Chapter 31 Columbus by Rafael Sabatini
THE DISCOVERY
Leading the way for the squadron, and under a full spread of sail, so as to take the light airs of morning, the Santa Maria groped her way into a wide bay of amazing beauty, where like a towering green cliff beyond a wide belt of silver sand rose a mighty forest in which strange birds screeched and fluttered, glittering like winged jewels.
In the chains stood a seaman, heaving the lead and calling the fathoms, a measure almost unnecessary, for so crystal clear was the water that the eye could sound it.
At eight fathoms the anchors were let go, and there was the movement and rattle, first of taking in sail, and then of swinging out and launching the boats in slings from the mainyards.
Colon on his quarter-deck pondered the scene with fevered eyes. The trees beyond that beach upon which the waves broke with a mere silken rustle, were of a size such as he had never seen. Palms that were strange to him filled the foreground intermingled with aloes of lily-like blossoms, some white, some scarlet. Behind this fringe rose the gigantic forest, in which he identified pines, but of colossal proportions, and trees which he might have supposed great elms but for the calabashes they bore, which he conceived to be a fruit. Amongst them, disturbed by the clatter and splash of the anchors, flitted those strange birds of fantastically brilliant plumage.
The October air, tepid as that of May in Andalusia, came to him laden with unknown perfumes; in the pellucid waters about the ship he beheld fishes of incredible colours. All were indications that he was come to a land of enchantment. He realized already that this was no more than an island, nor could he suppose it yet to be the Zipangu of his aims. He must regard it as an outpost of Asia, one of the thousand isles to which Marco Polo alluded. Zipangu must lie farther west, with the mainland of Cathay still farther.
As he stood there entranced he beheld human figures appearing on the beach. They were emerging from the forest, all of them stark naked, lithe, light-coloured shapes, but little duskier than most Spaniards. Taken with all the rest of that strange scene they came to persuade the amazed Colon that his discovery was not merely of new lands, but, indeed, of a new world.
With a flush of excitement on his cheekbones he issued short orders to Aranda concerning those who were to accompany him ashore. Whilst they were making ready he, too, re-entered his cabin to buckle on back-and-breast of burnished steel, to gird himself with his sword, and to don a cloak of bright scarlet camlet, so that he might do ceremonial justice to so mighty an occasion. In this splendour, and bearing the royal standard, he went over the side to the boat that waited manned by an armed crew. The notary Escovedo, the master-at-arms Aranda, the pilot Cosa, Ximenes, Sanchez and one or two others followed him, whilst from the Pinta and the Niña came the Pinzons, each with his following.
The first to step ashore, Colon knelt and kissed the earth; then still on his knees, with his following kneeling behind him, he uttered a short prayer. Whilst this was doing, the boats pulled back to the squadron, so as to bring off others of the crew.
When some fifty of them were assembled on that beach, the Admiral passed ritualistically to take possession in the name of the King and Queen, his Sovereigns. He set up the royal standard between those of the Pinzons, which bore a green cross and the crowned initials F and Y. Next he drew his sword, and pronounced the words of simple magic which bestowed the name of San Salvador upon this island called by the natives Guanahani, of a group—as he was yet to learn—known to them as the Lucayas.
The deed recording on that Friday the 12th of October the incorporation of the land in the dominions of Ferdinand and Isabel, was drawn there and then by Escovedo, who came equipped for the task. To this deed the chief amongst them set their hands in witness under that of Cristobal Colon, the Admiral.
Whilst this was doing the concourse of natives had been increasing. Gradually, in silent amazement, they emerged from cover and drew ever nearer to these strange beings, borne to their shore in the bodies of those vast birds that had now furled their white wings. Some of these Indians—as Colon miscalled them, conceiving himself in the Indies—were armed with spears that were mere sharpened staffs; but in none of them was either fear or hostility to be observed. For, as the Spaniards were to discover, fear and hostility were as alien to these savages as was the acquisitiveness that marks civilization and is responsible for so much of the fear and hostility that corrupts it. Personal property was unknown among this people, who held in common the simple possessions, so generously yielded them by the fruitful earth.
