18. As Columbus dined below the sterncastle (a structure above the main deck), two hundred men appeared, bearing the young king on a litter. Everyone, he noted yet again, was naked, or nearly so. Dismounting the litter, “at a quick walk he came to sit down beside me, nor would he let me rise to meet him or get up from the table, but beseeched me to eat.” While the Indian’s guard arrayed themselves on deck “with the greatest respect and readiness in the world,” Columbus invited the young king to partake of the feast, and was gratified to note that he ate all the “viands,” and as for the drink, “he simply raised [it] to his lips and then gave to the others, and all with a wonderful dignity and very few words.”
After the meal, an Indian courtier offered a gift that pleased Columbus. It was a belt “like those of Castile in shape but different workmanship.” The Admiral appraised this item carefully, as if deciding what it would fetch in Spain, and in return gave the chieftain “amber beads which I wore at my neck, and some red shoes, and a bottle of orange water,” which elicited exclamations of approval for their recipient.
Hindered by the lack of a common language or reliable interpreters, Columbus took the king’s signs and utterances to mean that the “whole island was mine to command.” And out of this communication gap was born the conviction, at least in Columbus’s mind, that he was acquiring an empire of his own. “After it was late and he wished to leave, the Admiral sent him away in the boat very honorably, and gave him numerous lombard shots; and, once ashore, he got into his litter and went off with more than two hundred men, and soon was borne behind him on the shoulders of an Indian, a very honorable man.” It had been a gratifying day’s work, rich in hopes and illusions, and in deception.
Weighing anchor, Columbus sailed eastward under a full moon to what was most likely Lombardo Cove, Acul Bay, in today’s Haiti: a protected, idyllic spot, even by the standards of the Caribbean. “This harbor is most beautiful,” he exulted.
The next day found the Admiral euphoric over his discovery, boasting in his diary, and very likely to his shipmates, that nothing in his twenty-three years at sea equaled it, and it was “superior to all and would hold all the ships of the world” within its four-mile length.
About ten o’clock that night, a canoe laden with Indians made its way from shore to the flagship “to see the Admiral and the Christians and to wonder at them.” A session of brisk bartering ensued, and Columbus dispatched a scouting party, who returned with reports of a “big village.” To Columbus’s chronicler Bartolomé de Las Casas, who spent years living in the Indies, these settlements were a familiar sight in this part of the world. “The inhabitants,” he wrote, “make their houses of wood and straw, in the form of a bell. They were very high and spacious, such that ten or more persons lived in each one. They drove in the big poles, as big as a leg or even a thigh, in a circle, half the height of a person, into the earth and close together; they were all joined together at the top, where they were tied with a certain cord of roots that formerly were called bejucos.” He proceeded to take his readers on an admiring guided tour of an Indian settlement. “With these roots and the bark of trees of a black color, and other bark stripped off that remained white, they made lattice work with designs and foliage like paintings on the inside of a building. . . . Others were adorned with stripped reeds that appeared very white. There were very thin and delicate canes.”
At first timid, the inhabitants gradually “lost their fear” and “countless men, women, and children” rushed forward with bread, “which is very white and good,” Columbus wrote with surprise, “and they brought us water in calabashes and in earthenware pitchers of the shape of those of Castile,” or so they appeared to him. The gifts he received included gold—precious gold!—moreover, the Indians performed their role with conviction. “It is easy to recognize when something is given with a real heart to give,” he concluded.
His acquisitive instincts satisfied for the moment, the Admiral praised his generous hosts, who possessed “neither spears nor darts nor arms of any sort.” Having decided there was nothing to fear, Columbus sent a party of six to the village, where they tried to explain once more that they had not come from the sky, as the Indians believed, but across the sea in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Sovereigns of Castile. Amid a sense of heightened expectation, Columbus finally decided to disembark and pay a visit. As soon as he made his intentions known, “there came down to the beach so many people that it was marvelous, men, women and children, shouting that he should not leave but stay with them.” Columbus remained safely in his longboat, receiving offerings of food, a portable feast in the making. Receiving parrots and other tributes, and giving “glass beads and brass rings and hawk’s bells—not that they demanded anything but that it seemed to him right.” And because, with another characteristic leap, “he already considered them Christians.”
Wherever he went, he responded with a similar sense of wonder and egotism, as if these spectacular sights had been created for his benefit, and as he later reminded himself, that of his royal patrons. Conditioned by medieval assumptions, his intellect and imagination labored to interpret these astonishing sights according to categories that he understood. The world on which he gazed, and depended for survival, was both natural and supernatural; he needed only to divine the Creator’s intentions to exploit them to the hilt. He believed the Indians to be exactly what his views insisted—advanced and attractive and potentially useful creatures—rather than what they actually were, or might be. And if they happened to be in doubt, he would gladly enlighten them. He was bemused rather than displeased to hear that the Indians considered his fleet to have descended from the heavens, especially since the misunderstanding gave him occasion to establish his credentials. Their crowds formed to see him; they displayed their women for his benefit. He in turn admired them as one would admire a prize steed or working dog, still in the wild but capable, even eager, for domestication, noting that “nothing was lacking but to know the language and to give them orders, because every order that was given to them they would obey without opposition.” If only Columbus, with his embattled status, could command the same respect in Spain, or anywhere else in Europe.
