A Voyage Long and Strange

by Tony Horwitz

  The next day the sky cleared, and soon after the Niña took refuge in the Azores. But when Columbus resumed sailing, he hit another storm that shredded the ship’s sails and brought out the chickpeas again. When the gale abated, Columbus found he was off Lisbon, and brought his crippled ship to shore. During his short stay, he was received “with great honor” by Portugal’s king, who had turned down the chance to sponsor the voyage: for the spurned mariner, a delicious vindication.

  Finally, on March 15, 1493, Columbus anchored near Palos, in Spain, thirty-two weeks after his departure from the town. His journal ends that day, on a told-you-so note. “The remarkable miracles which occurred during this voyage and for me,” Columbus wrote the king and queen, came despite the opposition “of so many of the principal persons of your household, who were all against me and treated this undertaking as folly.” As for his other nemesis, the Pinta’s captain, Columbus had reached Palos just ahead of him. Pinzón performed an additional favor by dropping dead soon after coming ashore.

  Nothing, it now seemed, stood between Columbus and the glory and honors he so avidly sought. The mariner began a triumphant procession to the royal court in Barcelona, bearing Indians, parrots, sweet potatoes, and other novelties as presents for the queen. “Eternal God our Lord,” Columbus wrote, in a letter that quickly circulated across Europe, “gives to all those who walk His Way, victory over things which seem impossible.”

  GLASSY-EYED FROM STUDYING logs and letters and nautical charts, it dawned on me one afternoon that Columbus Day loomed a few weeks off. This seemed an appropriate moment to revisit one of the navigator’s discoveries. The question was, Which one?

  His first landing, on Columbus Day in 1492, seemed the logical choice. But as I’d already learned, no one knew for certain where in the Bahamas he arrived. Nor did anything in the former British colony recall his visit, except a stone cross on San Salvador and Club Med’s “Columbus Isle” resort.

  The navigator’s next stop, Cuba, struck me as difficult to tour on short notice. And I rather doubted that Castro’s república observed Columbus Day, except as an opportunity to denounce imperialism. In any case, Columbus didn’t penetrate beyond Cuba’s coast.

  That left the neighboring island he’d named La Isla Española, which today is known as Hispaniola and is divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It was on Hispaniola that Columbus planted the first European outpost in America, after Vinland. The Spanish later founded the first permanent European settlement in America, at Santo Domingo, now the capital of the Dominican Republic. Columbus’s bones allegedly resided there, too.

  This was all I knew of the Dominican Republic, past or present, apart from its roster of baseball stars. In fact, I’d never visited any country in Latin America. But ignorance, in this instance, seemed appropriate. Columbus dead-reckoned his way to the Indies, and improvised once he got there. Booking a ticket to Santo Domingo, I figured I would do the same.

  DURING THE WEEKS before my departure, I boned up on Columbus’s return to Hispaniola, in 1493. This was a very different affair from the modest expedition of three ships and ninety men that the navigator had steered across the Ocean Sea a year before. Columbus was now a Spanish noble and Capitán General de la Armada, commanding a fleet of seventeen vessels and twelve hundred passengers, including several hundred gentlemen seeking fortune and adventure in the Indies. Horses, sheep, cows, and pigs also crowded aboard. “No European nation,” Samuel Eliot Morison observes, “had ever undertaken an overseas colonizing expedition on anything approaching this scale.”

  The big-budget sequel Columbus had negotiated with the Crown had two ambitious plot lines: extracting Hispaniola’s riches (one-eighth of which would go to the Capitán) and Christianizing its inhabitants. Gold and God, conquest and conversion—the incompatible twins of Spanish policy in America for decades to come.

  After a smooth Atlantic passage, Columbus island-hopped across the Caribbean, bestowing names still familiar to tropical vacationers: Dominica, Guadalupe, the Virgin Islands. At St. Croix, the Spanish skirmished with natives, killing several and taking many captive. Columbus gave one prisoner, “a very beautiful Carib,” to an Italian nobleman and friend, Michele de Cuneo, who took her to his cabin.