From this and the friendliness of these Lucayans, a friendliness reflected in their soft-spoken voices and gentle, liquid eyes, Colon may well have come to wonder whether this new world might not be an Eden, and an Eden in which there had been no Fall, the happy islanders being under no sentence to earn their bread by sweat. Those who now approached the Spaniards were, with a single exception, males and young, of a good height and athletic shape, well featured with lofty brows and fine eyes. Their hair, straight and coarse, was cut to a fringe across their foreheads, but left long enough to hang to their shoulders behind. Their faces were entirely beardless, the bodies of some were painted with stripes of various colours, black or white or red; others confined the paint to their faces, chiefly to the noses and round the eyes. Some few of them wore in their noses gleaming plates of yellow metal, which at a glance was to be recognized for virgin gold.
Advancing, they prostrated themselves before these strange beings with white, hairy faces and curiously shaped coverings of various colours to their bodies, most of them armoured like turtles. It required no great discernment to perceive that the chief god among these gods was the tall light-eyed man in the brilliant scarlet mantle, particularly as the climax of the ceremony of taking possession closed in acclamation of him and prostrations to him by some of his followers.
These were men who had been prominent in the mutiny, Ires amongst them. They may well have feared that in the hands of one who was now a viceroy de facto, yielding a sovereign authority that included the power of life and death, and this in a land so plentifully supplied with convenient trees, they might be called to the grim account which mutiny imposes. So those unruly ones went humbly down upon their knees before him, confessing their fault with every outward sign of contrition, and imploring his merciful forgiveness.
The Lord High Admiral of the Ocean-Sea and Viceroy of this New World was, you conceive, in no hanging mood that morning. He dispensed a liberal forgiveness, imposing upon them as a penance the emptying and scouring of the casks that had held their sea-water ballast, and the replenishing of them with fresh water from the island.
Dismissing them on that, Colon faced the ever-increasing throng of natives, and by his friendly smile and gestures encouraged them to approach. If the words he used were unintelligible, at least his tone of gentle benignity was not to be misunderstood.
In each hand he held up a couple of hawk-bells, and as he agitated them the liquid eyes of the savages lighted with amazement and pleasure at the melodious tinkle. He bestowed them upon a couple of the lads who stood nearest, and had the amused satisfaction of beholding them go bounding off transported by delight at the merry music that accompanied their movements.
A stalwart young islander, coming close, took the sleeve of the Admiral’s doublet between finger and thumb to feel its texture. Next he pressed his fingers hard against the Admiral’s cuirass, his eyes puzzled. Whilst he was doing so Colon fitted a cap of scarlet wool over the man’s straight hair. Over the head of another he flung a necklace of coloured beads. Then he beckoned forward the solitary female in that throng, a beautifully shaped, sleek brown girl whom no paint disfigured, and with his European notion of a gift that would be pleasing to a woman, he bestowed upon her a little circular mirror. She stared at her reflection in it, at first with awe at a supposed effect of magic, and then with laughing glee. After that, whilst he and his Spaniards continued to be objects of unrestrained friendly curiosity and investigation, he carried on a distribution of hawk-bells and beads until his little store was exhausted, all to the mounting joy of those gentle, simple creatures.
One passing untoward incident marred the idyll, and appropriately it was the debauched Gomez who was responsible for it. For the enlightenment of an islander who, perplexed, was fingering his scabbard, Gomez drew his sword and displayed it to him. The savage seized the glittering blade, instantly to let it go again as the blood spurted from his hand.
There was a sudden recoil, and the first display of dread at this evidence of the easy power to wound and perhaps to slay that was wielded by these strangers.
Only the Admiral’s visible sternness and the offending Spaniard’s cringing under the reproof of it as he returned his blade to its sheath, effaced the momentary evil impression.
Most of that day of days was spent ashore by the adventurers, savouring the strange luscious fruits and the cakes of rather insipid but wholesome cassava bread which the Lucayans brought them. What else the natives possessed they also freely brought in token of their hospitable goodwill. But they had little to offer besides their spears, balls of cotton yarn, the value of which Colon was quick to perceive, and their tame parrots, queer, gaudy birds that puzzled and even startled the Spaniards by their raucous voices and apparently human speech, which seemed to argue the possession of human brains.
