Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (26 page)

A scouting party came across “two dead men near the river, one with a rope around his neck and the other with a rope around his foot.” The next day, Chanca wrote, the scouts discovered “two more dead men, one of whom was in a position that revealed he had a long beard.” Who were they? With professional sangfroid, the physician observed that “some of our men had more negative than positive feelings, and rightly so, since none of the Indians have beards.” Columbus had nothing to say on a subject that could only bring dread to his men. They were about thirty-six miles from the fort.

 

Columbus departed for La Navidad two days later, on November 28, intending to call on Guacanagarí, the chief who had been entrusted with protecting the life of thirty-nine Spaniards from the first voyage. En route, the Admiral’s ship foundered amid the shallows in an eerie reenactment of the mishap the previous Christmas, when
Santa María
had struck a sandbar, but this time Columbus’s flagship broke free to arrive after nightfall. “We did not dare to take port near the coast until the next morning when the depth could be surely known and safe passage possible,” he recounted. They were still three miles from their goal when a canoe bearing five or six Indians gave pursuit, but Columbus had no intention of waiting for them.

He fired two shots to announce his arrival. As the reports echoed and faded, Columbus waited for the Christians in their garrison to respond in kind. But there was only silence that grew more poignant with every passing minute, “for they suspected that the comrades whom they had left there had been completely wiped out,” as Guillermo Coma remembered. Even the detached Chanca admitted to a “lot of concern” among the crew members. “Great sadness was all-encompassing,” he sighed. When the Spanish went ashore, they found neither fires nor dwellings.

Four or five hours later, the canoe approached one of the caravels; the Indians signaled that they sought Columbus, and came on board. One Indian identified himself as Guacanagarí’s cousin, and, exploiting Columbus’s lust for gold, presented the Admiral with gifts of “golden masks.” Hours of conversation ensued, and as the sun rose behind them, Columbus emanated “much satisfaction.” Perhaps the Christians were safe, after all. Guacanagarí’s self-styled cousin assured the Admiral that they were indeed well, with the exception of those who had died from illness, and a few others who had died “because of altercations.” And where was Guacanagarí himself? The Indian “cousin” claimed Guacanagarí was busy tending to a wound in his leg, but he would come the next day. There had been trouble, the Indian explained; two other chiefs, Caonabó and Marieni, had launched an attack and set fire to Guacanagarí’s village.

The Indians returned to their canoes, promising to come back the next day with Guacanagarí, “leaving us behind, less worried for the night,” Chanca recalled. Morning revealed that the village “had been burnt to the ground and all the belongings had been burnt and destroyed but for a few woven pieces of fabric and cloth that the Indians had brought to throw in the houses. All of the Indians who could be seen there seemed very suspicious, did not dare to approach us and indeed fled at first. . . . We nonetheless tried to flatter them by passing out such things as harness bells and seed pearls.”

Columbus went ashore to inspect the destruction of the first European fort in the Indies, and from the moment he set foot on blood-soaked foreign soil and imagined the suffering of his men, his sense of mission changed permanently. He “felt much grief at the sight of ruins of the houses and the fort,” said his son Ferdinand. “Nothing remained of the houses except some smashed chests and such other wreckage as one sees in a land that has been devastated and put to the sack.” He left orders to clean out the fort’s well, and to dispose of the gold nearby, but there was no gold to be found, and the well had run dry.

Sailing upriver in search of someone who could explain what had happened, Columbus found the corpses of ten Spaniards, “miserably deformed and corrupted, smeared with dirt and foul blood, and hideously discolored,” Coma recalled. “They had lain out in the open neglected and unburied for almost three months.” The Admiral and his men offered prayers for their souls, and prepared a Christian burial. “I felt great pain,” Columbus reflected, “and though I know it happened through their own fault, there is much to be sad about in such an event, for me it is a punishment greater than any experienced by their relatives, because I wanted them to win great honor at little danger.” And so they would have, he believed, “had they governed themselves according to my instructions.” Those instructions were clear: “Above all they were to leave alone the women belonging to their fellows as well as those of the Indians.” Instead, the Spaniards recklessly “gave themselves over to eating and to the pleasure of women, and so they came to ruin and destroyed themselves.”

Soon after, aboard ship, the Indians informed the Spanish that every single man at La Navidad had died. Who, Columbus wanted to know, had killed them?

Guacanagarí’s deputy replied that Chief Caonabó and Chief Marieni had been responsible for burning the fort and wounding the Indians who sided with the Spanish. In fact, he wanted to fly to Guacanagarí’s side and return with him to Columbus. The distraught Spaniards let him go: another mistake. “The entire day we waited for them, and when we realized they were not returning,” they suspected that the Indians had gotten drunk on the wine served to them aboard ship, climbed into their teetering canoe, capsized it, and drowned.

It seemed impossible that God’s will would be thwarted in such a drastic manner. The
fortaleza
had served as the linchpin of Columbus’s colonial enterprise and its destruction placed the fleet and all 1,500 men at risk. Columbus had come to believe that divine forces had combined to assist him in his mission. Why had divine favor yielded to divine displeasure?

Columbus ordered a thorough search of the devastated site, not forgetting to look for subterranean caches of gold. They reached a hamlet of seven or eight huts abandoned by their inhabitants the moment they heard the approaching Europeans “after taking with them what they could and leaving the rest hidden in the grass.” Within the huts were items once belonging to the men stationed at La Navidad, “in particular a mantle so elegant that one could not explain why it had been brought from Castile.” The Spaniards retrieved trousers, a piece of cloth, and even “an anchor from the ship”—
Santa María
—“that the Admiral had lost during the previous expedition.” All of these artifacts caused the Spanish concern, especially a small, carefully wrought basket holding a human head. “We inferred it was the head of a father, a mother, or a very dear person, only to learn later that many of these were found similarly preserved.”

