Indeed, not even the court itself could wholly contain and control public understanding of the New World anymore. Among the first letters sent back from the Second Voyage was one from Dr. Chanca, the chief physician of the new settlement, addressed to the city of Seville and evidently intended for wide public circulation. In the great trade fair at Medina del Campo, Hernando would find a growing book fair among the long-standing markets for silver, paintings, and Castilian wool returning to Spain in the form of Flemish tapestries, as well as the currency exchange which drew crowds of merchants from across Europe and connected this dusty outpost with the great banking centers of Lyons, Antwerp, and Venice. In the immense market square, alongside books from Salamanca, Barcelona, and Seville, Hernando found works from the centers of European print—Venice, Basel, Antwerp—perhaps including foreign editions of his father’s letter of 1493 reporting his discoveries. But by now Columbus’s accounts were not the only ones on the market, and it may have been in these bookstalls that Hernando first sensed the cacophony of printed voices competing to hold the public’s attention. While Dr. Chanca’s letter repeats Columbus’s official reports about the perpetual springtime of the islands, he is not quite as deft as the Admiral in moving swiftly from the vegetal riches of the New World to the mineral ones that will surely follow, as (for instance) when Columbus instructs Antonio de Torres to report the abundant evidence of spices that can be found by simply standing on the shores of these islands, without any effort to penetrate inland, which surely was proof of the unlimited riches within—and the same, he reasons, must be true of the gold on the new islands he has found:
Dominica
Mariagalante
Guadeloupe
Santa Cruz
Monserrate
Santa Maria la Redonda
Santa Maria la Antigua
San Martin
After recognizing in the first-named island the auspiciousness of their making landfall on a Sunday (domingo) and paying tribute to his flagship, the Mariagalante, Columbus named these islands after the chief pilgrimage sites in Spain. Dr. Chanca’s letter, however, marks a departure from the party line—noting for instance the exotic fruit that some of those on the fleet, perhaps trusting to the Edenic reports they had heard, attempted to taste, only to be rewarded for nothing more than a lick by grotesquely swollen faces and a raving madness.
The first cloud may have been cast for Hernando upon his father’s golden world by the succession of reports that slowly revealed the macabre fate of La Navidad, Columbus’s original fortress-settlement in the New World. Though Columbus attempted to gloss over this in his communication of January 1494, even the child Hernando might have noticed something amiss in that his father’s letters were addressed not from La Navidad but from the new settlement of La Isabela. Readers of Hernando’s later account of events might have had a premonition of this disaster, given how often he insists upon the care with which his father recorded the place where he had left thirty-nine men from varied backgrounds, including an Englishman, an Irishman from Galway, and a relation of Hernando’s on his mother’s side. But when the fleet of the Second Voyage finally made their way back to Hispaniola, they hardly had need of Columbus’s directions. On a riverbank near the first landmark of Monte Cristo they found two corpses, one with a noose around his neck and another with his feet tied, though some may have deceived themselves that these bodies, too decomposed for identification, were not those of men who had been left behind in La Navidad. Hernando meticulously recorded further details of this scene: one of the men was young and the other old; the noose was made of esparto grass and the strangled man’s arms were extended, his hands tied to a piece of wood like a cross. The hope that these were not Spaniards became harder to sustain when, the next day and farther up the river, they came across two more bodies, one thickly bearded—in a land of natives without facial hair. When they finally anchored off La Navidad, reluctant to come closer to shore for fear of grounding as the Santa Maria had, a canoe bearing envoys from Guacanagarí approached, its men wearing masks that they then handed to Columbus. They initially reported all was well but were finally pressed to admit that a few of the settlers of La Navidad had died of disease and fighting. Guacanagarí himself, they said, could not come to greet Columbus because he was lying in his hut, gravely wounded after having battled with two other caciques—Caonabó and Marieni—who had attacked La Navidad.7
Hernando’s account of these events, which draws upon Columbus’s lost expedition diaries but must also have been colored by his own memories, shows all the signs of trauma as it recounts the disintegration of Columbus’s idyll. Hernando describes the further bodies that were found, with an estimate of how long they had been dead, and the story that unfolded piece by piece of how a party of settlers had broken with the rest and embarked on a course of rape and pillage, leading the cacique Caonabó to march on them and put the stockade to the flame. Yet there were discrepancies in the stories told by Guacanagarí and his men, and the belief the Taino were simply and naively honest became harder to sustain. After narrating this bloodcurdling episode, Hernando turns strangely to his father’s pleasure when Guacanagarí gave him a gold belt, crown, and grains worth four gold marks, in exchange for items valued at only three reales (equivalent to less than one two-thousandth of the value). It is unclear whether Columbus was truly so cold-blooded in his mercantile calculations at this moment or if he was desperately grasping for positive news in the face of a massacre for which the real guilt was unlikely ever to be determined. Similarly, Hernando’s recording of this exchange in his biography of his father, shortly after what must have been a brutal childhood memory, has the feel of those misdirections often prompted by trauma.
