Dogs that do not bark

From Christopher Columbus and the mystery of the dumb dogs by Stephanie Pain.

On Christopher Columbus and the mysteries and disorientations of discovery when what you have discovered is not what you thought you had discovered. A mystery:

‘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.

Disorientation:

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.