Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (4 page)

The people he encountered appeared to be participating in a timeless pageant, and Columbus, ever curious, jotted down his impressions. In the channel running between Santa María and Long Island, he came upon a man alone in a dugout canoe, paddling from one island to the other. “He carried a bit of his bread that would be about the size of your fist, and a calabash of water, and a lump of bright red earth powdered and then kneaded, and some dry leaves which must be something much valued among them, since they offered me some . . . as a gift.” The dry leaves happened to be among the oldest crops known to humanity, yet it was virtually unknown in Europe. Apparently, the leaves had been cured, and their pungent scent lingered in the air and imbued the pores of every one who handled it and inhaled its smoke. The leaves belonged to genus
Nicotiana
: the tobacco plant.

The man came alongside
Santa María
and gestured that he wished to come aboard. Columbus granted the request and “had his dugout hoisted on deck, and all he brought guarded, and ordered him to be given bread and honey and drink.” The Admiral vowed to “give him back all his stuff, that he may give a good account of us” and report that he was given all he needed by the emissary of the beneficent Sovereigns of Spain.

 

L
ate on October 16, Columbus’s modest altruistic gesture paid generous dividends. The fleet happened to be in search of anchorage, frustrated by the inability of soft coral reefs to provide a reliable stay against the agitation of the sea. The man whom he had given water, nourishment, and transport noticed the situation. “He had given such a good account of us that all this night aboard the ship [that] there was no want of dugouts, which brought us water and what they had. I ordered each to be given something, if only a few beads, 10 or 12 glass ones on a thread, and some brass jingles, such as are worth in Castile a maravedí each”—a Spanish coin worth about twelve cents.

Overcoming his reluctance to disembark, Columbus went ashore on Long Island, and was pleasantly surprised by the inhabitants, “a somewhat more domestic people, and tractable, and more subtle, because I observe that in bringing cotton to the ship and other things, they know better how to drive a bargain than the others.” To his relief, the islanders wore clothing, which seemed to reflect their sophistication and civility. “I saw clothes of cotton made like short cloaks, and the people are better disposed, and the women wear in front of their bodies a small piece of cotton which barely covers their genitals.”

Lush, dark vegetation blanketed the island. Impenetrable mangroves overhung ledges, casting dismal shadows. Spiky beach plums obstructed the way to the island’s interior. Those able to hack a path through the brush might come upon a basin of murky water swaying within a deep blue hole. In another part of the island, caves tempted the bravest or most foolhardy to explore their depths. It was all strange and different from anything the men had ever witnessed. “I saw many trees very unlike ours,” Columbus marveled, “and many of them have their branches of different kinds, and all on one trunk, and one twig is of one kind and another of another, and so unlike that it is the greatest wonder of the world. How great is the diversity of one kind from the other!” He had stumbled across flora following a separate evolutionary path from its European counterparts. Catching his breath, he resumed, “For instance, one branch has leaves like a cane, others like mastic; and thus on one tree five or six kinds, and all so different.” How could this be? They were not grafted by human hands, “for one can say the grafting is spontaneous.” No matter what plant Columbus was describing, his astonishment was apparent. The same wild proliferation could be found among fish—“so unlike ours that it is marvelous; they have some like dories, of the brightest colors in the world, blue, yellow, red, and of all colors, and others painted in a thousand ways; and the colors are so bright, that there is no man would not marvel and would not take great delight in seeing them; also there are whales.” Sheer surprise and enchantment hijacked his grandiose agenda. Or were the snares of this world leading him fatally astray?

 

C
olumbus, normally so purposeful, wandered through the Bahamas for a full week, as if through a dreamscape. “I discovered a very wonderful harbor with one mouth, or rather one might say two mouths, for it has an island in the middle, and both are very narrow, and within it is wide enough for 100 ships, if it were deep and clean,” he recorded on October 17 as he approached Cape Santa María. “During this time I walked among some trees which were the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen, viewing as much verdure in so great development as in the month of May in Andalusia, and all the trees were as different from ours as day from night.” He was charmed and baffled by the spectacle. “Nobody could say what they were, nor compare them to others of Castile.” The sights of so many unidentifiable trees and plants and flowers caused him “great grief,” almost as if he were blind or speechless.

