To bring these nuggets from the Indies, Antonio de Torres had retraced Columbus’s route, arriving in Cadiz within twenty-five days, on March 7, 1494. In addition to the gold, he brought a sampling of spices and twenty-six Indians, including three believed to be cannibals. They were considered mere curiosities. The greatest excitement was caused by the fortune in gold nuggets.

Torres carried a lengthy, emotional letter from Columbus to the Sovereigns in which the explorer tried to make the best of the troubled situation in Hispaniola. He explained that he would have sent more gold with Torres’s fleet, “had not the majority of the people here suddenly fallen ill.” He had thought of employing the few men who remained healthy, but he dreaded the “many difficulties and dangers” they would have faced. He would have had to hike through rugged country to the mining region “23 or 24 leagues away,” all the while “fording inlets and rivers on a long journey.”

Nor was it wise to leave the sick men alone and unprotected from the Indians. Even if he had led the healthy men to the gold mines, they would have faced “a cacique named Caonabó, a man who, in everyone’s opinion, is very evil and even more audacious,” and likely to endanger them all. And if they reached the gold, how would they transport it to the ships? “Either we would have had to carry just a little bit every day, bringing it with us and risking sickness, or we would have had to send it with some of the men, still running the risk of losing it.”

Nearly as urgent as the pervasive illness was the “great scarcity of all things that are particularly efficacious in fighting sickness—such as raisins, sugar, almonds, honey, and rice—which should have arrived in large quantities but we got very little of.” And that had been consumed, “including the medicines.” Their situation worsened with every passing day.

Columbus sent several lists to Spain with Torres. One requested basic supplies “for the people”:

Another list presented requirements expressly “for the Admiral and his household,” who, on the basis of their stated needs, craved sweets and other delicacies to soften the hardships of the Indies:

The Admiral catalogued other indulgences to ease his stay in the islands: five-yard-long tablecloths, seventy-two small cloths, six towels, six pairs of tablecloths for his men, pewter cutlery, two silver cups, two jugs, a saltshaker, twelve spoons, two pairs of brass candlesticks, six copper pitchers, four pots, two cauldrons, four frying pans, two stewing pans, two copper pots with lids, a brass mortar, two iron spoons, graters, two forks, a colander, a large basin, candles and tapers, and a “grill to roast fish.” He did not explain how these items would help convert Indians, locate the Grand Khan, or find gold, but he did offer a suggestion concerning the islands’ cannibals. He urged the Sovereigns to consider “sending some of them to Castile . . . because they will finally abandon their cruel custom of eating flesh. And in Castile, by understanding the language, they can soon receive baptism and save their souls.” The Taínos, on whom Columbus had come to rely, would give “great credit when they see that we have taken prisoner those who torment them and of whom they are so fearful as to tremble at the very mention of their name.” He proposed regular transports of cannibals between the islands and Spain. “The more that are taken over there, the better.”

But the Sovereigns, noting the fatalities among the Indians who sailed for Spain, responded in the letter’s margin: “You must tell him what happened here with the cannibals who came.” The prospect of caravels filled with dying cannibals crowding the docks of Seville did not sit well with Ferdinand and Isabella; they much preferred that Columbus “should get busy there and, if at all possible, see to it that they submit to our holy Catholic faith, and likewise try to see to that with all the inhabitants right on their own islands.” In other words, it was better for Columbus to convert the Indians where they lived.

He expressed resentment of “these caballeros” who had substituted inferior horses at the last moment (“such nags that the best is not worth even 200 maravedís”). The Admiral declared, “These substitutions were carried out with great maliciousness,” and he described the dishonest scheme perpetrated by some of the men on the ships. “These caballeros, in addition to their pay, have had their expenses on the voyage paid so far, including that of their horses, and are still being paid now even though they are the kind of people who, when they do not feel well or do not feel like doing anything, claim that their horses are not to be used without them; and besides, they expect to do no work except on horseback.” The Sovereigns decreed that the caballeros must stay, but required them to make their horses available whenever “the Admiral so commands.”

And as for the unruly volunteers, who had a habit of going their own way, Columbus recommended that they, all two hundred of them, receive pay as a means of directing their conduct. (The Sovereigns agreed on this point.) And while he was at it, he asked for essentials such as clothing, shoes, mules, arquebuses, and crossbows to replenish the fleet’s dwindling stock of supplies.

After days in the wild, Ojeda and his men returned, explaining that after ascending a troublesome mountain pass, they had been welcomed by the chieftain of a nearby village, and reached the Cibao in only six days. Once there, he observed Indians panning for loose nuggets of gold in a stream. Hearing from the Indians that many streams contained gold nuggets, Ojeda concluded that the region must be “very rich in gold,” an overstatement worthy of Columbus. Recovering from his illness, and “overjoyed,” said his son, Columbus decided to see the gold for himself.

