Columbus briefly seemed a changed man. In the pages of his letters to the Sovereigns, he expressed an eagerness for the companionship of Indians, rather than sizing up their potential as slaves or converts to Christianity. Blistered by the Doldrums, shaken and humbled by the tidal wave, he sounded simply glad to be alive, and delighted to inhale deep drafts of scented air and to immerse his head in cold, sweet water. For a charmed interval, he saw himself as a fortunate survivor, part of the larger landscape linking divinity and humanity, rather than an overdetermined conqueror and master. Even the sight of gold and pearls adorning the Indians did not make him salivate with greed as it did on the previous voyages: “Many wore pieces of gold about their necks and some pearls on their arms. I was most happy to see those pearls and attempted to inquire where they could be found, and the people replied that they were taken from there, in the north of that land.” But Columbus put aside his obsession with riches in favor of the “wheat, wine, and meat” on the verge of spoiling in the holds of his ships, “and since my sole purpose was to see that they did not, I would not tarry for anything in the world”—not even gold. His priorities had altered; for once, he was more concerned with his well-being than with attempting superhuman tasks. The sense of tranquillity soon dispelled. On second thought, “I did try to get some of the pearls and sent the boats ashore.”
The landing party encountered “handsome,” “gentle,” and “tractable” people who gladly led the way to a “large house with a gabled roof,” rather than the expected tent, fully furnished with seats. The newly magnanimous Columbus praised his hosts for their good manners, and for their “fine bodies, tall and elegantly graceful, their hair very long and smooth and held around their heads by embroidered cloth . . . that from a distance seems to be made of silk and gauze.” He admired their well-made canoes (“I saw that in the center of each of them is a cabin with a bed occupied by the chief and his wives”) and on the setting, which he called Jardínes, or Gardens, “because that name fit it.” Absolutely riveted by the Indians’ showy gold jewelry, he peppered them with inquiries about where they had found it and how he could reach it, but they warned him away with tales of fierce cannibals or animals, he could not tell which. He considered seeking pearls as a substitute for gold but “did not carry out that search because of the victuals and the problems with my eyes, and because I have too big a nao, unsuitable for searching for pearls.”
A banquet of bread, fruit, and red and white “wine” awaited them. The alcoholic beverages puzzled Columbus; they were not distilled from grapes, but from some other fruit he did not recognize, and from maize, which he defined as “a grain with an ear shaped like a spindle.” Maize is the Taíno term for corn. Samples would be sent to Castile at the earliest opportunity.
Men and women remained segregated during the feast, and awkward silences dampened the mood. “Both parties were most sad because they could not understand each other; they wanted to ask us about our homeland, and we wanted to know about theirs,” Columbus remarked with laudable equanimity. He was tempted to linger, but “I was most anxious to deliver safely the victuals that would otherwise spoil and to get some remedy for myself since I felt sick from lack of sleep.” He calculated that “during this voyage on which I discovered the mainland I went thirty-three days without sleeping,” and claimed that he went “without my sight” throughout that period. At the very least, he suffered from impaired vision, and, he complained, “my eyes never hurt as much nor were as bloodshot and painful as they were at this point.”
Still unwilling to accept the mounting evidence that he had arrived at a continent, Columbus took refuge in the thought that the coastline delineated an island, and thought about sailing north, in the direction of Hispaniola. Wonder and confusion ensued when he dispatched a “light caravel to see if there was an exit or if a passage was likely.” Instead, the caravel reconnoitered a “large gulf,” an “awesome river,” and “the most abundant and freshest water I ever drank.” Yet he became “most disappointed” when he realized he was trapped, unable to sail to the north, south, or west. He had no choice but to turn back, but when he tried to raise familiar landmarks onshore, “the currents had carried me away.” Everywhere, “fresh, clear water carried me eastward with great force.” And in the distance, the roaring resumed. He decided that the “volumes of water flowing in and through the strait . . . were nothing less than the violent mingling of fresh and salt water: the fresh pushed forward, fighting its way out to the ocean, and the salt resisted it.”