Only gold roused him from his reveries. The moment he spotted a man “who had in his nose a gold stud” engraved with characters, he urgently tried to strike a deal, “and they answered me that never had anyone dared to barter for it.” If his intuition proved correct, the gold stud bore Chinese or perhaps Japanese inscriptions, but he was unable to examine it.

The next day “[t]here came so fair and sweet a smell of flowers and trees from the land, that it was the sweetest thing in the world.” And ahead, a smaller island, and another, so many that he despaired of exploring them all “because I couldn’t do it in fifty years, for I wish to see and discover the most that I can before returning to Your Highnesses (Our Lord willing) in April.”
Fifty years
: he was just beginning to appreciate the enormity and incomprehensibility of the lands he had found. Everything was strange and different—the vegetation, the people, the musky odor of flowers wafting from a nearby island. It was only October, the New World only a week old in his awareness. More than six months remained until he was due back in Spain, and anything could happen in this unexplored world.

 

As the entries in his diary increased, he related his experiences at sea with confidence and eloquence. On its surface, the diary is meant to convey the startling drama and novelty of his voyage, in which everything was a discovery, every experience and sensation was being registered for the first time by the European sensibility, and with European sensitivity—more specifically, the regal Castilian sensibility that Columbus longed to emulate. He tried to blend imperiousness and intelligence, as if holding the world at arm’s length to study it. For Columbus, an expatriate from Genoa, a merchant sailor and self-taught navigator, the aristocratic tone was a carefully crafted impersonation notable for what he omitted or downplayed or misunderstood as much as the startling discoveries he recorded.

As his voyage proceeded, the diary subtly transformed itself into a manifesto of discovery, and beyond that, a mirror into which he could not stop looking as it came to reflect his vision, his ambition, his will to greatness, himself. In his own mind, his experiences and observations were so persuasive that they interfered with his ability to respond to the ever-changing reality of exploration. Instead, he was confined by his rigid expectations.

To complicate matters, students of his remarkable diary must rely on a transcription of the original journal of the first voyage, which has been lost. It comes down through two main sources. The first is Columbus’s natural, or illegitimate, son Ferdinand, a sailor turned historian; the second is Bartolomé de Las Casas, the friar and chronicler. Ferdinand naturally sought to burnish his father’s tarnished reputation, while Las Casas sought a deep enough circle in hell in which to cast the explorer. But Las Casas’s attitude toward Columbus is more nuanced than that of a single-minded critic. He was aware of the complexity of the undertaking, to which he was an eyewitness and participant, yet also capable of seeing events in a larger historical context, living both in the moment and out of it. He lacked a holograph—the handwritten version—of the journal; instead, he worked from a flawed version about which he registered occasional scholarly complaints. In addition to routine copying errors, the unknown scribe on whom Las Casas relied had a troubling tendency to confuse “miles” with “leagues,” and even “east” with “west.” Such mistakes made it difficult to retrace Columbus’s route precisely.

As a champion of the dignity and human rights of the Indians, Las Casas included numerous passages in which Columbus admired his hosts. Las Casas switches frequently between direct quotation of the copy before him, in which Columbus speaks in the first person, and detailed summaries in which the Admiral is referred to in the third person, giving the impression that Columbus, like Caesar, referred to himself in that manner. (The scrupulous Las Casas distinguishes between the two by using quotation marks for direct quotations.)

Columbus’s vague, occasionally deceptive reports of tides, harbors, shoals, and sailing tactics complicated matters further. These descriptions were destined to cause centuries of chroniclers and would-be explorers to gnash their teeth over the absence of precise and useful navigational information—which was Columbus’s intention. Divulging his navigational theories and practices ran counter to his ingrained Genoese instincts as a pilot and mariner. It was more dangerous to reveal than conceal; if he was not careful, he might find himself marooned in Seville, or Lisbon, watching copycat missions exploit his discoveries. So he fell back on generic descriptions of beaches, harbors, tides, and shoals in an effort to cover his wake even as he wrote with an eye on posterity.

