by Marie Arana
If Spain had dreams of expansion, Portugal continued to thwart them. Even as Isabella and Ferdinand battled the Moors, struggling to unify the peninsula under their command, Afonso’s successor, King João, busily established a vigorous trade along Africa’s Gold Coast, explored the Congo, and launched the Atlantic slave trade, a monopoly Portugal would hold for more than a hundred years. Lisbon had become a center of exploration, a polestar for mapmakers. It was there that many starry-eyed sailors of that boisterous age came to launch their fortunes. Among them were two brothers from Genoa, sons of a humble weaver, who had abandoned their father’s stuffy little workshop for a life on the high seas. Bartholomew Columbus, the younger of the two, became a skilled mariner and maker of sea charts; Christopher, on the other hand, preferred wild, seafaring forays along the coast of Africa with Portuguese slave traders. When the famous Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and returned to Lisbon with promises of gold, Christopher Columbus was there to hear him. Columbus had been immersed in the work of plotting out trade routes, analyzing maps, poring over astronomical charts, pondering cosmographical theories, worrying his copy of Imago Mundi until it was frayed, stained, overrun by notes in his trademark jittery hand.
By then, Columbus’s petition to Portugal’s King Joao for three caravels had been roundly rejected. Columbus was convinced that a trade route to India—the same route that Bartolomeu Dias had been seeking to the East—could be found by sailing west, and so he had written to Paolo Toscanelli, a famous astronomer in Florence, to inquire his opinion. Columbus was especially interested in the route west of the Canary Islands, bypassing Portuguese territory altogether. The Florentine scholar did not hesitate. He referred Columbus to a letter and a map he had sent many years before to a Lisbon priest, who, in turn, had shared it with King Afonso. Sail due west from Lisbon, the letter said, and in time you will find yourself in the city of Kwang Chow. Before you reach it, you will come upon the land of Cipango (Japan). The map placed the hulking island of Cipango squarely in the far reaches of the Atlantic, exactly where the Americas would be found. “This island is rich in gold, pearls, and gems,” the astronomer added provocatively, echoing the fervor of the age. “Its temples and palaces are roofed with solid gold.”
CRUCERO
Peru, 1988
Gold and slaves. The first corrupts all it touches. The second is corrupt in itself.
—Simón Bolívar, 1815
Five centuries later, Leonor Gonzáles’s future husband, Juan Ochochoque, too, was feeling the allure of gold, the urge to leave an old world behind, climb the dirt trails to higher ground, chase metal fortunes. For all his thirty-three years, he didn’t have much to show for his life’s work: two teenage daughters, a woman who had shamed him with another man, a score of unsettled debts. He had abandoned the work he had inherited from his father, tending a fragile herd of alpaca against the glacial cold, shearing and selling the wool, butchering the older ones for meat. He had left behind the arduous work of digging trenches as a lowly conscript in the Peruvian army. The Maoist guerrilla forces of the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, were cutting a murderous path through the Peruvian highlands, burning government property, hanging dogs from lampposts, assassinating village leaders, and displacing hundreds of thousands. The army was no longer building much; it was struggling to fight back. Campesinos, country people like him with no combat training, were fleeing to safety in the big cities or higher still, into the punishing altitudes of the Andes.
Even as his woman took off for Puno with the other man, Juan told his teenage daughters that he would come for them when his fortunes improved. One frigid morning, he bought a pickax with the little money he had, left the little village of Crucero, and trudged up-mountain for four days through the rough volcanic rock that flanks the Rio Carabaya. On the fifth day, he arrived in Ananea, a humming little marketplace, where a soupmonger offered him a bowl of broth and a place to sleep in return for scrubbing down his stall and scouring out the pots. On the next day, Juan reached La Rinconada—a cluster of glistening tin roofs against a wide expanse of snow. Just under the blinding white, he could barely make out the black holes. There, tapping into the veins of the mountain known as Sleeping Beauty, hundreds of laborers worked the icy mines that had been founded by Incas, abandoned by Spaniards, and reinvigorated by those fleeing the terrorist peril. He promised one of the friendlier men a portion of his wages for a spot on the dirt floor of his hut.