  “She being naked according to their custom, I conceived a desire to take pleasure,” Cuneo wrote. “I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her finger nails in such a manner that I wished I had never begun.” But Cuneo persisted. “I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard-of screams that you would not have believed your ears.” Eventually, his victim succumbed. The first recorded sex between a European and American was rape.

  Such behavior had already caused trouble in Hispaniola, where Columbus arrived to find the fort he’d established at La Navidad in ruins. Decomposing bodies littered the coast. From Indians who had survived the round-trip to Spain and now served as translators, Columbus learned that La Navidad’s settlers had enraged islanders when each of them seized “five women to minister to his pleasure.” Then, heading inland in search of fresh plunder, settlers encountered a fierce cacique named Caonabo. He and coastal Indians killed the Spanish and laid waste to La Navidad—and to the notion that los Indios were, in Columbus’s earlier words, “cowardly beyond help.”

  Sailing east along the coast of Hispaniola, from today’s Haiti to the Dominican Republic, Columbus selected a new site for settlement, which he named La Isabela, in honor of the queen. The coast was low, pestilential, and badly watered. But Columbus picked the spot because it lay close to the rumored gold mines of the inland region called Cibao, which he was impatient to find. Just four days after founding La Isabela, he dispatched reconnaissance parties to the interior.

  The outriders returned with gold nuggets and other samples from streambeds. “All of us made merry,” wrote Cuneo, whose greed matched his lust, “not caring any longer about any sort of spicery but only for this blessed gold.” Columbus had originally planned to model La Isabela on Portuguese trading posts along the African coast. Now, fired by gold, he marched inland at the head of a large force to establish forts and secure the mountains and valleys of Cibao.

  Columbus, however, had no talent for the role of conqueror and colonizer. Among his many shortcomings was his poor judgment about those to whom he gave authority. As lieutenant and scout, he chose Alonso de Hojeda, a man described by a contemporary as “always the first to draw blood wherever there was a war or a quarrel.” When Hojeda captured several Indians accused of minor theft, he cut off the ears of one and sent the rest in chains to La Isabela. Columbus ordered that they be decapitated in the town plaza. Though others prevailed on him to lift the sentence, the relatively peaceful relations he had maintained with Indians until then had ended. In the future there would be little except mistrust and violence.

  Columbus also failed as a colonial administrator because he never really wanted the job. He was a seaman, not a landsman: a fish out of water whenever he went ashore. Rather than deal with the troubles brewing in Hispaniola, he decided to sail off and make new discoveries, leaving in charge a council headed by his hapless brother Diego. By the time Columbus returned from Cuba and Jamaica, five months later, the fledging colony on Hispaniola was near collapse. Crops planted at La Isabela had withered; no one wanted to tend chickpeas when they could search for gold. Parties sent inland to find riches had run amok, killing and raping and stealing food from natives. A mutinous Spanish faction had seized three ships and sailed home.

  Worst of all for Columbus, the vast mines of Cibao hadn’t been found. Islanders’ jewelry and other gold items had misled the Spanish; these riches weren’t the tip of a vast buried treasure but rather a modest store hoarded and crafted over generations. Most of the raw gold that existed on Hispaniola had to be painstakingly sifted from streambeds.

  To get it, Columbus enacted a cruel tribute system, requiring each adult Indian to produce a set amount of gold dust.
If there was none to be found, natives had to deliver other products, such as hammocks, hatchets, and cotton skirts. Columbus also made a commodity of natives themselves. Previously, he’d enslaved small numbers of Indians, and only those known as Canibales or Caribs. As alleged man-eaters, and as prisoners captured in a “just” war, they could be sold as chattel. Or so went the logic of the day.

  Now, however, Columbus rounded up several thousand natives of Hispaniola, loading some 550 of the “best males and females” for shipment to Spain. About two hundred died during the ocean crossing and were thrown into the sea. Many more perished soon after being put on the block in Spain. “They are not very profitable,” a cleric who witnessed the sale noted, “since almost all died, for the country did not agree with them.”

