A Voyage Long and Strange

by Tony Horwitz

  The Admiral was soon freed, but he no longer commanded much trust or backing in Spain. He’d shown himself an incompetent administrator, and had failed to deliver on his promise of great riches in Hispaniola. His advocacy of the slave trade—at one point, he proposed the trafficking of four thousand natives yearly—also discomfited Spain’s monarchs. The Crown’s contradictory policy toward Indians called for conversion and “benign subjection.” While sanctioning the enslavement of alleged cannibals, the Crown freed and returned home some of the Hispaniola natives whom Columbus sent for sale in Spain.

  The monarchs also began chipping away at the Admiral’s many privileges. They suspended his governorship of Hispaniola and allowed others to embark on voyages of their own, breaking Columbus’s monopoly on trade and discovery. When, after much hesitation, they authorized another voyage by Columbus, it was to explore only; the Admiral was barred from returning to Hispaniola.

  Columbus’s fourth and final voyage, in 1500, ended in calamity. After reaching Central America—which he believed was the site of King Solomon’s mines—his worm-eaten ships took on so much water that he had to run them aground in Jamaica. He was marooned there for a year, until rescued by several men who succeeded in canoeing to Hispaniola and securing another vessel. By then, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea had lost all four of his ships, a quarter of his sailors, and what little remained of his reputation.

  Columbus made it back to Spain in 1504, just a few weeks before the death of his longtime patron, Queen Isabel. He was now past fifty and crippled by arthritis, yet he trailed the peripatetic royal court on mule-back, vainly pleading for the privileges and riches he felt were still owed him. One of his last surviving letters, asking the monarchs for “restitution of my honor and losses,” captures the self-pitying despair of his final years. “I am ruined,” he wrote, “alone, desolate, infirm, daily expecting death. . . . Weep for me, whoever has charity, truth and justice!”

  In May 1506, still on the Crown’s trail, Columbus died, “much afflicted,” wrote his son Ferdinand, “by grief at seeing himself fallen from his high estate, as well as by other ills.” Columbus’s descendants ultimately lost all but a few of his hereditary titles.

  In a final insult, the most enduring honor of all went to a fellow Italian who had befriended Columbus in his last years. “He is a very honorable man and always desirous of pleasing me,” wrote Columbus, ever a poor judge of character, “and is determined to do everything possible for me.” The man’s name was Amerigo Vespucci.

  A well-connected Florentine merchant and a scion of the Medicis, Vespucci moved to Seville and outfitted fleets crossing the Atlantic. He sailed to the Indies several times between 1499 and 1502, under both Spanish and Portuguese auspices, and claimed to be a great navigator. But his true genius was for hype and self-promotion.

  “I hope to be famous for many an age,” he wrote, in one of the embellished accounts he gave of his voyages. Vespucci invented some episodes and lifted others from Columbus’s writing. Unlike the Admiral, though, he showed great flair for lubricious tales designed to titillate his European audience.

  Native women, he claimed, were giantesses—“taller kneeling than I am standing”—and impervious to age and childbearing, with taut wombs and breasts that never sagged. “Being very lustful,” Vespucci wrote, the women used exotic devices and insect venom to “make their husbands’ members swell” to fantastic size. Best of all, they were “very desirous to copulate with us Christians,” and native men regarded it as a “great token of friendship” to give the Christians one of their daughters, “even when she is a young virgin.” Not surprisingly, Vespucci’s account became an instant bestseller.

  Amazons, or women warriors, from a Dutch edition (ca. 1507) of Vespucci’s account of his voyage to South America

  Vespucci also claimed to have reached South America in 1497, a year before Columbus arrived there on his third voyage. Vespucci referred to the region as “a new world,” unknown to “our ancestors.” Though little is known about his travels, scholars have determined that he couldn’t have reached South America until 1499, after Columbus did. Nor is it clear that Vespucci regarded the “new world” as separate from Asia. Columbus also called South America “an other world,” and a “very large continent which until now has remained unknown”—while still believing he was somewhere in the Far East.

