Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (25 page)

Amid the melee, Peter Martyr reported, there appeared a woman whom the other Indians respected as their queen. Beside her stood her son, “a fierce and robust young man, with a ferocious look and the appearance of a lion.” They seemed prepared to finish every last Spaniard, even those in agony from the wounds they suffered from the poison-tipped arrows. Summoning their resources, the Spaniards rowed themselves beside the cannibals’ canoe to overturn it. Even with their canoe capsized, the Indian warriors, men and women alike, kept shooting their arrows, one stroke after another. Only when the archers sought refuge on a reef were the Spaniards able to capture them as they fought on to the end. Several Indians perished in this skirmish, and the Spaniards were pleased to note they had “wounded the queen’s son twice.”

The exhausted survivors were taken prisoner, and “even after being taken on board the Admiral’s ship the natives did not lose their fierceness and ferocious looks, not unlike African lions once they feel trapped,” in the words of Peter Martyr. Like many in Spain, the classically trained Martyr was of two minds about the Indians. From a safe distance, he compared them favorably to the “tyrants” of the time of “the mythical Aeneas,” the hero of Troy, and even portrayed their lives with a touch of envy. “But I feel that our natives of Hispaniola,” as he called the Indians, “are happier than they—more so were they converted to the true religion—because naked, without burdens, limits, or death-inducing currency, living in a golden age, free, without fraudulent judges, books, and content in their natural state, they live with no worries about the future.” Yet Columbus and his men realized that the Indian tribes they encountered often lived desperate, fear-ridden lives as they preyed on one another in an unending struggle for dominance and survival that mirrored the struggles of European nations. Even the wistful Peter Martyr was aware that the fierce Caribs ranged a thousand miles to find victims, and he admitted that the Indians, despite their apparent freedom and simplicity, were “troubled by the desire to rule and waste each other away with wars.”

Unlike the exalted, occasionally desperate sense of mission animating Columbus, his boyhood friend Michele de Cuneo, gentleman of Genoa, did not torment himself with questions about the fleet’s location or his role in God’s plan. Even the appalling castration practiced by the Caribs intrigued rather than horrified Cuneo. His determination to live in the moment, consequences be damned, prefigured the eventual arrival of buccaneers in the Caribbean.

Cuneo recorded careful observations of the Indians as they appeared to the men of the second voyage. The Indians pressed a heavy plate on the soft brows of infants to produce a profile they considered desirable, as he noted: “They have flat heads and the face tattooed; of short stature; as a rule they have very little beard and very well shaped legs and are thick of skin. The women have their breasts quite round and firm and well shaped.” They were carefully groomed, shaving and smoothing their skin with sharpened canes, and “the hair from the nose they uproot with their fingers.”

He observed their diet with amazement. “They eat all sorts of wild and poisonous beasts such as reptiles of 15 to 20 pounds each; and when they meet the biggest ones they are devoured by them.” He tried a sample, and found it “very good.” But the dogs were “not too good” at all; neither were the “snakes, lizards, spiders” that he claimed grew to the size of chickens. The Indians even ate “poisonous insects that breed in the swamps and weigh from a pound to a pound and a half.” Those he could not bring himself to stomach.

They acted according to their impulses, or so it seemed to Cuneo. They did not live long (“We have not seen a man who in our judgment would have been past 50 years of age”), they slept “mostly on the ground like beasts,” they let the women do most of the work, and they covered their bodies with dye to ward off the “extremely annoying” mosquitoes. (The Europeans, in contrast, failed to find any better remedy than staying in the water.) The Indians ate when hungry, had sex when it suited them, but they were “not too lustful,” which he attributed to their inadequate diet. “According to what we have seen in all the islands where we have been, both the Indians”—that is, the Taínos—“and the Caribs are largely sodomites, not knowing (I believe) whether they are acting right or wrong.”

 

Cuneo coolly recorded the brutal treatment the Spaniards accorded the Indians in the canoe as they battled against overwhelming odds. “One Carib was wounded by a spear in such a way that we thought he was dead,” he said of the confrontation, “but instantly we saw him swim.” The Spaniards quickly caught him and grappled him back to the ship, “where we cut off his head with an axe.” They took other Caribs as prisoners, and planned to send them all to Spain, as Cuneo casually recalled, with one striking exception. “While I was in the boat,” Cuneo bragged, “I captured a very beautiful woman, whom the Lord Admiral gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked—as was their custom. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought she had been brought up in a school for whores.”

So began the European rape of the New World.

Had Ferdinand and Isabella learned of such escapades, the perpetrators would have paid dire consequences. And if Columbus knew of his comrade’s scandalous behavior, he kept the knowledge to himself, and Cuneo had the sense to confide his written accounts of daily life during Columbus’s second voyage only to a circumspect friend.

Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, the naturalist and scholar, preferred to emphasize the loyalty and sensuality of Taíno women. “They are very fond of the Spaniards and consider themselves highly honored when they are loved by them. Many of these women, after they have known Christians carnally, will remain faithful to them unless they go too far away and remain too long, for they have no desire to be widows or nuns who protect their chastity.” For many, chastity was not uppermost in their minds, and pregnancies inevitably followed, for which they had a remedy. “Many of the Indian women eat of an herb that moves and expels the pregnancy,” he wrote. “They say the old women are the ones who should bear children. The young women do not want to give up their pleasures, or to become pregnant, because childbearing causes their breasts to become flabby. They have very beautiful breasts and are quite proud of them.” If an Indian woman eventually gave birth to a child, Fernández de Oviedo noted, “she goes to the river and bathes, and immediately the flow of blood and purgation ceases, and for a few days she does no work. The sexual organs of Indian women then contract so that the men who have had sexual intercourse with them say that they are so tight that it is with pain that a man may gratify his passion. Those who have not borne children seem to be almost virgins.” This behavior, so resilient and flexible, was very different from that of conventional Spanish and Christian mores, which placed a premium on virginity, abhorred abortion, and often suppressed inherent female sensuality in the name of chastity.

