Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [85]
Four or five hours later, the canoe approached one of the caravels; the Indians signaled that they sought Columbus, and came on board. One Indian identified himself as Guacanagarí’s cousin, and, exploiting Columbus’s lust for gold, presented the Admiral with gifts of “golden masks.” Hours of conversation ensued, and as the sun rose behind them, Columbus emanated “much satisfaction.” Perhaps the Christians were safe, after all. Guacanagarí’s self-styled cousin assured the Admiral that they were indeed well, with the exception of those who had died from illness, and a few others who had died “because of altercations.” And where was Guacanagarí himself? The Indian “cousin” claimed Guacanagarí was busy tending to a wound in his leg, but he would come the next day. There had been trouble, the Indian explained; two other chiefs, Caonabó and Marieni, had launched an attack and set fire to Guacanagarí’s village.
The Indians returned to their canoes, promising to come back the next day with Guacanagarí, “leaving us behind, less worried for the night,” Chanca recalled. Morning revealed that the village “had been burnt to the ground and all the belongings had been burnt and destroyed but for a few woven pieces of fabric and cloth that the Indians had brought to throw in the houses. All of the Indians who could be seen there seemed very suspicious, did not dare to approach us and indeed fled at first. . . . We nonetheless tried to flatter them by passing out such things as harness bells and seed pearls.”
Columbus went ashore to inspect the destruction of the first European fort in the Indies, and from the moment he set foot on blood-soaked foreign soil and imagined the suffering of his men, his sense of mission changed permanently. He “felt much grief at the sight of ruins of the houses and the fort,” said his son Ferdinand. “Nothing remained of the houses except some smashed chests and such other wreckage as one sees in a land that has been devastated and put to the sack.” He left orders to clean out the fort’s well, and to dispose of the gold nearby, but there was no gold to be found, and the well had run dry.
Sailing upriver in search of someone who could explain what had happened, Columbus found the corpses of ten Spaniards, “miserably deformed and corrupted, smeared with dirt and foul blood, and hideously discolored,” Coma recalled. “They had lain out in the open neglected and unburied for almost three months.” The Admiral and his men offered prayers for their souls, and prepared a Christian burial. “I felt great pain,” Columbus reflected, “and though I know it happened through their own fault, there is much to be sad about in such an event, for me it is a punishment greater than any experienced by their relatives, because I wanted them to win great honor at little danger.” And so they would have, he believed, “had they governed themselves according to my instructions.” Those instructions were clear: “Above all they were to leave alone the women belonging to their fellows as well as those of the Indians.” Instead, the Spaniards recklessly “gave themselves over to eating and to the pleasure of women, and so they came to ruin and destroyed themselves.”
Soon after, aboard ship, the Indians informed the Spanish that every single man at La Navidad had died. Who, Columbus wanted to know, had killed them?
Guacanagarí’s deputy replied that Chief Caonabó and Chief Marieni had been responsible for burning the fort and wounding the Indians who sided with the Spanish. In fact, he wanted to fly to Guacanagarí’s side and return with him to Columbus. The distraught Spaniards let him go: another mistake. “The entire day we waited for them, and when we realized they were not returning,” they suspected that the Indians had gotten drunk on the wine served to them aboard ship, climbed into their teetering canoe, capsized it, and drowned.
It seemed impossible that God’s will would be thwarted in such a drastic manner. The fortaleza had served as the linchpin