In the “protected and deep” embrace of Acul Bay, surrounded by “people very good and gentle and without arms,” he savored his explorer’s paradise. Even the inlet’s mouth was wide enough to let ships pass one another without incident. Furthermore, “any ship can lie in it without fear that other ships might come by night to attack them.” He decided to name the bay Puerto de la Mar de Sancto Tomás, “for today was his feast.”
Come Saturday, December 22, Columbus succumbed to the urge to find gold, and at dawn, the fleet quietly slipped its moorings amid heaving seas. In his mind’s eye, he imagined a place with more gold than earth, or so the Indians had led him to believe. Ominously, “the weather did not permit it,” and he quickly returned to his anchorage in Hispaniola, where he was courted by the local lord, Guacanagarí, who plied the Admiral with lavish gifts, most memorably a belt bearing a “mask that had two large ears of hammered gold as well as the tongue and the nose.” On closer inspection, he found that the “belt was of very fine jewelry work, like baroque pearls, made of white fishbones and some red ones interspersed like embroidery, so sewed with cotton thread and by such nice skill that on the side of the thread and on the reverse of the belt, it seemed very pretty embroidery, although all white, as if it were a web in a frame.” He tested it and judged it “so strong that I believe that an arquebus”—a portable muzzle-loaded firearm with limited accuracy but quite deadly at close range—“could not penetrate it, or with difficulty.”
On Sunday, Columbus set sail again, after expressing conventional reservations about going to sea on the Lord’s Day, “merely from his piety and not from any superstition.” No matter, gold was at stake.
Before he came to the gold, the gold came to him, borne by the local ruler. Prepared for hard bargaining, the Admiral reacted with astonishment, “for the Indians were so free, and the Spaniards so covetous and overreaching.” He and his men had only to give “a little piece of glass and crockery or other things of no value” to receive pieces of gold, and as these transactions proceeded, the Spaniards found they need give nothing to receive the precious gold, a practice forbidden by their Admiral, who, after observing that the Indians freely gave gold in exchange for just six glass beads, “therefore ordered that they”—Spaniards—“take nothing from them unless they gave them something in payment.” Bartered objects included glass beads, cotton, geese, or whatever came to hand. The ranks of the Indians swelled to include 120 canoes, “all charged with people, and all brought something, especially their bread and fish and water in earthen jars, and seeds of many sorts that are good spices, and ended up carrying one another piggyback across rivers and swampy places,” as much for the fun of it as for any other purpose, contented to pay their respects and rejoice with the men and their ships.
The festivities became more boisterous. Columbus estimated that more than a thousand Indians approached his tiny ship, each bearing a tribute, “and before they came within half a crossbow shot of the ship, they stood up in their canoes with what they brought in their hands, saying, ‘Take! Take!’” And so the Spaniards did, as five hundred more Indians swam out to Santa María, standing about a league offshore, to pay their respects.
At night, a convoy of Indian barges entered the harbor to visit the Spaniards, declaring they had come from afar. By now Columbus and his men, accustomed to receiving tributes of gold without having to seek it out, contemplated spending Christmas in this wonderful harbor, which, he surmised, belonged to an island “bigger than England,” his way of conveying the sense that it was very big indeed, as befit its presumed proximity to Asia.
An official visit from an Indian leader prompted Columbus, attentive to matters of status, to ponder the unfamiliar term cacique. “The Admiral had been unable to understand whether they used this for ‘king’ or ‘governor.’” As for the designation, Columbus “didn’t know whether they say this for ‘hidalgo’ or ‘governor’ or ‘judge.’” In practice, a cacique could be considered an important chieftain just below the rank of king.
This cacique demonstrated his importance by bringing with him a retinue of two thousand men, who “showed much honor to the ships’ people, and the populace, every one,” by bringing food, drink, cotton cloth, and especially for the Admiral, colorful parrots. And, of course, more gold. Finally, the Indians took their leave, “carrying on their backs what the cacique and others had given them down to the boats that remained at the entrance to the river.”
It was now Monday, Christmas Eve, and as soon as a promising offshore breeze stirred the rigging, he gave the order to weigh anchor, taking with him an Indian “who seemed better disposed and devoted or who spoke with more pleasure,” charged with locating the elusive gold mines sought by the Admiral on the basis of his mentioning the word “Çybao.” Columbus thought he heard the guide pronounce a near homonym, Çipango, Marco Polo’s name for Japan. The actual Cibao denotes the central region of the island of Hispaniola, and on that slender basis, Columbus leaped to the conclusion that his little fleet had made it to Marco Polo’s Asia, where the houses had roofs of gold.
