Encounters Unforeseen- 1492 Retold
Page 1
All Persons Press
New York, New York
First published in 2017 by All Persons Press
Encounters Unforeseen: 1492 Retold
Copyright © 2017 Andrew Rowen
All rights reserved.
Interior Maps and Illustrations by David Atkinson.
Permissions and Credits noted in List of Maps and Illustrations and Sources.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017911346
ISBN13: 978-0-9991961-1-3
Cover and Book Design by Glen Edelstein, Hudson Valley Book Design
Cover Illustration by Robert Hunt
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the copyright owner is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
CONTENTS
Dedication
List of Maps and Illustrations
HISTORICAL NOTE
PROLOGUE: 1455
I: 1455–1460, CHILDHOOD, LESSONS, LEGACY
II: 1460S, YOUTH
III: 1470S, ASCENSION
IV: 1480–1485, AMBITION
V: 1485–1490, FAITH
VI: 1490–AUGUST 2, 1492, DESTINY
VII: CROSSING THE SEA OF DARKNESS
VIII: LUCAYAN ISLANDS
IX: CUBA
X: HAITI
XI: NORTHERN CROSSING
XII: LISBON TO BARCELONA
XIII: SPRING 1493
XIV: SUMMER 1493
Participants, Taíno Spirits, Popes, and Conventions, with Family Tree for European Royalty
Glossary of Taíno Words
Sources
Acknowledgments
To my late mother, who taught me to listen to the voice and soul of each person, and my father, who taught me to make up my own mind.
LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
All maps and illustrations are from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries other than those designated by an asterisk, which have been drawn by David Atkinson.
Taíno in hammock drawn by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia General y Natural de Las Indias. Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1851–1855, vol. 1, pl. 1. Image from Biodiversity Heritage Library.
Principal Chiefdoms in Haiti and the Dominican Republic before 1492.*
Principal Kingdoms in Spain and Portugal before 1492.*
Atlantic World Map.*
The Taíno Caribbean.*
Yúcahu.*
Genove la Superba, engraving from the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493.
Catalan World Map, 1450. Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, Modena (Italy). Image from Getty Images.
Bohío and caney drawn by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia General y Natural de Las Indias. Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1851–1855, vol. 1, pl. 1. Image from Biodiversity Heritage Library.
Cohaba table, duhos, and vomit sticks.*
Guabancex.*
Map of Island of Chios, Liber insularum Archipelagi, Cristoforo Buondelmonti, ca. 1465–1475. Reprinted with permission of Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Deminán Caracaracol.*
World map in Ptolemy’s second projection. Ulm edition of 1482.
Toscanelli Chart, as reconstructed in Justin Winsor’s Narrative and Critical History of America. Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1889.
European portion of Nicholas Germanus’s world map, ca. 1467–1474.
Santa María de Guadalupe.*
Canary Islands, Madeira and Porto Santo, and Azores, a portion of the Cantino World Map of 1502. Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, Modena (Italy).
São Jorge da Mina, a portion of the Cantino World Map of 1502. Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, Modena (Italy).
Attabeira.*
Martin Behaim’s 1492 world globe reduced to a Mercator projection, in John Fiske’s The Discovery of America. Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1902.
Santa María de la Rábida.*
Crucifixion altar cross.*
Puerto de Martín Alonso, from Luz de Navegantes, de Vellerino de Villalobos, 1592. Reprinted with permission of Universidad de Salamanca (Spain), Biblioteca General Histórica, Ms. 291.
Monte Christi, from Luz de Navegantes, de Vellerino de Villalobos, 1592. Reprinted with permission of Universidad de Salamanca (Spain), Biblioteca General Histórica, Ms. 291.
Columbus’s map of Northern Haiti, 1493. Colección Duques de Alba.
Portion of Juan de la Cosa’s World Map, 1500. Naval Museum, Madrid. Route of Columbus’s voyage superimposed by David Atkinson.*
Seville in the sixteenth century. Civitates Orbis Terrarum.
Columbus’s signature, from Samuel Eliot Morison’s Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. New York: Heritage, 1963.
Columbus’s Coat of Arms, as painted in the La Rábida Monastery, Palos, Spain. Image from Alamy, Inc.
HISTORICAL NOTE
This novel dramatizes the history leading to Columbus’s first encounters with Native Americans from a bicultural perspective, fictionalizing Native American beliefs, thoughts, and actions side by side with those of Europeans. The history is presented through short stories alternating among three historic chieftains of the Taíno peoples of the Caribbean and a Taíno captive and comparable stories of Columbus and Spain’s Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. The narrative portrays the life experiences each protagonist brought to the encounters and then his or her astonishment, fears, and objectives in 1492 and 1493. The focus extends beyond Columbus’s voyage of “discovery” to depict the entirety of the encounters from the Native American perspective, including the Taíno “discovery” of Europe, when Columbus brings the captive and other Taínos back to Spain, as well as the chieftains’ reactions to the abusive garrison of seamen Columbus then leaves behind in the Caribbean. I seek to explore how and why Taínos and Europeans each made decisions and to avoid the traditional Columbus- and European-centric focus of most histories of the events, including those critical of Columbus and colonialism. The Taíno protagonists are neither merely victims nor statistics, but personalities and actors just as the Europeans.
