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As well being a consummate seaman, Christopher Columbus was a keen amateur
naturalist. After crossing the vast expanse of the Atlantic, he found the
wonders of the New World fascinating, even if he did not know where he was.
Wherever he went he wrote about what he had seen in his ship’s log.

‘He wrote that he was sad that he didn’t have a scientist’s knowledge
to identify the plants and animals he found,’ said Marcos Iglesias, a Cuban
student of Columbus. Some of his discoveries remain enigmatic, because the
creatures he first set eyes on in 1492 disappeared soon afterwards.

What, for example, were the ‘dogs that do not bark’, which Columbus
came across in Cuba? The native people kept the dogs in herds and ate them.
They must have been there for a long time, because later archaeologists
have uncovered their remains. They were not South American bush dogs; they
bark, and no one ever heard the ‘dumb’ dogs make any noise other than growl,
says Iglesias. The chances of ever finding out what sort of species Columbus
had found are slim.

Columbus also ran into ‘sirens’, but was not impressed by their beauty.
‘I saw three sirens that came very high out of the sea,’ he wrote. ‘They
are not as beautiful as they are painted since in some ways they have a
face like a man.’ Columbus’s ‘sirens’ – manatees – almost became extinct,
but are now beginning to recover.

If he didn’t think much of manatees, Columbus was mightily impressed
by parrots, which formed ‘flocks that darken the Sun’. He was so taken with
them that his crew asked the Indians to acquire one for him. Columbus may
have been the first sailor to walk the streets of Seville with a parrot
on his shoulder.

The admiral was even more interested in plants, hoping to make a fortune
from spices. Thinking that he had reached China, Columbus was somewhat confused
not to find the plants he expected. But he was so keen to acquire botanical
‘gold’ that he found plenty of substitutes, says George Griffenhagen, of
the American Pharmaceutical Association.

A plant Columbus thought he recognised as an aloe, the chief ingredient
of a common purgative, was not an aloe but an agave. As it turned out, the
local people used its leaves as a laxative. And he wrote to Ferdinand and
Isabela that he had found the mastic tree, which furnishes a remedy for
diarrhoea. Columbus’s mastic was the terpentine tree, which provided a
cure for stomach ache.

Looking for black peppercorns, he had to make do with ‘pepper in shells
like beans, very strong but without the flavour of the Levant’. He had found
capsicums. When he wanted cloves, he got allspice.

Columbus also found what he thought were the coconuts described by Marco
Polo. But his ‘big nuts’ were cocoa nuts, an altogether more valuable find.
The local people used cocoa as currency and it later became prize plunder
for pirates.

Though Columbus was not where he wanted to be, he found many remedies
in the West Indies. But despite the differences in the flora and fauna he
encountered there, Columbus was never quite convinced that he hadn’t found
China.