Fig. 1.3. Chart of Atlantic Ocean currents and winds used by early Portuguese explorers during Henry the Navigator’s lifetime, ca. 1430–1460, to perform the volto do mar maneuver.10
Incidentally, in 1488, Columbus first approached the king of Portugal with his proposal for a cross-ocean voyage. However, the ruler was uninterested, especially after Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 in search of an eastern route to China, which was finally found in 1513.
Fourth, Columbus knew how much food to take—thirty days’ worth. And, at the end, where did the “Admiral,” as he called himself in his logs, get his map, before any land had been sighted? We read from his diary: “25 September 1492 Very calm this day; afterwards the wind rose. Continued their course west till night. The Admiral held a conversation with Martin Alonzo Pinzon, captain of the Pinta, respecting a chart, which the Admiral had sent him three days before, and in which it appears he had marked down certain islands in that sea; Martin Alonzo was of opinion that they were in their neighborhood, and the Admiral replied that he thought the same.”11
Columbus routinely falsified the distances he traveled each day so the crew would not think they were so far from Spain. On a larger scale, it is rather farfetched that the experienced navigator made a “mistake” in his calculations, as often claimed, by using the 1,480-meter Italian “mile” for the longer 2,177-meter Arabic “mile.”12 This gave him control over any maps that would be made from his notes. For example, in a diary entry from the same date, he wrote, “They sailed . . . four leagues and a half west and in the night seventeen leagues southwest, in all twenty-one and a half: told the crew thirteen leagues, making it a point to keep them from knowing how far they had sailed; in this manner two reckonings were kept, the shorter one falsified, and the other being the true account.”13
Fifth, another deception was that he was going to meet the great khan of the Moguls. This was the name Europeans applied to a number of nomadic groups who at one time had almost conquered them, so, with this in mind, the king and queen gave Columbus a letter to give to him. Unlike most Europeans, Columbus could have learned from the Arabs and Jews who traded overland with China that the Moguls had ceased to rule in 1368 and had been replaced by the native Chinese Ming dynasty. As Weatherford commented in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World:
With so many empires striving to maintain the illusion of the [evil] Mongol Empire in everything from politics to art, public opinion seemed obstinately unwilling to believe that it no longer existed. Nowhere was the belief in the empire longer lasting or more important than in Europe, where, in 1492, more than a century after the last khan ruled over China, Christopher Columbus convinced the monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand that he could . . . sail west from Europe across the World Ocean and arrive in the land described by Marco Polo.14
Fig. 1.4. Handwritten notes by Columbus inscribed in the Latin edition of Marco Polo’s book Le livre des merveilles du monde.
In fact, Columbus carried Polo’s volume with him on his voyage, well annotated with his own notes.
Sixth, what was Columbus going to give the khan? This is a good question, because he only carried cheap trinkets, hawk bells, and little colored-glass beads; these were hardly presents for a great ruler, but they were what he would have seen in Africa that attracted “uncivilized” primitive peoples.
Seventh, if the khan had still ruled, what would his reaction have been to Columbus’s staking a claim on his islands, killing and enslaving his people, and taking their (his) gold?
Eighth, how much were Isabella and Ferdinand aware of these details? Probably not at all. They were openly disappointed upon Columbus’s return because there was so little gold and no spices to show for the voyage. Thus, to get funding for a second voyage (and a third and a fourth), Columbus had to make them believe that he had landed on the outer fringe islands of the khan’s empire.
Researcher Wade Frazier wrote:
Columbus was so intent on saying that he found Asia that he engaged in a bizarre act in Cuba. In June 1494, after sailing along the Cuban coast for a month, he compelled his crew to swear that Cuba was not an island but was in fact, “the mainland of the commencement of the Indies.” He made his crew swear out a notarized statement to that effect, and told them they were subject to a “penalty of 10,000 maravedis and the cutting out of the tongue that each one hereafter should say contrary.” He also threatened whippings. Columbus’s hagiographers again have a difficult time explaining such behavior, which was possibly to fulfill royal objectives to search for Asia. If Columbus could dot that “I” he could go back to Española and keep looking for gold.15
Ninth, another reason that Ferdinand and Isabella were deceived was the “discovery” of two “conflicting” tribes living on the islands, which were supposedly on the outer fringe of the khan’s empire, and who matched the thirteenth-century descriptions of Marco Polo and the fourteenth-century “journals” of “Sir John Mandeville.” (This was a fictional character who, for hundreds of years, was thought to be a real person, although now the writings, whose authorship is uncertain, have been shown to be a compendium of previous travel works).16
In the log of his initial voyage, Columbus spoke of meeting one of the two tribes, the peaceful Arawaks, a people seemingly still living in a “Golden Age.” Morgan, in his article in Smithsonian, describes the island and its inhabitants and imagines Columbus’s reaction. He writes that Mandeville had “told of an island where the people lived without malice or guile, without covetousness or lechery or gluttony, wishing for none of the riches of this world. They were not Christians, but they lived by the golden rule. A man who planned to see the Indies for himself could hardly fail to be stirred by the thought of finding such a people.”17
Previously, Marco Polo had written about a very different tribe:
When you leave the island of Java and the kingdom of Lambri, you sail north about one hundred and fifty miles, and then you come to two islands, one of which is called Nicobar. On this island they have no king or chief, but live like beasts. They go all naked, both men and women, and do not use the slightest covering of any kind. They are idolaters. They decorate their houses with long pieces of silk, which they hang from rods as an ornament, regarding it as we would pearls, gems, silver, or gold.18
