The Discoveries of America to the Year 1525

by Arthur James Weise

The channel between the island of Trinidad and the land of Gracia (which the natives called Paria), Columbus called la Boca de la Sierpe (the mouth of the Serpent). The fleet then sailed from the Gulf of Paria through its northern outlet, which Columbus called la Boca del Drago (the mouth of the Dragon), and passed by the cape which he called Cabo de las Conchas and the island which he named Margarita. “Although,” as Ferdinand Columbus remarks, “the admiral saw that the country of Paria extended much farther westward, nevertheless he says that from that time forward he could not give as good a description of it as he wished on account of his eyes being too much inflamed by constant watching. Therefore he was compelled to obtain the most of his information concerning it from the sailors and pilots.”[204]

When Columbus arrived, at the end of August, at the island of Española, where he intended to recruit his failing health, he found the colonists rebelling against the authority of his brother Bartolomé, whom he had left there as adelantado, or lieutenant-governor, when he sailed for Spain in 1496. Columbus at once took steps to put an end to the sedition. Meanwhile complaints were sent to their Spanish majesties, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who, to adjust the differences existing between the two contending factions, sent Francisco de Bobadilla to Española to discover the cause of the insurrection and to punish by fine and imprisonment those whom he should find culpable. Summoning the admiral to appear before him at San Domingo, he, as soon as Columbus arrived, ordered him to be put in irons and to be confined in the fortress. Having drawn up certain charges against Columbus, he sent him in chains to Spain. About the middle of November, 1500, the vessel arrived at Cadiz. When the news of Columbus’s humiliation at the hands of Bobadilla became known, the people everywhere censured the latter for the unwarranted abasement of the distinguished discoverer. The king and queen immediately sent orders for Columbus to be set at liberty, and afterward received him with many gracious acknowledgments of his important services, and publicly declared that Bobadilla should account to them for his ill treatment.[205]

When the information contained in Columbus’s letter respecting the large and valuable pearls possessed by the people of Paria became known in Spain a number of capitalists immediately fitted out a fleet to go to the Land of Pearls. The command of the vessels was given to Alonso de Hojeda, who had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage. The cosmographer, Juan de la Cosa, and Amerigo Vespucci went with Hojeda. Vespucci, in his account of the voyage, says: “We departed from the port of Cadiz, three ships in company, on the sixteenth day of May, 1499.... In forty-four days we arrived at a new land, which we judged to be main-land, and the continuation of that previously mentioned. It lay in the torrid zone south of the equator, where the south pole is elevated five degrees.” They sailed from their first place of anchorage and ran southeastwardly along the coast forty leagues. The strong currents running from the southeast to the northwest hindered the progress of the vessels so much that the explorers determined to change their course and to sail to the northwest. Following the trend of the coast in this direction, they, after sailing some time, reached a beautiful bay, at the entrance of which was a large island. About eighty leagues beyond this harbor they entered another, where they went on land and obtained one hundred and fifty pearls and some gold from the friendly natives. At another place the inhabitants of the country “had their cheeks stuffed with a green herb which they were continually chewing as animals chew their cud, so that they were scarcely able to speak. Hanging from the neck of each native were two dried gourd-shells, one filled with the herb which the people had in their mouths, the other containing a white meal like chalk dust. The natives carried small sticks which they wetted at intervals in their mouths and then put them into the meal and then into the gourds containing the herb.” Then they again filled their cheeks with the herb.

At another place the explorers remained forty-seven days, where they obtained “one hundred and nineteen marks of pearls” in exchange for some small trifles. From a native, Vespucci obtained an oyster containing one hundred and thirty pearls. The fleet sailed along the coast to where it was “fifteen degrees north of the equator.” Thence the explorers steered for Española to obtain provisions. Departing from the island on the twenty-second of July, 1500, they sailed for Spain, and arrived at the port of Cadiz on the eighth of September.[206]

