Hispaniola · the Caribbean
The Gourd That Held the Sea · A Story from Hispaniola
October 18, 2026 · 9 min · Audio in Spanish, English
In a house on Hispaniola, a gourd hanging from the roof keeps something unexpected. We hear how, according to a story Ramón Pané wrote down in the late 1490s, the sea was born, and how that story reached us from voice to voice and from language to language.
It also includes the version summarized by Peter Martyr, in which whales and great sea creatures come out of the gourd.
Chapters
Where this story comes from
- Ramón Pané, An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians (Spanish ed. 1932)
- Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, De Orbe Novo, Decade I, Book IX (trans. MacNutt)
- Sergio Botta, La ausencia de los dioses taínos (in Spanish)
- Ferdinand Columbus, Historie (Venice, 1571)
- L. Antonio Curet, A Hero’s Predicament (American Indian Magazine)
- Alex Palmer, This Culture, Once Believed Extinct, Is Flourishing (Smithsonian)
