Columbus, normally so purposeful, wandered through the Bahamas for a full week, as if through a dreamscape. “I discovered a very wonderful harbor with one mouth, or rather one might say two mouths, for it has an island in the middle, and both are very narrow, and within it is wide enough for 100 ships, if it were deep and clean,” he recorded on October 17 as he approached Cape Santa María. “During this time I walked among some trees which were the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen, viewing as much verdure in so great development as in the month of May in Andalusia, and all the trees were as different from ours as day from night.” He was charmed and baffled by the spectacle. “Nobody could say what they were, nor compare them to others of Castile.” The sights of so many unidentifiable trees and plants and flowers caused him “great grief,” almost as if he were blind or speechless.
Only gold roused him from his reveries. The moment he spotted a man “who had in his nose a gold stud” engraved with characters, he urgently tried to strike a deal, “and they answered me that never had anyone dared to barter for it.” If his intuition proved correct, the gold stud bore Chinese or perhaps Japanese inscriptions, but he was unable to examine it.
The next day “[t]here came so fair and sweet a smell of flowers and trees from the land, that it was the sweetest thing in the world.” And ahead, a smaller island, and another, so many that he despaired of exploring them all “because I couldn’t do it in fifty years, for I wish to see and discover the most that I can before returning to Your Highnesses (Our Lord willing) in April.” Fifty years: he was just beginning to appreciate the enormity and incomprehensibility of the lands he had found. Everything was strange and different—the vegetation, the people, the musky odor of flowers wafting from a nearby island. It was only October, the New World only a week old in his awareness. More than six months remained until he was due back in Spain, and anything could happen in this unexplored world.
As the entries in his diary increased, he related his experiences at sea with confidence and eloquence. On its surface, the diary is meant to convey the startling drama and novelty of his voyage, in which everything was a discovery, every experience and sensation was being registered for the first time by the European sensibility, and with European sensitivity—more specifically, the regal Castilian sensibility that Columbus longed to emulate. He tried to blend imperiousness and intelligence, as if holding the world at arm’s length to study it. For Columbus, an expatriate from Genoa, a merchant sailor and self-taught navigator, the aristocratic tone was a carefully crafted impersonation notable for what he omitted or downplayed or misunderstood as much as the startling discoveries he recorded.
As his voyage proceeded, the diary subtly transformed itself into a manifesto of discovery, and beyond that, a mirror into which he could not stop looking as it came to reflect his vision, his ambition, his will to greatness, himself. In his own mind, his experiences and observations were so persuasive that they interfered with his ability to respond to the ever-changing reality of exploration. Instead, he was confined by his rigid expectations.
To complicate matters, students of his remarkable diary must rely on a transcription of the original journal of the first voyage, which has been lost. It comes down through two main sources. The first is Columbus’s natural, or illegitimate, son Ferdinand, a sailor turned historian; the second is Bartolomé de Las Casas, the friar and chronicler. Ferdinand naturally sought to burnish his father’s tarnished reputation, while Las Casas sought a deep enough circle in hell in which to cast the explorer. But Las Casas’s attitude toward Columbus is more nuanced than that of a single-minded critic. He was aware of the complexity of the undertaking, to which he was an eyewitness and participant, yet also capable of seeing events in a larger historical context, living both in the moment and out of it. He lacked a holograph—the handwritten version—of the journal; instead, he worked from a flawed version about which he registered occasional scholarly complaints. In addition to routine copying errors, the unknown scribe on whom Las Casas relied had a troubling tendency to confuse “miles” with “leagues,” and even “east” with “west.” Such mistakes made it difficult to retrace Columbus’s route precisely.
As a champion of the dignity and human rights of the Indians, Las Casas included numerous passages in which Columbus admired his hosts. Las Casas switches frequently between direct quotation of the copy before him, in which Columbus speaks in the first person, and detailed summaries in which the Admiral is referred to in the third person, giving the impression that Columbus, like Caesar, referred to himself in that manner. (The scrupulous Las Casas distinguishes between the two by using quotation marks for direct quotations.)
