Dogs of God

by James Reston Jr

  “Here neither wench nor woman wears a thing,” the normally prudish Columbus wrote in his journal, thinking, no doubt, about what Queen Isabella would think when she read the entry of December 20, 1492. “The women have very pretty bodies, and they were the first to come to bring what they had, especially things to eat, bread of yams, and nut-colored quinces, and five different kinds of fruit.” Columbus could not believe that in this wider world there existed “such good-hearted people so free to give, and so timid that they were all eager to hand the Christians as much as they had. When the Christians arrived, the natives ran up to bring them all.”

  Within three weeks, Columbus was taking captives, including women and girls, into the cramped quarters of his tiny caravels. And when he left forty men behind to build a Christian village in the New World called La Navidad out of the wreck of the Santa María, each man demanded five concubines. With this first European colony, Columbus left a doctor, Maestre Juan Sánchez, to treat the Europeans with sores.

  Of the American origin of syphilis, historians of the time had no doubt. From Pinzón and others of the crew who were now carriers, as well as the five Indians in Columbus’s entourage, the disease traveled to Barcelona, where the first general outbreak was recorded in 1493. From that port city, it was to spread to France and Italy. When, a year later, Charles VIII of France (known as “Fathead” for his oversized head) invaded Italy and occupied Naples, the army brought with it legions of public women, and syphilis reached epidemic proportions.

  If Europeans were to suffer from New World syphilis, it was nothing compared to what Native Americans quickly suffered from European diseases. Smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, diphtheria, influenza, yellow fever, and typhoid among others devastated the native peoples and quickly led to the eradication of entire populations, including the sweet-natured Tainos who had been the first to greet Columbus with open arms. When Columbus invaded the New World with seventeen ships in his second voyage, his crews were immediately laid low with disease. Instead of six individuals, the fleet of the second voyage endeavored to bring back 550 slaves; but 200 died along the way, and half of the remaining 350 were sick and dying when the fleet reached Spain. On the island of Hispaniola alone, where Columbus founded his first settlement, the native population of the island of 300,000 in 1492 was cut in half in four years. In 1508, 60,000 remained; and four years later, only 20,000. By the mid-sixteenth century, the Tainos were exterminated.

  In this first contact between the Old and the New World, trade in disease marked and marred the “Columbian exchange.”

  26

  Theatre in Barcelona

  BARCELONA

  Columbus’s path to glory began in humility. For surviving the winter tempest around the Azores, it had fallen to him to make the crew’s official expression of thanksgiving. For surviving the equally ferocious storm off the Portuguese coast, he too had, improbably, drawn the crossed garbanzo bean. Now in his simple shirt, alone, he went to the tiny convent of Santa Clara in Moguer, passed along its Moorish corridor, and into the chapel of the nuns of St. Clare. There, he spent the entire night in prayer. A day later, he rode a mule to a whitewashed sanctuary on a bluff outside Huelva overlooking the sea called Santa María de la Cinta. In fulfilling his promise there, he knelt before the icon of the Virgin, whose manifestation, it was believed, had saved seamen from drowning in the past, and perhaps in the present.

  With these obligations dispatched, the time for pride had come. A letter from Barcelona arrived on March 30, addressed to Don Cristóbal Colón, our Admiral of the Ocean Sea, viceroy and governor of the islands he has discovered in the Indies. “We wish you to come soon,” the monarchs wrote effusively to him. “You should hasten your coming as much as possible, so that everything may be arranged. The summer is with us. We must not let the best time to return to the Indies slip away. See if some preparations for your return to the lands you have discovered can commence in Seville. And write soon, so that we can prepare for your arrival, so that all may be ready.”

  The anxiety of the monarchs was palpable. Columbus must come quickly, must receive his due from his sovereigns and the nation, but once these joyous festivities were over, he must be dispatched quickly and mightily back to the New World to secure the claim of the Spanish kingdom.

  They had good reasons for high anxiety, for they had received important intelligence from their powerful vassal, the count of Medina-Sidonia, about Portuguese intentions. The duke had learned that in the wake of Columbus’s departure, João II was highly exercised by the Spanish discoveries, rebuking himself for his negligence and myopia. Now he meant to rectify his mistake swiftly. In the spring of 1493, as Columbus was still in Palos, an armada was being mobilized in Lisbon for an expedition of discovery, under the command of a formidable captain, Dom Francisco Dalmeyda.

  The Spanish monarchs were well acquainted with Dalmeyda. A nobleman and son of Count Abrantes Dom Lopo, he was Portugal’s premier warrior-statesman. He had distinguished himself in the Battle of Toro during the War of Succession with the Spanish in 1476; he had performed delicate diplomatic missions for two Portuguese kings; and he had sought permission from King João II to fight alongside the Spanish in the War Against the Moors. At the siege of Granada, this gallant Portuguese knight had comported himself so brilliantly that the Spanish monarchs wished to heap honors upon him. But he had refused them all. “My king will reward me,” he had replied grandly. Now this impressive cavalier was preparing to undermine the claim to the New World by his former allies. (Later, he would sail around the Cape of Good Hope, become the first Portuguese viceroy of India, and be killed by Hottentots on his way home.)

