Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [125]
The fleet set out on the morning of March 26, 1496, with Bartholomew aboard, but he disembarked as planned when the ships called at Puerto Plata, not far from La Isabela on the northern coast of Hispaniola. Bartholomew returned to La Isabela overland, and the fleet sailed on without him, under Columbus’s sole command.
The going was agonizingly slow. Twelve days later, Columbus put the eastern extremity of Hispaniola astern, sailing “directly east as much as wind permitted.” Provisions were low, his men tired and in bad humor. On April 6, the Admiral changed course and headed south. Within three days he dropped anchor off Marie Galante, the island that he had blithely claimed for Spain at the beginning of the voyage. The respite proved brief. The next day, a Sunday, he set sail, contrary to his custom, his ears ringing with the complaints of his men about toiling on the Lord’s Day.
Standing off Guadeloupe, he sent a few small boats ashore, taking care to arm the men, and “before they reached the beach a multitude of women armed with bows and arrows and with plumes on their heads rushed out of the woods and assumed a menacing attitude.” Those in the boats sent the two Indians among them to bargain with the women warriors, and when they realized the men had come in search of food, not conquest, they directed them to the “northern shore of the island, where their husbands would furnish them with what they needed.” The inexperienced Spaniards combed the shore, came away empty-handed, and reeling from hunger and exhaustion, returned to the caravels and set sail on a northerly course. As their ships hugged the shore, Indians assembled at the water’s edge, where they “uttered great cries” and fired off volley after volley of poison-tipped arrows at the exposed watercraft.
Undeterred, Columbus sent his men ashore, prepared to meet with a harsh response. The Indians regrouped and tried to stage another ambush, but they dispersed as soon as the Spanish fired their clumsy but noisy guns. In their haste, the Indians abandoned their supplies and their dwellings, “which the Christians entered, looting and destroying all they found,” Ferdinand wrote. Most of all they needed food. “Being familiar with the Indian method of making bread, they took their cassava dough and made enough bread to satisfy their needs.”
They searched the dwellings with care, noting “large parrots, honey, wax, and iron which the Indians used to make little hatchets, and there were looms, like our tapestry looms, on which they weave cloth.” They came across one more item: “a human hand roasting on a spit.” The men recoiled in horror.
Soon they were nosing around Guadeloupe, perhaps entering the cove known as Anse à la Barque, marked by serene huts, among other signs of benign inhabitants.
Columbus dispatched a boat with an armed crew, who encountered countless arrows soaring overhead. A few shots scattered the archers, and the landing party raided the huts, looking for food and supplies, but found only huge red parrots staring blankly at them. In frustration, a small group of Spanish marauders gave chase to the Indians and captured three boys and ten women, whom they held hostage as they traded for cassava root.
The ships remained at anchor in Guadeloupe for nine days, as the men busied themselves baking cassava bread on hot griddles, preparing firewood, and gathering water. The leisurely schedule hints that they also enjoyed the “hospitality