It was solemnly affirmed by this official that if any should swerve from this belief, the miserable skeptic, if an officer, should be fined 10,000 maravedis; and if a sailor, he should receive a hundred lashes and have his tongue pulled out. Such were the scarcely heroic measures that Columbus thought it necessary to employ if he would dispel any belief that all these islands of the Indies were but an ocean archipelago after all, and that the width of the unknown void between Europe and Asia, which he was so confident he had traversed, was yet undetermined. To make Cuba a continent by affidavit was easy; to make it appear the identical kingdom of the Great Khan, he hoped would follow. During his first voyage, so far as he could make out an intelligible statement from what the natives indicated, he was of the opinion that Cuba was an island. It is to be feared that he had now reached a state of mind in which he did not dare to think it an island.
If we believe the _Historie_,--or some passages in it, at least,--written, as we know, after the geography of the New World was fairly understood, and if we accept the evidence of the copyist, Herrera, Columbus never really supposed he was in Asia. If this is true, he took marvelous pains to deceive others by appearing to be deceived himself, as this notarial exhibition and his solemn asseveration to the Pope in 1502 show. The writers just cited say that he simply juggled the world by giving the name India to these regions, as better suited to allure emigration. Such testimony, if accepted, establishes the fraudulent character of these notarial proceedings. It is fair to say, however, that he wrote to Peter Martyr, just after the return of the caravels to Isabella, expressing a confident belief in his having come near to the region of the Ganges; and divesting the testimony of all the jugglery with which others have invested it, there seems little doubt that in this belief, at least, Columbus was sincere.
[From Philoponus's _Nova Typis Transacta Navigatio_.]]
On the next day, Columbus, standing to the southeast, reached a large island, the present Isle of Pines, which he called Evangelista. In endeavoring to skirt it on the south, he was entangled once more in a way that made him abandon the hope of a directer passage to Española that way, and to resolve to follow the coast back as he had come. He lost ten days in these uncertain efforts, which, with his provisions rapidly diminishing, did not conduce to reassure his crew. On June 30, trying to follow the intricacies of the channels which had perplexed him before, the Admiral's ship got a severe thump on the bottom, which for a while threatened disaster. She was pulled through, however, by main force, and after a while was speeding east in clear water. They had now sailed beyond those marshy reaches of the coast, where they were cut off from intercourse with the shore, and hoped soon to find a harbor, where food and rest might restore the strength of the crew. Their daily allowance had been reduced to a pound of mouldy bread and a swallow or two of wine. It was the 7th of July when they anchored in an acceptable harbor. Here they landed, and interchanged the customary pledges of amity with a cacique who presented himself on the shore. Men having been sent to cut down some trees, a large cross was made, and erected in a grove, and on this spot, with a crowd of natives looking on, the Spaniard celebrated high mass. A venerable Indian, who watched all the ceremonials with close attention, divining their religious nature, made known to the Admiral, through the Lucayan interpreter, something of the sustaining belief of his own people, in words that were impressive. Columbus's confidence in the incapacity of the native mind for such high conceptions as this poor Indian manifested received a grateful shock when the old man, grave in his manner and unconscious in his dignity, pictured the opposite rewards of the good and bad in another world. Then turning to the Admiral, he reminded him that wrong upon the unoffending was no passport to the blessings of the future. The historian who tells us this story, and recounts how it impressed the Admiral, does not say that its warnings troubled him much in the times to come, when the unoffending were grievously wronged. Perhaps there was something of this forgetful spirit in the taking of a young Indian away from his friends, as the chroniclers say he did, in this very harbor.