Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  Columbus appears to have used a shipboard log to write a much longer and more complete narrative of the journey that reached Isabella later. It remained, nevertheless, a subjective and biased report intended to persuade Isabella and her husband that their money had been well spent and that further investment would provide even greater gains. The original was lost, but some of Columbus’s own words survive in a version provided by Las Casas, a contemporary who became the first historian of what was soon called ‘the Indies’. He used Columbus’s narrative to compose an account known as the Diary of the First Voyage5 and to write his own History of the Indies. Other original sections of Columbus’s writing can be found in the much later Histories of the Admiral, attributed to his son Hernando.6 ‘As well as writing down each night the events of that day and, during the day, logging the night’s navigation, I plan to draw up a new chart, in which I shall include all the sea and landmasses of the Ocean Sea in their places,’ Columbus wrote in an introduction addressed to Isabella and her husband. ‘Above all it is important that I should renounce sleep and concentrate instead on navigation, which will require a great amount of work.’

  Isabella learned that Columbus, who commanded his tiny fleet from the sixty-foot Santa María, had begun to lie to his own crew almost immediately, since he was worried they would mutiny if they knew how far from Europe they were sailing. He pretended that each day they had covered a shorter distance than they really had ‘so that if the voyage stretched out they would not be overcome by fear or dismay’. After ten days on the open sea, they saw a bolt of fire fall into the ocean, upsetting superstitious crew members ‘who began to imagine they were signs that we had taken the wrong course’.7 With no sight of land, they became anxious, muttering that the winds would never blow them back to Spain.

  They made good daily distances. On 10 October, more than a month after setting out, Columbus calculated that they had sailed 62.5 leagues, but told the crew it was only 46. In the Mediterranean Sea, or along the Atlantic seaboard routes, it was rare for sailors to go for long periods without seeing land and by now there was a restless, almost mutinous, air on his ships, but he made it clear that he would not turn back. ‘His aim, and that of the monarchs, was to discover the Indies via the western sea and they had chosen to accompany him,’ said Las Casas.8 ‘He would continue until, with God’s grace, he found them.’ On the following day, the miracle happened. They began to spot tree trunks and branches, as well as the remains of artefacts that had obviously been shaped by human hands, floating around them.9 At ten o’clock that night Columbus thought he saw a flame in the far distance. ‘It was like a wax candle rising and falling,’ he said.10 He secretly called over Isabella’s overseer Rodrigo Sánchez de Segovia, one of the men she had sent to keep an independent eye on the expedition. But while another royal official called Pedro Gutiérrez thought he could also see the light, Sánchez de Segovia did not, and they decided not to tell the crew. It would not have been the first time that a sighting of land had proved false. Columbus later claimed for himself the 10,000 maravedís prize that Isabella had promised to give the first person who spotted land, though that honour probably goes to Juan Rodríguez de Bermejo, also known as Rodrigo de Triana, the lookout on the speedier Pinta, who made the first confirmed sighting after his vessel forged ahead overnight.11

  They approached the island sighted from the Pinta slowly, spotting naked people on shore. Columbus had himself rowed ashore, accompanied by a group of armed men and the royal standards he would use to claim the island for Isabella’s Castile and Christendom. As the banners bearing Castile’s castles and Christ’s cross were planted on this new, exotic land, Columbus appeared to believe that the green vegetation, plentiful streams and strange fruits that they could spot were a sign that he was close to Asia. In fact, he had probably reached San Salvador or Watling Island, lying on the eastern side of the Bahamas.12

  Isabella’s new subjects were, she read, mostly good natured, innocent and simple. They had gathered eagerly around the strangely hirsute and overdressed newcomers, with their pale skins and beards. ‘Since they were so friendly and seeing that they were people who would be best converted to our holy faith through love rather than by force, I gave them some red bonnets and glass beads which they hung around their necks and many other things of little value, all of which pleased them greatly and they were so easily won over that it was marvellous,’ wrote Columbus. ‘They brought us parrots and balls of cotton thread and darts and many other things, which they exchanged for the things that we gave to them, like glass beads and little bells.’

