Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (14 page)

The conquest of Granada solidified the increasingly bloody reign of Los Reyes Católicos, who gained the confidence and the means to undertake a series of initiatives designed to fortify their Christian empire and pursue their ultimate goal of retaking Jerusalem. They marched into Africa both to spread Christianity as far and wide as possible, and to seize gold. On March 31, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella signed an order designed to expel the Jews from Spain. They could either convert to Christianity to preserve their way of life, their families, and their fortunes or leave the country by July 31. Years before, in 1477, a more innocent and idealistic Isabella had seen herself as the Jews’ guardian, signing a decree offering them a measure of protection. “The Jews are mine, and they are under my protection and power,” she had stated at the time. She later turned her back on them, and by 1489, Jews in Spain were condemned to be burned at the stake for their supposed treachery. By now public opinion had turned strongly against them, so strongly, in fact, that the expulsion was seen as long overdue. Ferdinand and Isabella found themselves trying to keep pace with the whirlwind of hatred and civil war that they had sown.

In 1492, Isabella invited Columbus to return to Spain, where the Sovereigns constantly circulated among various friendly castles, palaces, and monasteries. Their peripatetic existence kept them in contact with their realm and their subordinates, but it also created a bureaucratic void in which documents and orders often went astray. Although Columbus’s transactions with the Sovereigns and his voyages are well documented, there are significant lacunae, caused in part by this situation.

When Christopher Columbus again appeared in their midst to ask for backing for his voyage, his plans, as far-fetched as ever, came as a welcome distraction from the travails of the Inquisition, and a partial fulfillment of their goal to forge a Christian empire. He talked at length with Isabella, who gradually became convinced that his proposed mission could be useful to them. Consisting of only three ships, it would not cost the hard-pressed crown much, and the expenses would be paid for by levies and the sale of indulgences. To demonstrate her sincere faith, she offered her jewels as collateral : a touching gesture, but it was not expected that anyone would claim them. Three weeks after expelling the Jews from Spain, Los Reyes Católicos signed the following decree:

“That night the wind blew hard from the east northeast,” Columbus noted on or about December 17, 1492, grateful that Tortuga sheltered their small craft. In the morning, he ordered his crew to put their nets out to fish, and while they did, the inhabitants—now invariably termed “Indians”—frolicked with them and, more interestingly, offered arrows said to have been fashioned by the unseen but ever-present cannibals. These weapons were long, slender “spikes of canes, fire-hardened and sharp.” The Indians pointed to a couple of men whose bodies had been mauled and “gave them to understand that the cannibals had eaten them by mouthfuls.” If the Indians were seeking to form an alliance with their visitors against this dreaded enemy, Columbus the skeptical Genoese mariner remained unconvinced, and he resumed bartering for gold as he praised the intelligence of the Indians who cooperated.

In the evening, he recorded, a large canoe bearing forty men approached from Tortuga. When the canoe-borne warriors landed on the beach, the local chieftain angrily commanded them to return whence they came, hurling seawater and stones after them. After they shoved off in their canoes, the same chieftain took one pebble and, rather than throwing it at the Spaniards, calmly placed it in the hand of the Spaniards’ marshal as a gesture of peace.

When the canoe, and the threat it posed, vanished from sight, the chieftain described—through interpreters—their life in Tortuga. Was there gold? More in Tortuga than in Hispaniola, but no gold mines to speak of. Nevertheless, the “country was so rich that there is no need to work much to sustain life or be clothed, since they go naked.” Heedless of these details, which signified the Indians’ sinful indolence, Columbus stubbornly persisted in his search for gold, learning that a source could be found within a journey of four days overland, or “one day of fair weather.”