So it was that Juan Ochochoque became a peon in the mines of La Rinconada. He was not allowed to mine at first, relegated to the business of sweeping out the shaft, hauling out stones. But eventually he was admitted to the circle of barreteros, prospectors who set out with an iron rod from time to time to determine where a likely vein might be. Juan never mastered the rod, but with his affable nature and forthright manner, he rose to warrant the trust necessary to enter a mine with men whose very lives depended on one another. Mining cachorreo, the age-old colonial system in which a man split rock for thirty days for no pay until—on the thirty-first—he was allowed to carry out one backload for himself, he saved enough to become self-sufficient. It was at about that time that he came upon the discovery that would change his life forever.
Her name was Leonor Gonzáles, a young woman with two small daughters. She was small, spirited, with bright eyes and glossy black braids. She bustled here and there, climbing up the cliffs with the pallaqueras—the rock spill scavengers—when she could. Either that or sell this and that on the roadside. A bite of food. A bit of knitting. There seemed to be no men in her life, save her old, wizened father and a wastrel uncle. They said that the man who had given her children had gone off to the mines one morning and never come back. The demons within had claimed him.
THE TATTERED DREAMER
Spain, 1492
As centuries unfold, the Ocean, loosening its bonds, will reveal an enormous land, a new world . . . and Thule will no longer be the outer rim of the Universe.
—Seneca (a Spaniard), AD first century
As 1482 slipped into 1483 and Portuguese trade on the coast of Africa flourished, Columbus cut a strange, outlandish figure, hurrying through Lisbon in a frayed coat, with his prematurely white hair askew and Toscanelli’s map firmly in hand. But if he was little interested in personal riches, he was well aware that money was an asset without which nothing would get “done aright.” Gold was what expanding kingdoms fed on; silver was the spark that fired global exploration. He sailed out of Lisbon secretly in 1484, penniless, widowed, with a young son to feed and staggering debts to honor, but he left with formidable assets of his own: a passionate conviction and the verbal capacity to communicate it. Making his way from the port at Palos to Seville and then Córdoba, he paid countless visits to the royal household, prattling on to anyone willing to listen about pavilions roofed in gold and the great khans of Cipango. When at last he was able to convince Queen Isabella to sponsor an expedition beyond the latitudes of the Unknown—beyond the nec plus ultra of antiquity—he had learned that more than continuing the Holy Crusade, perhaps even more than the prospect of converting heathen souls to Jesus, riches were what his king and queen were after. Ferdinand and Isabella had grown weary of dealing with intermediaries; they needed to find a direct route to the treasure troves of the Indies. The financial pressures were ever more onerous. The time to act was now.
On April 17, 1492, Isabella, the redheaded queen with the cool green gaze, finally persuaded her husband that they should reach beyond the confines of their known world and make a bid for distant conquests. They signed the Capitulations of Santa Fe, a document that invested Columbus, for all perpetuity, with the titles of “Admiral of the Ocean Seas” and “Viceroy of the Indies,” which included all islands and continents he would discover. There was everything to gain, little to lose. They had invested no troops, no management oversight, few funds. “Columbus’s enterprise,” an enthusiastic investor gushed, “will add many carats to the stature
and renown of Your magnificent Highnesses!”
Columbus undertook the enterprise knowing that carats were precisely what he had to secure. “Gold is a wonderful thing!” he wrote from the shores of the New World, suggesting that his sailors were virtually sweeping it from the sand. “From gold springs all treasure! With gold one can achieve anything on this earth, even pass through the very gates of Heaven!” From his very first landing on a small island in the Bahamas, Columbus was as interested in that dazzling substance as he was in the new race of man before him. He wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella of the friendly youths who swarmed down to greet his ships: “a handsome people: with hair not curly, but straight and thick, like the mane of a horse.” They were naked, guileless, seemingly “poor in everything.” But soon, he was adding, “I was alert to the task of ascertaining whether or not they had gold, and I could see that some of them had bits of it hanging from their noses. Signaling with their hands, they told me that, going south and steering round the island, I would find a king who had vast stores of the stuff.” The gold was so plentiful in that other land, he was told, that people drank from goblets of gold. There are no fewer than one hundred allusions to gold and silver in Columbus’s reports to his king and queen during the three months between October 12, 1492, and January 12, 1493. In truth, he was finding precious little of it, but in his accounts, gold is omnipresent, seductive, glittering just out of reach. The indigenous Americans, quick to see what was on the admiral’s mind, goaded him: a little farther, just behind that island—there, toward the horizon—he would find men with more riches and women more beautiful to behold. But there was something else, something apart from the gold that piqued Columbus’s interest: a sense that he might do whatever he wanted with these people. “They have no experience with arms,” he wrote his king and queen, “and they are suitable to take orders and be made to work, sow, and do anything else that may be needed, and build towns and be taught to wear clothes and adopt our customs.”