Noticing the Admiral’s excitement, the cacique compounded the miscommunication by speaking of a “great quantity of gold there.” He indicated the “banners of beaten gold” he bore. Columbus yearned to claim this glittering wealth in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella.
By eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve, with his ships running confidently before a light breeze, the Admiral “decided to stretch out and sleep.” He was exhausted from the rigors of the voyage, along with the rest of the crew, and had been drinking in celebration of the holiday. And that was when the trouble started. “As it was calm, the seaman who steered the ship decided to go to sleep, and hand over the tiller to the ship’s boy, which the Admiral had always strictly forbidden during the entire voyage, come wind come calm; namely that they should let the ship’s boy steer.” Nevertheless, a lad of about fourteen or fifteen now guided Santa María.
“It pleased Our Lord that at Midnight, after they had seen the Admiral lie down and rest, and seeing there was dead calm and the sea like [water] in a porringer”—a shallow bowl usually equipped with a handle—“all lay down to sleep, and the tiller remained in the hand of the small boy, and the currents carried the ship upon one of the banks which, even though it was night, made a sound so they could be heard and seen a good league off.” It was the grating thud of the keel grinding into sand. The ship came to an abrupt halt, stranded. The most significant voyage of discovery, years in the making, backed by the most powerful rulers in Europe, threatened to end on a calm night and a gentle sea at the hands—just one small hand, to be exact—of an innocent youth who steered the ship.
“The boy, who felt the tiller, and heard the sound of the sea, gave tongue, at which the Admiral jumped up and was so prompt that no one had yet felt that they were aground.” Unseen below the water’s surface, not one but three coral reefs presented a concealed, treacherous barrier.
Columbus roared at Santa María’s master and owner, Juan de la Cosa, to secure the longboat they towed astern, grab an anchor, and take it into the longboat. Cosa, accompanied by other desperate crew members, jumped into the longboat as the Admiral assumed they were taking steps to rescueSanta María. In fact, they fled to Niña, “half a league to windward.” But those aboard that ship would not permit them to board. Frustrated, they had no choice but to return to the wreck of Santa María.
Alarmed, Columbus surveyed the scene: his own men abandoning his ship, the water becoming shallower as the sea drove the hull ever higher onto the fatal reef, and the ship beginning to list precariously, as if preparing her death throes. He “ordered the mainmast to be cut away and the ship to be lightened as much as they could, to see if they could get her off [the reef],” but Santa María persisted in driving up the reef until “she lay on her beam ends across the sea (although there was little or no sea running), and the planking opened.”
In this desperate situation, Columbus, overwrought, lay to until daylight. When it became possible to see beyond the beach and into the deep forest, he dispatched Diego de Arana, listed as “marshal of the fleet,” and Pedro Gutiérrez, “butler of the royal household,” to seek help from Guacanagarí, the Indian leader who had regarded the Spaniards as supernatural beings.
The Admiral, meanwhile, said that he “wept,” a remarkable confession. Officers normally commanded, or disciplined, or set an example for others. But the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, overwhelmed, terrified, and possibly disgraced, shed tears. He was Christopher Columbus, the Christ-bearer, as he thought of himself. How could this disaster be happening?
The Indians rushed to the Spaniards’ rescue, emptying Santa María of her precious cargo. “He cleared the decks in a very short time, such was the great haste and care that the king gave.” Columbus noted through his tears that the Indians exercised the same care to secure everything on land that they had removed from the ship. Nor did the king’s services and sensitivity toward the afflicted mariners end there. “From time to time he sent one of his relatives to the weeping Admiral to console him, telling him that he must not be troubled or annoyed; that he would give him whatever he had.”
As the sun rose over the scene of wreck and recovery, Columbus surveyed the possessions and reflected that not even in Spain would they have been safer, or treated better, than they were here. And he continued to weep, perhaps more with gratitude and relief than with sheer terror, recording the histrionics in his journal for posterity. “He and all the people wept,” he observed once more, adding a curious footnote, open to various interpretations : “All are people of love and without greed, and suitable for every purpose. I assure Your Highnesses”—the distant but all-seeing Ferdinand and Isabella—“that in all the world there is no better people nor better country. They love their neighbors as themselves, and have the sweetest talk in the world, and gentle, and always with a smile.” Even though they went about as naked “as their mothers bore them,” he advised, they maintained “very good manners.” The king exercised such admirable self-restraint “that it is a pleasure to see all of it.” Perhaps it was the suddenness of the shipwreck, or the aftereffects of the drinking (if it occurred), or the emotional connotations of the holiday—whatever the reason, the wreck of Santa María and the rescue of her contents and crew had the makings of a Christmas miracle to his way of thinking. By means of this cognitive shift, he devised an ambitious scheme to salvage the voyage, his honor, and that of Spain from disaster.