Before setting out, Columbus assigned his brother Don Diego to secure La Isabela and supervise its construction. The Admiral ordered all the arms stored in the flagship during his absence “that none might use them to mutiny, as some had attempted to do while he was ill,” his son wrote. There was ample motivation. The hidalgos and other amateur explorers on the voyage believed that “as soon as they landed they could load themselves with gold and return home rich,” according to Ferdinand, without realizing that his father was as susceptible to the magic spell cast by gold as anyone in his crew, and encouraged the illusion. Sadly, “they did not know that gold may never be had without the sacrifice of time, toil and privations.” Once they were confronted with the reality that gold was scarce and difficult to mine, and that transporting it to Spain would be time-consuming and dangerous, disillusionment and resentment quickly set in. And so the stage was set for mutiny.

Led by the amphibious Admiral, the land force embarked on a journey across a landscape “of such perfection, grace, and beauty,” wrote Las Casas, “so fresh, so green, so open, of such color and altogether so full of beauty, that as soon as they saw it they felt they had arrived in some part of Paradise.”

On the scene, Columbus reported to Ferdinand and Isabella that “Cibao is the Indian name, which in our language means ‘quarry.’ It is a huge region, the land very rough, all the mountains and peaks quite high, and all or most of them not very steep. It has no trees, but it is not without vegetation because of its exceptional fertility; the grass here grows like a weed, thicker and higher than a field of barley at the best time of year, and in forty days it grows as high as a horse’s saddle, and it is always thick and green if it is not burnt. The ground below all those mountains and peaks is full of stones as large and round as those on a riverbank or a beach, and all or most of them are bluish.” The Cibao’s pure water delighted him; it was “clear, delicious, cold and not harsh like those waters that harm people and make them sick; it dissolves kidney stones, and many were cured.” Even better, “All the creeks and streams, large and small, have gold nuggets, in the water or nearby where the water has washed them out. I believe, or rather, I am certain, that this gold comes from the mines on the peaks and mountains, and during the rainy season the water carries it into the streams.”

Attracted by the industrious Spaniards, Indians gathered in the Cibao, seeking bells and other trinkets as eagerly as the white men sought gold. The Admiral obliged, so long as the Indians brought gold. Some nuggets were so large that Columbus assumed the Indians had melted smaller pieces of gold to form large lumps. Columbus held the nuggets in his hand, as an old Indian man told him there were others as “big as walnuts,” or even bigger. “When I received the two nuggets from this old man,” Columbus wrote, “I was most happy and indicated that they were very nice and gave him a bell. He received it with a sigh of satisfaction expressing greater contentment than someone being given a fine city.” These two nuggets, he said, were as nothing “compared with the others in his land.” The old man stooped and picked up several stones, claiming that he had nuggets of gold that were even larger. “They ranged in size from that of a walnut to a big orange,” Columbus exclaimed in wonder. But matters were not quite that simple.

Believing that he was close to finding greater amounts of gold, the Admiral “sent a young nobleman with a few armed soldiers to explore the [Cibao] region,” wrote Ferdinand. He returned telling fantastic stories of “gold nuggets the size of a man’s head . . . found on a riverbank.” Curiously, Columbus never followed up, preferring to whet the appetite of his Sovereigns for more voyages. He had his excuses prepared—the distance from the Cibao to the ships was too great, he lacked proper gold-mining equipment, the gold would be there when he got back—but, given the overwhelming importance of gold to Columbus and to Spain, his account is deeply suspect. He had indeed found gold, but not the incredible amounts of which he boasted.

While Díaz de Pisa was confined aboard ship, it emerged that he had fabricated a catalogue of outrageous accusations against the Admiral and concealed it in a buoy marking an anchor. Even Columbus’s harsh critic, Bartolomé de Las Casas, expressed dismay at Díaz’s treachery: “I cannot imagine just how the Admiral could have committed all the crimes and injuries listed in the short space of two months that he had been out there.” Despite Columbus’s intercession, rumors of his cruelty toward his own men spread throughout Castile. “I have read the letters he sent to the king and queen in which he explains that he was obliged by law to hand out the punishments he did,” Las Casas noted, “which is an indication that he did punish some of them,” but the cleric sided with Columbus, for once. “Criminals are always demanding to go unpunished,” he wrote, “and always claim their actions are justified and that it is they who are being victimized.”

Giambattista Strozzi, writing from Cadiz, catalogued the fleet’s flora and fauna snatched from the Indies, including gold, spices, parrots, and other fowl. Strozzi also wrote excitedly of “many brown men with wide faces like Tartars, with hair extending to the middle of their shoulders, large and very quick and fierce, and they eat human flesh and children and castrated men whom they keep and fatten like capons, and then they eat them. They are called cannibals.”