  Their own land did not agree with the Spanish, either. By late 1495, a visitor to La Isabela reported, the sick and hungry colonists were so discontented that they swore only one oath: “God take me to Castile.” Instead, soon after Columbus sailed home in 1496, colonists relocated to a harbor on Hispaniola’s south coast. At first, it was known as Isabela Nueva. But as the settlement grew, it acquired a name of its own: Santo Domingo, the first European city in the New World.

  CHAPTER 3

  SANTO DOMINGO

  THE COLUMBUS JINX

  In a museum in Havana there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, one when he was a boy and one when he was a man.

  —Mark Twain, The Adventures of Thomas

  Jefferson Snodgrass

  AT THE AEROPUERTO Internacional Las Américas, I was welcomed with a paper cup of rum and a power blackout. Outside the darkened terminal, men surrounded me, shouting “Taxi!” One burst from the pack, grabbed my wrist, and escorted me to a cab. He wasn’t the driver, just a middleman. “Welcome to the D.R.,” he said, holding out his hand. “I work for tips.”

  A few minutes from the airport, the taxi approached a tollbooth with no clear driving lanes, just motorists nosing between other cars in a honking mêlée. After the toll, we trailed a truckful of bananas, the azure Caribbean on one side and a cement-block shantytown on the other. Then the road arced over the Ozama River and into Santo Domingo’s Zona Colonial, the heart of the original Spanish city.

  In contrast to cursed La Isabela, Santo Domingo had been well sited, on a fine harbor surrounded by fertile land. Enriched by sugar plantations, the outpost also became the hub for Spain’s conquest of South and Central America. Within a few decades of its founding in 1496, Santo Domingo grew into a settlement of four hundred houses and two thousand people, with a town crier, an aqueduct, and a university.

  Five centuries later, the Zona Colonial still had a pleasant Old World feel. It stretched for roughly ten square blocks, a carefully plotted grid of streets and plazas that reflected the sixteenth-century Spanish love of symmetry. Handsome, flat-fronted stone buildings opened into courtyards with fountains and Moorish arches. Every avenue seemed to boast at least one “primada de America”: the first cathedral, the first convent, the first hospital, the first fortress, the first courtroom. Though many of these structures were now picturesque ruins, the Zona was a reminder of how substantial the Spanish presence in America had been a full century before the first English settlers built huts in Virginia and Massachusetts.

  The Zona’s elegance was also a reminder of how far Spanish America had fallen since. Outside the small cocoon of the colonial district, and at many points within it, Santo Domingo resembled capitals across the developing world: a desperate and chaotic mess. About a quarter of the D.R.’s nine million people crowded in and around the city, many of them occupying slums like those I’d passed while driving from the airport. Guards with shotguns stood before every bank. Anger over power blackouts and soaring prices periodically erupted in general strikes, street protests, and barricades of burning tires.

  This state of near collapse made Santo Domingo a challenging place to operate. So did the weather. Though the temperature didn’t budge much either side of eighty-six degrees, the humidity was more oppressive than the wet season in Tahiti or a heat wave in the bayous of Louisiana. The chicken-broth air felt as if it would break into a downpour at any moment, but never did. Pens melted in my hand and pocket. Even my wristwatch and glasses became intolerable. Within minutes of stepping outside, I was a sodden, ink-stained wreck.

  In other tropical locales, the solution was to strip down to shorts and T-shirt. But in Santo Domingo this was unthinkable. Almost no one wore shorts; even short sleeves seemed taboo. Instead, men strolled past in dress shirts and slacks, and women in form-fitting blouses and the tightest skirts and jeans I’d ever seen. Yet they somehow stayed perfectly groomed and dry. This struck me as a dazzling sort of performance art, and a way to maintain private dignity amid public squalor. Bags disgorged trash over every sidewalk, and honking vehicles clotted every street. But individual Dominicans looked great.

  Which made me feel all the more pathetic—an alien who moved too fast, sweated too much, and had skin too pink for the tropical sun. Worse still, if Dominicans cared so much about their own appearance, what did they make of mine? Hair plastered to skull, cheap shirt stuck to chest, khakis stained with ink and sweat, fogged glasses sliding down my nose. Only the dogs, flat on the sidewalk as if slain by the heat, seemed fit company for a wretched and panting Americano.

