Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [83]
The Indian men emphasized audacious sexual display. The caciques “wear a tube of gold, and the other men large snail’s shells, in which they place the male organ. The rest of the body is naked, because the Indians do not feel that the human body is anything to inspire shame”—Fernández de Oviedo wrote in appreciation—“and in many provinces neither men nor women cover their sexual organs nor do they wear anything on any part of the body.” Stirring accounts such as this made as much of an impression on European awareness of the Indians visited by Columbus as alarming reports of cannibalism and poison arrows.
In Chanca’s account, the battle between the Spaniards and the Indians arose not from provocation, as Cuneo implied, but from happenstance: the unexpected appearance of a canoe with two men and a boy who were so astonished by the sight of the enormous Spanish fleet that “they stayed for a good hour without moving.” They were slowly surrounded by Spaniards approaching in boats. “As they kept on wondering and trying to understand what it was all about, they did not notice that they could not flee.” When they finally tried to escape, “the men from our boat seized them very promptly.”
Chanca sympathized with the small party of captive Indians, far outnumbered by the twenty-five Spaniards who had seized them. Surrounded, the Indians “struck one with two arrows in the chest and the other with one in the ribs, and, had it not been for the fact they wore shields and wooden plates and also that there was a collision with the boat that capsized their canoe, they would have hit the majority of them with arrows.” They fought on even after their canoe capsized. Dodging poison-tipped arrows, the Spaniards wounded and captured a single warrior, and brought him back to the fleet, where he died of his injuries.
During the first voyage, the ferocious Caribs had been more rumor than reality. Now Chanca observed them at close quarters, their “very long hair,” and a “thousand different decorative images on their faces, crosses and other symbols of varying fashion, as each of them likes best.” The few Caribs captured by the Spanish had eerily “painted eyes and eyebrows, which—it seems to me—they do on purpose to appear more frightful.” They were, in fact, terrifying. The Spaniards captured their Indian attackers only to find that the men had been castrated: standard practice for the Caribs, who sought to improve the taste of their victims before eating them.
His need to hurry increasing with every league and sign of Carib cruelty, Columbus held to his northwest course, “preferring,” said Chanca, “to bring help to our people whom we had left on Hispaniola.”
Slicing through cobalt sea, out of sight of land, the fleet was accompanied by the angular black, swooping silhouettes of frigate birds. Chanca accurately portrayed these pelicanlike creatures as “predatory sea birds that do not stop or sleep on the water.” Two days later, the men of the fleet spotted land, probably the Virgin Islands; fished for sole, sardines, shad, and even sea horses; passed along the southern coast of Puerto Rico; beheld an Indian watch tower “that could hold ten or twelve persons”; and on Friday, November 22, watched in expectation as the northern coast of Hispaniola finally came into view, solid, fragrant, and mysterious.
This was Chanca’s first visit to the Indies, and the scope of Hispaniola overwhelmed him. “A very wide territory,” he observed, “to the point that those who have seen its coast claim it could be two hundred leagues long.” He was accustomed to the sparse countryside of Spain,