  But some scholars in Europe had come to doubt that these lands were part of Asia, and they found support for this belief in Vespucci’s account. In 1507, a year after Columbus’s death, the German geographer Martin Waldseemüller published a text and map adding a “fourth part” to the known world of Europe, Asia, and Africa. “I see no reason why one should justly object to calling this part Amerige,” Waldseemüller wrote, “or America, after Amerigo, its discoverer, a man of great ability.” His revised world map had “America” engraved next to a landmass roughly resembling Brazil.

  Waldseemüller later changed his mind and dropped the name from a subsequent edition. But “America” was reprised in 1538 by the great cartographer Gerard Mercator, who applied it to continents both north and south.

  “Strange,” lamented Ralph Waldo Emerson, “that broad America must wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickledealer at Seville, who . . . managed in this lying world to supplant Columbus and baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name.”

  AFTER SEVERAL DAYS in Santo Domingo, I met a museum guide named Carlos who taught English as his second job and agreed to take on a third, as my translator. Lean and handsome, with close-cropped black hair, Carlos had a firmly set jaw that emphasized his glumness. The only time he smiled was when I told him about my fruitless phone calls and failed appointments.

  “El fucu de Colón,” he said.

  “El what?”

  “Fucu. That means curse or jinx.” Most Dominicans, he explained, believed Columbus brought bad luck. Even mentioning his name risked misfortune. Few businesses were named for the navigator, and the ones that were had gone bust. “Of course, our luck in the D.R. is bad to begin with,” Carlos said. “But with Columbus it is worse.”

  “So that’s why no one will meet with me?”

  “Probably not. To see anyone, you must know someone who knows someone. Or you must pay.”

  Carlos didn’t know anyone, except other ill-paid guides around the Zona Colonial. But he was willing, for a modest wage, to risk assisting my cursed pursuit of Columbus.

  We began where the navigator’s story ends, at the alleged resting places of his remains: El Faro a Colón, the Columbus Lighthouse. The Faro occupied a vast park on the other side of the Ozama River from the colonial district. The massive scale and layout of the grounds—a rectilinear expanse decked with flags, pavilions, and artificial ponds—reminded me at first of the Mall in Washington, D.C. Except that the Faro was a memorial space devoted to a single shrine: an enormous concrete cross laid on the ground.

  “Monumental” seemed too minimalist a word to describe it. The Faro was almost seven hundred feet long and sloped upward, with the top of the cross reaching a height of ten stories. The Faro was also equipped with 150 powerful searchlights, and a beacon designed to project a crucifix into the night sky that was visible in Puerto Rico, two hundred miles away. I hadn’t seen a monument so grandiose, and so at odds with its environs, since visiting Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

  But even the mammoth Faro was subject to the Columbus jinx. Conceived during a pan-American conference in 1923, the project lay dormant for lack of funds until the late 1980s, when the Dominican strongman, President Joaquín Balaguer, rushed to build the monument in time for the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s sail. He ordered the razing of a shantytown on the site, forcibly relocating thousands of residents, and channeled almost all the poor nation’s cement and about $100 million of its scarce funds into erecting the lighthouse.

  Then the fucu struck. Tests of the beacon caused city-wide blackouts and protests by Dominicans. Balaguer’s sister dro
pped dead within hours of visiting the Faro. The pope, scheduled to inaugurate the monument, was diagnosed with cancer. He also came down with political doubts about aligning himself with the structure, which had become a symbol of the nation’s corrupt, dictatorial, and oligarchic rule. Before long, the searchlights and beacon had to be shut down; the 300,000-watt light show was an insult to the thousands of city dwellers who lacked power.

  So there it stood: a lighthouse without light. In fact, nothing about the Faro fit its name. It didn’t soar. It squatted, blocky and gray and streaked with grime, like a neglected public housing project. Carlos walked me to the edge of the park surrounding the supine cross, and pointed at a six-foot coral and concrete barrier topped with barbed wire. “We call this el muro de la vergüenza,” he said, “the wall of shame.” The barrier had been built to shield visitors to the Faro from the impoverished neighborhood beside it.

