Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 Read Free Page B

who had marks of wounds on their bodies, and made signs to them to ask what it was, and they showed me that people of other islands which are near came there and wished to capture them, and they defended themselves. And I believe that people do come here from the mainland to take them as slaves.”
    Slaves . The idea instantly struck Columbus as plausible, even desirable. “They ought to be good servants,” he continued, “and of good skill, for I see they repeat very quickly whatever was said to them.” And, in the same breath, he judged that “they would easily be made Christians, because it seemed to me that they belonged to no religion.” He planned to present six of these nameless, naked individuals to his royal sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella, “that they may learn to speak.”
     
    I n the morning, masses of Indians crowded the beach to gape at the three ships from afar. Others arrived by dugout (“fashioned like a long boat from the trunk of a tree”) carrying forty or fifty men, who propelled themselves with a curious object that the European sailors, despite their lifelong acquaintance with the ocean, had never before seen. Having no word for it, Columbus called it a “thing like a baker’s peel,” a broad, mostly flat blade attached to a long handle. We know it as a canoe paddle.
    They brought additional gifts for Columbus, who dismissed them as “trifles too tedious to describe.” It was gold that he—and Spain—wanted, not trinkets or parrots. He glimpsed tiny amounts in the form of jewelry piercing their noses, and immediately began asking for the source of this precious metal. If his instincts were correct, the gold came from Çipango—Japan. “I intend to go and see if I can find the Island of Çipango,” he emphasized. He was confident that the gentle people in their dugout canoes would direct him to the island.
    After this first encounter, Columbus’s fleet skirted the coast of San Salvador. Wherever they went, excitement erupted onshore. Some of the startled inhabitants offered food and drink, and others, both men and women, hastened into their boats shouting, “Come and see the men who come from the sky!” It seemed to Columbus that those ashore were giving thanks to God as they threw themselves on the ground.
    He would have made other landfalls, but his nautical instinct warned him away from a “great reef of rocks which surrounded the whole of this island.” Infuriatingly, “inside this reef there are some shoal spots, but the sea moves no more than within a well,” and so he sailed on, and on, overwhelmed by the splendor of the Caribbean, its cobalt waters, cottony clouds, and periwinkle skies. To flatter Ferdinand and Isabella, he compared the spectacle to the countryside around Seville in the months of April and May, but in fact the pellucid ocean in which he found himself was even more gorgeous and beguiling. Columbus said that he “saw so many islands that I could not decide where to go first; and those men whom I had captured made signs to me that they were so many that they could not be counted, and called by their names more than a hundred.” He eventually decided to make for the largest landmass, estimating that it lay five leagues from the island he designated San Salvador.
    Exhilarated and distracted, he did not linger at his new anchorage. “When from this island I saw another bigger one to the West, I made sail to navigate all that day until nightfall because otherwise I would not have been able to reach the western cape.” He called it Santa María de la Concepción, and dropped anchor there at sunset. The island is often assumed to be Rum Cay, to use its more mundane modern name, and one hardly befitting Columbus’s exalted sense of mission.
    Driven by the search for gold, he had allowed his wily captives to lead him to this spot because those who dwelled there “wore very big bracelets of gold on their legs and arms.” When the ships approached the shore,