Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [14]
Wherever he went, both “islands and lands,” Columbus made a practice of erecting a cross, an arduous project. He wrote of fashioning crosses from trees, proclaiming, “It is said that a carpenter could not have made [it] better proportioned.” Once the cross was in place, he and his men solemnly prayed before it, pilgrims in search of an elusive Jerusalem.
Cuba, he came to realize, was heavily populated with gregarious Indians. On Sunday, November 10, a dugout canoe arrived with six men and five women to pay their respects. Columbus returned their hospitality by “detaining” them in expectation of returning to Spain with them. He bolstered their number with seven additional women and three boys. He explained his thinking this way: “I did this because the men would behave better in Spain with women of their country than without them.”
His decision, he said, was based on his experiences “detaining” the inhabitants of Africa’s west coast to Portugal. “Many times I happened to take men of Guinea that they might learn the language in Portugal, and after they returned it was expected to make some use of them in their own country, owing to the good company that they had enjoyed and gifts they had received,” but matters never turned out as hoped. The problem, he decided, was that without their women the men would not cooperate. This time, the result would be different. His latest captives, “having their women, will find it good business to do what they are told, and these women would teach our people their language,” which, he assumed, “is the same in all these islands of India.”
As if to prove his point, he recorded a vignette that remained fresh in his memory: “This night there came aboard in a dugout the husband of . . . two women and father of three children, a boy and two girls, and said he wished to come with them, and begged me hard.” Columbus allowed the supplicant to join the expedition. “They all now remained consoled with him,” the Admiral noted, but he was disappointed to report that his newest ally was “more than 45 years,” too old for vigorous labor.
Columbus noted on November 11 that the inhabitants of Cuba appeared to practice “no religion,” but at least they were not “idolaters,” and, he decided, “very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil, neither murder nor theft; and they are without arms and so timid that a hundred of them flee before one person of ours, although they may be playing the fool with them.” His recommendation: “Your Highnesses ought to resolve to make them Christians, for I believe that if you began, in a short time you would achieve the conversion to our holy faith of a multitude of folk, and would acquire great lordships and riches and all their inhabitants for Spain.” And why was that? “Because without doubt there is in these countries a tremendous quantity of gold.” The Indians, he pointed out, busy themselves mining gold “and wear it on their necks, ears, arms and legs, and the bracelets are very large.” God and gold: what better reasons to found an empire across an ocean?
Shortly before sunset that evening Columbus raised sail and proceeded east by south to a promontory he named the Cape of Cuba.
Of all the days he had endured at sea thus far, November 21, a Wednesday, proved to be the most treacherous, and not just because he committed a spiraling series of navigational misjudgments. Based on the hasty, elliptical comments in his diary, it appears that he was attempting to use his quadrant to fix his location. The quadrant readings placed him at a latitude of 42 degrees, but “it seemed to him that he could not be so far distant [from the equator].” His assumption was correct. The 42nd parallel passes through the border between New York and Pennsylvania; he was, in fact, at 21 degrees of latitude. At least he knew that something was seriously awry, it being “manifest that in latitude 42 degrees in no part of the earth is there believed to be heat, unless it be for some accidental reason.