Columbus’s vague, occasionally deceptive reports of tides, harbors, shoals, and sailing tactics complicated matters further. These descriptions were destined to cause centuries of chroniclers and would-be explorers to gnash their teeth over the absence of precise and useful navigational information—which was Columbus’s intention. Divulging his navigational theories and practices ran counter to his ingrained Genoese instincts as a pilot and mariner. It was more dangerous to reveal than conceal; if he was not careful, he might find himself marooned in Seville, or Lisbon, watching copycat missions exploit his discoveries. So he fell back on generic descriptions of beaches, harbors, tides, and shoals in an effort to cover his wake even as he wrote with an eye on posterity.
Alternately puzzled and overconfident, he wrestled with the most basic problem of exploration: his location. His subject was his discovery of “India,” but his principal concern remained himself, his travails, and his sense of heroism. Whenever Columbus stood outside the momentous events of explorations and calmly retold his account, the unfolding of God’s will became an important theme; when he was in the service of the Lord, there were no accidents, only degrees of devotion. In the service of the Lord, he saw himself as a priest of exploration.
But when Columbus’s convictions outran reality, or when his vanity and anxiety got the better of him, he succumbed to his darker instincts. He seemed oblivious to the well-being of others, and alarmingly ready to sacrifice all for an exalted, unattainable goal, whether it was the discovery of the Grand Khan’s empire or the liberation of Jerusalem. In these dramas, he saw himself as a tormented, heroic figure. The greater his fantasies, the more inhuman he became. His journal, in part a record of his passionate instability, records some of his suffering from a sense of dread and oppression, relieved mainly by intimations of glory and omnipotence. He was more than a discoverer, he was an intensifier of both his voyages and his inner struggles. This penchant for self-dramatization is part of the reason Columbus’s exploits are so memorable; he insisted on making them so.
As the journal gathered substance, it became an important record of the voyage, the rudder of the Admiral’s psyche, a stay against both actual and psychic storms. It was not, however, a source of comfort to Columbus. In place of the expected sense of vindication, the Admiral often sounds ever more frantic and embattled by his discoveries and their challenges. He becomes aware that he is entering into a lasting struggle in which every triumph seems to be accompanied by a misstep, unforeseen consequences, or even a potential crime. Paradoxically, as his power and prominence (in his own mind) increase, so does his vulnerability—to Indians, to rivals such as the Pinzón brothers, to a dimly perceived sense that the stakes of the voyage are higher and more ambiguous than those he originally formulated. Rather than finding a nautical analogue to Marco Polo’s travels, and a path to personal wealth, he had blundered into an “other world,” as he came to call it, where there were no maps to guide him. He was lost and misguided for all practical purposes, yet he could not admit that possibility to himself and the others on the voyage; it was much better to insist that he had not yet found what they sought, but that conviction alone did not offer much comfort. The more he found, the more frantic he became, as the empire he sought revealed itself to be greater and more varied than he had imagined.
As Columbus went island-hopping, marveling at the “singing of the little birds” and the “grass like April in Andalusia,” while he looked for gold, he heard from a cacique about a “large island” that the explorer reflexively decided “must be Japan.” And visiting that island nation, he was “determined to go to the mainland,” that is, China, “and to the city of Quinsay,” Marco Polo’s antique term for the Song dynasty capital, now known as Hangzhou, the richest and largest city in the medieval world. In this magnificent setting, Columbus imagined himself presenting “Your Highnesses’ letters to the Grand Khan, and to beg a reply and come home with it.”
