Latin America

Duke University Press

Chapter Title: The First Pirate of the Caribbean: Christopher Columbus Chapter Author(s): Michele de Cuneo

Book Title: The Ocean Reader Book Subtitle: History, Culture, Politics Book Editor(s): Eric Paul Roorda Published by: Duke University Press. (2020) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11smqbv.63

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide

range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and

facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

https://about.jstor.org/terms

Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Ocean Reader

This content downloaded from 169.235.64.254 on Thu, 25 Mar 2021 00:22:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

273

The First Pirate of the Caribbean:

Christopher Columbus

Michele de Cuneo

The first recorded pirates of the Caribbean were the “Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), and the crew of his second voyage to the New World. One of them was the Italian nobleman Michele de Cuneo, about whom little is known, who wrote this letter. It describes the pilfering, homicidal, rapacious be- havior of the approximately 1,200 Europeans who invaded the Caribbean islands in late 1493. That enterprise culminated with the shipment of some 500 enslaved native people back to Spain.

In the name of Jesus and of his glorious mother Mary from whom all good things come. The twenty-fifth of September 1493 we left Cádiz with seven- teen ships that were excellent in all ways, to wit, fifteen square-rigged and two lateen-rigged, and on the second of October we arrived at Grand Canary Island. We set sail again the next night, and on the fifth of the month we arrived at La Gomera, one of the islands called the Canaries. If I were to re- count to you the many celebrations, gun salutes, cannon salutes, and solemn oaths we carried out at that place, I would be too prolix; and this was done because our admiral had been in love in another time with the noblewoman of the said place. In that place we took all the refreshment we needed. The day of October tenth we made sail to continue our voyage on the proper course, but due to contrary winds, we nevertheless took three days sailing between the Canary Islands. The thirteenth of October, on Sunday, in the morning, we left behind the Island of Hierro, the last of the Canary Islands, and our direc- tion was to the west, with the southwest wind. The twenty-sixth of October, the eve of [the feast day of] Saints Simon and Jude, at approximately 4 P.M., a tempest was unleashed on the sea such that you would not believe it: we thought we had reached the end of our days; it lasted all night until dawn, and luckily the ships did not collide one into the other. In the end, it pleased God to keep us together, and the third of November, on Sunday, we saw land, that is to say, five unknown islands.

To the first our lord the admiral gave the name Santo Domenico, for it

This content downloaded from 169.235.64.254 on Thu, 25 Mar 2021 00:22:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

274 Michele de Cuneo

being Sunday when it was found; to the second, Santa María la Galante, in honor of his flagship, named María la Galante.1 These two islands were not large; nonetheless, the lord admiral marked them on his chart. . . .

That same day we left from there and came to a large island that was populated by cannibals, who ran into the mountains as soon as they saw us, abandoning their houses to us. We landed on this island and stayed about six days. .  .  . To this island the lord admiral gave the name Santa María de Guadalupe. . . .2

From this island of cannibals we made sail on the tenth of November, and the thirteenth of that month we arrived at another island of cannibals, lovely and very fertile, and we entered a very beautiful bay. When the cannibals saw us, they fled in the same way as on the other [island] to the mountain, and abandoned their houses to us, which we went into and took whatever we pleased. In these few days we found many islands we did not land on. . . . To these islands, because they were so close and clustered together, the said lord admiral gave the name the Eleven Thousand Virgins, and the above- mentioned that of Santa Cruz.3 One of those days while we were riding at anchor, we saw coming around a point, a “canoe,” that is to say, a boat, which is how they call it in their language, paddling, that seemed to be a well-armed brigantine, in which came three or four cannibal men with two cannibal women and two “Indians” made slaves; the cannibals there call slaves those who are their neighbors on those other islands, and they also had cut them a little from the genital member to the stomach, so that they were still ailing. And we having the captain’s launch on shore, upon seeing the approach of the canoe, leaping without delay into the boat we gave chase to the said ca- noe; when we approached it, the cannibals cut us up badly with their bows, in such a way that, if the shields had not been in place, we would have been ruined; I saw a galley sergeant who had a shield in his hand take an arrow in the chest that went in three inches deep, from which ill fortune he died a few days later. We took the said canoe with all of its men, and one cannibal was wounded by a spear, from which he seemed to be dead; and throwing him into the sea as dead, we saw him suddenly start to swim; so we caught him and hoisted him aboard the ship with a meat hook, where we cut off his head with a hatchet; the rest of the cannibals, along with the aforementioned slaves, we later sent to Spain. Being back on board, I took a very lovely can- nibal woman, whom the lord admiral gave to me, taking her to my cabin, she being nude as is their practice, I felt the desire to take my pleasure with her; and as I wanted to put my desire to work, she, resisting it, scratched me in such a way with her fingernails, that I wished I had not begun, but that being seen, and to tell you the outcome, I grabbed a belt and gave her a good beating, so that she let out unheard-of screams like you would not believe.

This content downloaded from 169.235.64.254 on Thu, 25 Mar 2021 00:22:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The First Pirate of the Caribbean 275

Finally, we came to an agreement in such a manner that I can say from what happened that she seemed to have been raised in a school of whores.

Translated by Eric Paul Roorda

Notes

1. The island of Marie Galante still bears that name; the other island was one of the nearby islands called the Saintes. 2. The island of Guadeloupe. Eleven men from the expedition went ashore “to rob” and got lost in the jungle. Columbus sent 200 men in four squads of fifty ashore to locate them, without success. The 200 returned from the search hungry and exhausted. The Europeans assumed the would-be thieves had been caught and eaten by the natives, whom they mis- took to be cannibals. If not for an old “cannibal woman” gesturing to them where to go to find their disoriented comrades, they would have been left behind. 3. These islands are today the Virgin Islands and St. Croix. The tale of the martyred St. Ur- sula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins is said to have taken place in the late fourth century, when all of them were supposedly shipwrecked and killed by Huns.

This content downloaded from 169.235.64.254 on Thu, 25 Mar 2021 00:22:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms