An island.
The native people had seen the white flukes of our sails rising from the horizon. They had gathered on the beach as if awaiting the arrival of a Leviathan or emperor. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder with little more than plaited reed loinclothes mantling their scrolls. Several wore headdresses of feathers and shells, some held gourd bowls filled with fruit, coloured stones and feathers.
Mariners and philosophers regularly state that such newly encountered natives are handsome, as if one could say that noses, beauty and nobility existed in equal quantity among all members of a people. Surely there’s always an Auntie Faygel or a Zaiydee Shmuel with a nose like a tableau from Exodus played out on an anthill. But nu, these people were impressive pieces of bronze. Bright coins on the sand: their skin more lustrous than our sailors’ pockdotted and leathered parchment; their strong bodies, the muscled arms and chests of the men, the smooth torsos and naked breasts of the women.
Ach. Perhaps these are but overheated words from the ajar mouths of Pinzón’s gawking sailors for each member of this mutinous crew was now a sail billowing full with the Zephyrous thrill of recklessness in a kvelling gale of ambition and freedom. Each thought himself his own admiral, cut lose from the halyards of society, travelling into the unwritten margins.
Each man, now individual, thought himself impressive. The great canoe of our caravel growing into the barque of a giant as it rose from beyond the horizon, our vast mainsail like the banner of an advancing army entering a city, emblazoned with a green cross: F for Ferdinand, Y for Ysabella, large as trees surmounted with crowns broad as horses.
Pinzón: “We arrive from the East like the rising sun bringing light to the dark unknowing, these uncivilized lands on the fringes of Cipangu, Cathay, and the territories of the Great Khan. Here, each of us shall be as an emperor or king.”
Of course, to the islanders we may have appeared as monkeys dressed up in silks. A hundred monkeys typing Shakespeare would seem to them to be chattering gibberish. Though they would have been impressed by the typewriters.
We dropped anchor and the men rowed to shore, sacks filled with tchatchkes, the swag of visiting gods. Moishe was in the second boat, and I travelled on his leeward shoulder. We stood like rock stars awaiting special effects: Pinzón in his furs and silk breeches, some of the men in metal breastplates, ready to stride into the Promised Land or to re-enter Eden.
All the men, armed.
Pinzón wanted to replay Columbus’s landing, with himself in the role of Columbus. But this time we would not trade small talk and worthless chazerei. We were not pedlars and tinkers, but Odyssean conquerors.
The ship’s master unfurled the flag of the Spanish kingdoms and planted it in the sand. For we shall have dominion over every living thing that moveth upon the earth and have a fancy brocaded flag to prove it.
The natives fell to their knees and then, their arms stretched before them, touched their foreheads to the ground.
“They think we’re gods,” Moishe exclaimed.
“Maybe you,” I said. “Me, they think of as a bird.”
The islanders rose up and surrounded us. Some held out their gourd bowls of gifts. Our men made ready to receive them. Pinzón looked warily at them, and seeing no gold and not wanting a repeat of Columbus’s giltless meetings with the natives, gave the order for the men to take up their arms and make ready to fire.
What did war look like to the natives of this island—if they had war? In a war, a duel, or a chess game both sides need to know they are playing. Otherwise it’s hunting. Skeet shooting. Murder.
To Pinzón, the islanders, though statuesque as rippling stallions or shapely as does, were little more than animals inside: Less-than-Calibans. Un-Christianizables. Primitive though noble Golems without souls. And like Golems or magpies, they knew how to find shiny and precious things.
The men loaded their arquebuses with powder and gunshot while the natives looked on in fascination. Pinzón’s orders echoed in the stillness. “We don’t need a translator to explain this,” he said.
Then, “Fire.”
The sound was like a rank of cannons. The vessel of the world shattered to hellflame and thunder.
Islanders dropped to the sand, ragged hibiscus-flower wounds on their bare chests and contorted heads. Some ran into the forest. Some began to run and then collapsed. Surely not so many could have been hit. A kick and a brief inspection revealed that some had fainted in terror, while others had been slain by fear alone.
Pinzón ordered several men captured and chained to the flagpole. Some women he had bound and carried back to the ship. A man adorned in a feather headdress and long cape, likely the cacique, lay on his back in the sand, bleeding from his mouth. Pinzón stood over him, sword pressed against his heaving throat.
“Gold,” Pinzón said.
The man looked up at Pinzón, not understanding.