The Admiral glumly summed up his situation: “I was commanded from Spain not to touch or land there.” But land at Santo Domingo he did. It was Wednesday, June 29.
Columbus dispatched one of his captains, Pedro de Terreros, to Ovando, the knight commander, to convey the Admiral’s respects and to explain that one of his ships had to be replaced, or lives would be endangered. Adding to the urgency of the situation, he warned of a “great storm” approaching the region, and for this reason if no other, “he wished to take shelter in port.” At the moment, the port was witnessing the final preparations of Bobadilla’s convoy of ships bound for Spain. As Columbus knew, one of those ships, the fragile
Aguja
, carried his personal treasure. So he used the storm both as a pretext to return to Santo Domingo and supervise his personal wealth and to deliver a necessary warning. Drawing on his experience in judging weather, he advised Ovando “not to permit the homeward-bound fleet to sail for eight days because of the great danger.”
Ovando stubbornly resisted Columbus’s prudent, if self-interested, warning. He “would not permit the Admiral to enter the port,” said Ferdinand, “much less would he detail the fleet that was homeward bound for Castile” even though the roster included such important personages as Francisco de Bobadilla and Francisco Roldán, “and all the other rebels who had done the Admiral so much hurt.” If Ovando and the others had heeded Columbus’s warning, matters would have turned out very differently. The fleet would have reached Spain only a few days later than planned. Instead, a calamity occurred.
Defying Columbus, Ovando ordered the fleet to depart, regardless of the storm warning. Ferdinand recorded that when the ships “reached the eastern end of Hispaniola, the storm assailed them with such fury that the flagship carrying Bobadilla and most of the rebels went down.”
Columbus recalled the calamity with biblical intensity and resonance: “The storm was terrible, and on that night my fleet was broken up. Everyone lost hope and was quite certain that all the rest were drowned. What mortal man, even Job himself, would not have died of despair? Even for the safety of myself, my son, brother and friends, I was forbidden in such weather to put into land or enter harbors that I had gained for Spain by my own blood and sweat.” Meanwhile, “
Gallega
lost her board and all lost a great part of their provisions.” Despite these hazards, he noted in wonder, “the ship in which I was traveling, though amazingly storm-tossed, was saved by Our Lord and was completely unharmed.” At times like these, Columbus felt singled out by the Lord, yet his salvation was not all that mysterious; he had wisely anchored in the lee of the shore. Even as the fleet’s crew found deliverance from the storm, they experienced waves of “grief and chagrin” at being snubbed by the imperious Ovando. And if another disaster appeared on the horizon, “they could expect no aid from ashore.” Stateless and unwanted, they were all on the way to becoming outlaws and buccaneers.
“B
y skill and good judgment he managed to keep the fleet together till the next day,” Ferdinand continued, “when, as the storm gained in intensity and night came on with deep darkness, three ships were torn from their anchorages, each going its own way; and though all ran the same danger, each thought the others had gone down. . . . Still greater was the danger of the caravel
Bermuda
, which ran out to sea, where water washed over the deck—from which it is easy to understand why the Admiral wanted to trade her for another.” Without Bartholomew, all agreed, the ship would have been lost.
The next day, the surviving ships in Columbus’s fleet held a rendezvous in the port of Azua. “As each captain related his misfortune, it appeared that the Adelantado, experienced seaman that he was, had weathered the great storm by going out to sea, while the Admiral had saved his ship by lying close to shore, like a sage astrologer who foresaw whence the danger must come.” Believing that he commanded the planets, the weather, and nature itself, the enemies of Columbus “charged that by his magic arts he had raised that storm to take revenge on Bobadilla and other enemies that were with him.” In fact, he had relied on his instinct for survival and hard-won nautical experience to warn against the hurricane.
W
hen it was over, the men, utterly drained, went fishing, “one of the pleasures offered by the sea in such time of idleness.” The presence of natural splendor roused them from their misery, as did the sudden appearance of a giant manta ray gliding through the water on graceful fins tapered like a bird’s: a marvelous fusion of locomotion and beauty. To Columbus’s young son, the ray looked “as large as a medium-sized bed.”
