Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [13]
The scouts, Rodrigo de Xerez and Luis de Torres, returned to describe their reconnoitering on Tuesday, November 6. Within twelve leagues, they said, they had found a “village” with fifty tents and a thousand inhabitants, who received the visitors “with great solemnity.” They were pleased to report that the inhabitants “touched them and kissed their hands and feet, marveling and believing that they came from the sky.” They were offered chairs, while their hosts squatted at their feet, as one of their Indian companions explained to the throng that as Christians, their visitors “were good people.” A respectful frenzy ensued. “The men went out and the women entered, and squatted in the same fashion around them, kissing their hands and feet, feeling them to ascertain if they were of flesh and bones like themselves; begging them to stay at least five days.” The visitors responded in a calculatingly commercial vein, displaying samples of spices they sought, cinnamon and pepper and the like, and inquiring where they could be found, receiving only vague directions (“around there, to the southeast”) by way of reply. They found no Chinese, no Arabs, no descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, and no trace of the Grand Khan. But they had made friends and potential allies. Five hundred men and women wished to accompany them on their return “to the sky,” as they imagined. They allowed only a handful the privilege of their company.
Returning to the ships, “the two Christians met on the way many people who were going to their towns, women and men, with a firebrand in the hand, [and] herbs to drink the smoke thereof.” This brief observation referred to tobacco, a new and strange practice to the Spanish, who observed the Indians making cigars and setting fire to tobacos, the fumes of which they inhaled deeply. But spices remained the ultimate cash crop for Columbus, who, for the time being, remained oblivious to the commercial value and addictive attributes of this aromatic leaf.
After hearing the report, Columbus, rather than dwelling on the failure of the expedition to meet its objectives, offered Ferdinand and Isabella a considered and nuanced appraisal of the “Indians” surrounding him, as he tried to come to terms with their obvious humanity and potential for conversion to Christianity:
They are a people very guileless and unwarlike . . . but they are very modest, and not very dark, less so than the Canary Islanders. I maintain, Most Serene Princes, that if they had access to devout religious persons knowing the language, they would all turn Christian, and so I hope in Our Lord that Your Highnesses will . . . convert them as you have destroyed those who would not seek to confess the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
Having expressed this sincere hope, Columbus predicted that if Ferdinand and Isabella followed this path, they would be “well received before the eternal Creator” when the time came for them to “leave your realms.” With that inspirational flourish, he prepared the fleet for departure. Within a day, a robust wind blew up to carry the ships away.
The next two weeks found Columbus increasingly exasperated by the flaws in his navigational techniques and maps, and stubbornly pursuing the civilized grandeur of the East even as the brilliance of the Caribbean seduced him. He eventually returned to Cuba to resume his patient exploration, river by river, musing on “the cities of the Grand Khan, which will doubtless be discovered.”
He lost count of the harbors he visited, the palm trees, and all the other trees and bushes and wildlife that he could not recognize or name, and mountains so high that it seemed to him that there were none higher in all the world, “nor any so beautiful and clear, without clouds or snow.” The islands, too numerous to count, he took to be “those found on the world maps at the end of the Far East.” He speculated that there were “immense riches and precious stones and spiceries in them, and that they extend much further to