Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [19]
The “one language” about which he wrote was Arawak, now classed as a member of the Maipurean linguistic family, widely spoken across the Caribbean and South America. In his haphazard yet thorough exploration of the Caribbean Basin, he probably encountered two regional Arawakan dialects, Cuban and Bahamian.
Indian culture, even agriculture, scarcely interested Columbus. In a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella, he spoke of the lands he explored as a spiritual and economic tabula rasa on which his Sovereigns would leave a lasting imprint of empire. “Your Highnesses will command a city and fortress to be built in these parts,” he predicted, “and these countries converted; and I certify”—a term with the force of an oath—“to Your Highnesses that it seems to me that there could never be under the sun [lands] superior in fertility, in mildness of cold and heat, in abundance of good and pure water; and the rivers are not like those of Guinea, which are all pestilential,” he noted as an afterthought. And as everyone at court knew, Guinea fell squarely within Portugal’s sphere of influence.
To prevent the Portuguese and other meddlesome outsiders such as the French or Arab pirates from poaching on this newly discovered paradise, Columbus urged Ferdinand and Isabella “not to consent that any foreigner does business or sets foot here, except Christian Catholics, since was the end and the beginning of the enterprise,” a sentiment with which the Sovereigns and generations of clerics would find themselves in solemn agreement. It would remain his last chance but also his most persuasive argument: no matter what else went wrong, or whatever else he failed to accomplish on his voyage, he was bringing Christianity to the Indians before anyone else.
Assessing his accomplishments thus far, Columbus was on firmer ground concerning the health of his men. He boasted that “nobody has even had a headache or taken to his bed through sickness; except one old man with pain of gravel, from which he has suffered all his life, and he was well at the end of two days.” That happy circumstance “applies to all three vessels.” It was a remarkable piece of good fortune, given the unprecedented nature of the voyage, Columbus’s distorted view of geography, his unreliable celestial navigation, and their primitive, unsanitary ships.
No sooner had Columbus informed the Sovereigns of his grand vision than he heard an alarming account from some of his crew. While reconnoitering, they told him, “they found in a house a cake of wax,” a fetish object that he found intriguing enough to bring home with him to Spain to display to the Sovereigns. Also, “the seamen found in a house a man’s head in a basket, covered with another basket and hanging to a post.” According to their description, these dried heads were festooned about the settlement, forming a gruesome tableau. Columbus assumed that the object “must be those of some ancestors of the family; because those houses were of a kind where many persons live in one, and they should be relations descended from only one.”
Despite his shockprooftone, he urgently wanted to seek the relative safety of open water, but just then heavy rain, dark clouds, and a southwest wind dead astern blew in and made navigation all but impossible. The rain was so intense his men could practically inhale it, and it went in cycles, replaced by shifting veils of mist. An hour later, the rain would descend and commence weeping over the same sodden scene. The next day, November 30, the damp wind shifted to the east, contrary to his course.
Unable to put to sea, he dispatched