  Columbus was impressed by the people he referred to as ‘Indians’, though they were mostly Taíno, a people of Arawak descent who were spread across the islands of the Caribbean and modern-day Florida.13 They were well built, ‘with handsome bodies and fine features’ – though the fact that he saw very few old people suggests that they did not live very long. Broad faces with ‘beautiful eyes’ were daubed with different colours – charcoal black, white, red or whatever they could find. Some painted their entire bodies. Their natural skin colour was a yellowish shade of brown and Isabella was told that they reminded her sailors of the native guanche Canary Islanders who had visited her at court, though the Taíno were slightly lighter-skinned. Some, indeed, were deemed ‘so fair that if they wore clothes and stayed out of the sun and wind they would almost be as white as people in Spain’.

  Isabella read that the Taíno hair was so thick, straight and black that it reminded Columbus of a horse’s tail and he would soon find that it was worn in varying styles on different islands. Some men cut it short, with a few long trails of hair down their back. Others wore it long at the back and cut straight across a fringe that reached down to their eyebrows, or allowed it to grow ‘as long as the women in Castile’ and gathered it up in a net held together with colourful parrot feathers. All went about in different degrees of nakedness, without any sense of shame, though some wore small loincloths or larger strips of cotton tied around their waists. Columbus was impressed not just by their physique and apparent innocence, but by their sailing skills – especially the way they handled dug-out canoes that fitted up to forty men. Bows, arrows and primitive clubs were the only weapons they carried, though some bore the marks of cuts and blows received during fighting.

  Isabella must have been delighted by Columbus’s belief that it would be easy to conquer, convert and persuade these people to guide him to sources of gold. They had never seen swords such as those Columbus showed them, which ‘they held by the sharp edge, cutting themselves’, Isabella read. Their innocence extended to religion, and she was told that ‘they would easily become Christians, as it seemed that they did not follow any sect at all’. Columbus pledged to take half a dozen of them back with him to show Isabella and her husband, though he did not initially say whether he planned to do this by persuading or imprisoning them.

  Her new subjects had little gold adornments hanging from their noses and ‘from their gestures I understood that on the southern side of the island there was a king with large pots full of it’. Columbus genuinely believed that he had bumped into the outlying islands of Asia, and dreamed of reaching Japan. As they sailed on to other islands, natives continued to appear on the beaches, or swam out to their three boats, while the exotic tropical vegetation, dazzling fish and apparently perfect harbours continued to amaze the visitors. As Isabella read on, Columbus’s description of this earthly paradise grew in both passion and colour. ‘These islands are very green and fertile with sweet air and there may be many other things that I don’t know about them, but I do not want to stop here because I wish to explore many more islands in order to find gold,’ he said. Even the fish, which in Isabella’s world mostly came in tones of silver, grey, brown or pink, were dazzling, ‘with the most wonderful colours in the world, blues, yellows, reds and all sorts of colours arranged in a thousand ways … so exquisite that no man can fail to wonder at them’.

  The queen also learned t
hat, on Friday, 19 October he had sighted an island that he named after her, Isabella (having already named another one Ferrandina, after Ferdinand, and two others San Salvador and Santa María of the Conception).14 ‘I have named a westerly cape here, Cabo Hermoso [Cape Beautiful]. And beautiful it is, indeed,’ he said, before lamenting that it would take him fifty years to explore these new lands. Again, he was entranced by what he understood to be stories of magnificently wealthy monarchs. ‘The people I am carrying with me say there is a king here, who is lord of all the islands of this area and wears on his own body large amounts of gold … I cannot stop to see everything, as I could not do so in fewer than fifty years and I want to explore and discover as much as I can before returning to your Highnesses, if God wills it, in April.’