Although he was situated in the midst of the Bahamas, he remained convinced that he had arrived at the doorstep of Asia. In reality, Quinsay lay more than eight thousand miles west of his position in the Caribbean, but these dimensions contradicted his firmly held assumptions about the size of the globe and the placement of continents—not that other navigators or cosmographers in Europe had a more accurate notion of these things. The precise globes that Columbus studied are not known, but one of the most influential representations of the day, by Martin Behaim, a German mapmaker in the service of Portugal, did indicate that Çipango was at hand. Columbus could not admit the possibility that these globes and all their assumptions might be spectacularly wrong.
When not contemplating his China delusion, Columbus returned to his other chimera: gold.
He spent a night and the following day, October 22, “waiting to see if the king here or other people would bring gold or anything substantial.” Many came to observe, some naked, others painted red, black, or white, offering cotton or other local items in exchange for simple European utensils. The only gold in evidence took the form of jewelry that some of the Indians wore “hanging from the nose.” They were willing to exchange these items for hawk’s bells, but upon examining the haul, he complained, “There’s so little that it is nothing at all.”
From gold, his mind swung back to Asia. He reckoned he was but a day’s sail from Japan, or Çipango, not the eight thousand miles separating him from his improbable destination. On October 23, he wrote of blithely departing for Cuba, “which I believe should be Çipango,” to look for gold. “On the globes that I saw,” he reminded himself, “it is in this region.” So stated Martin Behaim.
At midnight, Columbus weighed anchor and shaped a course for Cuba, but by nightfall he had nothing to show for his brave effort, as the wind “blew up brisk and I didn’t know how far it was to the island of Cuba.” Accordingly, he lowered sail, except for the forecourse, until rain caused him to furl that sail as well. So it went for four days, “and how it rained!”
On Sunday, October 28, he entered a deep, unobstructed river—perhaps Bahía Bariay in Cuba—and anchored within its protective embrace, where he beheld “trees all along the river, beautiful and green, and different from ours.” He labored over his descriptions of flora and fauna with extreme care, as if the natural bounty could substitute or distract from the wonders he had failed to find so far—gold, spices, and tangible evidence of the Grand Khan, whom he had crossed an ocean to see, without realizing that two oceans, and two centuries, separated them.
Instead, he wrote of flowers and singing birds and a barkless dog, probably domesticated by local “fishermen who had fled in fear.” Within their huts, he found an eerie sight: “nets of palm fiber and ropes and fish-hooks of horn, and bone harpoons, and other fishing tackle, and many fireplaces within.” But where were the inhabitants of this Arcadia? With stifled breathing and hesitant footfalls, his men warily crept through the timeless village.
Ordering that nothing be disturbed, he returned to his ship and resumed his voyage upriver, groping for superlatives to describe Cuba: “The most beautiful that eyes have ever seen: full of very good harbors and deep rivers.” Indians, when he encountered them, spoke of ten great rivers, and, he wrote, “one cannot circumnavigate it with their canoes in 20 days.” He refused to entertain the implication that Cuba was an island. If he had not arrived on Asia’s doorstep, where was he? It was a question that haunted the entire premise of the voyage.
He persuaded himself that the inhabitants, or Indians, mentioned “mines of gold and pearls,” and claimed he caught a glimpse of “mussel shells” that might contain pearls, and on the basis of this misunderstanding, concluded that the “ships of the Grand Khan, great ones,” had preceded him.
Baffled, curious, predatory, he made his way inland, admiring grander dwellings, which he struggled to describe in the idiom he understood: “They were made in the manner of Moorish tents, very large, and looking like tents in an encampment, without regularity of streets, but one here and another there; and inside well swept and clean, and their furnishings well made . . . of very fair palm branches.” Here and there masks, some masculine, others feminine, adorned the walls, but he could not ascertain “whether these are for beauty or to be worshipped.” Again, he emphasized, “they didn’t touch a thing.”
