In the third decade of his De Orbe Novo (1516), Peter Martyr of Angleria records a cosmogony of the Taíno people of Hispaniola. His account ultimately derives from the earlier report of the friar Ramón Pané, whom Columbus had commissioned to live among the Taíno and document their beliefs. Peter Martyr’s version was largely forgotten until 1900, when the German ethnologist Heinrich Schurtz cited it in his Urgeschichte der Kultur. Schurtz’s discussion was excerpted without attribution by the French anthropologist Raoul Allier in 1912; Allier’s version, which silently corrected what he took to be errors in Schurtz’s reading, became the standard reference for nearly forty years. Pané notes that his informant, a baptized cacique whose Christian name he gives as Íñigo, told the story reluctantly and in fragments over several months, and that he himself had to assemble it into a coherent form. Whether certain elements reflect Taíno belief or the unconscious imposition of classical patterns by Pané, by Peter Martyr, or by both, has been debated at length.

The Taíno say that in the time before time there was a great chief whose name is lost, whom they called only Yaya, which Íñigo rendered into Castilian as el más grande, “the greatest.” Yaya had a son, and because he feared the son would one day overthrow him, he killed him. Following Taíno custom, he placed the body in a gourd and hung it from the rafters of his dwelling. One day, seized by grief (or by something for which Pané found no Castilian word) Yaya asked his wife to bring him the gourd. When he looked inside, he saw that his son’s bones had become fish, his hair sea-grass, and his blood a vast and endless sea. From that day the village never went hungry. When asked how a finite vessel could contain an infinite ocean, Íñigo replied that the gourd was also infinite, though it did not appear so. He added that the Taíno word for “gourd” shares a root with their words for “skull” and “womb.”

One day Yaya left to visit the plain of his ancestors, and in his absence four brothers came upon his house. These brothers had been born simultaneously, and their mother had died in childbirth. They found the gourd, looked upon the sea within it, and resolved to take it for themselves. But Yaya returned at that moment, and the brothers, startled, dropped the gourd. It broke against the ground, and the sea rushed out and filled the valleys and covered the plains, leaving only the mountain peaks standing above the waters.

The Franciscan Álvaro de Fuentes, writing in 1623, records a variant collected in the eastern mountains. In his account, the gourd did not break; instead, the sea dried up inside it, and the islands are what remained. De Fuentes credits the story to an unnamed Taíno elder. In the margin of the manuscript, a later hand has struck through this attribution and written simply: de Fuentes himself.