Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [11]
Although he was situated in the midst of the Bahamas, he remained convinced that he had arrived at the doorstep of Asia. In reality, Quinsay lay more than eight thousand miles west of his position in the Caribbean, but these dimensions contradicted his firmly held assumptions about the size of the globe and the placement of continents—not that other navigators or cosmographers in Europe had a more accurate notion of these things. The precise globes that Columbus studied are not known, but one of the most influential representations of the day, by Martin Behaim, a German mapmaker in the service of Portugal, did indicate that Çipango was at hand. Columbus could not admit the possibility that these globes and all their assumptions might be spectacularly wrong.
When not contemplating his China delusion, Columbus returned to his other chimera: gold.
He spent a night and the following day, October 22, “waiting to see if the king here or other people would bring gold or anything substantial.” Many came to observe, some naked, others painted red, black, or white, offering cotton or other local items in exchange for simple European utensils. The only gold in evidence took the form of jewelry that some of the Indians wore “hanging from the nose.” They were willing to exchange these items for hawk’s bells, but upon examining the haul, he complained, “There’s so little that it is nothing at all.”
From gold, his mind swung back to Asia. He reckoned he was but a day’s sail from Japan, or Çipango, not the eight thousand miles separating him from his improbable destination. On October 23, he wrote of blithely departing for Cuba, “which I believe should be Çipango,” to look for gold. “On the globes that I saw,” he reminded himself, “it is in this region.” So stated Martin Behaim.
At midnight, Columbus weighed anchor and shaped a course for Cuba, but by nightfall he had nothing to show for his brave effort, as the wind “blew up brisk and I didn’t know how far it was to the island of Cuba.” Accordingly, he lowered sail, except for the forecourse, until rain caused him to furl that sail as well. So it went for four days, “and how it rained!”
On Sunday, October 28, he entered a deep, unobstructed river—perhaps Bahía Bariay in Cuba—and anchored within its protective embrace, where he beheld “trees all along the river, beautiful and green, and different from ours.” He labored over his descriptions of flora and fauna with extreme care, as if the natural bounty could substitute or distract from the wonders he had failed to find so far—gold, spices, and tangible evidence of the Grand Khan, whom he had crossed an ocean to see, without realizing that two oceans, and two centuries, separated them.
Instead, he wrote of flowers and singing birds and a barkless dog, probably domesticated by local “fishermen who had fled in fear.” Within their huts, he found an eerie sight: “nets of palm fiber and ropes and fish-hooks of horn, and bone harpoons, and other fishing tackle, and many fireplaces within.” But where were the inhabitants of this Arcadia? With stifled breathing and hesitant footfalls, his men warily crept through the timeless village.
Ordering that nothing be disturbed, he returned to his ship and resumed his voyage upriver, groping for superlatives to describe Cuba: “The most beautiful that eyes have ever seen: full of very good harbors and deep rivers.” Indians, when he encountered them, spoke of ten great rivers, and, he wrote, “one cannot circumnavigate it with their canoes in 20 days.” He refused to entertain the implication that Cuba was an island. If he had not arrived on Asia’s doorstep, where was he? It was a question that haunted the entire premise of the voyage.
He persuaded himself that the inhabitants, or Indians, mentioned “mines of gold and pearls,” and claimed he caught a glimpse of “mussel shells” that might contain pearls, and on the basis of this misunderstanding, concluded that the “ships