It didn’t seem to matter to Columbus’s contemporaries that the island of Nicobar had been known since the days of Ptolemy, more than a thousand years before, and was north of Java and part of the Andaman Islands in the East Indian Ocean, thousands of miles from where Columbus “supposed” he had landed. Nor was there a concern—given future developments—that Columbus’s description of some of the supposed inhabitants ended on a rather ominous note that signaled his absolute, unquestioned dominion:
October 11–12, 1492: As I saw that they [the Indians] were very friendly to us, and perceived that they could be much more easily converted to our holy faith by gentle means than by force, I presented them with some red caps, and strings of beads to wear upon the neck, and many other trifles of small value, wherewith they were much delighted, and became wonderfully attached to us. Afterwards they came swimming to the boats, bringing parrots, balls of cotton thread, javelins, and many other things, which they exchanged for articles we gave them, such as glass beads, and hawk’s bells; which trade was carried on with the utmost good will. But they seemed on the whole to me, to be a very poor people. They all go completely naked, even the women, though I saw but one girl. . . . Some paint themselves . . . with such colors as they can find. . . . Weapons they have none, nor are acquainted with them. . . . It appears to me that the people are ingenious, and would be good servants and I am of the opinion that they would very readily become Christians, as they appear to have no religion. They very quickly learn such words as are spoken to them. If it pleases our Lord, I intend at my return to carry home six of them to your Highnesses, that they may learn our language.19
But teaching the Natives Christianity or the Spanish
language and clothing them were not the reasons Columbus was there. One often-taught idea is that Isabella pawned her jewels to sponsor the voyage, but what is seldom mentioned is that Columbus was primarily financed by Ferdinand’s financial minister and Italian bankers, with the condition that he had to pay the loans back. Thus, after land was sighted and visited, he explored another island and wrote about what was foremost on his mind while also showing his unconcern for whatever the great khan might think of his appropriations. This tends to reinforce my belief that visiting the lands of Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire was merely a ruse.
October 15, 1492: From this island espying a still larger one to the west, I set sail in that direction and kept on till night without reaching the western extremity of the island, where I gave it the name of Santa Maria de la Concepcion. About sunset we anchored near the cape, which terminates the island toward the west, to inquire for gold, for the natives we had taken from San Salvador told me that the people here wore golden bracelets upon their arms and legs. I believed pretty confidently that they had invented this story in order to find means to escape from us, [Columbus had kept a number of them prisoners, several of whom escaped or were killed while fleeing.] still I determined to pass none of these islands without taking possession, because being once taken, it would answer for all times. . . . But in truth, should I meet with gold or spices in great quantity, I shall remain till I collect as much as possible, and for this purpose I am proceeding solely in quest of them.20
It is ironic that when Columbus returned to the island of Hispaniola on his third voyage, he sensed a hurricane coming and found shelter and warned the new Spanish governor, who ignored him. The result was the sinking of twenty-nine of the thirty ships carrying the first load of treasure back to Spain.
Thus, during his fourth voyage to the New World, Columbus wrote a letter to the king and queen that summed up his views of the world. He stated, “Gold is the most precious of all commodities; gold constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all he needs in the world, as also the means of rescuing souls from Purgatory and restoring them to the enjoyment of paradise.”21
THE DYNAMICS OF SLAVERY
However, with so little gold actually found, Columbus had to come up with some other ideas. In a letter to Luis de Santángel (sometimes spelled de Sant Angel), the finance minister who had helped sponsor his first voyage, Columbus wrote about the certain profits to be made with a second voyage:
Another island, I am told, is larger than Hispaniola [Haiti], where the natives have no hair, and where there is countless gold; and from them all I bring Indians to testify to this. To speak, in conclusion, only of what has been done during this hurried voyage, their Highnesses will see that I can give them as much gold as they desire, if they will give me a little assistance, spices, cotton, as much as their Highnesses may command to be shipped, and mastic as much as their Highnesses choose to send for, which until now has only been found in Greece, in the isle of Chios, and the Signoria can get its own price for it; as much lign-aloe as they command to be shipped, and as many slaves as they choose to send for, all heathens.22
There were two rationales for Columbus’s proposed slave dealings with the “heathens.” One was that in 1452 and 1454 two papal bulls by Pope Nicholas V had granted Portugal’s King Alphonso V the right to put Moors and unbelievers into hereditary slavery. The other was his convenient description of the second tribe (the counterparts to the Arawaks), the Caribs, whom he described as being like the Nicobarians*2 that Ptolemy had written about and described later by Frederic J. Mouat in 1863 using phrases from Shakespeare’s Othello (Act I, scene 3):
[There is] a race of cannibals, formidable not only to their enemies, but to all who approached their coasts . . . a dreaded “anthropophagi” whose heads do not grow beneath their shoulders.23
While the Arawak people of the Caribbean, which included both the Carib and neighboring tribes, fit the European preconceived idea of the “noble red man” that was derived from Mandeville, Marco Polo, and others, the Carib tribe fit the equally preconceived role of “man-eaters.” Thus, Columbus could circulate stories of them having “dog-like” noses, which would sound reasonable to Europeans who had never seen monkeys. He added that they captured young boys, whom they castrated and fattened up like capons for their feasts.