With that, the wind died, and Columbus and his men retreated to their ships to prepare for the observance of a feast day, which he called the Commemoration of the Annunciation (now known as Our Lady’s Expectation), December 18. As Columbus dined below the sterncastle (a structure above the main deck), two hundred men appeared, bearing the young king on a litter. Everyone, he noted yet again, was naked, or nearly so. Dismounting the litter, “at a quick walk he came to sit down beside me, nor would he let me rise to meet him or get up from the table, but beseeched me to eat.” While the Indian’s guard arrayed themselves on deck “with the greatest respect and readiness in the world,” Columbus invited the young king to partake of the feast, and was gratified to note that he ate all the “viands,” and as for the drink, “he simply raised [it] to his lips and then gave to the others, and all with a wonderful dignity and very few words.”

After the meal, an Indian courtier offered a gift that pleased Columbus. It was a belt “like those of Castile in shape but different workmanship.” The Admiral appraised this item carefully, as if deciding what it would fetch in Spain, and in return gave the chieftain “amber beads which I wore at my neck, and some red shoes, and a bottle of orange water,” which elicited exclamations of approval for their recipient.

Hindered by the lack of a common language or reliable interpreters, Columbus took the king’s signs and utterances to mean that the “whole island was mine to command.” And out of this communication gap was born the conviction, at least in Columbus’s mind, that he was acquiring an empire of his own. “After it was late and he wished to leave, the Admiral sent him away in the boat very honorably, and gave him numerous lombard shots; and, once ashore, he got into his litter and went off with more than two hundred men, and soon was borne behind him on the shoulders of an Indian, a very honorable man.” It had been a gratifying day’s work, rich in hopes and illusions, and in deception.

 

Weighing anchor, Columbus sailed eastward under a full moon to what was most likely Lombardo Cove, Acul Bay, in today’s Haiti: a protected, idyllic spot, even by the standards of the Caribbean. “This harbor is most beautiful,” he exulted.

The next day found the Admiral euphoric over his discovery, boasting in his diary, and very likely to his shipmates, that nothing in his twenty-three years at sea equaled it, and it was “superior to all and would hold all the ships of the world” within its four-mile length.

About ten o’clock that night, a canoe laden with Indians made its way from shore to the flagship “to see the Admiral and the Christians and to wonder at them.” A session of brisk bartering ensued, and Columbus dispatched a scouting party, who returned with reports of a “big village.” To Columbus’s chronicler Bartolomé de Las Casas, who spent years living in the Indies, these settlements were a familiar sight in this part of the world. “The inhabitants,” he wrote, “make their houses of wood and straw, in the form of a bell. They were very high and spacious, such that ten or more persons lived in each one. They drove in the big poles, as big as a leg or even a thigh, in a circle, half the height of a person, into the earth and close together; they were all joined together at the top, where they were tied with a certain cord of roots that formerly were called
bejucos
.” He proceeded to take his readers on an admiring guided tour of an Indian settlement. “With these roots and the bark of trees of a black color, and other bark stripped off that remained white, they made lattice work with designs and foliage like paintings on the inside of a building. . . . Others were adorned with stripped reeds that appeared very white. There were very thin and delicate canes.”

At first timid, the inhabitants gradually “lost their fear” and “countless men, women, and children” rushed forward with bread, “which is very white and good,” Columbus wrote with surprise, “and they brought us water in calabashes and in earthenware pitchers of the shape of those of Castile,” or so they appeared to him. The gifts he received included gold—precious gold!—moreover, the Indians performed their role with conviction. “It is easy to recognize when something is given with a real heart to give,” he concluded.

His acquisitive instincts satisfied for the moment, the Admiral praised his generous hosts, who possessed “neither spears nor darts nor arms of any sort.” Having decided there was nothing to fear, Columbus sent a party of six to the village, where they tried to explain once more that they had not come from the sky, as the Indians believed, but across the sea in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Sovereigns of Castile. Amid a sense of heightened expectation, Columbus finally decided to disembark and pay a visit. As soon as he made his intentions known, “there came down to the beach so many people that it was marvelous, men, women and children, shouting that he should not leave but stay with them.” Columbus remained safely in his longboat, receiving offerings of food, a portable feast in the making. Receiving parrots and other tributes, and giving “glass beads and brass rings and hawk’s bells—not that they demanded anything but that it seemed to him right.” And because, with another characteristic leap, “he already considered them Christians.”

