Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [186]
Catching his breath, Ferdinand recorded his on-the-fly impressions of Veragua’s Indians, the curious way they turned their backs when they spoke to each other; their habit of incessantly chewing an herb (“We decided that must be the cause of their rotten teeth”); the way they caught fish with hooks “sawed out of tortoise shell” and then wrapped the fish in leaves to dry.
As his impressions of Indian customs accumulated, the young Ferdinand came to regard his hosts from a very different perspective than that of his father. The Admiral appraised the Indians’ abilities, trying to be as utilitarian as he could, assessing their tactical value, fitness for conversion to Christianity, and usefulness. Ferdinand was simply in awe of their gracefulness and mastery of their environment, and quite unlike his father, never forgot that he was in their homeland, rather than the other way around. In his descriptions, they had a way of materializing and disappearing without warning, usually benign, occasionally sly, always cloaked in mystery. To the young man, they were Indians, not potential slaves or in need of conversion. They were already complete.
Europeans in Veragua lived by its waterways, and, Ferdinand discovered, died by them. “The river, which had before placed us in grave peril by flooding, now placed us in an even worse plight by a sharp drop in water level,” he grimly observed. “The reason was that the January rains having ceased, the mouth of the river became so choked up with sand that instead of four fathoms, which had barely permitted our entrance, there was only half a fathom of water over the bar. We thus found ourselves trapped and without hope of relief.” Hauling the ships over the sand to the ocean was out of the question, and “even had we the equipment to do it, never was the sea so quiet but that the least wave could break a ship to pieces against the shore—especially ships like ours that were already like honeycombs, riddled through and through with shipworm.” All the men could do was pray for rain, which, in sufficient quantities, would float the ships over the bar to open water.
They preferred risking the hazards of the ocean to those on land, where their onetime ally the Quibián, “greatly offended that we had settled on that river,” now “planned to set fire to the houses and kill the Christians.” In retaliation, the Spaniards would spirit the Quibián and “all the leading local citizens” away to Castile, and make sure those who remained behind “accepted the overlordship of the Christians.”
As unrealistic as his plan to double-cross the cacique sounds, Columbus’s men counted on their horses, their dogs, and most of all their firearms to prevail. And so the scene was set for another confrontation between the righteous Christians and the threatened Indians.
On March 30, the Adelantado set out with seventy-four men to a hamlet in Veragua to confront the Quibián. From his hillside hut, the cacique warned the Spaniards away. He did not want his kin seeing him with the outsiders, nor did he want the outsiders violating the sanctity of his home. To discourage the cacique from fleeing, Bartholomew arrived with a detachment of only five men. What could be the harm in that? The other Europeans, meanwhile, lurked in the jungle in widely spaced pairs, ready to spring a trap. “Having come within a musket shot of the house, they were to surround it and allow no one to escape.” It was an absurd exercise, trying to place Indians under house arrest in their own village, but Bartholomew proceeded with a stubbornness worthy of his brother. As he approached the hut, “the Quibián sent word that the Adelantado must not enter the house, that although he was suffering from an arrow wound, he himself would come out to speak with him. He did this to keep the Christians from seeing his wives, for the Indians are very jealous. So he came out and sat down in the doorway, saying that the Adelantado might approach, and this the Adelantado did, telling the other Christians to attack as soon as he had grasped