When Columbus sailed west, he had been a medieval man from a medieval world, surrounded by medieval notions about Cyclops, pygmies, Amazons, dog-faced natives, antipodeans who walk on their heads and think with their feet—about dark-skinned, giant-eared races who inhabit the lands where gold and precious gems grow. When he set foot on American soil, however, he did more than enter a new world: he stepped into a new age, and that step would have lasting consequences. The Age of Discovery (1450 to 1550) would clarify much about this world; it would also ignite cultural confrontations and fusions quite unlike any that had gone before. Cutting a path through that entirely original universe, Columbus could only work with what he knew. He had landed, as far as he understood from Toscanelli’s map, on an island somewhere off the coast of India. Having studied Marco Polo’s travel journals, he expected to find those islands replete with spice fields and gold mines there for the taking. If he could catch the right wind, he would come upon the hulking island of Cipango and eventually the mainland of Cathay, where Kublai Khan’s palaces shone in the distance, gems were traded for pepper, and gold was as plentiful as brick.
This was the vision Columbus held in his head, and the one he shared with his king and queen even as he navigated far seas and wrote to them about sights no European had ever witnessed. Much later, during his fourth voyage, when he already had outposts in Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Panama, and was shipping gold and slaves to Seville, he remained convinced he was on the verge of finding Japan, stumbling into a grand bonanza. As he skimmed the coast of what is now Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, marveling at the gold his sailors raked from the riverbeds and the pearls they swept up “like chaff,” he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella that he was nearing the River Ganges. A scant year before, he had written to Pope Alexander: “I have secured one thousand four hundred islands as well as three hundred thirty three leagues of the continent of Asia for my lords, the King and Queen. Here there are mines of all manner of metal, but especially gold and copper. There is brazilwood, sandalwood, aloes. . . . This island is Tarsus, Scythia, Ophir, Ophaz and Cipango. We call it Hispaniola.”
It was not immediately apparent that Columbus’s New World had been born of a geographical error. The Old World, flabbergasted by the revelations, struggled to understand. As news of his discoveries spread through Europe—as he returned in April 1493, making a deliberate point to land first in Portugal, which had declined to sponsor him, and then sail triumphantly to the Spanish port of Palos—Europeans flocked to witness the “New World wonders.” Columbus took his exotic caravan overland, making his way in a breathtaking procession from Seville to Barcelona, where King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella awaited. His sailors paraded past an exuberant public, holding aloft their colorful, fantastical trophies—pineapple, chili, corn, squash, avocado, guava, papaya—and the people marveled. Jewel-bright macaws, monstrous and lumbering iguanas—animals never seen before in Europe—were ferried past in crates. Six handsome Indians in loincloths led the parade, sporting turquoise, gold masks, and bangles. There were baskets filled with gold mirrors, silver hoops, belts wrought from riotously colored feathers, barrels of gold nuggets. It was a grand show—a pars pro toto—to persuade Spain that Columbus’s error had actually been a resounding success; that he would now fulfill all the financial expectations of his king and queen. Perhaps, if the show was persuasive enough, it would buy him the time to reach the real India and find true wealth. He needn’t have worried. When all was said and done, the Catholic monarchs fell to their knees and thanked God for the bounty.