  Isabella may have sensed, however, that for all the beauty and charming naivety of the people, Columbus had been suffering from growing frustration. He had erected crosses on the islands he found, claiming them for her Castile and Christ. But he had not yet found proof that this was the Asia he had promised to discover, nor had he found any appreciable quantities of the gold, spices or other goods that might make him, and Castile, wealthy. ‘I am still resolved to find the mainland and the city of Quisay [in China] and present your letters to the Great Khan, asking him for a reply and bringing it back to you,’ he wrote in his diary on 21 October.

  When he reached Cuba – which he hoped might be Japan – his anxiety and inability to understand the natives allowed his fertile imagination to interpret their words and gestures in the most optimistic, and unrealistic, fashion – even imagining that he had been told the Great Khan’s ships came here, taking just ten days to sail from Asia. ‘They said large ships and merchants and such things came from the south-east,’ he added. ‘And I also understood that, far off, there were people with just one eye and others with dog’s noses who ate men and that, when they captured one, they slit his throat and drank the blood and cut off his penis.’

  Columbus’s delight at the naivety of the people did not stop him from kidnapping five of the more trusting men who came aboard his ship, the Santa María, or ordering his men to seize seven women from a house they raided. If Isabella and Ferdinand wanted converts to Christianity, he said, then this was the best way to start. The captives could learn Spanish and the customs of Castile, be instructed in the faith and return as interpreters. ‘These people have no sect of their own and are not idolators,’ he wrote. ‘They are very meek, with no knowledge of evil or killing or of taking other people captive,’ he insisted. They also believed that Columbus and his men were messengers from God and so were ‘ready to recite any prayer that we say to them and to make the sign of the cross’. Isabella and her husband should ‘set about making them Christians, which I think will not take long, with numerous peoples converting to our Holy Faith as great lands, riches and all these peoples are won for Spain’.

  Columbus squabbled with his crew and Martín Alonso Pinzón, captain of La Pinta, who sailed off separately for more than a month. Isabella’s new ‘admiral’, meanwhile continued exploring and singing the praises of the places and peoples he encountered. She learned, for example, that even for a seasoned sailor, the islands of the Caribbean offered incomparable harbours. ‘I have sailed the sea for 23 years, barely leaving it for any time worth counting, and I have seen both the Levant and the west … and have gone on the northern route to England and south to Guinea, but in none of those places are the ports as perfectly formed [as here],’ he wrote after encountering yet another bay surrounded by dense green vegetation and fed by crystal-clear river water.

  Isabella was told that these new lands were ‘as much yours as Castile itself’ and that their inhabitants would be easy to control and even easier to put to work. ‘With the people I have with me, who are not many, I could run through all these islands without trouble,’ she read. ‘I have seen three of our sailors step ashore and watched a multitude of these Indians run away, even though nobody wanted to do them any harm. They carry no arms, go naked and have no skill with weapons … and will be easily persuaded to obey orders, sowing seeds or whatever else is needed, building towns and being taught to wear clothes and learn our customs.’

  Disaster had struck on Christmas Day, 1492. On a calm night, Columbus went to his bunk while a junior seaman took the helm. A gentle current sucked the ship, the Santa María,15 silently on to sand or rocks off the island which the Indians who lived there called ‘Heiti’16 (Hispaniola, now home to the Dominican Republic and Haiti) with Columbus waking to the sound of a juddering rudder and panicking crew. They abandoned ship and Columbus threw himself on the mercy of a local chief called Guacanagari who ‘showed great sadness at our adversity and shed tears, immediately sending everyone from his village in many big canoes, so that we and they could unload the decks’. Isabella’s new subjects behaved with a natural generosity which, had they been aware of their new status in the eyes of their Castilian visitors, might have been less forthcoming. ‘Nowhere in Castile would our things have been so well looked after … I swear to your Highnesses that there are no better people on earth. They love others as they love themselves, talk in the sweetest tones in the world, are gentle and always smiling.’ They might wander around stark naked, but he was quick to assure his prudish queen that this did not mean there was anything untoward about the behaviour of the men towards the women, or vice versa, which remained ‘honourable’.

