The Night the Moon Went Out

They had been stranded on Jamaica for eight months. Columbus’s two ships, eaten through by shipworm, a sea creature that bores holes in timber, lay beached on the sand and served as huts. More than a hundred men were left, and among them was Gaspar, a thirteen-year-old ship’s boy who counted the days with a nail on a plank. Months earlier, Diego Méndez, the admiral’s secretary, had set off in a canoe to ask for help from Hispaniola. Nobody knew whether he had arrived.

Until recently, the Taíno people of the nearby village had brought them cassava bread, fish and fruit in exchange for small bells, glass beads and combs. But in January a group of sailors mutinied, roamed the island and took food by force. Since then the baskets had stopped coming. The chief said they had nothing left to give, and his eyes said something wearier: that they no longer trusted the strangers.