Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (3 page)

 

 

 

Nautical mile:
approximately 6,080 feet

Fathom:
traditionally the distance between the fingertips of a person’s outstretched arms, or six feet

League:
approximately three nautical miles

 

With minor exceptions, dates are given in the Julian calendar, which had been in effect since 45 BC, and was the calendar Columbus used.

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII initiated a new calendar, still in use today, to compensate for accumulated errors in the Julian calendar. Ten days were omitted, so October 5, 1582, became October 15.

Thus, the eclipse Columbus experienced in Jamaica on February 29, 1504, corresponds to March 10, 1504, in the Gregorian calendar.

On Friday morning, October 12, Columbus ventured ashore, followed by the Pinzón brothers: Martín Alonso,
Pinta
’s captain, and Vicente Yáñez,
Niña
’s captain. Only hours before, these two contentious brothers had been ready to mutiny against Columbus, believing that he was leading them to certain destruction; now they were walking on land inhabited by well-meaning people. It was the moment of first contact.

Soon the two parties from separate hemispheres were engrossed in the most basic of rites, trade. The tawny-skinned inhabitants offered squawking, blinking parrots and skeins of cotton thread, for which they received tiny hawk’s bells, used to track birds in falconry, and glass beads from the pallid visitors. The officers unfurled the royal standard, while Columbus, seeking to validate his discovery, summoned the fleet’s secretary and comptroller to “witness that I was taking possession of this Island for the King and Queen.” In so doing, he claimed a modest coral island in the Bahamas, now generally assumed to be San Salvador.

 

T
he people of the island visited by Columbus were the Taínos, a widely distributed ethnic group, skilled at cultivating corn and yams, and making pottery. Despite their peaceful manner, they could be fierce warriors, but they had met their match. The arrival of the Spaniards in the New World heralded the extinction of the Taíno culture, but for now, the tribe possessed a blend of sophistication and innocence that Columbus tried to capture in his diary:

The Spaniards had come all this way, across the Ocean Sea, expecting to confront a superior civilization. How disconcerting to be confronted with “naked people” who were “very poor in everything.” Columbus and his men would have to be careful not to hurt them, rather than the other way around. “I saw some who had marks of wounds on their bodies, and made signs to them to ask what it was, and they showed me that people of other islands which are near came there and wished to capture them, and they defended themselves. And I believe that people do come here from the mainland to take them as slaves.”

Slaves
. The idea instantly struck Columbus as plausible, even desirable. “They ought to be good servants,” he continued, “and of good skill, for I see they repeat very quickly whatever was said to them.” And, in the same breath, he judged that “they would easily be made Christians, because it seemed to me that they belonged to no religion.” He planned to present six of these nameless, naked individuals to his royal sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella, “that they may learn to speak.”

 

I
n the morning, masses of Indians crowded the beach to gape at the three ships from afar. Others arrived by dugout (“fashioned like a long boat from the trunk of a tree”) carrying forty or fifty men, who propelled themselves with a curious object that the European sailors, despite their lifelong acquaintance with the ocean, had never before seen. Having no word for it, Columbus called it a “thing like a baker’s peel,” a broad, mostly flat blade attached to a long handle. We know it as a canoe paddle.

They brought additional gifts for Columbus, who dismissed them as “trifles too tedious to describe.” It was gold that he—and Spain—wanted, not trinkets or parrots. He glimpsed tiny amounts in the form of jewelry piercing their noses, and immediately began asking for the source of this precious metal. If his instincts were correct, the gold came from Çipango—Japan. “I intend to go and see if I can find the Island of Çipango,” he emphasized. He was confident that the gentle people in their dugout canoes would direct him to the island.

After this first encounter, Columbus’s fleet skirted the coast of San Salvador. Wherever they went, excitement erupted onshore. Some of the startled inhabitants offered food and drink, and others, both men and women, hastened into their boats shouting, “Come and see the men who come from the sky!” It seemed to Columbus that those ashore were giving thanks to God as they threw themselves on the ground.

He would have made other landfalls, but his nautical instinct warned him away from a “great reef of rocks which surrounded the whole of this island.” Infuriatingly, “inside this reef there are some shoal spots, but the sea moves no more than within a well,” and so he sailed on, and on, overwhelmed by the splendor of the Caribbean, its cobalt waters, cottony clouds, and periwinkle skies. To flatter Ferdinand and Isabella, he compared the spectacle to the countryside around Seville in the months of April and May, but in fact the pellucid ocean in which he found himself was even more gorgeous and beguiling. Columbus said that he “saw so many islands that I could not decide where to go first; and those men whom I had captured made signs to me that they were so many that they could not be counted, and called by their names more than a hundred.” He eventually decided to make for the largest landmass, estimating that it lay five leagues from the island he designated San Salvador.

Exhilarated and distracted, he did not linger at his new anchorage. “When from this island I saw another bigger one to the West, I made sail to navigate all that day until nightfall because otherwise I would not have been able to reach the western cape.” He called it Santa María de la Concepción, and dropped anchor there at sunset. The island is often assumed to be Rum Cay, to use its more mundane modern name, and one hardly befitting Columbus’s exalted sense of mission.

Driven by the search for gold, he had allowed his wily captives to lead him to this spot because those who dwelled there “wore very big bracelets of gold on their legs and arms.” When the ships approached the shore, the hostages escaped one by one, and Columbus belatedly realized he had been deceived. Irritated, he would have sailed on, but, he stated, “it was my wish to bypass no island without taking possession,” and so he did in the name of Castile, even though “having taken one you can claim all.” Such were the rules of exploration and empire as he understood them.

He dispatched several seamen in hot pursuit of the fugitives, chasing them ashore, but, as he ruefully noted, “they all fled like chickens.” When another dugout canoe innocently approached “with a man who came to trade a skein of cotton, some of the sailors jumped into the sea because he wouldn’t come aboard,” and seized the poor fellow as a replacement detainee. Observing from his vantage point on the poop deck, Columbus “sent for him and gave him a red cap and some little beads of green glass which I placed on his arm, and two hawk’s bells which I placed on his ears”—that is, the standard-issue trinkets of little value—“and I ordered him back to his dugout.”

L
ater, on Monday, October 15, his ships urged on by a southeasterly wind, Columbus cautiously navigated to another island, in all its features as described by Columbus consistent with Long Island, Bahamas. The island is eighty miles long and only four miles wide, and appears as a jagged pile of sand and rock rising above the surface of the ocean, which varies in hues from lush aubergine to sparkling white surrounded by a light blue corona.

Columbus kept his head about him as he gaped at the display and diligently recorded instructions for future navigators: “You must keep your eyes peeled when you wish to anchor, and not anchor near the shore, although the water is always very clear and you see the bottom. And among all these islands at a distance of two lombard—or cannon—shots off-shore there is so much depth that you can’t find the bottom”: advice for navigating Long Island that holds as true today as it did five centuries ago.

He was now almost as far north as he would go on this voyage, and once again his thoughts turned toward India. Columbus would have stayed to admire the setting—“very green and fertile and the air very balmy, and there may be many things that I don’t know”—but he was on a mission “to find gold” and the Grand Khan.

Complicating his task, he had entered into one of the most intricate mazes of islands and isthmuses on the planet. From the vantage point of the thermosphere, hundreds of miles above, the islands appear as scattered, burnished leaves flecked with gold and floating on liquid sapphire, slowly churning, blossoming, and fluorescing. From sea level, as Columbus and his men saw them, they were no less striking, seeming to rise from the heaving surface of the sea like apparitions, or fragments of stars or asteroids fallen to earth.