At departure, Columbus gave sealed orders to the captain of each ship, not to be opened unless weather forced a change of course. He insisted on secrecy because he did not want others, especially the Portuguese, to be privy to his route.
By Thursday, October 24, 1494, he had run more than four hundred leagues west, concerned that he had not encountered seaweed, although by this point in his first voyage he had seen quantities. Then, “to the surprise of all,” a swallow appeared that day and for two days thereafter. The next day, “[t]he waves rolled high, darkness prevailed everywhere, and black night covered the sea, except where lightning flashed and the thunder echoed. There is nothing more perilous than a shipwreck under these circumstances,” Guillermo Coma recalled. The rain and wind blasted the ships with such force that “the yards snapped, the sails were torn to shreds, and the ropes parted. The planks creaked and the gangways were awash, while some [ships] found themselves hanging on the crest of the waves and others saw the waters spread apart and lay bare the floor of the sea.” The vessels threatened to collide like toys in a pond.
Amid the turmoil, St. Elmo’s fire appeared in their midst. Named for St. Erasmus of Formiae, or St. Elmo, the patron saint of Mediterranean sailors, St. Elmo’s fire displays glowing blue or violet air that has been ionized, or electrified, by a thunderstorm, often accompanied by buzzing or hissing. Superstitious sailors, dependent on omens to guide their lives at sea, regarded St. Elmo’s fire as a sign of divine favor.
November 2 found Columbus studying the skies, observing “dark, threatening clouds ahead, which convinced him that land was near.” He lowered sail, kept watch, and by daybreak on November 3 was rewarded with the sight of a mountainous island called Charis by its isolated inhabitants since time immemorial. No more. Having arrived on a Sunday, he christened it Dominica, as if converting the island itself.
Word of the landfall spread from one ship to another quickly.
¡Albricias!
¡Que tenemos tierra!
The reward! We have land!
He spotted another island, and another, four in all, now known as the Leeward Islands—the northernmost islands of the Lesser Antilles, located at the confluence of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. (“Leeward” refers to the prevailing winds in the region; the islands are downwind, or leeward, of the Windward Islands, situated to meet the trade winds. The Leeward Islands include the U.S. and British Virgin Islands, Nevis, Saint Kitts, Saint-Barthélemy, Antigua, and Guadeloupe.) The miraculous appearance of these isles cheered all the men, who appeared on deck to intone prayers and hymns of gratitude and relief. As they did, the animals they carried with them, the chickens, the roosters, and especially the horses, raised an excited cacophony.
Columbus had successfully completed his second outbound transatlantic crossing, this time with seventeen ships, all of them avoiding serious accidents, over a distance of eight hundred leagues—about 2,400 miles—from the island of Gomera, in just twenty days. Relying on his judgment, instincts, and favorable winds, he had hit upon the optimal route between Gomera and the Leeward Islands, and demonstrated he could lead a transatlantic crossing without the Pinzón brothers; in fact, he surpassed them at this game. Of course, he was nowhere near his previous landfalls in the Indies, particularly the men stranded at La Navidad. Nevertheless, his men were safe, and the second voyage was off to an auspicious start.
He attempted to moor at Dominica’s eastern shore, but found no anchorage. “The sea was heavy and a storm and mist were approaching,” he later explained to Ferdinand and Isabella. Trouble was just starting. “I turned back toward the fleet that was quite scattered and brought them all together. Then I dispatched the best equipped caravel to the point in the north,” but he ignored her progress. “I was preoccupied because of the bad weather that was raging.” Reefing sail and summoning the other ships, he “made for another island ten leagues distant from Dominica.” Columbus swallowed his disappointment without realizing he had just been spared encountering cannibals said to be dwelling there. In the years to come, so the story goes, Europeans who fetched up on this island had a rough time of it—that is, until the day the cannibals became so ill after devouring a friar that they avoided anyone dressed as a cleric. For that reason, when Spanish ships from across the Atlantic had no choice but to forage on Dominica for food or water, they assigned a friar, or a sailor who dressed as one, to the task.
