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1492-12-12

Sailors recall the Taíno women Columbus had taken at Puerto de Mares

Haitian

… The Admiral had her clothed, and gave her glass beads and hawks’ bells and brass rings, and sent her back ashore very honorably, according to his custom: he sent some persons from the ship with her, and three of the Indians he carried with him, so that they might speak with those people. The sailors who went in the boat, when they were taking her ashore, told the Admiral that she no longer wanted to leave the ship, and wanted to stay with the other Indian women he had had taken at the puerto de Mares of the island of Juana de Cuba. All these Indians who came with that Indian woman came, so he says, in a canoa, which is their caravel, in which they sail from somewhere, and when they appeared at the entrance of the harbor and saw the ships, they turned back and left the canoe somewhere thereabouts, and went off on the way to their village. She showed the location of the village. This woman wore a little piece of gold in her nose, which was a sign that there was gold on that island.

Source  ·  p. p. 236 Bartolomé de Las Casas, Diario del primer viaje (Las Casas’s abstract of Columbus’s log), in Navarrete, Colección de los viages y descubrimientos, t. I (1825), p. p. 236