Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (8 page)

Considering it superior to all other harbors he had visited on his voyage, Columbus explored its perimeter, sounded its depths, searched for hazards, and was pleased to declare, “There does not seem to be a single shoal.” Its length could comfortably accommodate “a thousand carracks,” a heavy hint to his Sovereigns about the region’s potential. “The whole harbor is very breezy and uninhabited, clear of trees,” he commented. The majestic sweep extended as far as the eye could see, an emerald set in shimmering sapphire. “The land is very high, and all open country or clear.” In another direction, he saw “a beautiful plain,” large villages, and dugouts that were fifteen thwarts long, fleeing rather than approaching his ships. The Indians accompanying suddenly announced they had “great desire to go to their own country,” but he had his suspicions about their motives, and they, no doubt, about his.

At seven the following morning, the commencement of the dawn watch, Columbus spread sail, and put Port St. Nicolas to stern.

 

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he approaching rain portended three solid days of cloudbursts and downpours. “Blew hard from the NE,” he noted laconically, hard enough, in fact, to force the ships to drag their anchors, “at which the Admiral was surprised.” Again, his scouts saw signs of human habitation, but by the time they went ashore, the inhabitants had disappeared into the tropical forest. The image of a bewildered Columbus both entreating and frightening the indigenous people of the Caribbean is at odds with the storehouse of conventionally heroic images of the Admiral as divinely inspired, supremely confident, bringing Christianity and Spanish rule to untutored peoples. And it is at odds with the argument that he planned to exploit, enslave, degrade, or slaughter the timid, mostly unarmed Indians whose language he tried to learn, and whose seamanship he admired. At this juncture, he was neither a bringer of laws nor a spreader of disease, as centuries of commentators and portrait painters have represented him, but rather an earnest, fearless, and misguided navigator (and self-serving chronicler) who had difficulty impressing his sense of mission and self-importance on others, beginning with his own crew. Only the Indians who had never before seen his like were impressed, and they responded by taking flight. The more familiar they became with him and his men, the more they gravitated toward the explorer, partly because he deftly bribed them with trinkets, and partly because of an unspoken sense of a shared potential destiny between these two disparate groups. Their behavior, the way they clung to him like iron filings to a magnet, suggests that despite his confusion about where he was and his indecisiveness, his sense of high purpose communicated itself to his hosts. At the same time, he was also the cunning merchant of Genoa, looking for resources to trade and exploit.

 

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urther exploration of Hispaniola and neighboring islands—it is not clear exactly which, owing to Columbus’s often disjointed syntax—brought him into contact with more Taínos and their preoccupation with the marauding and man-eating Caribs. “All these islands live in great fear of those Caniba,” he lamented. “And so I repeat what I have said, that Caniba is nothing else than the people of the Grand Khan, which should be very near and own ships, and they come to capture them, and since they don’t return they suppose that they’ve been eaten.” Oblivious to the irony of his observation, Columbus remarked, “Every day we understand these Indians better, and they us, although at many times they have understood one thing for another.” Who was more misguided, the Indians or Columbus himself, who clung to the belief that he had arrived in Asia, on the doorstep of the Grand Khan?

The next day, December 12, provided additional proof of Columbus’s contradictory impulses. It began with the seamen raising a “great cross at the entrance of the harbor.” Once this deed had been accomplished, three seamen walked inland, supposedly to “see the trees and plants,” only to confront a “great crowd of people,” all of them naked, and all of whom fled at the sight of the intruders. This time, under orders from Columbus, they captured a woman, who happened to be “young and beautiful,” and brought her, in all her innocence and nakedness, before the Admiral, who “had her clothed and gave her glass beads and hawk’s bells and brass rings; and he sent her ashore very honorably, according to his custom.”

