VOYAGE OF STRANGERS (31 page)

November 28, 1493

A shore party finds La Navidad burned to the ground and learns that all the Spaniards who remained there are dead

January 2, 1494

The fleet anchors off Hispaniola at the site of what will be Isabela

January 6, 1494

Hojeda and Gorbalan are sent to find the gold mine of Cibao

January 20, 1494

Hojeda returns to Isabela and reports that he has found Cibao; in reality, there is alluvial gold but no mine

February 2, 1494

Twelve ships under De Torres are sent back to Spain

March 12, 1494

Columbus leads an expedition from Isabela inland over the               mountains

March 16, 1494

Columbus orders the building of a fort at Santo Tomas

April
9-12, 1494

Hojeda mutilates a Taino for stealing
clothes and takes a
cacique
captive

April 24, 1494
             

Columbus leaves Isabela with three shi
ps for further exploration, leaving his brother Don Diego in charge

June
21, 1494

Columbus’s brother Bartholomew ar
rives in Isabela with three ships

September
, 1494

Margarit and Fray Buil seize three caravels and sail for Spain

September 29, 1494

Columbus returns to Isabela

February 24, 1495

Four caravels, under the command of
De Torres, leave for Spain with a cargo of 500 Taino slaves, of whom more than 200 die at sea

Afterword

Besides the characters listed as known to history, I have used historical details as much as possible. For example, there really was a merchant noble family in Seville called Espinosa, although the characters of this name in the book are fictitious. The real-life Espinosas dealt in olive oil and wine; other families manufactured soap. There really was a "bakery inquisitor" who prepared supplies for the second voyage, though his name is unknown.

To the best of modern knowledge, Columbus was exactly where I have said he was on the dates given in the story. My fictional characters had more freedom to move around, within the framework of the historical timetable.

Some of the historical details are so amazing that it would be hard to make them up. The Santa Maria really was wrecked on Christmas Eve, 1492, in calm waters after a wild party with the Indians on board. There really was a full eclipse of the moon on April 2, 1493, the first day of Passover that year. 

Almost all the incidents involving historical characters actually happened. Melchior Maldonado and Dr. Chanca really visited
Guacanagarí’s village and took the
cacique
’s bandages off to see if he was faking his injury. Fray Pane really published his “collection of folk tales.” Hojeda really cut off a Taino’s ears for stealing a few articles of clothing.

Michele de Cuneo really committed the rape described in this book. He wrote his own account of it when he returned to Europe, and
twentieth-century historians still quoted it as an amusing anecdote.

The treatment of the Taino from 1493 on is fact, including the taking of 1,500 Taino
in February 1495. Five hundred were sent to the slave markets of Spain; two hundred died before the voyage ended and were thrown into the sea. Some of the Taino drank cassava juice, which contains cyanide, to avoid being enslaved or killed. The modern view that the Taino disappeared primarily because of disease from germs imported from Europe is at best a comfortable exaggeration. By 1496, at least one-third of all the Taino had been killed.

There is no record of the Taino names of any of the Indians who were captured and taken to Spain. Only the names of some of the
caciques
have survived. My fictional Taino names are based on words from the Dictionary of the Modern Taino Language at http://members.dandy.net/~orocobix/tedict.html, eg "gold flower," "butterfly." The hutia is a rodent that still exists in the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean islands, though many of its species are extinct and others threatened.

No two parties agree on almost anything connected with Columbus’s voyages, although contemporary accounts exist, including extracts from the journal Columbus kept on the first voyage. My main references were Samuel Eliot Morison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography
Admiral of the Ocean Sea
(1942) and Kirkpatrick Sale’s
The Conquest of Paradise
(1984), along with J.M. Cohen’s translation of the primary sources (which include parts of Columbus’s own letters and logbook, the biography written by his son, and other contemporary accounts), published as
Christopher Columbus: The Four
Voyages
(1969).

Morison and Sale disagree on almost everything, including whether the Caribe were cannibals. Morison was a man of his time, with an unselfconscious Eurocentric and patriarchal view of events and motives. He was also an experienced sailor. In 1939 and 1940, he followed the routes Columbus took on all four voyages in his own sailboat, so he speaks with authority about where Columbus went and the conditions on land and sea.   Sale is a radical historian who challenges the traditional view of the “Discovery” with his more contemporary perspective, made vivid by his blunt use of such words as “rape” and his charge that Columbus was responsible for “the death and enslavement of many Indians and the destruction of their culture,” ie genocide.