On Tuesday, October 30, the fleet was under way again, Pinta carrying Indian guides, and Columbus still planning to happen upon the Grand Khan. By November 1, he went ashore near Puerto de Gibara, on Cuba’s northeastern shore, deploying his Indian passengers as scouts and emissaries. They were engaged as before in a fruitless search for gold. On this occasion, he observed “a piece of worked silver hanging from the nose” of an Indian, a detail that sparked his curiosity. His men engaged in communicating by sign language with the locals, taking a tribal conflict for full-blown war between the islanders and the Grand Khan. “It is certain,” he proclaimed, “that this is the mainland,” and that Quinsay lay only one hundred leagues distant. It was time to prepare a scouting party to reach the legendary Chinese capital.
Columbus dispatched “two Spanish men: the one was called Rodrigo de Xerez, who lived in Ayamonte, and the other was one Luis de Torres . . . of Murcia and had been born a Jew, and knew, it is said, Hebrew and Aramaic and also some Arabic.” Two Indians accompanied the scouts, and carried “strings of beads to buy food with.” They had their orders to find the island’s king, present their credentials, exchange gifts, and discover their actual location. They had six days to complete their mission.
As Columbus was at pains to explain, Luis de Torres was a recent converso, or convert, to Christianity, and probably an unwilling one. His original name is believed to have been Yosef Ben Ha Levy Haivri, “Joseph the Son of Levy the Hebrew,” and he would become the first person of Jewish origin to settle in the New World. Columbus had brought Torres on the voyage both for his political skills and his linguistic abilities. They might have dealings with Arab traders, and in the event they encountered descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Torres was expected to communicate with them. Columbus was, in reality, wholly unprepared for speaking with the “Indians” in their actual tongue and resorted to improvised sign language, a modus operandi that generated ambiguity and confusion that he took as confirmation of his fantastic ideas about the Grand Khan.
On the morning of November 3, Columbus went aboard the ship’s launch to await the scouting party and survey a “very remarkable harbor, very deep and clear of rocks,” with a beach well suited to careening, or repairing the hulls of ships.
A few days later, on November 4, Martín Alonso Pinzón, who considered himself the expedition’s virtual co-leader, went ashore and made a highly promising find, “two pieces of cinnamon,” actually Canella winterana, or wild cinnamon blossoms, giving off their smoky-sweet odor. He was eager to trade this desirable commodity, and would have done so, were it not for the “penalty the admiral had imposed.” There were even cinnamon groves nearby, according to Pinta’s boatswain, but on inspection, Columbus decided that was not the case. The Spanish explorers listened intently to tales of gold and pearls “in an infinite amount.” The more they listened, the more credulous they became, until Columbus was registering reports of men with the heads of dogs “who ate men and that in killing one they beheaded him and drank his blood and c
ut off his genitals.” Grotesque stories such as these sounded similar to tales recounted by Sir John Mandeville, whose fanciful tales were at least as popular in western Europe as Marco Polo’s. Such things could not happen here—or could they?
The scouts, Rodrigo de Xerez and Luis de Torres, returned to describe their reconnoitering on Tuesday, November 6. Within twelve leagues, they said, they had found a “village” with fifty tents and a thousand inhabitants, who received the visitors “with great solemnity.” They were pleased to report that the inhabitants “touched them and kissed their hands and feet, marveling and believing that they came from the sky.” They were offered chairs, while their hosts squatted at their feet, as one of their Indian companions explained to the throng that as Christians, their visitors “were good people.” A respectful frenzy ensued. “The men went out and the women entered, and squatted in the same fashion around them, kissing their hands and feet, feeling them to ascertain if they were of flesh and bones like themselves; begging them to stay at least five days.” The visitors responded in a calculatingly commercial vein, displaying samples of spices they sought, cinnamon and pepper and the like, and inquiring where they could be found, receiving only vague directions (“around there, to the southeast”) by way of reply. They found no Chinese, no Arabs, no descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, and no trace of the Grand Khan. But they had made friends and potential allies. Five hundred men and women wished to accompany them on their return “to the sky,” as they imagined. They allowed only a handful the privilege of their company.
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