Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [22]
At seven the following morning, the commencement of the dawn watch, Columbus spread sail, and put Port St. Nicolas to stern.
The approaching rain portended three solid days of cloudbursts and downpours. “Blew hard from the NE,” he noted laconically, hard enough, in fact, to force the ships to drag their anchors, “at which the Admiral was surprised.” Again, his scouts saw signs of human habitation, but by the time they went ashore, the inhabitants had disappeared into the tropical forest. The image of a bewildered Columbus both entreating and frightening the indigenous people of the Caribbean is at odds with the storehouse of conventionally heroic images of the Admiral as divinely inspired, supremely confident, bringing Christianity and Spanish rule to untutored peoples. And it is at odds with the argument that he planned to exploit, enslave, degrade, or slaughter the timid, mostly unarmed Indians whose language he tried to learn, and whose seamanship he admired. At this juncture, he was neither a bringer of laws nor a spreader of disease, as centuries of commentators and portrait painters have represented him, but rather an earnest, fearless, and misguided navigator (and self-serving chronicler) who had difficulty impressing his sense of mission and self-importance on others, beginning with his own crew. Only the Indians who had never before seen his like were impressed, and they responded by taking flight. The more familiar they became with him and his men, the more they gravitated toward the explorer, partly because he deftly bribed them with trinkets, and partly because of an unspoken sense of a shared potential destiny between these two disparate groups. Their behavior, the way they clung to him like iron filings to a magnet, suggests that despite his confusion about where he was and his indecisiveness, his sense of high purpose communicated itself to his hosts. At the same time, he was also the cunning merchant of Genoa, looking for resources to trade and exploit.
Further exploration of Hispaniola and neighboring islands—it is not clear exactly which, owing to Columbus’s often disjointed syntax—brought him into contact with more Taínos and their preoccupation with the marauding and man-eating Caribs. “All these islands live in great fear of those Caniba,” he lamented. “And so I repeat what I have said, that Caniba is nothing else than the people of the Grand Khan, which should be very near and own ships, and they come to capture them, and since they don’t return they suppose that they’ve been eaten.” Oblivious to the irony of his observation, Columbus remarked, “Every day we understand these Indians better, and they us, although at many times they have understood one thing for another.” Who was more misguided, the Indians or Columbus himself, who clung to the belief that he had arrived in Asia, on the doorstep of the Grand Khan?
The next day, December 12, provided additional proof of Columbus’s contradictory impulses. It began with the seamen raising a “great cross at the entrance of the harbor.” Once this deed had been accomplished, three seamen walked inland, supposedly to “see the trees and plants,” only to confront a “great crowd of people,” all of them naked, and all of whom fled at the sight of the intruders. This time, under orders from Columbus, they captured a woman, who happened to be “young and beautiful,” and brought her, in all her innocence and nakedness, before the Admiral, who “had her clothed and gave