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island or a continent.” His instincts told him it was a peninsula extending eastward from the mainland, but his exploration of its coast and accounts provided by the Indians suggested that it was actually a great island. To test his hypothesis, he set out from La Isabela for the coast of Cuba, and when he reached it, he inquired of the Indians whether it was an island or the mainland—not that they understood his meaning. It seemed that they were more interested in eating and their women than in exploring, or even communicating with outsiders. It was even possible they did not grasp the distinction between an island and the mainland. Their world consisted only of islands, and Cuba, they allowed, was an island, but a very substantial one, requiring more than “forty moons” to sail from one end to another—or was that the time required to circumnavigate? It was impossible to decipher the exact meaning.

The imprecision unleashed Columbus’s most fanciful geographical notions. From Cuba, he believed it would be only a short distance to the Golden Chersonese, as the Malay Peninsula had been known since the era of Ptolemy. In reality, the distance between Cuba and the Malay Peninsula was more than eleven thousand miles, over land and water. But in Columbus’s mind, he was nearing his destination. “I kept following the same course of discovery and reached the island of Jamaica in a few days with a very favorable wind, for which I give infinite thanks to God, and from there turned back toward the mainland and followed its coast west for seventy days.” Approaching what he believed was the Golden Chersonese, Columbus turned back, “fearing the winds would shift and the very difficult navigating conditions I was experiencing, for the bottom was shallow and I had large ships. It really is very dangerous to sail through so many channels: many times I came to a standstill with all three ships aground so that none could help the others.” He sailed north to Cuba, a distance of several hundred miles, because, he said, “I wanted to assure myself that Juana”—his name for Cuba—“is not an island.”

Caught up in his geographical folly, Columbus lost “most of the victuals, which were soaked in seawater when the ships had run aground and at times were about to crack open, but I had with me master carpenters and all the tools to repair and make them like new if necessary.” It might have been at this point—Columbus was sketchy on the details—that the fleet entered an inviting harbor on Cuba, complete with food for the taking. “I went ashore and saw more than four quintals”—nearly a thousand pounds—“of fish on spits on the fire, rabbits, and two ‘snakes.’” Tied to the trees, they were “the most nauseating sight man had ever seen since all had their mouths sewn shut except some that were toothless; they were all the color of dried wood and the skin on their whole body [was] quite rough, especially around the head coming over their eyes, giving them a poisonous and frightening appearance. Like fish, they were all covered with scales, but hard ones, and down the middle of their bodies, from their heads to the tips of their tails, they had some protuberances, high, ugly, and as sharp as diamond points.”

The Taínos called the beasts iwana, and the term eventually entered the Spanish language as iguana, a type of lizard prevalent throughout Central and South America. To the amazement of the Spaniards, the Indians considered iguanas a delicacy. “Our men did not dare taste them,” wrote Peter Martyr, “because their disgusting look seemed to provoke not only nausea but horror.” Columbus’s brother Bartholomew found his courage, and “decided to put his teeth into an iguana,” in imitation of a cacique’s sister. To his astonishment, “once that tasty meat began to reach his palate and throat, he seemed to go after it with gluttony.” The other Spaniards followed suit, eating bits of iguana at first, and soon “turned gluttons” who “would not speak of anything but of such delicacy, claiming that the banquets prepared with them were more sumptuous than ours based on peacocks,