Unable to secure anchorage, Columbus ordered his fleet to a nearby island; the predatory Caribs called it Aichi, and the Taínos, their prey, knew it as Touloukaera. Heedless of the island’s contentious history, he christened this inviting speck of land Marie Galante, after his flagship. He dropped anchor, ventured ashore, and, in the words of his son, “with suitable solemnities renewed possession that in the name of the Catholic Sovereigns he had taken of all the islands and mainland of the Indies on his first voyage.” More powerful than ever, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea had returned to his demesne.
The expedition’s physician, Diego Alvarez Chanca, wrote of the landfall with wonder: “On this island there were woods so dense that it was amazing to look at them and especially stupefying were the many species of trees unknown to everyone—some with fruits, others with flowers, and all was green,” while the trees in Spain showed only bare gray branches at this time of year. Here, the very air seemed to tremble with magic. “We found a tree whose leaves had the most pleasant clove scent I ever before smelled,” he marveled. Tempted, several crew members tasted the unfamiliar fruit. Instantly, “their faces swelled up and they developed such a strong burning and pain to appear seized with rabies, which could not be cured by any means of cold things.” Two hours later, the visitors from Spain, tongues afire, departed in their ships.
Just nine leagues to the north, the fleet arrived at a spectacularly lofty island. “This island,” Columbus wrote, “is shaped like the point of a diamond, so high that it is a marvel, and from its summit gushes out a tremendous spring that scatters water on every side of the mountain; from where I stood other streams were flowing in on the other side, one of them so big its sharp, high drop made it resemble water gushing out of a barrel, all white, and we could not believe it was water and not a vein of white rock.” The sailors wagered: rock or water? When they dropped anchor, they had their answer: it was water, on an island filled with abundant streams. “Upon reaching the island I named it Santa María de Guadalupe,” he wrote, referring to a monastery in Santa María de Guadalupe de Extremadura, Spain. It was November 14.
The wind suddenly shifted, bringing bouts of dense mist and torrential rain. Columbus spent a strenuous day battling high winds and heavy seas. When the weather lifted slightly, he produced his spyglass and observed people barely visible through a clearing in the trees. He gave the order to drop anchor, but the panicky island dwellers fled well before the Spaniards could make contact with them. “I reached the north side,” Columbus wrote, “where most of the population lives, and I went in very close to land and anchored the whole fleet.”
Columbus sent a captain ashore, where he “found a good deal of unspun cotton, yarn, and edible provisions,” in Chanca’s words. But where were the people?
“Our men,” Ferdinand wrote, “found only some children, in whose hands they put hawk’s bells in order to reassure the parents when they returned.” The Spaniards inspected the structures, and noted “geese resembling our own” and unearthly parrots as large as roosters bristling with feathers of brilliant vermilion, azure, and white. Emboldened, they sampled a fruit similar to melon but sweeter in taste and smell. They noted bows and arrows, hammocks, and took care to restrain themselves from removing anything from the abandoned hamlet so that “the Indians might have more trust in the Christians.”
On closer inspection, the peaceful domestic scene turned into a nightmare. “In their houses,” Columbus wrote, “I found hanging baskets and great arches of human bones as well as heads hanging up in every house.” He was startled to come across “a large piece from the stern of a Spanish ship; I believe it was from the one I left at La Navidad last year.” An unnerving silence enveloped the explorers. They assumed they were being watched, but by whom?
“As for the people,” Columbus wrote to his Sovereigns, “few were taken and few seen; all of them fled into the countryside, and because the trees were thick could not be captured except for some women, which I am sending to Your Highnesses.” They were refugees, victims of brutality and cannibalism. “In my opinion, they were taken as slaves or concubines.” By means of gestures they indicated that “their husbands had been eaten and that other women had had their sons and brothers eaten, and that they themselves had been forced to eat them.” There was more, sadly. “I also found some boys who had been brought there, and each of them had had his penis cut off.” At first, Columbus thought they had been castrated “out of jealousy for their women,” but, he learned, “they follow that practice to fatten them up, like capons in Castile, so they can be eaten for feasts; women they never kill.”
Had the men at La Navidad met with the same end as the horrifying human remains in the Indians’ dwellings indicated? Had Columbus allowed them to be sacrificed in this manner? Stricken with guilt and panic, he intended to go from one island to the next, destroying every canoe he encountered as retribution, “but the desire to aid those whom I had left behind here did not allow time for searches, nor did I have peace of mind.”