The elusive Indians’ choice of a site struck the Spanish as extremely odd. “These people are so savage that they have no rationality in seeking out a place to live,” Chanca wrote in exasperation, “so it appears strange to see how primitively those who live along the sea built their houses, which are all so overtaken by weeds and humidity that I am amazed at how they can possibly survive.” But weeds and humidity, along with poisonous insects, snakes, and fevers, would form their environment as long as they remained in these islands.

Columbus’s little search party reached an Indian village, received a reassuring tribute of gold, and learned more about the murder of the Christians by Caonabó and Marieni. Chanca reported “indications of quarrels among the Christians, since some of them had taken three women, others four.” The story could have been a fabrication to justify the slaughter. The Spanish accepted it at face value. “Therefore, we believed their misfortune was caused by jealousy,” Ferdinand said in resignation. He pointed out that his father had heard a comparable tale from Indians who “could say some words in Spanish and knew the names of all the Christians who had been left” at the fort. “They said that soon after the Admiral’s departure, they began to quarrel amongst themselves, each taking as many women and as much gold as he could.”

As pieced together by Ferdinand, Caonabó’s rampage built to a ghastly climax. “Arriving at the town by night, Caonabó set fire to the houses in which the Christians lived with their women, forcing them to flee in fright to the sea, where eight of them drowned; three others, whom the Indians could not identify, were killed ashore.” If there was any redeeming element to this grisly tale, it was that Guacanagarí had taken the side of the Christians and was wounded while fighting against Caonabó, just as Guacanagarí had claimed to Columbus.

If that was the case, the Admiral had an ally among the Indians, after all. “I believe this Guacanagarí is not really responsible for the death of our people,” he came to believe. “On the contrary, I am most obligated to him.” The pendulum in Columbus’s mind kept swinging, and he concluded that the Indians were too timid to have murdered the reckless Spaniards: “This also feeds my suspicion that the disaster might have come about from internal quarreling.”

 

The next morning, December 7, Columbus dispatched a caravel to search for a suitable place to build a new city. Another party, including Chanca, set forth with the same goal. Eventually they came to a “very safe port” suitable for settlement, presumed to be present-day Cap Haitien, on Haiti’s northern coast. They would have made this attractive harbor their next encampment, but Columbus decided it was too far from the gold mines he expected to find.

The scouting party did locate Guacanagarí, lying “on his pallet in a posture of one who suffers from wounds,” in Chanca’s careful wording. Deeply suspicious of the chieftain, Columbus’s men questioned him about the massacre at La Navidad, and Guacanagarí repeated the story that it had been the work of Caonabó and Marieni, who had also wounded his leg. He displayed the bandages, temporarily convincing the Spanish skeptics, and winning friends by giving each of his visitors a “golden jewel”—finely worked gold that they “hang on their ears and in the nostrils . . . not to show wealth, but to look good.”

The following day, Guacanagarí sent his brother to invite the Admiral himself to visit. “The Admiral went ashore along with most of the leaders and so well-dressed that they would have drawn praise even in a great city,” in Chanca’s words. Columbus took care to bring a few trinkets to reciprocate for the gold he and his men had received. They found Guacanagarí regally suspended in his hammock, accompanied by his wife, twelve ladies-in-waiting—all naked, or nearly so—various companions, and guards reclining watchfully on the ground: the Indian royal court. They had prepared carefully for their visitors.

“He did not get up,” Chanca said of the wily Indian leader. “He addressed us with a gesture of courtesy as best he could and showed deep emotion to the point of tears for the Christians’ deaths, and began talking about that, saying as best he could that a few died because of illness and others had gone to Caonabó’s territory to find the gold mine in the city and were killed there, while the rest had been seized and killed in their own camp.” As if to wish away the tragedy, or in recompense for lives lost, Guacanagarí presented Columbus with more gifts—gold, always gold—and belts and headgear adorned with semiprecious stones. The jewels twinkled, they glittered, and the crown was solid and substantial in his hands, conferring the illusion of power and mastery on its grateful, wide-eyed recipient. Guacanagarí then bestowed still more gifts: “eight hundred small figured white, green, and red stone beads together with one hundred figured gold beads, a royal gold crown, and three little gourds filled with gold grains,” said Columbus’s son Ferdinand.

For the moment, the Admiral was more stunned and flattered than bent on revenge for the deaths of his men, and appeared only too willing to cooperate with his host. The brilliance of gold put the lives of the barely mourned, practically anonymous men who had lost their lives at La Navidad into the shadows of obscurity. A leader who valued gold above the security of his men could be counted on to aspire to great accomplishments at great cost.

Columbus offered Guacanagarí the services of Chanca, the fleet’s physician, and the surgeon, both in attendance. Chanca stepped forward and indicated that he needed to inspect the chief ’s wound in the light of day; it was too dark inside the dwelling. The injured chieftain complied, limping and leaning on Chanca’s shoulder. “After he was seated, the surgeon approached him and started taking the bandages off.” Guacanagarí explained that the wound had been caused by a weapon made of stone. “When the leg was unbound, we gathered to examine it. It was obvious he felt no more pain in it than in the other leg, although he cleverly tried to show it hurt him very much.” Columbus and his men began to suspect that his men had lost their lives not through their own recklessness, or disease, or even starvation (an unlikely occurrence in this fertile land), but had been murdered, every last one of them, by Indians. Nevertheless, he decided the best course was to pretend that he still believed the chieftain’s improbable story, to the point of inviting him to dine aboard ship that evening.