  Trinkets were traded for local goods, but what most impressed the natives was Columbus’s firepower. When he ordered a lombard and a long-barrelled espingarda gun to be fired, the watching Indians fell to the ground in surprise and shock. ‘So many good things happened that this disaster turned out to be a great thing,’ the document that Columbus had prepared for Isabella read. ‘Because it is true to say that if I had not run aground I would have sailed off without anchoring here.’ Divine intervention was a theme that chimed perfectly with Isabella’s beliefs. He had not initially planned to leave a colony behind him but now he decided to build a wooden fort, depositing a small garrison of thirty-nine men inside it.17 ‘I trust in God that on my intended return from Castile, a ton of gold will have been found by those who had to be left behind and that they will have discovered the gold mine and the spices,’ he said, adding that there would be such an abundance of wealth that Isabella and Ferdinand could within three years recover for Christendom the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and Jesus’ empty tomb. This was a reminder of his extravagant request, undoubtedly designed to flatter Isabella’s crusading spirit, that any money generated by his expedition should go towards helping them conquer Jerusalem. ‘Your Highnesses laughed and said you liked the idea and that this was already one of your desires,’ he wrote.

  On 4 January 1493, he weighed anchor and, in a light breeze, set sail for Europe, leaving behind his small garrison at the makeshift settlement he had christened La Navidad – including an Englishman known as Tallarte de Lajes and an Irishman known as Guillermo Ires (William Irish).18 He left them with a year’s supply of biscuit and wine, some of his artillery and goods that they were instructed to use to barter for gold. His orders to this first European colony in the Caribbean included the stipulation that they should be kind and solicitous to the natives, paying special respect to their chief Guacanagari. A list of prohibitions included avoiding any kind of violence, thievery or confrontation with their hosts and, above all, that they should be careful not to ‘insult or harm the women in a way that might provoke offence or provide a bad example to the Indians and besmirch the reputation of Christians’.19 Two days later he linked up once more with Pinzón, who reacted furiously to the news that thirty-nine of the men he had helped recruit in Palos had been left behind.

  Spain’s colonisation of the Americas had started, ushering in a new period of European expansion to the west. Christendom was on the rise again and what would later develop into ‘Western civilisation’ was embarking on a sudden spurt of growth. The impact of that ripples i
nto the present day. It was an accidental beginning, caused by the grounding of the Santa María, since Isabella had not ordered any potential colonists to go with him. But now that Columbus had planted her flag on several islands in the Caribbean, Isabella was the queen of places and peoples that she had never seen. The queen of Castile had just expelled one group of subjects. Now she was incorporating others, and had to decide exactly how her new peoples should be treated.

  Technological progress cannot explain the dramatic and history-changing success of Isabella’s Atlantic venture. Quadrants, astrolabes, latitude tables and portolan charts were either mistrusted, used wrongly or inaccurate. Navigators like Columbus still relied on the stars, the sun, compasses, defective tables and their own experience or intuition. Nor were their ships a vast improvement on previous models, though the addition of triangular sails meant the caravels could sail much closer to the wind.20 Luck and the Reconquista, however, had placed Isabella’s Castile at the gateway to a system of fixed winds and ocean currents that made the return journey to the Americas possible. These had long been taking her ships south to the Canary Islands. It was from there that Columbus had picked up the north-east trade winds as they swooped towards the equator and then swung west towards the Americas and the Caribbean. Those winds, in turn, helped set up a huge circular current – the north Atlantic gyre – which ran clockwise around the ocean. This turned north as it neared the Americas and east again by mainland north America, where prevailing westerly winds had helped blow Columbus’s vessels back towards home.