1492 from a Bicultural Perspective

As the Santa María and Niña continued east along the Taíno Haiti’s northern coast, word traveled among the locals that it was safe to meet the pale beings. On December 16, likely near modern Port-de-Paix, more than five hundred Taínos gathered at a beach to behold and...

Columbus brought the Santa María and Niña to anchor—in his view—in the greatest harbor he had yet entered (Baie de l’Acul, Haiti), perhaps the most populated area in Guacanagarí’s chiefdom of Marien. Columbus named the harbor Mar de Santo Tomás as the day was the...

Guacanagarí dispatched a canoe with nitaínos (Taíno noblemen) to invite Columbus to meet in Guacanagarí’s village. In the Taíno tradition described in Encounters Unforeseen, he sent as a gift a face mask inlaid with gold and woven to a tightly knit cotton girdle...

Guacanagarí’s noblemen offered to guide the Santa María and Niña to his village. But the wind was too weak to sail, and Columbus dispatched an embassy in the ship’s launch led by the expedition’s royal secretary to accompany the noblemen back to meet Guacanagarí....

With a light breeze permitting departure, Columbus’s two ships sailed from Baie de l’Acul to retrace the route his embassy had taken the prior day to visit Guacanagarí. The ships progressed slowly. Columbus turned to his Journal, taken by the Taínos’ friendliness,...

Around midnight on Christmas Eve, the Santa María foundered on a reef off Point Picolet. Columbus took various measures to try to save the ship, including sawing off a mast to lighten it, but the tide was receding and the Santa María impaled on the reef and began to...

At dawn on December 26, Guacanagarí rode by canoe to meet Columbus aboard the Niña. That afternoon and over the next week, the two men would have a series of conversations—dramatized in Encounters Unforeseen—resulting in understandings that Columbus would leave a...

By New Year’s Day, Columbus selected almost forty crewmen—roughly equivalent in number to the sunken Santa María’s crew—to be left behind when he departed for Spain. Selection wasn’t difficult because many volunteered, enticed by the gold pieces they had traded for...

Columbus came ashore to say farewell to Guacanagarí and instill both "friendship and fear," directing crewmen to conduct a mock battle between themselves using swords, crossbow, and artillery. They fired a lombard at some plank siding of the Santa María heaped at the...