However, Morgan’s account fails to mention that Columbus did not distinguish between the two stereotypes when the slave dealings commenced. More important, he failed to mention that there has never been proof that cannibalism existed in the Caribbean, except perhaps for the ritual eating of dead enemies. This would have been somewhat like the ingestion of Christ’s blood and flesh in the Catholic Communion rite or, as in the case of the Andeman Islanders, to prevent their evil spirits from returning to life.
The curator for the Anthropology Department of the American Museum of Natural History, David Hurst Thomas, in his book Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity, discussed this topic and the opinions of Columbus’s premier biographer, Samuel Eliot Morison (1887–1976):
In his Pulitzer Prize–winning Admiral of the Ocean Sea, published in 1942, and the subsequent European Discovery of America (1971–1974), the Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison uncritically employed Bad Indians to lionize Columbus, his lifelong hero. . . . He portrayed Columbus, in typically stirring language, as “an intrepid mariner and practical dreamer” who met the hardships of land and sea “with stoic endurance.” Among those hardships were the “dreaded man-eating Caribs,” said to live on the island of Dominica, killing and eating all who ventured ashore. One day, Morison relates, the Caribs became so violently ill after eating a Spanish friar that they swore off clerics for good. From that time forth, whenever Spaniards were forced to call at Dominica for water, “they either sent a friar ashore or rigged up the boat’s crew with sacking and the like to fool the natives.”24
The occasional brutality shown by Columbus and his men toward the Caribs was more than justified, Morison argued, because it was directed at club-wielding children of nature who existed halfway between humanity and animality. In Morison’s view, Columbus was sent to the New World because the Caribs were the antithesis of civilized Europeans. They deserved what they got, and Columbus was just the man to set things straight.
Even today, similar portraits turn up in books like James Michener’s Caribbean and other historical novels that are sold in tourist traps from Miami to Trinidad. Michener claimed, for example, that there was historical evidence for the life of the two tribes he portrayed.25
For his slave trade, Columbus clearly had a well-thought-out plan.
On his second voyage, after capturing a few of them, he sent them in slavery to Spain, as samples of what he hoped would be a regular trade. They were obviously intelligent, and in Spain they might “be led to abandon that inhuman custom, which they have of eating men, and there in Castile, learning the language, they will much more readily receive baptism and secure the welfare of their souls.” The way to handle the slave trade, Columbus suggested, was to send ships from Spain loaded with cattle (there were no native domestic animals on Española), and he would return the ships loaded with supposed Cannibals.26
Columbus also wrote about the home base he had built for the enterprises he had envisioned.
In Hispaniola, in the most convenient place, most accessible for the gold mines and all commerce with the mainland on this side or with that of the great Khan, on the other, with which there would be great trade and profit, I have taken possession of a large town, which I have named the City of Navidad. I began fortifications there, which should be completed by this time, and I have left in it men enough to hold it, with arms, artillery, and provisions for more than a year; and a boat with a master seaman skilled in the arts necessary to make others; I am so friendly with the king of that country that he was proud to call me his brother and hold me as such. Even should he change his mind and wish to quarrel with my men, nei
ther he nor his subjects know what arms are, nor wear clothes, as I have said. They are the most timid people in the world, so that only the men remaining there could destroy the whole region, and run no risk if they know how to behave themselves properly.27
When the Santa Maria ran aground before Columbus left the New World, Guacanagari, the local native leader, gathered his people together and helped the Spaniards salvage their possessions. Columbus again was impressed by such good will, writing they were “so full of love and without greed, and suitable for every purpose, that I assure your Highnesses that I believe there is no better land in the world, and they are always smiling.” Columbus emphasized that Guacanagari “was greatly delighted to see the admiral joyful and understood that he desired much gold.”28
But when Columbus returned on his second voyage with thirteen hundred settlers, including soldiers and priests, he found the fort in ruins and the bodies of eleven of the thirty-nine men he had left behind. In retaliation, he designed a tribute system. Every native over fourteen was to provide a “hawk’s bell” of gold every three months, which is about the size of a thimble. Upon payment for the gold, the natives were made to wear tokens as proof the gold had been received. When the Spanish found natives without the tokens, they were made examples of by cutting off their hands, resulting in death. Historian Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States, “The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.”29
Secrets of Ancient America: Archaeoastronomy and the Legacy of the Phoenicians, Celts, and Other Forgotten Explorers Page 3
