Encounters Unforeseen- 1492 Retold

by Andrew Rowen

  The merchant, the Venetian Alvise da Ca’ da Mosto, was excited that his objective—trading with the Guineans—at last was at hand. Prince Henrique had charged him with the voyage’s success, and he and Henrique would share its profits equally. This expedition was his first for Henrique and, if pleased, the prince likely would sponsor others.

  Ca’ da Mosto’s woolen shirt, breeches, and jerkin were finer than Dias’s, and his silver neck chain dangled a jeweled pendant to draw attention to his greater stature. But Ca’ da Mosto was in his early twenties and exercised his authority respectfully and often deferentially. Both Dias and the pilot were older men and more experienced sailors, and they might not abide by instructions affecting the ship if they disagreed substantially. Both were Portuguese, as was the crew of some twenty men, and Ca’ da Mosto’s ability to converse with the two older men casually in Portuguese, no less to reason with them over a point of controversy, was limited. He was a foreigner to their kingdom and mindful that his instructions matched their view as closely as possible.

  Ca’ da Mosto descended into the caravel’s hold to inspect the condition of his principal cargo, seven horses. The air below reeked of their sweat, excrement, and fodder, the stench aggravated by the stifling heat and humidity. They had sailed with ten horses, but two had died from the heat and one had been thrown overboard after breaking a leg when the ship lurched. Ca’ da Mosto inspected them carefully, aware the Budomel had paid handsomely for horses in the past. The seven remained healthy, and their harnesses, the woolen cloth from Genoa, the silk from Mohammedan kingdoms of the north, and the iron cooking pots had survived undamaged.

  He returned to the deck and ordered that Pedro be taken ashore to announce their arrival to the Budomel. Ca’ da Mosto had grown fond of Pedro, who was but a teenager and quick to understand. Prince Henrique had interviewed him sometime before and judged he had the facilities with language, conversation, and commerce necessary to be an interpreter. As with other slaves, Henrique had required his conversion to Christianity, and Pedro had been baptized in memory of one of Henrique’s deceased older brothers. There was little risk Pedro would flee when ashore. The Budomel would not permit it, as the Budomel also relied on Pedro to accomplish the trade. Pedro understood his role, boarded the caravel’s rowboat, and was ferried by two seamen through light surf to the beach, where Wolof tribesmen were watching, waiting, and then vanished with him into the forest.

  As they awaited the Budomel’s reply, Ca’ da Mosto reflected on his incredible journey to achieve this remote beachhead. They had departed Sagres Bay at Cape St. Vincent (Portugal) in March and sailed the Ocean Sea more than five hundred miles southwest to Porto Santo and Madeira, islands donated by the Crown to Prince Henrique, where Ca’ da Mosto had dined on beef and honey. Henrique had granted a gentleman of Milanese descent hereditary governorship of Porto Santo for settling it.1 The caravel then had traversed more than three hundred miles south to the Canary Islands, anchoring at Gomera and Hierro where Christians had settlements under Castilian sponsorship. He had eaten but barley toast, goat, and goat’s cheese, as the settlements had little other produce. The islands were inhabited by fierce tribes of brown-skinned idolaters who worshipped the sun, moon, and planets and resisted Christian invasion of their homeland, although the Castilians frequently captured them for enslavement and sale in Lagos, Seville, and Aragón. Finally, they had run another five hundred miles south to Cape Blanco (Mauritania) and followed the African coast along the great desert (the Sahara), passing Henrique’s trading post at Arguin Island (Mauritania) where the local peoples2—more darkly brown skinned than the Canarians— lived a harsh nomadic existence and practiced Mohammedanism. Arab merchants from the desert’s interior frequented Arguin to trade slaves, gold, and spices for horses and European wares. The desert had ended at the Río de Senega, where the kingdoms of the black peoples began, but Mohammedanism had crossed the river to claim souls among the Wolof, rather than Christianity.

  Soon, Lord Budomel entered the beach from the forest mounted on a horse and dressed in a cotton robe falling to his ankles, followed by fifteen mounted warriors and over a hundred foot soldiers bearing spears. Ca’ da Mosto and Dias understood the show of force—the trade, and their men’s safety onshore, were subject to the Budomel’s grace. The caravel was equipped with crossbow, sword, and cannon, but they were hopelessly outnumbered ashore.