  In the face of this stiff challenge, the Spanish royals replied urgently to the count of Medina-Sidonia, ordering him to arm and provision all the caravels in his domain for a major expedition. Speed was now of the essence. In addition, they tapped Juan de Fonseca, archdeacon of Seville, a prelate with an unusual talent as outfitter of armadas, to begin planning for the second voyage.

  By the time Columbus arrived in Seville in the first week of April, his fame had spread far and wide. Throngs turned out to watch his colorful procession pass. Strange Caribbean masks, fashioned with fishbone and decorated with precious jewels, were held aloft for the crowds. Small pots, molded into vacant moonfaces and said to represent the spirit gods of the aborigines, were passed around. Iridescent, cackling parrots, yellow and green and red-collared, glistened in the sunshine. Coyly, sailors allowed glimpses of their personal gold. The surviving Indians were displayed like circus creatures, as if they had two heads or sprouted tails.

  In fact, to the European eye, the creatures of the New World were something unworldly and inhuman, for besides their coarse, black hair and their dusky skin, their foreheads were bizarrely large and wide and their heads abnormally flat. This apparent deformity was actually the fashion of the time in the Caribbean, for wide foreheads and flat heads were much admired among the Taino Indians. The look was achieved by a mother squeezing the skull of her newborn between two boards, when the tiny skull was still soft and pliable. Add to this flatheadedness the red and white body paint and the plugs in the noses and the ears, and the result was a kind of freak show.

  From Seville’s balconies, flowers and compliments rained down on the heroes. Bells rang, banners were on display, and churches held solemn masses of Corpus Christi. The Admiral might well have sailed to Barcelona in a few days from either Seville or Palos and heeded the monarchs’ plea for haste. But that would have denied him the ballyhoo he required. The monarchs had asked for time to prepare for a conqueror’s welcome. So be it. He was now a master of ceremony and propaganda and self-promotion.

  In Seville, the colorful procession pitched its tent appropriately near the Arch of the Images and in the shadow of the Giralda, in a barrio of narrow streets called El Postigo. There was much to do. For the coming extravaganzas, a tailor needed to be found to design modest but exotic garb for the Indians: red breeches, loose
shirts, and headpieces over their waist-length hair that could be festooned with feathers and shells, to complement their gold earrings and the gold sticks that adorned their nostrils.

  The orders of the monarchs had reached Juan de Fonseca, and the discoverer and the military archdeacon met about the plans for the armada. Another communication from the king and queen had requested Columbus to put his mind to his vision for the coming colonization. On April 9, he did so. Most of his letter concerned gold: who could search for it, how it was to be safeguarded from theft and embezzlement, what percentage of its worth should go to the Church to support its missions, even how it should be stored in treasure boxes, locked with two keys and guarded by two men on the journey home. Emphasizing these details left the impression that tons of the stuff lay around everywhere, just to be scooped up; this fantasy, useful though it was for Columbus’s immediate purpose, would get the discoverer in trouble with the monarchs later when the pickings of subsequent voyages were slim. Three or four towns should be established, Columbus recommended, consisting of several thousand colonists.

  To this April 9 letter, for the first time, he affixed his mystifying signature, with its mixture of Greek and Latin letters, random dots and slashes, and apparent mystical cryptology. It was a pyramid of letters, always with an S over an X, an A over an M, a Greek S over a Y, and an S at the apogee of the pile. Dots separated the letters. That the letters should always be in the same configuration was clearly intentional and important to him, for he signed his letters this way to the end of his life and even instructed his heirs to do the same, “preserving,” as he wrote, “the relation of the lines and points.” At the base of the pyramid of this elaborate monogram were the markings:

  COLUMBUS’S MYSTERIOUS SIGNATURE.

  It is generally assumed that the S’s and A in the upper arrangement stand for the Latin phrase “Servus Sum Altimissimi Salvatoris—I am Servant of the Most Exalted Saviour,” and that the last line is the Greek and Latin form of his first name, suggesting himself as the bearer of Christianity to pagan lands. Given the immense significance of the discovery, there is no doubt that Torquemada and his Inquisition were now poring over every dot and tittle that Columbus produced, especially if the rumor of Columbus’s possible Jewish origins had reached their ears. If he presented himself now as the proselytizing hound of the Christian faith, he was safe. But there is also no doubt that the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, as he languished those days in Seville before his inauguration into the nobility, was keen on participating in the way his immortality was shaped.

  What better way to start than with a conundrum for the ages.

  On April 31, 1493, exactly one year to the day after the Edict of Expulsion for the Jews from Spain, the dazzling spectacle of Revelation took place in the Great Royal Palace of Barcelona. The site was the Salon del Tenill, the principal reception hall of the palace, with its curved ribbed ceiling, its frescoes glorifying the Spanish conquest of Majorca, its Gothic and romanesque appointments. All had been made ready. The monarchs sat upon a dais: Isabella magnificently dressed and jeweled; Prince Juan, the heir apparent, by her side; and Ferdinand, still bearing the raw, grotesque scar from the assassination attempt. Below them clustered the chivalry of the New Spain: an eager and excited assemblage of knights and prelates. The Cardinal of Spain was there, along with the Grand Inquisitor. The naysayers who had been unable to recognize a prophet a year before were pushed to the fringes, while Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, the Italian humanist and philosopher, took a prominent place, his pen poised to spin the wondrous discovery into providential legend and Columbus himself into a human God.

