And there was Michele de Cuneo, with his Carib slave: “Having taken her into my cabin, she being naked according to their custom, I conceived a desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her fingernails in such manner that I wished I had never begun. But seeing that (to tell you the end of it all), I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard of screams that you would not have believed your ears. Finally we came to an agreement in such a manner that I can tell you that she seemed to have been brought up in a school of harlots.”
And the letter to the Marquis of Mantua, announcing that vessels of the King of Spain “discovered certain islands, among others a very large island toward the Orient which had very great rivers and terrible mountains and a most fertile country inhabited by handsome men and women, but they all go naked, except that some wear a leaf of cotton over their genitals . . .”
Melville, in TYPEE:
“. . . we found ourselves close in with the island the next morning, but as the bay we sought lay on its farther side, we were obliged to sail some distance along the shore, catching, as we proceeded, short glimpses of blooming valleys, deep glens, waterfalls, and waving groves, hidden here and there by projecting and rocky headlands, every moment opening to the view some new and startling scene of beauty.”
“As they drew nearer, and I watched the rising and sinking of their forms, and beheld the uplifted right arm bearing above the water the girdle of tapa, and their long dark hair trailing beside them as they swam, I almost fancied they could be nothing else than so many mermaids . . .”
(Columbus, First Voyage: “On the previous day, when the Admiral went to the Rio del Oro, he saw three mermaids, which rose well out of the sea . . .”)
TYPEE: “We were still some distance from the beach, and under slow headway, when we sailed right into the midst of these swimming nymphs, and they boarded us at every quarter; many seizing hold of the chainplates and springing into the chains; others . . . wreathing their slender forms about the ropes . . . All of them at length succeeded in getting up the ship’s side, where they clung dripping with the brine and glowing from the bath, their jet-black tresses streaming over their shoulders, and half-enveloping their otherwise naked forms. There they hung, sparkling with savage vivacity . . .”
“Our ship was now given up to every species of riot . . .”
But Columbus in Spain, fourteen eighty-five to ninety-two:
“All this delay did not go without great anguish and grief for Cristóbal Colón, for . . . he saw his life was flowing past wasted . . . and above all because he saw how distrusted his truth and person were, which for generous persons it is known to be as painful and detestable as death.”
Columbus waited.