On the day after Christmas, while still drying his tears and expressing his gratitude to his Indian saviors, and his Sovereigns, he began to formulate his rejoinder to the Indians’ altruistic impulses: a Spanish empire across the sea, and loyal slaves to maintain it. It seemed to Columbus that the Indians were prepared to assume this role; indeed, with their show of subservience they were practically auditioning for it. This was, of course, his assumption, not theirs, and it had its roots in his long experience with slavery, especially female slavery, in Genoa, where slaves formed an essential and intimate component of the economy and of households. To his way of thinking, they were analogous to the Arabs, Asians, and eastern Europeans, non-Christians all, who supplied Genoa with its free labor.
For the moment, he kept his plan to himself, and the generous gestures resumed the following day, when Guacanagarí tearfully promised Columbus and his men “two very big houses, and would give more if necessary,” along with canoes necessary to handle the ship’s cargo, and sufficient manpower, all “without taking any morsel of bread or anything else.” In his desire to repay and validate their kindness with something, anything, the Admiral resorted to offering more hawk’s bells, and at the sight of these tinkling trinkets, the Indians called out “chuque, chuque” and seemed “on the point of going mad for them.” Columbus was gratified to receive four pieces of gold “as big as the hand” in exchange, he was pleased to note, “for nothing.” The Admiral became merry, “and the king rejoiced much to see the Admiral merry.” That evening, the two leaders dined twice, first aboard Niña, the Spaniard celebrating his deliverance and gratification of his greed, the Indian celebrating his own generosity, and later ashore, where they devoured “yams, rock lobsters, game, and other viands they had, and their bread,” cassava. The Indians exhibited respectable table manners, Columbus was pleased to note, and afterward he cleaned his hands by rubbing them with herbs in the manner of his hosts.
Striding past “groves of trees next to the houses,” the Spaniards found themselves escorted to their guest quarters by “a good thousand people, all naked,” except for Guacanagarí, who, out of respect for his guests, “now wore a shirt and gloves that the Admiral had given him, and over the gloves he made more rejoicing than anything.” They talked of strategic matters, of the Indians’ fierce rivals, the Caribs, who carried bows and arrows reminiscent of the Spaniards’ exotic weapons, but made without iron, and of the way the Caribs captured the Indians at will. At once, “the Admiral said by signs that the Sovereigns of Castile would order the Caribs to be destroyed, and would order them all brought with their hands bound.” To reinforce his show of strength, Columbus ordered a lombard and musket to be fired. The two shots, powered by gunpowder technology unknown to the Indians, shattered the Caribbean calm, and the Indians fell to earth. A little later, they brought Columbus, their protector, a “big mask that had great pieces of gold in the ears and the eyes and in other parts,” together with gold ornaments, which they ceremoniously draped over the Admiral’s head and neck.
Thereafter, the idea of a fortress, once the stuff of daydreams, became Columbus’s mission and obsession. Once he felt a faint puff of destiny urging him on, he submitted to it as if it were a gale. The “great luck” of running into a reef and wrecking the flagship during a Christmas Eve spree became “the predestined will of God,” complete with a purpose that Columbus suddenly divined: “that he might leave the people there” to begin a colony, and to become the catalyst for more voyages to China.
Ruminating on the accident, he made critical revisions to his account. No longer was it caused by the inexperienced hand of the ship’s boy on the tiller at precisely the wrong moment, as Santa María encountered an all-but-invisible reef at night while Columbus slept; now he insisted it was caused by the “treachery of the master and the people . . . in refusing to run out the anchor from the stern to kedge”—that is, haul—“off the ship as the Admiral ordered.” There was no more mention of the hapless boy at the tiller, or Columbus’s fatigue, or the holiday celebrations; “treachery” had taken their place.
If only his orders had been obeyed, “the ship would have been saved.” He laid the blame on the “men of Palos,” the Spanish port where the voyage began, where he failed to receive the “vessels suitable for the voyage” to which he believed himself entitled. The town of Palos, under orders from Ferdinand and Isabella, had provided two of the three ships comprising his fleet, tiny Niña, as her name indicated, and delicate Pinta. This explanation failed to account for the loss of Santa María, in which Columbus himself had a stake. The treachery and accident fit a larger divine plan, “preordained” to bring him into contact with this land and people, so he thought. Until this event, Columbus wrote, “he always went with the intention to discover and not tarry in a place more than one day.” No more. His self-serving revelation endowed him with a different goal, one that far exceeded his boast that he could sail from Spain to China.