Guillermo Coma, the nobleman traveling with Columbus, remarked that they were accomplished mariners, traveling from island to island in canoes, “even as far as a thousand miles in search of plunder.” And they were ferocious. “They hand over the female captives as slaves to their womenfolk, or make use of them to satisfy their lust. Children borne by the captives are eaten like the captives.” It might have been for this reason that the Indian women were quick to resort to self-inflicted abortions.

Despite these repugnant practices, Guillermo Coma considered the Caribs “intelligent, sharp-witted, and shrewd,” qualities that gave him hope that “they could easily be led to adopt our laws and manner of life, when they realize that our manners are more mild and our manners more civilized than theirs. It is hoped, therefore, that they will in a short time abandon their savage character as a result both of instruction from us and an occasional threat that, unless they abstain from human flesh, they will be reduced to bondage and carried in chains to Spain”—a “civilized” society with terrors of its own, and which would all but exterminate the Caribs within a few years.

Concerning the Indians’ diet, the doctor approvingly noted a “bread made from a weed root” (cassava), and yams, which he considered a source of “excellent nourishment.” Guillermo Coma raved about them: “When eaten raw, as in salads, they taste like parsnips; when roasted, like chestnuts. When cooked with pork, you would think you were eating squash. You will never eat anything more delicious.” Michele de Cuneo, on the other hand, favored parrots. “The flesh tastes like that of the starling. There are also wild pigeons, some of them white crested, which are delicious to eat.” Not everything that grew on the island attained this high culinary standard. Chanca noted that the Indians routinely consumed “snakes, lizards, spiders, and worms found all over the land,” a stomach-turning regimen that made “these people more similar to animals, as far as I am concerned.”

To enforce his will, Columbus constantly threatened violence. He agonized over how to portray his inglorious efforts before the court of Castile, where jealous bureaucrats waited to discredit him. Success for Columbus meant, above all, identifying with divine will, but for the time being he was in danger of losing the way. Accusations of Columbus’s cruelty and “hatred for Spanish,” in Las Casas’s words, gained credence in the royal court—“accusations that gradually wore him down, ensured he never knew a day’s happiness through the rest of his life, and sowed the seeds of his eventual fall.”

Columbus and his backers were coming to terms with the fatal calculus of discovery. Despite strenuous efforts to ascribe his motives and deeds to a higher power, the quest remained intensely personal, especially when Columbus confronted sickness, suffering, and the prospect of death. At times like these, he seemed to purchase glory with the suffering of his crew members. The first voyage’s unlikely success emboldened Columbus to believe that establishing trade with China could be swift and painless, but that no longer appeared true. It was one thing, he realized, to visit a strange harbor, drop anchor, ask the priests on board to bless their cause, and sail away when the wind and tide permitted, another to establish a permanent, selfsustaining settlement: that was the difference between discovering an empire and maintaining it. Empire building required an innovative and different skill set, as essential as the navigational instincts and abilities he had spent a lifetime acquiring. It meant adding the skills of military commander, merchant, politician, and even spiritual leader—all roles he was barely qualified to play. Grumble though they did, threatening mutiny and retribution for perceived slights, no one else among the hundreds of men on the voyage’s roster displayed an aptitude for them or was willing to risk taking them on.

But there was worse to come.

Energetic and responsive, Ojeda ingratiated himself with Columbus and his adjutants, but the decision to put the reckless young man in charge soon proved questionable. Las Casas paid tribute to Ojeda’s charisma, and to his fatal flaw. “He was slight of body but very well proportioned and comely, handsome in bearing, his face good-looking and his eyes very large, one of the swiftest of men,” the historiador sighed. “All the bodily perfections that a man could have seemed to be united in him.” For instance, “he was very devoted to Our Lady,” and yet, “he was always the first to draw blood whenever there was a war or a quarrel.” His fiery temperament would soon pose problems for Columbus.

On April 9, 1494, Ojeda led four hundred men from La Isabela on the pacification mission. They had, at best, only a partial understanding of Indian territories on Hispaniola, and were often unable to tell friend from foe. Occasionally, the Indians were both.

They had divided the island into five kingdoms. The closest at hand was Magua, including La Isabela and the voluptuous Vega Real, ruled by Guarionex. To the northwest, Guacanagarí held sway over Marien. In the east, Guayacoa claimed Higuey, famed for fighters fierce enough to repel Carib invasions. Xaraguá, the island’s largest kingdom, lay to the south, and belonged to Behechio, whose sister, Anacaona, was Caonabó’s wife. On the strength of this alliance, Caonabó claimed a mountain range in central Hispaniola.

