When Columbus had set out on his first voyage he was attempting to reach Asia across an oriental ocean stretching westwards from the fringes of Europe to the shores of Cipangu (Japan) and Cathay (China). The purpose was to provide an alternative route for trade between the East Indies and Europe.
On his first voyage Columbus assumed that when he landed on the island of Cuba that he had reached Cipangu (Japan). Columbus recounts that:
The Indians tell me that there are gold mines and pearls on this island, and i saw a likely spot for pearls . . . I understand that large vessels belonging to the Great Khan come here, and that the passage to the mainland takes ten days.
Columbus soon began to doubt that he had reached Japan, but he then substituted an equally fanciful theory: perhaps Cuba was part of the mainland of Cathay (China) and the court of Marco Polo's Great Khan would be found in the interior. He even despatched a group, including a 'Chaldean-speaking' interpreter, to investigate , "but finding no signs of organised government. they decided to return'.
It is worth remembering that Columbus had as his guide books for this exploration the already far from recent accounts of the travels of Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville of their journeys to the Far East, and he was projecting these, sometime fantastical, versions of Asia onto what was, in fact, an entirely new world, that is from a specifically European and Eurocentric point of view, of islands and continents long inhabited.
Indigenous genetic studies suggest that the first inhabitants of the Americas share a single ancestral population, one that developed in isolation, conjectured to be Beringia. The isolation of these peoples in Beringia might have lasted 10–20,000 years.
The term Beringia was coined by the Swedish botanist Eric Hultén in 1937.
During the ice ages, Beringia was not glaciated because snowfall was very light. It was a grassland steppe, including the land bridge, that stretched for hundreds of kilometres into the continents on either side.
It is believed that a small human population of at most a few thousand arrived in Beringia from eastern Siberia during the Last Glacial Maximum before expanding into the settlement of the Americas sometime after 16,500 years BP (Before Present).
Around 16,500 years ago, the glaciers began melting, allowing people to move south and east into Canada and beyond. These people are believed to have followed herds of now-extinct Pleistocene megafauna along ice-free corridors that stretched between the Laurentide and Cordilleran Ice Sheets.
Another route proposed involves migration – either on foot or using primitive boats – along the Pacific Northwest coast to the south, including as far as South America. Archeological evidence of the latter would have been covered by the sea level rise of more than 120 meters since the last ice age.
The time range of 40,000–16,500 years ago is debatable and probably will remain so for years to come. The few agreements achieved to date include:
- origin from Central Asia (DNA studies reported in 2012 indicate the area of Altai Republic, with a separation of populations 20,000-25,000 years ago)
- widespread habitation of the Americas during the end of the last glacial period, or more specifically what is known as the Late Glacial Maximum, around 16,000–13,000 years before present.
Marco Polo's travels may have had some influence on the development of European cartography, ultimately leading to the European voyages of exploration a century later. The 1453 Fra Mauro map was said by Giovanni Battista Ramusio (disputed by historian/cartographer Piero Falchetta, in whose work the quote appears) to have been partially based on the one brought from Cathay by Marco Polo:
That fine illuminated world map on parchment, which can still be seen in a large cabinet alongside the choir of their monastery [the Camaldolese monastery of San Michele di Murano] was by one of the brothers of the monastery, who took great delight in the study of cosmography, diligently drawn and copied from a most beautiful and very old nautical map and a world map that had been brought from Cathay by the most honourable Messer Marco Polo and his father.
— Giovanni Battista Ramusio
Though Marco Polo never produced a map that illustrated his journey, his family drew several maps to the Far East based on the wayward's accounts. These collection of maps were signed by Polo's three daughters: Fantina, Bellela and Moreta. Not only did it contain maps of his journey, but also sea routes to Japan, Siberia's Kamchatka Peninsula, the Bering Strait and even to the coastlines of Alaska, centuries before the rediscovery of the Americas by Europeans.
Failing to locate the expected court of the Great Khan, Columbus began to focus on how Cuba and the other islands might be exploited and the indigenous people evangelised. He continued to savour the richness of the flora and fauna, and to contemplate the discovery of gold and other riches; but increasingly he turned to the vision of the Indians serving as the innocent raw material of a new Catholic community to be constructed in the Spanish dominions.
The search for the court of the Great Khan had yielded nothing more than a village of fifty huts, and the 'inexhaustible' quantities of gold that Marco Polo had reported in japan had not been uncovered. The Indians would be doubtful allies against the Muslim: Columbus was to comment that "Ten Christians could put 10,000 of them to flight, so cowardly and timid are they."
Already Columbus had taken men, women and children and confined them in onboard servitude. On one occasion he took six young men from a canoe to add to the quota already captured; the next day, he collected seven women and three children, deciding that the men who were to be transported as slaves to Spain would do better with women of their own. Columbus had no doubt that the Christian church smiled on slavery.
On 16 January 1493 Columbus began the long journey home, without his flag-ship but bearing many items that would impress the Catholic monarchs of Spain: samples of gold, a few spices, tobacco, that was 'highly esteemed among the Indians, the hammock (from the Arawak language 'hamaca') and an assortment of miserable slaves to display at court.
