Columbus

by Laurence Bergreen

  To enforce his will, Columbus constantly threatened violence. He agonized over how to portray his inglorious efforts before the court of Castile, where jealous bureaucrats waited to discredit him. Success for Columbus meant, above all, identifying with divine will, but for the time being he was in danger of losing the way. Accusations of Columbus’s cruelty and “hatred for Spanish,” in Las Casas’s words, gained credence in the royal court—“accusations that gradually wore him down, ensured he never knew a day’s happiness through the rest of his life, and sowed the seeds of his eventual fall.”

  Columbus and his backers were coming to terms with the fatal calculus of discovery. Despite strenuous efforts to ascribe his motives and deeds to a higher power, the quest remained intensely personal, especially when Columbus confronted sickness, suffering, and the prospect of death. At times like these, he seemed to purchase glory with the suffering of his crew members. The first voyage’s unlikely success emboldened Columbus to believe that establishing trade with China could be swift and painless, but that no longer appeared true. It was one thing, he realized, to visit a strange harbor, drop anchor, ask the priests on board to bless their cause, and sail away when the wind and tide permitted, another to establish a permanent, selfsustaining settlement: that was the difference between discovering an empire and maintaining it. Empire building required an innovative and different skill set, as essential as the navigational instincts and abilities he had spent a lifetime acquiring. It meant adding the skills of military commander, merchant, politician, and even spiritual leader—all roles he was barely qualified to play. Grumble though they did, threatening mutiny and retribution for perceived slights, no one else among the hundreds of men on the voyage’s roster displayed an aptitude for them or was willing to risk taking them on.

  But there was worse to come.

  “With the Admiral on the very brink of his tribulations and anguish,” a messenger from Fort Santo Tomás appeared with alarming news. The Indians on whom the Spaniards had come to rely were abandoning their settlements. A warrior named Caonabó was vowing to kill every Christian. Roused from his torpor, Columbus immediately assembled seventy of his ablest men to protect the fort. He appointed Alonso de Ojeda to command another group, with orders to proceed to Fort Santo Tomás, which they would use as a staging area to aid the surrounding settlements “in a show of the strength and power of the Christians, which might cow the Indians into learning to obey.”

  Energetic and responsive, Ojeda ingratiated himself with Columbus and his adjutants, but the decision to put the reckless young man in charge soon proved questionable. Las Casas paid tribute to Ojeda’s charisma, and to his fatal flaw. “He was slight of body but very well proportioned and comely, handsome in bearing, his face good-looking and his eyes very large, one of the swiftest of men,” the historiador sighed. “All the bodily perfections that a man could have seemed to be united in him.” For instance, “he was very devoted to Our Lady,” and yet, “he was always the first to draw blood whenever there was a war or a quarrel.” His fiery temperament would soon pose problems for Columbus.

  On April 9, 1494, Ojeda led four hundred men from La Isabela on the pacification mission. They had, at best, only a partial understanding of Indian territories on Hispaniola, and were often unable to tell friend from foe. Occasionally, the Indians were both.

  They had divided the island into five kingdoms. The closest at hand was Magua, including La Isabela and the voluptuous Vega Real, ruled by Guarionex. To the northwest, Guacanagarí held sway over Marien. In the east, Guayacoa claimed Higuey, famed for fighters fierce enough to repel Carib invasions. Xaraguá, the island’s largest kingdom, lay to the south, and belonged to Behechio, whose sister, Anacaona, was Caonabó’s wife. On the strength of this alliance, Caonabó claimed a mountain range in central Hispaniola.

  Confronting this network of Indian alliances, Ojeda’s small force met with an intimidating show of force. Columbus reported:There were over 2,000 Indians, all armed with javelins, which they launch from slings much more quickly than from a bow, and all of them were painted black and other colors, with fancy glass beads, mirrors, masks, and mirrors of copper and gold on their heads, letting out frightening cries, as they are wont to do at certain times. One group had planned to wait on the field for the horses and tip them over by jumping on them. . . . They tried to carry out their plan. But it was the horses that ran over them as they stood in their way, and the horses collided with them and killed them.

