Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  The Admiral himself in his letter to Luis de Santangel spoke of how “in thirty-three days I reached the Indies.” In the same letter, he wrote that he had “passed over to the Indies [sic] with the fleet which the most illustrious King and Queen our Lords gave me.”51 Why not India? Because, presumably, Columbus wanted “to use the vaguest, most inclusive term he could find to suggest the East, without doing violence to the public imagination at home”;52 and Fernando Colón, the clever son of the Admiral, thought that he used the phrase “the Indies” “because they constituted the eastern part of India, beyond the Ganges, to which no geographer had set bounds on the east.…”53

  Columbus continued to think in terms of the Indies, and no one challenged him. But, of course, he had discovered something different. Fernando and Isabel as well as the court knew what had happened. They soon began to act as Peter Martyr would have desired.

  8

  “They love their neighbors as themselves”

  The Tainos were “affectionate and without covetousness.…

  They love their neighbors as themselves.”

  Columbus’s comment on the indigenous inhabitants of La Española, 1492

  The two continents now known as “America” and the many islands off them “discovered” by Columbus were first settled by certain Asiatic peoples who, before 15000 B.C., reached what is today Alaska, over a tongue of ice that then linked it with Siberia.1 The sea did not flow through what we now think of as the Bering Strait until after the Ice Age, about 8000 B.C.

  Those Asiatics seem to have traveled in packs of about fifty or so, in a manner characteristic of men in the long age of hunting. Perhaps they went east first in pursuit of animals, such as mammoths, just as Columbus went west in search of gold and spices.

  In physical appearance, these people probably resembled Mongols or Tartars. Perhaps some looked like the Ainus of Japan. A woman whose skeleton was found near the city of Mexico in A.D. 2002 seemed, however, to have a long head, more European than Asiatic. Archeologists will devote much time thinking of the significance of this. At all events, many people of Asiatic origin slowly journeyed down the Americas, living as nomads.

  New men and women kept on coming from Asia until the opening of the Bering Strait made the journey more difficult. But that did not stop some continued migration; for example, the Eskimos did not reach their present habitat until about A.D. 100. Some of these wanderers may have reached Mexico about 10000 B.C.

  Several sedentary centers of culture were eventually established: in the valley of Mexico, in Yucatan, and in Peru. All these were made possible by the discovery of agriculture. That itself seems either to have followed or been necessitated by the extinction of the large mammals, the pursuit of which may have led to man’s coming to America in the first place.

  In Mexico, the age of agriculture began about 5000 B.C., no doubt when some family discovered that the planting of seeds could assure a regular production of crops. This first crop was certainly maize, which is indigenous to Mexico and has been the North American continent’s most important contribution to the world’s prosperity. Even in A.D. 2000 it was still providing over half of Mexico’s food. Maize soon began to be grown on terraces. Other plants of old Mexico were avocados, beans, and chili peppers, though wild fruit, fish, and game also played an important part in the diet. Pottery began to be made not long after 5000 B.C., and cotton was being used for cloth by about 3000 B.C.

  These events occurred much later than they did in the Old World (planting seeds for an anticipated harvest began in the Near East by about 10000 B.C. or earlier). Nor was this agricultural revolution in the Americas accompanied by the domestication of animals, as it was in Asia. The primitive American dog remained an object of game. Horses were indigenous to the Americas, but they no longer existed by 8000 B.C. There were in the Americas no beasts of burden except, to some limited extent, the llama in Peru, until the Europeans brought them.

  As in Asia, the coming of agriculture in the Americas led all the same to the intense concentration of human beings in towns. There emerged organized religions, complex political systems, and, at least in what is now called Mesoamerica (Central America and Mexico), commerce. Among the first objects of trade in what is now Mexico, obsidian, a fine, hard, black stone, was preeminent, which last played an exactly similar part in ancient Mesopotamia.

  When Columbus and his Spanish friends reached the Caribbean in September 1492, they found people called the Tainos in the Bahamas (known then as the Lucays); on the island that he called La Española, anglicized as Hispaniola, but which the indigenous people called Haiti or Qusiquey (which signified “than which nothing is larger”); in Cuba, which has retained its indigenous name; in Puerto Rico, which was then known as Boriquen; in Jamaica (a word signifying “land of wood and water”); and in the northern islands of the Lesser Antilles.

