Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [181]
The balance of October 1502 passed in an overheated hallucination of voyaging.
October 5 . . . Zorobaró Bay “has three or four channels that are very convenient for getting in and out with every kind of wind. The ships sailed as if in streets between one island and another, the branches of trees brushing the rigging of the ships.” Twenty canoes approach, with Indians “as naked as they came from their mothers’ wombs,” ready to trade gold for hawk’s bells. . . .
October 7 . . . Columbus seizes two Indians who refuse to sell their gold mirrors to the Europeans. “The Indians are painted all over their face and body in different colors, white, black, and red.” Pedro Ledesma, the pilot, experiences a more elaborate reception, according to Las Casas: eighty canoes, “each with a great deal of gold aboard,” approach the Spanish fleet, but “the Admiral refused to take any of it.”
Knowing the Admiral’s obsession with gold, Las Casas scratched his head. Either the encounter with eighty gold-laden canoes never occurred, or the Admiral concluded their cargo and their message lacked legitimacy.
Within days, the Spaniards are on the move again.
October 17 . . . The Admiral sends boats ashore at the Chiriqui Lagoon, whereupon a hundred Indians rush into water up to their waists “brandishing spears, blowing horns, beating a drum, splashing water toward the Christians, and squirting toward them the juice of some herb that they were chewing.” Once the Indians quiet down, Columbus’s men trade for sixteen mirrors of pure gold worth 150 ducats. Elation overcomes them.
In the last days of October, Columbus and his men detected “signs of a building,” by which Ferdinand meant an edifice made of stone rather than wood, cane, or thatch. For the Europeans, the presence of stone indicated an advanced civilization, in this case, the remnants of the Maya. The Maya’s architectural accomplishments were all the more remarkable because, unlike Europeans, they did not use animal or water power to assist in construction; everything was done by hand.
Ferdinand compared the sturdy result to a “great mass of stucco” that “appeared to have been made of stone and lime.” And the Admiral was so impressed that he “ordered a piece to be taken as a souvenir of that antiquity.” Having found in the Maya a civilization worthy of the name, Columbus appeared on the brink of further study and encounters, but he preferred to search for the Chinese described by Marco Polo, and so he moved on.
On November 2, the fleet arrived at a harbor that Columbus called Puerto Bello, in Panama, “because it is very large, beautiful, thickly populated, and surrounded by cultivated country.” Ferdinand extolled the setting, in which vessels could lie close to shore, yet slip away quickly. “The country about the harbor is well tilled and full of houses only a stone’s throw or crossbow shot apart, all as pretty as a picture, the fairest thing one ever saw.” Seduced by nature, the fleet tarried as rain and foul weather descended.
A week later, the sodden fleet resumed its course eastward, sighting fields of maize from the decks of their ships, and coming to rest in a cove, where the intruders terrified the locals, who frantically swam to safety. When the Europeans tried to catch up with a fleeing Indian and haul him aboard for sport, Ferdinand recalled that “he would dive like a waterfowl and come up a bowshot or two distant. It was really funny to see the boat giving chase and the rowers wearing themselves out in vain, for they finally had to return empty-handed.”
In the torpor of heat and rain—temperatures averaged in the high eighties by day, with only a little cooling at night—they were losing track of time. Suddenly it was November 23, and they were “repairing ships and mending casks”—this was when the coopers played their part—just