Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [219]
At midnight, Sunday, December 16, a “light offshore breeze” picked up, and along with it, the explorer’s fortunes. He “sailed close-hauled along the coast of Hispaniola.” At three in the morning, “a wind sprang up” and as he approached the “middle of the gulf ”—anyone’s guess which one, with Columbus obscuring his track to preserve secrecy—his fleet encountered a tiny, isolated craft: one canoe bearing one Indian. Columbus wrote that he wondered how this “Indian could stay afloat with such a strong wind,” and moved quickly to seize him and have him “brought aboard ship.” Columbus resorted to his standard procedure for dealing with unwilling guests, bestowing glass beads, bells, and brass rings on the Indian, whom he transported sixteen miles to a position “near the sea.” Disembarking at another settlement consisting of new houses, the Indian became the explorer’s goodwill ambassador, telling the locals that the great chief and his men, the Admiral and the Christians, as they thought of themselves, were “good people,” and confirming rumors that had already reached the ears of the inhabitants.
Walking out of the dense, leafy growth came five hundred men, and eventually, their chief. Impressed and gratified, the Admiral described the extraordinary sight: “One by one, and many by many, they came to the ship, bringing nothing with them, although they wore the finest gold in the ears or in the nose, which they gave with good grace.” He responded to their generosity, and to the lure of gold, by ordering them to be treated honorably because “they are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest.” During these respectful rituals, their twenty-one-year-old king remained safely on the beach, earning Columbus’s goodwill by encouraging a flow of intelligence concerning the location of gold. Even they reminded him of his adopted home. “This king and all the others went naked as their mothers bore them, and so too the women, without any shame; and they are the most handsome men and women that he had found hitherto; so white that if they went clothed and protected themselves from the sun and air they would be almost as white as in Spain.” The gratifying potential of gold prompted Columbus to lavish praise on their island, and he went so far as to claim that in all Castile “nothing compared with it for beauty and excellence.” The very trees were exceptional, to his way of thinking, “so luxuriant that their leaves ceased to be green, and were of blackish verdure.” Here, he concluded, could be found “everything that man could want.”
That night, the young king ventured aboard the flagship, and cast doubt on the story of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and Columbus’s mission. Through interpreters, the navigator and his officers heard that the king believed these three ships had come from the sky, as did the “Sovereigns of Castile,” who were “not of this world.”
Columbus interpreted these naive words with dismaying opportunism. “You may believe that this island and all the others are as much yours as Castile,” he advised. “There is nothing wanting save a settlement, and to command them [the inhabitants] to do as what you will.” Having made this assessment, he naturally took the next step: “I, with the people on board, who are not many, could overrun all these islands without opposition; for already I have seen that when only three of the mariners went ashore, where there was a formidable multitude of these Indians, all fled, without seeking to do them ill.” Even better, “they bear no arms, and are completely defenseless . . . so that a thousand [of them] would not face three [of Castile]; and so they are fit to be ordered about and made to work, to sow and do all else that may be needed, and you may build towns and teach them to go clothed, and to [live by] our customs.” In other words, their nakedness, their innocence,