Confronting this network of Indian alliances, Ojeda’s small force met with an intimidating show of force. Columbus reported:

Columbus considered this turn of events “a miracle of no small importance, that a few Christians could escape a multitude of people sworn to their death.”

Ojeda captured three Indian leaders—a chief and his brother and nephew—and placed them in irons to present to Columbus, waiting impatiently at La Isabela. To add to the spectacle, Ojeda ordered his men to lead another Indian into the midst of his village and “cut off his ears” in retribution for the Indians’ failing to be helpful to the Spaniards when fording a stream. When the other prisoners reached La Isabela, Columbus went even further: he ordered them “to be taken to the main square and publicly beheaded.”

To Las Casas, the despicable tactics meant that the Indians “had every right to consider” violence against Ojeda—who had cut off the ears of an Indian for shock value—“and the Christians traveling with him.” Columbus should have known better; he should have warned the Indians that he was coming, sent messengers to “notify all the kings and lords of his intended arrival,” to let them know that he was coming “for their benefit,” and to ask permission. And he should have sent “tokens, as he was formally instructed to in the written orders given him by the king and queen.” He should have “extended . . . every courtesy and taken every . . . step, as prescribed in the gentle teachings of the gospel whose minister and messenger he was to assure them that he came in peace and love and to avoid committing any outrage or act that might distress or upset the gentle and innocent.”

This gentle diplomatic prescription was all very well, but the massacre at La Navidad remained fresh in the mind of Columbus and all the other members of his party, for whom the time for sending invitations or asking permission had long passed.

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, pheasants and partridges.”

Shortly afterward, Bartholomew himself fought to subdue rebellious Indians and bring their leader Guarionex around to the Christians’ side. He was gratified to see that Guarionex became an advocate of the Europeans, praising their mercy and generosity. When the cacique finished his speech, his followers lifted him on their shoulders and jubilantly paraded him about. The rapprochement bought only a few days’ peace from the stress of Spanish-Indian conflict.

As disoriented as ever, he expressed the wish to return to Spain—not across the Ocean Sea, but “from the east, by way of the Ganges, Arabian Gulf, and Ethiopia.” Columbus was a man of fixed beliefs, and to his way of thinking, east was west, and west was east.

The geographical impossibility of dozens of Spanish caravels reaching these landlocked Asian and African kingdoms seemed entirely plausible to another scholar, Andrés Bernáldez, who theorized that Columbus “could arrive by land at Jerusalem and Jaffa and from there board a ship, cross the Mediterranean and finally reach Cádiz.” Marco Polo had completed a similar journey ; why not Columbus? It might be a dangerous passage, Bernáldez admitted, “for all the populations from Ethiopia to Jerusalem are Moorish,” but Columbus was “convinced” that he could sail directly from Cuba “in search of the region and city of Cathay under the rule of the Grand Khan.” As precedent, Bernáldez cited John Mandeville, who “went there and saw and lived for a certain length of time with the Grand Khan.” In reality, Mandeville had cobbled together an entertaining hoax out of fantastic accounts of the world dating back to antiquity.

Columbus was not the only explorer to have caught a glimpse of a larger, previously unimaginable truth only to retreat to the security of conventional wisdom. A half-dozen years earlier, Bartolomeu Dias had insisted that his men swear oaths when he was exploring the African coast. Columbus had witnessed his return to Lisbon, and might have become aware of the pact, and employed it now to protect the integrity of the voyage as originally conceived. The world was what Columbus said it was.

To enforce his view, he instructed Fernand Pérez de Luna, the official on board concerned with certification of documents, to take depositions from all the men aboard the fleet’s vessels. Placing loyalty above the truth, each swore that Cuba was longer than any island with which they were familiar, so it had to be an extension of a continent. Thus, there was no need to explore it any further. Those who dared to violate the oath faced penalties: a fine often thousand maravedís and having their tongues slashed. Columbus felt so strongly about the matter that he required the boys among the crew to sign the oath. Any lad who spoke out against it would suffer one hundred lashes, a potentially fatal punishment. Even the expert cartographer Juan de la Cosa signed, although his map of 1500 would show that Cuba was, in fact, an island.

If Columbus hoped the oath would silence debate on this sensitive subject of Cuba, he was disappointed. When the learned abbot of Lucerna arrived in Hispaniola several months later, he declared that, as everyone knew, Cuba “was only a very big island, in which judgment, considering the character of our navigation, most of us others concurred.” Columbus had not succeeded in fooling anyone, except, perhaps, himself. Worse, he sowed suspicion that he was manipulating the data to support promises he could not keep.