At sea once more, he became unusually contemplative. “Sailing from Spain to the Indies I find 100 leagues west of the Azores the greatest change in the sky and the stars and the quality of the air and in the waters of the sea,” he reflected, “and I treasure that experience.” He noticed phenomena that in his frenzy he had overlooked: the way “the sea here is filled with a certain kind of weed resembling small pine branches bearing fruit like that of the mastic; this weed is so thick that on the first voyage I thought that the sea was shoal and that I would end up running the ships aground.” Now, he marveled, “one does not encounter a single twig.” His surroundings soothed him, “the sea very calm and peaceful, and even when a strong wind blows, the surface of the sea does not swell or ruffle.” The sky itself appeared “very mild” and conducive to stargazing: “I see that the North Star describes a circle with a diameter of five degrees, and the guards are on the right hand; at that very moment, the star is at its lowest point, from which it rises until it reaches the left side.”
His eyesight improving, Columbus passed his nights observing celestial objects, but the security such observations afforded him was illusory. The consummate dead-reckoning navigator was not especially adept with the navigational tools and concepts of his day, and on this occasion he came up with an outlandish finding. “I diligently observed it with the quadrant,” Columbus said, “and I regularly saw the plumb line fall to the same point,” whereas he expected it to shift slightly as his ship slid through the slick sea. Something was awry. “I hold that this is an unknown phenomenon,” he declared, and it led him, in this deceptively calm state of reflection, to the most radical hypothesis that he would ever make—more extreme, even, than his misguided belief that he had sailed to India. He believed that he had discovered the entrance to paradise.
In the grip of this idea, Columbus interpreted the movement of the ship’s compass needles as pointing the way to heaven. The farther west they sailed, he believed, the higher their ship would rise. Practically smacking his forehead in dismay at Columbus’s folly, Las Casas commented, “From this, he arrived at the idea, against all the common knowledge of astrologers and philosophers, that the world was not round,” that is, a perfect sphere. (Most Europeans of Columbus’s day realized that the world was round, as mathematicians and geographers of antiquity had predicted.)
Columbus meant something far more elaborate than a slight bulge or distortion in the earth’s sphericity. “Each time I sailed from Spain to the Indies, I found that when I reached a point a hundred leagues west of the Azores, the heavens, the stars, the temperature of the air and the waters of the sea abruptly changed,” he recorded. “It was as if the seas sloped upward.” Sloped upward? This observation perplexed him, because he had “always read that the world of land and sea is spherical,” yet now “I have found such great irregularities that I have come to the following conclusions concerning the world: that it is not round as they describe it, but the shape of a pear, which is round everywhere except at the stalk, where it juts out a long way. . . like a woman’s nipple.” This prominent feature led to paradise itself, extending from a watery summit. “I do not believe that anyone can ascend to the top,” he cautioned at the end of his fantastic conjecture.
If the gold and slaves and spices he had sent back from his earlier voyages would not silence his critics, perhaps this sighting would. “I do not believe that the earthly paradise is a steep mountain,” he explained, “except at its summit, the part I
described as the stem of the pear.” He believed that “no one could reach the summit,” where the water’s source lay. He divined this because of the torrents of fresh water he had experienced off the coast of Venezuela, “for I never read nor knew of so much fresh water penetrating so far inland and so near salt water. . . . And if it does not come from there, from paradise, the wonder is even greater, because I do not believe that a river as big and deep is known anywhere else in the world.”
In this upwelling from his unconscious ruminations, his search for paradise served as a metaphor for the more elemental surveillance of womankind, of Mother Earth. He took solace in his reveries of inhabiting a world where magic was still possible even as he experienced a troubling sense of confronting the unknown. It was, for him, reassuring to know that the promise of paradise existed, even if he would never reach it himself.