“Now I have given orders to erect a tower and a fortress, all very well done, and a great moat, not that I believe it to be necessary for these people, for I take for granted that with this people I could conquer all this island, which I believe to be bigger than Portugal”—Spain’s principal rival for empire—“and double the number of inhabitants.” In this revised world order, he viewed the Indians, his gentle, generous, resourceful protectors, in a harsh new light, “naked and without arms and very cowardly, beyond hope of cure.” His tears had dried, and his meaning was clear; he considered them ripe for exploitation. Their weakness became his strength, and he turned to the God-given task of empire building. “It is right that this tower should be built,” he insisted, “and it is as it should be, being so far from Your Highnesses, and that they may recognize the skill of Your Highnesses’ subjects, and what they can do, so they may serve them”—Columbus chose his words carefully—“with love and fear.”
The matériel for the stronghold came from Santa María, transmuted into a new purpose, “boards of which to build the whole fortress.” They worked diligently, completing a rudimentary structure in only ten days, a microcosm of confinement and order in a sea of freedom and occasional chaos. Indicating the rapid advance of his plans, he gave orders for “provisions of bread and wine for more than a year, and seeds to sow, and the ship’s barge, and a caulker, a carpenter, a gunner and a cooper.” He envisioned a stream of wealth in the form of gold and spices flowing from this fortress directly to Castile and the cause of a new Crusade. He became so imbued with a sense of divine mission that he declared that “all the gain of this Enterprise should be spent in the conquest of Jerusalem,” as he had once mentioned to his Sovereigns, whom he recalled smiling indulgently at the thought. Inconsistent, inspired, and self-serving, Columbus was proving himself a brilliant but mercurial explorer.
Couched in spiritual and political idealism, the sudden, unauthorized construction of a manned fort served Columbus’s interests first and foremost. Until he had hit upon this scheme, he had contracted for a single voyage. Now he would have to return in the name of Spain, if only to relieve the crew, who became hostages to his ambition, marooned off the coast of Haiti, unable to return home until he fetched them. Only Columbus and a few of his officers and pilots knew where in the world this fortress was located, and only they would be able to find it again. If Bartolomeu Dias had been able to think up a comparable scheme, he might not have been cast aside by his sovereign, King João of Portugal. Columbus would not allow Ferdinand and Isabella the same option; they would be duty bound to send him on another journey. For all its anticipation and daring, his voyage to the New World, rather than an end in itself, had become a prologue to a much grander adventure into empire, conquest, and conversion, one that would also serve, he hoped, as his avenue into history.
Guacanagarí returned at dawn on Thursday, December 27, hoping to delay Columbus’s departure with the promise of more gold. The Admiral continued to court his favor by inviting Guacanagarí, his brother, and another “very intimate relation” to dine with him, when they suddenly switched tactics and expressed the desire to go with Columbus to the wonderful kingdom of Castile. Their sense of urgency only increased when, in the midst of the meal, other Indians arrived bringing news of Pinta; she was anchored “in a river at the end of that island.”
Columbus seized the opportunity to send the unstable and insubordinate Martín Alonso Pinzón a letter of reconciliation. Columbus needed Pinzón. The Admiral’s plan to establish a fortress in the wilds of India would not succeed so long as his men were threatening mutiny. Worse, Pinzón’s returning to Spain to disseminate a different version of events, one that showed Columbus as a naive, self-seeking adventurer rather than an idealistic servant of Castile, could trigger a disastrous chain of events. If Pinzón’s version prevailed, the Sovereigns might be inclined to forgive rather than punish him for his near mutiny.
As Columbus tarried among the Indians and presided over construction and staffing of the fortress, the Indians appeared to compete for his favor. In Columbus’s telling, one leader entreated him to make use of an elaborate “dais of palm bark,” while another at first feigned ignorance of his presence and then ran to him and “hung on his neck a great plate of gold that he carried in his hand” in an effort to outdo his rival. This flattery and bribery continued through Sunday, culminating in a ceremonial send-off, which Columbus found irresistible. The cacique personally received the Admiral with great pomp and formality, and led him by the arm to a sort of dais and chair. He asked Columbus to be seated, whereupon he removed a bejeweled headpiece and placed it on the explorer’s head. Returning the gesture, Columbus removed a collar encrusted with multihued gems and placed it around the cacique’s neck. He also bestowed the handsome scarlet cloak he wore that day on the Indian, and even sent for a pair of fine boots for the Indian to wear. Finally, he placed on his finger a large silver ring. It reminded the Indian of a silver earring worn by a mariner. With this ceremonial exchange of gifts and show of goodwill, Columbus’s voyage was nearing its conclusion, and he wanted to see the Sovereigns before his rival Pinzón got there. He was likely already en route, with malice in mind.
On Monday, the last day of the year, Columbus prepared to set sail for Spain at last, “taking on water and wood,” and planning to “give prompt news to the Sovereigns, that they might send ships to discover what remained to be discovered.” He could have continued his voyage of exploration, voyaging eastward along the coast “until he had seen all that country,” but on sober reflection, he realized that he was left with only one vessel, and “it did not seem reasonable to expose himself to the dangers that could occur in discovering,” as well as “all that evil and inconvenience” stemming from the “parting of the caravel Pinta.” By this, Columbus hinted he was preparing to counter malicious propaganda that he expected to be spread by his rival Martín Alonso Pinzón. The last thing the Admiral wanted the Sovereigns to consider was an unauthorized account of howSanta María came to be lost, or the mysterious disappearance of Pinta, or the failure to locate the Grand Khan, or other embarrassing incidents. It was preferable to focus on his hastily improvised fortress and plans to colonize the strange land that he had discovered.