The outcome we know was uncertain or indiscernible to the participants, and I have tried to present their thoughts and actions from youth through 1493 as they would have lived them day to day, often enveloped in confusion or chaos, without imposing the historical conclusions of a history written with hindsight or inventing an overarching story plot typical of traditional fiction. Throughout, I have sought historical validity and considered first primary sources written by those who witnessed the events, knew the participants, or lived in the sixteenth century. Each participant’s thoughts and actions are presented consistent with my interpretation of the historical record to the extent one exists or fictionalized in a manner I believe likely could have occurred, with the methodology noted below.
The Taínos had no written history, and the only contemporaneous written accounts of the encounters are by the conquering Europeans, reflecting the conquerors’ knowledge and perspective and sometimes lacking credibility. The pre-1492 stories of the Taíno chieftains—Caonabó, Guacanagarí, and Guarionex—and the Taíno captive depict the few events known to have occurred, including
the rulers’ ascensions to power, their marriages, and a religious prophecy of genocide. Within this framework, the stories are fictionalized based on descriptions of Taíno culture in the writings of contemporary Europeans (such as Peter Martyr d’Anghera, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Ramón Pané, and Columbus himself) and twenty-first-century anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists. Commencing October 12, 1492, the stories are constructed by extrapolating from the conquerors’ day-to-day accounts of the encounter (to the extent credible), including Columbus’s Journal, the biography written by his son Ferdinand, and Las Casas’s Historia de las Indias, what the Taínos then experienced—fictionalizing the conquered’s account to mirror the conquerors’.
With respect to the Europeans, vastly more is known, but the historical record is incomplete and, as to youth, sparse. The stories of Isabella’s youth and Columbus’s youth and early adulthood are almost as fictional as the pre-1492 Taíno stories and are similarly constructed on the basis of what is known of contemporaneous Castilian, Genoese, and Portuguese society. The passages regarding Columbus’s pre-1492 ocean-sailing experience are founded in but a few sentences in primary sources, the validity of which historians debate, and are fictionalized in part based on other sources indicating the conditions and purposes for which similar voyages occurred in the fifteenth century. Following youth, the stories of Isabella and Ferdinand reflect the record provided by court chroniclers and official documents, as do the Columbus stories commencing with his voyage, but events and thoughts are fictionalized with a specificity that far exceeds this record.
The novel also seeks a rounded presentation of European history by portraying both the larger Atlantic world into which the participants were born and how the European sovereigns ruled over their very own subjects and subjugated other Old World peoples, closely prelude to encountering Native Americans. A prologue introduces Old World seaborne commerce, based on the European merchant’s own account. Stories depict Isabella and Ferdinand’s subjugation and Christianization of the Canary Islands, establishment of the Inquisition, conquest of the Islamic kingdom of Grenada, and expulsion of the Jews from Spain, as well as the Portuguese establishment of African trading colonies as they sought to reach the Indies first by circumventing Africa. These and other stories explore the European justifications for conquest and enslavement of other peoples and forced religious conversion of them and religious minorities. They also illustrate the threats to European Christian civilization posed by Islam’s spread and chronicle the expansion of European geographic knowledge and dominion. As a result, the novel includes more pre-encounter European stories than Taíno.
I have tried to dramatize thoughts from the participants’ perspectives in the fifteenth century, including those of rulers and common subjects, masters and servants, slaves, and concubines. For both Taínos and Europeans, religion was central to the individual’s identity and understanding of the world, and the stories present spirits, God, and saints as ever present. Taíno and European societies were both organized by social caste and defined different roles for men and women, and the Europeans practiced slavery. While many of the thoughts related are readily understood as improper and wrong in a modern perspective, frequently it is clear many participants perceived otherwise. Columbus’s unspoken thoughts presented during the encounters embody the concepts underlying the European subjugation of Native Americans over the next centuries. I have sought to fictionalize thoughts accurately as I believe they would have been, to avoid—undoubtedly imperfectly—my own embellishment of hero or villain beyond that, and to leave moral and historical judgments regarding Columbus and others as so fictionalized for the reader.
Stories are told from the perspective of the participants’ probable knowledge of geography at the time of the story, and all maps presented herein are from the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, except the four modern maps immediately following this historical note. Taínos and Europeans both believed places existed—sometimes known through religious tradition—that today we know do not exist, and these places are presented as real when the participants would have so believed. The modern maps show the principal Taíno chiefdoms and Hispanic kingdoms existing before 1492, the greater Atlantic world, and the Taíno Caribbean.
