by Tony Horwitz
The next day, he saw green reeds and a stick in the water “that looks man-made.” He doubled the number of lookouts and reminded them that the first to make a confirmed sighting of land would receive a large cash prize from the Crown and a silk doublet from him. Late that night, Columbus thought he saw a light to the west, “like a little wax candle bobbing up and down.” He summoned two other men; one saw the light, the other did not. “It was such an uncertain thing that I did not feel it was adequate proof of land.”
Four hours later, the Pinta fired one of its guns. A lookout named Rodrigo de Triana had sighted land, about six miles to the west. Columbus reconsidered his doubts from the night before. “I now believe that the light I saw earlier was a sign from God and that it was truly the first positive indication of land.”
Scholars and naval officers have concluded that Columbus couldn’t have seen a fire or any other light the night before, when his ship lay about thirty-five miles offshore. Overwrought and exhausted, he may have imagined a light where there was none. But Columbus claimed the honor of discovery, and the reward. Of Rodrigo de Triana we hear no more in the navigator’s journal.
The morning of October 12 brought Columbus his first clear view of the coast. “At dawn we saw naked people, and I went ashore in the ship’s boat,” he wrote. He raised banners emblazoned with a green cross and the initials of Spain’s monarchs, claiming the land in their name. Columbus called it San Salvador, or Holy Savior. According to one account, he and his men then knelt to kiss the sand, “thanking God who had requited them after a voyage so long and strange.”
I FIRST READ Columbus’s account of his landing in a writing studio forty miles from my hometown, Washington, D.C., short for “District of Columbia”—a feminized version of “Columbus.” Two state capitals and some forty other U.S. cities, towns, and counties also bear his name. So do countless institutions, including Columbia University, which I’d attended. His landing date, of course, is a national holiday.
Like most Americans, I’d never given any of this a second thought—until I tracked Columbus’s path on a nautical chart pinned to my office wall. Only then did it occur to me that the nation’s capital and a host of other sites across the land are named for a man who never set foot on this continent.
Just to be sure, I skipped ahead, tracing the rest of his voyage and three later sails he made across the Atlantic. Columbus hopscotched all over the Americas between 1492 and 1504, and was the first European to land at a score of modern nations. Not once did he see or touch anything that later became U.S. soil.
I returned to his first landing, at the island he called San Salvador. The literature on this alone could fill a bookshelf. A painting of the scene adorns the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Yet, as with so much about Columbus, a key detail remains mysterious. Where, exactly, was he?
As best as mariners and scholars can determine, Columbus made landfall at the eastern edge of the Bahamas, some four hundred miles southeast of Florida. But the Bahamas are an archipelago of seven hundred islands, plus three times that number of the sand-and-coral islets called cays. Elaborate cases have been made for at least nine different islands and cays, including one named Watlings that helpfully rechristened itself San Salvador in 1926. But no conclusive trace of Columbus’s Bahamian visit has yet been found.
The mystery of his landing site is all the more tantalizing because of what he wrote about it. The journal entries for the week he spent touring San Salvador and nearby isles read like postcards from paradise. “The water is very clear and you can see the bottom during the daylight hours. . . . Here the fishes are so unlike ours that it is amazing . . . colored in a thousand ways; and so bright that anyone would marvel.” He observed strange plants with equal relish. “You can even smell the flowers as you approach this coast; it is the most fragrant thing on earth.” Though animal life was sparse, Columbus and his men sampled a local delicacy, a six-foot “serpent” that was probably an iguana. “Tastes like chicken,” Columbus observed.
He also marveled at the naked islanders who greeted him on the beach, describing them as tall, “well-proportioned,” and “the color of sunburned peasants,” with “very pretty” eyes and straight hair worn short in front and long in back. Columbus, believing he had reached islands off the Orient, called the natives Indios, or Indians. In a roundabout way, he was right; Columbus hadn’t reached Asia, but he had stumbled onto people of Asian stock. The islanders, like the natives encountered by Vikings, were distantly descended from migrants who had crossed from Asia to America thousands of years before.
