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herself a capable archer; her arrow pierced a shield. In retaliation, the Spaniards rammed the canoe, dumping the Indians into the salt water. Swimming to safety, they continued to shoot arrows tipped with a deadly poison believed to have derived from manchineel fruit, sometimes called “beach apples,” growing in abundance on bushy trees. These apples were so toxic, wrote Fernández de Oviedo, that “if a man lies down to sleep for only an hour in the shade of one of these manchineel trees, he awakes with his head and eye swollen, and his eyebrows level with his cheeks.” The Spaniards called the fruit manzanilla de la muerte, little apple of death. The Caribs mixed the poison apples with toxins from vipers and poisonous insects to make an even deadlier concoction. Even the leaves were dangerous, and the Caribs used them to poison their enemies’ water supply. The only known antidote was seawater. Out of fifty wounded by poison arrows, “not three survived.”

Amid the melee, Peter Martyr reported, there appeared a woman whom the other Indians respected as their queen. Beside her stood her son, “a fierce and robust young man, with a ferocious look and the appearance of a lion.” They seemed prepared to finish every last Spaniard, even those in agony from the wounds they suffered from the poison-tipped arrows. Summoning their resources, the Spaniards rowed themselves beside the cannibals’ canoe to overturn it. Even with their canoe capsized, the Indian warriors, men and women alike, kept shooting their arrows, one stroke after another. Only when the archers sought refuge on a reef were the Spaniards able to capture them as they fought on to the end. Several Indians perished in this skirmish, and the Spaniards were pleased to note they had “wounded the queen’s son twice.”

The exhausted survivors were taken prisoner, and “even after being taken on board the Admiral’s ship the natives did not lose their fierceness and ferocious looks, not unlike African lions once they feel trapped,” in the words of Peter Martyr. Like many in Spain, the classically trained Martyr was of two minds about the Indians. From a safe distance, he compared them favorably to the “tyrants” of the time of “the mythical Aeneas,” the hero of Troy, and even portrayed their lives with a touch of envy. “But I feel that our natives of Hispaniola,” as he called the Indians, “are happier than they—more so were they converted to the true religion—because naked, without burdens, limits, or death-inducing currency, living in a golden age, free, without fraudulent judges, books, and content in their natural state, they live with no worries about the future.” Yet Columbus and his men realized that the Indian tribes they encountered often lived desperate, fear-ridden lives as they preyed on one another in an unending struggle for dominance and survival that mirrored the struggles of European nations. Even the wistful Peter Martyr was aware that the fierce Caribs ranged a thousand miles to find victims, and he admitted that the Indians, despite their apparent freedom and simplicity, were “troubled by the desire to rule and waste each other away with wars.”

Unlike the exalted, occasionally desperate sense of mission animating Columbus, his boyhood friend Michele de Cuneo, gentleman of Genoa, did not torment himself with questions about the fleet’s location or his role in God’s plan. Even the appalling castration practiced by the Caribs intrigued rather than horrified Cuneo. His determination to live in the moment, consequences be damned, prefigured the eventual arrival of buccaneers in the Caribbean.

Cuneo recorded careful observations of the Indians as they appeared to the men of the second voyage. The Indians pressed a heavy plate on the soft brows of infants to produce a profile they considered desirable, as he noted: “They have flat heads and the face tattooed; of short stature; as a rule they have very little beard and very well shaped legs and are thick of skin. The women have their breasts quite round and firm and well shaped.” They were carefully groomed, shaving and