REDISCOVERING COLUMBUS, PART
VI:
Looking for Japan-in the Caribbean by Peter Stanford
To the sailors it was dry, steady land they staggered about on, like dancing bears, after their long weeks at sea. It was welcoming and wondering looks from friendly naked men of extraordinarily polite manners and from captivating women. To the Admiral-for he now could take this title, having found the farshoreoftheOcean Sea-it was these things, plus the exultation of having found the Indies by a new route never successfully tried before. This was a discovery he correctly felt to be a world-changing triumph for his sovereigns. Try all that, with the steady Trade Winds blowing, northeast in the morning, veering southeast in the afternoons as the day warmed up, and the wealth ofCipango (Marco Polo 's fabled Japan, where houses were roofed in gold) just around the comer! It was good to be alive, discoveri ng new peoples, with great things in the offing. Columbus, however, could not afford to dilly-dally, nor did he want to. He knew he had to do two things to succeed in his voyage: bring back what wealth he could, and open a trade route to China and the spice islands of the Indies, perhaps by way of Japan, if this seemed advisable. According to his calculations, he should have been near China, and he believed (with the rest of Europe) that Japan was a good 1500 miles nearer Europe than China. In other words, if he was in the vicinity of Japan, as he soon dec ided he was, that meant he still had to go half again as far as he'd come to get to China. Yet, he also kept in mind the possibility that he'd overshot Japan, and he speaks often of expecting to run into emissaries of the Great Khan-being unaware, as apparently most Europeans were, that the Great Khan had ceased to exist, Tartar rule in China having ended more than 100 years earlier. It is difficult for us today to conceive a world in whi ch news of the end of the world's greatest empire would fail to reach educated people in Europe for over a century; it is difficult also to conceive of Columbus believing he was in Asia when we know so well that he was in the Americas, turning up islands and coastlines so very familiar to us, as he found his way among lands utterly new to him . A favored descriptive for these next weeks and months of his sailing is to say "he blundered his way." I pause on this matter only to counsel readers to get this notion out of their heads, along with the underlying attitude of ridicule. Do this not for Columbus's sake but for your own! What is the point of following his voyage and his discoveries if you are not prepared to share his world? Let's endeavor to share his joys, confusions and disappointments as he opened up a quarter of the globe utterly unknown to the most learned people of the wide-awake Renaissance world he came from. Columbus may not have been the first European to arrive among these islands that gird the Caribbean, but he was certain) y the first to get there and come back to tell the tale. And he knew he was the first, and that the tale he told would lead to a new age in ocean trade. But, ifhe failed to bring back the goods-namely, gold and other evidences of local wealth and of having reached Japan or China-the voyage would be a practical dead end for him and for his patrons.
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So Columbus ended up spending only one full day and parts of two others in the island he called San Salvador. Despite the interest he took in the cotton which the natives grew on the island and traded, and the small gold ornaments the natives wore, he noted in his journal at the end of his one full day 's stay, Saturday, October 13: " in order not to lose time, I want to go to see if I can find the island of Cipango." So began a 12
three-month peregrination through several of the Bahama Islands, along the coast of Cuba, and finally to Haiti , where he was to make hi s departure for Spain early in the fo llowing year. Columbus took with him six Taino Indians. They did not want to go with him and made several attempts to escape, sometimes with the help of other Indians. But, curi ously enough, relations with these captives were friendly, apparently on both sides; on several occasions the captives advised other peaceful Indians not to run away, but to stay and meet with the Spanish. Among the Bronze Age Mediterranean peoples we know this drafting of locals went on all the time, and some sort of compelled service like thi s might have been known to the Tainos and accepted by them. One thing certain was that this drafting of guides did not alarm the Tainos; seeing the draftees seemed to reassure other Tainos. Another thing we can be quite certain of is that the Tai nos knew what real oppression and kidnapping was. Their Carib neighbors, pushing up from the south along the island chain, attacked the Taino people savagely, killing unresisting people of all ages and carrying off select yo ung women. Columbus's journals make clearthat what these Tai no captives were telling the other Tai no people they met was, in effect: Don 't worry, these are not Caribs. The second island Columbus reached, on October 16, he named Santa Maria de la Conception, for the Virgin Mary . Two of the Tainos escaped here, and Columbus did not stay long , for fear he would lose them all. He released one Tai no his sai lors had grabbed, in order, as he quite openly says, to spread the idea that the men he had with him had done him some harm , and thatthat was why they were held captive. And between this island and the next one, the Santa Maria picked up a single native in a canoe. They brought him aboard with his canoe, fed him and released him at the end of their passage, at an island which Columbus called Fernandina, after his patron king. Most scholars agree Fernandina is Long Island in the Bahamas. Columbus was working hi s way south and west to find Cipango. His journal reflects the excitement, still on him, of walking strange land. Going for water, he notes: "And because it was a bit far I stopped for a period of two hours and in this time I also walked among those trees, which were more beautiful to see than any other thing that has ever been seen, seeing as much verdure and in such degree as in the month of May in Andal usia. And all the trees are as different from ours as day from night; and also the fruits and grasses and stones and everything." There is continued argument and uncertainty about where Columbus went next- full agreement on where he is from day to day is gained when he reached the big main islands of Cuba and Haiti. These arguments have a very unfortunate a-historical effect; they convey the impression that where he was wasn't real, because we can't swear to its location on a map. Uncertainty is all aro und us in our own lives. Are we unable to handle it in the past because time past is different, somehow, from time we ari: living through or time to come? But Columbus knew very well where he was from day to day and from moment to moment-he just couldn't relate these islands to the rest of the known world. The seasonal rains had come-that was very real, and Columbus complained of it. The regular Trade Wind breezes faltered. Columbus wrote down enormous detail about the lands he was in and the sea he traversed. At one point, in the entry for October 19, he explains to his sovereigns: SEA HISTORY 59, AUTUMN 1991