The overdue departure finally occurred on January 2, 1493, with Columbus placing Diego de Arana, Pedro Gutiérrez, and Rodrigo Escobedo in charge of the fortress and, in the Admiral’s mind, over the Indians. With the threat of the fierce Caribs ever present in the minds of the Indians, the Spaniards demonstrated their lombards, pointing out “how [they] pierced the side of the ship and how the ball went far out to sea.” He staged a mock battle between his men and the Indians to demonstrate “they need have no fear of the Caribs, even if they should come.” He backed his assurances with tangible resources, designating thirty-nine men, the translator Luis de Torres among them, to remain behind in the fortress, along with sufficient food, and even a physician, all of them good “men of the sea.”
Even with these reassurances, the Indians remained fearful, and made their best effort to seduce Columbus, their defender, with an irresistible offering. One of Guacanagarí’s men informed Columbus that the king had “ordered to be made a statue of pure gold as large as the Admiral himself.” What could be more impressive, or more calculated to appeal to Columbus’s vanity than this priceless effigy? They promised it would be ready for delivery in only ten days.
Friday dawned fair, with a light wind, and Columbus made a determined effort to depart, deploying nimble Niña to scout a channel and to confirm that it was free of reefs; he noted islets and gulfs as he went, but light wind impeded his progress that morning. He continued to profess, though with less conviction, that the splendid China described by Marco Polo must be close by, but the kingdom remained as elusive as the mythical El Dorado.
On Sunday, while running along the northern coast of the landmass he had named Hispaniola, he feared that reefs and shoals lurked around every point, or were concealed beneath the iridescent water of every harbor like so many sea monsters, their teeth poised to rip his ship’s hulls to slivers. Amid these hazards, Pinta, presumed lost, appeared on the horizon, racing downwind toward Niña and Columbus. The two ships sailed a full ten leagues together to find a safe anchorage, and then Martín Alonso Pinzón came aboard, dispensing with the usual formalities, “to excuse himself, alleging that he had left him [Columbus] against his will.”
Exasperated, Columbus dismissed Pinzón’s claim as “all false.” Pinzón had gone his way out of “much insolence and greed.” His behavior was the work of Satan. The Indians believed that Pinzón had abandoned the fleet in the futile pursuit of gold, going all the way to Jamaica—“Yamaye” to the Spaniards—a ten-day journey by canoe. Columbus declared that Pinzón’s unauthorized conduct amounted to “insolence and disloyalty.”
Water is the enemy of wood, and Niña required repairs, pumping, and caulking the following day, January 8, before Columbus considered the craft seaworthy. He awaited news of the life-size gold statue he had been promised, but none was forthcoming. On Tuesday, a high wind from the southeast delayed his exodus yet again. He remained troubled by the actions of the Pinzón brothers, Martín Alonso and Vicente Yáñez, who had abandoned him on November 21. “To get rid of such bad company, with whom he had had to dissemble (for they were undisciplined people), and although he had along many men of good will (but it was no time to deal out punishment), he decided to return and delay no more.”
As usual, the slightest mention of gold acted on him like a powerfully addictive drug and sufficed to distract him from his other concerns and goals. Columbus heard from his sailors that they had found gold in the mouth of a river—probably the Yaque—while they were collecting water forNiña. He dreamed of the wide and deep river “all full of gold, and of such quality that it is marvelous but very fine.” He ordered the sailors “to go up the river a stone’s throw,” in search of the gold, and when they filled their barrels with water and returned to Niña, “they found bits of gold”—gold!—adhering to the barrel hoops. He named the body of water Río de Oro, River of Gold. Columbus’s thoughts once again veered toward reality and the necessity of returning to Spain “at full speed to bring the news and to quit the bad company that he had, and that he always said they were a mutinous lot.” The ill will was entirely mutual.
After the latest series of delays and maneuvers, he estimated he had traveled only twenty-seven miles from the fortress, which he had taken to calling La Navidad, after the date of the shipwreck and to commemorate the beginning of the Spanish empire in Hispaniola. At midnight, January 9, he set sail once again, soon becoming frustrated by reefs and unseen channels. He took in fine sights, turtles (“very big, like a large wooden shield”) and “three mermaids who rose very high from the sea,” but, he hastened to add, “they were not as beautiful as they were painted, although to some extent they have a human appearance on the face.” In fact, the creatures were sea cows, or manatees, herbivores that generally graze in shallow waters, forbidding-looking beasts weighing over a thousand pounds, nearly ten feet long, with widely spaced eyes and a mournful appearance.
