Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [23]
Columbus claimed that the young woman preferred to stay with the other female detainees, whom he planned to hand over to Ferdinand and Isabella as exotic gifts. Of greater interest, “This woman wore on her nose a little piece of gold, which was a sign that there was gold in that island.” For Columbus, this sign, no matter how insignificant, was more than a mere indication or clue, it was a manifestation of the latent wealth and power of these islands, and so it was sufficient to inspire him to continue his quest.
Columbus dispatched another party, who came upon a large village with “1,000 houses and more than 3,000 men,” all fleeing the approaching Christians and their Indian guide, who shouted that they need not fear, “that the Christians were not from Caniba but from the sky, and that they gave many things to all those whom they met.” Most of those fleeing heeded the Indian, turned, and “came up to the Christians and placed their hands on their heads, which was a sign of great respect and friendship.” Despite the reassurances, “they were all trembling.”
Once the fear abated, the Taínos invited the Christians into their homes and offered them the “roots”—tubers, specifically—“ like great carrots that they grow and plant in all these countries.” Tubers come in two varieties, stem tubers, such as potatoes, and root tubers. This homely brown root tuber, with its skimpy, gnarled reddish shoots, formed the staple of the Indian diet: the starchy, sturdy cassava plant. (It sometimes goes by the names yucca and manioc.) Columbus’s men found that Taíno agriculture surpassed the slash-and-burn techniques of other tropical societies. To cultivate cassava, the Taínos laboriously fashioned rows of small, mounded fields, about three feet by nine feet, called conucos, designed to resist erosion, to facilitate water drainage during the rainy season, and to store cassava tubers for as long as three years against the possibility of famine. With the cassava, “they make bread of it, and cook and roast it, and it has the flavor proper to chestnuts.” In time, the Spanish came to call this homely brown tuber the “bread of the Indies.”
Cassava is rich in calories, if little else, and until cooked, nearly tasteless. But raw cassava requires careful preparation; it contains trace quantities of cyanide (cyanogenic glucoside) that must be leached away by scraping and fermenting; ingesting unprocessed cassava causes painful chronic pancreatitis, or inflammation of the pancreas. Only forty milligrams of cassava cyanide can kill a cow. To make cassava fit for consumption, the Indian women grated the tubers and mixed the dried flour with water to form a paste, which they spread in a thin layer over a basket. The treatment, lasting five hours, broke down most of the toxic cyanogenic glucosides in the cassava, and the resulting hydrogen cyanide, also extremely toxic, escaped into the air. Only then did cassava flour become safe for human consumption.
The cassava was but one of many plants unknown to Columbus and his men—unknown across Europe, in fact. The Admiral, the fleet’s physician Dr. Chanca, and his men wondered at the sight of strange peppers, beans, peanuts, and batatas, or sweet potatoes, growing in the rich Caribbean soil. Even more enticing were dozens of new and unusual varieties of fruit new to European palates. The Spanish visitors had their first sight and taste of papaya, mango, guava, star apple, mammee apple, and passion fruit. And there were the piñas, or pineapples, “produced on plants like thistles in the manner of aloes with many pulpy leaves,” a fascinated visitor noted, trying to compare them to more familiar European plants. This fruit had scales and bark “about the thickness of a melon,” and took a year or so to mature. It was said to smell “better than peaches,” and one or two of them would suffuse the interior of a dwelling with their sweet perfume.
There was more. When the Indians learned that Columbus