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As regards the route taken by Columbus in his first voyage among the islands, these maps follow the lines laid down by the German traveler Rudolf Cronau, in his recent work," Amerika." His views are based on a thorough exploration of the Bahamas.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS.

BY EMILIO CASTELAR.

V. THE NEW WORLD.

[graphic]

HERE are longings which can find expression only in music, and ideas which poesy alone may convey. As human speech, creation's divinest work though it be, is too weak to voice the infinite intensity of love, so history, although showing forth the mind of man as the universe proclaims its Maker, can never in its cold analysis rise to the level of poetry, which after all is the sole human medium capable of fitly depicting the feelings of Columbus in presence of those islands-the ecstatic rapture of sight and sense, the mingling of all his being with the virgin life there revealed amid blue seas and skies, as though it were the work of his own soul and the crystallization of his great purpose.

Something akin to the feelings of Him who looked upon his work and saw that it was good must have been in the mind of Columbus when he gazed upon those islands, and in the ecstasy of his joy found them fair beyond the fondest imaginings of his fancy. Yet Columbus is silent

touching his emotions, as well at the sight of the dim taper that told of human life amid the wastes as when he beheld the first land that proved the truth of his predictions. A monkish chronicler, in the solitude of his cell, could scarce have set down more curtly the acts of other men than has Columbus his own deeds.

"At the second hour," he says, "after midnight, the land appeared, two leagues distant. All sails were furled, leaving only the stormsail, lay hove-to awaiting the day, Friday, when they which is the squaresail without bonnets, and they reached one of the Lucayos, which in the Indian tongue was called Guanahaní. Soon naked men were seen, and the admiral went ashore in the long boat, with Martin Alonso Pinzon and Vicente Yañez, his brother, who was captain of the Niña. The admiral displayed the royal standard, and the captains the two flags of the green cross, which the admiral carried on all the ships as

signals, bearing an F and a Y, and above each other on the other. On reaching shore they saw letter a crown, one on one side of the cross and the very green trees, and much water, and fruits of divers kinds. The admiral summoned the two captains with the others who went ashore, and

Keungo Descovedo the scrivener of all the fleet, Lu Codrigo Sanchez of Segovia, and bade them beath and witness how he in presence of them all was taking and of right did take possession of said island for the king and for the queen, his lords, making all the requisite declarations as is more fully set forth in the minutes which were there drawn up."

Could the tale be more simply told? Does this recital, as bald as a bill of lading or a business letter, show any trace of the emotion which underlies other passages of the journal? Halting only three days in the first-found island, Columbus passed on to others, giving them names typical of his thoughts and aims. The first he named San Salvador, in homage to our Lord, whose saving arm had upheld him in his sorest need; the second he called Santa María de la Concepcion, a name invoked by him throughout the voyage, and to the holy efficacy of which he attributed his good hap in escaping storm and sickness hitherto; the third he christened Fernandina, as a tribute to his king, a proof that the monarch had not been as hostile to Columbus as a certain historical school maliciously supposes, or that, if he had been, Columbus sought his future favor and consigned the past to oblivion; to the fourth he gave the name which he might well have used at first, or at least employed before the king's, the name of Isabella. Thus the discoverer went on, in the effusive joy of his first communings with this renewed Eden-world of nature, fulfilling by the giving of these names the debts of gratitude he owed.

Island after island rose before him, yet he came not to any continent, although in his ignorance of the true extent of the ocean he imagined himself at the threshold of Eastern Asia, and about to realize his lifelong dream of finding the Indian empire. Feverishly he sought the one factor that could lend value to his discovery, but gold was rare in those islands, which yielded but bloom and fruitage, heaped as by enchantment upon the billows of the Atlantic.