The Indian men emphasized audacious sexual display. The caciques “wear a tube of gold, and the other men large snail’s shells, in which they place the male organ. The rest of the body is naked, because the Indians do not feel that the human body is anything to inspire shame”—Fernández de Oviedo wrote in appreciation—“and in many provinces neither men nor women cover their sexual organs nor do they wear anything on any part of the body.” Stirring accounts such as this made as much of an impression on European awareness of the Indians visited by Columbus as alarming reports of cannibalism and poison arrows.

 

In Chanca’s account, the battle between the Spaniards and the Indians arose not from provocation, as Cuneo implied, but from happenstance: the unexpected appearance of a canoe with two men and a boy who were so astonished by the sight of the enormous Spanish fleet that “they stayed for a good hour without moving.” They were slowly surrounded by Spaniards approaching in boats. “As they kept on wondering and trying to understand what it was all about, they did not notice that they could not flee.” When they finally tried to escape, “the men from our boat seized them very promptly.”

Chanca sympathized with the small party of captive Indians, far outnumbered by the twenty-five Spaniards who had seized them. Surrounded, the Indians “struck one with two arrows in the chest and the other with one in the ribs, and, had it not been for the fact they wore shields and wooden plates and also that there was a collision with the boat that capsized their canoe, they would have hit the majority of them with arrows.” They fought on even after their canoe capsized. Dodging poison-tipped arrows, the Spaniards wounded and captured a single warrior, and brought him back to the fleet, where he died of his injuries.

During the first voyage, the ferocious Caribs had been more rumor than reality. Now Chanca observed them at close quarters, their “very long hair,” and a “thousand different decorative images on their faces, crosses and other symbols of varying fashion, as each of them likes best.” The few Caribs captured by the Spanish had eerily “painted eyes and eyebrows, which—it seems to me—they do on purpose to appear more frightful.” They were, in fact, terrifying. The Spaniards captured their Indian attackers only to find that the men had been castrated: standard practice for the Caribs, who sought to improve the taste of their victims before eating them.

His need to hurry increasing with every league and sign of Carib cruelty, Columbus held to his northwest course, “preferring,” said Chanca, “to bring help to our people whom we had left on Hispaniola.”

Slicing through cobalt sea, out of sight of land, the fleet was accompanied by the angular black, swooping silhouettes of frigate birds. Chanca accurately portrayed these pelicanlike creatures as “predatory sea birds that do not stop or sleep on the water.” Two days later, the men of the fleet spotted land, probably the Virgin Islands; fished for sole, sardines, shad, and even sea horses; passed along the southern coast of Puerto Rico; beheld an Indian watch tower “that could hold ten or twelve persons”; and on Friday, November 22, watched in expectation as the northern coast of Hispaniola finally came into view, solid, fragrant, and mysterious.

 

This was Chanca’s first visit to the Indies, and the scope of Hispaniola overwhelmed him. “A very wide territory,” he observed, “to the point that those who have seen its coast claim it could be two hundred leagues long.” He was accustomed to the sparse countryside of Spain, the parched soil, and in November, the sunny but chilly Seville.

Here, on Hispaniola, the profusion of strange flora perplexed him. “A very unusual land,” he remarked, “with a great many wide rivers, big mountain chains, ample and treeless valleys and high peaks. I suspect the vegetation does not dry up at all during the year. I do not think there is any winter in this territory, since at Christmas there can be seen many nests, some with birds, others with eggs.” These birds puzzled him. Their appearance was the result of a separate evolutionary track; as such, they were the product of forces unknown to Chanca or anyone else of that era. Lacking a taxonomy adequate to the formidable task of classifying the fauna all around him, he hesitantly recorded references to “a few multi-colored dogs,” and a “furry animal like the rabbit . . . with a long tail and with fore and hind legs like those of mice, and it climbs trees. Many people who have eaten it say it is indeed tasty.” At such moments, it seemed as though he were in another world similar to that of Europe, but subtly and enigmatically different, like a foreign language he could only partly decipher. Creatures that he took to be snakes, for instance, baffled him; he claimed that the Indians “like them a lot, much as we like pheasants in our country. They are of different shape but the same size as our lizards,” with the exception of one curious beast that he estimated to be the size of a calf “and had the shape of a lance.” The creature inspired an outpouring of Spanish abhorrence, yet “many attempts to kill it were thwarted by the dense vegetation where it could hide by the sea and never be caught.”

 

In late November 1493, the fleet paused at the port of Monte Cristi, on the inhospitable northern coast of what is now the Dominican Republic “to study the configuration of the territory,” in Chanca’s words, “since the Admiral considered unsuitable for a settlement the place where he had left the men.” With the benefit of hindsight, Columbus realized that his hasty choice of site on the first voyage had failed to take into account basic considerations such as the availability of water and food, and proximity to the aggressive Caribs. He concluded he needed to know the territory—and its dangers—better. He soon found them.