Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [45]
About ten o’clock that night, a canoe laden with Indians made its way from shore to the flagship “to see the Admiral and the Christians and to wonder at them.” A session of brisk bartering ensued, and Columbus dispatched a scouting party, who returned with reports of a “big village.” To Columbus’s chronicler Bartolomé de Las Casas, who spent years living in the Indies, these settlements were a familiar sight in this part of the world. “The inhabitants,” he wrote, “make their houses of wood and straw, in the form of a bell. They were very high and spacious, such that ten or more persons lived in each one. They drove in the big poles, as big as a leg or even a thigh, in a circle, half the height of a person, into the earth and close together; they were all joined together at the top, where they were tied with a certain cord of roots that formerly were called bejucos.” He proceeded to take his readers on an admiring guided tour of an Indian settlement. “With these roots and the bark of trees of a black color, and other bark stripped off that remained white, they made lattice work with designs and foliage like paintings on the inside of a building. . . . Others were adorned with stripped reeds that appeared very white. There were very thin and delicate canes.”
At first timid, the inhabitants gradually “lost their fear” and “countless men, women, and children” rushed forward with bread, “which is very white and good,” Columbus wrote with surprise, “and they brought us water in calabashes and in earthenware pitchers of the shape of those of Castile,” or so they appeared to him. The gifts he received included gold—precious gold!—moreover, the Indians performed their role with conviction. “It is easy to recognize when something is given with a real heart to give,” he concluded.
His acquisitive instincts satisfied for the moment, the Admiral praised his generous hosts, who possessed “neither spears nor darts nor arms of any sort.” Having decided there was nothing to fear, Columbus sent a party of six to the village, where they tried to explain once more that they had not come from the sky, as the Indians believed, but across the sea in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Sovereigns of Castile. Amid a sense of heightened expectation, Columbus finally decided to disembark and pay a visit. As soon as he made his intentions known, “there came down to the beach so many people that it was marvelous, men, women and children, shouting that he should not leave but stay with them.” Columbus remained safely in his longboat, receiving offerings of food, a portable feast in the making. Receiving parrots and other tributes, and giving “glass beads and brass rings and hawk’s bells—not that they demanded anything but that it seemed to him right.” And because, with another characteristic leap, “he already considered them Christians.”
Wherever he went, he responded with a similar sense of wonder and egotism, as if these spectacular sights had been created for his benefit, and as he later reminded himself, that of his royal patrons. Conditioned by medieval assumptions, his intellect and imagination labored to interpret these astonishing sights according to categories that he understood. The world on which he gazed, and depended for survival, was both natural and supernatural; he needed only to divine the Creator’s intentions to exploit them to the hilt. He believed the Indians to be exactly what his views insisted—advanced and attractive and potentially useful creatures—rather than what they actually were, or might be. And if they happened to be in doubt, he would gladly enlighten them. He was bemused rather than displeased to hear that the Indians considered his fleet to have descended from the heavens, especially since the misunderstanding gave him occasion to establish