Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (5 page)

From gold, his mind swung back to Asia. He reckoned he was but a day’s sail from Japan, or Çipango, not the eight thousand miles separating him from his improbable destination. On October 23, he wrote of blithely departing for Cuba, “which I believe should be Çipango,” to look for gold. “On the globes that I saw,” he reminded himself, “it is in this region.” So stated Martin Behaim.

At midnight, Columbus weighed anchor and shaped a course for Cuba, but by nightfall he had nothing to show for his brave effort, as the wind “blew up brisk and I didn’t know how far it was to the island of Cuba.” Accordingly, he lowered sail, except for the forecourse, until rain caused him to furl that sail as well. So it went for four days, “and how it rained!”

On Sunday, October 28, he entered a deep, unobstructed river—perhaps Bahía Bariay in Cuba—and anchored within its protective embrace, where he beheld “trees all along the river, beautiful and green, and different from ours.” He labored over his descriptions of flora and fauna with extreme care, as if the natural bounty could substitute or distract from the wonders he had failed to find so far—gold, spices, and tangible evidence of the Grand Khan, whom he had crossed an ocean to see, without realizing that two oceans, and two centuries, separated them.

Instead, he wrote of flowers and singing birds and a barkless dog, probably domesticated by local “fishermen who had fled in fear.” Within their huts, he found an eerie sight: “nets of palm fiber and ropes and fish-hooks of horn, and bone harpoons, and other fishing tackle, and many fireplaces within.” But where were the inhabitants of this Arcadia? With stifled breathing and hesitant footfalls, his men warily crept through the timeless village.

Ordering that nothing be disturbed, he returned to his ship and resumed his voyage upriver, groping for superlatives to describe Cuba: “The most beautiful that eyes have ever seen: full of very good harbors and deep rivers.” Indians, when he encountered them, spoke of ten great rivers, and, he wrote, “one cannot circumnavigate it with their canoes in 20 days.” He refused to entertain the implication that Cuba was an island. If he had not arrived on Asia’s doorstep, where was he? It was a question that haunted the entire premise of the voyage.

He persuaded himself that the inhabitants, or Indians, mentioned “mines of gold and pearls,” and claimed he caught a glimpse of “mussel shells” that might contain pearls, and on the basis of this misunderstanding, concluded that the “ships of the Grand Khan, great ones,” had preceded him.

Baffled, curious, predatory, he made his way inland, admiring grander dwellings, which he struggled to describe in the idiom he understood: “They were made in the manner of Moorish tents, very large, and looking like tents in an encampment, without regularity of streets, but one here and another there; and inside well swept and clean, and their furnishings well made . . . of very fair palm branches.” Here and there masks, some masculine, others feminine, adorned the walls, but he could not ascertain “whether these are for beauty or to be worshipped.” Again, he emphasized, “they didn’t touch a thing.”

 

O
n Tuesday, October 30, the fleet was under way again,
Pinta
carrying Indian guides, and Columbus still planning to happen upon the Grand Khan. By November 1, he went ashore near Puerto de Gibara, on Cuba’s northeastern shore, deploying his Indian passengers as scouts and emissaries. They were engaged as before in a fruitless search for gold. On this occasion, he observed “a piece of worked silver hanging from the nose” of an Indian, a detail that sparked his curiosity. His men engaged in communicating by sign language with the locals, taking a tribal conflict for full-blown war between the islanders and the Grand Khan. “It is certain,” he proclaimed, “that this is the mainland,” and that Quinsay lay only one hundred leagues distant. It was time to prepare a scouting party to reach the legendary Chinese capital.

Columbus dispatched “two Spanish men: the one was called Rodrigo de Xerez, who lived in Ayamonte, and the other was one Luis de Torres . . . of Murcia and had been born a Jew, and knew, it is said, Hebrew and Aramaic and also some Arabic.” Two Indians accompanied the scouts, and carried “strings of beads to buy food with.” They had their orders to find the island’s king, present their credentials, exchange gifts, and discover their actual location. They had six days to complete their mission.

As Columbus was at pains to explain, Luis de Torres was a recent
converso
, or convert, to Christianity, and probably an unwilling one. His original name is believed to have been Yosef Ben Ha Levy Haivri, “Joseph the Son of Levy the Hebrew,” and he would become the first person of Jewish origin to settle in the New World. Columbus had brought Torres on the voyage both for his political skills and his linguistic abilities. They might have dealings with Arab traders, and in the event they encountered descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Torres was expected to communicate with them. Columbus was, in reality, wholly unprepared for speaking with the “Indians” in their actual tongue and resorted to improvised sign language, a modus operandi that generated ambiguity and confusion that he took as confirmation of his fantastic ideas about the Grand Khan.

 

O
n the morning of November 3, Columbus went aboard the ship’s launch to await the scouting party and survey a “very remarkable harbor, very deep and clear of rocks,” with a beach well suited to careening, or repairing the hulls of ships.

A few days later, on November 4, Martín Alonso Pinzón, who considered himself the expedition’s virtual co-leader, went ashore and made a highly promising find, “two pieces of cinnamon,” actually
Canella winterana
, or wild cinnamon blossoms, giving off their smoky-sweet odor. He was eager to trade this desirable commodity, and would have done so, were it not for the “penalty the admiral had imposed.” There were even cinnamon groves nearby, according to
Pinta
’s boatswain, but on inspection, Columbus decided that was not the case. The Spanish explorers listened intently to tales of gold and pearls “in an infinite amount.” The more they listened, the more credulous they became, until Columbus was registering reports of men with the heads of dogs “who ate men and that in killing one they beheaded him and drank his blood and cut off his genitals.” Grotesque stories such as these sounded similar to tales recounted by Sir John Mandeville, whose fanciful tales were at least as popular in western Europe as Marco Polo’s. Such things could not happen here—or could they?

