Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [100]
For him, as for other Europeans, ingesting iguana marked another step on the path toward a new civilization, half wild, half sophisticated. Bartholomew enjoyed the immediate pleasures of Hispaniola that Columbus habitually disdained. He was entertained by naked—or nearly naked—virgins with surprisingly fair skin. He and his party tried sleeping in “hanging beds,” or hammocks. He became an enthusiastic audience for Indian dances and songs, including one performance of staged warfare that devolved into hand-to-hand combat claiming the lives of four Indians.
Shortly afterward, Bartholomew himself fought to subdue rebellious Indians and bring their leader Guarionex around to the Christians’ side. He was gratified to see that Guarionex became an advocate of the Europeans, praising their mercy and generosity. When the cacique finished his speech, his followers lifted him on their shoulders and jubilantly paraded him about. The rapprochement bought only a few days’ peace from the stress of Spanish-Indian conflict.
Meanwhile, the Admiral patrolled the channels between Hispaniola and Cuba in search of the mainland, but found only islands. By this time he had counted roughly seven hundred. The number might have been inflated by his passing the same island several times from different directions.
As disoriented as ever, he expressed the wish to return to Spain—not across the Ocean Sea, but “from the east, by way of the Ganges, Arabian Gulf, and Ethiopia.” Columbus was a man of fixed beliefs, and to his way of thinking, east was west, and west was east.
Alarmingly, Columbus’s geographical fantasies found a receptive, uncritical audience in Peter Martyr, who breathlessly wrote to Count Giovanni Borremeo that “daily more and more marvels from the New World”—that controversial term again—“are reported through that Genoese, Columbus the Admiral.” This time, “he says that he has run over the globe so far from Hispaniola toward the west that he has reached the Golden Chersonese, which is the furthest extremity of the known globe in the east.” So convinced was Martyr of the importance of this spurious finding that he planned to write entire books about it.
The geographical impossibility of dozens of Spanish caravels reaching these landlocked Asian and African kingdoms seemed entirely plausible to another scholar, Andrés Bernáldez, who theorized that Columbus “could arrive by land at Jerusalem and Jaffa and from there board a ship, cross the Mediterranean and finally reach Cádiz.” Marco Polo had completed a similar journey ; why not Columbus? It might be a dangerous passage, Bernáldez admitted, “for all the populations from Ethiopia to Jerusalem are Moorish,” but Columbus was “convinced” that he could sail directly from Cuba “in search of the region and city of Cathay under the rule of the Grand Khan.” As precedent, Bernáldez cited John Mandeville, who “went there and saw and lived for a certain length of time with the Grand Khan.” In reality, Mandeville had cobbled together an entertaining hoax out of fantastic accounts of the world dating back to antiquity.
Columbus might have acted foolishly, but he was no fool. Some part of his mind grasped the implications of Cuba’s being an island rather than part of the Asian mainland. In this case, the geographical premise of his voyages was fatally flawed, and he was nowhere near India but rather had blundered into an unanticipated, unexplored region that we now call the Caribbean. The error—with its conceptual, political, and navigational dimensions—was too large to confess to his all-powerful Sovereigns, to his men, or even to himself. How much more comforting it was to assume that his swift transatlantic navigation, twice accomplished, proved rather than disproved his theory of reaching India. Although he asked the necessary questions, the answers meant that he would have to acknowledge that the world was much larger than he, and nearly all Europeans of his era, believed, that it contained an ocean all but unknown to Europeans, and a continent, also