by Alan Mikhail
On these ships—on all four of his New World journeys, in fact—Columbus took with him speakers of several Middle Eastern languages, planning to use these men, some of whom were themselves converts to Christianity, to communicate with the Eastern Nestorians—the Christians described by Marco Polo and others, who supposedly were interested in aligning with European Catholicism—as well as with the silk and spice merchants he expected to find. Between them, they spoke Arabic, Hebrew, Chaldean, and of course Spanish. Ironically, even as the Spanish Crown was expelling its Jews and Muslims and attempting to destroy the Muslim empires of the Mediterranean, the languages of those very civilizations were crucial to the Catholic plans of conquest.
As Columbus had learned from his experience on the West African coast, it was necessary first to sail south in order to sail west, so he plotted a course for the Canary Islands. When the three ships arrived in the islands about a week later, trouble arose—the Pinta’s rudder broke loose. Frustrated by this early stroke of bad luck, Columbus had no choice but to wait on Grand Canary while the ship was repaired, and load more provisions. He set sail again on September 8. Once the islands had faded from view some of the crew wept, fearful they would never again touch solid ground.
For the next thirty-four days, Columbus followed a remarkably true course westward. With calm seas, steady winds, and sunny skies—fortunate conditions, given that this was hurricane season—Columbus beamed with confidence. His men, though, grew more skeptical as the days passed. They seized on every speck of ocean debris as a sign of nearby land, then fell into deepening despair when no shoreline came into view. At one point in mid-Atlantic, mutiny nearly broke out, with the crew threatening to toss Columbus overboard if he did not turn the ships around. As if in some Stygian perpetuity, they seemed to be moving only toward more open sea. As late summer yielded to autumn, the men’s emotions proved choppier than the ocean’s waves. Finally, near dusk on October 11, reeds, birds, and what looked like hand-carved wood floated by the ships. When darkness fell, some of the men reported seeing a light blinking out in the blackness. No one slept that night. As day broke, Columbus and his men laid their eyes on land. They had, it seemed, finally arrived, but no one knew quite where.
From that day until his death in 1506, Columbus remained convinced that he had found a western route to Asia. His first thought was that the flat, tree-covered island he and his crew had reached was a speck of land off the coast of India—hence the importation of that term to describe the inhabitants of the New World. In Columbus’s day, “India” denoted a vague, all-encompassing concept of the whole of Asia. Of course, they were not in India or anywhere near it, but in the Bahamas. Columbus named the island where he anchored his ships San Salvador; the people who lived there called it Guanahani.
As he and his men gratefully hopped ashore, it took several minutes for their sea legs to adjust to solid ground. Then, with the banners of Ferdinand and Isabella fluttering in the warm fall breezes of the sea that Columbus understood to be the western Pacific, “many people of the island came to them.” San Salvador and other Caribbean islands belonged to the Taino people, and Columbus’s first descriptions of them illustrate how he intepretated the New World through his experiences of the Old to make the Indies intelligible to his patrons. The Taino, he writes, were a friendly people, “the colour of Canary Islanders (neither black nor white).” As “naked as their mothers bore them,” they carried no arms, painted themselves, and were of “fine limbs and good proportions.” They generously offered the Europeans food, water, balls of cotton thread, and parrots. In exchange, Columbus’s men gave them beads, baubles, and bits of colored glass—and, unwittingly, yet monstrously so, also passed on their pathogens. The Taino, Columbus thought, “would easily be made Christians,” and the fact that some wore gold pieces in their noses suggested riches to come.
Wasting no time, Columbus boarded his ship after just two days on San Salvador to sail for the Asian mainland, which he understood to be close. He took along six evidently willing Tainos to serve as guides and interpreters. Following the chain of the Bahamas southward, he claimed the Crooked Islands for Spain. On shrubby Southern Crooked Island, which he christened La Isabella, Columbus was told about a great king “who wears much gold.”
