Columbus

by Laurence Bergreen

  The courtyard, or batey, as the Indians called it, served as the arena for games. Ten or twenty athletes clustered at opposite ends of the batey, where they served and passed a ball from one player to another. Men and women competed separately. Indian rules prevented athletes from guiding the ball with their hands or feet, so they bounced it off their bodies, taking care to keep it within bounds. During these contests, ordinary spectators sat on the ground, the Indian ruling caste on benches or stools. The raucous games went on day after day, with caciques as well as the players themselves betting on the outcome. Often the teams represented chiefdoms, and took on a political slant, coinciding with significant Indian civic events.

  The Spanish visitors had never seen anything like these strenuous games. Nor had they seen an elastic ball, rubber, or rubber plants. From these innocent, spontaneous encounters between cultures, the first traces of an American character began to form, although it went unacknowledged at a time when slaves and spices and gold led the agenda, along with not-soinnocent sexual encounters.

  Nor had Columbus’s men seen anything like the Indians’ fantastic religious rites. The same courtyard where ball games were played served as the setting for elaborate Taíno ceremonies to honor local deities; elaborate observances of marriage and death, and battles; and reenactments of the deeds of their forefathers, all with hypnotic musical accompaniment. On the day of an observance, the pulse-quickening rhythms of Taíno drums and flutes reverberated throughout the public courtyard and the forest beyond. The most conspicuous instrument that Columbus and his men probably heard was the mayohuacán, or maguey, a drum carved from a substantial tree trunk, with an oval slit—or a slit in the shape of an H—on the top. The design produced a deep, powerful resonance that could be heard for miles around as a drummer used one or two sticks to strike the mayohuacán, which was suspended between trees. The Taínos made music, too, with a prototype of maracas, a pair of substantial rattles containing a large ball; slits on the side permitted the rhythmic sound to emerge. Often used in religious ceremonies, they were adorned with carved representations and images of cemís, tiny but mighty Taíno religious figures. They were joined by güiras, raspers fashioned from hollowed-out gourds with ridges notched into their sides. Today, güira and maracas remain integral to Latin American music, as do modern versions of flutes and Taíno whistles called guamós or cobos. And there were the breathy exhalations of a Taíno trumpet, fashioned from a conch shell. Its notes carried throughout the forest to broadcast warnings of danger to distant members of their tribe.

  With these instruments, the Taínos performed hymns and rites called areítos to celebrate natural events such as solstices, plantings, and harvests. Areítos commemorated the marriage of a cacique, the birth of an important nitaíno (a Taíno of the ruling caste), or a military victory. “Since time immemorial, particularly in the mansions of their kings, they have ordered their behiques or wise men to instruct their sons in knowledge about everything,” Peter Martyr wrote. “With this teaching, they accomplish two goals: one general, playing [songs] about their origins and development, and the other particular, lauding the illustrious deeds in peace and in war of their fathers, grandfathers, great grandfathers, and other ancestors.” In each case their “melody is perfectly in accord with each theme.”

  The Taínos prepared carefully for their sacred areítos. The dancers fasted for eight days before the ceremony, imbibing only an herbal tea, or diga. Before performing, they bathed in rivers and in sacred charcos, natural pools, to purify their bodies. Europeans came to believe that the ritual bathing was meant to propitiate Atabeyra, at times the deity of fresh water and at other times the mother of Yúcahu, the Taínos’ principal god. After they purified themselves, the males decorated their bodies with vegetable-dye images of their cemís. Concluding the purification rite, they plunged elaborately decorated vomiting sticks made from the ribs of a manatee down their throats to empty their stomachs in preparation for receiving divine enlightenment.

  At the start of the ceremony, the presiding cacique took his place on a dujo, a stool with four legs, decorated with colorful images of cemís. He inhaled the powerful hallucinogenic cohoba powder through the slender black stems of his pipe, one for each nostril. Cohoba was derived from a slender tree known to botanists as Anadenathera peregrina, and to the Indians as yopo, which flourished throughout the Southern Hemisphere. Its ground seeds produced the potent snuff, and after inhaling it, the cacique fell into a deep trance lasting three or four hours. When he emerged, he announced to his followers the prophecies he had heard from the cemís, and those divine utterances set the program that followed. Drummers and other musicians struck their instruments, and the intoxicating reverberation filled the public square, and floated up to the sky, even as the cohoba dust filled the nostrils of the Indians and altered their perception of reality. Three hundred dancers, moving as one, shook the snail shells bound to their arms, their calves, their thighs, and even their heels. “Loaded with these shells they struck the ground with their feet, leaping, singing, and dancing, and they saluted the cacique who, seated in the doorway, received those who came, beating on his drum with a stick,” wrote Peter Martyr.

  The dancers held hands or clasped each other’s shoulders as they danced, the men flashing their body designs in gaudy red, black, and white. “The women, on the other hand, came without any special haircuts or paint, the virgins totally nude,” said Martyr.