When the three black caravels appeared, Guacanagarí, as volatile as ever, took flight, “though his people pretended he would soon return.” Columbus waited, but by Saturday, he realized that Guacanagarí was unlikely to reappear, and he set a westerly course for the nearby island of Tortuga. The journey meant enduring a sleepless night of choppy seas and a frustrating lack of wind. In the morning, he took his ships in the opposite direction, to the east, dropped anchor near the entrance to the Río Guadalquivir, as he called it, “to await a wind that would enable him to make way against the current.” It blew up eventually, and Thursday, April 29, found the three caravels approaching the southern coast of Cuba, where Columbus located a bay “with a mouth of great depth and one hundred fifty feet wide.” He named it Puerto Grande, dropped anchor, and by evening he and his men were devouring freshly caught fish roasted over a fire and sampling plump, eighteen-inchlong rodents known as hutias (Isolobodon portoricencis), “which the Indians had in abundance.”

By May 1, Columbus was sailing through weed-choked waters, “encountering commodious harbors, lovely rivers, and very high mountains,” and waving at locals who believed the black ships had descended from heaven. The well-wishers offered tributes of fish and cassava bread, asking nothing in return. As before, Columbus bestowed hawk’s bells and glass beads on his supplicants, “wishing to send them away happy.” And with that altruistic gesture, he resumed the crucial task of finding gold. In Ferdinand’s worshipful view, the quick departure demonstrated his father’s resolve, but Columbus himself took a more pragmatic view. “The wind was fresh and I was using it, because things at sea are never certain, and many times an entire trip is lost because of a single day.”

After two days and two nights of “excellent weather” Columbus beheld a view of the island’s primeval interior. Through some trick of light and atmosphere the vista seemed close at hand, as though he could reach out and graze a mountaintop with his fingertips. That may have been why Columbus—no aesthete—was moved by the sight. “It is the prettiest that eyes have ever seen,” he exulted. “It is not mountainous, yet the land seems to touch the sky, and it is huge, bigger than Sicily, with a perimeter of eight hundred miles. It is most fertile and densely populated, both on the seacoast and inland. . . .”

Once again, he was Jamaica-bound, and in search of gold.

In severe weather, Columbus would normally strike sail, but his fleet was in danger of colliding with small islands, their dull trees and beaches just visible through the fog and mist. As the weather brightened, the palm trees and scrub sparkled. Columbus called the islets the Queen’s Garden, in honor of his sovereign. “The farther he went, the more islands he discovered, and on one day he caused to be noted 164 islands. God always sent him fair weather for sailing among them, and the vessels ran through those waters as if they were flying,” Bernáldez said.

Ashore, they marveled at the profusion of wildlife, “cranes the size and shape of those of Castile, but bright red.” Nearby, “they found turtles and many turtle eggs, resembling those of hens but having very hard shells.”

Returning to their ships, Columbus’s men noticed the strange manner in which Indians fished from their canoes. As they approached, Ferdinand relates, the Indians “made signs not to come nearer until they had done fishing,” which meant tying “slender cords to the tails of certain fish that we call revesos”—remoras, or suckerfish—“that pursue other fish, to which they attach themselves.” Despite Ferdinand’s enthusiasm for the technique, the Spanish colonists did not trouble to learn this method of fishing for themselves, preferring to rely on the Indians’ largesse.

While methodically sounding the harbor, he and his men were alarmed by the sight of seventy giant canoes, paddles churning through the sea, Indians shouting, ready to attack. “After I anchored, they came down to the beach in numbers to cover the earth, all painted up with a thousand colors, primarily brown, and all of them naked; they wore various kinds of feathers on their heads, their chests and bellies were covered with palm fronds, and they shouted at the top of their lungs and threw spears, although they did not strike us.” Columbus feigned indifference, occupying himself by taking on wood and water, repairing his battered vessels, indirectly letting the Indians know that their bellicose gestures would accomplish nothing. To flee would only encourage the Indians, who, Columbus reminded himself, were so inexperienced that they would grasp a Spanish sword by the blade “without thinking they can be hurt.”

According to Ferdinand, Columbus resolved to “scare them right at the start” by sending small craft filled with crossbowmen who wounded at least six or seven Indians by a conservative estimate. The brawl settled matters for the moment.

Columbus’s Indian interpreter sailed to shore in a longboat to conduct diplomacy among the inhabitants, and once he had calmed their anxieties, struck a deal, the outlines of which quickly became apparent. “A multitude of canoes came peacefully from the neighboring villages to trade their things and provisions for our trinkets.” He obtained all he wished, except for the gold that he believed was just waiting to be discovered.

That night, the fleet rode at anchor in Santa Gloria’s idyllic harbor, and in the morning, May 6, the Admiral raised sail, and traveled fifteen miles west along the Jamaican coast, dropping anchor again in a horseshoe-shaped place of refuge that instantly became Puerto Bueno.