  These Tainos have been called the Arawaks, but that is an incorrect usage; people of that name did exist, but they lived in the Guianas and the island of Trinidad. The word “Taino” meant “good” in the language of the people concerned: several Tainos used it to Columbus to insist that they were not “bad” Caribs.2 But no one in the sixteenth century took much notice of these niceties.

  In the Lesser Antilles, to the south of Guadeloupe, the Spaniards, as we have seen, would encounter other, less sophisticated but fiercer people, the Caribs.

  All the peoples of the Caribbean came originally by canoe from the continent of South America along the chain of islands known as the Antilles, or the West Indies, via Trinidad and Tobago. The winds in the region favored travel from south to north and from east to west. The strong currents of the River Orinoco may have swept these people into the West Indies to begin with. Trade winds from the northeast also blow in that region most of the year. Taino myths, however, insisted that the inhabitants were spawned from certain magic caves on La Española.

  In the far west of Cuba, beyond Pinar del Río, the Spaniards would find a few people of another race, the Guanahatebeyes, sometimes called Ciboneys, of whom little is known except that they remained nomadic. They were savages who lived in caves, without settled villages or politics, and ate turtles, fish, and birds.3 They were probably early inhabitants pushed to the west by the Tainos when they came up from the Lesser Antilles, but they seem to have vanished early in the Spanish occupation. Now the Tainos have followed the Guanahatebeyes into the shades, though the blood of some of them (perhaps of both peoples) flows among both the immigrant black and white inhabitants of all the Caribbean islands, especially in certain Cuban pueblos near Bayamo and among certain aristocratic Cuban families (such as the Recios); and there are Caribs in reservations on what is now the island of Dominica. A few Taino words also linger on in Spanish and even in English (hammock, canoe, hurricane, savannah, cannibal, barbecue, and, of course, cacique).

  There was little contact between these Tainos and the civilizations on the mainland. The strait between Cuba and Yucatan is little more than 120 miles wide, but the currents there prevented regular communication, even though the Mayas in the latter territory had strong vessels capable of crossing seas. On the other hand, the islands of Tobago and Grenada are about sixty miles from the mainland to the south, and that journey is easily made in a canoe, while even the one hundred miles from St. Vincent to Guadeloupe presents no difficulty.

  The people of Mesoamerica were far more sophisticated than the Tainos, but in their legends and writings (as collected by the Spaniards after their conquest), there is almost nothing about traveling east, save that the ancient Mexica believed that one of their gods, Quetzalcoatl, vanished into the Mexican Gulf on a raft of serpents.

  The intercourse between Mesoamerica and the Caribbean islands was modest, but it did exist. On the Mexican island of Cozumel, Cortés’s Spaniards found a woman from Jamaica who had been shipwrecked there.4 The horizontal drum of the Mexica, the teponaztli, was known in Cuba when Columbus reached that island in 1492. Columbus himself claimed to have
found in Cuba a nose ring of worked silver; if so, the ring must have originated in Michoacan, the only nearby center of silver, in what is now Mexico.5 Then the first Spanish governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, wrote to the King of Spain in 1514 that he had been told by people on his island that Indians had come over the sea to the northwest of Cuba from land five or six days’ canoe journey distant.6 The people concerned could have come from Yucatan or the territory of the Mexica.7 In a few centuries, the Tainos, if left to themselves (a big assumption), might have mastered this strait and begun to trade with Yucatan. But then they might have been conquered by the Mexica as easily as they were by the Spaniards.