  Ca’ da Mosto descended into the rowboat with Henrique’s representative, a scrivener who would monitor the trade and Ca’ da Mosto closely. The Budomel dismounted as Ca’ da Mosto arrived at the beach, and the two men embraced. Through Pedro and hand gestures, Ca’ da Mosto expressed Prince Henrique’s esteem for the Budomel and their special seaborne trading relationship, and the Budomel expressed that the visit was his honor and that he held the same esteem for Henrique. Ca’ da Mosto presented a silver washbasin as an intimate gift, and the Budomel reciprocated with an ivory comb.

  That evening, in a village nearby, Lord Budomel hosted Ca’ da Mosto and his officers to a feast of fish, fowl, kidney bean, fruit, and palm wine. The Budomel reminisced about Portuguese traders he had known, and they discussed the competing overland desert trade routes through Timbuktu and Wadan by which Arab merchants transported gold and slaves north on camels.

  With a rapport established, Ca’ da Mosto described his horses and their harnesses in detail, as well as his wool, silk, and iron pots. He offered to trade all the horses and harnesses and most of the other goods for slaves. The Budomel replied he would pay one hundred slaves for that and invited Ca’ da Mosto inland to visit his principal village for pleasure and to understand the Wolof while the slaves were gathered. He also presented Ca’ da Mosto with a beautiful Wolof girl, twelve years old, to take for his chamber when he departed. Ca’ da Mosto reflected that one hundred slaves was a bargain for but seven horses and harnesses and some cloth and pots, and he accepted, including the visit inland. The Budomel reflected that just one hundred slaves was a bargain for the same.

  In the morning, Ca’ da Mosto instructed the scrivener to have the ship readied for slaves and that the girl be taken aboard and kept near his cabin. He and Pedro set off inland with the Budomel. They saw elephants, great serpents, and brightly colored parrots, and Ca’ da Mosto enjoyed the Budomel’s hospitality. Like the sovereigns of Hispania, Lord Budomel continually moved his court from village to village to impress his rule over local chieftains. Ca’ da Mosto learned that the Budomel frequently warred with other chieftains, much as Christian princes did among themselves. The spoils of these wars included the slaves Ca’ da Mosto was to receive—men, women, and children of other chiefdoms the Budomel had vanquished.

  Lord Budomel invited Ca’ da Mosto to visit his mosque to observe evening prayer and sought an explanation of Christianity. Ca’ da Mosto studied the Budomel and his noblemen praying, murmuring to the sky and then bowing to kiss the earth, and sensed that his host’s faith was not as absolute as the Arabs to the north, but more a matter of custom and unification with his local chieftains. Ca’ da Mosto explained some articles of Christianity and, after they had discussed them for a few days, challenged his host, comfortable that the Budomel’s curiosity signaled that a debate wouldn’t affect the trade.

  “Your faith is false on many grounds. Mine is true and holy.”

  “Your faith does appear to be good,” the Budomel said with a laugh. “It could be no other than God that bestows you such riches, skills, and knowledge.”

  “More’s at stake than wealth,” Ca’ da Mosto warned, concerned for his host’s well-being. “You should consider conversion so your soul attains salvation.”

  “But God is a just Lord,” the Budomel responded, shaking his head. “My people are better able to gain salvation than yours. God has given us almost nothing in the world, so he will give us paradise hereafter.” The Budomel declined conversion, yet Ca’ da Mosto perceived he would have embraced it but for fear of losing his power as chieftain.

  Pedro als
o appreciated the Budomel’s hospitality, particularly since the Budomel addressed him as Malik, his name before the Christians had purchased him. Malik reciprocated, hailing his host with the proper Wolof pronunciation, as the “Damel.” Malik had grown up with giraffes and elephants, and, while Ca’ da Mosto went about examining the Wolof’s customs, Malik excused himself, sometimes to worship spirits and his ancestors in the forest. As he prayed, Malik remembered the ancient Wolof proverb that a log stuck in a river doesn’t turn into a crocodile, and he wondered whether he would ever believe in Christ.

