Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [223]
Andrés Bernáldez’s vivid and appealing description of the Indians of Jamaica is reproduced in Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, pages 474–76.
Columbus’s remarks about the second voyage come from Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters, vol. 6, part 1, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana, written February 26, 1495, pages 267–325 passim.
Chapter 7: Among the Taínos
Michele de Cuneo on La Bella Saonese is quoted in Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, page 478. His other observations can be found in Admiral of the Ocean Sea, pages 482–88.
Columbus writes about converting Indians to Christianity in Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters, vol. 6, part 1, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana, pages 340–41. And he explains his ideas about educating Indians on page 355.
Las Casas discusses greyhounds and Indians in Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters, vol. 6, part 2, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana, pages 113, 152. And he explores Columbus’s increasingly tormented relations with the Indians on page 492 of Admiral of the Ocean Sea.
In addition to Peter Martyr, Columbus himself refers to the massive number of Indian deaths in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella dated October 15, 1495, in Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters, vol. 6, part 1, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana, page 337. Here he says the famine killed two-thirds of the region’s 50,000 inhabitants, and “it is not over yet, nor do we know when to hope the end.” For more statistics about the depopulation of the Indians, see Admiral of the Ocean Sea, page 493.
The Dominican Republic (1998) by Frank Moya Pons reviews the political structure of the Indians, pages 22–23.
Aguado is quoted in Deagan and Cruxent, Columbus’s Outpost among the Taínos, pages 63–64, relying on Las Casas.
Ramon Pané and his Indian investigations receive a thorough consideration in Antonio M. Stevens-Arroyo, Cave of the Jagua [sic] (2006), pages 41–83.
The anecdote about the headless people at La Isabela appears in Columbus’s Outpost among the Taínos on page 72, quoting Las Casas. I have adjusted the translation slightly for syntax.
Interlude: The Columbian Exchange
The starting point for considering the Columbian Exchange is Alfred Crosby’s 1972 work, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (republished in 2003). Related studies of this resonant subject include the following: Woodrow W. Borah and Sherburne F. Cook ’s The Aboriginal Population of Central Mexico on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest (1963); Noble David Cook’s Born to Die; The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (1992), edited by William M. Denevan; Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (1956); William H. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples (1976); Elinor G. K. Melville’s A Plague of Sheep (1994); Redcliffe N. Salaman’s The History and Social Influence of the Potato (1993); and Russel Thornton’s American Indian Holocaust and Survival (1987).
The following chart suggests the extent of the Columbian Exchange as it affected both the Old World and the New:
Chapter 8: “A Great Roaring”
Columbus’s impassioned complaints about his detractors at court and the heat he endured on the third voyage can be found in Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters of the Second, Third, and Fourth Voyages, vol. 6, part 1, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana, pages 66–67.
For more on Columbus’s flamboyant ideas concerning biblical sites, see Delno C. West, “Christopher Columbus, Lost Biblical Sites, and the Last Crusade.”
The Dragon’s Mouth is mentioned in Las Casas on Columbus, page 46. Meanwhile, references to the earthly paradise and the characteristics of the people he encountered appear in Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters of the Second, Third, and Fourth Voyages, vol. 6, part 1, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana, pages 87 and following.
Columbus’s observation that “the world is small” appears in the Letter Rarissima, quoted in Nuova Raccolta, vol. 6, part 1. Columbus wrote this letter in