Interesting as everything was to Colon, of chief interest were the plates of virgin gold that so many of the Lucayans wore in their noses. Here was the indication of the presence of that metal, to whose abundance in these parts Marco Polo bore such emphatic witness. Fingering the plates he sought by signs to elicit from their owners whence the metal was derived. He gathered from them that it was chiefly produced from some land away to the south, which naturally he supposed to be Zipangu. Meanwhile, perceiving his interest in these pieces of gold, the savages freely bestowed several of them upon him. He received them in earnest of the rich harvest to be reaped at Zipangu, towards which he must press on.
They lingered, however, on San Salvador for another day, making a survey of the island by coasting in their boats along it to the north-west. As they proceeded islanders appeared to greet them. Some came swimming out to them, displaying in their amphibian ease a new marvel to the Spaniards. Others paddled to escort them in canoes that were dug from single tree-trunks, some of them so enormous as to carry fifty men.
Strange tropical flowers and fruits and birds of dazzling plumage, the noisy parrot ever predominating, continued to arouse their wonder; they breathed an air that was laden with a spicy fragrance, but nowhere did they see animals of any kind.
In token of the Spanish possession of the land and of the conversion of it to Christianity which was to follow, Colon set up a great cross conspicuously on a headland. Thereafter, their water-casks being filled, they took them aboard together with a supply of wood, and that same evening weighed anchor, and stood out to sea, to resume the quest for Zipangu. They carried off aboard the flagship seven of the men of Guanahani, and might have taken more had they yielded to all who were eager to go with them.
In order to render intercourse with these Lucayans easier than by the present vague methods of pantomime, their education in Spanish was begun at once. First each part of the body was touched and named in Castilian, until the Lucayans, grasping what was intended, repeated the sounds; then came nature’s features, such as the sea, the sky, the sun, the land and the trees; after that they passed to objects of general use. The Lucayans proved quick and apt, their comparatively virgin minds so receptive that within a few days simple ideas were easily conveyed and exchanged. They were also taught, parrot-like, to recite the Paternoster and the Ave Maria and to make the Sign of the Cross, all of which they learnt so readily and with such manifestations of delight that Colon ingenuously conceived in them a predisposition to become good Christians.
On the day after leaving San Salvador they cast anchor off another small island, which in vegetation and inhabitants reproduced all the features they had seen already. This, which Colon supposed one of the thousand isles that Marco Polo places to the east of Cathay, he named Santa Maria de la Concepcion.
Sailing on, standing now to westward, they overtook at sea a single naked Indian in a canoe. They took him aboard together with his craft, in which they found a calabash of water and a cake of cassava, with which he had provided himself for his voyage. From the fact that he bore a string of coloured beads, Colon guessed him to be travelling as a news-carrier, bearing word to other islands of the strange advent among them. So that the Indian might report upon them in a manner calculated to ensure them a welcome, the Admiral took him to his cabin, regaled him with honey, bread and wine, and then overwhelmed him with gifts: a red cap for his head, more beads for his neck, and hawk-bells for his ears. After that his canoe was hoisted out again, and he was permitted to depart.
It resulted from this that when, having lain hove to for the night, they came on the morrow to the largest island yet found, the natives swarmed about them with gifts of fruit and yams and balls of cotton yarn. Ashore here they found the first elements of a primitive civilization, associated, however, with the same gentle simplicity. Whilst all the men and the majority of the women went naked, yet a notion of clothing existed amongst the latter, some of whom wore aprons woven of cotton. Their dwellings were in the shape of wigwams, fashioned of branches and thatched with reeds and palmetto leaves, and in the cotton nets in which they slept the Spaniards found a space-saving utilitarian article worth adapting to European usage under its Indian name of hammock. Here too they found the first animals they had seen in the Lucayas: a breed of dogs that did not bark but were as companionable to man as those of Europe; the tree coney, which the Indians called the utia; and the great lizards, five or six feet long, known as iguanas. These last the Spaniards were to find eminently edible once they had conquered their repulsion of their reptilian appearance, and their apprehensions that the beasts might be armed with a poisonous sting.