Onshore, Indians donned brightly colored feather headdresses and masks, and hurled their poison spears at Columbus’s ships. Undeterred by what he considered a ritual show of force, the Admiral sent a party of men ashore in a longboat to scrounge for water and wood and the opportunity to repair their leaky boats, only to meet with a hail of stones. To tame the warriors, Columbus sent another boat with sailors armed with crossbows, whose arrows injured and killed several. To teach the Indians a lesson, Bernáldez recalled, the Spanish deployed a vicious dog that “bit them and did them great hurt, for a dog is worth ten men against the Indians.”

The following day, a half-dozen Indians appeared onshore with offerings of cassava bread, fruit, and fish to appease the Spanish invaders. Columbus and his men helped themselves to the Indians’ bounty, all they could want with the exception of gold. On May 9, the newly repaired ships raised anchor and sailed from Puerto Bueno, again in a westerly direction, to a spacious harbor Columbus named El Golfo de Buen Tiempo, the Fair Weather Gulf—now known as Montego Bay. Inevitably, a storm blew up. Without giving a reason, striking out blindly in search of gold and the Grand Khan, Columbus left the Jamaican coast and returned to the mysterious land of Cuba—Juana—reaching Cape Cruz on May 14.

To his surprise, he heard rumors of himself. The Indians had been expecting the man with the large black ships to return.

After reaffirming his good intentions to the Indian sentinels of Cape Cruz, Columbus departed, plying a northeastern route that took the fleet along what is now the Balandras Channel to the Gulf of Guacanayabo. Although the Admiral seemed to have reoriented himself now that he was back in Cuba, he remained befuddled about his global whereabouts, and as reliant as ever on spurious sources, especially Sir John Mandeville.

They sailed on, Columbus anxious to avoid the slightest contact with razor-edged coral reefs and sinister sandbars. From the Gulf of Guacanayabo on May 15, he sailed gingerly to the west, probably past an archipelago off Santa Cruz del Sur, into the Rancho Viejo Channel (as it is now called) and the Pingue Channel, into a gulf guarded by a blockade of islands with the alarming name of Laberinto de las Doce Leguas, Labyrinth of Twelve Leagues. It was but one more maze that Columbus had entered, some geographical, others conceptual, combining to mislead him into exploring dead ends and arriving at false conclusions. He was saved from folly or disaster by his remarkable navigational intuition and his instinct for self-preservation as storms buffeted his ships when they were trapped and vulnerable in the channels. Daily tempests forced him into impossible navigational quandaries in tight spaces—whether to spread sail or take it in, to drop anchor or not to drop anchor—and he often violated his own cardinal rule by scraping the bottom of the channels he explored. The worst transgression occurred when Santa Clara ran aground, and for many anxious hours he was unable to dislodge her. Eventually he and his crew freed her, and he regained the freedom of the sea.

As Columbus resumed his exploration of the southern coast of Cuba, he arrived at the massive incursion known as the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs). Always persuaded that he was on the verge of reaching India, he suspected that he had located—at last!—a passage from Juana to the mainland. The navigator in him eventually realized that he was in fact exploring a spacious gulf, as he later described to Bernáldez, “on the edge of the sea, close by a great grove of palms that seemed to reach the sky” shielding two gushing springs. “The water was so cold and of such goodness and so sweet that no better could be found in the world.” Never had he sounded more charmed by his surroundings. For once Columbus gave himself up to rapt contemplation of the vistas before him.

He had no choice but to find a way out. For once his gift for dead reckoning failed him. Never before had he seen such an erratic display of water—white, black, milky, and indigo, as if all the formations and currents with which he had become familiar during a lifetime of sailing had lost their meaning. He spent several days cautiously proceeding along Cuba’s sweltering southern coast, always near to the shore should disaster strike. He sent an agile caravel into a channel to find water, or signs of human habitation, but the ship soon returned, her crew reporting that the vegetation was “so thick that a cat couldn’t get ashore.” Columbus tried to pierce the dense mangrove cover, but he, too, complained that the land was “so thickly wooded down to the seashore that they seemed to be walls” that excluded his fleet from the gold, the glory, and the fulfillment of discovery and conquest.

As he coasted along an uninspiring formation he named Punta de Serafín, a wind arose, and the obstructing islands gave way to open water and a prospect of distant mountains. And so, Bernáldez writes, “the Admiral decided to lay a course toward those mountains, where he arrived the following day, and they proceeded to anchor off a very fine and very large palm grove”—almost any grove would have looked appealing after the oppressive wall of mangroves they had endured—“where there were springs of water, sweet and very good, and signs that there were people about.” Strange things started happening.