  As Ca’ da Mosto visited the Wolof, Dias supervised the bolting of ankle chains on the caravel’s deck and in its hold and took responsibility for Ca’ da Mosto’s Wolof girl. Ndey dreaded the caravel and the crew. She had never seen such a sinister being—its body was enormous and its three appendages towered to the sky—and she feared the portholes on the bow were its eyes and that it would eat her. She had never met pale men, nor men so fully clothed, and she feared their paleness meant they were of the dead, evil spirits returning to visit the living. They leered at her body and, as men of other tribes, were dangerous. But they didn’t touch her, as she was for their own chief. They hung a wool cloth to make a tiny enclosure for her in the crawl space between their chief’s cabin and the stern.

  Dias brought the caravel close to shore when the slaves had been gathered. Lord Budomel’s soldiers herded the vanquished Guineans—men, women, and a few children—through the shallows at low tide, and the crew hauled them aboard and shackled them, some where the horses had been corralled and dung rotted, swarming with flies in the heat. As Ndey, they were terrified by the immensity of the structure and thought the pale men were evil spirits. They had no inkling where they were being taken or whether they were about to be executed or eaten. A discharge of the caravel’s cannon augured that death at the devil’s hand was imminent.

  After formally parting from the Budomel, Ca’ da Mosto boarded the ship, and it entered the swells of a turbulent Ocean Sea, causing the slaves further terror. Dias set the course south to trade the remaining goods and explore for gold. Ca’ da Mosto went to his cabin, a tiny room to starboard below the stern deck and above the hold, adjacent to the tiller attached to the rudder, which was manned by two seamen. He found the girl inside, apparently nourished and unmolested, and was pleased. Upon returning to the deck, he asked Pedro her name.

  As the sun set, the caravel sped through rising swell at a brisk pace. The crew prayed and sang a hymn to the Virgin Mary, a version of “Salve Regina,” seeking the Virgin’s protection of the ship during the night. After the moon rose, Ca’ da Mosto retired to his cabin and, by candlelight, entered notes of the Wolof visit in a log. He bade the girl join him.

  Ndey entered his cabin resigned and prepared to fulfill the Damel’s gift. Before her seclusion aboard the ship, Ndey’s mother— weeping—had instructed her on what to do and what it meant for her future. The Damel had decided her fate. She would not be given to a neighboring chieftain to forge an alliance or to one of the Damel’s generals in reward for a battle victory. She had been given to a pale-skinned chieftain and would be taken far distant to lands unknown. She would not be married to him, but she might bear his child. She might be forced to worship his gods and renounce her own. He might discard her at any time in some hostile land. She shouldn’t dream she had any choices to make.

  Still weeping, Mother had tempered this. He appeared to have tremendous wealth and power. Mother had instructed that if she pleased him, and if his customs were as the Wolof’s, she would not want or be bound. Like the other pale men, he stank from the lack of bathing and constant wearing of garments in heat, but he appeared more refined. Ndey stood meekly before Ca’ da Mosto, terrified.

  To Ndey’s surprise, he knew her name. He caressed her face once, took her goatskin from her waist, and then removed his own garments and motioned for her to lie before him. With the pilot walking the deck above, the tillermen adjusting the tiller just steps away, and the cries and moans of the vanquished peoples rising from the deck and hold below, Ca’ da Mosto entered her. She felt pain and cried aloud. When he was done, he fell asleep and Ndey returned to her crawl space, passing the tillermen who grinned meanly at her. Ndey wiped the blood and his seed from her crotch as her tears began quietly, and then she wept and trembled uncontrollably. She knew she would never see Mother again.

  Above, on the stern deck, Malik chose a place to sleep. In the moonlight, he looked down at the slaves, stupefied by all that was new and terrible. Some pale men said interpreters became freemen after four voyages, but Malik wondered if that always occurred. He remembered when he had been captured by a Mohammedan chieftain like the Budomel and then sold to Henrique’s Christian slave masters and transported by ship to the slave market at the quay in Lagos. That quay was this cargo’s fate, too. Prince Henrique would give a few of them as gifts to other lords and to Christian bishops, and the rest would be sold, husbands, wives, and children broken apart according to the wishes of the buyers.

  Malik watched as many of the slaves succumbed to seasickness and lay chained in their own vomit, urine, and excrement. He reflected on how the Christians and Mohammedans both worshipped the same god and thought the other infidels and fit to burn in hell. He wondered whether this hell could be worse than what he witnessed below. Clouds then shrouded the moon, and it began to rain.

