Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [12]
Baffled, curious, predatory, he made his way inland, admiring grander dwellings, which he struggled to describe in the idiom he understood: “They were made in the manner of Moorish tents, very large, and looking like tents in an encampment, without regularity of streets, but one here and another there; and inside well swept and clean, and their furnishings well made . . . of very fair palm branches.” Here and there masks, some masculine, others feminine, adorned the walls, but he could not ascertain “whether these are for beauty or to be worshipped.” Again, he emphasized, “they didn’t touch a thing.”
On Tuesday, October 30, the fleet was under way again, Pinta carrying Indian guides, and Columbus still planning to happen upon the Grand Khan. By November 1, he went ashore near Puerto de Gibara, on Cuba’s northeastern shore, deploying his Indian passengers as scouts and emissaries. They were engaged as before in a fruitless search for gold. On this occasion, he observed “a piece of worked silver hanging from the nose” of an Indian, a detail that sparked his curiosity. His men engaged in communicating by sign language with the locals, taking a tribal conflict for full-blown war between the islanders and the Grand Khan. “It is certain,” he proclaimed, “that this is the mainland,” and that Quinsay lay only one hundred leagues distant. It was time to prepare a scouting party to reach the legendary Chinese capital.
Columbus dispatched “two Spanish men: the one was called Rodrigo de Xerez, who lived in Ayamonte, and the other was one Luis de Torres . . . of Murcia and had been born a Jew, and knew, it is said, Hebrew and Aramaic and also some Arabic.” Two Indians accompanied the scouts, and carried “strings of beads to buy food with.” They had their orders to find the island’s king, present their credentials, exchange gifts, and discover their actual location. They had six days to complete their mission.
As Columbus was at pains to explain, Luis de Torres was a recent converso, or convert, to Christianity, and probably an unwilling one. His original name is believed to have been Yosef Ben Ha Levy Haivri, “Joseph the Son of Levy the Hebrew,” and he would become the first person of Jewish origin to settle in the New World. Columbus had brought Torres on the voyage both for his political skills and his linguistic abilities. They might have dealings with Arab traders, and in the event they encountered descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Torres was expected to communicate with them. Columbus was, in reality, wholly unprepared for speaking with the “Indians” in their actual tongue and resorted to improvised sign language, a modus operandi that generated ambiguity and confusion that he took as confirmation of his fantastic ideas about the Grand Khan.
On the morning of November 3, Columbus went aboard the ship’s launch to await the scouting party and survey a “very remarkable harbor, very deep and clear of rocks,” with a beach well suited to careening, or repairing the hulls of ships.
A few days later, on November 4, Martín Alonso Pinzón, who considered himself the expedition’s virtual co-leader, went ashore and made a highly promising find, “two pieces of cinnamon,” actually Canella winterana, or wild cinnamon blossoms, giving off their smoky-sweet odor. He was eager to trade this desirable commodity, and would have done so, were it not for the “penalty the admiral had imposed.” There were even cinnamon groves nearby, according to Pinta’s boatswain, but on inspection, Columbus decided that was not the case. The Spanish explorers listened intently to tales of gold and pearls “in an infinite amount.” The more they listened, the more credulous they became, until Columbus was registering reports of men with the heads of dogs “who ate men and that in killing one they beheaded him and drank his blood and cut off his genitals.” Grotesque stories such as these sounded similar to tales recounted by Sir John Mandeville, whose fanciful tales were at least as popular in western