Columbus claimed the “costliest and handsomest things in that cargo: cotton mantles and sleeveless shirts embroidered and painted in different designs and colors; breechclouts of the same design and cloth as the shawls worn by women in the canoe, being like the shawls worn by the Moorish women of Granada; long wooden swords with a groove on each side where the edge should be, in which were fastened cord and pitch; flint knives that cut like steel; hatchets resembling the stone hatchets used by the other Indians, but made of good copper.” The haul even included crucibles to melt copper.
One other item, mentioned only in passing by Ferdinand, was, if anything, even more valuable than the others: the cacao leaf. When a handful of dried cacao beans used for currency fell to the floor, he noted, “all the Indians squatted down to pick them up as if they had something of great value—their greed driving out their feelings of terror and danger at finding themselves in the hands of such strange and ferocious men as we must have seemed to be.”
Columbus and his men were the first Europeans to behold the cacao, traditionally associated with trade and currency in the Americas. A thousand cacao beans could purchase a slave, for example, but beyond monetary value, the cacao itself was prized by the Maya, who called it ka’kau and believed it was discovered by the gods. The Spanish word cacao also derived from another Maya term, chocol’ha, or the verb chokola’j, meaning “to drink chocolate together.” The Maya used cacao for a variety of medicinal and spiritual purposes; they roasted the beans, mixed them with spices and water, and heated the concoction until it was piping-hot chocolate. Among the Maya, drinking the brew was a privilege reserved for royalty, wealthy princes, shamans, and artists.
Chastened by the Sovereigns’ disapproval of slavery, Columbus no longer regarded his dignified hosts as potential serfs and trophies to send to Spain, and his son considered them delegates of a remarkable, highly accomplished civilization. Impressed, Columbus “detained only one, an ancient named Yumbé, who seemed to be the wisest man among them and of greatest authority,” who would reveal “the secrets of the land” and persuade his people to talk with the visitors from afar. Satisfied, Ferdinand reported that the elder served them “willingly and loyally.” Too willingly, in fact. The more items Columbus displayed, according to Las Casas, “the more the Indians readily agreed that they knew where they were available simply because . . . to say so gave such pleasure, even when they had never before seen or heard of the things they were showing them and he was inquiring about.” The Indians went so far as to include fantastic descriptions of “people who lived in the lands of which they spoke [who] had ships and lombards, bows and arrows, swords and cuirasses”—armor—“and anything else they saw the Christians had.” Dazzled by the descriptions, Columbus fancied hearing accounts of horses, which were no more part of the landscape than unicorns. As they continued to talk, he misinterpreted their obliging descriptions to mean that he and his men were “only ten days’ journey to the river Ganges”—the largest, holiest river in India.
He immediately wrote a report on his findings for the Sovereigns.
The reason for the misunderstanding, besides Columbus’s overactive imagination and stubbornly held geographical misconceptions, was simple enough. “The whole conversation was conducted in sign language,” in Las Casas’s words. “And either the Indians were deliberately playing games with him, or he simply understood nothing of what they were trying to say and only heard what he wanted to hear.”
On this basis, the Admiral was elated. Here at last was the “great wealth, civilization, and industry” he had promised his Sovereigns. He had been toying with the idea of returning to Cuba, to his way of thinking still a peninsula, not an island, but the opulence of the region persuaded him that he had found a trade route to India, so “he decided to continue with his search for a strait across the mainland that would open a way to the South Sea and the Lands of Spices.” To Columbus, with his rigid yet mystical mind-set, this geographical impossibility seemed logical and in harmony with his interpretation of the Bible, the Travels of Marco Polo, and the authors of antiquity. At last everything was falling into place.
So he sailed on, said his son, “like one groping in the darkness.”
To judge from his son’s words, Columbus no longer assumed he was in Asia, but he believed he could locate a passage—over water, or, surprisingly, over land—leading there. Perhaps echoing the Admiral’s rhetoric, Ferdinand grandly described it as the “doorway through which Spain entered upon the dominion of many seas.” In search of this chimera, Columbus approached the coast of Honduras and “made for a point of the mainland that he called Caxinas from the name of a tree that grew there; this tree produces fruit resembling wrinkled olives with a spongy core,” but on arrival, he found “nothing worthy of mention” with the exception of Indians, dressed, Ferdinand recalled, “like those in the canoe, in dyed shirts and breechclouts”—a loincloth with flaps in the front and back. “They also had thick quilted cotton jerkins like breastplates that were sufficient protection against their darts and even withstood some blows from our swords.” The description strongly implied that some sort of conflict, perhaps hand-to-hand combat, had occurred between the Europeans and the Indians. Ferdinand refrained from saying anything critical about these Indians, but wrote about another group with foreboding, characterizing them as “ugly,” “black,” wearing no clothing, and “very wild in all respects.” The fleet’s captive Indian guide pointed out that they ate both human flesh and raw fish, and pierced holes in their ears large enough to insert hens’ eggs.
