Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [59]
Feigning curiosity when he was, in fact, avoiding a reasonable trajectory for his ships, he sent two men inland to look for “a king of great cities.” He dispatched two scouts to find centers of commerce and civilization, and three days of reconnoitering in the wild led only to “small villages and people without number, but nothing of importance.” More likely, Columbus deliberately altered parts of his log to conceal his precise whereabouts from his rivals, and it was possible that he was being similarly disingenuous about his half-completed exploration of Cuba.
Rather than pursuing geographical truth, he dashed away to another island, one that he named Hispaniola. Indians had told him about it, or so he said. His story was getting better with the telling, and so he continued to embellish, even when his journal, with its sense of wonder and ambiguity, contradicted his letter’s mythmaking.
He portrayed Hispaniola as an extraordinary opportunity for empire building. “It has many large harbors finer than any I know in Christian lands, and many large rivers. All this is marvelous.” In fact, everything there was “marvelous”—the plants, the trees, the fruit—and Hispaniola itself “is a wonder” replete with many “incredibly fine harbors” and “great rivers” containing gold (not really), “many spices” (not true), and “large mines of gold and other metals” (a flagrant exaggeration).
As with his fear of the Cuban “winter,” only Columbus could verify these statements. He preferred to evoke “lofty” lands, sierras, and mountains. “All are most beautiful, of a thousand shapes, and all accessible, and filled with trees of a thousand kinds and tall, and they seemed to touch the sky.” Some flowered; others bore fruit, “and there were singing the nightingale and other little birds of a thousand kinds in the month of November.” He wrote on, telling of its rich red soil (true), its powdery beaches strewn with glassine sand (true), its cooperative populace, who seemed wholly of a piece with the soothing environment (hardly), and water of crystal clarity that he had seen nowhere else (for once, the absolute truth). “You could not believe it without seeing it,” he exclaimed. Even Marco Polo, also inclined toward hyperbole, had not remarked on such gentle and beguiling natural settings, and for the benefit of the Sovereigns, Columbus wondered if he were approaching the entrance to paradise. In Hispaniola, “the sierras and the mountains and the plains and the meadows and the lands are so beautiful and rich for planting and sowing, and for livestock of every sort, and for building towns and villages.” And so Columbus wrote on, soothed by the sound of the sea, encouraged by the prospect of his glorious return to Spain, storms and struggles all behind him as he evoked the magic isles of his voyage.
When he turned his attention to the inhabitants of “this island,” he became more candid, and for those who had not seen what he had seen, utterly baffling. They were profoundly human and sensitive, they were savage and dangerous, they flung their arrows at him, they offered to build a life-size gold statue in his image, they considered his fleet the fulfillment of a longstanding prophecy, and they drove him from their land. Their behavior varied from one harbor he visited to the next. Generalizations about them were difficult, if not impossible, to make, but he would try.
To begin, they all “go naked, men and women, as their mothers bore them, except that some women cover one place