  Columbus considered this turn of events “a miracle of no small importance, that a few Christians could escape a multitude of people sworn to their death.”

  Ojeda captured three Indian leaders—a chief and his brother and nephew—and placed them in irons to present to Columbus, waiting impatiently at La Isabela. To add to the spectacle, Ojeda ordered his men to lead another Indian into the midst of his village and “cut off his ears” in retribution for the Indians’ failing to be helpful to the Spaniards when fording a stream. When the other prisoners reached La Isabela, Columbus went even further: he ordered them “to be taken to the main square and publicly beheaded.”

  Columbus’s behavior troubled the Spanish no less than his victims. “What wonderful news would now be spread the length and breadth of the land concerning the greatness and goodness of these Christians!” Las Casas exclaimed, thinking of the strategic error caused by Columbus’s edict, as well as history’s verdict on the explorer, which was sure to be harsh.

  To Las Casas, the despicable tactics meant that the Indians “had every right to consider” violence against Ojeda—who had cut off the ears of an Indian for shock value—“and the Christians traveling with him.” Columbus should have known better; he should have warned the Indians that he was coming, sent messengers to “notify all the kings and lords of his intended arrival,” to let them know that he was coming “for their benefit,” and to ask permission. And he should have sent “tokens, as he was formally instructed to in the written orders given him by the king and queen.” He should have “extended . . . every courtesy and taken every . . . step, as prescribed in the gentle teachings of the gospel whose minister and messenger he was to assure them that he came in peace and love and to avoid committing any outrage or act that might distress or upset the gentle and innocent.”

  This gentle diplomatic prescription was all very well, but the massacre at La Navidad remained fresh in the mind of Columbus and all the other members of his party, for whom the time for sending invitations or asking permission had long passed.

  Columbus remained at La Isabela to plan more nautical exploration. To administer Hispaniola while he was searching for the illusory mainland, he appointed a council including his brother Don Diego, Fray Buil, Pedro Fernández Coronel, Alonso Sánchez de Carvajal, and Juan de Luxan, a “gentleman of Madrid of the household of the Catholic Sovereigns.” With the council in place, Columbus was at last ready to explore the coast of Cuba, still unsure about “whether it was an island or a continent.” His instincts told him it was a peninsula extending eastward from the mainland, but his exploration of its coast and accounts provided by the Indians suggested that it was actually a great island. To test his hypothesis, he set out from La Isabela for the coast of Cuba, and when he reached it, he inquired of the Indians whether it was an island or the mainland—not that they understood his meaning. It seemed that they were more interested in eating and their women than in exploring, or even communicating with outsiders. It was even possible they did not grasp the distinction between an island and the mainland. Their world consisted only of islands, and Cuba, they allowed, was an island, but a very substantial one, requiring more than “forty moons” to sail from one end to another—or was that the time required to circumnavigate? It was impossible to decipher the exact meaning.

  The imprecision unleashed Columbus’s most fanciful geographical notions. From Cuba, he believed it would be only a short distance to the Golden Chersonese, as the Malay Peninsula had been known since the era of
Ptolemy. In reality, the distance between Cuba and the Malay Peninsula was more than eleven thousand miles, over land and water. But in Columbus’s mind, he was nearing his destination. “I kept following the same course of discovery and reached the island of Jamaica in a few days with a very favorable wind, for which I give infinite thanks to God, and from there turned back toward the mainland and followed its coast west for seventy days.” Approaching what he believed was the Golden Chersonese, Columbus turned back, “fearing the winds would shift and the very difficult navigating conditions I was experiencing, for the bottom was shallow and I had large ships. It really is very dangerous to sail through so many channels: many times I came to a standstill with all three ships aground so that none could help the others.” He sailed north to Cuba, a distance of several hundred miles, because, he said, “I wanted to assure myself that Juana”—his name for Cuba—“is not an island.”