  Returning to the lighthouse, we entered through a slit in one of its massive walls. The Faro was as cheerless within as it was forbidding without. The arms of the cross formed narrow corridors between towering walls of concrete. The Faro’s architect had designed these claustrophobic “canyons,” he wrote, to convey “the gloom, confinement and superstition of Columbus’s own time.” The beacon atop the Faro was meant to contrast with the interior and symbolize modern progress.

  This may have sounded inspired on paper. In practice, with the beacon shut off, there was only the gloom and confinement. The design also diminished Columbus’s mausoleum, which sat in the space where the two arms of the cross met. Ornately carved from Carrara marble, with steps leading up to an arched door, the crypt looked like a toy cathedral deposited on the floor of a prison block. A guard leaned on a rifle before the tomb. He was the only person in sight.

  Behind him, inside the crypt, lay the bones of the Great Discoverer. Or possibly not. Columbus was maddeningly elusive, even in death. In 1506, he’d been buried without fanfare in the Spanish town of Valladolid, and was moved three years later to a monastery in Seville. The body of his son Diego joined him there in 1526. Then, in about 1541, Diego’s widow arranged for father and son to be shipped to Hispaniola, where Columbus had stated he wished to be buried. Christopher and Diego were interred beside the altar of Santo Domingo’s cathedral. But the stone or inscription marking the spot was covered up, to protect the remains from the pirates who frequently looted the city.

  In 1795, Spain ceded its colony in Hispaniola to Napoleon. So that the navigator’s remains would not fall into the hands of the perfidious French, a box believed to contain Columbus’s bones was removed to Spanish-held Havana. At the end of the nineteenth century, Spain lost Cuba, too, and Columbus’s peripatetic remains went to sea again, returning across the Atlantic to the soaring Gothic cathedral in Seville.

  In 1877, however, workmen at the Santo Domingo cathedral had unearthed a lead box with bones inside and an inscription that read, “Illustrious and esteemed gentleman, Don Cristóbal Colón.” This raised the possibility that the wrong remains—those of Diego—had been sent to Cuba and later to Spain. Dominicans certainly believed so, and had built the grand mausoleum before me to hold what was left of the navigator.

  Spanish researchers had long disputed the Dominican claim, casting doubt on the coffer’s inscription and other evidence. Just before my visit, forensic geneticists in Spain had reignited the controversy by announcing plans to DNA-test the bones inside the Seville crypt. Despite repeated requests over the years, the D.R. refused to allow study of the Faro’s bones. This raised suspicions that Dominicans preferred that their claim on Columbus not be subject to scientific analysis. The Faro was a big enough albatross without its centerpiece turning out to be the wrong man’s dust.

  “It is Columbus, absolutely,” said a guide named Leopoldo, who materialized out of the Faro’s gloom and joined us by the crypt. “Spain wants to take our tourists.”

  If so, there weren’t many to steal. At the moment, Carlos and I were the only visitors. “But come,” Leopoldo said, “let me show you the museum.”

  He led us down one of the long corridors, our footfalls echoing in the empty concrete canyon. Then we turned through a doorway and into a large room with a painting of Columbus, copies of books he’d read, the marriage certificate of Ferdinand and Isabel, and other displays. I barely had time to study this exhibit before Leopoldo took my arm. “Come, come. We have sixty-four more rooms to visit.”

  “Museum” didn’t capture the Faro’s interior, just as “lighthouse” misrepresented its exterior. Tucked within the monument’s walls was a collection that covered a city block. The Faro had been intended to honor not only Columbus, but also the global network he helped create: a monument, its builders proclaimed, to world peace. So Dominicans had set aside space—immensities of space—for countries from around the world to put up national displays, rather in the manner of an old-time world exposition.

  The first room we’d visited was Spain’s. Next was Japan’s, which displayed samurai armor and a picture of a golden pagoda. Most nations followed this model, exhibiting proud emblems of their history and culture. China: calligraphy and Ming vases. Russia: a samovar and a set of Matryoshka nesting dolls. And so on through the continents until we reached the Americas. Guatemala displayed a Mayan vase, Ecuador a set of twenty-five-hundred-year-old bowls that Leopoldo said were worth millions of dollars. As we toured room after room, I began to wonder how my own country would present itself in this ersatz United Nations.

