WaybackWire

AT SEA.—The men of the fleet could endure no longer on Wednesday 10 October and complained of the length of the voyage. The Admiral told them that “however much they might complain, he had to go to the Indies, and that he would go on until he found them, with the help of our Lord.”

Three days before, after a signal of land from the Niña proved false, great flocks of birds passed from the north to the south-west, and the Admiral, knowing that the Portuguese found most of their islands by the flight of birds, turned W.S.W.

On Thursday the Pinta’s men took up a small pole that seemed worked with iron, and the Niña’s men saw a branch covered with berries. Every one rejoiced. The Admiral promised a silk doublet to whoever first cried land, besides the Sovereigns’ 10,000 maravedis.

GUANAHANI.—The people of Guanahani came to the shore calling out and giving thanks to God as the Admiral’s boats went along their coast on Sunday 14 October. “We understood that they asked us if we had come from heaven,” he writes.

They go naked, all young men under thirty, well made, with short coarse hair and painted bodies, the colour of the Canarians. The Admiral gave some red caps and glass beads, believing they would be converted more easily by love than by force.

They have no iron and know nothing of arms: they took swords by the blade and cut themselves. Some bore the marks of wounds, and gave him to understand that people from other islands come to seize them.

The Admiral has taken seven of them aboard to learn the tongue of Castile. He writes that “with fifty men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them”.

ISABELLA.—The Admiral has found gold in the islanders’ noses, but no mine.

At Guanahani he saw a small piece of gold fastened in a hole in some noses, and understood by signs that a king to the south had great cups full of it. “I was attentive, and took trouble to ascertain if there was gold,” he writes.

The Indians aboard told of much gold on a larger island, Fernandina; there they all spoke of Samaot, island or city, where there is gold. A man there had a lettered piece of gold in his nose, and would not part with it.

On Isabella, which the men of San Salvador call Saomete, the Indians say a king inland, who wears much gold, rules all the islands about. The Admiral doubts it: “I do not give much faith to what they say, as well because I do not understand them well as because they are so poor in gold that even a little that this king may have would appear much to them.”

Some of the islanders who came to barter had gold in their noses, but so little that it counts for nothing. Going round to the king would cause much delay, and he sees no gold mine there, so on Tuesday 23 October he resolved to sail for Cuba.

ON THE COAST OF CUBA, Wednesday.—The Admiral means to send a present and the Sovereigns’ letter to the king of this land, which the Pinta’s captain understood from the Indians to be a great continent.

That king, the captain understood, is at war with the Great Khan, whom the Admiral says he must try to reach; he thinks him to be here or at Cathay.

He came believing that Cuba, as the Indians aboard call it, must be Cipango, which on the spheres and the map of the world lies in this region. He writes: “I cannot understand their language, but I believe that it is of the island of Cipango that they recount these wonders.”

He entered a river on Sunday and went ashore. Two houses, which he took for those of fishermen who had fled, held a kind of dog that never barks, nets of palm fibre and horn fish-hooks; he ordered nothing touched.

He writes that “he never beheld such a beautiful place, with trees bordering the river, handsome, green, and different from ours”. The Indians say there are gold mines and pearls, and he understood that large ships of the Great Khan come here, ten days from the mainland.