Columbus claimed that the young woman preferred to stay with the other female detainees, whom he planned to hand over to Ferdinand and Isabella as exotic gifts. Of greater interest, “This woman wore on her nose a little piece of gold, which was a sign that there was gold in that island.” For Columbus, this sign, no matter how insignificant, was more than a mere indication or clue, it was a manifestation of the latent wealth and power of these islands, and so it was sufficient to inspire him to continue his quest.

 

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olumbus dispatched another party, who came upon a large village with “1,000 houses and more than 3,000 men,” all fleeing the approaching Christians and their Indian guide, who shouted that they need not fear, “that the Christians were not from Caniba but from the sky, and that they gave many things to all those whom they met.” Most of those fleeing heeded the Indian, turned, and “came up to the Christians and placed their hands on their heads, which was a sign of great respect and friendship.” Despite the reassurances, “they were all trembling.”

Once the fear abated, the Taínos invited the Christians into their homes and offered them the “roots”—tubers, specifically—“ like great carrots that they grow and plant in all these countries.” Tubers come in two varieties, stem tubers, such as potatoes, and root tubers. This homely brown root tuber, with its skimpy, gnarled reddish shoots, formed the staple of the Indian diet: the starchy, sturdy cassava plant. (It sometimes goes by the names yucca and manioc.) Columbus’s men found that Taíno agriculture surpassed the slash-and-burn techniques of other tropical societies. To cultivate cassava, the Taínos laboriously fashioned rows of small, mounded fields, about three feet by nine feet, called
conucos
, designed to resist erosion, to facilitate water drainage during the rainy season, and to store cassava tubers for as long as three years against the possibility of famine. With the cassava, “they make bread of it, and cook and roast it, and it has the flavor proper to chestnuts.” In time, the Spanish came to call this homely brown tuber the “bread of the Indies.”

Cassava is rich in calories, if little else, and until cooked, nearly tasteless. But raw cassava requires careful preparation; it contains trace quantities of cyanide (cyanogenic glucoside) that must be leached away by scraping and fermenting; ingesting unprocessed cassava causes painful chronic pancreatitis, or inflammation of the pancreas. Only forty milligrams of cassava cyanide can kill a cow. To make cassava fit for consumption, the Indian women grated the tubers and mixed the dried flour with water to form a paste, which they spread in a thin layer over a basket. The treatment, lasting five hours, broke down most of the toxic cyanogenic glucosides in the cassava, and the resulting hydrogen cyanide, also extremely toxic, escaped into the air. Only then did cassava flour become safe for human consumption.

The cassava was but one of many plants unknown to Columbus and his men—unknown across Europe, in fact. The Admiral, the fleet’s physician Dr. Chanca, and his men wondered at the sight of strange peppers, beans, peanuts, and
batatas
, or sweet potatoes, growing in the rich Caribbean soil. Even more enticing were dozens of new and unusual varieties of fruit new to European palates. The Spanish visitors had their first sight and taste of papaya, mango, guava, star apple, mammee apple, and passion fruit. And there were the
piñas
, or pineapples, “produced on plants like thistles in the manner of aloes with many pulpy leaves,” a fascinated visitor noted, trying to compare them to more familiar European plants. This fruit had scales and bark “about the thickness of a melon,” and took a year or so to mature. It was said to smell “better than peaches,” and one or two of them would suffuse the interior of a dwelling with their sweet perfume.

There was more. When the Indians learned that Columbus desired a parrot, they brought as many of the tropical birds as he and his men wished, without asking anything in return. They were gorgeous, iridescent creatures of scarlet, cobalt, and yellow, accented with black-and-white markings around the head; as long as a man’s arm, they were watchful and animated. When not cracking seeds in their powerful mandibles, they mimicked human speech and even seemed to comprehend it. Of all the non-human creatures Columbus’s men encountered on the island, they were the most intelligent and sociable.

