Sunday, 13 January 1493
I sent the men ashore to a beautiful beach to get some ajes to eat, and they found some men with bows and arrows. They traded for two bows and many arrows and begged one of the Indians to come to the ship to speak to me. He came, and he is much uglier in the face than any of the other Indians I have seen; it was all smeared with charcoal, although everywhere the Indians are accustomed to painting themselves different colors. He wears his hair very long, drawn back, and tied in a pony tail, then gathered in a net of parrot feathers. He was naked like all the others. I assume that he is one of the Caribes (Columbus has encountered the Ciguayos, according to Las Casas, further evidence that he is on the cultural frontier.) who eat men, and that the bay I saw yesterday separates the land and makes this an island by itself. When I asked him about the Caribes, he made signs to the east, nearby, which I saw yesterday before I entered this bay. The Indian told me that there is a great deal of gold in that land; he pointed to the poop of the caravel, which is very large, and indicated there are pieces as large as that. He called gold tuob and did not understand it as caoma, as it is called in the first part of Isla Espanola, nor as nozay (On 1 November Columbus used the word nuzay (nucay). This appears to be the same word for gold as nozay. Caoma was the most common word for gold, according to Las Casas.) as it is called in San Salvador and the other islands. On the Isla Espanola they call copper or a poor quality of gold tuob. This Indian told me of the island of Matatinino (The island of Martinique. The Island of Women was a myth, but it certainly fired up a lot of explorers, rivaling the legend of the Seven Cities and El Dorado.), farther to the east of Caribe, and said that it is inhabited only by women, and that on it is a great deal of tuob, which is gold or copper. He also told me about the island of Goanin (Goanin was not an island, but a gold/copper alloy, mostly the latter. Today the word is guanin.),where there is a lot of tuob. I have already been told about these islands by many persons in the past several days. In the islands I have passed the inhabitants greatly fear the Caribes, which in some places they call the Canibas, but in the Isla Espanola they are called Caribes. They must be very daring people since they go to all the islands and eat the people they are able to capture. I understood a few words, and in this way I learned other things; the Indians with me understood more, although the languages are different because of the great distances of these lands from each other. I ordered that the Indian be given something to eat, and I gave him pieces of green and red cloth and some small glass beads, which they like very much. I sent him ashore and told him to bring gold if he had it, which I think he had, based on some of the jewelry he wore.
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