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hawks. Before setting off on his voyage, he laid in a store of hawk’s bells. If the barbarous people he expected to find in the Indies should think civilization and Christianity an insufficient reward for submission to Spain, perhaps hawk’s bells would help.
    Columbus sailed from Palos de la Frontera on Friday the third of August, 1492, reached the Canary Islands six days later, and stayed there for a month to finish outfitting his ships. He left on September 6, and five weeks later, in about the place he expected, he found the Indies. What else could it be but the Indies? There on the shore were the naked people. With hawk’s bells and beads he made their acquaintance and found some of them wearing gold nose plugs. It all added up. He had found the Indies. And not only that. He had found a land over which he would have no difficulty in establishing Spanish dominion, for the people showed him an immediate veneration. He had been there only two days, coasting along the shores of the islands, when he was able to hear the natives crying in loud voices, “Come and see the men who have come from heaven; bring them food and drink.” If Columbus thought he was able to translate the language in two days’ time, it is not surprising that what he heard in it was what he wanted to hear or that what he saw was what he wanted to see—namely, the Indies, filled with people eager to submit to their new admiral and viceroy.
    Columbus made four voyages to America, during which he succeeded in exploring an astonishingly large area of the Caribbean and a part of the northern coast of South America. Everything he saw fitted his conception of the Indies. Cuba, he believed, was a peninsula on the mainland of China, a part of the province of Mangi; he named the easternmost point of it Cape Alpha et Omega and contemplated the awesome fact that the entire landmass of the world stretched continuously westward between him and Cape St. Vincent in Portugal, the western-most extension of Europe.
    From the moment of his first landfall, Columbus was looking for spices and gold. The reason he was so distraught at not recognizing trees and plants was that he thought that some of them must be valuable spices, which he ought to bring back with him in quantity. But gold was unquestionably more important than spices or even than pearls and precious stones, and Columbus had his heart set on finding gold. “Gold,” he rhapsodized, “is most excellent…and he who possesses it may do what he will in the world, and may so attain as to bring souls to paradise.” At every island the first thing he inquired about was gold, taking heart from every trace of it he found. And at Haiti he found enough to convince him that this was Ophir, the country to which Solomon and Jehosophat had sent for gold and silver. Since its lush vegetation reminded him of Castile, he renamed it Española, the Spanish island, which was later latinized as Hispaniola.
    Española appealed to Columbus from his first glimpse of it. From aboard ship it was possible to make out rich fields waving with grass. There were good harbors, lovely sand beaches, and “trees of a thousand kinds, all laden with fruit, which the admiral believed to be spices and nutmegs, but they were not ripe and he did not recognize them.” The people were shy and fled whenever the caravels approached the shore, but Columbus gave orders “that they should take some, treat them well and make them lose their fear, that some gain might be made, since, considering the beauty of the land, it could not be but that there was gain to be got.” And indeed there was. Although the amount of gold worn by the natives was even less than the amount of clothing, it gradually became apparent that there was gold to be had. One man possessed some that had been pounded into gold leaf. Another appeared with a gold belt. Some produced nuggets for the admiral. Española accordingly