Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [77]
Columbus, like other explorers of his day, considered his routes and discoveries trade secrets for which he daily risked his life, and he jealously guarded them from opportunists and rivals. Meanwhile, his trusted chart maker, Juan de la Cosa, amassed data for an official guide to the newly discovered archipelago, but it has not survived, and his famous map dating from the year 1500 contains little detail concerning this region. At some point during the second voyage, he gathered together “drawings of all the islands discovered so far along with those from last year, all of them on a map I made with no small labor,” but even if these charts had survived, they might have been of limited value.
Some names chosen by Columbus at this point in his voyage have endured, in abbreviated form, to offer clues to his whereabouts. Santa María de Montserrate, named for a monastery near Barcelona, became Montserrat; Santa María de la Antigua, named for the celebrated Virgin in the Seville Cathedral, before which Columbus is believed to have prayed, became Antigua. But Columbus’s San Martín surrendered its name to an island lying to the northwest; afterward, it was known as Nuestra Señora de las Nieves, Our Lady of the Snows. The evocative designation referred to a miracle attributed to the Virgin Mary rather than to actual snow on the island, of which there was none.
As he named these islands, Columbus led his fleet through a world that seemed newly formed each day, mountains emerging from the darkness at dawn, reaching toward stands of cumulus at midday, and receding into the dusk before disappearing into the star-pricked night. Sailing east in search of India, gliding over the quicksilver surface of the sea flashing from gray to cobalt to indigo, the ships seemed to be playing hide-and-seek, not just with islands and currents but with reality itself.
In the morning the Admiral dispatched two small boats to capture an Indian to point the way to Hispaniola and its fort, imperiled La Navidad. The boats returned with two boys, who explained they came from Boriquén, or Puerto Rico, and had been kidnapped by the Caribs. On another sortie, the boats retrieved six women seeking refuge from the Caribs aboard the Spanish ships. Columbus refused, gave them hawk’s bells and other small gifts, and sent them back to the island, where the Caribs seized the women and boldly pilfered the trinkets in full sight of the Spaniards.
When the boats returned a third time to take on wood and water, the women pleaded with the visitors for asylum. “Being kindly received and generously plied with food, they thought the gods had come to their aid,” Guillermo Coma reported. The women locked their legs around the masts and pleaded to remain rather than be returned to the Caribs, “like sheep to the slaughter.”
The grateful women divulged all they knew of the islands in the area, and secretly pointed out Caribs to the Spanish. The Caribs would impregnate women and devour their offspring. Male victims fared no better. If captured alive, they were immediately slaughtered and eaten. Chanca wrote that the Caribs “claim human flesh is so exquisite that a similar delicacy does not exist in all the world.” A pile of bare human bones testified to their predilection: “All that could be gnawed on, had been gnawed on, and all that was left, was what could not be eaten, because it was inedible.” Chanca reeled at the sight and smell of a “human neck . . . boiling in a pot.” Worse, “Young boys once captured have their members cut off and are kept as servants till adulthood, at which time, when the Caribs want to celebrate, they kill and eat them.” To demonstrate this last point, however extreme, three Indian boys who had escaped the Caribs and sought refuge among the Spanish “had been castrated.”
As Columbus prepared to sail for the island of Hispaniola, he learned that a company of nine men—eight soldiers and their captain—had gone ashore and had yet to return. No one aboard the ships knew what had become of them.