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Updated: May 20, 2025
All of the new-found people were of the same race, spoke the same language, and were equally ignorant of Cipango and Cathay and India, lands of rich cities and temples and marble bridges, and pearls and gold. Columbus had found only "a poor people," with no clothes and hardly a sign of a golden ornament.
Indeed, it is almost ludicrous to see, throughout, how Columbus is possessed with the notions borrowed from his reading of Marco Polo and other travellers. He asks for "his Cipango," as Herrera slily puts it; and the natives at once point out to him the direction where that is. They thought he meant Cibao, where afterwards the best mines of gold were found.
He was much delighted with the beauty of the woods and plains in this part of the island, insomuch that he was disposed to believe it must be Cipango, or Japan; and had he known that he was then near the rich mines of Cibao, he would have been still more confirmed in that opinion.
And it pleased the Lord Almighty, that in the year one thousand four hundred and ninety-two, I should discover the continent of the Indies and many islands, among them Hispaniola, which the Indians called Ayte, and the Monicongos, Cipango.
In an awakening age of enterprise, when chivalry had not passed away, nor the credulity of the Middle Ages, the reports of this Cipango inflamed the imagination of Europe, and to reach it became at once the desire and the problem of adventurers and merchants. But how could this El Dorado be reached?
One had seen from topmast the Santa Clara. Still we sailed by the south coast of Hispaniola. We knew now that it was not Cipango. But it was a great island, natheless, and one day might be as Cipango. Beata, Soana, Mona were the little islands that we found.
The island of Cipango was the first land he expected to make, and he intended to visit afterwards the province of Mangi, and to seek the Great Khan in his city of Cambalu, in the province of Cathay.
Behaim's globe, which was completed in the year 1492, represented the farthest point that geographical knowledge had reached previous to the discoveries of Columbus, and on it is shown the island of Cipango or Japan.
He spent some time looking for the gold, but could not find any; although he heard of the island of Cuba, which he took to be the veritable Cipango. He weighed anchor on October 24th and sailed south-west, encountering some bad weather on the way; but on Sunday the 28th he came up with the north coast of Cuba and entered the mouth of a river which is the modern Nuevitas.
A dozen of you have sailed among the Greek islands. There may be as many here as those. This is a small island and its folk simple. They are not Negroes, but the skin of the Indian is darker than ours, and that of Cipango and Cathay is yellow. As for clothing, in all warm lands the simpler folk wear little.
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