The next day’s anchorage brought Columbus, still aboard Niña, to the mouth of a broad waterway that he named Río de Gracia. A “good landlocked harbor” beckoned in the distance, but the presence of shipworms, or teredos, warned him away. Once shipworms worked their way into the planks, there would be no getting rid of them, and they would destroy the ship from within. He departed from this uneasy anchorage at midnight on Friday, and confidently reported “great progress because the wind and currents were with him. Dared not anchor for fear of shoals, and so lay-to all night.”
Even before dawn Niña raised anchor and shaped a generally easterly course. Columbus was tempted to explore “a great and very beautiful opening between two great mountains,” which led to an enticing harbor, but he was fearful that once Niña entered the harbor, the wind might shift. Instead, he rounded one rocky cape after another, daring to anchor in the midst of a “very great bay” surrounding a “tiny little island.” He estimated the depth at twelve fathoms when he dropped anchor, and dispatched a barge in search of water and people, but the inhabitants, he reported, had all fled, and with them the hope of obtaining the life-size statue of gold. He paused to wonder at the immense surroundings, and the configuration of the landmass along whose board he had been coasting. Had he reached a new gulf or island? Or was this endless and varied coastline still “one land with Hispaniola”? If so, “he remained amazed at how big was the island of Hispaniola.”
On Sunday, the Admiral had the time and tranquillity to make planetary observations. He patiently awaited “the conjunction of the moon with the sun,” which he expected four days later, on January 17, as well as the sun in opposition with Jupiter, which he claimed to be “the cause of great winds.”
As Columbus studied the heavens, preoccupied with what the celestial signs portended for his destiny, sailors aboard Niña’s barge disembarked onshore in search of food, “and they found some men with bows and arrows, with whom they waited to talk.”
One warrior wished to board Niña to meet the Admiral himself, and when Columbus came face-to-face with him, the encounter proved unsettling. His face was stained with a substance that Columbus took to be charcoal but more likely was a dye derived from a local fruit. “He wore his hair very long and drawn together and fastened behind, and gathered into a little nest of parrots’ feathers, and he was as naked as the others.” Columbus believed the Indian was a Carib, but in Las Casas’s opinion, the emissary belonged to the Taínos, who had borrowed the Caribs’ weapons in self-defense. It mattered little to the Admiral, who talked only of gold. Was there any to be found in this region? A great deal, the Indian replied, gesturing at Níña’s substantial poop to evoke a massive quantity.“Tuob,” he called it, a new designation for the precious substance, and said it could be found on the island of Boriquén, the Land of the Valiant Lord, as the Taínos referred to Puerto Rico.
In exchange for this intelligence, Columbus ordered that the obliging Taínos be given food, “pieces of green and red cloth, and little beads of glass,” and sent the man ashore with orders to return with gold. Columbus had seen traces of gold sewn in the Taínos’ clothes and assumed it must be readily available. When the barge bearing the Taínos approached the shore, no less than fifty-five men, with “very long hair, as the women wear it in Castile,” appeared from behind the trees, each one carrying a bow. The Taíno who had gone aboard Niña turned to his own people and persuaded them to lay down their bows, which Columbus’s men offered to buy, along with arrows. The mood suddenly turned hostile: “Having sold two bows, they wished to give no more, but prepared rather to attack the Christians and capture them.”
They came rushing at them with ropes, prepared to bind their victims as a prelude to imprisonment, torture, and slaughter. “Seeing them running toward them, the Christians, being prepared as always the Admiral advised them to be, fell upon them and gave an Indian a great slash on the buttocks, and wounded another in the breast with an arrow.” At that, the rest of the Taínos ran from the scene of battle.
What should have been a peaceful commercial encounter had turned bloody and vicious, but the unexpected turn of events reassured rather than dismayed the Admiral. He confided to his journal that he was sorry about the ill will engendered by the conflict; at the same time, he was not sorry at all: The Indians would have to learn “fear of the Christians.” Although he appeared indifferent to the reputation of the Caribs, he came around to the opinion that they had just drawn the blood not of the Taínos but of the Caribs themselves, “bad actors” who “ate men.”
Now they had been chastened, or so he hoped. If they encountered the Spanish seamen at the fortress La Navidad, they would “fear to do them any harm.” And even if they were not Caribs, “they must have the same customs,” and would be deterred in the same way. In either case, the charmed relations and fellow feeling between Indians and Spaniards dissipated. Although Columbus had tried to banish the sinister Caribs from his thoughts, it was apparent from his journal, with its frequent mentions of these fierce warriors, that they were on his mind, and to the peaceful Taínos, they posed an ever-present danger.
By January 15, three weeks after the shipwreck, Columbus had yet to summon the resolve to leave the Indies and their unfulfilled promise of gold for the repercussions awaiting him in Spain. He invited several Indians aboard Niña and sent a barge bearing Spaniards to reconnoiter ashore. He confessed that he could not learn much about a country in the space of a few days, “both from the difficulty of language, which the Admiral didn’t understand except by guess, and because they knew not what he was trying to say.”