Hernando’s presence at court made him an eyewitness to the competing interpretations of these events. Dr. Chanca’s account of the La Navidad affair played into a dawning belief in the deceitful bloodiness of these new Spanish subjects, something that would have been reinforced by reports of a further disaster for Spanish Atlantic expansion that also arrived in April 1494. In an attempt to complete the conquest of the Canary Islands by taking the final holdout of Tenerife, the conquistador Alonso de Lugo had refused to accept the surrender of the pastoralist Guanches who lived there and attacked instead, only to be roundly beaten back to the sea with the loss of eight hundred Christian lives. The heartwarming triumph of the natives of Tenerife was sadly short-lived: de Lugo returned the following year with a larger force and captured them en masse, a pattern of hardening attitudes toward Atlantic peoples that was only to worsen in the coming years. The German traveler Hieronymus Munzer was soon to see these “beasts trapped in human form” for sale in Valencia and to note without irony the “sweetening effect” of religion on these slaves, many of whom were put to work harvesting sugarcane. To counter this mounting bigotry, Columbus had a tightrope to walk: even as he attempted to conjure out of nothing a belief in the New World as a gold-paved Eden, he had to admit the settlement was faltering at the outset. In the same breath with which Antonio de Torres was to report that vines and wheat sprang marvelously and untended out of the New World ground, he was obliged to request the Monarchs send supplies from Spain, namely:
wine, hardtack, wheat, salt pork, other salted meat, cattle, sheep, lambs, male and female calves, donkeys, raisins, sugar, almonds, honey, rice, and medicine
And all this if possible before the summer arrived. The reason Columbus gave for this want in his land of milk and honey was the poor quality of what had been stocked for the Second Voyage: the wine had been lost through poorly made barrels, the horses supplied by the farrier in Seville were all broken-backed nags, and the fine strapping men he expected to find when they disembarked in Hispaniola turned out to be layabouts who expected simply to feast on manna, gather the gold that was lying about, and return to Europe rich men. They could not survive on the local cassava bread and required the food they were used to in Spain, and they constantly fell ill in that climate. To prove this
de Torres carried with him a list of the healthy and a list of the sick. Just as Columbus was quick to blame the fate of La Navidad on the viciousness of some of the men he left there, so the failure of the New World settlements over the coming years was increasingly to be laid (by Columbus himself, and later Hernando) at the feet of men whom the Admiral disdained for not being willing to suffer like him to turn his vision into a reality. But even Columbus’s adherence to the picture of naked innocence among the New World natives was beginning to crumble: not only does he detail the defensive measures he has taken against local aggression, he also in his struggle to make his discoveries profitable proposes a trade be set up in which Spanish cattle be exchanged for New World slaves. Though the Monarchs firmly resisted this suggestion, Columbus continued to push for it in hopes of saving his vision of the New World, being tempted for the sake of expediency into an execrable history of kidnap and enslavement.8
The letters from Columbus over the succeeding years followed these familiar patterns. Hernando would have learned in his seventh year, during the early months when the court was at Madrid, of his father’s expedition against the aggressor Caonabó in the province of Cibao, where the rivers ran with grains of gold but they faced constant attacks from Caonabó’s warriors. At the same time Hernando would have heard tell of his father’s expedition in search of terra firma, the continental landmass of Cathay, when instead he got no farther than the coasts of Cuba and Jamaica, becoming marooned amid a labyrinth of hundreds of islets he named the Jardines de la Reina, “The Queen’s Gardens.” There they witnessed flamingos, pilot fish that hitched rides on the dorsal fins of other swimmers, turtles as big as shields