1492: The Year Our World Began (23 page)

At two o’clock on the morning of Friday, October 12, five weeks into their journey, a seaman straining from the rigging of Martín Alonso’s ship set up the cry of “Land!” The agreed signal—a shot from a small cannon—rang out, and all three ships answered with praises to God. To the presumed chagrin of the lookout, Columbus claimed the reward for himself on the grounds that he had seen a light from land the previous night. Cupidity can hardly explain this stunningly unfair egotism. Columbus—in his self-appointed role as chivalric type—had to be the first to spy land, like the model hero of a Spanish version of the Alexander romance, in which Alexander sails to India and “Thus spake Alexander, the
first of all his crew, / That he had seen the land ahead ere any seaman knew.”
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What with unrecorded drift, the distortions of magnetic variation, and the untrustworthiness of the surviving fragments of his log, it is impossible to reconstruct Columbus’s course with absolute confidence. Therefore, we do not know exactly where he made landfall. His descriptions of places and courses generally are too vague and too riven with contradictions to be reliable. His accounts of his travels are highly imaginative—almost poetic—and readers who take them literally crucify themselves in struggling to make sense of them. All that is certain about the first island he touched when he reached the Caribbean is that it was small, flat, fertile, dotted with pools, and largely protected by a reef, with what Columbus calls a lagoon in the middle, and a small spit or peninsula on the eastern side: this formed an exploitable natural harbor. It could have been almost any of the islands of the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos. The natives, according to Columbus, called it Guanahani. He christened it San Salvador. The island now called Watling is the least-bad match for his description.

To judge from the surviving materials, what impressed Columbus most were the natives. This does not necessarily reflect his own priorities, for his first editor, whose extracts from Columbus’s papers are almost all we have of the explorer’s account of his first voyage, was obsessed with the “Indians” of the New World. He selected what concerned them and, perhaps, left out much that did not. Four themes emerge from the narration of the encounter as we have it.

First, Columbus stressed the nakedness of the people he confronted. For some readers at the time, nakedness had negative connotations, rather as it might in the United States today, where it seems inseparable from lurid fears of sexual excess. Some late-medieval clerics were obsessed by fears of heretics whom they called “Adamites” and who supposedly believed that they were in a permanent state of innocence, which they signified by going naked, at least in their own congregations, where they were said to practice orgies of promiscuity. The sect seems to have
existed only in overexcited minds. Hang-ups of this kind were not, however, as common then as they are now. Most of Columbus’s contemporaries would have thought well of nakedness. For classically inclined humanists, it signified the sort of sylvan innocence ancient poets associated with the “age of gold.” For Franciscans, who were the source of the most marked religious influences on Columbus, nakedness was a sign of dependence on God: it was the state to which St. Francis himself stripped to proclaim his vocation. Most readers at the time would probably have inferred that the people Columbus met were “natural men,” free of the accomplishments and corruptions of civilization.

Second, Columbus repeatedly compared the islanders with Canarians, blacks, and the monstrous humanoid races that were popularly supposed to inhabit unexplored parts of the earth. The purpose of these comparisons was not so much to convey an idea of what the islanders were like as to establish doctrinal points: the people were comparable with others who inhabited similar latitudes, such as Canarians and black Africans, in conformity with a doctrine of Aristotle’s; they were physically normal, not monstrous, and therefore—according to a commonplace of late-medieval psychology—fully human and rational. This qualified them as potential converts to Christianity.

Third, Columbus insisted on their natural goodness. He portrayed them as innocent, unwarlike creatures, uncorrupted by material greed—indeed, improved by poverty—and with an inkling of natural religion undiverted into what were considered “unnatural” channels, such as idolatry. By implication, Columbus’s “Indians” were a moral example to Christians. The picture was strongly reminiscent of a long series of exemplary pagans in medieval literature, whose goodness was meant to be a reproach to wicked Christians.

Finally, Columbus was on the lookout for evidence that the natives were commercially exploitable. At first sight, this seems at odds with his praise of their moral qualities, but many of his observations cut two ways. The natives’ ignorance of warfare establishes their innocent credentials but also makes them easy to conquer. Their nakedness might
evoke an idyll, but, to skeptical minds it could also suggest savagery and similarity to beasts. Their commercial inexpertise showed that they were both uncorrupted and easily duped. Their rational faculties made them both identifiable as humans and exploitable as slaves. Columbus’s attitude was ambiguous but not necessarily duplicitous. He was genuinely torn between conflicting ways of perceiving the natives.

Columbus spent the period from October 15 to October 23 reconnoitering small islands. His observations of the natives show that he felt—or wanted to convince himself—that they were, in his eyes, becoming more civilized or, at least, more astute. In one place, they knew how to drive a bargain. In another, the women wore a sketchy form of dress. In another, the houses were well and cleanly kept. Through sign language, or interpreted from the utterances of the natives, indications multiplied of mature polities, headed by kings. Though we cannot know where to place these islands on a map of the Caribbean, they occupy an important place in the map of Columbus’s mind: serially aligned, leading onward toward the imagined “land which must be profitable.” In Columbus’s imagination, the first big piece of gold reported to him, on October 17, became an example of the coinage of some great prince.

The same tension of mounting expectations affected Columbus’s perceptions of the natural world. He claimed to see hybrid plants that cannot have existed. He noted the abundance of mastic where none grew. He speculated about dyes, drugs, and spices, which, he admitted, he could not identify. He got around the Caribbean by kidnapping or cajoling native guides to accompany his vessels. The islands were linked by canoe-borne trade, and the local navigators had complete mental maps at their disposal, which some of them supplemented, on a later voyage, by laying out a scheme for Columbus, using beans and pebbles.