When King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella heard that the Portuguese had reached India by sailing around Africa, they commissioned Columbus to explore the western coast of Paria, where he conceived a navigable strait could be found through which the vessels of Spain might sail to Cathay. Four caravels composed the fleet with which he sailed from Cadiz on the ninth of May, 1502. On the fifteenth of June, the vessels came in sight of one of the Caribbean islands called by the natives Mantinino. Thence they sailed to the island of Dominica, and thence to Española. Departing, on the fourteenth of July, from the port of Brazil, on the south side of the island of Española, Columbus sailed toward the Bay of Honduras, eastward of which he imagined was a strait through which he might sail to the Indian Ocean and reach Cathay. “We came to certain islands,” says Ferdinand Columbus, who had accompanied his father to the New World, “where we went ashore on the largest, called Guanaia, whence those that make sea-charts took occasion to call all those islands Guanaia, which are almost twelve leagues from the continent, near the province now called Honduras, though the admiral then called it Cabo Casinas.” While the fleet was anchored in one of the roadsteads of the group of islands called Guanaia, a large log-boat crowded with Indians and filled with certain commodities arrived there. Describing the capture of this highly valued prize, Ferdinand Columbus remarks: “Fortune so ordered it that a canoe, as long as a galley and eight feet wide, all of one tree, and like the other boats in shape, put in there, loaded with commodities brought from the country toward the west and bound for Nueva España.[207] In the middle of it was a covering like an awning, made of palm leaves, resembling those of the Venetian gondolas, which protected all beneath it, that neither rain nor sea-water could wet the goods. Under the awning were the women and children. Although there were twenty-five men in the canoe, they had not the courage to defend themselves against those in our boats who pursued them. The canoe being taken without any opposition it was brought to the admiral’s caravel.... He commanded that such articles should be taken as were thought to be the most desirable and valuable, as quilts, shirts of cotton without sleeves, curiously made and dyed with different colors, apron-cloths, and large sheets in which the Indian women in the canoe wrapped themselves as the Moorish women, formerly in Granada, were in the habit of doing. There were also long wooden swords, with grooved edges on each side, in which sharp pieces of flint were compactly fastened with thread and a bituminous substance, and these cut naked men as if they were made of steel; also copper hatchets to cut wood, like those of stone which the other Indians use; also bells of the same metal, and dishes and crucibles to melt it in. For food they had such roots and grain as the people of Española eat, and a kind of liquor made of maize, like the English beer, and an abundance of cacao-nuts, which in New Spain pass for money, which they seemed to value very much, for when they were brought aboard among the other goods, I observed that when any of these nuts fell, the Indians all stooped to pick them up, as if they were things of value.... Notwithstanding the admiral had heard so much from those in the canoe concerning the great wealth, politeness, and ingenuity of the people westward toward New Spain, yet thinking that he could sail to those countries lying to the leeward, when he thought fit from Cuba, he would not go that way at this time, but adhered to his intention of discovering a strait in the continent to pass into the South Sea,[208] by which he could sail to the countries that produce spice. Therefore he resolved to sail eastward toward Veragua and Nombre de Dios, where he imagined the strait to be.... He was deceived in the undertaking, for he did not conceive it to be an isthmus, or a narrow neck of land, as it really was, but a small bay extending from sea to sea.”[209]

On the coast of Veragua, now the isthmus of Panama or Darien, Columbus found the ruins of an immense building covered with tables of strange hieroglyphics and unique reliefs. These vestiges of an ancient civilization made so profound an impression on the mind of the admiral that he selected a curiously elaborated piece of the wall, and brought it away in one of his caravels. “This was the first place, in the Indies,” says Ferdinand Columbus, “where they saw any sign of an edifice. It was a great mass of wall of imagery seemingly composed of lime and stone. The admiral ordered a piece of it to be brought away to show the evidence of its antiquity.”[210]

On the fifth of January, 1503, they cast anchor near a river which the Indians called Yebra, and the admiral Belem or Bethlem. Westward of it was a river which the natives called Veragua. Columbus, having determined to build a town at this point, began, about the end of February, to erect “houses upon the river of Belem, about a cannon-shot from its mouth, within a trench, on the right bank of the river, at the mouth of which there is a little hill. Besides these houses, which were all of timber and covered with the leaves of palm trees growing along the shore, another large house was built to serve as a store-house and magazine, in which were stored several cannon, some powder, provisions, and other necessaries for the use of the planters....

“The customs of the Indians here are somewhat similar to those of the natives of Española and the neighboring islands; but the people of Veragua and its neighborhood, when they talk to one another and eat turn their backs, and are always chewing an herb, which, as we think,” says Ferdinand Columbus, “makes their teeth to decay and rot. Their food is fish; these they take with nets and hooks.... They have an abundance of maize, which is a kind of grain growing in an ear, or hard head like millet, of which they make white and red wine, as beer is made in England, and mix their spice with it as pleases their palates. It has a pleasant taste like a sharp, lively wine.”[211]

“In Cariay and the adjacent country,” says Columbus, “there are great enchanters of a very dreadful kind.... I saw there, built on a mountain, a sepulcher as large as a house and elaborately sculptured. The body lay uncovered with the face downward. The people told me of other very excellent works of art.... They said that there were great mines of copper in the country, of which metal they make hatchets and other manufactured articles, both cast and soldered. They also make forges from it, and all the apparatus of goldsmiths, and also crucibles. The inhabitants wear clothes. I saw in that province large sheets of cotton elaborately and skillfully made, and others very delicately colored with pencils. They informed me that in the interior, towards Cathay, that the people there have them interwoven with gold.... One thing I dare declare, for there are many to attest it, that in the land of Veragua I saw more indications of gold in the two first days [of my stay there] than I had found during four years in Española.”[212]