Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [46]
In the “protected and deep” embrace of Acul Bay, surrounded by “people very good and gentle and without arms,” he savored his explorer’s paradise. Even the inlet’s mouth was wide enough to let ships pass one another without incident. Furthermore, “any ship can lie in it without fear that other ships might come by night to attack them.” He decided to name the bay Puerto de la Mar de Sancto Tomás, “for today was his feast.”
Come Saturday, December 22, Columbus succumbed to the urge to find gold, and at dawn, the fleet quietly slipped its moorings amid heaving seas. In his mind’s eye, he imagined a place with more gold than earth, or so the Indians had led him to believe. Ominously, “the weather did not permit it,” and he quickly returned to his anchorage in Hispaniola, where he was courted by the local lord, Guacanagarí, who plied the Admiral with lavish gifts, most memorably a belt bearing a “mask that had two large ears of hammered gold as well as the tongue and the nose.” On closer inspection, he found that the “belt was of very fine jewelry work, like baroque pearls, made of white fishbones and some red ones interspersed like embroidery, so sewed with cotton thread and by such nice skill that on the side of the thread and on the reverse of the belt, it seemed very pretty embroidery, although all white, as if it were a web in a frame.” He tested it and judged it “so strong that I believe that an arquebus”—a portable muzzle-loaded firearm with limited accuracy but quite deadly at close range—“could not penetrate it, or with difficulty.”
On Sunday, Columbus set sail again, after expressing conventional reservations about going to sea on the Lord’s Day, “merely from his piety and not from any superstition.” No matter, gold was at stake.
Before he came to the gold, the gold came to him, borne by the local ruler. Prepared for hard bargaining, the Admiral reacted with astonishment, “for the Indians were so free, and the Spaniards so covetous and overreaching.” He and his men had only to give “a little piece of glass and crockery or other things of no value” to receive pieces of gold, and as these transactions proceeded, the Spaniards found they need give nothing to receive the precious gold, a practice forbidden by their Admiral, who, after observing that the Indians freely gave gold in exchange for just six glass beads, “therefore ordered that they”—Spaniards—“take nothing from them unless they gave them something in payment.” Bartered objects included glass beads, cotton, geese, or whatever came to hand. The ranks of the Indians swelled to include 120 canoes, “all charged with people, and all brought something, especially their bread and fish and water in earthen jars, and seeds of many sorts that are good spices, and ended up carrying one another piggyback across rivers and swampy places,” as much for the fun of it as for any other purpose, contented to pay their respects and rejoice with the men and their ships.
The festivities became more boisterous. Columbus estimated that more than a thousand Indians approached his tiny ship, each bearing a tribute, “and before they came within half a crossbow shot of the ship, they stood up in their canoes with what they brought in their hands, saying, ‘Take! Take!’” And so the Spaniards did, as five hundred more Indians swam out to Santa María, standing about a league offshore, to pay their respects.
At night, a convoy of Indian barges entered the harbor to visit the Spaniards, declaring they had come from afar. By now Columbus and his men, accustomed to receiving tributes