To help, Columbus detained four youths aboard Niña, communicating with them by sign language. The boys indicated they knew the nearby islands well, and could serve as guides and go-betweens if necessary. So they joined the Spaniards for the journey to Spain, heedless of the elements to which they would be exposed on the open water, and, if they survived, in Europe. From the Indians Columbus also heard a story concerning another island, Matinino, said to contain abundant copper. The island, they added, was “inhabited only by women.” Columbus decided to go there directly, see the women, and carry specimens away with him.
The story evoked Marco Polo’s account of Male Island and Female Island, located somewhere in “greater India.” The legend, beguilingly related by the Venetian, was fact to Columbus and to Europeans. Perhaps the Admiral had managed to locate himself in the Venetian’s world after all. “I assure you that in the island the men do not live with their wives or with any other women; but all women live on the other island, which is called Female Island.” According to Polo, the men visit for three months of pleasure-taking before taking their leave.
Fumbling for the proper words with which to communicate with the island’s inhabitants, Columbus studied their bows and arrows, made from the “shoots of canes.” The Indians inserted a fish tooth at the tip, generally coated with poison. He also noted abundant cotton and chili, “which is stronger than pepper,” yet “the people won’t eat without it, for they find it very wholesome.” Traditional European black pepper belongs to the genus Piper, while the shiny green and red chili pepper belongs to the genus Capsicum , and there was so much in evidence that he estimated he could “load fifty caravels with it in Hispaniola.” But was chili pepper worth anything in Spain?
Thick mats of seaweed clogged the harbor, he noticed. He had seen it before, “in the gulf when they came upon the discovery,” and in his experience it grew only in shallow waters near land. “If so,” he guessed, “these Indies were very near the Canary Islands,” his jumping-off point before heading out to the uncharted Atlantic, which he called the Ocean Sea, “and for that reason he believed that they were less than 400 leagues distant.” In fact, he would have to traverse more than twice that distance.
The ever-present drifting seaweed was the brown algae, commonly called gulfweed, or sargassum, from which the huge Sargasso Sea takes its name. His fleet had silently and unwittingly entered a sea like no other, stretching two thousand miles east from Bermuda. The water of the Sargasso Sea was intensely blue, so clear that he could gaze two hundred feet into its depths. The sea extends fifteen thousand feet—nearly three miles—to the ocean’s floor. This strange, shoreless sea is defined by the confluence of four currents known as the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre. (In oceanography, a gyre denotes a system of rotating ocean currents generated by large-scale wind movements.) When Columbus sailed through the Sargasso Sea, he experienced a unique combination of wind and water and plant life in the form of sargassum.
Like many sailors, he feared the thick, floating mats would snarl his ships and lead to disaster. In reality, sargassum is too fragile to act as a barrier. It consists of miniature floats containing oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen for buoyancy, and it derives its name from these little structures, which reminded Portuguese sailors of a grape they called salgazo. The designation evolved into the word sargaço, or seaweed, and later the floating mats of seaweed were classified as the genus Sargassum. (There are six species ofSargassum, with two, Sargassum natans and Sargassum fuitans, predominating.) Columbus called it, simply, “weed,” and it was ubiquitous, covering a million square miles, or more, of the Sargasso Sea and Atlantic Ocean. From time to time storms scattered sargassum into the Caribbean Basin, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Gulf Stream, which carried it to the north, along the Atlantic Coast. In time, the Gulf Stream nudged it ashore, or swept it back into the vortex of the Sargasso Sea. So Columbus encountered its feathery stems wherever he went.
The homeward passage commenced three hours before dawn, on January 16, before a moderate offshore breeze. Relying on his four Indian guides, he headed in the general direction of the Caribs, “the people whom all those islands hold in so great fear, because it is said that with their countless canoes they range over all those seas, and it is said that they eat the men whom they can take.”
After traveling sixty-four miles, according to his dead reckoning, the Indian guides indicated that their destination would “lie to the southeast.” Instead, he trimmed the sails, proceeded another two leagues, and Niña caught what he considered a wind capable of bearing the ship all the way to Spain.
His confidence surged. He had survived the voyage, outlasted a partial mutiny, and discovered a previously unknown part of the world. He had even established and staffed a fort in this remote outpost. Nor did his achievements end there. He had demonstrated the validity of his “grand design” to himself, and soon enough, he would do the same for Ferdinand and Isabella. Nothing could alter those achievements, with the possible exception of Pinzón’s malice or divine intervention.
The two surviving ships of the little fleet (Pinta was not far behind) headed out to the open sea with all its hazards. What awaited him on the Iberian Peninsula would be far more uncertain and dangerous than anything he had faced in the mild waters and on the powdery white beaches of the Caribbean.