The very next day, May 20, Columbus negotiated his way past seventyone islands, “not counting the many they sighted at sunset toward the westsouthwest.” The vista was anything but reassuring: “The sight of these islands or shoals all about them was frightening enough, but what was worse was that each afternoon a dense mist rose over them in the eastern sky, with such thunder and lightning that it seemed a deluge was about to fall; when the moon came out, it all vanished, dissolving into rain and part into wind.” It was such a common atmospheric phenomenon, he said, that “it happened each afternoon.”

On May 22, the fleet approached an island that appeared slightly more substantial than the others he had recently passed. Santa Marta, Columbus decided to call it as he went ashore, desperately in need of food and water. The Indians had abandoned their village, and in their huts, the starving sailors found only fish. In the background, large dogs, “like mastiffs,” pawed the earth and growled. Unsatisfied and bewildered, the Spanish returned to their ships and sailed onward, “northeasterly among the islands,” past stately cranes and gaudy parrots, wandering blindly into a “maze of shoals and islands” that “caused the Admiral much toil, for he had to steer now west, now north, now south, according to the disposition of the channels.” Within their confines, the ships could not tack and maneuver. Peter Martyr related that “the water of these channels was milky and thick for forty miles, as if they had sprinkled flour all over the sea.” While Columbus and his men frantically sounded the bottom and kept lookout, the keels often scraped bottom. Nevertheless, the fleet made it through and exited into the open sea, where, eighty miles away, lofty mountains hung suspended against the sky. They were approaching Cuba and apparent safety.

The fleet put in, and a lone Spanish scout, armed with a crossbow, went ashore in search of desperately needed water. During his search, he confronted the spectacle of a man dressed in a white tunic. At first, the scout thought he beheld a friar whom the Admiral had brought along. “Suddenly, from the woods he saw a whole group of about thirty so-clothed men coming,” Peter Martyr related. “He then turned around shouting and ran as fast as he could toward the ships. These men dressed in tunics clapped their hands at him and attempted to persuade him with all means not to be so fearful, but he kept running.” Stranger still, the men appeared to have complexions as light as those of the Spanish. From what tribe had they come? Were they lost Europeans? Emissaries of the legendary Prester John? And if so, had Columbus’s fleet finally reached the Indies?

Astonished by the apparition, Columbus sent a delegation “to see if they could talk with these people, for according to the crossbowman, they came not to do any harm but to speak with us.” They found no one, “which displeased me much because I wanted to speak with them since I had traversed so many lands without seeing people or villages.” Attempting to blaze a trail inland to the men, the Spanish “got themselves so entangled that they hardly made a mile,” let alone forty. They returned to the ships, exhausted and empty-handed.

Columbus snatched one of the Indians, “telling him and the other Indians through an interpreter that he”—the Indian hostage—“would be released as soon as he had shown him the way and given him other information about that region.” The information Columbus received was exactly what he did not want to hear: Cuba, said the Indian, was an island, which meant that the fleet had not reached the outskirts of the Indies. Ferdinand is silent on his father’s reaction to this news, but the Admiral’s sense of bewilderment can be imagined, and it was compounded by the fleet’s having wandered into a dangerously shallow channel. In the effort to move to a deeper waterway, Columbus “had to kedge it with cables over a sandbank less than a fathom deep but two ship lengths in size.” Kedging meant dragging the ship from one small anchor to another.

The ship emerged at night into a sea that seemed to be covered from one end to the other with turtles. (Peter Martyr said the ships “had to slow down” just to get past them all.) At daybreak, cormorants took wing, “so numerous that they darkened the sun.” And the next day, “so many butterflies flew about the ships that they darkened the air till afternoon, when a heavy rain squall blew them off.”

“All these changes and the appearance of the sea caused great dread among the sailors, since they had never seen or experienced anything of the kind before and accordingly believed themselves to be irretrievably doomed,” said Las Casas. They anxiously traversed this sea, only to come to another, black as ink and five fathoms deep, and then, to Columbus’s great relief, the fleet made Cuba, where he turned east, negotiating the headwinds and in search of fresh water, safe harbor, and a brief respite from the toil of discovery.

The ships had taken a beating. Their keels had been battered and torn from repeated contact with the bottom. Their ropes and sails had rotted away. The food, sodden with seawater and fouled with vermin, had spoiled. As if these troubles were not enough, while Columbus was writing in his journal on June 30, he felt his ship run aground “with such force that they could not get her off by the stern with the anchors or by any other means; however, with God’s aid, they managed to pull her off by the prow, though she suffered considerable damage from the shock of the grounding.” Columbus found wind to sail away from the near disaster with as much speed as he could muster “through a sea that was always white and two fathoms deep,” and he kept going, enduring every evening at sunset “violent rainstorms which wore the men out,” said Las Casas, who continued, “The Admiral was in a state of extreme anxiety.”

