It was now well on in the afternoon, but he would go with the Mighty Stranger, the Great Cacique his friend, to see the ships and all the wonders. His was a childlike craving for pure novelty and marvel.
So we went, all of us, back through vast woodland to cerulean water. Water was deep, the Marigalante rode close in, and about and beyond her the Santa Clara, the Cordera, the San Juan, the Juana, another Nina, the Beatrix and many another fair name. They were beautiful, the ships on the gay water and about them the boats and the red men’s canoes.
We went to the Marigalante, I with the Admiral. Dancing across in the boat there spoke to me Don Diego Colon, born Giacomo Colombo, and I found him a sober, able man, with a churchly inclination. Here rose the Marigalante, and now we were upon it, and it was a greater ship than the Santa Maria, a goodly ship, with goodly gear aboard and goodly Spaniards. Jayme de Marchena felt the tug of blood, of home-coming into his country.
CHAPTER XXVIII
FINDING young Sancho upon the Marigalante, I kept him beside me for information’s sake. He, too, had his stories. And he asked me how Pedro and Fernando died.
In this ship were two sets of captives, animals brought from Spain and Indians from those fiercer islands to the south. The Monsalvat that was a freight ship had many animals, said Sancho, cattle and swine and sheep and goats and cocks and hens, and thirty horses. But upon the Marigalante, well-penned, the Admiral had a stallion and two mares, a young bull and a couple of heifers, and two dogs—bloodhounds. The Caribs were yonder, five men in all.
He took me to see them. They were tall, strong, sullen and desperate in aspect, hardier, fiercer than Indians of these northward lands. But they were Indians, and their guttural speech could be made out, at least in substance. They asked with a high, contemptuous look when we meant to slay and eat them.
“They eat men’s flesh, every Caribal of them! We saw horrid things in Guadaloupe!”
Away from these men sat or stood seven women. “They were captives,” said Sancho. “Caribs had ravished them from other islands and they fled in Guadaloupe to us.”