His exploration of Guadeloupe revealed a string of abandoned villages, but in one hamlet his men came across an “abandoned one-year-old baby who remained alone for six days in this hut.” Each day his men passed by the hut, “and they always found the little one next to a bundle of arrows, and he used to go to a nearby river to drink and then return to his hut, and he was always cheerful and content.” Consumed by the idea of this small child alone in the wilderness, Columbus intervened, pledging the boy “to God and fortune,” adding, “so I had him entrusted to a woman who had come here from Castile.” References to this woman and others like her are too skimpy to convey an idea of what role, if any, they played. In this instance, the abandoned Indian child flourished under the care of his nursemaid. “Now he is so well behaved,” Columbus boasted to Ferdinand and Isabella, “and he speaks and understands our tongue very well, and that is beautiful.” He would send him to Spain forthwith, “but I am afraid he might die, being so young.”
Columbus, like other explorers of his day, considered his routes and discoveries trade secrets for which he daily risked his life, and he jealously guarded them from opportunists and rivals. Meanwhile, his trusted chart maker, Juan de la Cosa, amassed data for an official guide to the newly discovered archipelago, but it has not survived, and his famous map dating from the year 1500 contains little detail concerning this region. At some point during the second voyage, he gathered together “drawings of all the islands discovered so far along with those from last year, all of them on a map I made with no small labor,” but even if these charts had survived, they might have been of limited value.
Some names chosen by Columbus at this point in his voyage have endured, in abbreviated form, to offer clues to his whereabouts. Santa María de Montserrate, named for a monastery near Barcelona, became Montserrat; Santa María de la Antigua, named for the celebrated Virgin in the Seville Cathedral, before which Columbus is believed to have prayed, became Antigua. But Columbus’s San Martín surrendered its name to an island lying to the northwest; afterward, it was known as Nuestra Señora de las Nieves, Our Lady of the Snows. The evocative designation referred to a miracle attributed to the Virgin Mary rather than to actual snow on the island, of which there was none.
As he named these islands, Columbus led his fleet through a world that seemed newly formed each day, mountains emerging from the darkness at dawn, reaching toward stands of cumulus at midday, and receding into the dusk before disappearing into the star-pricked night. Sailing east in search of India, gliding over the quicksilver surface of the sea flashing from gray to cobalt to indigo, the ships seemed to be playing hide-and-seek, not just with islands and currents but with reality itself.
In the morning the Admiral dispatched two small boats to capture an Indian to point the way to Hispaniola and its fort, imperiled La Navidad. The boats returned with two boys, who explained they came from Boriquén, or Puerto Rico, and had been kidnapped by the Caribs. On another sortie, the boats retrieved six women seeking refuge from the Caribs aboard the Spanish ships. Columbus refused, gave them hawk’s bells and other small gifts, and sent them back to the island, where the Caribs seized the women and boldly pilfered the trinkets in full sight of the Spaniards.
When the boats returned a third time to take on wood and water, the women pleaded with the visitors for asylum. “Being kindly received and generously plied with food, they thought the gods had come to their aid,” Guillermo Coma reported. The women locked their legs around the masts and pleaded to remain rather than be returned to the Caribs, “like sheep to the slaughter.”
The grateful women divulged all they knew of the islands in the area, and secretly pointed out Caribs to the Spanish. The Caribs would impregnate women and devour their offspring. Male victims fared no better. If captured alive, they were immediately slaughtered and eaten. Chanca wrote that the Caribs “claim human flesh is so exquisite that a similar delicacy does not exist in all the world.” A pile of bare human bones testified to their predilection: “All that could be gnawed on, had been gnawed on, and all that was left, was what could not be eaten, because it was inedible.” Chanca reeled at the sight and smell of a “human neck . . . boiling in a pot.” Worse, “Young boys once captured have their members cut off and are kept as servants till adulthood, at which time, when the Caribs want to celebrate, they kill and eat them.” To demonstrate this last point, however extreme, three Indian boys who had escaped the Caribs and sought refuge among the Spanish “had been castrated.”