A Voyage Long and Strange

by Tony Horwitz

  The Indians attacked, drove the Spanish from the hill, and tried to burn the cross, “which they supposed to be a magical power that supported their enemies’ courage.” But the cross refused to burn. Natives tried to pull it down with vines. When this, too, failed, they chopped at it with stone axes, which broke against the wood.

  Then another miracle occurred. The Virgin, with a babe in her arms, appeared above the cross. The Indians pelted her with arrows; the missiles bounced back and struck them instead. When the Spanish counterattacked, the Indians fell by the thousands, the survivors fleeing to every corner of the Vega Real.

  The miracle at Santo Cerro had made the hilltop a pilgrimage site, the first Christian shrine in America. The wide, spreading tree shading us was a tropical plant called nispero, the same type from which Columbus allegedly cut the cross. Pieces of the cross had circulated to cathedrals across Hispaniola.

  But the holiest link to the miracle lay inside Santo Cerro’s hilltop church. Caonabo led me across the chapel’s tiled floor to a dim alcove with a grate set in the floor. Beneath it was the Hoyo Santo, the Holy Hole. “In this very place,” said a sign above the grate, “according to a very old tradition, Christopher Columbus on March 25, 1495, planted a tall cross.”

  As sacred sites went, the Holy Hole wasn’t much to look at. Crouching on our knees, we peered through the grate at a shallow cavity in the ground. Dirt, a stone, and above the hole, a slotted box marked “offerings and promises.” Votive candles and a small statue of the Virgin perched nearby.

  In the church office, we found a rotund cleric clutching rosary beads. This was Antonio Camilo, bishop of the local diocese. He said eighty thousand pilgrims came to the Holy Hole each year, usually to give thanks for healing. “We even have prisoners who come when they get out of jail,” he said, “to thank the Virgin for their freedom.” The grate had been installed some fifty years ago, he said, because people took too much soil out of the hole, sometimes eating the dirt. “It became a health and safety problem,” he said.

  I asked him if the annihilation of the Taino was a source of any discomfort for those who flocked to the shrine. “For me, Columbus is a sympathetic figure,” he said. “A visionary, even if he was a poor administrator. He didn’t intend to wipe out the Indians. Disease did that. But now he is blamed, because there is some kind of aversion to anything that represents Spain.” The bishop shrugged. “If Columbus hadn’t come, someone else would have.”

  The bishop had a service to conduct, but he directed us to another Columbus site, just down the hill. Around the time of the 1495 battle, Columbus established a fortified settlement, Concepción de la Vega, and Hispaniola’s first monastery. Following the bishop’s directions, we drove in circles for half an hour before spotting a battered, barely legible sign reading “National Historic Park.” It pointed us to an empty ticket booth that looked as though it had been splintered by a shotgun blast.

  Climbing through a hole in the surrounding fence, we toured what had been, in the early 1500s, the first boom town in Spanish America, enriched by Cibao’s modest deposits of gold. Archaeologists had uncovered an aqueduct and luxury items such as Venetian glass. Destroyed by an earthquake in 1562, Concepción de la Vega was now a ruin of crumbled walls and rusted signs.

  Even less remained of the monastery, located on a rutted road a few miles off. There were no signs at all, just piles of stones in a field ringed by palm trees. We were climbing over a fence to take a closer look when two young men appeared. They said it cost seventy pesos to enter, a price that included a guided tour.

  Caonabo looked at the rocky field and laughed. “And see what?” he asked.

  “The dead,” one of the men said.

  We paid and followed him as he walked among the stones, pointing to the outline of a chapel, classroom, cloister, and library. Then he walked us across the blazing hot field to an area littered with large canopies of corrugated metal. With the help of his friend, he lifted one of the metal shields.

  Beneath lay an open grave and skeleton. “This one is Spanish,” he said. The body had been buried on its back, arms crossed on its chest. He lifted another piece of metal to reveal a skeleton in fetal position. This was how the Taino were buried. Another difference: the Taino were buried with wooden plates, shells, and other items, apparently to equip them for the next life. Ramón Pane, the Spanish friar who lived with the Taino, wrote that they believed the dead came out at night to eat guava and “have festivities” with the living, even sex.

