Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [137]
Columbus thought he had seen the last of them until one of their caciques came to the flagship. The Indian’s gold crown caught the eye of every Spaniard, as did his crimson cap and the dignified manner in which he paid his respects to the Admiral. He placed his crown on Columbus’s head, sealing their sudden bond. The generous gesture was not quite enough for Columbus, who was hoping for an offering of silk, or brocade, as if to reenact a scene from Marco Polo’s Travels. Instead, he met the steady gaze of curious Indians. “They were not so brown as the others,” said Las Casas, drawing on the accounts of Columbus and other participants, “rather more white than others that had been seen in the Indies, very good-looking with handsome bodies. Their hair was long and straight, cut in the Castilian style.” Their heads were bound with woven cotton, which Columbus, always on the lookout for signs that he had reached the East, took for turbans. Other Europeans eyed the Indians’ weapons, especially their bows and feathered arrows tipped with a sharp, barbed bone “like a fishhook.”
Negotiating their way past the Indians, Columbus and his men stumbled ever deeper into a boisterous paraíso teeming with anacondas, pythons, howler monkeys (the loudest land animals in the New World), capuchin monkeys (whose monkish appearance reminded early European visitors of the habits and hoods of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin), macaws, toucans, parrots, storks, kingfishers, and woodpeckers. Agile jaguars and pumas wound their way through the impenetrable undergrowth. In search of pearls, Columbus, bewildered, remarked on the “very large oysters” before turning his attention to the plentiful fish and parrots staring at the intruders in their midst. The parrots were “green, of a very bright color tending toward white, while those of the islands are greener and of a darker color. All those of the mainland have yellow necks, like stains, and the points above the wings have colored patches, and there are some yellow feathers on the wings,” according to Las Casas.
Surveying from Point Arenal, on Venezuela’s northern coast, Columbus studied the islands to the north and the mountains to the south with growing curiosity. They saw tracks of animals—goats, the men assumed, but actually deer—but found the corpse of only one. Like so much else in the “other world,” they knew not what to make of the sight.
Columbus resumed searching for an Indian interpreter and for water. His men were at the point of digging wells in the sand when they came upon several boreholes that fishermen had apparently abandoned. He arrived at a channel that he named Boca del Dragón, the “Dragon’s Mouth,” between the pincerlike land extensions of Trinidad and Isla de Gracia. Refreshed, the Admiral intended to sail to the north toward the familiar sights of Hispaniola, but, he noted with alarm, “there were some great crosscurrents throughout the entrance that made a great roaring . . . like waves breaking and shattering on the rocks.” The question was how to get around the churning seawater. He anchored just beyond the opening of the channel, and “discovered that the water came in, night and day, from east to west with a fury like that of the Guadalquivir when it is high, and it flowed so continuously I feared I could not turn back because of the current nor proceed farther because of the shallows.” He was trapped.
In the early hours of August 4, the Dragon’s Mouth bit.
“Well into the night,” Columbus later recalled, “I heard while on deck a terrible roar coming from the south toward the nao; I ran to look and saw a tidal wave swelling from west to east like a hill as high as the nao coming toward me little by little, and on its