  Scholarship veers wildly about numbers of these first Americans, between thinking that there were in the islands “at contact” with Europeans either 8 million Tainos8 or only 200,000.9 The historian, agitator, saint, and preacher Bartolomé de las Casas extravagantly guessed that 3 million Indians died in La Española between 1494 and 1508; and in 1519 the Dominicans stated that Bartolomeo Columbus, the Admiral’s brother, estimated that there had been 1,100,000 Indians in La Española in 1494.10 The lower figures are definitely more likely. There is much documentation about the early days in Santo Domingo, but no anxiety was expressed about the decline of the population until 1511. Most people agree that by the year 1510 there were about 35,000 people on the island.11 The Spaniards were unsentimental, but they were not so insensitive that they would not have noticed a 99 percent decline between 1493, when the new settlers arrived, and that year. In 1499, Columbus was still thinking it possible to export 4,000 slaves a year from the island. So let us guess that there were between 40,000 and 100,000 in La Española and another 100,000 in Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Cuba, and elsewhere in the Caribbean islands.12

  These people usually lived in large villages of between one thousand and two thousand people. Columbus told the King and Queen of Spain that the Tainos were less civilized than the Japanese and Chinese. That was true, though the Admiral’s knowledge of the Orient was minimal. Each village in the Taino world was governed by a chief, or a cacique, to use their word. Their houses, always large enough for several families, were made of wood and thatch, with mud or earth floors, similar to the bohíos that survive in Cuba today, though now they are smaller. The houses were usually ranged irregularly around a central plaza. The chief’s house was larger than that of the others. The chiefs concerned themselves with storing surplus food in a special warehouse. These leaders, incidentally, might have been either male or female, a complete deviation from the usual among primitive peoples. Ancestors were always traced matrilineally, though there was polygamy.13 Thus the role of women in the ancient Caribbean was stronger than in most countries, sophisticated or the reverse.

  Inside these houses there were hammocks for sleeping made from cotton. The word hamaca for these things was to be general in South America (cotton was one of the plants to be found on both sides of the Atlantic before the voyages of Columbus). Baskets hung on the walls. Caciques would receive visitors seated on a well-carved wooden stool (duho), as they had received the conversos, Luis de la Torre and Rodríguez de Xerez, on the voyage of Columbus in 1492. Tainos were good woodworkers (and, indeed, workers in other materials, too—carved skulls were sometimes worn as pendants). A queen in La Española would send fourteen of these stools to the brother of Columbus in 1494, and he himself sent some ebony ones to Spain, to be admired by Peter Martyr. Chiefs would be carried in hammocks if they went anywhere by land. The villages were grouped into districts, and the districts into regions, over which an overcacique would “reign.” But he did not have the power of life and death over the people, which the village chief did—an engaging example of the principle of subsidiarity in reverse from which perhaps we have much to learn.

  The names of several regional monarchs in La Española have come down to us through Spanish chronicles. There was Caonabó, who reigned in the hilly country in the center of the island known as La Maguana to the Spaniards and Cibao to the Indians, the site of the supposed gold mines that Columbus sought indefatigably. That cacique was married to Anacoana, sister of Behechio, who ruled the west. Then there was Cayaca, an old queen who dominated the east. The last important monarch was Guarionex, in the large and fertile plain in the north of the island. Subsidiary to each of these were another seventy or eighty caciques, of whom Guacanagarí, who remained friendly with the Christians, was lord of the territory on which Navidad had been founded by Columbus and who, according to his own account, had tried to protect the settlers there. In consequence he was hated by the others, especially by Behechio and Caonabó, who had each stolen one of his wives. All these monarchs or leaders accepted the principle of heredity as if they had been Europeans.

  One of Columbus’s companions, a Jeronymite hermit, Father Ramón Pané, who accompanied him to La Española in 1493, wrote an account of the religion of these people. There were two supreme gods, or zemis: Yúcahu, god of salt water and of cassava; and Atabey, his mother, goddess of fresh water and fertility. There were other gods of lesser importance. All were often depicted by little statuettes of bone, wood, and pottery, and chiefs kept copies of these in special houses, which served as primitive temples, guarded by priests who, however, did not constitute a special class. Shamans or medicine men, whose task was to cure the sick, used the zemis in their ceremonies.

  Annual celebrations were held to honor the caciques, at which there would be dancing and drumming, and a procession through the town. Music and dancing always went together. Both male and female Tainos also played ball games (separately), using rubber balls, enacted in special courts with different regions or villages contesting together. Perhaps this was another mark of contact with the mainland, for in Mesoamerica, too, ball games were played in splendid walled courts.