The parrots did not distract Columbus from the singular beauty of the women arrayed before them; where he previously gaped at their near nakedness and lack of modesty, he now recorded reports of “two wenches as white as they can be in Spain,” who inhabited a region whose “lands were cultivated and . . . down the center of the valley a very wide and great river which could irrigate all the lands. All the trees were green and full of fruit, and the plants all flowery and very tall, the paths very broad and good.” From this point forward, Columbus bursts the bounds of conventional logbook discourse, for a time leaving behind all mention of tides and winds and sail for rapturous and visionary description. “The air,” he wrote, “was like April in Castile,” reverberating with intoxicating sounds that struck him as “the greatest delight in the world,” with all of nature in harmony. “At night some little birds sang sweetly, the crickets and frogs made themselves heard, the fishes were as in Spain; they say much mastic and aloes and cotton trees”—but, he had to add, jarred from his reverie, “gold they found not.” The spell broken, he busied himself trying to measure the length of the night and day with hourglasses, but without the expected result, and he was forced to admit, “there could be some mistake because either they didn’t turn them so promptly, or the sand failed to pass through.” His grumbling at the impasse is palpable. It was apparent that his imagination and instincts remained more finely attuned and far-reaching than his clumsy handling of his flawed instruments.

 

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he next day, he departed Puerto de la Concepción—now Moustique Bay, Haiti—and made his way toward a craggy, mountainous island that reminded the crew of the humped back of a turtle, and so it came to be called Turtle or Tortoise Island, best known by its Spanish name, Tortuga. He beheld “a very high land but not mountainous, and it is very beautiful and very populous.” He resolved to try for Tortuga again the following day, December 15, this time anchoring “half a league to leeward off a beach, good, clean holding ground.”

 

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olumbus dropped abundant hints that he was becoming melancholy and disoriented in paradise. He had arrived, and he was still lost. He yearned to find the gold he had promised his Sovereigns, and himself, and beyond that, a larger sense of purpose. Over his journal hovers the sense that, having failed thus far to make contact with the Grand Khan or other powerful and wealthy rulers, his ambitious voyage lacked redeeming purpose. He had witnessed what had befallen Bartolomeu Dias, the Portuguese explorer, on his return to Lisbon from the Cape of Good Hope four years earlier. Dias had spent two years of struggle and deprivation to reach this goal, risking his life and those of his crew, only to receive a lukewarm reception from the vain and volatile king of Portugal. Two years later, in 1490, still trying to win his sovereign’s favor, and his share of glory, Dias embarked on another expedition and perished.

The tragic career of this noble mariner stood as a cautionary tale, one that Columbus did not intend to repeat in the fertile paradise he had discovered. His psyche required a greater destiny.

No matter where he went, or who he became, Columbus remained a son of Genoa, the Ligurian seaport where bold maritime exploration was a way of life.

In 1291, the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa, Ugolino and Vadino, assembled a carefully planned and well-capitalized ocean voyage to India. Relying on a drastically oversimplified idea of the earth’s geography and size, they believed they could reach their destination by sailing west, or perhaps by circumnavigating Africa. They had access to maps and portolan charts, showing the coast in detail, and they sailed in galleys similar to those employed by Genoese mariners since the 1270s. Had they reached their destination, history might have celebrated Vivaldi Day rather than Columbus Day. But the brothers’ lumbering galleys proved no match for the high seas, and the brave fleet disappeared without a trace.

In 1336, Lanzarotto Malocello navigated his way to the Canary Islands, bestowing the name Lanzarote on one of them. Only five years later Nicoloso da Recco arrived at the Azores. Ever more ambitious voyages by sea came to seem inevitable. Many daring Genoese voyagers formed partnerships with the kingdom of Portugal, and in 1317 a Genoese led the emerging Portuguese navy. The plague and political instability slowed but did not halt the pace of discovery; by 1441, when António de Noli reached the Cape Verde Islands, the idea of additional islands beckoning across the Atlantic to the south and west became a powerful attraction for Columbus and other ambitious Italian navigators.