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the pantries of Castile. As the other members of the Indian party “looked with amazement upon all these things,” Guacanagarí “preserved a ceremonious decorum and gravity worthy of his rank,” enhanced by his offering gifts of gold to his appreciative hosts. The illusion of dignity dissolved when he noticed the Indian women aboard ship. “Turning to the women who had been saved from the cannibals, he was seen gazing and leering at one of them, named Catalina by our men,” Peter Martyr recorded. Guacanagarí would have persisted in his advances, but he was amazed by the strange beasts—horses brought by the Spanish. “They had engraved bits, bright-hued caparisons, and handsomely polished belly-bands,” according to Coma. “Their formidable appearance did not fail to terrify the Indians, for they suspected that the horses fed on human flesh.”

Employing Indian interpreters who had miraculously survived a spell in Spain after the first voyage and then returned to their homeland, Columbus explained his plans to build another settlement, this time on Guacanagarí’s territory. The chief claimed to welcome the arrangement, “although the place was unhealthy, being very humid.” Columbus then engaged the startled chieftain in earnest conversation about Christianity. In the past, the Indian leader had been skeptical, but now he “consented to wear about his neck a silver image of the Virgin, something he had refused to do before.”

With Guacanagarí aboard ship, wrote Peter Martyr, “there were those who advised the Admiral to keep Guacanagarí so that he could be punished if they learned that our men had been punished by his order. But, realizing this was not the time to irritate his feelings, the Admiral let him go.” It was a decision that Columbus would come to regret.

The chieftain’s brother returned the next day bearing gold, always gold, and accompained by women from Boriquén, or Puerto Rico. If the Spaniards assumed the women were intended for them, they were proved wrong as the Indian proceeded to violate them “both in his own name and his brother’s the king,” said Peter Martyr. After this episode, the Spaniards and, very likely, the exhausted Indian fell asleep aboard ship, at which point the women jumped into the water and fled to land. The Spaniards were slow to awaken to the situation, and by the time they did, the women “had covered such a long distance that our boats were not able to recapture more than four of them . . . when they were getting out of the water.” Peter Martyr cast their dash for freedom in sympathetic terms. “Catalina, with seven other women, relying on the strength of her arms, swam about three miles in a not very calm sea: indeed, that was the distance of the fleet from the shore.” The Spanish crew gave chase in small boats, capturing only three, but not their leader Catalina, who, they believed, had successfully escaped to Guacanagarí.

By the light of day, Columbus indignantly demanded their return, and sent a search party, which discovered that Guacanagarí himself had escaped in the company of the women with all his possessions. Columbus assigned a subordinate to lead a company of several hundred Spaniards in search of the fugitive Indian, only to wander into “some tortuous gorges, with steep hills on both sides.” They spied a substantial hut in the distance, and thinking that it might conceal Guacanagarí, they approached it. They confronted an Indian with a “wrinkled forehead and thick eyebrows, accompanied by a hundred men . . . armed with bows, arrows, painted lances and poles.” They ran toward the Spaniards “with a threatening look, shouting they were Taíno, that is, ‘noble people,’ not cannibals.” Though not above violence, the “noble people” were less belligerent, and the company of sailors, breathing a collective sigh of relief, gave a “peace signal,” whereupon the Indians “abandoned their arms and their fierceness.” The Spanish fostered the friendship by offering hawk’s bells that the Indians prized for the brass. Despite the reconciliation in the wild, the Indians had no idea of Guacanagarí’s whereabouts,