Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [7]
He dispatched several seamen in hot pursuit of the fugitives, chasing them ashore, but, as he ruefully noted, “they all fled like chickens.” When another dugout canoe innocently approached “with a man who came to trade a skein of cotton, some of the sailors jumped into the sea because he wouldn’t come aboard,” and seized the poor fellow as a replacement detainee. Observing from his vantage point on the poop deck, Columbus “sent for him and gave him a red cap and some little beads of green glass which I placed on his arm, and two hawk’s bells which I placed on his ears”—that is, the standard-issue trinkets of little value—“and I ordered him back to his dugout.”
Later, on Monday, October 15, his ships urged on by a southeasterly wind, Columbus cautiously navigated to another island, in all its features as described by Columbus consistent with Long Island, Bahamas. The island is eighty miles long and only four miles wide, and appears as a jagged pile of sand and rock rising above the surface of the ocean, which varies in hues from lush aubergine to sparkling white surrounded by a light blue corona.
Columbus kept his head about him as he gaped at the display and diligently recorded instructions for future navigators: “You must keep your eyes peeled when you wish to anchor, and not anchor near the shore, although the water is always very clear and you see the bottom. And among all these islands at a distance of two lombard—or cannon—shots off-shore there is so much depth that you can’t find the bottom”: advice for navigating Long Island that holds as true today as it did five centuries ago.
He was now almost as far north as he would go on this voyage, and once again his thoughts turned toward India. Columbus would have stayed to admire the setting—“very green and fertile and the air very balmy, and there may be many things that I don’t know”—but he was on a mission “to find gold” and the Grand Khan.
Complicating his task, he had entered into one of the most intricate mazes of islands and isthmuses on the planet. From the vantage point of the thermosphere, hundreds of miles above, the islands appear as scattered, burnished leaves flecked with gold and floating on liquid sapphire, slowly churning, blossoming, and fluorescing. From sea level, as Columbus and his men saw them, they were no less striking, seeming to rise from the heaving surface of the sea like apparitions, or fragments of stars or asteroids fallen to earth.
The people he encountered appeared to be participating in a timeless pageant, and Columbus, ever curious, jotted down his impressions. In the channel running between Santa María and Long Island, he came upon a man alone in a dugout canoe, paddling from one island to the other. “He carried a bit of his bread that would be about the size of your fist, and a calabash of water, and a lump of bright red earth powdered and then kneaded, and some dry leaves which must be something much valued among them, since they offered me some . . . as a gift.” The dry leaves happened to be among the oldest crops known to humanity, yet it was virtually unknown in Europe. Apparently, the leaves had been cured, and their pungent scent lingered in the air and imbued the pores of every one who handled it and inhaled its smoke. The leaves belonged to genus Nicotiana: the tobacco plant.
The man came alongside Santa María and gestured that he wished to come aboard. Columbus granted the request and “had his dugout hoisted on deck, and all he brought guarded, and ordered him to be given bread and honey and drink.” The Admiral vowed to “give him back all his stuff, that he may give a good account of us” and report that he was given all he