  Caught up in his geographical folly, Columbus lost “most of the victuals, which were soaked in seawater when the ships had run aground and at times were about to crack open, but I had with me master carpenters and all the tools to repair and make them like new if necessary.” It might have been at this point—Columbus was sketchy on the details—that the fleet entered an inviting harbor on Cuba, complete with food for the taking. “I went ashore and saw more than four quintals”—nearly a thousand pounds—“of fish on spits on the fire, rabbits, and two ‘snakes.’” Tied to the trees, they were “the most nauseating sight man had ever seen since all had their mouths sewn shut except some that were toothless; they were all the color of dried wood and the skin on their whole body [was] quite rough, especially around the head coming over their eyes, giving them a poisonous and frightening appearance. Like fish, they were all covered with scales, but hard ones, and down the middle of their bodies, from their heads to the tips of their tails, they had some protuberances, high, ugly, and as sharp as diamond points.”

  The Taínos called the beasts iwana, and the term eventually entered the Spanish language as iguana, a type of lizard prevalent throughout Central and South America. To the amazement of the Spaniards, the Indians considered iguanas a delicacy. “Our men did not dare taste them,” wrote Peter Martyr, “because their disgusting look seemed to provoke not only nausea but horror.” Columbus’s brother Bartholomew found his courage, and “decided to put his teeth into an iguana,” in imitation of a cacique’s sister. To his astonishment, “once that tasty meat began to reach his palate and throat, he seemed to go after it with gluttony.” The other Spaniards followed suit, eating bits of iguana at first, and soon “turned gluttons” who “would not speak of anything but of such delicacy, claiming that the banquets prepared with them were more sumptuous than ours based on peacocks, pheasants and partridges.”

  For him, as for other Europeans, ingesting iguana marked another step on the path toward a new civilization, half wild, half sophisticated. Bartholomew enjoyed the immediate pleasures of Hispaniola that Columbus habitually disdained. He was entertained by naked—or nearly naked—virgins with surprisingly fair skin. He and his party tried sleeping in “hanging beds,” or hammocks. He became an enthusiastic audience for Indian dances and songs, including one performance of staged warfare that devolved into hand-to-hand combat claiming the lives of four Indians.

  Shortly afterward, Bartholomew himself fought to subdue rebellious Indians and bring their leader Guarionex around to the Christians’ side. He was gratified to see that Guarionex became an advocate of the Europeans, praising their mercy and generosity. When the cacique finished his speech, his followers lifted him on their shoulders and jubilantly paraded him about. The rapprochement bought only a few days’ peace from the stress of Spanish-Indian conflict.

  Meanwhile, the Admiral patrolled the channels between Hispaniola and Cuba in search of the mainland, but found only islands. By this time he had counted roughly seven hundred. The number might have been inflated by his passing the same island several times from different directions.

  As disoriented as ever, he expressed the wish to return to Spain—not across the Ocean Sea, but “from the east, by way of the Ganges, Arabian Gulf, and Ethiopia.” Columbus was a man of fixed beliefs, and to his way of thinking, east was west, and west was east.

  Alarmingly, Columbus’s geographical fantasies found a receptive, uncritical audience in Peter Martyr, who breathlessly wrote to Count Giovanni Borremeo that “daily more and more marvels from the New World”—that controversial term again—“are reported through that Genoese, Columbus the Admiral.” This time, “he says that he has run over the globe so far from Hispaniola toward the west that he has reached the Golden Chersonese, which is the furthest extremity of the known globe in the east.” So convinced was Martyr of the importance of this spurious finding that he planned to write entire books about it.