Columbus’s visionary propensities remained intact, stronger and more singular than ever. Other explorers felt buoyed by the belief that they were fulfilling the Lord’s will, but Columbus’s striking conception of the entrance to paradise was unique. It was easy for students of Columbus, beginning with Bartolomé de Las Casas, to separate fact from folly, and science from delusion, but to the Admiral’s way of thinking, these seeming opposites remained inextricably intertwined. Even at this late date, eight years after setting out on his first voyage, he still believed that he was on the doorstep of the Indies, as well as the threshold of paradise. Experience fostered his illusions rather than dispelling them. As the voyage proceeded, he gave himself over to reveries. When he considered the globe, he no longer saw the ocean, evidence of currents and tides, sandbanks, reefs, bays, or other geologic features, but a series of shimmering images that might be better described as visions containing coded information about the nature of the cosmos. For him, reconnaissance was the process of deciphering this God-given code as best he could.
“The world is small,” he later declared, on the basis of this experience and other mystical flights. “Six parts are dry and only the seventh is covered with water. Experience has already verified that”—even though his voyages demonstrated that, on the contrary, the world was mostly covered by oceans. In his defense, he argued that “I hold that the world is not so large as thought by common men.” Columbus based his expert opinion on a conception of the world that included paradise, but excluded the Pacific Ocean and the Americas. His small world had a circumference of about 14,000 miles, when in reality earth’s circumference at the equator is about 24,900 miles.
Clinging to his insupportable beliefs, he maintained that as a result of the “navigation and exploration and discovery” promoted by the Sovereigns, he could tell which zones of the earth he had visited by the complexions of the people he encountered. In Cape Verde, he insisted, “the people there are much darker” than elsewhere, “and the farther south one goes the more extreme their color,” reaching the blackest at a point “where the North Star at nightfall was five degrees above the horizon.”
He explained that after he had passed through the dreadful Doldrums, and reached luxuriant Trinidad, “I found the mildest temperature and lands and trees as green and beautiful as the orchards of Valencia in April, and the people there have beautiful bodies and are whiter than the others I was able to see in the Indies.” Not only that, “they have greater ingenuity, show more intelligence, and are not cowardly,” qualities that he attributed to the “mild temperature,” the result of being in the “highest point in the world,” as he had previously explained. And, to clinch his argument, “Over our heads and theirs the sun was in the sign of Virgo.” Like others of his day, and Ptolemy long before him, Columbus remained a dedicated student of the movement of the planets and their effect on human behavior and destiny. The positioning of the zodiac was clearly a positive sign, and he confidently went about correcting the misapprehensions of Aristotle and “other sages” with his newly acquired—and utterly fantastic—data.
In his search for a paradise, Columbus touched the eastern cape of the Isla de Gracia, off the Venezuelan coast. Once again, he sent small craft to the shore, where his scouts encountered cold fires, a deserted dwelling, fish set out to dry, and other signs of people who had fled the intruders. The Spaniards harvested Jamaican plum, a leathery fruit that Las Casas compared to “oranges with insides like figs.” And they took note of “wild cats.” Otherwise, they had little to report. With every passing harbor, his visions of paradise faded, and the unresolved tasks of his voyage loomed.
On Monday, August 6, the fleet was approached by a small canoe bearing four men who belonged to the Guaiqueri Indian nation, and the occasion probably marked their first contact with Europeans. They wore brilliant textiles accented by jewelry fashioned from gold and gold alloy, which they obtained by trade from other Indian groups. This gleaming metal was likely guanín, an alloy combining gold, silver, and copper in varying proportions. Columbus had run across guanín a couple of times on previous voyages, thanks to the Taínos, who offered it to him, and he had sent a sample to Spain to be assayed, with interesting results. The Spaniards, of course, favored gold, but the Indian alloy contained a high proportion of copper, which lowered the melting point from over a thousand degrees centigrade for unadulterated gold to two hundred degrees for alloys containing 14 percent to 40 percent copper. For this reason, copper was more valuable to the Indians than gold.
