Further exploration of Hispaniola and neighboring islands—it is not clear exactly which, owing to Columbus’s often disjointed syntax—brought him into contact with more Taínos and their preoccupation with the marauding and man-eating Caribs. “All these islands live in great fear of those Caniba,” he lamented. “And so I repeat what I have said, that Caniba is nothing else than the people of the Grand Khan, which should be very near and own ships, and they come to capture them, and since they don’t return they suppose that they’ve been eaten.” Oblivious to the irony of his observation, Columbus remarked, “Every day we understand these Indians better, and they us, although at many times they have understood one thing for another.” Who was more misguided, the Indians or Columbus himself, who clung to the belief that he had arrived in Asia, on the doorstep of the Grand Khan?
The next day, December 12, provided additional proof of Columbus’s contradictory impulses. It began with the seamen raising a “great cross at the entrance of the harbor.” Once this deed had been accomplished, three seamen walked inland, supposedly to “see the trees and plants,” only to confront a “great crowd of people,” all of them naked, and all of whom fled at the sight of the intruders. This time, under orders from Columbus, they captured a woman, who happened to be “young and beautiful,” and brought her, in all her innocence and nakedness, before the Admiral, who “had her clothed and gave her glass beads and hawk’s bells and brass rings; and he sent her ashore very honorably, according to his custom.”
Columbus claimed that the young woman preferred to stay with the other female detainees, whom he planned to hand over to Ferdinand and Isabella as exotic gifts. Of greater interest, “This woman wore on her nose a little piece of gold, which was a sign that there was gold in that island.” For Columbus, this sign, no matter how insignificant, was more than a mere indication or clue, it was a manifestation of the latent wealth and power of these islands, and so it was sufficient to inspire him to continue his quest.
Columbus dispatched another party, who came upon a large village with “1,000 houses and more than 3,000 men,” all fleeing the approaching Christians and their Indian guide, who shouted that they need not fear, “that the Christians were not from Caniba but from the sky, and that they gave many things to all those whom they met.” Most of those fleeing heeded the Indian, turned, and “came up to the Christians and placed their hands on their heads, which was a sign of great respect and friendship.” Despite the reassurances, “they were all trembling.”
Once the fear abated, the Taínos invited the Christians into their homes and offered them the “roots”—tubers, specifically—“ like great carrots that they grow and plant in all these countries.” Tubers come in two varieties, stem tubers, such as potatoes, and root tubers. This homely brown root tuber, with its skimpy, gnarled reddish shoots, formed the staple of the Indian diet: the starchy, sturdy cassava plant. (It sometimes goes by the names yucca and manioc.) Columbus’s men found that Taíno agriculture surpassed the slash-and-burn techniques of other tropical societies. To cultivate cassava, the Taínos laboriously fashioned rows of small, mounded fields, about three feet by nine feet, called conucos, designed to resist erosion, to facilitate water drainage during the rainy season, and to store cassava tubers for as long as three years against the possibility of famine. With the cassava, “they make bread of it, and cook and roast it, and it has the flavor proper to chestnuts.” In time, the Spanish came to call this homely brown tuber the “bread of the Indies.”
Cassava is rich in calories, if little else, and until cooked, nearly tasteless. But raw cassava requires careful preparation; it contains trace quantities of cyanide (cyanogenic glucoside) that must be leached away by scraping and fermenting; ingesting unprocessed cassava causes painful chronic pancreatitis, or inflammation of the pancreas. Only forty milligrams of cassava cyanide can kill a cow. To make cassava fit for consumption, the Indian women grated the tubers and mixed the dried flour with water to form a paste, which they spread in a thin layer over a basket. The treatment, lasting five hours, broke down most of the toxic cyanogenic glucosides in the cassava, and the resulting hydrogen cyanide, also extremely toxic, escaped into the air. Only then did cassava flour become safe for human consumption.
The cassava was but one of many plants unknown to Columbus and his men—unknown across Europe, in fact. The Admiral, the fleet’s physician Dr. Chanca, and his men wondered at the sight of strange peppers, beans, peanuts, and batatas, or sweet potatoes, growing in the rich Caribbean soil. Even more enticing were dozens of new and unusual varieties of fruit new to European palates. The Spanish visitors had their first sight and taste of papaya, mango, guava, star apple, mammee apple, and passion fruit. And there were the piñas, or pineapples, “produced on plants like thistles in the manner of aloes with many pulpy leaves,” a fascinated visitor noted, trying to compare them to more familiar European plants. This fruit had scales and bark “about the thickness of a melon,” and took a year or so to mature. It was said to smell “better than peaches,” and one or two of them would suffuse the interior of a dwelling with their sweet perfume.
