It would be a mistake, however, to believe the New World, as a whole, was an oasis of civilization in the European sense of the term. America had many faces, and to its conquerors it offered a variety of aspects. Christopher Columbus, when he went ashore on the island of San Salvador - one of the Bahamas - was greeted by the Lucayas, an agricultural and artistic people who typified the "noble savage" of popular legend. The Spaniards, on the other hand, were shortly to meet a completely different sort of native; the ferocious cannibals of the Caribbean. Such diversity is reflected in the history of the pre-Columbian New World, a history so complex that it has taken historians almost five centuries of study in order to disengage its main lines.