Columbus’s perspective was also influenced by his earlier travels in the Old World. Islanders lived in tall, airy structures that resembled “Moorish tents,” and traveled in “boats fashioned in one piece from the trunks of trees,” which he called almadias, the Portuguese term for African dugouts. Only later would he learn the native word: canoa. He also noted swinging beds made from “nets of cotton,” which islanders called hamaca. Like canoes, hammocks would quickly become part of the European lexicon, and a convenience adopted by sailors.
Communication, at this point, was limited to gestures. So it’s hard to know how Columbus learned that the native name for San Salvador was Guanahani (which may have been a word for iguana). Even more dubious were his attempts at divining native beliefs. “By the signs they made I think they are asking if we came from Heaven,” he wrote, adding that they shouted to one another, “Come see the men from Heaven.” He would repeat this claim at other islands, and later visitors to America took up the self-serving belief that awestruck natives thought Europeans fell from the sky.
An Indian paddling a canoe, from a 1535 Spanish history of the Indies
Columbus also helped implant the image of Indians as childlike innocents. “I cannot get over the fact of how docile these people are,” he wrote. Later, he called them “tractable.” The first evidence of this came on the beach at San Salvador, where Columbus distributed trinkets that had been market-tested in Africa: red caps, glass beads, and small, tinkling hawks’ bells. Natives “took great pleasure in this,” and offered all they owned in exchange, including parrots and balls of cotton. Columbus’s men, like the Vikings before them, couldn’t believe their luck, and started swapping broken glass and crockery for spears tipped with fish teeth.
The islanders were accommodating in other ways, too. “Some brought us water; others, things to eat,” Columbus wrote. “Others, seeing that I did not care to go ashore, jumped into the sea and swam out to us.” On another island, natives showed crewmen where to find fresh water and carried full casks to the boats.
It’s impossible to know whether natives behaved this way out of instinctive hospitality, for fear of Spanish swords, or in hopes of extracting more bells and beads. But Columbus’s response says much about his mind-set and the legacy of his voyage. After just a few hours ashore, he wrote of islanders: “They ought to make good and skilled servants.” Two days later, having departed San Salvador with seven captives to bring to the king and queen, he added: “After they learn our language I shall return them, unless Your Highnesses order that the entire population be taken to Castile, or held captive here. With 50 men you could subject everyone and make them do what you wished.”
As callous as this sentiment appears, Columbus didn’t conjure it out of nowhere. He’d voyaged to slave ports in Africa; to the Atlantic island of Madeira, where the Portuguese imported slaves to work on sugar plantations; and to the Canaries, where the Spanish were completing the conquest and enslavement of the native Guanches. Europeans also enslaved Muslims captured in battle, and, in earlier times, had done the same to Slavs: the origin of the word “slave.” Columbus’s tragic contribution was to be the first European to see the potential for forced labor in the New World.
Another enduring affliction also traces back to that first, seemingly innocent encounter at San Salvador. Among the goods that natives offered sailors was “a kind of dry leaf that they hold in great esteem.” This mys
terious plant reappeared on other islands, where Columbus finally recognized its use. Men and women carried “a half-burnt weed in their hands, being the herbs they are accustomed to smoke.” The herbs were rolled inside a leaf to form tubes the natives called tabacos. Before long, tobacco would hook Europeans and become one of America’s most profitable exports.
In 1492, however, Columbus was fixated on a more familiar commodity. He noticed a piece of gold hanging from an islander’s nose and learned “by signs” that a sail to the south would lead him to a king who “has great containers of it.” Back at sea, the natives he’d seized directed him to an island where they said people wore gold bracelets. Columbus suspected they “made up the tale in order to get me to put ashore so they could escape.” But he landed anyway, staying just long enough to establish that there wasn’t any gold. Then he headed off for yet another island, rumored to be even richer. Thus began the frantic chase after precious metal that would drive the Spanish all over the Americas in the fifty years to follow.