But let us follow the track of the discoverer. On October 12 Columbus sighted the island of San Salvador. On the 15th, he sailed toward the island he named Santa Maria, and thence toward Fernandina. October 19, he discovered Isabella. In the first two of these he was especially struck by the primitive and natural state of the islanders, naked yet not ashamed, who gazed upon the strange objects presented to their view with a childlike curiosity; in the second he remarked, as we have seen, an ascent in the scale of life denoted by the products rudimentary industry; in the third urity of atmosphere, a mysterious diation, a crystalline transparency

of the waters, a sweeter breath of bloom and savor of fruitage, and such rich dyes on the far horizon as enraptured him, and filled his body with a new life and his soul with poesy. Among its vegetable growths he particularly noted the lign-aloe, and among animals the iguana. As the tree comes from eastern Asia, Columbus gave close heed to it, and investigated its abundance in those fair new-found fields. With knotty trunk and fleshy leaves, its foliage dark-colored and its fruit resembling cherries, its sap bitter and the gum exuding from its fibers and the perfume shed by its wood very fragrant, it was medicinally known in those times, as Columbus notes in his diary that record of whatever singular object met his keen scrutiny. No less worthy of note was the iguana, an exclusive amphibious product of those shores, and unknown in our own land, yielding a medicinal oil, and eaten by the natives and even by the discoverers themselves. Las Casas says they saw it eaten, but partook not of so repulsive a food; but Acosta, in his "History of the Indies," after mentioning sev eral other articles of food, exclaims, “Much more toothsome is the iguana, although foul to look upon, for it is like the lizard of Spain." In traversing those seas, two contradictory impressions possessed the discoverer — his infinite delight with what he beheld and his bitter disappointment at finding nowhere the gold he coveted. He notes the products brought by the savages, and at each step very ingenuously and sincerely bewails the scarcity of the wishedfor precious metal. The first tribe he met offered him balls of cotton yarn, gay parrots, arrows," and other trifles which it were tedious to write down"; and although he inquired diligently if they had any gold, and noted how some of them wore a bit of it suspended from their pierced nostrils, he found nothing of value. He asked the bedizened natives whence they procured their gold, and from their responses, made in signs, not words, he inferred the existence of golden sands in the vicinity, and vases or jars of gold in neighboring lands that lay to the southward and were ruled by a powerful monarch. Columbus sought to induce his informants to guide him to this new El Dorado, but they soon convinced him that they knew nothing whatever about the journey. Still, all that he learned and saw strengthened his conviction that his true course lay toward the south, and he determined to steer thither, in the firm belief that he should speedily encounter the island of Cipango (Japan), so minutely described by Marco Polo as a rich mine of precious metals, situated some fifteen hundred miles from the mainland of India. These natives of San Salvador swam like tritons about his ships, offering limpid water and luscious

fruit, but not a grain of gold. Only Cipango could supply his need. But still he found not the Croesus of Cipango, nothing but more savages at Concepcion. Nevertheless, the garrulous Indians of San Salvador had told him how the people of this little isle wore many and heavy rings on their arms and ankles. The discoverer gloomily adds, " I firmly believe they said this as a trick to get rid of me." Indeed, having taken several Salvadoreans on board, and an Indian found in a canoe between San Salvador and Concepcion, the poor wretches sought flight by swimming, despite the vigilance of the officers and crew. For instance, one of the savages put out in his canoe in great haste for the ships, to sell his precious ball of cotton yarn. When the sailors kindly invited him on board the caravel, he obstinately refused, whereupon some of them sprang overboard and seized him. The admiral called the Indian to the quarterdeck, and, divining the necessity of exciting the curiosity of the natives, dressed him grotesquely like a Venetian harlequin, and sent him straightway ashore. They set a gaudy cap on his head, beads of green glass on his wrists, pendants of gilded and jingling hawk-bells in his ears, and so they sent him back, that the naked inhabitants might see what manner of men their visitors were, and what unknown marvels they brought.

