Historians have disagreed when and where Chief Caonabó died at sea, with the primary sources noted below conflicted and unclear.
Bartolomé de Las Casas believed he drowned right in the harbor at Isabela during a storm that sank the caravel in which he was chained immediately prior to departure. But the order of events depicted in Columbus’s letter to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of October 15, 1495—discovered in 1985, part of the “Libro Copiador”—undercuts Las Casas’s interpretation.
Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, and Andrés Bernáldez indicated or suggested Caonabó died further at sea. Ferdinand Columbus’s biography of his father implies Caonabó was alive when the Niña and India anchored at Guadeloupe (see prior post).
Following my read of Ferdinand Columbus, Columbus and Caonabó depicts Caonabó dying sometime after the Niña and India departed Guadeloupe on April 20, 1496, and before their arrival in Cádiz on June 11.
The map below—a portion of Juan de la Cosa’s World Map of 1500—has been superimposed with the route of the voyage from the harbor at Isabela to Cádiz (and so included in Columbus and Caonabó). Whatever interpretation, Caonabó died somewhere along the route.