Even Las Casas pitied Columbus at this point, evoking “the unparalleled suffering of the admiral on these voyages of discovery.” Reviewing the misfortunes plaguing the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the chronicler rose to a histrionic pitch, declaring, “His life was one long martyrdom, something which will lead others . . . to conclude that there is little to be gained and little rest to be enjoyed in this world for those who are not forever conferring with God.” Las Casas was unique in considering Columbus impious; from another perspective, the Admiral’s misfortunes, and those he caused others, could be traced to his tightly held spiritual convictions, which were both his inspiration and his undoing.

As if they were biblical plagues, Las Casas listed the afflictions: the “sudden squall that placed him in imminent and deadly danger” by “thrusting the neck of his vessel down beneath the waves so that it seemed that it was only by the grace of God that he was able to take in the sails and hold fast by using the heaviest of anchors.” That crisis was followed by “the great quantity of water the ship took on board,” the exhausted crew, and the lack of food, supplemented only by “the odd fish they managed to catch.” Columbus’s distress was made all the worse by his oppressive sense of responsibility for the others and for himself. No wonder that he felt moved to cry out to Ferdinand and Isabella: “Not a day goes by that I am not faced with the prospect of the certain death of us all.”

While resting and overseeing repairs to the ships, Columbus went ashore to attend Mass on the beach; it was now July 7. There he was approached by an “eighty year old man,” said Peter Martyr, relying on Columbus, “a leader all respected, though naked, with many followers. During the service, this man remained still, looking surprised, face and eyes still; then, he gave the Admiral a basket full of fruits that he held. Communicating with the Admiral by means of signs, they exchanged religious affirmations.” With the help of Diego Colón—an Indian convert to Christianity who had taken the Admiral’s surname—the elderly man “made a speech,” and quite a surprising oration it was, covering morality and the afterlife. According to Ferdinand Columbus’s version, the chieftain said he had been to Hispaniola himself; in fact, he was acquainted with his counterparts there, and he had also been to Jamaica, and even “traveled extensively in western Cuba.” If so, this was a personage who could give Columbus reliable information about these islands, and he even offered an explanation for the apparition the scout had seen weeks before: “the cacique of that region dressed like a priest.” A priest: it again seemed possible that Prester John had preceded the Spanish to this partially Christian land, and if he had, so might the Grand Khan, just as Marco Polo had written. If Columbus interpreted the cacique’s sign language correctly, they might have arrived in the Indies, after all. The illusion would remain undisturbed, as compelling as ever. He could sail on indefinitely, if uneasily, in search of his elusive Indies, and, of course, gold, passing up countless Edens with their hatching turtles and butterfly storms.

But the cacique had more to say. He talked of human souls following one of two paths, gloomy or pleasant, and he admonished Columbus to decide for himself which direction to take, and what his reward or punishment in the afterlife would be for his actions. Or so the cacique’s translated, partly understood words sounded to Columbus, who expressed surprise at the wisdom of the elder. He explained that he was familiar with the concept of punishment and reward in the afterlife, yet he wondered how the cacique, at home in a state of nature, had come to subscribe to the same philosophy.

Columbus explained that the king and queen of Spain had sent him to “bring peace to all the uncharted regions of the world,” which, to his way of thinking, meant subduing cannibals and punishing criminals wherever they were found. Men of goodwill had nothing to fear from the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. It seemed to Columbus that his words had pleased the cacique so deeply that the old man would have joined the Spaniards if his wife and children had not objected. Yet the philosophical Indian was puzzled: How was it that the Admiral, who appeared to have supreme power, bowed to the authority of another? Even more incredible to his ancient ears were the descriptions of the “pomp, power, and magnificence of the Sovereigns and their wars, how big their cities and how strong their fortresses,” in Peter Martyr’s words. Such splendor was overwhelming, and the cacique’s wife and children wept at the Admiral’s feet.

Keeping his composure, the chieftain “asked many times if the country that gave birth to such men was not indeed heaven,” in Peter Martyr’s transcription. Among the Indians, Columbus gathered, “earth was a shared asset, like sun and water, and . . . ‘mine and yours’ concepts, which are the seeds of all evils, do not apply.” The cacique explained that his people were “satisfied with little, and in that land there are more fields available to cultivate than there is need.” It was a golden age for the Indians, Columbus recalled. “They do not surround their properties with ditches, walls, or hedges; they live in open fields, without laws, books, or judges; they behave naturally in a just manner. They consider evil and wicked anyone who delights in harming others.”

The old man’s ideas challenged the explorer’s assumptions about the world beyond Spain. Perhaps the church might not have a monopoly on the afterlife, blasphemous as that notion was. Perhaps Spain did not have a monopoly on empire. Perhaps he was on a voyage of redemption. Or damnation. He would find out.