  We went through another door and there it was, spanning two walls. On one hung a few small photographs of July 4 celebrations: fireworks and flag-waving. The other wall, much more prominent, was covered in poster-sized blowups of newspaper front pages. All were dated September 12, 2001, and bore images of the previous day’s attack on New York’s Twin Towers.

  “DAY OF TERROR,” read the hugely enlarged headline from the New Hampshire Concord Monitor.

  “HOW MANY DEAD?” (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette).

  “OUR NATION SAW EVIL” (Raleigh News and Observer).

  “WAR AT HOME” (Dallas Morning News).

  No other items were displayed. Registering the shock on my face, Leopoldo shook his head sympathetically. “I am so sorry,” he said. “You must think of it every day.”

  What I felt at that moment wasn’t sorrow for the 9/11 victims, but mortification. Tiny Ecuador gave precious pottery as a token of its heritage. My nation, the hemisphere’s richest, offered only this: Share our fear and feel our pain. In a venue designed to promote global amity and understanding, the United States chose to emphasize how divided and troubled the world remained. It was a minor thing, really, a display in a little-visited Dominican museum. But still, the exhibit rankled: my own small wall of shame.

  “I leave you to visit the rest on your own,” Leopoldo said, accepting a tip before melting back into the gloom. “The rest” was several more floors, with odd displays of Dominican history: rusted cannons, old coins, the skeleton of a soldier with a bullet in his ribs. The higher Carlos and I went, the dimmer and emptier the display cases became, until there was nothing to observe but dozing guards. The Faro was the largest and strangest museum I’d ever visited.

  Descending to the ground floor, we became lost in a warren of dark offices. Stumbling into one, we found a man in a suit with a scale model of the Faro on his desk. This turned out to be the Faro’s administrator, Teódulo Mercedes, one of the many people I’d phoned repeatedly without success. He seemed as startled to see us as we were to find him: an official caught in the act of doing his official job.

  Worried he might somehow dematerialize, I jumped straight to the object of my quest. Who, I asked, was buried in Columbus’s tomb?

  Teódulo chuckled. “It is Columbus, this is certain,” he said, without specifying Christopher or Diego. “But let us talk of other things.”

  The Faro’s 45,850 cubic yards of concrete, for instance, and 125 bathrooms. Incredibly, the original design had called for the buil
ding to be a third larger. An engineer by training, Teódulo went on for half an hour, cataloguing the Faro’s immensity. “It is like the Eiffel Tower in France,” he concluded, “a symbol of our country.”

  This was true: the D.R. was in trouble, and so was the monument. Apart from school groups, Teódulo acknowledged, the Faro attracted few visitors. And there was the embarrassing problem of the darkened searchlights, which the D.R. couldn’t afford to turn on.

  Encouraged by his frankness, I steered us back to Columbus’s remains. Teódulo sighed. “The Spanish made a mistake, they took the wrong bones. Now they must protect their claim. This is understandable.”

  If the Spanish were wrong, why not let them test the remains here?

  “The method they use is not certain,” he replied. “Why disturb the bones for nothing? We know we are right. This will all be revealed on Sunday.”

  Sunday was October 12, Columbus’s landing date, commemorated each year at the Faro with a formal ceremony attended by Dominican dignitaries. Teódulo said a churchman would open the locked coffin so those in attendance could view the great man’s remains. I felt a flutter in my chest, as Columbus must have whenever he heard fresh news of gold. Very few outsiders had ever glimpsed the bones. The elusive Admiral, or what was left of him, lay almost within my sight.

  I asked Teódulo if there was any chance an American writer, a great admirer of Columbus and of the Dominican Republic, could be on hand to document this glorious event. The engineer smiled. “Yes, you may come,” he said, “and if I am right, for you I will have a very big surprise.”

  I SPENT THE few days until the twelfth learning about the people Columbus called los Indios. In the D.R., they are known as Taino, a native word that apparently meant “good” and was used by islanders to distinguish themselves from their enemies, the Caribs. The Taino descended from natives who had migrated from the South American mainland over two millennia earlier. While there were variations in dialect and custom, the islanders Columbus encountered across the Caribbean belonged to the same linguistic and cultural family.