In this island, which Colon named Fernandina, and in a neighbouring one which he named Isabella, they lingered for some days, hourly discovering fresh natural beauties, and ever more deeply impressed by the astounding fertility of the land. Upon each, to mark its appropriation to Spain, Colon set up a cross.
He gathered specimens of tropical vegetation, herbs and spices; but of gold he could find none beyond the rudely wrought ornaments which were freely yielded to him.
His Lucayans by now had made sufficient progress in Castilian to answer the simple inquiry where this metal was to be found in quantity. They conveyed that it abounded in a land to the south which they called Cuba, and in another to the east of that, called Bohio. He thought he understood from what else they sought to tell him, that not only gold and spices were among the produce of those lands, but that ships came from afar to trade there. It was a rash interpretation of what they strove to say, but it supplied once again a persuasion that this Cuba of theirs was, at last, the Zipangu of his quest, and thither he now laid a course.
Touching at various islands on the way, and finding each more beautiful than the last, they came on the 28th October, just over a fortnight after making their first landfall on San Salvador, within sight of the loveliness of Cuba, with its lofty mountains, stately forests, and a coast-line that spread east and west to the horizons.
Anchoring in the mouth of a noble river, Colon took possession with the usual ritual, and named the island Juana in honour of Prince Juan to whom his little Diego was now a page.
The beauty and fertility of this new discovery exceeded all that they had yet beheld. That its inhabitants were not in the same state of primeval innocence as those met hitherto they suspected from the circumstance that none showed themselves. If the Spaniards had learnt anything at all in this New World it was that fear has no place in a state of innocence; and that fear was an emotion with which this island was acquainted, they perceived when upon going ashore they found that all inhabitants had taken flight, leaving their huts deserted. These huts were grouped into villages, and were built more solidly than any hitherto seen elsewhere. Rudely carved statues and gaudily painted wooden masks suggested rudiments of art among this people. Fishing appeared to be the great pursuit of dwellers along the coast, for in every hut they found hooks, harpoons, and nets woven from the fibre of the palm-tree.
At every step the extraordinary and brilliant fecundity of the land disclosed itself to their enchanted eyes in the fact that whilst some trees were in blossom, others were already laden with fruit. Parrots and green woodpeckers abounded, humming-birds hovered over the great scented blossoms, and once a flock of scarlet flamingoes startled the adventurers by their unnatural flaming appearance against the sky.
They sailed westward along the coast of this island which in length exceeds that of England and is but little less than that of England and Scotland combined; but they never reached its westward end because from two of the Lucayans who were aboard the Pinta Pinzon understood that this was the mainland.
A little bewildered by these assertions, the Admiral nevertheless was not to be persuaded that he was here upon the coast of Cathay, and it is probable that he would have continued westward had not his own Lucayans made it plain beyond misunderstanding that gold was to be had in quantity from Bohio, to the east. At the same time, if this should, indeed, be the mainland of Asia, then somewhere inland should be the dominions of Marco Polo’s Grand Khan. To resolve the matter, he dispatched into the interior a party which included that Hebrew linguist Torres and two Indian guides, one of whom, a native of San Salvador, was already able in a rudimentary manner to act as an interpreter; the other came from one of the Cuban villages with which the Spaniards had by this time contrived to establish relations.
Whilst they were gone upon that errand Colon continued to sail westward on his voyage of exploration along that lovely coast, without, however, coming in sight of any end to it. He turned back at last to the river of his first anchorage, there to await the return of his envoys. When they came they reported failure to discover the object of their quest. They had penetrated some miles inland, and found a large village with greater signs of civilization than hitherto beheld, set in delicious groves and amid wide plantations of maize. They had been well received and entertained, and among curiosities observed they reported a habit of using burning brands, which the Indians called tobaccos, made up of weeds wrapped in a leaf, the smoke of which they inhaled, discovering in it a stimulus that conquered fatigue. They had found, however, no signs of wealth, beyond that of the stupendous fecundity of the soil, which whilst ultimately it might prove as productive a source of riches as any other, was not quite the kind of wealth they sought as a beginning. Of gold they had discovered no sign, but they, too, brought back the tale that it was to be found in plenty on the great island of Bohio.
So Colon weighed anchor and they stood off to the north-east carrying with them a half-dozen Cuban youths and as many of their women.