  At a signal from the behiques, or wise men, the garlanded women, dancing and singing their hymns, which they call areítos, offered cassava in laboriously woven baskets. Upon entering, they began to circle those who were seated there; these, rising with sudden leaps, celebrated with admirable areítos of praise, together with them, to the cemí, narrating and singing with the illustrious gestures of their ancestors, giving thanks to the deity for their well being, humbly asking him for future felicity; both sexes on their knees at the end, they offered the deity cassava, which the wise men blessed, and then they divided the cassava into pieces as personal presents.

  At the conclusion, each participant carried part of the cassava home and kept it all year as an object of sacred remembrance.

  The lost party of nine men suddenly appeared before Columbus on November 8, explaining that they had gone astray in the forest. “We rejoiced at their arrival as though they had come back to life,” Chanca wrote, sensibly enough. They were accompanied by ten women and boys, all fleeing the Caribs. To find their way back to the waiting ships, several men had shimmied to the treetops “to get oriented with the stars but were absolutely not able to see the sky.” Wandering to the water’s edge, they stumbled upon the waiting fleet by accident.

  The Admiral was more irritated than pleased by their unexpected return. The tale of their ordeal failed to move his unyielding heart. And he “punished them for their rashness, ordering the captain put in chains and placing the others on short rations,” Ferdinand reported.

  At daybreak on November 10, Columbus and his fleet departed from Guadeloupe, sailing northwest along the coast to the island of Montserrat. The handful of Indians aboard his ship explained that the island had been ravaged by the Caribs, who had eaten “all its inhabitants.” Columbus hastened to Santa María la Redonda—so named because it was round—and then Santa María de la Antigua, and held to a northwesterly course, spotting more islands “all very high and densely wooded” and potentially useful, but as his son tells us, Columbus was “so anxious to relieve the men he had left on Hispaniola that he decided to continue” until November 14, when a storm forced the fleet to seek shelter in Salt River Bay, in the lee of the island now known as St. Croix.

  A few of the men went ashore “to learn what kind of people lived there,” Chanca noted, “and also because we needed information about which way to follow.” Here, as on other islands, “most of the women . . . were prisoners of the Caribs,” just as they had expected “on the basis of what the women with us had predicted.”

  Columbus a
gain dispatched scouts to capture an Indian guide, but they returned instead with several women and three children. As the scouts approached their ship, they found themselves in a pitched battle with four men and a woman in an Indian canoe. The lone woman proved herself a capable archer; her arrow pierced a shield. In retaliation, the Spaniards rammed the canoe, dumping the Indians into the salt water. Swimming to safety, they continued to shoot arrows tipped with a deadly poison believed to have derived from manchineel fruit, sometimes called “beach apples,” growing in abundance on bushy trees. These apples were so toxic, wrote Fernández de Oviedo, that “if a man lies down to sleep for only an hour in the shade of one of these manchineel trees, he awakes with his head and eye swollen, and his eyebrows level with his cheeks.” The Spaniards called the fruit manzanilla de la muerte, little apple of death. The Caribs mixed the poison apples with toxins from vipers and poisonous insects to make an even deadlier concoction. Even the leaves were dangerous, and the Caribs used them to poison their enemies’ water supply. The only known antidote was seawater. Out of fifty wounded by poison arrows, “not three survived.”

  Amid the melee, Peter Martyr reported, there appeared a woman whom the other Indians respected as their queen. Beside her stood her son, “a fierce and robust young man, with a ferocious look and the appearance of a lion.” They seemed prepared to finish every last Spaniard, even those in agony from the wounds they suffered from the poison-tipped arrows. Summoning their resources, the Spaniards rowed themselves beside the cannibals’ canoe to overturn it. Even with their canoe capsized, the Indian warriors, men and women alike, kept shooting their arrows, one stroke after another. Only when the archers sought refuge on a reef were the Spaniards able to capture them as they fought on to the end. Several Indians perished in this skirmish, and the Spaniards were pleased to note they had “wounded the queen’s son twice.”

  The exhausted survivors were taken prisoner, and “even after being taken on board the Admiral’s ship the natives did not lose their fierceness and ferocious looks, not unlike African lions once they feel trapped,” in the words of Peter Martyr. Like many in Spain, the classically trained Martyr was of two minds about the Indians. From a safe distance, he compared them favorably to the “tyrants” of the time of “the mythical Aeneas,” the hero of Troy, and even portrayed their lives with a touch of envy. “But I feel that our natives of Hispaniola,” as he called the Indians, “are happier than they—more so were they converted to the true religion—because naked, without burdens, limits, or death-inducing currency, living in a golden age, free, without fraudulent judges, books, and content in their natural state, they live with no worries about the future.” Yet Columbus and his men realized that the Indian tribes they encountered often lived desperate, fear-ridden lives as they preyed on one another in an unending struggle for dominance and survival that mirrored the struggles of European nations. Even the wistful Peter Martyr was aware that the fierce Caribs ranged a thousand miles to find victims, and he admitted that the Indians, despite their apparent freedom and simplicity, were “troubled by the desire to rule and waste each other away with wars.”