By Sunday morning, August 14, 1502, Columbus felt safe enough to go ashore with the captains and a substantial complement of sailors. They celebrated Mass along a placid Honduran beach while Spanish banners fluttered in the humid ocean breeze. Whether or not the participants, the Admiral included, were aware of it, this was the first Mass to be heard on the American mainland, or, as Columbus insisted, in “India.”
Three days later, the Admiral dispatched his brother and several launches to hear another Mass ashore and then “take formal possession of the land in the name of the Catholic Sovereigns.” In recognition, if not comprehension, of the ceremony, “more than a hundred Indians bearing food came down to the shore; as soon as the boats had beached, they presented these gifts to the Adelantado,” who, Ferdinand noted, “ordered them repaid with hawk’s bells, beads, and other trifles.” These Indians frightened the young Ferdinand as no others had. They communicated in unintelligible languages, and “they tattoo their arms and bodies by burning in Moorish-style designs that give them a strange aspect. Some display painted lions, others deer, others turreted castles.” In honor of their pierced ears, Columbus called the region Costa de la Oreja, Coast of the Ear. Their faces, covered with white and red cloth, haunted Ferdinand’s dreams. “They really look like devils,” he insisted.
Bartholomew attempted to learn more about the region’s resources. But his inexperienced interpreter, a native of Hispaniola, failed to comprehend the local language. At least the Indians took pleasure in the gifts from the visitors from afar, and repaid the hospitality the following day, when “more than two hundred others came to the same spot, bringing food of various kinds: chickens that were better-tasting than ours, geese, roast fish, red and white beans resembling kidney beans, and other commodities.” The gifts echoed the land’s abundance, its pumas, stags, and roe deer patrolling the hills, and its waters teeming with fish.
The Admiral led the fleet from the Honduran coast in an ordeal of beating to windward. Ferdinand reported that “it took them seventy days of sailing to make the sixty leagues from Point Caxinas to that Cape, now tacking toward the sea and again toward land, often gaining with the wind and as often losing, according to whether the wind was strong or weak when they came about.”
Columbus recalled the passage as a prolonged test of both his maritime skills and his sanity. “I found myself going against the wind and terrible contrary current. Against them I struggled
for sixty days, after which I barely managed to cover a little over seventy leagues. In all this time I did not enter any port, nor could I, nor did the storm from heaven leave me; rain, tremendous thunder and lightning came continuously so that it seemed like the end of the world.” More than ever, he believed he was traversing a biblical universe of primordial awe. He took his trial at sea personally; the elements became mortal enemies, determined to claim the lives of everyone on board his ships. His suffering, coupled with piety, validated his discoveries.
For eighty-eight days the frightening storm did not leave me, to the point that while at sea I saw neither sun nor stars to act as a guide; my ships were devastated, sails torn away, anchor, rigging, and cables lost, as were the boats and much of the provisions; the men were sick to death, all of them contrite, many vowing to devote themselves to religious life, and none neglected to make vows and promise to undertake pilgrimages. Many times they reached the point of making confessions to each other.
Other storms had been experienced, but none ever lasted as long or had been as frightening. Many whom we considered courageous lost all hope time and again.
In the midst of the storm, facing a near-death experience, he was most concerned about the fate of at least one member of the fleet:Anxiety for my son, who was with me, wrung at my heart, the more so since I saw him so young, thirteen, struggling so long with such travails. Our Lord gave him such courage that he inspired the others, and he worked as if he had been sailing for fifty years. It was he who consoled me. I had taken ill, and at various times I reached the point of death; from a small cabin that I had ordered built on deck I was directing the course. My brother was in the worst and most dangerous ship. My anxiety was actually greater, because I had brought him with me against his will. Another sorrow lacerated the heart in my breast, and that was for my son Don Diego, whom I had left in Spain, almost an orphan.
On September 12, the fleet arrived at a cape, which Columbus named Gracias á Dios after the gratitude he experienced on deliverance from the storm. “If the coast had not had some good anchorages, it would certainly have taken us much longer to make that distance, but as it was clean and had two fathoms of depth half a league from shore,” Ferdinand calmly recalled, “it was very easy to anchor at night or when the wind was slack.” The younger Columbus’s steady tone stood in contrast to his father’s melodramatic recapitulation of events. The Admiral described how it felt to be pummeled in a storm, while the boy about whom he had so much anxiety related circumstances as they arose in a more or less realistic manner. The father was always lunging forward, into the storm, while the son stood back to contemplate it.
On September 16, in Ferdinand’s words, “the Admiral sent the ship’s boats toward a river that seemed to be deep and easy of entrance. But as they came out, the onshore wind having freshened, and the sea becoming heavy, such a surf built up at the mouth that one boat was swamped, and her crew drowned.” Columbus named the unhappy stream in which two men had died Río de Desastres, as its banks were lined with “canes as thick as a man’s thigh.”
Nine days later, at an island named Quiribirí, the ships anchored tentatively before shaping a course to Cariay (most likely Puerto Limón), off the coast of Costa Rica, whose vistas made an indelible impression on the lad. “Here we found the best country and people that we had yet seen; because the land was high and abounded in rivers and great trees, and the island itself was very verdant, full of groves of lofty trees, palms,” and a “great number of Indians, many armed with bows and arrows, others with palmtree spears black as pitch and hard as bone and tipped with fish bones, and still others with macanas or clubs.” With his customary composure, he added, “They seemed determined to resist our landing.”