Indians smoking cigar-like rolls of tobacco, from a sixteenth-century French account of the New World
After finding no gold in the Bahamas, Columbus embarked for an island his captives called Cuba, the rare native place name in the Caribbean that survives to this day. Indians told him the island “has much commerce; gold, spices, ships, and merchants.” This report, and Columbus’s “globes and world maps,” he wrote, convinced the navigator that Cuba and Japan “are one and the same.”
Reaching Cuba’s north coast, he declared the island “the most beautiful I have seen,” mountainous, fecund, and mild. But the promised riches were nowhere in sight. Nor did the island match Marco Polo’s tales of “Cipango,” as he called Japan. The Venetian had described gold-plated palaces and wondrous pink pearls. Columbus found only palm huts and “tasteless snails.”
Rather than be discouraged by this, Columbus displayed his exceptional talent for wishful thinking. If Cuba wasn’t Japan, then it must be the Asian mainland. The Great Khan of China couldn’t be far off!
To find him, Columbus dispatched his converso emissaries, Rodrigo de Xerez and Luis de Torres, carrying trade beads, their Latin letter from the Crown, and samples of cinnamon and pepper, “so that they would recognize the same if they came across them.” Columbus remained with his ship; throughout the voyage, he rarely ventured ashore for long.
The diplomats and their Indian guides returned several days later, having traveled thirty-six miles inland to a large settlement. The emissaries were lodged, fed, carried on villagers’ shoulders, and enthroned on chairs shaped like “a short-legged animal,” with the tail lifted up to form the seat’s back. Women surrounded them, “kissing their hands and feet, trying to see if they were of flesh and bone like themselves.”
The scene sounds like a classic of first contact. But Columbus tells us little else, except that Indians studied the cinnamon and pepper, of which they themselves had none. Evidently eager to please, they “told by signs that there were many such spices nearby to the SE”—or so the diplomats understood. Torres’s Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic weren’t of much use. “Having seen that there were no rich cities,” Columbus tersely concludes, “my men returned.”
Still, the navigator was undaunted. While the envoys were away, he, too, had heard about spices to the southeast, as well as gold. So he coasted Cuba until he came to its eastern edge, within sight of an island called Bohio. The Indians on board were terrified of Bohio’s people, who they said had the faces of dogs and one eye in the middle of their foreheads. In fact, such monsters had been imagined by the medieval writer John Mandeville, whose fanciful travelogue was extremely popular in Columbus’s day. Indians evidently picked up on sailors’ belief in such creatures, and also warned of warriors on Bohio who ate other humans (Mandeville had written of this, too). Natives called these man-eaters Canibales, thus introducing yet another word to the Western lexicon.
Columbus, as usual, put a positive spin on this report. He guessed that the Canibales had taken captives in Cuba and were therefore “more astute and intelligent” than the Indians he’d met so far. To Columbus, this could only signify one thing: Canibales belonged “to the domain of the Great Khan.” And so he headed out to sea again, steering for Bohio.
Dog-headed cannibals butcher and prepare humans for eating, from a German book on Columbus’s discoveries, 1525
The new island was even more beautiful than Cuba, with wide plains that reminded Columbus of Castile. He called it La Isla Española, “the Spanish Island.” And instead of Canibales—or Caribs, as the man-eaters were also called—he met coastal natives “so liberal in giving, and so timid, that they strip themselves of everything to give all that they have to us.” At one point, he claimed, a thousand people paddled canoes out to greet the Spanish ships, holding up their goods and crying, “Take, take.”
Better still, they told of vast gold deposits in the island’s interior, at a place called Cibao. To Columbus, the name “Cibao” sounded enough like “Cipango” to convince him that he’d finally reached Japan. And the gold was there for the taking, or so he surmised. Meeting a cacique, or hereditary ruler, Columbus confessed that the two parties comprehended nothing of what the other said. “Nevertheless, I understood he told me that if anything here would please me, the whole island was at my command.”