The year 1492 had turned out to be a boom year for Ferdinand and Isabella. Truly, the heavens had smiled on them. They had done the Church’s bidding, purged their fledgling empire of Muslims and Jews. They had defended themselves against a belligerent neighbor. They had consolidated Spain. And now they were opening a new frontier in the Indies, where boundless riches awaited. Pope Alexander, Aragonese by birth and a friend of King Ferdinand’s, was one of the first to receive a gift of gold from Columbus. With it came Isabella’s plea to help protect Spain’s claims to the newly discovered lands. She implored the pope to support them against Portugal’s King João, who, having learned of Columbus’s discoveries firsthand, immediately dispatched a hostile letter, claiming all territories—by virtue of earlier treaties—for the Portuguese Crown. In Rome, the pontiff grandly spread out a map of the hemisphere and drew a straight line from pole to pole, assigning everything west of it to Ferdinand and Isabella; everything east, to King Joao. The Americas, except for the hump that is now Brazil, would be Spanish. Africa would be Portuguese.
An arduous voyage through tempest and hazard had finally brought Columbus the glory he craved. No longer the threadbare dreamer of Lisbon, he was a hero to his royals, an inspiration to all Europe. In May, as his six Indian chattel were baptized with great fanfare in Barcelona, Columbus was granted the title of captain general of the Indies. Eventually he was given his own coat of arms, more ships and munitions, equipment to facilitate metal mining, and the confidence that, through the Capitulations of Santa Fe, his binding agreement with the king and queen, he would claim a percentage of all discoveries. And so dreams of gold and silver proliferated throughout the Old World. Sailors, swordsmen, gentlemen, miners, peasants—some employed by the Crown, others escaping dubious pasts—thronged to the Spanish port of Cádiz to enlist in the admiral’s glittering enterprise. Isabella’s well-known love for jewelry, amplified now by these prospects, took on new meaning when Ferdinand hectored the outbound crews: “Get gold! Humanly, if possible. But attain it, whatever the cost.”
The cost would be high. Columbus’s next three voyages were fraught with peril and brought modest rewards. In 1495, in desperation, he issued an infamous edict, ordering all male Arawak Indians in Hispaniola over the age of thirteen to produce large hawk’s bells of gold every three months; if they did not, their hands would be hacked off. And yet everywhere he ventured—whether he was marauding villages, establishing strongholds, or scouring the coasts for any g
lint of treasure—there was little of the stuff Ferdinand had called for. Frustrated, Columbus turned to other opportunities. He began to engage spiritedly in the slave trade, a commerce he knew well from his exploits in Africa. By his second voyage, he had captured 1,500 Taíno men, women, and children, and herded the 550 best specimens to the slave markets of Seville. By the end of that trade, as many as five million souls would be trapped and sent elsewhere. “Slaves are the primary source of income for the admiral,” the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas later complained, fanning the flames of Columbus’s ruin.
Blamed for appalling cruelties—the burning and destruction of entire villages, the abduction of slaves, the staggering losses in population—Columbus was taken prisoner by the King’s administrator, shackled, and shipped back to Spain. The reasons given were countless, among them the simple fact that he had promised so much and delivered so little. His accusers, streaming back to tierra madre from Hispaniola, were legion, and although the very Catholic Isabella was not inclined to believe them, the more pragmatic Ferdinand lent them an ear. Hadn’t Columbus’s dreams been a drain on the Crown’s treasury? they asked. Didn’t his meager booty refute all the extravagant pictures he had painted—the glorious, glittering mountains of metal that promised to rival King Solomon’s ancient mines? Worst of all, hadn’t a great fraud been perpetrated on Spain? Hadn’t the prim, Catholic, teetotaling queen been led to think that she was spreading the faith, when, in fact, her reign was disseminating nothing so much as greed, death, and destruction? The implication was clear: Columbus had either deceived his king and queen with gross exaggerations, or he had wronged them by wicked malfeasance. It was the first time—to be followed by uncountable others—that Europe would be accused of abusing its colonial powers. And indeed, when the Crown’s emissary arrived in Hispaniola to investigate Columbus’s crimes, he was greeted by the sight of seven corpses swinging from the gallows—luckless Spaniards who had run afoul of El Capitán’s orders.