  _______________

  1 Bartolomeu Perestrelo.

  2 The Azanaghi or Tuareg.

  I

  1455–1460,

  CHILDHOOD, LESSONS, LEGACY

  CAONABÓ

  Aniyana (Middle Caicos, Turks and Caicos, Caribbean)

  Caonabó lay naked on a bed of fronds cut from surrounding palm trees, intently studying the gourds floating among the ducks in the pond below, all but three gently blown by the wind. He had observed the duck hunt many times, but today he focused carefully on its method as he would participate for the first time. He marveled at the stealth and cunning involved, doubted whether he could achieve it, and pondered whether the hunted’s soul remembered the hunter.

  In the pond, Caonabó’s father and two servants were submerged to the chin, peering through eyelets carved in gourds that masked their heads and presence. Father had ordered the servants—his naborias—to fill the pond with gourds fallen from the calabash tree that morning, and some twenty true ones now floated among the birds. Father stared directly along the water’s surface at a duck but a yard before him, extended his arms underwater beneath it, and shot his hands upward to clutch its feet and yank it under. A second duck immediately dived to follow the doomed duck in search of fish, and one of the naborias seized it underwater. The other ducks remained stationary, unconcerned with the gourds floating or stalking about them.

  Caonabó studied where the two ducks had vanished and watched ripples quietly emanate to lap and wash out against the pond’s embankments, grimly aware that death befell the ducks beyond his vision and mesmerized that the hunt nevertheless would continue. Underwater, the ducks struck their bills to bite and flapped furiously to escape, but Father swiftly broke his duck’s neck and tucked it under a cord strung about his waist. The naboria stuffed his in a cotton net to drown. Father, in thought, honored Yúcahu, the spirit of yuca (yucca or manioc), the sea, and male fertility, fatherless and the most important spirit in daily life.1

  Mother, Father’s first wife, sat calmly on her knees on the fronds beside their son, her back upright and hands in her lap, reflecting her stature, grace, and elegance. She was naked except for a married woman’s nagua (loincloth) strung in front below the navel, a cotton headband, and jewelry, and sunlight flickered through the forest to dance lightly on her olive-brown skin and long, black hair. She was heavy with child and irritated by the scruff of the forest underbrush and hovering mosquitoes. But she ignored the discomfort and turned slowly to sit on her thigh to better watch Caonabó study the hunt, concerned that he remain attentive and confident. He was her firstborn, j
ust eight years old, and she knew him to be strong and clever and eager for his first try. She sensed his impatience with the pace of Father’s advance to the next prey and whispered to him that it was important to move very slowly.

  Father and the naborias continued to hunt, slowly drifting among the unsuspecting ducks and silently striking, seizing more than a dozen before those remaining grew wary and took flight. The men removed their helmets, waded from the pond, and laid the kill on the forest floor for Caonabó to examine. Caonabó approached, and the ducks’ glazed eyes stared back at him, as if seeking retribution. He wondered if their souls had departed.

  Father motioned for his son to sit as he and the naborias taught how to catch a duck’s feet underwater and snap its neck. The naborias let on that ducks sometimes got away and that one wanted most of all to avoid being bitten, particularly on the butt or, worse, the penis. The older naboria spun a story of an odd Lucayan2 on a neighboring island who got so tangled up wrestling with an enormous duck that the bird nipped off a bit of his rump. Everyone laughed. Caonabó felt a surge of blood at his temples, exposing his anxiety about achieving manhood.

  After the lesson, children and other villagers wandered over to wish Caonabó success in his own hunt. He greeted them proudly, particularly the younger girl Onaney. Father’s fourth wife brought Caonabó’s infant sister to say hello, and he took her in his arms to show her the dead ducks. But Father soon ordered that those interested hike north through the woods to a tidal pond adjacent to the sea. Caonabó followed Father and, when they arrived near the pond’s embankment, they sat again, this time alone.

  “There’s more to learn than stalking the ducks slowly and grabbing their feet.” Father waited for Caonabó to respond, but the boy’s eyes betrayed uncertainty, and Father continued. “It’s important to consult the spirits.” Father unleashed a cotton pouch from the cord about his waist and withdrew his cemí of Yúcahu, a triangular rock statuette smaller than his hand carved with Yúcahu’s image—a being with eyes glaring forward and an enormous mouth wide-open, ready to plow earth, its legs folded underneath like a frog’s on the statuette’s base, its back arced at the rear, and its prescient forehead at the triangle’s top. “You know Yúcahu. Why do we honor him?”