There was more. When the Indians learned that Columbus desired a parrot, they brought as many of the tropical birds as he and his men wished, without asking anything in return. They were gorgeous, iridescent creatures of scarlet, cobalt, and yellow, accented with black-and-white markings around the head; as long as a man’s arm, they were watchful and animated. When not cracking seeds in their powerful mandibles, they mimicked human speech and even seemed to comprehend it. Of all the non-human creatures Columbus’s men encountered on the island, they were the most intelligent and sociable.
The parrots did not distract Columbus from the singular beauty of the women arrayed before them; where he previously gaped at their near nakedness and lack of modesty, he now recorded reports of “two wenches as white as they can be in Spain,” who inhabited a region whose “lands were cultivated and . . . down the center of the valley a very wide and great river which could irrigate all the lands. All the trees were green and full of fruit, and the plants all flowery and very tall, the paths very broad and good.” From this point forward, Columbus bursts the bounds of conventional logbook discourse, for a time leaving behind all mention of tides and winds and sail for rapturous and visionary description. “The air,” he wrote, “was like April in Castile,” reverberating with intoxicating sounds that struck him as “the greatest delight in the world,” with all of nature in harmony. “At night some little birds sang sweetly, the crickets and frogs made themselves heard, the fishes were as in Spain; they say much mastic and aloes and cotton trees”—but, he had to add, jarred from his reverie, “gold they found not.” The spell broken, he busied himself trying to measure the length of the night and day with hourglasses, but without the expected result, and he was forced to admit, “there could be some mistake because either they didn’t turn them so promptly, or the sand failed to pass through.” His grumbling at the impasse is palpable. It was apparent that his imagination and instincts remained more finely attuned and far-reaching than his clumsy handling of his flawed instruments.
The next day, he departed Puerto de la Concepción—now Moustique Bay, Haiti—and made his way toward a craggy, mountainous island that reminded the crew of the humped back of a turtle, and so it came to be called Turtle or Tortoise Island, best known by its Spanish name, Tortuga. He beheld “a very high land but not mountainous, and it is very beautiful and very populous.” He resolved to try for Tortuga again the following day, December 15, this time anchoring “half a league to leeward off a beach, good, clean holding ground.”
Columbus dropped abundant hints that he was becoming melancholy and disoriented in paradise. He had arrived, and he was still lost. He yearned to find the gold he had promised his Sovereigns, and himself, and beyond that, a larger sense of purpose. Over his journal hovers the sense that, having failed thus far to make contact with the Grand Khan or other powerful and wealthy rulers, his ambit
ious voyage lacked redeeming purpose. He had witnessed what had befallen Bartolomeu Dias, the Portuguese explorer, on his return to Lisbon from the Cape of Good Hope four years earlier. Dias had spent two years of struggle and deprivation to reach this goal, risking his life and those of his crew, only to receive a lukewarm reception from the vain and volatile king of Portugal. Two years later, in 1490, still trying to win his sovereign’s favor, and his share of glory, Dias embarked on another expedition and perished.
The tragic career of this noble mariner stood as a cautionary tale, one that Columbus did not intend to repeat in the fertile paradise he had discovered. His psyche required a greater destiny.
CHAPTER 2
Son of Genoa
No matter where he went, or who he became, Columbus remained a son of Genoa, the Ligurian seaport where bold maritime exploration was a way of life.
In 1291, the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa, Ugolino and Vadino, assembled a carefully planned and well-capitalized ocean voyage to India. Relying on a drastically oversimplified idea of the earth’s geography and size, they believed they could reach their destination by sailing west, or perhaps by circumnavigating Africa. They had access to maps and portolan charts, showing the coast in detail, and they sailed in galleys similar to those employed by Genoese mariners since the 1270s. Had they reached their destination, history might have celebrated Vivaldi Day rather than Columbus Day. But the brothers’ lumbering galleys proved no match for the high seas, and the brave fleet disappeared without a trace.