While they exchanged and examined jewelry, the trading parties imbibed chicha, brewed from maize. Slightly cloudy and yellowish in appearance, and tasting like sour apple cider, the potion had a low alcoholic content that imparted a mild buzz. One of the Spanish pilots indicated to the Indians that he wished to accompany them to the shore, but as he stepped into the lightweight craft, he capsized it and the Indians swam away, but not fast enough to avoid the pilot, who presented them aboard ship to the Admiral. “When they left here,” he reported, “I gave these Indians bells and beads and sugar, and I sent them to shore, where they had a great battle. And after they found out about the good treatment, they all wished to come to the ships.” Columbus graciously received the Indians seeking safe haven, and received tributes of bread, water, and chicha. Warmed by the beverage, he cordially engaged them in conversation, with smiles and nods of mutual incomprehension all around.
The next day, the Indians returned to the ships in greater numbers, bearing more gifts, especially their pleasant, murky beverages. In exchange they were happy to accept tiny brass bells. The metal exerted a continuing fascination for the Indians, who gratefully sniffed the gleaming items, attempting to detect properties in European jewelry to which the Europeans themselves were oblivious. The Indians believed they could smell valuable copper, if any, in the jewelry.
The inhabitants offered shrieking, twitching parrots and skillfully woven, brightly colored textiles to the Admiral, who preferred to take the Indians themselves. By day’s end, his intended hostages had slipped away. In the morning, when a canoe bearing twelve Indians approached, the Spaniards briskly took them into custody. Columbus selected six to his liking, and dismissed the rest, “without scruple,” Las Casas reported, “as he did many other times on the first voyage.” Such behavior, according to Las Casas, amounted to a mortal sin, but these concerns did not trouble the Admiral when he was determined to add to his empire.
Several days later, Columbus heard of an Indian bearing a gold nugget the size of an apple. So there was gold, after all. Then men bedecked with gold, as well as ornamental necklaces and beads, arrived in canoes. The women wore strings of colored pearls on their arms. Entranced by the gold, Columbus opened negotiations for more of these precious objects to present to Ferdinand and Isabella. In high spirits, he happened upon an encampment of unusually charming and hospitable Indians, and with his men gladly partook of their red and white fermented beverages. Only the weather troubled him. “I am cold enough to need a cloak every morning, I say, even though I am so close to the equator.”
He sailed on in search of pearls, hailing
Indians who might be helpful in his quest. As his dependable source, he relied on the Naturalis historia of Pliny, the Roman scientist, historian, and compiler, who led Columbus to believe that pearls generated from drops of dew forming within oysters when their shells were open. Observing abundant dew, and sizeable oysters, or creatures that he took to be oysters, Columbus expected to find pearls everywhere, even in the oysters he spotted growing on the branches of mangroves. However, he was mistaken: the mollusks were not oysters, and the pearls elusive. He continued to be undone by his hopes, his dreams, and his avarice.
Columbus risked leading his squadron to disaster as he entered alarmingly shallow water: only four fathoms deep, equivalent to twenty-four feet. The ships required at least three fathoms’ clearance for safe passage. Fortunately, the violent currents—three by his count—running past the Dragon’s Mouth carried them past the shoals to deeper waters.
The next day, August 13, he resumed his westward run along Paria’s northern coast, giving thanks to God for his deliverance and coming to grips with the new lands he had discovered within days of his arrival.
“Your Highnesses have won these vast lands which are an other world”—otro mundo, in his words—“in which Christendom will have so much enjoyment and our faith in time so great an increase.” The term “other world” marked a shift in his thinking. He had given up on the idea that he was exploring Marco Polo’s ancient India, in search of the Grand Khan, and instead had stumbled across something entirely new and troubling. “I have come to believe that this is a mighty continent that was hitherto unknown.” That was a true discovery, something utterly unexpected. That singular fact did not automatically mean that he now realized that Hispaniola and the other islands of the “Indies” lay far distant from India. It meant he was more perplexed than ever before. His voyages of confirmation had become voyages of doubt. He was equipped to confirm cherished myths, not explode them.
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