Throughout the novel, almost all persons identified with proper names are historic, although historic Taínos known to history by their baptized Christian names are given fictitious birth names, as are a few historic persons whose name is unknown. Occasionally, unknown—and thus fictitious—relatives of participants are referred to simply by their relationship to the participant (e.g., “Mother”). In a handful of instances, stories include fictitious relatives, intimates, or other minor characters who are given fictitious names in order to facilitate the narrative’s continuity; these few persons are identified as fictitious in the list of Participants or the Sources sections provided at the novel’s end. The conventions used with respect to the language and spelling of names of persons and places; the measurement of time and distance; the assumed ages of the Taíno participants; the words Taíno, Caribe, Lucayan, and Indian, and various Christian religious terms; and fictionalization are set forth under Conventions following the Participants list. Taíno words (other than proper names) are italicized and translated when first introduced and then compiled at the end in the Glossary of Taíno Words. Parenthetical phrases or footnotes in the narrative occasionally identify historic persons or peoples unnamed in the narrative, when historic persons lived, or the modern names or locations of historic places.
The historical record is conflicted often—with primary and secondary sources disagreeing as to what occurred and why—and to preserve the novel style I present only my interpretation. For readers interested, the Sources section lists by story the primary and secondary sources relied on, occasionally noting my reasoning and contrary interpretations. The stories often incorporate words from or paraphrase the primary sources, with the objective of best capturing the participants’ intent and fifteenth-century perspective. To preserve the novel style, these incorporations are not designated by quotation marks, but the Sources section indicates the chapter, section, paragraph, and/or date of the primary sources relied on, as well as acknowledging those who have graciously permitted such usage.
The novel ends in September 1493, as Columbus prepares in Spain for his second voyage and the chieftains consider what to do with the garrison remaining on their territory. During the period presented, the violence done by Europeans to Taínos consists of isolated events. But the conceptual framework has been set before the maelstrom, and it remains for future novels to explore the horrific story of the systematic slaughter, religious contempt, servitude, slavery, and utter collapse of human well-being and dignity that followed.
August 3, 2017
ANDREW S. ROWEN
Anthropologists and historians debate the locations and boundaries of the chiefdoms, and the locations above are consistent with those proposed by Irving Rouse. See Rouse’s The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
Island names are based on Julian Granberry and Gary Vescelius’s Languages of the Pre-Columbian Antilles (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004) and other sources. Aniyana (Middle Caicos); Ba We Ka (Caicos bank); Baneque (Great Iguana); Boriquén (Puerto Rico); Caicos (North Caicos); Guanahaní (San Salvador); Haiti (Dominican Republic and Haiti); Manigua (Rum Cay); Samoete (Crooked, Fortune, and Acklins Islands); Utiaquia (Ragged Islands); Wana (East Caicos); Yamaye (Jamaica); Yuma (Long Island). Cuba abbreviates a longer word.
NOTE ON DATING OF STORIES
If the historical record indicates a specific or approximate date for an event or events central to a story, that date is noted in the story’s title—without parentheses. If the historical record is conflicted or silent as to the date of the central events dramatized, or if the central events are fictional but an historical context has been described as of a specific d
ate, the story’s title indicates a possible date or the date of the historical context—in parentheses. If history provides no guidance or context, the story is left undated.
PROLOGUE: 1455
CA’ DA MOSTO
Land of the Budomel (North of Dakar, Senegal, Africa),
April–May 1455
A solitary caravel, dispatched by Prince Henrique of Portugal and flying the colors of his nephew the Portuguese king Afonso V, sailed southward in the Ocean Sea along the west coast of Africa, its lateen sails emblazoned in red with the square cross of the Order of Christ. Its owner, the pilot, and a young merchant stood together on the stern deck and studied the shoreline some miles east, comparing it to their chart based on voyages of previous Portuguese traders. The ship cruised rapidly, propelled by steady northeasterly winds that blew offshore to sea—permitting it to run with the wind without tacking—and a strong current that swept south along the coast. The pilot estimated they had coursed more than sixty miles south of the Río de Senega, which separated the great desert of the north from Guinea, the tropical land to the south.
The three men agreed they had arrived at a Wolof kingdom ruled by a local chieftain the Portuguese referred to as “the Budomel,” “Lord Budomel,” or simply “Budomel,” with whom the Portuguese had traded for over five years. There was no port, just a beach suited for landing abreast the open ocean and sheltered from the southbound current. The pilot summoned the ship’s black slave, Pedro, who confirmed their arrival. Pedro had been purchased by previous traders farther north along the coast and then trained by Prince Henrique’s men to serve as an interpreter with the Budomel and other Wolof chieftains.
The ship’s owner, Vicente Dias, served as its captain to protect his investment, and he directed the pilot and crew to tack the ship toward shore slowly, alert for shoals. They lowered the sails and anchored well outside the surf breaking on offshore sandbars, a few hundred feet from the beach.