The crew of
Vizcaína
came upon the creature asleep on the ocean’s surface and stabbed it with a harpoon “so it could not escape.” They secured it to their launch with a rope, and “it drew the boat through the harbor as swiftly as an arrow.” All the while, those aboard
Vizcaína
, “not knowing what went on, were astounded to see the boat running about without oars.” The fun ended when the manta ray died and “was hauled aboard with tackling gear used for heavy objects.”
Later, the men came upon a manatee, or sea cow. Ferdinand approached it cautiously. “It is not known in Europe,” he stated. “It is as big as a calf and resembles one in taste and color, but it is better tasting and fatter.” In its strangeness, the bulbous, glistening creature offered further proof that they had entered a world of mystery as well as danger.
B
y the middle of July 1502, one storm system after another was making up across the Caribbean Sea. It was hurricane season. Having completed repairs to his fleet, taken on supplies, and rested, Columbus and his men strained for the safer waters of Yaquimo, in today’s Haiti, to ride out the storm. As soon as they departed on July 14, they “ran into such a flat calm that he could not hold his course, and the currents carried him to some small sandy islands near Jamaica.” Ferdinand probably meant Morant Cays, sparsely vegetated islets rising from coral, beautiful to see but hazardous to navigate. Columbus called them the Puddles because “his men soon found enough water for their needs by digging puddles in the sand.”
During a leisurely southerly swing off the coast of Honduras, Ferdinand warned, “the map-makers have not traveled in this part of the world.” He continued, “They fall into a grievous error,” when they depicted Cape Gracias á Dios as a separate landform from Cape Honduras, although in reality they were the same.
As Ferdinand realized, this erroneous depiction was a hoax designed to deprive his father of the fruits of his exploration. Two envious explorers, Juan Díaz de Solís and Vicente Yáñez Pinzón (who had commanded a ship on the Admiral’s first voyage), set out in 1508 for Nicaragua, which the Admiral had considered so promising for exploitation. Reaching the islands off the coast of Honduras, which they knew as Guanajas, they ignored the advice given by one of their pilots, Pedro de Ledesma, who recognized the landforms because he had explored them with the Admiral. Instead, they falsely claimed they had arrived at another island for the first time.
Their assertion, backed by phony charts, fooled many, but not Ferdinand, who was determined to expose their conspiracy in his account of his father’s life. In Ferdinand’s words, the charts clearly “depict that island twice,” in different locations. In the short run, there was nothing Columbus or his son could do to correct a deception occurring in such a remote and poorly understood region.
I
n Guanaja, Columbus sent reliable Bartholomew ashore with two skiffs; there they “encountered people who resembled those of the other islands, but they had narrower foreheads.” Treading carefully among pine trees “and pieces of earth called
cálcide
, which the Indians use to cast copper,” and which some of the men, mistaking it for gold, pocketed, they came upon a canoe as long as a galley, eight feet across, hollowed out from a single giant tree trunk. Ferdinand wrote that the canoe was “freighted with merchandise from the western regions around New Spain,” an observation often taken to mean that Columbus’s men had come across an artifact of the Aztec empire, then at its apogee during the reign of the ruler Ahuitzotl.
More likely, the Europeans confronted the highly advanced, complex Maya civilization. In China, Marco Polo had encountered a culture beyond his own; now Columbus faced a similar situation. The Maya were an ancient, hierarchical, deeply spiritual, militaristic society. Their civilization had highly developed mathematics, astronomy, architecture, and letters. They charted the movements of heavenly bodies in books fashioned from the bark of trees. In the years after 1000 BC, when Romans and Celts were struggling to dominate a fragmented and stunted western Europe, Maya civilization flourished in villages and cities. The Maya writing system recorded the deeds of leaders and their political conquests.
By AD 250, Maya civilization entered its Classic era, characterized by the rise of dynasties, whose deeds were recorded in symbolic characters, or glyphs. The Maya population and cities expanded rapidly until about AD 900, when the empire entered a steep, mysterious decline—not all at once, and not everywhere, but the downward trend gained momentum and became irreversible. The Maya collapse was accompanied by civil war, exhaustion of natural resources, prolonged drought, and other calamities. The populace nearly vanished from the face of the earth; during the collapse, the number of inhabitants in one region alone declined 99 percent, or even more. Where there were once millions of Maya, there were now only a few thousand tending to deteriorating edifices, many half-buried by sifting topography, whose origins were lost in the mists of legend. Columbus and his men saw the remnants of a great civilization. Compared with the Maya, he and his European crew hailed from a
New
World, and now they were encountering the
Old
among the Maya in Veragua.