My online sources ranged from the helpful but not always reliable Wikipedia to scholarly articles and book excerpts. I found websites maintained by those who claim Taino ancestry and are trying to reconstruct the tribal language and culture. I found one scholarly article that made a case for
taino
not being the name of an ethnic group at all, but just a word, meaning “good,” that Columbus and his companions heard the people they met use. I discounted this. According to Phil Konstantin, author of
This Day in North American Indian History
, "Many tribal names mean 'People,' "'Us,' 'human beings,' or similar words."

Passages from Mary Elizabeth Perry’s
Crime and Society in Early Modern Seville
(1980), which I found on the website of the Library of Iberian Resources Online, were particularly helpful in orienting me to late fifteenth-century Seville. On the same site, Ruth Pike’s
Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century
(1972) provided information about the Moorish and African slaves and the manner in which they were sold in Seville. For information about the Roma, I relied on Rom-identified online sources, learning, among other things, that few generalizations can be made about this widely traveled and much oppressed people, who originated in the Punjab region of northern India.

My impression is that each authority, including Morison and Sale, decided what they would believe and what they would disregard. This is understandable, because even Columbus lied. On the first voyage, he kept two logs, one with what he believed were accurate figures of how far they had sailed each day, and the other with more optimistic figures, which he made up and shared with the crew to keep their spirits up. According to Morison, Columbus’s estimates were so faulty that in fact, the false figures were more accurate than those he believed to be the true ones. Following the historians’ example, I have adhered to those aspects of history that suited my story and adopted a flexible attitude toward the rest. Novelists make things up—it’s our job.

Note:
The Prologue of
Voyage of Strangers
first appeared in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
(January 2011)
as the short story "Navidad".

Acknowledgments

My thanks
and gratitude to Janet Hutchings, who brought Diego to life by publishing my stories of the first voyage, “The Green Cross” and “Navidad,” in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
; to my blog sisters Sharon Wildwind and Julia Buckley and historical novelists Kenneth Wishnia and Annette Meyers, the fine writers who critiqued the first draft; to D.P. Lyle, MD, who helped me make a fifteenth-century death from asthma credible; and, as always, to my husband Brian, whose love of history inspires me, even though (or maybe because) he gets his information from history books rather than novels.

About the Author

Elizabeth Zelvin is a New York City psychotherapist and author of the Bruce Kohler mystery series. Her short stories have been nominated three times for the Agatha Award and once for the Derringer Award for Best Short Story. "The Green Cross," her first story about Diego and Admiral Columbus, first appeared in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
and was an Agatha nominee. Learn more about Liz at
http://elizabethzelvin.com
.

Books and Stories by Elizabeth Zelvin

"The Green Cross"
(A Diego
Mendoza and Admiral Columbus Story)

Novels

Voyage of Strangers
(A Diego Mendoza and Admiral Columbus Novel)

Death Will Get You Sober
(A Bruce Kohler Mystery)

Death Will Help You Leave Him
(A Bruce Kohler Mystery)

Death Will Extend Your Vacation
(A Bruce Kohler Mystery)

E-Novella

Death Will Save Your Life
(A Bruce Kohler Mystery)

Short Stories

"Navidad" (A Diego Mendoza and Admiral Columbus Story)

Death Will Tank Your Fish & Other Stories

"
Death Will Tank Your Fish" (A Bruce Kohler Mystery)

"The Silkie"

"Dress to Die"

"The Saxon Hoard"

"Choices"

"Death Will Tie Your Kangaroo Down"
(A Bruce Kohler Mystery)

"Death Will Trim Your Tree"
(A Bruce Kohler Mystery)

"Death Will Clean Your Closet"
(A Bruce Kohler Mystery)

"The Emperor's Hoard"

"Shifting Is for the Goyim" (An Emerald Love Mystery)

"Girl Feeding Birds"

"A Breach of Trust"

"Death Will Fire Your Therapist" (forthcoming)

Music

Liz Zelvin: Outrageous Older Woman
(CD or mp3)