What is in many ways more fascinating than Hernando’s observations as he travels through these islands – manatees in Azúa, freshwater puddles in the Pozze, chocolate money in Guanaja – is the principle of organisation that is hidden from even Hernando himself: every island, every landing point, is defined for him and his readers by the unique lesson it has to teach the explorers. The idea that one would record what is distinct about a place seems so obvious, so natural, we might easily miss the fact that doing so belongs within a particular, and particularly European, tradition of thought. In part this was a practice made necessary by the lack of accurate measures of longitude: if a landmass could not be assigned specific spatial coordinates, it could only be identified by its unique human or landscape features. But this had unintended consequences: if each island must present a new experience to the observer, the map becomes little more than a record of the order in which the world is revealed to that observer.
This habit had taken up residence in the European mind at least as long ago as Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus’ ten-year homeward voyage from Troy takes him to a succession of islands, and a distinct lesson is learned on each: the dangers of self-indulgence and oblivion on the Island of the Lotus Eaters, the dangers of greed on Circe’s island, the threat posed by carnal enjoyment on Callisto’s island, and so on. The tendency can also be seen in medieval maps, where the remote regions of the world were filled in with dog-headed men, cannibals and wonders, never the same thing twice as the drive was less to describe a place and more to define it, to give it a unique property that could then be listed and ordered. The habit would remain, as we will see, deeply embedded in European thought, with narratives from Rabelais’ Quart livre to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels featuring a sequence of islands, each of which poses a distinct challenge. This was not limited to the stories Europe told about the world. Several projects were begun in the 1520s (one with links to Hernando) to compile Isolarii, geographical encyclopedias of every island in the world – even down, as Hernando would later note, to the Pozze sandbars off Jamaica – noting the distinct features of each. The desire to order the world by splitting it into distinct landmasses that could then be put in particular orders was so strong that imaginary islands were often created, in explorers’ narratives and in the most famous Isolario (by Bordone), to play host to particular experiences. The physical world, threatening to the European mind in its incomprehensible complexity, becomes more manageable when it is an archipelago of different experiences that can be put in order.13
The importance of this underlying order becomes apparent in the pains Hernando took to correct a later map that had reproduced the Guanaja islands twice – treating their visit of 1502 and a subsequent sighting of the islands as evidence of two separate landmasses. The problem this created was not simply that it deprived Columbus of the honour due him as the sole discoverer of the Guanajas (he was, after all, ‘discoverer’ of hundreds of islands), nor even the usefulness of a map as a navigational chart, as until the development of accurate observations of longitude these maps were of limited use in that respect anyway. Rather, the danger of duplicate islands was that they threw into doubt the entire system of organisation, creating the prospect of a map filled with infinite shadow islands, each one produced by a different person’s experience of them.14
Despite the great wealth contained in the canoe from Guanaja, Columbus was determined not to be distracted from continuing in his search for a passage through to the East. They parted from these traders, nevertheless ‘detaining’ one of them, an old man named Yumbe who acted as translator in the coming months and who seems to have become a firm favourite with the crew. Their ultimate destination was the region north of Paria, which Columbus had visited on the Third Voyage, where he felt sure the passage to the East would be found. Finding this region, however, was easier said than done, and after reaching the mainland they were forced simply to turn south and coast along ‘like a man groping in the dark’, stopping only to note the local particularities: Caixinas Point, named after the Paradise plum trees that grew plentifully there, where the locals wore armour of woven cotton capable of deflecting a sword stroke; the Costa de las Orejas, where the dark-skinned people ate raw fish and flesh, wore no clothes, painted themselves with ‘Moorish’ designs as well as lions and turreted castles, and stretched holes in their earlobes (orejas) large enough to fit a hen’s egg; Cape Gracias a Dios, which they were thankful to reach after progressing just seventy leagues in sixty days, where the land curved south and the winds turned favourable; the Rio de los Desastres, where there were canes as thick as a man’s thigh and where a ship’s boat was pulled under by a current.
At Cariay, ‘verdant as a field of basil’, and its adjacent island of Quiribiri, the fleet first began to encounter the guanín pendants that Columbus had seen around Paria: golden discs polished to such a sheen the sailors took to referring to them as ‘mirrors’. In an attempt to win the favour of this people, Columbus ordered presents be distributed among them, only to find them resistant to such obligation; the fleet found all of the gifts on the beach the next morning, tied into a bundle. The following day the natives of Cariay presented them with two young girls of eight and fourteen, naked but covered in guanín pendants. While Columbus’ memory of the meeting with these girls was vile in the extreme – despite their youth, he would later write, the most practised whores could not have been more experienced at enticement – this is likely to have been more a projection of the lustful desires of the adult sailors; Hernando, with the bashful nobility of adolescent sexuality, recalled only their braveness among strangers. Columbus clothed them and sent them back to their tribe. Bartholomew captured two natives to act as guides as they progressed down the coast, in response to which the natives sent two wild pigs (peccaries) as ransom, but Columbus insisted on paying for the pigs with gifts. To add to the considerable confusion, one of the peccaries got loose on deck and careened around, only to be attacked by a local cat-like creature that one of the sailors had wounded and brought aboard. Hernando concluded from the encounter between the wild pig and the cat that the cats must be used as hunting animals much like greyhounds in Spain, though it becomes clear from his description the ‘cat’ was actually a spider monkey.15
During the painfully slow passage along this coast Hernando was drawn even closer to his father by the fever that struck them both down. Columbus later wrote that the suffering of his son, only thirteen at the time, racked his soul, which sank to see Hernando so fatigued. This despair was transformed to boundless feelings of parental pride, however, as the Admiral watched the boy from his sickbed on deck: despite his illness the young Hernando worked so hard that it gave spirit to the other men, and tended to the comfort of his father all the while. It was as if, Columbus said of his son, he had been a sailor for eighty years. This was the kind of intuitive nautical genius Columbus only ever attributed to himself, a testimony of shared character that was cherished as the centrepiece of Hernando’s self-image for all his life.16
From Cariay onwards the avalanche of local customs and curiosities is simplified into records of the steadily increasing numbers of gold guanín mirrors the fleet was able to acquire for very little in return, a sure sign for Columbus that they were nearing the gold-rich region for which he had been searching since 1492 and which might also be