in numbers that blanketed the sea, a cloud of butterflies so large it cast the ship in darkness, and a breeze so sweet the soldiers felt themselves surrounded by roses and the finest perfumes in the world. The Admiral boasted they would have returned to Castile via the East on that very journey, if not for the fact that their supplies were exhausted, as was the Admiral, having not (he claimed) changed clothes or slept in a bed for eight months. On returning to Hispaniola Columbus found his brother Bartholomew, who had finally caught up with him after more than six years, and succumbed to a fever that for five months deprived him of his sight, his memory, and his senses.9
Columbus’s letters and the objects he sent back to Spain with them are witnesses to a mind struggling to put this flood of new things into order, when every day produced some unheard-of wonder, a struggle that is the prehistory to his son’s lifelong quest to organize the world. Insofar as Columbus did attempt to impose a system on what he was seeing, he usually fell back on the worldview of medieval cosmography, in which the oddity of men and their customs showed how far from the center of the world any given place was, whereas the perfumes of Araby and the abundance of gold were clues that one was approaching the earthly Jerusalem or the boundaries of the lost Eden. Columbus’s New World was to him strangely both of these things, both center and periphery, both far from the known and approaching man’s point of origin. More often than not his reports of the New World simply never progressed beyond incoherent lists. We should not, however, assume that because the lists lacked order and seemed chaotic, this was a dispassionate and scientific record of what he was seeing: in the tradition of the medieval enumeratio, the rambling list was often a way of describing God, whose divine incomprehensibility could not be expressed except by the use of dissimilar images. One such list, for instance, described Christ as the
source, way, right, rock, lion, light bearer, lamb—door, hope, virtue, word, wisdom, prophet—victim, scion, shepherd, mountain, nets, dove—flame, giant, eagle, spouse, patience, worm . . .
Perhaps in imitation of this Columbus most often fell back on protestations of inexpressibility—that the marvelous beauty of the New World was something that could not be put into words but simply had to be seen, to be experienced in rapt admiration. This move at once produced a mystical impression of these new territories and postponed giving them a meaning, leaving Columbus the sole authority, having been the only one to see what could not be properly described.10
Some observations did manage to breach this defensive wall of conventional interpretation and blank wonder. The bafflement Columbus felt, for instance, at the natives of Cibao province “locking” the doors of their huts by placing single canes across the entry, slender barriers that none of them would dream of breaching, witnesses the effect of a custom that could not be fitted into these schemes. These cane locks could not be explained by either of the simple narratives used to understand the New World, of Edenic innocence on the one hand or barbaric bestiality on the other; instead, they confronted the viewer with a version of privacy unique to that culture. In time it would be precisely these oddities of custom that would lead European thinkers to wonder if their own customs—of dress, of behavior, of morality—were not the natural and necessary practices of a civilized people but were equally arbitrary and nonsensical when viewed from outside of that culture. But these awakenings would for a long time remain dormant. In the meantime Columbus and his sponsors at court saw no irony in sending “cannibals” back to Spain to cure them of their sinful appetite for human flesh by converting them to Christianity, membership of which cult they would regularly celebrate by eating the body of the Son of God during Mass. No one appeared to flinch at subjecting the stone cemies or idols of the Taino to derision and mockery, as mere pieces of wood and stone that the natives thought could speak and to which they made offerings, while renaming Taino places after statues of the Virgin and saints that had equally proved their blessedness by miraculous acts.