Were it not for the impending annihilation of millions of native people, the follies of this first encounter in the Americas would seem comical. Given the difficulties of communication between Columbus and the Taino, he did not understand, for example, whether the king was on this island, the putative mainland, or elsewhere—but as the islanders knew about him, Columbus figured, he could not be far away. When a search party failed to find him on La Isabella, Columbus leapt to the conclusion that he must therefore be on the mainland—the Asian mainland—and was surely the Grand Khan, the very object of his voyage. His excitement swelled as he imagined his first glimpse of the khan’s majestic court. As he wrote in his logbook on October 21, 1492, for Isabella and Ferdinand to read later, his crew’s next stop would be “another very large island that I believe must be Cipango [Japan] according to the indications that these Indians that I have give me, and which they call Colba [Cuba]. In it they say there are many and very large ships and many traders. And from this island . . . I have already decided to go to the mainland and to the city of Quinsay [Hangzhou, China] and to give Your Highnesses’ letters to the Grand Khan.”
On October 28, having traveled south, Columbus’s ships landed on the northern coast of Cuba. Maybe, he now thought, this was not Japan; Cuba appeared far too vast to be an island. Most of the other islands he had visited—the Canaries, Madeira, Chios, the Bahamas—were rather small. Ireland and Iceland are islands, too, of course, but fantasy was quickly overtaking reality. Columbus decided he must be in China itself, perhaps only steps away from the grandeur of the Grand Khan’s court. From the coast of Cuba, he sent two of his interpreters into the interior to find the route to the Grand Khan.
Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres (a Spanish Jewish convert to Christianity), together with two of the Tainos Columbus had brought from San Salvador, were gone for two days. They returned to the shore with reports of a village whose inhabitants were very friendly and had shared sweet potatoes, maize, and beans—all novel crops for the two Europeans. The villagers had also offered them tobacco, making Rodrigo and Luis the first nonindigenous people to smoke it. Having no interest in either maize or tobacco, Columbus bemoaned the fact that the men had failed to find the Grand Khan or even a trace of Nestorian Christianity. And the promise of a bounty of gold that had glistened so tantalizingly in the noses of the Taino on San Salvador remained elusive. Columbus decided to continue probing the coast, this time following it eastward toward a harbor that looked promising. Having reached the eastern tip of Cuba, he sailed over to a mountainous island in the distance. Reminded of the splendors of Castile, Columbus dubbed the island La Isla Española, “the Spanish Island”—or, in Latin, Hispaniola.
In early December, Columbus, his crew, and their Taino guides spent a few more weeks sailing eastward along the northern coast of Hispaniola, landing and going ashore whenever they could. But winter threatened, and Columbus decided to sail back to Spain before supplies ran too low. On Christmas Day of 1492, the Santa María, the largest ship in the fleet, came up short, her rudder stuck fast in a coral reef. Columbus tried to float the ship by cutting away her heavy mast and offloading as much cargo as possible, but it was useless. The current pushed her farther onto the reef, and her seams opened. Water rushed through the Santa María’s hull. She was gone.
The men moved quickly to transfer the ship’s cargo to the other two vessels. As Columbus reported to his patrons, “Not even a shoe string was lost.” Ever the believer, ever the conqueror, Columbus wrote, “Our Lord had caused the ship to run aground there so that he would found a settlement there.” He and his men built a small camp from the Santa María’s salvageable timbers, overlooking the wreck. He named it La Navidad, to commemorate the day of t
he ship’s disaster. Since the remaining two vessels could not accommodate all the sailors, Columbus was forced to leave thirty-nine men behind. He left them enough food and supplies for a year, but when he returned eleven months later, he found the camp burned and all the men dead.
On January 16, 1493, in the depth of winter, Columbus and his two rickety, leaky ships departed La Navidad, pushing off from Cape Cabrón in eastern Hispaniola to head home. Columbus and his men had found only a few specks of gold, certainly no Christians, and not a hint of a Grand Khan. Yet thoughts of India, Japan, and China still danced in his head. The Europeans’ few months in the Caribbean had been an almost otherworldly experience of incomprehensibility, imbued with surreal visions for all involved—indigenous as well as European.
Information on those first days of contact—dissected endlessly and infused in subsequent centuries with racialized and colonial overtones of conquest and destiny—is mostly lost to us. Columbus’s few logbook pages are all we have. While we cannot know the Taino perspective on those last few months of 1492, one can imagine the overwhelming, almost spectral strangeness of their first sighting of people so pale, dressed so peculiarly, sailing vessels and carrying standards they had never seen before. To say this was one of the oddest moments—never mind one of the most dangerous—in these people’s lives clearly understates their experience; indeed, this first encounter defies description. What we can safely surmise is that both the Taino and the Spanish refracted their first meeting through their past experiences.