  Taino society was divided into two classes, the lower one consisting of workers who seem to have had no rights. There were, however, no slaves—almost a unique qualification. Las Casas, though, who knew Cuba, would say that the Ciboneys were “a simple and gentle class of people who were held as if they were slaves.”14

  The Tainos had some knowledge of metallurgy, for they found gold in rivers and beat it into plates. They could not smelt metals, but they traded with peoples on the northern shore of South America, where that craft was known, in order to obtain a cheaper gold made with a copper alloy (guanin), which was worn as ornaments by chiefs. These Tainos made fire by using a wooden drill; they knew how to make pottery and could weave cotton into cloth.

  In general, the men went naked but sometimes wore cotton loincloths, while the women wore cotton skirts and, if unmarried, bands over their hair. Chiefs liked feather headdresses, sometimes elaborate, as was the case in other parts of the Americas before Columbus arrived.

  The Tainos had devised a successful form of agriculture, whose main characteristic was a mound of earth (conuco) three feet high and about nine feet round, on which they grew root crops. Their only tools were digging sticks. The main crop was cassava or yucca (casabe manioc), followed by the sweet potato (batata). From the former, a flour was made that was turned into an unleavened flat bread that could last a long time. Columbus described yucca as “their life.”15 He was right. The sweet potato was also eaten as a vegetable. Maize was grown, too, on a small scale, but the bread made from it did not last long.

  Other products included pineapples, peanuts, squashes, peppers, and beans, as well as tobacco. The latter was smoked, in the form of cigars, for pleasure, a habit swiftly picked up by the Spaniards. The Tainos had, however, no alcohol. They went fishing with nets. They ate iguana, parrots, and the now extinct rabbitlike rodent, the hutia, one of which, it will be recalled, was presented to Queen Isabel by Columbus. Turtles were held, especially in south Cuba, in shallow corrals. These would be described by Michele Cuneo, one of Columbus’s most observant Genoese companions in 1493, as “infinitely large, enormous.”16 There were no domestic animals, but small dogs that did not bark but were kept as pets an
d eaten. The Tainos used canoes and, for the purpose of trade, took to the sea much more than the modern inhabitants of the Caribbean. These canoes were hollowed out of ceiba trees with stone tools and were often well carved and ornamented. The Tainos had paddles but no sails. Some of these canoes could carry 150 people, Columbus thought.17 There seem to have been many variants of the Taino language. Thus those who lived in the northern part of La Española spoke a different language from those in the south.

  These Indians were not warlike. Columbus described them as “affectionate and without covetousness.” “They love their neighbors as themselves,” he remarked; “they have the sweetest speech in the world.” But even had it not been for the Spaniards, the Tainos were probably nearing the end of their time as an independent people, for they were constantly faced by Carib raiders from the east, who were busy stealing girls for brides. To fend off such attacks, the Tainos, having painted themselves red, placed effigies of their gods on their heads. They fought with sticks, bows and arrows, and spears propelled by throwing sticks. But though they were mild people, they suffered from endemic syphilis; ancient Taino stories include the tale of a legendary oarsman setting off for South Africa in search of a cure for it.18

  The main islands of the Tainos’ enemies, the Caribs, were Guadeloupe and Martinique. These people, of whom little is known, have given their name to the sea and the region unjustly. The Carib men and women apparently lived in segregated houses, as in an old-fashioned boarding school. They had the same crops as the Tainos, and they made a kind of wine from pineapples.19 They also bred ducks, which the Tainos did not. They raided all other islands to obtain wives, but like the Tainos, they principally traded with the north coast of South America. Their main weapon was the bow and arrow. They ate parts of the warriors whom they captured—not for pleasure but to acquire their valor. Their language was Arawak, that is, a South American tongue distinct from Taino. The Spaniards tended to call anyone who fought them, and did not accept Christianity, Caribs, but they thereby confused the issue, for the Caribs raided other islands but were not found settled north of Guadeloupe.