  Unlike the exalted, occasionally desperate sense of mission animating Columbus, his boyhood friend Michele de Cuneo, gentleman of Genoa, did not torment himself with questions about the fleet’s location or his role in God’s plan. Even the appalling castration practiced by the Caribs intrigued rather than horrified Cuneo. His determination to live in the moment, consequences be damned, prefigured the eventual arrival of buccaneers in the Caribbean.

  Cuneo recorded careful observations of the Indians as they appeared to the men of the second voyage. The Indians pressed a heavy plate on the soft brows of infants to produce a profile they considered desirable, as he noted: “They have flat heads and the face tattooed; of short stature; as a rule they have very little beard and very well shaped legs and are thick of skin. The women have their breasts quite round and firm and well shaped.” They were carefully groomed, shaving and smoothing their skin with sharpened canes, and “the hair from the nose they uproot with their fingers.”

  He observed their diet with amazement. “They eat all sorts of wild and poisonous beasts such as reptiles of 15 to 20 pounds each; and when they meet the biggest ones they are devoured by them.” He tried a sample, and found it “very good.” But the dogs were “not too good” at all; neither were the “snakes, lizards, spiders” that he claimed grew to the size of chickens. The Indians even ate “poisonous insects that breed in the swamps and weigh from a pound to a pound and a half.” Those he could not bring himself to stomach.

  They acted according to their impulses, or so it seemed to Cuneo. They did not live long (“We have not seen a man who in our judgment would have been past 50 years of age”), they slept “mostly on the ground like beasts,” they let the women do most of the work, and they covered their bodies with dye to ward off the “extremely annoying” mosquitoes. (The Europeans, in contrast, failed to find any better remedy than staying in the water.) The Indians ate when hungry, had sex when it suited them, but they were “not too lustful,” which he attributed to their inadequate diet. “According to what we have seen in all the islands where we have been, both the Indians”—that is, the Taínos—“and the Caribs are largely sodomites, not knowing (I believe) whether they are acting right or wrong.”

  Cuneo coolly recorded the brutal treatment the Spaniards accorded the Indians in the canoe as they battled against overwhelming odds. “One Carib was wounded by a spear in such a way that we thought he was dead,” he said of the confrontation, “but instantly we saw him swim.” The Spaniards quickly caught him and grappled him back to the ship, “where we cut off his head with an axe.” They took other Caribs as prisoners, and planned to send them all to Spain, as Cuneo casually recalled, with one striking exception. “While I was in the boat,” Cuneo bragged, “I captured a very beautiful woman, whom the Lord Admiral gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked—as was their custom. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought she had been brought up in a school for whores.”

  So began the European rape of the New World.

  Had Ferdinand and Isabella learned of such escapades, the perpetrators would have paid dire consequences. And if Columbus knew of his comrade’s scandalous behavior, he kept the knowledge to himself, and Cuneo had the sense to confide his written accounts of daily life during Columbus’s second voyage only to a circumspect friend.

  Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, the naturalist and scholar, preferred to emphasize the loyalty and sensuality of Taíno women. “They are very fond of the Spaniards and consider themselves highly honored when they are loved by them. Many of these women, after they have known Christians carnally, will remain faithful to them unless they go too far away and remain too long, for they have no desire to be widows or nuns who protect their chastity.” For many, chastity was not uppermost in their minds, and pregnancies inevitably followed, for which they had a remedy. “Many of the Indian women eat of an herb that moves and expels the pregnancy,” he wrote. “They say the old women are the ones who should bear children. The young women do not want to give up their pleasures, or to become pregnant, because childbearing causes their breasts to become flabby. They have very beautiful breasts and are quite proud of them.” If an Indian woman eventually gave birth to a child, Fernández de Oviedo noted, “she goes to the river and bathes, and immediately the flow of blood and purgation ceases, and for a few days she does no work. The sexual organs of Indian women then contract so that the men who have had sexual intercourse with them say that they are so tight that it is with pain that a man may gratify his passion. Those who have not borne children seem to
be almost virgins.” This behavior, so resilient and flexible, was very different from that of conventional Spanish and Christian mores, which placed a premium on virginity, abhorred abortion, and often suppressed inherent female sensuality in the name of chastity.

  The Indian men emphasized audacious sexual display. The caciques “wear a tube of gold, and the other men large snail’s shells, in which they place the male organ. The rest of the body is naked, because the Indians do not feel that the human body is anything to inspire shame”—Fernández de Oviedo wrote in appreciation—“and in many provinces neither men nor women cover their sexual organs nor do they wear anything on any part of the body.” Stirring accounts such as this made as much of an impression on European awareness of the Indians visited by Columbus as alarming reports of cannibalism and poison arrows.

  In Chanca’s account, the battle between the Spaniards and the Indians arose not from provocation, as Cuneo implied, but from happenstance: the unexpected appearance of a canoe with two men and a boy who were so astonished by the sight of the enormous Spanish fleet that “they stayed for a good hour without moving.” They were slowly surrounded by Spaniards approaching in boats. “As they kept on wondering and trying to understand what it was all about, they did not notice that they could not flee.” When they finally tried to escape, “the men from our boat seized them very promptly.”