In 1336, Lanzarotto Malocello navigated his way to the Canary Islands, bestowing the name Lanzarote on one of them. Only five years later Nicoloso da Recco arrived at the Azores. Ever more ambitious voyages by sea came to seem inevitable. Many daring Genoese voyagers formed partnerships with the kingdom of Portugal, and in 1317 a Genoese led the emerging Portuguese navy. The plague and political instability slowed but did not halt the pace of discovery; by 1441, when António de Noli reached the Cape Verde Islands, the idea of additional islands beckoning across the Atlantic to the south and west became a powerful attraction for Columbus and other ambitious Italian navigators.
Tragic events at sea formed an essential part of Genoa’s culture, and that of the surrounding Ligurian region, the setting for some of Europe’s most ancient human settlements. The steep, rocky Ligurian coast offered rich and fertile soil, but in limited quantities. The meager amount of arable land forced farmers to carve narrow terraces into mountainsides. The most reliable crop happened to be Savona wine, produced west of Genoa. These restrictions spurred Ligurians to look to the sea for sustenance and survival. Of necessity, Ligurian sailors and pilots, rowers and riggers, emerged as the best and the bravest in Italy, or perhaps the most foolhardy. A Ligurian proverb warned, “O mare o l’é male” : The sea is evil.
A necessary evil, however.
All along its length, the region, known as the Ligurian Riviera, sheltered harbors and ports for sailors venturing into the sea for their livelihood. The port of Genoa, with its generous harbor, reigned over all, a semicircle jutting out from the hills of Sarzana, highlighted by a pier. Ships sought the port’s mandraccio, or shelter. “The harbor curves around in an arc here and, lest the fury of the sea damage the ships, comes protected by a jetty, which, it is said, would have cost only a little more had it been made of silver,” wrote Enea Silvio Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II) of Columbus’s home port in 1423.
It was here that Columbus was born in 1451. Questions and alternative theories about Columbus’s origins have long located his birth and upbringing in places as varied as Portugal, Spain, and northern Africa, but the evidence, including 453 legal and commercial documents, overwhelmingly places him in Genoa, the son of Domenico Columbus, a weaver, tavern keeper, and local politician.
Bartolomé de Las Casas, later a remorseless critic of the explorer, plainly states that “Christopher was universally acknowledged to be Genoese by birth.” Stories about his ancestors insist that “his forebears were people of rank and had once been wealthy,” as if to suggest that Columbus sought to restore the status of his family, who “appear to have lost their fortune during the wars and internecine squabbles that one finds at every turn throughout the history of Lombardy,” the dominant region of northern Italy.
Concerning the name Columbus, Las Casas relates that in antiquity it had been “Colonus,” but he “elected to style himself Colón,” a transformation Las Casas ascribed to the “will of the Lord, who had chosen him to carry out the task conveyed by the name Christopher Colón.” Following his subject’s interpretation of his name, “he was named Christopher, that is to say, Christum ferens, which is Latin for the bearer or carrier of Christ.”
Columbus took to signing his name with elaborate flourishes to underscore his reputation as the man “adjudged worthy above all others to bring these numberless peoples who had lain in oblivion throughout so many centuries to the knowledge and worship of Christ.” Las Casas explained that Colón meant “new settler,” which he judged a “fitting title for a man whose industry and whose labors led to the discovery of numberless souls.”
The adult Columbus appeared in Genoese records in October 1470 in connection with a commercial transaction. “In the name of our Lord,” it begins, “Christopher Columbus, son of Domenico, more than nineteen years of age, and in the presence of, and by the authority, advice and consent of Domenico, his father, present and authorizing, voluntarily . . . confessed and in truth publicly recognized, that he must give and pay to Pietro Belesio of Porto Maurizio, son of Francesco, present, forty-eight lire, thirteen soldi and six denari di genovini, and this is for the remainder owed for wine sold and consigned to the same Christopher and Domenico by Pietro.” Domenico promised to guarantee his son’s obligation in the presence of several witnesses including Raffaele of Bisagno, a baker.
Domenico’s trade as a wool weaver and carder signified to his fellow Genoese that, given wool’s prestige, he was a presence in Genoa’s commercial scene. Wool weavers maintained their own guild. More than a trade union, a guild offered its members a way of life. There were over eighty at the time of Columbus’s childhood in La Superba, as Genoa called itself. They settled trade disputes, represented their members before the doge, administered exams to those seeking to gain entry, and organized weddings and funerals for their members, including gifts and the specifics of religious observance.