Wherever he went, he responded with a similar sense of wonder and egotism, as if these spectacular sights had been created for his benefit, and as he later reminded himself, that of his royal patrons. Conditioned by medieval assumptions, his intellect and imagination labored to interpret these astonishing sights according to categories that he understood. The world on which he gazed, and depended for survival, was both natural and supernatural; he needed only to divine the Creator’s intentions to exploit them to the hilt. He believed the Indians to be exactly what his views insisted—advanced and attractive and potentially useful creatures—rather than what they actually were, or might be. And if they happened to be in doubt, he would gladly enlighten them. He was bemused rather than displeased to hear that the Indians considered his fleet to have descended from the heavens, especially since the misunderstanding gave him occasion to establish his credentials. Their crowds formed to see him; they displayed their women for his benefit. He in turn admired them as one would admire a prize steed or working dog, still in the wild but capable, even eager, for domestication, noting that “nothing was lacking but to know the language and to give them orders, because every order that was given to them they would obey without opposition.” If only Columbus, with his embattled status, could command the same respect in Spain, or anywhere else in Europe.

 

I
n the “protected and deep” embrace of Acul Bay, surrounded by “people very good and gentle and without arms,” he savored his explorer’s paradise. Even the inlet’s mouth was wide enough to let ships pass one another without incident. Furthermore, “any ship can lie in it without fear that other ships might come by night to attack them.” He decided to name the bay Puerto de la Mar de Sancto Tomás, “for today was his feast.”

 

C
ome Saturday, December 22, Columbus succumbed to the urge to find gold, and at dawn, the fleet quietly slipped its moorings amid heaving seas. In his mind’s eye, he imagined a place with more gold than earth, or so the Indians had led him to believe. Ominously, “the weather did not permit it,” and he quickly returned to his anchorage in Hispaniola, where he was courted by the local lord, Guacanagarí, who plied the Admiral with lavish gifts, most memorably a belt bearing a “mask that had two large ears of hammered gold as well as the tongue and the nose.” On closer inspection, he found that the “belt was of very fine jewelry work, like baroque pearls, made of white fishbones and some red ones interspersed like embroidery, so sewed with cotton thread and by such nice skill that on the side of the thread and on the reverse of the belt, it seemed very pretty embroidery, although all white, as if it were a web in a frame.” He tested it and judged it “so strong that I believe that an arquebus”—a portable muzzle-loaded firearm with limited accuracy but quite deadly at close range—“could not penetrate it, or with difficulty.”

On Sunday, Columbus set sail again, after expressing conventional reservations about going to sea on the Lord’s Day, “merely from his piety and not from any superstition.” No matter, gold was at stake.

Before he came to the gold, the gold came to him, borne by the local ruler. Prepared for hard bargaining, the Admiral reacted with astonishment, “for the Indians were so free, and the Spaniards so covetous and overreaching.” He and his men had only to give “a little piece of glass and crockery or other things of no value” to receive pieces of gold, and as these transactions proceeded, the Spaniards found they need give nothing to receive the precious gold, a practice forbidden by their Admiral, who, after observing that the Indians freely gave gold in exchange for just six glass beads, “therefore ordered that they”—Spaniards—“take nothing from them unless they gave them something in payment.” Bartered objects included glass beads, cotton, geese, or whatever came to hand. The ranks of the Indians swelled to include 120 canoes, “all charged with people, and all brought something, especially their bread and fish and water in earthen jars, and seeds of many sorts that are good spices, and ended up carrying one another piggyback across rivers and swampy places,” as much for the fun of it as for any other purpose, contented to pay their respects and rejoice with the men and their ships.