  Not that I had anyone else to talk to. My original plan had been to contact journalists, professors, and museum curators who might get me started on Columbus’s trail. But simply consummating a phone call in Santo Domingo proved a chore. My Berlitz Spanish and the meager English of most operators and receptionists made communication difficult. Almost no one answered office phones, anyway, probably because they were rarely in the office. Most Dominicans, I learned, devoted their time to second jobs that paid better than their official posts. Cell phones couldn’t be counted on, either: the frequent blackouts made them hard to keep powered.

  The few appointments I managed to arrange also turned out to be highly provisional. Among the first Dominican words I learned was ahorita, akin to mañana or the Arabic insha’allah. Ahora is Spanish for “now.” Ahorita, when used in the D.R., means roughly, “between now and never.”

  So my first few days followed a dispiriting routine. My hotel room in the Zona fronted on a narrow street where buses with pneumatic horns set off car alarms, jolting me awake at dawn. I’d take a cold shower, chill-dry myself before a wheezing air conditioner, spray-paint my entire torso with Arrid Extra Dry, and go downstairs to sweat into a strong cup of café con leche. Then I’d start working the hotel’s crackly phone line. If I was lucky enough to reach someone, I’d hop in a taxi and sit in heavy traffic, haggling over the fare until I reached an office where the person I’d come to see wasn’t there. Then I’d take a taxi back to the Zona, drink more café con leche, and walk around until the caffeine and my sweat glands gave out. By eleven A.M., I’d surrendered hope of interviewing anyone. By noon, I no longer cared. And by my third day, I realized that without a superhuman expenditure of will and pesos, I’d accomplish nothing at all during my entire stay.

  The one source of solace was an outdoor café, El Conde, where I whiled away my evenings over Presidente beer and dishes such as mangoo (mashed plantains with eggs and onion) and chivo guisado (translated on the menu as “fricasse kid”). The café was reasonably peaceful, apart from the beggars, shoeshine men, money changers, blaring merengue music, and a tour guide named Hector, who kept hectoring me in a raspy smoker’s voice to pay $10 for a tour I’d already taken with another guide. To fend him off one night, I struck up a conversation with a Scotsman at the next table.

  “Three bad days and you’re moaning?” he said, when I shared my reporting woes. “I’ve been here five months and haven’t had a good day yet.”

  George Houston was an engineer who had come to the D.R. on a government contract, to fix a traffic bridge over the Ozama River. Although the bridge was about to collapse, his company had yet to be paid, or even
given the go-ahead to start work.

  George didn’t take this personally. The government wasn’t paying its foreign creditors either, or many of its employees, or its power generators (hence the blackouts). Inflation ran at 50 percent a year, and the value of the peso against the dollar had plunged 120 percent in just the past nine months. Along with ahorita, I’d picked up an expressive Dominican phrase: Estamos jodidos, meaning “We’re fucked.” How’s the economy? Estamos jodidos. What do you think of the government? Estamos jodidos.

  George was just hoping his firm in Glasgow would call him home before the bridge and the whole country fell down around him. “In the meantime I get a lot of reading done,” he said, hefting a fat novel, “when there’s light.”

  IN 1496, AS Santo Domingo arose on the banks of the Ozama, Columbus was back in Spain, struggling to secure support for a return to the Indies. The failures of his second voyage had badly dented his reputation, and his third sail, in 1498, would do nothing to restore it. Though Columbus ventured much farther than he had before, he showed signs of losing his grip on the sea and sky—and, possibly, on his own mind.

  At one point, faulty stargazing led Columbus to conclude that he had sailed uphill. This caused him to reconsider the shape of the globe. He compared it to a round pear with a stalk, “like a woman’s nipple.” At the tip of this nipple resided “the earthly Paradise.” In other words, Columbus thought he was sailing up the breast of the world to the Garden of Eden. His actual location was present-day Venezuela, making the South American continent yet another of his unwitting discoveries.

  Columbus and his brothers also continued to bungle their management of Hispaniola, which was riven by mutiny and Indian rebellion. When word of the chaos reached Spain, the Crown sent a judge to investigate. He promptly arrested Columbus and shipped him home, in chains, on trumped-up charges of abusing colonists.