As Columbus advanced he was gladdened by fertile islands, a limpid sea, brilliant cliffs, balmy air, and blue sky; but he halted not for these, pressing ever onward in search of virgin gold; for all his discoveries hitherto had yielded but a handful of bread, a gourd of water, and a bit of red earth rubbed to powder and smeared on a few dried leaves as an ornament in high estimation, offered by a poor savage, to whom the admiral gave honey and sweet cakes and sent him back to make good report of the newcomers among his own folk. In effect, the Indians of all those islets, divining the character of their guests by their gifts and their behavior, put out in their canoes, offering an abundance of fresh spring-water, which Columbus gladly accepted to replenish his casks, and were well repaid with gaudy tambourines worth perhaps a maravedí of Castile, and trinkets cheaper still, and candied sweets. Keeping clear of the reefs that abound in the Bahamas, and ever hurrying on in quest of gold, Columbus circumnavigated the islands and found some Indians disposed to barter, who offered him cotton cloths. Singular trees, wholly unlike those at home, thickstemmed and bearing masses of pods on one side and reed-like leaves on the other; fishes of strangely variegated colors; and other natural objects, diverted their minds from the poignant regrets due to the scarcity of gold. At other places they saw dwellings like booths or the

tents of a European encampment, with tall and slender chimneys; but by far the most marvelous sight to them was a tiny bit of gold, worn as a nose-ring, bearing letters stamped upon it -a thing to be followed up, but which unfortunately could not be investigated through the failure of him who saw it, in the absence of Columbus, to beg or buy it.

At length, on October 18, he hoisted sail at daybreak and quitted Fernandina. He had found the island which the Indians declared to be full of gold, but their tales had proved untrue. Now and then a tiny fragment had been seen, but so small as to be of little worth. And yet, while the sad reality seemed most to mock their impatient desires, the Indians persevered in their reports of a realm ruled by a fabulously wealthy potentate, clad, they said, something after the Spanish fashion, with garments of enormous price. For two nights Columbus had awaited the apparition of this bejeweled monarch, to bring him gold in its native purity; but he saw naught but naked Indians of the same race as those already found, painted with white and scarlet in uniform designs, some few only of whom bore little bits of gold in their noses, "but so little," says Columbus, "that it is naught." The sense most gratified in this expedition to Isabella was that of smell. The whole island seemed to Columbus one vast fruit of intoxicating fragrance. A thousand spice-groves exhaled sweet savors, perfuming the breeze for many miles about. Strange vegetation, unknown odors, and fruits of luscious flavor abounded everywhere, enchanting sight and sense, without their discoverer being able in any wise to divine their qualities or give them a name, or even to classify or describe them with any exactness, for want of previous botanical training

a fact he bitterly and eloquently bewails in accents that even now move us to pity, heightened as they are by the long lapse of time and the magnitude of an achievement that greatens with each passing century. Neither Salvador, nor Concepcion, nor Fernandina, nor Isabella, nor any islet of those encountered in that tireless voyage and so attentively circumnavigated, answered to the phantasm of Cipango, pictured by the medieval chroniclers and seen in the fancy of Columbus as a fragrant paradise and rich storehouse where gold and gems were to be gathered in handfuls. So, having sailed through those regions without finding the gold he sought, it seemed to him that he should no longer tarry there in idle enjoyment, but press untiringly onward until he should chance upon some land of greater wealth, such as the famed Cuba, whose name was borne on every breeze even as it hung on every lip.

One of the greatest difficulties in the discoverer's way was his ignorance of the several

tribal dialects. He himself says that he had to depend entirely on signs, it being utterly impossible to comprehend the spoken words. Thus he mistook the word bohio for a city, when it means any kind of shelter; he blundered in supposing naca to be the Great Khan whose fame ran in his mind, when it means "in the midst of," and he translated babeque as "empire" without thinking in his ignorance that it might mean anything else under heaven. But let us go on. At midnight of October 24 he weighed anchor, and set sail from Isabella toward the island called by the natives Cuba, but which he, misled by his fantastic charts, called Cipango. It rained and blew hard all that night. At dawn the storm lulled. A gentle breeze succeeded to the howling wind, and Columbus spread all the canvas of his caravel. Squaresail, studdingsails, foresail, spritsail, mizzen, topsail-every cloth was spread and the quarter-boat was at the davits. Thus he sailed until nightfall, when the wind freshened. Not knowing his bearings, and fearing to run for the island in the dark because of the abounding shoals and reefs on which he might be lost, he hove to and waited until dawn. That night he barely made two leagues. On the 25th, he sailed from sunrise until nine, running some five leagues, when he shifted his course to the westward, making eight knots an hour. Ateleven, eight small islands were sighted, which he called Las Arenas, because of their sandy beaches and the shoalness of the water to the south. On the morning of October 27 he resolutely headed in quest of Cuba, but at nightfall a heavy rain forced him to lie to. On the 28th he entered a lovely estuary, free from dangerous rocks and shoals, all the shores he skirted being deep and the water of exceeding clearness. Thus he reached a river, at whose mouth he found twelve fathoms, and "never so fair a sight have I seen, the river being wholly bordered with trees, very beautiful and green, being unlike ours, with fruit and flowers, each after its kind."