T
he scouts, Rodrigo de Xerez and Luis de Torres, returned to describe their reconnoitering on Tuesday, November 6. Within twelve leagues, they said, they had found a “village” with fifty tents and a thousand inhabitants, who received the visitors “with great solemnity.” They were pleased to report that the inhabitants “touched them and kissed their hands and feet, marveling and believing that they came from the sky.” They were offered chairs, while their hosts squatted at their feet, as one of their Indian companions explained to the throng that as Christians, their visitors “were good people.” A respectful frenzy ensued. “The men went out and the women entered, and squatted in the same fashion around them, kissing their hands and feet, feeling them to ascertain if they were of flesh and bones like themselves; begging them to stay at least five days.” The visitors responded in a calculatingly commercial vein, displaying samples of spices they sought, cinnamon and pepper and the like, and inquiring where they could be found, receiving only vague directions (“around there, to the southeast”) by way of reply. They found no Chinese, no Arabs, no descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, and no trace of the Grand Khan. But they had made friends and potential allies. Five hundred men and women wished to accompany them on their return “to the sky,” as they imagined. They allowed only a handful the privilege of their company.

Returning to the ships, “the two Christians met on the way many people who were going to their towns, women and men, with a firebrand in the hand, [and] herbs to drink the smoke thereof.” This brief observation referred to tobacco, a new and strange practice to the Spanish, who observed the Indians making cigars and setting fire to
tobacos
, the fumes of which they inhaled deeply. But spices remained the ultimate cash crop for Columbus, who, for the time being, remained oblivious to the commercial value and addictive attributes of this aromatic leaf.

After hearing the report, Columbus, rather than dwelling on the failure of the expedition to meet its objectives, offered Ferdinand and Isabella a considered and nuanced appraisal of the “Indians” surrounding him, as he tried to come to terms with their obvious humanity and potential for conversion to Christianity:

Having expressed this sincere hope, Columbus predicted that if Ferdinand and Isabella followed this path, they would be “well received before the eternal Creator” when the time came for them to “leave your realms.” With that inspirational flourish, he prepared the fleet for departure. Within a day, a robust wind blew up to carry the ships away.

 

T
he next two weeks found Columbus increasingly exasperated by the flaws in his navigational techniques and maps, and stubbornly pursuing the civilized grandeur of the East even as the brilliance of the Caribbean seduced him. He eventually returned to Cuba to resume his patient exploration, river by river, musing on “the cities of the Grand Khan, which will doubtless be discovered.”

He lost count of the harbors he visited, the palm trees, and all the other trees and bushes and wildlife that he could not recognize or name, and mountains so high that it seemed to him that there were none higher in all the world, “nor any so beautiful and clear, without clouds or snow.” The islands, too numerous to count, he took to be “those found on the world maps at the end of the Far East.” He speculated that there were “immense riches and precious stones and spiceries in them, and that they extend much further to the south, and spread out in every direction.” At all this, Columbus “marveled greatly.”

Wherever he went, both “islands and lands,” Columbus made a practice of erecting a cross, an arduous project. He wrote of fashioning crosses from trees, proclaiming, “It is said that a carpenter could not have made [it] better proportioned.” Once the cross was in place, he and his men solemnly prayed before it, pilgrims in search of an elusive Jerusalem.

Cuba, he came to realize, was heavily populated with gregarious Indians. On Sunday, November 10, a dugout canoe arrived with six men and five women to pay their respects. Columbus returned their hospitality by “detaining” them in expectation of returning to Spain with them. He bolstered their number with seven additional women and three boys. He explained his thinking this way: “I did this because the men would behave better in Spain with women of their country than without them.”

His decision, he said, was based on his experiences “detaining” the inhabitants of Africa’s west coast to Portugal. “Many times I happened to take men of Guinea that they might learn the language in Portugal, and after they returned it was expected to make some use of them in their own country, owing to the good company that they had enjoyed and gifts they had received,” but matters never turned out as hoped. The problem, he decided, was that without their women the men would not cooperate. This time, the result would be different. His latest captives, “having their women, will find it good business to do what they are told, and these women would teach our people their language,” which, he assumed, “is the same in all these islands of India.”

As if to prove his point, he recorded a vignette that remained fresh in his memory: “This night there came aboard in a dugout the husband of . . . two women and father of three children, a boy and two girls, and said he wished to come with them, and begged me hard.” Columbus allowed the supplicant to join the expedition. “They all now remained consoled with him,” the Admiral noted, but he was disappointed to report that his newest ally was “more than 45 years,” too old for vigorous labor.

Columbus noted on November 11 that the inhabitants of Cuba appeared to practice “no religion,” but at least they were not “idolaters,” and, he decided, “very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil, neither murder nor theft; and they are without arms and so timid that a hundred of them flee before one person of ours, although they may be playing the fool with them.” His recommendation: “Your Highnesses ought to resolve to make them Christians, for I believe that if you began, in a short time you would achieve the conversion to our holy faith of a multitude of folk, and would acquire great lordships and riches and all their inhabitants for Spain.” And why was that? “Because without doubt there is in these countries a tremendous quantity of gold.” The Indians, he pointed out, busy themselves mining gold “and wear it on their necks, ears, arms and legs, and the bracelets are very large.” God and gold: what better reasons to found an empire across an ocean?