  The guide lifted another shield. “The papa, the mama, and the baby,” he said of three skeletons, packed close together. And so on through the rest of the graves: flat Spaniards, fetal Indians. He wanted us to get our seventy pesos’ worth.

  Depressed by the scene, and depleted by the baking heat, we cut the tour short and went to chat in the shade. The guide, Juan Carlos, said he lived on a nearby farm where he and his family grew yucca and sweet potato, using a horse and plow. The government paid him a small fee to look after the fort and monastery. We were the first visitors in many months.

  I asked Juan Carlos whether his job had given him any appreciation of Columbus. He answered with a guffaw and a Dominican phrase I hadn’t yet heard: “¿Tú crees que todavía hay indios?” Caonabo said the literal translation was “You think there are still Indians?” It referred to the innocence of the Taino, who had been tricked by the Spanish with hawks’ bells and other trinkets into surrendering their wealth and freedom. In modern parlance, the phrase meant, “Do you take me for a fool?”

  Columbus, Juan Carlos went on, was a “hijo de puta,” a son of a whore. “This was a rich island. He took away all the gold and other goods and ever since we’ve been poor.” Five hundred years later, he added, “the Spanish are still fucking us,” this time with their corporations, including a hated power company. “So nothing has changed. Except that we don’t pay energy bills, as a protest.” He spat in the dust. “The people of this island are not fools anymore. We won’t let them cheat us again.”

  CAONABO AND I climbed back in the Move and puttered out to the highway. I was tired and low, and the prospect of retreating to Santo Domingo depressed me. Studying the map, I located La Isabela, the wretched outpost Columbus had established on the north coast of Hispaniola. It looked to be about sixty miles to the northwest, half the distance we’d already traveled. That left us plenty of time to get there before dark, or so I thought.

  Half an hour later we reached the outskirts of Santiago, the D.R.’s second-largest city. The traffic on our side of the highway slowed to a crawl. “Driving rule number three,” Caonabo announced, “head for daylight, wherever you can find it.” He edged the car onto the road’s shoulder. When that lane filled, he put two wheels up on the sidewalk and steered around the traffic. Motorists in the left lane jumped a low median strip and drove the wrong way down the oncoming lanes. As we nosed forward, it became apparent that cars coming the other way had done the same. So all four traffic lanes, as well as the shoulder and sidewalks, were now tangled like intertwined fingers.

  We came to a halt when the Move’s front bumper pressed against the front bumper of a car coming down the sidewalk the other way. Everyone honked madly, to no purpose. After an hour, rain started pelting down and darkness fell on the logjam. Caonabo cut off the engine and lit a cigarette.

  “Estamos jodidos,” he said. Exhaling, he offered the last driving tip for the day: “If everyone follows the rules, it leads in the end to chaos.”

  LATE THAT NIGHT, we reached the coastal city of Puerto Plata, so named because Columbus called a nearby peak Monte de Plata, or Silver Mountain. When he wasn’t seeing gold, he saw silver.

  We couldn’t see a thing because of a blackout. Edging along the waterfront we found one place with a generator and a sign that identified it as the Puerto Plata Beach Resort and Casino. Caonabo suggested we bed down there for the night.

  “I don’t know. Sounds expensive.”

  Caonabo chuckled. “Not
anymore.” The place had gone bust several years before and recently reopened as a resort hotel, minus the resort. In the dimly lit lobby, we woke a young clerk who offered us rooms for the equivalent of $17, less than one-tenth the resort’s previous rate. We walked past the closed swimming pool, its surface coated in dead bugs, and entered cavernous rooms stripped of everything except beds.

  I was ready to fall into mine, but not Caonabo. He had an old girlfriend in town and wanted to catch up. “You must see some Dominican nightlife,” he said. So we headed off to collect his friend, a brown-eyed woman named Filbia, who wore a cross dangling from her throat. Then Caonabo drove us down the coast to Playa Dorado, or Golden Beach, a gated resort with an eighteen-hole golf course, a mall with designer shops, and a bar called Hemingway’s. There were no Dominicans here, except for young women on the arms of elderly American and European men.