Columbus’s journals reveal that he had an inkling that he had stumbled across a powerful and ancient civilization, but ultimately the Maya failed to engage his interest for one overriding reason: they were not Chinese. The only aspects of the Maya that Columbus did appreciate were their seamanship and their long, agile, canoelike craft. Given their prowess on the water, it is worth asking why the advanced Maya did not discover Europe long before Columbus arrived on their shores. The answer has to do with the trade winds, which blow steadily south and west, defeating attempts to sail against them. Columbus benefited greatly from these prevailing winds, which at the same time kept Maya mariners hugging the shore.
The Spaniards paid close attention to the Maya watercraft. “Amidships it had a palm-leaf awning like that which the Venetian gondolas carry; this gave complete protection against the rain and waves. Under this awning were the children and women and all the baggage and merchandise. There were twenty-five paddlers aboard, but they offered no resistance when our boats drew up to them,” said Ferdinand. The reception was especially welcome after the unpleasantness of Nicolás de Ovando and near extinction in the hurricane. When the flagship got close enough, Columbus offered “thanks to God for revealing to him in a single moment, without any toil or danger to our people, all the products of that country.” Time and again on his voyages he had encountered fleeing Indians, deserted hamlets, and, on occasion, pots and skewers containing human body parts. This time, he had found the opulence he had sought for so long.
Columbus claimed the “costliest and handsomest things in that cargo: cotton mantles and sleeveless shirts embroidered and painted in different designs and colors; breechclouts of the same design and cloth as the shawls worn by women in the canoe, being like the shawls worn by the Moorish women of Granada; long wooden swords with a groove on each side where the edge should be, in which were fastened cord and pitch; flint knives that cut like steel; hatchets resembling the stone hatchets used by the other Indians, but made of good copper.” The haul even included crucibles to melt copper.
One other item, mentioned only in passing by Ferdinand, was, if anything, even more valuable than the others: the cacao leaf. When a handful of dried cacao beans used for currency fell to the floor, he noted, “all the Indians squatted down to pick them up as if they had something of great value—their greed driving out their feelings of terror and danger at finding themselves in the hands of such strange and ferocious men as we must have seemed to be.”
Columbus and his men were the first Europeans to behold the cacao, traditionally associated with trade and currency in the Americas. A thousand cacao beans could purchase a slave, for example, but beyond monetary value, the cacao itself was prized by the Maya, who called it
ka’kau
and believed it was discovered by the gods. The Spanish word
cacao
also derived from another Maya term,
chocol’ha
, or the verb
chokola’j,
meaning “to drink chocolate together.” The Maya used cacao for a variety of medicinal and spiritual purposes; they roasted the beans, mixed them with spices and water, and heated the concoction until it was piping-hot chocolate. Among the Maya, drinking the brew was a privilege reserved for royalty, wealthy princes, shamans, and artists.
Chastened by the Sovereigns’ disapproval of slavery, Columbus no longer regarded his dignified hosts as potential serfs and trophies to send to Spain, and his son considered them delegates of a remarkable, highly accomplished civilization. Impressed, Columbus “detained only one, an ancient named Yumbé, who seemed to be the wisest man among them and of greatest authority,” who would reveal “the secrets of the land” and persuade his people to talk with the visitors from afar. Satisfied, Ferdinand reported that the elder served them “willingly and loyally.” Too willingly, in fact. The more items Columbus displayed, according to Las Casas, “the more the Indians readily agreed that they knew where they were available simply because . . . to say so gave such pleasure, even when they had never before seen or heard of the things they were showing them and he was inquiring about.” The Indians went so far as to include fantastic descriptions of “people who lived in the lands of which they spoke [who] had ships and lombards, bows and arrows, swords and cuirasses”—armor—“and anything else they saw the Christians had.” Dazzled by the descriptions, Columbus fancied hearing accounts of horses, which were no more part of the landscape than unicorns. As they continued to talk, he misinterpreted their obliging descriptions to mean that he and his men were “only ten days’ journey to the river Ganges”—the largest, holiest river in India.