From Columbus’s point of view, however, the trading prospects seemed desperately unpromising. One of the engravings accompanying his first printed report shows what he was after: in the lee of one of his island discoveries, a rich merchant galley lies, while merchants in oriental headgear and robes exchange rarities with natives onshore. The
scene was fantastic, but Columbus was hoping to find such prospects opening in reality before his eyes, as proof that he was close to the prosperous economies of Asia. Instead, it seemed he had stumbled on a Stone Age obstacle course, where no one produced anything for which he would be able to find a market.

In his own mind at least, Columbus was approaching civilized lands and profitable trades. As he approached Cuba on October 24, he assumed he was about to find Japan or China. When he got there, he took refuge in vague descriptions unrelated to reality. Everything was of the sweetest and fairest. As it became increasingly obvious that the inhabitants were poor and improbable trading partners, he began to advocate their evangelization as an alternative justification for his enterprise. He adumbrated a vision of a purified Church peopled by unsullied innocents. Alternatively, the thought that the people could be enslaved to make up for the lack of other marketable goods kept obtruding. This was typical of Columbus, who never found it hard to simultaneously entertain incompatible thoughts.

Dissatisfied with Cuba, he tried to get away from the island, but adverse winds frustrated several attempts. Martín Pinzón, however, succeeded in making off on his own, and remained out of touch until the expedition was almost over. True to form, Columbus suspected his co-commander of disloyalty and seeking private gain. On December 4, Columbus at last escaped from Cuba and stumbled upon Hispaniola. For two reasons, it was the most important island he was ever to find. In the first place, it produced fair quantities of gold. This was the making of Columbus’s mission; without it, he would almost certainly have returned home to ridicule and obscurity. Second, the island housed an indigenous culture of sufficient wealth and prowess to impress the Spaniards. With some of the natives, Columbus could establish friendly relations—or so he thought—and fix in their territory the intended site of a future colony.

In what survives of his account, Columbus made little mention of the superior material civilization of the islands. But the elaborate stonework
and woodwork, the ceremonial spaces, the stone-lined ball courts, the stone collars, pendants, and stylized statues, the richly carved wooden thrones, the elaborate personal jewelry all combined to convince him that Hispaniola was his best find so far, with the most promising environment and the most ingenious inhabitants. “It only remains,” he wrote to the monarchs, “to establish a Spanish presence and order them to perform your will. For…they are yours to command and make them work, sow seed, and do whatever else is necessary, and build a town, and teach them to wear clothes and adopt our customs.”
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In Columbus’s changed perceptions of the people, all the agonies of Spain’s future in the
New World were foreshadowed. A long-term colonial vision crowded out the quick pickings he formerly imagined—the exotic products, the commercial gain. In the unequal Arcady he now envisaged, the natives would be “civilized” in the Spaniards’ image, and the colonists would be teachers as well as masters. The Spaniards could suck like leeches, build like bees, or spread an inclusive web like spiders. Neither Columbus nor any of his successors ever resolved the contradictions.

Natives’ nudity and timidity symbolize innocence, while the King of Spain beholds Columbus’s landfall. From a versified version of Columbus’s report (1493).
Giuliano Dati,
Lettera delle isole che ha trovato il re di Spagna
(Florence: Morigiani and Petri, 1493).

To understand the febrile mental condition that now overtook him, a leap of imagination is needed: what must it have been like to be isolated on what he called “that sea of blood,” thousands of miles from home, surrounded by unknown perils, baffled by an unfamiliar environment, for which neither reading nor experience equipped Columbus or any of his men, and surrounded by the unintelligible babble and gestures of captive guides? Not surprisingly in these circumstances, his grip on reality wavered. At first, for instance, he was disinclined to believe the natives’ stories of how they were hunted by cannibal enemies (though those stories were, in essence, true). Within a few weeks, however, he was entertaining far more bizarre fantasies: of islands populated respectively by Amazon women and bald men, of the enmity of Satan, “who desired to impede the voyage,” of the proximity of the fabled Prester John (according to medieval legend, a Christian potentate, dwelling supposedly in the depths of Asia, who longed to join a Western crusade).

In these circumstances, he claimed to have a sudden revelation. On Christmas Eve, his flagship ran aground. At first he was inclined to blame the negligence of a lazy seaman, who, against orders, left a boy in charge of the tiller. On reflection, the next day he saw the outcome rather differently, as the result of treachery by “the men of Palos,” who had begun by giving him a dud ship and ended by failing to ease it off the rocks. The wickedness of the crew seemed providentially ordained, as surely as that of Judas. “It was a great blessing,” he wrote, “and the express purpose of God that the ship should run aground there.” The event obliged him to leave some of his men behind—a garrison, which, he hoped,
would become the kernel of a colony. The debris of the ship and the dregs of the crew would supply the needs of the moment. As if by a miracle, the ruin of the ship provided “planks to build the fort with and stocks of bread and wine for more than a year and seed to sow and the ship’s boat and a caulker and a gunner and a carpenter and a cooper.”
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The disaster turned Columbus’s thoughts homeward. He had collected many samples of gold, pods of pungent chili, rumors of pearls, and some human specimens in the form of kidnapped natives to show off back at court. He had discovered the pineapple, tobacco—“some leaves which must be highly esteemed among the Indians,”
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though he did not yet know what it was for—the canoe, and the hammock, a gift of Caribbean technology to the rest of the world and to seamen in particular. If he had not reached China or Japan, he had, he reflected, at least found “a marvel”—the realm of Sheba, perhaps, or the land from which the Magi bore their gifts of gold and aromatics.