Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [109]
Among the Taínos
It began with a clap of thunder as the crew raised anchor off Cape Cruz, Cuba, on July 16, “so sudden, violent, and with such a downpour of rain, that the deck was placed underwater,” Columbus said. They struck sail and pushed their heaviest anchors overboard to secure a mooring amid the flashes of lightning. By the time they had accomplished that task, so much water had seeped through the “floor timbers that the sailors could not get it out with the pumps, especially because they were all very tired and weak from too little food.” To sustain them through their difficult labors, “all they had to eat daily was a pound of rotten biscuits and a pint of wine.” Drawing on their last reserves of strength, the men struggled to prevent the vessel from sinking.
Weakened, Columbus cowered before the onslaught of the elements, and confided to his journal: “I am on the same ration as the others. May it please God that this be for His service and that of Your Highnesses. Were it only for myself, I would no longer bear such pains and dangers, for not a day passes that we do not look danger in the face.” And yet he persisted; there was no other choice.
The storm eventually blew itself out, and two days later, on July 18, their weather-beaten ship returned to Cape Cruz, due north of Jamaica. A delegation of cheerful Indians brought cassava bread, fish, and abundant fruit to the weak and starving Spaniards. When the men recovered, Columbus desired to sail for Hispaniola, but, with the wind being contrary, he stood for Jamaica.
Four days later, the fleet glided into the translucent waters surrounding Jamaica, where still more Indians plied the sailors with lusty greetings and succulent victuals, “which they liked much better than what they had received on all the other islands.”
Early one morning, a canoe approached, bearing an Indian who gave little gifts to every Spaniard in sight, except Columbus. “I was off to one side reciting some prayers I find helpful,” he wrote, and “did not immediately see the gifts or the determination of the approach of this man.” Eventually he did take notice of the cacique’s theatrical entrance. “In the largest canoe he came in person with his wife and two daughters, one of whom was about eighteen years, very beautiful, completely naked as they are accustomed to be, and very modest; the other was younger, and two stout sons and five brothers and other dependents; and all the rest must have been his vassals,” Columbus later told his friend Bernáldez. Two or three men had their faces painted with colors in the same pattern, and each wore on his head a large feather helmet, and on his forehead a round disk as large as a plate. Each held in his hand a gadget that he tinkled. As for the cacique, he wore ornaments fashioned of guanín, a gold alloy, around his neck. To Columbus, the finery resembled “eight-carat gold.” Some were as large as plates, he claimed, and shaped like fleurs-de-lis. Except for a finely worked girdle, the rest of his body was exposed. And his wife was naked, “except in the one spot of her pudendum, which was covered by a little cotton thing no bigger than an orange peel.” Her older daughter wore around her middle a single string of small and very black stones, from which hung something made of “green and red stones fastened to woven cloth.”
The cacique and his entourage came aboard Columbus’s caravel, turned to address the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and amid torrents of praise for Spain, declared, “I have decided to go to Castile with you and obey the King and Queen of this world.”
Columbus considered those words carefully. “He said all this so reasonably I was wonder struck.” As a distracting wind shifted one way and then another, he invited the cacique and his entourage to remain aboard ship for the day, “staying out in the open sea until the waves became enormous.” The ship heaved and groaned in the heavy weather. “By this time the women were most afraid, crying and asking their husband and father to go back home,” Columbus observed. “From that moment,