Columbus’s men signaled that they came in peace rather than war, whereupon the Indians jumped into the water and swam out to the ships to “trade their weapons, cotton cloaks and shirts, and the guanín pendants which they hang about their necks.” Volatile as ever, the Admiral refused on this occasion, preferring to demonstrate that he and his men “did not covet their possessions.” To emphasize his point, he ordered presents from Spain to be distributed. The less interest the Europeans exhibited in trading, the more the Indians showed, and they boldly invited the visitors to go ashore by making signs and “holding up their cloaks like banners.” But the Europeans, obeying the Admiral, stayed aboard ship, spoiling the fun. The Indians responded by tying all the trinkets they had received into a neat bundle, which they left on the boat landing for the Spaniards to discover.
On September 25, on Cariay, said Columbus, “I stopped to repair the ships and replenish my victuals and rest the crews, which were very sick, and myself, having, as I said, been many times at the point of death.” But he was not too sick to learn about the “gold mines of the region of Çiamba, which I was seeking. Two Indians led me to Carabarú, where the people went naked and wore a gold disk hanging from the neck, which they were unwilling to sell or trade.” As mesmerized by gold as ever, Columbus forgot about his suffering at sea, and debriefed the Indians about gold and gold mines.
The Indians treated the Europeans with caution. “Thinking that we distrusted them, the Indians sent aboard an old Indian of venerable presence bearing a banner tied to a stick; two girls, one eight and the other fourteen years old, accompanied him,” Ferdinand wrote. In reply, Columbus dispatched a skiff to retrieve water from the mainland. Before they returned to the ship, “the Indians urged them by signs to take the girls.” By all accounts, Columbus treated them well, ordering them to be clothed and fed, and then he sent them ashore, where they rushed into the welcoming arms of the Indian elder and more than fifty others. Later that day, the Indians returned all the gifts given to them by the Europeans, the hawk’s bells and other knickknacks.
In the morning, Bartholomew and a scribe went ashore. As soon as he set foot on the boat landing, Indians took him by both arms and sat him down on the tall, whispering grass by the water’s edge, in full view of the ships. He asked them a few questions, his amanuensis ready to record their replies, but “the Indians were so terrified by the sight of the pen and paper that most of them ran away. The reason was that they were afraid of being bewitched by words or signs.”
And yet, said Ferdinand, “it was they who impressed us as being great sorcerers, but on approaching the Christians they scattered a certain powder in the air; they also burned this powder in censers and with these censers caused the smoke to go toward the Christians,” not unlike the incense with which they were familiar. The Indians’ reluctance to accept gifts struck Ferdinand as “evidence that they suspected us of being enchanters, confirming the adage that says a rogue sees himself in every other man.” There was a spark of mutual recognition between the Indians and the Christians, who recognized the sophistication and intelligence—as well as the strangeness—of the other.
It was Sunday, October 2, the ships still anchored in the vicinity of Puerto Limón, when Columbus sent his indefatigable brother ashore once again, this time to “learn of the Indians’ dwellings, customs, and mode of life.”
Bartholomew and his party came across an amazing crypt, a “wooden palace” covered with cane, containing several tombs. One held a single corpse, “dried and embalmed”; another held two corpses, “with no bad odor, wrapped in cotton cloth: over each tomb was a tablet carved with figures of beasts, and on some the effigy of the dead man, adorned with many beads . . . and other things they most prize.” This memento mori illustrated both the brevity of their temporal lives and the longevity of their spiritual horizons.
Columbus being Columbus, he honored the Indians’ intelligence by capturing several “so that we might learn the secrets of the country,” in Ferdinand’s words. Out of seven seized, two were selected to act as guides. “The others he sent home with gifts in order not to throw the country into an uproar.” Relying as usual on an interpreter, he explained that he needed their assistance to navigate the coast, promising to set them free at j
ourney’s end. The Indians misunderstood, and concluded, not unreasonably, that Columbus was holding them for ransom. The folly persisted into the next day, when a delegation of Indians presented the Europeans with “two native wild boars”—in all likelihood ugly, bristling peccaries, or New World pigs—“small but very savage,” in exchange for their kinsmen. Although he refused to yield, he paid them for the “boars” and sent them home politely clutching the same useless gifts they had refused in the past.
The peccaries briefly distracted Columbus, who had become fascinated by the only slightly less bizarre spider monkey, the “size of a small greyhound, but with a longer tail, so strong that if one coils it about something, it holds it as tightly as if it were fastened with a rope,” in Ferdinand’s deft description. “These animals move about in the trees like squirrels, leaping from tree to tree and grasping the branches not only with their hands but also with their tails, by which they often hang for rest or for sport.” Not knowing what to make of the agile, long-limbed spider monkeys, which are indigenous to the New World, Ferdinand called them “cats.” Their playfulness led to cruel sport, which Ferdinand never forgot.
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