When Columbus, Cortés, and eventually thousands of other Europeans crossed the Atlantic, they did not forget the long centuries of civilizational conflict that had formed them as soldiers, Christians, and conquerors. Although this fact is ignored in most historical accounts, many of those who fought against indigenous peoples in the New World had battled Muslims in the Old World. With these experiences of war in the Mediterranean having embedded Islam in their minds as an ever-present threat, enemy to them nearly always equaled Muslim. Thus, as they increasingly came to regard the indigenous peoples of the Americas as enemies, they viewed them through their unique definition of enemy: Muslim. This was in some ways all they could do, given the conceptual pathways that had been forged in Europe’s collective consciousness for nearly a thousand years.
The transatlantic passage was the easy part for Europeans. Infinitely more complex was the mental journey required to assimilate the New World into their understanding of the globe. Columbus was never able to do this. He died, in 1506, too soon to understand his mistake—or, alternatively, perhaps he was simply unwilling to admit that the land he had found was not Asia. It would take several more decades for the mental gulf between the Old and New Worlds—a chasm far wider than the Atlantic—to be traversed. To understand the full range of this, and especially of the central role of Old World conflicts as the primary means of assimilating the New World into the Old, we must leap in time somewhat beyond 1492 and examine subsequent Spanish explorations of other parts of the New World.
THE FIRST EUROPEAN ACCOUNT of Mexico demonstrates how the Spanish imported to the New World their knowledge and fear of Islam in order to understand the culture and politics of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. In February 1517, the conquistador Francisco Hernández de Córdoba lobbied Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, the savage first Spanish governor of Cuba, to allow him to sail from the island in search of new territories and exploitable resources for the Spanish Crown. After some haggling over the terms of the expedition, Hernández de Córdoba received permission and set off from Havana on February 8 with three ships and a hundred men.
Hernández de Córdoba navigated his fleet westward along the relative safety of the northern coast of Cuba to the island’s tip at Cabo de San Antonio before setting off into open sea. Aboard one of these vessels, Bernal Díaz del Castillo recorded what happened next, revealing the perilousness of the journey and the cluelessness of Hernández de Córdoba and his crew.
[O]nce in the open sea, we steered at a venture towards the west, without knowledge of the depths or currents, or of the winds that prevail in those latitudes. So we were in great hazard of our lives when a storm struck us which lasted two days and two nights and had such force that we were nearly wrecked. When the weather moderated we resumed our course, and twenty-one days after leaving port to our great joy we sighted land, for which we gave thanks to God. This land was as yet undiscovered, and we had received no report of it. From the ships we could see a large town, which appeared to lie six miles back from the coast, and as we had never seen one as large in Cuba or Hispaniola we named it the Great Cairo [El Gran Cairo].
Just as Columbus had initially assimilated Cuba as Japan and San Salvador as India, here the Maya city that would later be known as Cape Catoche, on the Yucatán peninsula, became Cairo. Egypt’s most famous city was a touchstone, conjuring up in the Spanish imagination the image of a gargantuan metropolis of grandeur, threatening mystery, and bloodthirsty fantasy. Far more populous than any city in Europe, Cairo was the second largest city in the Mediterranean after Istanbul, and it had been the symbol of Muslim power for centuries before the conquest of Constantinople. Cairo had sent out ships to torment Spanish settlements in North Africa and on the Iberian peninsula. It had captured and imprisoned Christians and dispatched threatening missives to European capitals. Cairo controlled holy Jerusalem, and prevented Europeans from trading with India and China. Across the Atlantic, this center of enemy Muslim power in the Old World scripted the Spanish understanding of a vast Maya city. By 1517, Indians in the New World had become a new enemy for Spanish Catholics—effectively, the Muslims of the Caribbean.
Cairo, fatefully, mattered in another way in 1517. A few weeks after the Spanish christened Cape Catoche El Gran Cairo, Selim, as we will see, marched his Ottoman troops to conquer Mamluk Cairo.