Alternately puzzled and overconfident, he wrestled with the most basic problem of exploration: his location. His subject was his discovery of “India,” but his principal concern remained himself, his travails, and his sense of heroism. Whenever Columbus stood outside the momentous events of explorations and calmly retold his account, the unfolding of God’s will became an important theme; when he was in the service of the Lord, there were no accidents, only degrees of devotion. In the service of the Lord, he saw himself as a priest of exploration.

But when Columbus’s convictions outran reality, or when his vanity and anxiety got the better of him, he succumbed to his darker instincts. He seemed oblivious to the well-being of others, and alarmingly ready to sacrifice all for an exalted, unattainable goal, whether it was the discovery of the Grand Khan’s empire or the liberation of Jerusalem. In these dramas, he saw himself as a tormented, heroic figure. The greater his fantasies, the more inhuman he became. His journal, in part a record of his passionate instability, records some of his suffering from a sense of dread and oppression, relieved mainly by intimations of glory and omnipotence. He was more than a discoverer, he was an intensifier of both his voyages and his inner struggles. This penchant for self-dramatization is part of the reason Columbus’s exploits are so memorable; he insisted on making them so.

As the journal gathered substance, it became an important record of the voyage, the rudder of the Admiral’s psyche, a stay against both actual and psychic storms. It was not, however, a source of comfort to Columbus. In place of the expected sense of vindication, the Admiral often sounds ever more frantic and embattled by his discoveries and their challenges. He becomes aware that he is entering into a lasting struggle in which every triumph seems to be accompanied by a misstep, unforeseen consequences, or even a potential crime. Paradoxically, as his power and prominence (in his own mind) increase, so does his vulnerability—to Indians, to rivals such as the Pinzón brothers, to a dimly perceived sense that the stakes of the voyage are higher and more ambiguous than those he originally formulated. Rather than finding a nautical analogue to Marco Polo’s travels, and a path to personal wealth, he had blundered into an “other world,” as he came to call it, where there were no maps to guide him. He was lost and misguided for all practical purposes, yet he could not admit that possibility to himself and the others on the voyage; it was much better to insist that he had not yet found what they sought, but that conviction alone did not offer much comfort. The more he found, the more frantic he became, as the empire he sought revealed itself to be greater and more varied than he had imagined.

 

A
s Columbus went island-hopping, marveling at the “singing of the little birds” and the “grass like April in Andalusia,” while he looked for gold, he heard from a cacique about a “large island” that the explorer reflexively decided “must be Japan.” And visiting that island nation, he was “determined to go to the mainland,” that is, China, “and to the city of Quinsay,” Marco Polo’s antique term for the Song dynasty capital, now known as Hangzhou, the richest and largest city in the medieval world. In this magnificent setting, Columbus imagined himself presenting “Your Highnesses’ letters to the Grand Khan, and to beg a reply and come home with it.”

Although he was situated in the midst of the Bahamas, he remained convinced that he had arrived at the doorstep of Asia. In reality, Quinsay lay more than eight thousand miles west of his position in the Caribbean, but these dimensions contradicted his firmly held assumptions about the size of the globe and the placement of continents—not that other navigators or cosmographers in Europe had a more accurate notion of these things. The precise globes that Columbus studied are not known, but one of the most influential representations of the day, by Martin Behaim, a German mapmaker in the service of Portugal, did indicate that Çipango was at hand. Columbus could not admit the possibility that these globes and all their assumptions might be spectacularly wrong.

When not contemplating his China delusion, Columbus returned to his other chimera: gold.

He spent a night and the following day, October 22, “waiting to see if the king here or other people would bring gold or anything substantial.” Many came to observe, some naked, others painted red, black, or white, offering cotton or other local items in exchange for simple European utensils. The only gold in evidence took the form of jewelry that some of the Indians wore “hanging from the nose.” They were willing to exchange these items for hawk’s bells, but upon examining the haul, he complained, “There’s so little that it is nothing at all.”