This growing body of knowledge about the western Atlantic gave rise during Columbus’s Second Voyage to the first systematic attempts to write about this New World, a process in which Hernando played a key part. In response to Columbus’s letters of 1494 Hernando’s tutor Peter Martyr declared his intention to write a history of the voyages of exploration and the lands they had encountered, a task that was to occupy him intermittently for the rest of his life. And a mail packet that arrived late in 1495, as the court toured Catalonia, contained the first attempt to write an ethnographic account of a New World people, in the form of Fray Ramón Pané’s extensive study of the habits and customs of the Taino, a text that survives only because Hernando copied it wholesale into his writings about his father, and to which we owe most of our knowledge about a culture that was quickly eradicated by massacre, conversion, and disease. Pané’s survey begins with a description of the Taino sky deity and his five-named mother, and their belief that mankind emerged from two caves, Cacibayagua and Amayauba, guarded by a man named Marocael (“without eyelashes”) who was turned to stone for failing to guard the caves. The description then relates a story of how the first female humans disappeared to an Island of Women, leaving behind children whose cries turned into the croaking of frogs; the men who remained, like the Christians who first arrived from the sea, were a people without women, ones who took what they lacked. Pané records the two caves, from which the sun and moon emerge, contained two stone cemi idols named Boinayol (“son of the serpent-formed storm god”) and Maroya (“cloudless”), as well as the Taino belief that dead men roam the earth without navels, endlessly seeking to embrace the female Coaybay (“absent ones”). His account of native culture ends with a description of their ritual chants (which he likens to those performed by Muslims), their shamanic witch doctors, and the way their idols were made, from trees that move from their rooted spot and reveal to the shaman the form they wish to take during a psychotropic cohoba trip. Perhaps Hernando would have felt some sympathy with the frogs central to Taino culture, who were once children left by their mothers and whose croaking is the sound of them calling out to the parent they have lost.
Many of the stories that Hernando transcribed from Pané are jumbled and difficult to understand, and Pané modestly admits the limitations of his account, noting he did not have enough paper to write on and was forced to attempt to memorize
everything in order, and that furthermore the linguistic and cultural barrier prevented him from understanding many things fully. But this humility should not distract from the system quietly imposed by Pané on what he heard, which proceeds from an account of the Taino gods, through their story of the creation of man, to their understanding of the shape of the cosmos and of the afterlife, and finally the social institutions that are an expression of their way of seeing the world, from their rituals and sacred objects to the way in which they believe bodies can be healed by their form of medicine. This European way of describing “exotic” peoples, moving from religious beliefs to social practices, was not an invention of Pané’s, and since Pané it has become so naturalized that we are in danger of missing the argument that it contains. Hernando may well have recognized that the description of the Taino follows the form set down by classical works including Pliny’s Natural History and transmitted through the Middle Ages by Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies: both Pliny and Isidore attempt to describe the entirety of the world as it is known to them, and one might be tempted to see their encyclopedias as merely randomly ordered lists. Closer inspection, however, reveals a clear organizational principle based on Aristotelian philosophy, moving (as one description has put it) from “the original to the derived, and from the natural to the artificial.” As in Pané’s description of the Taino, this creates order by starting with the things from which the world is seen to come (the gods, Creation), before moving on to the things created (man) and in turn the things created by these creations (religious ceremonies, medical practices, etc.). This seems a reasonable enough way of proceeding, but in practice it allows the Christian reader to dismiss the entirety of another culture on the basis of an incorrect belief in God: if the premises on which the culture is based are false (i.e., their notion of God), all practices, beliefs, and customs derived from those premises must also be false. Tellingly, Pané’s document ends with an account of his part in the first New World conversion to Christianity, of the attempts by a violent opponent of the Christians (the cacique Guarionex) to destroy the Christian icons, and the public burning of Guarionex’s men by Bartholomew Columbus.11
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 5