(pages 79 - 80 Cuba: From Conquistador to Castro by Geoff Simons Macmillan Press, Basingstoke, 1996)
On 25 September 1493, Columbus began his second voyage to the Indies; this time he sailed with 17 ships from Cadiz. Now between 12,000 and 15,000 colonists, the largest such expedition ever to leave Europe, was heading west. The volunteers - soldiers, officials, priests, peasants, gentlemen and others - had far exceeded the capacity of the fleet. A principal aim was to explore Cuba to discover its precise nature (island or mainland), since "the Sovereign sagely suspected, and the Admiral declared, that a mainland should contain greater good things, riches and more secrets than any one of the islands". The monarchs and colonists alike remained hungry for gold.
When Columbus reached Española he found that the Navidad garrison had been massacred by the Indians, weary of the endless Spanish demands for food and gold. At the end of April 1494 he began his exploration of the southern coast of Cuba, by 18 July reaching the south-western extremity of the island (Cabo de Cruz). After some weeks of coastal exploration Columbus decided to spend no more time investigating Cuba.
(page 81 Cuba: From Conquistador to Castro by Geoff Simons Macmillan Press, Basingstoke, 1996)
Kirkpatrick Sale in his 1991 The Conquest of Paradise gives this account of what is known to historians as the:
"Cuba - no-island" oath.
On June 12, when the Admiral's three ships were almost at the westernmost end of Cuba, he decided that the entire crew should declare under oath that the coast they had been sailing along for the past four weeks was not that of an island at all but in fact "the mainland of the commencement of the Indies," and that if they went on, "land would be found where there are civilized people of intelligence who trade and know the world." And it was no casual oath, either: the Admiral made it clear that each man and boy among them had to take it, dispatched a notary public to write down their sworn statements, and decreed that all were "under a penalty of 10,000 maravedis and the cutting out of the tongue for every time that each one hereafter should say contrary," with an extra hundred lashes for gromets or "a person of such condition."Sale suggests that this self-serving attempt "to delude not only his crew but, through them the sponsors in Castile and even more the restless colonists in Española", contained multiple causes and motivation, not least a self-delusion born of forlorn wishful thinking, a fantastical dreaming worthy of Cervantes Don Quixote.
It is impossible to tell. All one can say is that, in spite of the Admiral's continued insistence that Cuba was part of some Asian mainland, even as late as the summary letter of the Fourth Voyage in 1503, it would have taken a true madman to have actually believed such a thing for long. No fewer than five maps drawn in Colon's lifetime, including the beautiful world map made around 1500 by Colon's sailing mate Juan de la Cosa . . . unquestionably show Cuba as an island, and as early as 1501 peter Martyr reports that "there are many who affirm that they have sailed round Cuba."
When Columbus returned to Española from Cuba in September, he found a situation of demoralisation and social decay: the settlers were roaming the land, attacking the Indians, stealing their possessions, and provoking resistance. Columbus himself felt compelled to organise military action against sections of the indigenous population: some five hundred Indians were captured and transported to Spain for sale as slaves. He then instructed the Indians to pay tribute to the Spanish authorities; they were required to pay either a hawk's bell full of gold dust or 25 lb of woven cotton every three months, partly as commercial tax and partly as a disciplinary pressure. Now the vassaldom of the Indians to the Catholic Church was to be made amply plain.
Columbus launched a series of campaign against the Indians of Española, involving expeditions to every part of the island and justifying his later boast to have conquered the island: Columbus, despite the thrust of some biographers, was the first of the Spanish conquistadores in the New World. The interests of the Indians were ignored; the central aims were to appease the colonists and to bring booty to the Spanish crown. Forts were built, the Indians subjected to a harsh military regime, and despair and death visited on a hapless native population unused to either crippling taxation or forced labour. At one sham parley, the Indian chief Caonabo was reportedly persuaded to wear 'bracelets' which were really manacles. According to Las Casas, Columbus succeeded over a few brief years in exterminating two-thirds of the Indian population of Española. The scene was set for the patterns of genocide and industrial slavery that would be visited on the American Indians - and on countless African men, women and children - by the Christian Europeans in the decades and centuries that followed.
(page 83 Cuba: From Conquistador to Castro by Geoff Simons Macmillan Press, Basingstoke, 1996)
Re-conquest, then conquest!
The emergence of the term "Conquistador" in the formation of the Spanish New World Empire has its origins and use in deeper and more troubling historical roots than the colonization process itself. In his The Nature of the Conquest and the Conquistadors Alistair Hennessy writes:
The use of the word “Conquest” is unique to the Spanish case for two reasons.
Firstly, the subjugation of the Aztec and Inca empires, which has hitherto attracted the widest attention of historians, was clear- cut and irrevocable, symbolized by the death of Montezuma (Motecuhzoma) and Atahualpa. There were after-revolts, Cuauhtemoc in Mexico, the revolt of 1536 and of Inca claimants in Peru-but in practical terms the heartlands of the two great empires were subdued.
Secondly, “Conquista” echoes “Reconquista”, with the latter being a model of the former, carrying over into the Indies the values which had sustained the crusade against the Moors. The coincidence of the termination of the 700 year Reconquista with the capture of Granada, the last Moorish kingdom in Spain, with the “discovery” of the Indies encouraged a providentialist view of Spain’s crusading mission.