They educated their members’ children, and it was under the guild’s auspices that Christopher studied arithmetic, geography, and navigation. The schools offered two curricula. Those who studied Latin, the Latinantes, paid ten soldi for the privilege; all others paid five. Latin was employed for documents, scientific papers, and other formal utterances; otherwise, the Genoese dialect with its mellifluous French inflection prevailed. “Son zeneize, rizo rœo, strenzo i denti e parlo ciœo” runs a popular regional expression. “I’m Genoese, I seldom laugh, I grind my teeth, and I say what I mean”: attitudes Columbus epitomized. By the time he left Genoa, he knew at least two languages, Genoese and Latin, and he later acquired Portuguese and Spanish.
Columbus’s mother, Susanna Fontanarossa, belonged to a prosperous landowning family in Quezzi, a village of the valley of Bisagno, near Genoa. Her father was Jacobi di Fontanarubea, or, as he came to be known, Giacomo Fontanarossa. Susanna was a popular name in the region, and associated with the church of Santa Susanna in Rome. She was born about 1425, and upon her marriage brought a dowry consisting of a house and land, both of which were subsequently sold. She and her husband Domenico, Columbus’s father, bore at least five children: Giovanni Pelegrino, Bartholomew, Diego, Bianchinetta, and the infant who would be called Christopher Columbus. She died about 1480, little known to the world at large, though she had influenced it greatly through her children.
Maritime trade was vital to Genoa’s existence, and local authorities managed it with great care. At the top of the regulatory pyramid, the Office of the Sea had final say over the harbor and shore, and the Of
fice of the Commune Fathers oversaw the docks and piers, as well as the excavation of the harbor necessary for the ships’ safety. Equally critical, the Office of Health worked strenuously to prevent ships from returning with the plague and similar diseases. No one aboard an arriving ship was permitted to set foot on terra firma without obtaining a permit, available for a fee from the Office of Health’s representative on Genoa’s Spinola Bridge. If a ship’s crew might have been exposed to plague in their travels, they were subjected to a strict quarantine. Beggars, if caught, were subjected to a penalty of three lashings, and lepers were forbidden to enter the city, nor was anyone allowed to feed or shelter them. Despite these regulations, the plague was a frequent and dreaded visitor in Genoa, worse in summer, milder in winter. In self-defense, households burned clothes and other goods thought to be contaminated.
The Genoese bureaucracy extended beyond the entrance to the harbor, keeping track of ships as they traveled to and from their destinations across the Mediterranean. Vessels departing from Genoa were generally observed by sentries at the Lanterna, and by other sentries posted along the shore. If they spied an unusual occurrence—a dangerous-looking craft or an accident at sea—they reported their suspicions to the Lanterna by means of smoke signals during the day or fires at night.
In 1490, smoke signals alerted Genoa to an attack by corsairs from Nice. The city mounted a rapid retaliation, catching the aggressors by surprise, rescuing its own men, in the process contributing to the city-state’s fierce reputation. Genoa punished its enemies, and took care of its own. It posted consuls to strategically important cities, and they regularly communicated by ship-borne letter, or, when urgent, by smoke signals. This intelligence network gave Genoa military and strategic advantage over its rivals, who took out their frustrations and grievances with reprisals, and, when possible, by capturing Genoese galleys and imprisoning all those on board. (Marco Polo of Venice was one of thousands of enemies of the Republic of Genoa who were subjected to this treatment.) Genoa responded to the increased threats by ordering ships to travel in convoys, heavily armed, and prepared to respond to attack. Genoese pirates earned a reputation for savagery, as well as for slave trading. They constantly did battle with Catalans and with the French, who gradually overtook the Genoese Republic by force, and by marriage. Gradually the republic lost its influence, as newer, larger powers emerged. The spices, especially pepper, and gems that had formerly arrived by ship in Genoa now went to Lisbon and later to Madrid as the commercial center of gravity drifted from the Mediterranean to the Iberian Peninsula. In its shrunken universe, Genoa focused on trade with North African ports, which could be extremely profitable, as well as extremely dangerous, and on currency exchange, an arena in which its bankers became known as swift and hard negotiators.
Columbus Page 6