But the seas and shoals were not. On Christmas Eve, a “young ship’s boy” was carelessly left at the helm of the Santa María, perhaps because the rest of the crew was sleeping off their holiday drinking. Currents carried the ship onto a reef, where it became stuck and took on water. Columbus and his crew had to abandon ship and board the Niña. Indians came out in canoes to unload the Santa María so that its provisions were saved.
Columbus had lost his flagship, yet even this misfortune seemed to him providential. “Our Lord miraculously ordered that the Santa María should remain here because it is the best place on the islands to make a settlement, and it is near the gold mines.” He used wood from the Santa María to build a small fort and left thirty-nine men with enough bread and wine for a year, as well as seeds. Columbus named the outpost Villa de la Navidad, City of the Nativity, since it was founded on Christmas.
The navigator commanded the Spanish settlers to respect island chiefs, commit no injuries or insults (particularly toward women), and stay together at La Navidad, unless guided by Indians to gold mines. Sailing off, he felt sure he would return from Spain to find that his men had discovered riches “in such quantities that within three years the Sovereigns will prepare for and undertake the conquest of the Holy Land.”
THE HEROIC VERSION of Columbus’s story, taught to generations of American schoolchildren, is radically abridged. It dwells on the difficult lead-up to his voyage and climaxes with his dramatic “discovery” in 1492. All but forgotten are Columbus’s three later sails to America and his checkered career as a colonial administrator. Modern critics of Columbus reverse the traditional narrative. They focus on his troubled later voyages, and the horrors that followed in his wake, to cast the Genoese as a genocidal figure. Columbus didn’t discover America; he destroyed it.
But the more I read of the navigator’s story, the less he seemed to fit either paradigm. After leaving the thirty-nine settlers at La Navidad, Columbus followed the coast of La Isla Española to the island’s eastern edge, where he met natives very different from those he’d encountered so far. Their faces were smeared with charcoal, they wore parrot-feather headdresses, and they carried bows and heavy clubs. Sailors who tried to trade with them quickly became afraid and launched an attack, slashing one man in the buttocks and wounding another in the chest before the natives took flight.
Columbus, characteristically, stayed on board his ship during the fight. But after hearing the report of his men, he wrote, “The people here are evil, and I believe they are from the island of Caribe, and that they eat men.” Of the violence, he added, “In one way it troubled me and in another it did not, in that now they m
ight be afraid of us.”
The encounter at what Columbus called the Gulf of Arrows marked the only recorded bloodshed during his first voyage. This may have been due to the pacific character of most islanders he met, and the weakness of their arms. But the absence of carnage is nonetheless striking. Vikings had slain the first natives they met, without provocation, and many of the Europeans who followed Columbus to America began killing almost from the moment they hit the beach.
On his first voyage, at least, Columbus didn’t instinctively resort to violence. Nor did he regard natives as subhuman Skraelings. Rather, he saw them as children and potential converts, albeit in servitude to Europeans. Only the Caribs, as alleged cannibals, were beyond redemption. That Columbus felt troubled at all by violence against them was unusual in an era that lionized crusaders and the spilling of “infidel” blood.
He was also determined to find the island he believed the Canibales came from. But by the time he left the Gulf of Arrows, Columbus’s caravel was leaking, his sailors were restive, and he feared that the captain of the Pinta, the troublesome Martín Alonso Pinzón, would sail ahead to Europe and claim the glory of discovery. So when a strong wind “blew very favorably for going to Spain,” Columbus abandoned his plans for further exploration and headed home.
He almost didn’t make it. Near the Azores, the ships hit a winter storm so fierce that huge waves crashed from opposite directions, breaking over the Niña, while the Pinta “disappeared from sight.” Even Columbus’s habitual confidence was shaken. “All were resigned to being lost,” he wrote. Fearing that news of his discovery would never reach Spain, he put a wax-sealed manuscript telling of his voyage in a barrel and had it thrown overboard. He and his men also drew lots—actually, chickpeas from a cap—to determine who would make a religious pilgrimage if the crew survived.