  While stuck in traffic in Santiago, Caonabo had told me he’d stopped drinking eighteen years ago, after waking up one morning on the street and learning from friends that he’d been dancing in a trash can the night before. But as soon as we reached the bar, he ordered rum. Caonabo downed his drink and ordered a different brand, called Brugal Viejo. “Very old and very strong,” he said. “There is a saying, ‘When you drink Brugal, you either fight or fuck.’ Or both.”

  I wasn’t keen to rescue him from a trash can, or have to take the driver’s seat and navigate the darkened streets of Puerto Plata. Besides, I was obviously a third wheel. Before Caonabo could order another drink, I suggested that he and Filbia drop me near our hotel so I could grab a bite and walk back. They left me across from a neon-lit nightclub. “Filbia says you might enjoy yourself there,” Caonabo said, driving off into the dark.

  I poked my nose into the club, which had a sign saying “Karaoke Erotica.” There was no sign of karaoke, only tables of German men bellowing at bare-breasted, pole-dancing women. The bouncer said I could have a “private dance,” upstairs, for $75 an hour. Sex tourism had replaced gold as the draw for European males in Hispaniola.

  I retreated to an outdoor restaurant across the street, only to be besieged by teenaged girls muttering “Puta.” I walked on, until I saw a man on the sidewalk hacking at something with a cleaver and piling it onto paper plates. Having eaten little all day, I ordered a serving of the mystery meat. On my plate, in the dark, it looked like burned ear. I took a tentative bite; the meat was smoky, hard to chew, and very greasy. Tasty in a revolting sort of way. So I ordered another plate before returning to the hotel.

  The next morning I woke to find my bed vibrating. At first I thought Caonabo was trying to shake me awake. By the time I’d spilled onto the floor and realized that this was my first earthquake, the tremor had stopped. Outside, a dozen people stood nervously in the parking lot. One of them said that a few weeks before, a powerful quake had knocked down hundreds of homes in Puerto Plata. This must be an aftershock.

  Caonabo emerged from his room looking rumpled and bleary. I asked how his night had been. “Don’t remember,” he said, holding his head. “Yours?”

  “Ate some street food. Not sure I should have.”

  Caonabo looked alarmed. “What was it called?”

  “Don’t know. Chimichanga, or something.”

  “Chicharrones?”

  “That’s it. Chewy and greasy.”

  Caonabo shook his head. “This is very bad.” Chicharrones, he said, were deep-fried pork skins with gristly flesh and fat attached, flavored with road fumes and flies. Though popular among Dominicans, the dish was famously lethal to foreigners. “Eat just a little bit and you regret it for the rest of your life, which isn’t long,” Caonabo said.

  “I ate two plates.”

  Caonabo glanced at his watch. “You may have a few more hours before the symptoms appear. We better hit the road.”

  La Isabela lay an hour’s drive west, along a small coastal road between mountains and the sea. The sky was cobalt, clear of the humid haze I’d become accustomed to in the D.R. Sugarcane rose like high, wide-bladed grass beside the road, and we passed wood houses roofed with palm fronds, much like those the Spanish described. Columbus wrote that the fields and hills along this coast were “the best and most lovely lands in the world.” For the first time, I felt able to grasp his awe at the beauty of this tropical isle.

  Near La Isabela, a herd of cows crowded the road. “Another tapón,” Caonabo said, honking and nosing his way through the bovine jam. Then we reached the national park enclosing the original Spanish settlement. In contrast to Concepción de la Vega, this one was well-kept and staffed, with a museum on Taino and Spanish life.

  Founded in 1494 as a settlement of two hundred wood and thatch houses, La Isabela had been troubled from its start. A third of Columbus’s men quickly fell ill, though no one knows from what. The causes may have included spoiled rations, parasites, insect-borne disease, and syphilis. Adding to Columbus’s woes was the presence of minor noblemen, “for whom having to work with their hands was equivalent to death, especially on an empty stomach.” Columbus had to quell one mutiny by hanging several ringleaders.

  Resupply fleets kept the settlement afloat, but just barely. A new arrival from Spain in late 1495 reported that colonists were subsisting on small quantities of wheat, rancid bacon, and rotten cheese. Deserted soon after, in favor of Santo Domingo, La Isabela became a literal ghost town. Those who visited in the 1500s were frightened off by caballeros fantasmas, phantom knights who, when removing their hats in greeting, lifted off their heads as well.