  The discoverer entered—a magnificent, noble figure now, striding along the carpet to the dais, kneeling before the majesties, and kissing their hands, before he was directed to a stool next to them, an honor so great and rare that it was reserved only for the occasion of great deeds by great men. Up until this time, the “famous men of Spain” achieved eternal life only through bravery and sacrifice against the Moors, a poet of the time, Jorge Manrique, wrote. But now there was a different way. “He looked like a Roman senator,” a contemporary chronicler wrote; “tall and stately, gray-haired, with a modest smile on his dignified face betraying his pleasure and glory.”

  To the report of trumpets and thump of drums, the doors were thrown open and minions came forward, bearing large silver plates piled with gold nuggets, strange gold-decorated masks, and figurines. Sailors followed with the skins of huge lizards and snakes, and exotic dried plants, some with aromatic and medicinal properties, some merely novel, like tobacco leaves and corn ears.

  And then the climax. The audience gasped as the flatheaded Indians entered in their foppish, Sevillian getups, their noses pierced with gold needles and their faces painted savagely, carrying cackling parrots. Their skin, a witness wrote, was the color of “cooked quinces”; to some, they looked like a mixture of Moors and Norse. Their appearance was all the more bizarre for their fear and their sickness and their drunkenness, for they had been plied with wine night and day to calm their jitters and shakes. At this overwhelming scene, they sobbed and howled in terror and despair, as Columbus barked orders for them to kneel and keep quiet.

  Soon enough, the celestial strains of the Te Deum drowned out these wails and sobs, as the royal choir burst into song. In their declamations, the monarchs and their councilors competed with one another in their superlatives. Columbus was Heracles and a modern Dionysus. He had indeed fulfilled the prophecy of Seneca. To this argonaut, in search of the Golden Fleece, the chains of the ocean had been loosed, the boundaries of Christendom extended, the riches of Spain increased. In finding huge freshwater rivers with wonderful natural harbors, he had also fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:

  “Their land is filled with silver and gold, and there is no end to their treasures, in a place of broad rivers and streams where galleys with oars can go, and stately ships can pass.”

  The soaring rhetoric of queens and bishops and councilors challenged the eloquence of the argonaut himself. From his stool he gave a stellar performance in encapsulating his glorious deeds. In describing the wonders of Hispaniola and Juana (Cuba), he evoked the loveliest valleys of Castile and Andalusia and sugarcoated his descriptions with a biblical veneer. He had discovered no less a place than Ophir, the biblical land of gold, and he had found Cipangu, the land of Marco Polo. It was true that he had found no great cities and no palaces with gold-covered roofs, nor had he been able to meet the Great Khan of Cathay. Time had been short—the spring season approached, and he had been eager to return home to announce the good news—but he had heard rumors of them to the south and the west. He could not be sure whether the land he called Juana was the mainland, or a very long island of several thousand miles. It could be the island that Marco Polo had called Java.

  From his stool Columbus captivated his audience, and Peter Martyr, the legend maker, took his notes. “The ancients, to show their gratitude, used to respect as gods men whose vision and toil revealed lands which had been unknown to their ancestors,” Martyr wrote later. “We, who hold that beneath his three persons there is only one God to be worshipped, can nonetheless feel wonder at men such as these, even if we do not worship them. Let us revere the sovereigns under whose leadership and auspices it was granted these men to fulfill their plans. Let us praise to heaven sovereigns and discoverers, and let us use all our powers to make their glory seen as is right and proper.”

  With Peter Martyr’s sheen, the legend took shape. The wreck of the Santa María had been a blessing, for it had led to the first settlement of the New World. At the first sight of the Spaniards, the natives had fled “like timid hares fleeing greyhounds.” But the fleet-footed Christian dogs had given chase, and caught one woman, “naked and content with nature.” They had brought her back to the caravels, had fêted her with food and wine and clothed her magnificently before setting her free. Her own people had been so amazed at “her wonderful apparel” that they all came running to th
e shore, proclaiming that the Spaniards had been sent from heaven. And they swam out to the caravels bringing gold, as much gold as the explorers could ask for.

  But then there were other hostile and dangerous natives. They ate human flesh. “They castrate the boys they catch, in the way we do cock chickens or pigs, if we want to rear them to be fatter and more tender for the table,” Martyr imagined in a form of medieval pornography. “When fully mature men come into their hands, they kill them and divide them into portions; they make a feast of their guts and their extremities while they are fresh; they pickle their limbs in salt, as we do hams, and preserve them for later occasions. Eating women is for them a sin and disgusting. If they do acquire any young women they tend them and confine them, just as we do hens, ewes, heifers, to breed from them.” The description of these terrible savages inflamed the imagination of the Spanish warriors in Martyr’s audience to think of military conquest, colonization, and slavery. How else was a conquistador to deal with man-eating savages armed with poisoned arrows?