Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [175]
During a leisurely southerly swing off the coast of Honduras, Ferdinand warned, “the map-makers have not traveled in this part of the world.” He continued, “They fall into a grievous error,” when they depicted Cape Gracias á Dios as a separate landform from Cape Honduras, although in reality they were the same.
As Ferdinand realized, this erroneous depiction was a hoax designed to deprive his father of the fruits of his exploration. Two envious explorers, Juan Díaz de Solís and Vicente Yáñez Pinzón (who had commanded a ship on the Admiral’s first voyage), set out in 1508 for Nicaragua, which the Admiral had considered so promising for exploitation. Reaching the islands off the coast of Honduras, which they knew as Guanajas, they ignored the advice given by one of their pilots, Pedro de Ledesma, who recognized the landforms because he had explored them with the Admiral. Instead, they falsely claimed they had arrived at another island for the first time.
Their assertion, backed by phony charts, fooled many, but not Ferdinand, who was determined to expose their conspiracy in his account of his father’s life. In Ferdinand’s words, the charts clearly “depict that island twice,” in different locations. In the short run, there was nothing Columbus or his son could do to correct a deception occurring in such a remote and poorly understood region.
In Guanaja, Columbus sent reliable Bartholomew ashore with two skiffs; there they “encountered people who resembled those of the other islands, but they had narrower foreheads.” Treading carefully among pine trees “and pieces of earth called cálcide, which the Indians use to cast copper,” and which some of the men, mistaking it for gold, pocketed, they came upon a canoe as long as a galley, eight feet across, hollowed out from a single giant tree trunk. Ferdinand wrote that the canoe was “freighted with merchandise from the western regions around New Spain,” an observation often taken to mean that Columbus’s men had come across an artifact of the Aztec empire, then at its apogee during the reign of the ruler Ahuitzotl.
More likely, the Europeans confronted the highly advanced, complex Maya civilization. In China, Marco Polo had encountered a culture beyond his own; now Columbus faced a similar situation. The Maya were an ancient, hierarchical, deeply spiritual, militaristic society. Their civilization had highly developed mathematics, astronomy, architecture, and letters. They charted the movements of heavenly bodies in books fashioned from the bark of trees. In the years after 1000 BC, when Romans and Celts were struggling to dominate a fragmented and stunted western Europe, Maya civilization flourished in villages and cities. The Maya writing system recorded the deeds of leaders and their political conquests.
By AD 250, Maya civilization entered its Classic era, characterized by the rise of dynasties, whose deeds were recorded in symbolic characters, or glyphs. The Maya population and cities expanded rapidly until about AD 900, when the empire entered a steep, mysterious decline—not all at once, and not everywhere, but the downward trend gained momentum and became irreversible. The Maya collapse was accompanied by civil war, exhaustion of natural resources, prolonged drought, and other calamities. The populace nearly vanished from the face of the earth; during the collapse, the number of inhabitants in one region alone declined 99 percent, or even more. Where there were once millions of Maya, there were now only a few thousand tending to deteriorating edifices, many half-buried by sifting topography, whose origins were lost in the mists of legend. Columbus and his men saw the remnants of a great civilization. Compared with the Maya, he and his European crew hailed from a New World, and now they were encountering the Old among the Maya in Veragua.
Columbus’s journals reveal that he had an inkling that he had stumbled across a powerful and ancient civilization,