  The ruins of La Isabela remained relatively undisturbed until the nineteenth century, when a revival of interest in Columbus led treasure hunters to dig up relics and cart away chunks of stone buildings. Then, in 1945, the Dominican dictator Trujillo ordered local officials to “clean up” the site in time for a tour by international archaeologists and politicians. When the visitors arrived, they found nothing left above ground. Local officials, misunderstanding Trujillo’s order and terrified of failing to carry it out, had sent in workmen with bulldozers.

  “They flattened all the trees and what was left of the buildings,” a park guide named Bernardino told us. Later, when the D.R.’s north coast became a landing point for anti-Trujillo forces, the dictator sent in heavy equipment again, to grade the site for military drills.

  Remarkably, archaeologists in the 1980s and 1990s had nonetheless unearthed a number of relics and the remains of five buildings, including Columbus’s fortified house. Originally a two-story structure with plaster walls and a watchtower, the casa was built on a point of land with an expansive view of the aquamarine bay. The prevailing breeze made it the most comfortable spot in La Isabela.

  A nobleman on Columbus’s second voyage wrote in 1494 that “the Admiral’s residence is called the royal palace,” in expectation that Spain’s sovereigns would one day stay there while visiting “this well favored land.” Another document listed items needed for the Admiral and his household, including mattresses made “of fine Brittany linen,” silk cloth, “tapestries depicting trees,” brass candlesticks, and “twelve boxes of quince-preserve.”

  Five centuries later, the palace consisted of several crumbled walls, none higher than my thigh—a memorial in fallen stone to the unfulfilled dreams of the man who built it. Just outside the palace walls stood rock piles and small white crosses. Hundreds of Spaniards, and untold numbers of Taino, had died in and around La Isabela during its brief existence.

  “Muchos muertos,” Bernardino said, walking us to holes in the ground covered in wire mesh. Here, again, lay exposed skeletons: Spaniards with arms crossed, Taino in fetal curls. In Santo Domingo, I’d been desperate to glimpse bones. Now I’d seen quite enough of them.

  I was also growing weary of “firsts,” which seemed to be awarded very promiscuously in the D.R. As Bernardino showed us another rectangle of stones, site of “the first church and the first mass in the first city in America,” I realized I’d heard much the same claim made in La Vega and
Santo Domingo. Peevishly, I asked about La Navidad, the outpost Columbus built from the wood of the Santa María, and technically the first Spanish settlement in America.

  “It is in Haiti,” Bernardino replied, as if that made it unworthy of consideration. “And it was just a fort.”

  At least that’s the translation Caonabo gave me. Worn out from the heat and his lingering hangover, he’d taken off his T-shirt and tied it around his head as a shield against the sun. When Bernardino talked at length about the contents of an excavated storehouse, Caonabo offered this abridgment: “He says, ‘Columbus brought animals and seeds and stuff.’ ”

  We tipped Bernardino, bought a reproduction zemi at the gift shop, and retreated to the car. Studying the map again, I plotted a return drive along small roads that followed the route Columbus had taken as he crossed the mountains and rivers to reach Cibao. It looked as though we’d see some nice scenery, and skirt Santiago, site of the hideous traffic jam we’d hit the day before.

  Caonabo was doubtful—“Driving rule number five: never trust a Dominican map”—but too exhausted to argue. So we set off in the direction of a bridge over the Yaque River, the gateway to Cibao.

  Before long, we became hopelessly lost, winding down back roads that carried us deeper into the countryside. Barefoot, shirtless kids waved to us from atop mules loaded with thatch. Men carried machetes and bags of bananas on their heads. Whenever we stopped to ask the way to the bridge over the Yaque, passersby consulted one another, pointed in opposite directions, and then shouted gaily after us, “¡Vaya bien!” Good traveling!

  After an hour of clueless meandering, we found ourselves on a narrow track that turned from gravel to dirt, tunneling between woods draped in Spanish moss. Then the road dead-ended at a bluff by a wide muddy river. We’d finally stumbled on the Yaque.