Columbus was now in Cuba. The tropical horizon bathed in the intense ether; the Atlantic waters half azure and half opalescent, like a gigantic sheet of mother-of-pearl; the gilded reefs bright with nacreous shells; the keys covered with aquatic plants and swarming with infusorial life; the banks of the river fringed with mighty reeds like a floating garden; in the far reaches mountains tinged purple and lilac like crystalline masses of light; the tangled foliage forming an impassable rampart, rich with

1 The journal itself is lost. As late as 1554 it seems to have been in the possession of Luis Columbus. The text now extant is an abridgment by Padre Las Casas, and was first printed in Navarrete's "Coleccion" in 1825. The only version we have in English, somewhat retrenched and not always happy in rendering the

rainbow colors; gorgeous insects like winged gems of every hue; the giddy fluttering of butterflies whose wings gleamed with gold, and crimson, and azure, and every prismatic tint till they seemed like airy garlands; plants of a thousand forms, heavy with bloom, bright to dazzle the eye and fragrant to entrance the senses; thick masses of lianas and trailers spread like Persian carpets under foot and drooping like Oriental tapestries from the branches overhead; the quick flight of humming-birds and parrakeets with plumage more bright than Cathayan silks; the choiring of nightingales and the chirping of crickets, unheard in our climes in the autumn and winter, but vocal yonder in October; the broad-leaved plantains, heavy and rich as velvet hangings and borne down with rosy and golden fruit; cocoa-palms towering skyward from the water's edge; tree-ferns guarding the portals of the trackless virgin forests that spread afar like a sea of verdure, in whose hollows hung gauzy vapors; fields of maize thick with tassels of waving gold and silken tresses; the massive logwood with its deep-red sap; date-palms and cherimoyers bearing exquisite fruit; cacti towering like cedars; mahogany and ebony trees of iron hardness; groves of orange and pomegranate; a flood of ever-varied foliage and an outpouring of animal life; heavy odors drifting afar over the seas; a tangle of indescribable vegetation; the blended murmur of the rippling streams and the trembling leafage-all this incredible exuberance must have moved the weary pilot of the worn-out world as painless Paradise moved the sinless Adam when he arose at the divine inbreathing to draw into his veins the mysterious effluvia of universal life.

Would you comprehend how this Cuba affected Columbus? Then heed not those writers who would bound his emotions by official phrases remote from the spot and the time, and ill reflecting the discoverer; go to the man himself as he appears in his private journal. This has been widely published and is familiar to many. Read it for a space, and, if possible, read it in the original Spanish; which, however marred by time and careless transcription, still breathes the first feelings of the discoverer.1 We have heretofore complained of the bald narrative bequeathed to us of the landing on San Salvador. We said that we could glean nothing from that monkish scrivener's report to reproduce for us that most extraordinary and solemn moment in all history, which closed the older epoch and ushered in a new age for nature and

quaint conceits of the original, was made by Samuel Kettell, on the suggestion of George Ticknor, and was published in Boston in 1827, with the title, "Personal Narrative of the First Voyage of Columbus to America." Copies are now scarce, even in the larger libraries. -TRANSLATOR.