  The geographical impossibility of dozens of Spanish caravels reaching these landlocked Asian and African kingdoms seemed entirely plausible to another scholar, Andrés Bernáldez, who theorized that Columbus “could arrive by land at Jerusalem and Jaffa and from there board a ship, cross the Mediterranean and finally reach Cádiz.” Marco Polo had completed a similar journey ; why not Columbus? It might be a dangerous passage, Bernáldez admitted, “for all the populations from Ethiopia to Jerusalem are Moorish,” but Columbus was “convinced” that he could sail directly from Cuba “in search of the region and city of Cathay under the rule of the Grand Khan.” As precedent, Bernáldez cited John Mandeville, who “went there and saw and lived for a certain length of time with the Grand Khan.” In reality, Mandeville had cobbled together an entertaining hoax out of fantastic accounts of the world dating back to antiquity.

  Columbus might have acted foolishly, but he was no fool. Some part of his mind grasped the implications of Cuba’s being an island rather than part of the Asian mainland. In this case, the geographical premise of his voyages was fatally flawed, and he was nowhere near India but rather had blundered into an unanticipated, unexplored region that we now call the Caribbean. The error—with its conceptual, political, and navigational dimensions—was too large to confess to his all-powerful Sovereigns, to his men, or even to himself. How much more comforting it was to assume that his swift transatlantic navigation, twice accomplished, proved rather than disproved his theory of reaching India. Although he asked the necessary questions, the answers meant that he would have to acknowledge that the world was much larger than he, and nearly all Europeans of his era, believed, that it contained an ocean all but unknown to Europeans, and a continent, also unknown to Europeans. Those realities sounded even more fantastic than his imaginings, and he backed away from them.

  Columbus was not the only explorer to have caught a glimpse of a larger, previously unimaginable truth only to retreat to the security of conventional wisdom. A half-dozen years earlier, Bartolomeu Dias had insisted that his men swear oaths when he was exploring the African coast. Columbus had witnessed his return to Lisbon, and might have become aware of the pact, and employed it now to protect the integrity of the voyage as originally conceived. The world was what Columbus said it was.

  To enforce his view, he instructed Fernand Pérez de Luna, the official on board concerned with certification of documents, to take depositions from all the men aboard the fleet’s vessels. Placing loyalty above the truth, each swore that Cuba was longer than any island with which they were familiar, so it had to be an extension of a continent. Thus, there was no need to explore it any further. Those who dared to violate the oath faced penalties: a fine often thousand maravedís and having their tongues slashed. Columbus felt so strongly about the matter that he required the boys among the crew to sign the oath. Any lad who spoke out against it would suffer one hundred lashes, a potentially fatal punishment. Even the expert cartographer Juan de la Cosa signed, although his map of 1500 would show that Cuba was, in fact, an island.

  If Columbus hoped the oath would silence debate on this sensitive subject of Cuba, he was disappointed. When the learn
ed abbot of Lucerna arrived in Hispaniola several months later, he declared that, as everyone knew, Cuba “was only a very big island, in which judgment, considering the character of our navigation, most of us others concurred.” Columbus had not succeeded in fooling anyone, except, perhaps, himself. Worse, he sowed suspicion that he was manipulating the data to support promises he could not keep.

  On Thursday, April 24, Columbus “set sail with three ships,” bound for Hispaniola’s Monte Cristi. The next day he entered a nearby harbor where he expected to find his Indian ally Guacanagarí.

  When the three black caravels appeared, Guacanagarí, as volatile as ever, took flight, “though his people pretended he would soon return.” Columbus waited, but by Saturday, he realized that Guacanagarí was unlikely to reappear, and he set a westerly course for the nearby island of Tortuga. The journey meant enduring a sleepless night of choppy seas and a frustrating lack of wind. In the morning, he took his ships in the opposite direction, to the east, dropped anchor near the entrance to the Río Guadalquivir, as he called it, “to await a wind that would enable him to make way against the current.” It blew up eventually, and Thursday, April 29, found the three caravels approaching the southern coast of Cuba, where Columbus located a bay “with a mouth of great depth and one hundred fifty feet wide.” He named it Puerto Grande, dropped anchor, and by evening he and his men were devouring freshly caught fish roasted over a fire and sampling plump, eighteen-inchlong rodents known as hutias (Isolobodon portoricencis), “which the Indians had in abundance.”