In numerous other ways, the vocabulary of war with Islam became the language of Spanish conquest in the Americas. Columbus identified Taino weapons as alfanjes, a Spanish word derived from Arabic for a curved metal scimitar inscribed with Qur’anic verses. Despite the fact that Columbus himself observed that the Taino “have no iron,” and of course knew nothing of the Qur’an, he likened them to Muslim soldiers by putting alfanjes in their hands. Later, when Columbus first saw the scarves of a group of indigenous women, he compared them to almaizares, Moorish sashes, citing them as evidence of some sort of contact between this part of “Asia” and Spain. A few decades later, Hernán Cortés wrote that the Aztecs wore “Moorish robes” and that Aztec women resembled “Moorish women.” On Bonacca Island near the Honduran coast, the Spanish noticed that, “like the Moors, the women covered their faces.”
Cortés was, like Columbus, a veteran of Spain’s Reconquista. His encounter with the Aztecs proved especially fertile for comparisons with the Islamic civilizations the Spanish had fought in the Old World. In the Aztecs, Cortés and his men met a formidably complex empire with cities larger than any in Spain, a highly sophisticated political culture, and imposing armies. More than, for example, the Taino, the Spanish recognized the Aztecs as a rival civilization akin to the Muslim empires of the Old World—“a familiar barbarian empire,” in one historian’s words. Cortés wrote in his diary that he saw more than four hundred mosques (mezquitas) in what is today Mexico. He called Montezuma a sultan, and described the ruler’s palaces in terms that strikingly evoke Granada’s Muslim palaces, even claiming to see styles of floor and roof tiles that only existed in Granada at the time. In the words of J. H. Elliott, one of the foremost scholars of Cortés, “Since the only political model for his conquest Cortés knew was the Reconquest, Moctezoma had to be treated in his narrative as a Muslim ruler would have been. Anahuac [meaning here the valley of Mexico at the core of the Aztec Empire] is thus described, as far as Cortés is able, in images more appropriate to Assyria or Persia or, closer to home, the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, than to any possible Amerindian society.”
Such cultural filtering of the New
World through the Old would continue long after Columbus and Cortés. Over the course of the sixteenth century and beyond, this prism refracted what Europe encountered in the Americas. Thus, when the Spanish tried to subdue and Christianize Mexico’s nomadic Chichimecs, they habitually referred to them as alarabs, “the Arabs.” In Brazil, the children of Portuguese men and Indian women were called mamelucos, Mamluks. Plains Indians captured and transported by the Spanish to New Mexico as slaves came to be known as genízaros, a corruption of the Turkish word for janissary (yeniçeri). The famed adobe bricks of Spanish Mexico used a technology first developed by the Muslims of Spain, and the word adobe is itself an adaptation of the Arabic word for brick, al-tub. As these examples show, even as the Spaniards fled the Mediterranean to escape Islam, they had been so forged by the struggle with their Old World enemy that they could not get away from it in the New World. In fact, they unwittingly, and against their own interests, carried Islam with them to the Americas.
Particularly worrisome for the Spanish was, perhaps oddly, native dancing, which they identified as a key piece of cultural evidence for the link between Islam and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Spanish observers of Aztec dancing wrote that it was derived from “the zambra of the Moors.” In Spain, the zambra was associated with the Moriscos, Muslim converts to Christianity often suspected of harboring secret Muslim beliefs and plotting against Catholics—the most bloodthirsty of wolves in sheep’s clothing. Having been baptized, Moriscos possessed all the rights of Christians; they could marry Christians, receive Communion, and participate in church life. But if they were Muslims masquerading as Christians, their actions threatened not only the Christian soul but also the Spanish body politic. The Spanish monarchs feared the Moriscos as a fifth column for the Ottomans, and the Inquisition tried hundreds of them, attempting to prove that they remained Muslim in their souls. As part of the attempt to snuff out any notion of a unique Morisco identity, as well as to assert that their practices remained tainted by Islam, the zambra was banned on the grounds that it was heretical. Thus, using the word to describe Aztec dancing linked indigenous Americans to Moriscos as elements of the global Islamic peril.