for the spirit of man. But when Columbus comes to Cuba, he ceases to cramp his feelings, he represses not his style, he sets no bounds to his admiration, his thoughts break into lightningflashes like those of some inspired poet when the frenzy of inspiration is on him. The Columbian account of Cuba may not be comparable in form with Milton's description of Paradise or Camoëns's portrayal of the ocean; but there is in it a simplicity that touches the sublime, in that it lacks effort and exaggeration, so that we feel and know that he who penned it was the discoverer himself, martyr to his own greatness, consumed by the creative fire that sheds its beams on all the world around, but destroys the unhappy possessor. Whenever Columbus praises the lands he found, he likens them to his cherished memories of gladsome Andalusia and sterner Castile. Not once does he recall his own Italy. Although born and nurtured on the fair Ligurian shores, not once is he reminded of their delectable valleys, their celestial peaks, their foam-capped seas, their marble cliffs, or their golden sands kissed by siren-haunted waves. But he compares Cuba with a very similar region, with that Sicily which was the theater of the divine deeds of Hellenic mythology. Its position between Italy and Greece, its pellucid waters, its azure skies, its shining shores, the deep clefts of its valleys where bloom the bay and myrtle beloved of the olden gods, its flaming Etna shooting a fiery glare through the far blue skies, and with its ashes making fruitful the stony fields-all these natural contrasts and outward manifestations of life lend it the rare attractiveness to which it owes the choice of its soil as a fit scene for the divine story of Olympus. Wherefore Sicily, at the portals of the Old World, typifies the past; whilst Cuba, at the gateway of the New World, is emblematic of the future.

that they hung the gay ribbons and beads about their necks and danced to show their joy; poor in all things, for they went as their mothers bore them; their hair thick as a horse's mane and falling in long locks upon their shoulders; shapely of body and handsome of face; straight of limb and slender of waist; painted some with black, some with white, but more with red, their own complexion being that of the Canarians; so ignorant of arms that they grasped swords by the blade, and so unused to field labor that they knew not the mattock or the plow; some bearing scars as showing that man and warfare are born together, and that combat is more natural to him than toil; without other creed than a vague belief in the supremacy and grandeur of heaven -they absorbed the attention of Columbus, and plunged him into comparisons born of their contrast with the Spaniards, and of the lot which, in his innate prescience, he foresaw in store for them as a result of his miraculous advent. In his observations, hurriedly sketched and therefore the more interesting, such notes as the following occur in regard to his first visit to San Salvador: "Of women I saw but one, a mere girl; and all the men I saw were youthful, for none saw I of a greater age than thirty years." In another place he says: "All that they had they gave away for any trifle given to them," adding that they were "a gentle folk enough, desiring to have anything of ours, yet fearing that naught will be given to them unless they give something, and having nothing they take what they may and forthwith swim away." And further on he adds, speaking of their ignorance of trade: "Yet for potsherds and bits of broken glass cups were they content to sell; and even have I seen sixteen balls of cotton given for three ceotis of Portugal, which is a blanca [half a maravedi] of Castile, and therein was more than an arroba [25 pounds] of spun cotton." Again he says: "In the eastern part of the island saw I many women, and old men and children which I saw not at my first landing"; and to give an idea of their simple nature he tells how "some brought us water, others things to eat; others, when they saw that I went not ashore, leaped into the sea, swimming, and came, and as we supposed asked us if we were come from heaven; and there came an old man into the boat, and all, men and women, in a loud voice cried-'Come and see the men who came from heaven; bring them food and drink.'" And elsewhere, speaking of the natives of Fernandina, he says: "These folk are like those of the other islands, and of the same speech and customs, save that these seem to me something more domesticated and better traders and keener, for I see that they have brought cotton and

Of all his discoveries, Cuba aroused in Columbus the deepest emotions. In the Lucayan Bahamas he was struck by the primitive innocence of their inhabitants -a rare and strange thing, in truth-more than by the aspects of nature, less gigantic and less beautiful than in Cuba. His pristine discoveries were mere islets, very unlike the two greater islands found at the close of this first voyage and hurriedly explored before his return to Spain. After leaving the Lucayos he came, as we have seen, to the uninteresting group of Las Arenas. Yet even here Columbus studied man in natural preference to all things else. These naked tribes, more amenable to the influences of kindness than to the sway of force; amazed at seeing a gaudy cap or hearing the tinkle of a hawk-bell or a tambourine; so kindly disposed that they swam out to the caravels, bearing cotton thread and parrakeets; so light-hearted

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