Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  We henceforth see the poor Admiral trying vainly to cope with the problems of administration on land for which he had no gift, and no doubt longing to return to the sea, which he saw as his own.

  11

  “Mainland, no island”

  I held this land to be mainland, no island.

  Columbus sailing along the coast of Cuba, 14941

  On March 12, 1494, Columbus set off with five hundred men to explore what he thought of as “the gold country” of La Española,2 traveling to the Puerto de Cibao (near San José de las Matas) and Santo Tomás, on the River Jámico. All the able-bodied men not needed to guard the ships that remained of the fleet rode or walked with Columbus. Conditions were hard, but “the desire for gold kept them strong and vigorous.”3 The Indians acted as beasts of burden, helping to carry baggage and arms, and assisting those who could not swim across two rivers.

  The royal controller, Bernal Díaz de Pisa, had by now quarreled with Columbus, apparently not realizing that “gold may never be had without the sacrifice of time, toil, and privations.”4 Seizing two ships, he tried to return to Spain as soon as Columbus had left for the interior, on March 12. But he never left port and was imprisoned by Columbus’s brother Diego, with a few “accomplices,” as a traitor.5

  On his inland journey, Columbus took with him not only his team of foot soldiers but also what he called “the necessary horsemen,” which may have meant that he agreed to take some of the knights: and henceforth he grudgingly allowed their horses the fodder that they needed.6

  Columbus reached what he hoped would turn out to be the magically golden Cibao after four days, on March 16; he found it stony and unwelcoming, though bathed by streams. Having discovered some signs of gold, he decided to establish a fort there at a place that he named San Tomás.7 Pedro de Margarit, the Catalan, and Fray Boil, representatives of both Crown and Church, were left behind as the local commanders, for once in agreement. Cuneo reported that on this journey some traitors made themselves known; but they betrayed one another and the Admiral had no difficulty in coping with them, whipping some, cutting off the ears of a few and the noses of others, so that, Cuneo wrote, “one felt very sorry for them.”8 Columbus had one Aragonese, Gaspar Ferriz, hanged. Presumably Ferriz and his friends had sought to overthrow Columbus by force.

  The Admiral then returned to Isabela, arriving there on March 29. Two days later, on April 1, a messenger reached him from Margarit saying that “the Indians of the neighborhood had fled” and that King Caonabó seemed to be preparing to attack the fortress. So, the following day, Columbus sent back to San Tomás seventy men with ammunition.9 He seems to have used this occasion as an excuse to rid himself of more of those knights who were ready to challenge him. He also ordered Margarit to capture the cacique Caonabó, whom he now supposed to have been the author of the death of the Spaniards at Navidad. The seizure was to be effected by arranging that one of Margarit’s men, Contreras, should treat him well until he could be captured. Margarit refused to be a party to this plan, not on moral grounds, it seems, but because he thought that it would damage the overall Spanish standing with the Indians. So, after another week, Columbus sent, on April 9, further reinforcement to San Tomás, consisting of all the healthy Castilians who remained, except for officials and artisans. These totaled about 360 men and the remaining 14 knights. The commander would be the handsome Alonso de Hojeda, with Luis de Arriaga as his deputy.

  This was a demotion for Margarit, who, however, was asked to lead an expedition around the island. That made him the man responsible for supplying food for about five hundred men, causing him to seem, as a modern historian put the matter, “the captain of hunger.”10 Margarit was to “reconnoiter the provinces and people.” He was “to take good care of the Indians and ensure that no evil or hurt was done them, nor should they be captured against their will. But, rather, they should be honored and kept in safety so that they do not rebel.” But if they stole anything, they should have their ears and noses cut off “because they are parts whose loss one could not disguise.”11 Margarit was told by Columbus to ensure that “Spanish justice was much feared.”12 If the Spaniards could not buy food, it should be seized “as honestly as possible.”

  Alonso de Hojeda, meanwhile, had few doubts about moral issues, and when he reached the neighborhood of San Tomás, he tricked Caonabó and two or three of his relations into capture. He sent them back, bound, to Columbus at Isabela.13 One of these princes was tied up in the square of the new town, in front of everyone, and had his ears cut off. The Admiral was determined to send Caonabó back to Spain as a trophy, but the ship on which he was stowed sank offshore while embarking slaves. Caonabó, the prize, was drowned.14 By this time the Admiral felt certain that the shipment of Indians to Spain was necessary as a means of providing some kind of wealth for the Crown, even though they constituted the very labor force on which he had proposed to rely. The right of the Christians to behave in this way derived from Columbus’s belief, shared by the priests, that, not having received baptism, all Indians were in a state of sin.15

  The consequences were predictable. The natives ceased to collaborate with the Europeans. They stopped supplying fish, just when the flour that had been brought from Spain came to an end, as had other supplies. There were no good new European crops ripening as yet—even though the Admiral’s son Fernando would report that chickpeas, wheat, sugarcane, melons, cucumbers, and grapes were all beginning to be grown near Isabela. In the short term, rationing had to be introduced. The climate seemed far from perfect for European crops, and sickness was frequent. Gold was not being found at all regularly.

  Columbus refused to confront the crisis. Thinking of himself first and foremost as “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” and a sailor-explorer, he decided to leave to others his role as “governor” and “viceroy”; and on April 24 he set out on a journey of discovery west to the lands, such as Cuba, on which he had touched so briefly on his first voyage.

  The Admiral left his new colony in the hands of his brother Diego and Father Boil, who would preside over a council on which would also serve Pedro Fernández Coronel, the alguacil mayor; Alonso Sánchez Carvajal, Columbus’s friend from Baeza; and a onetime member of the royal household, Juan de Luján.16 Columbus explained, before leaving, that food would soon be coming from Spain, but he did not wait to see if that prediction had validity. This seemed an act of desertion to those he left behind. After all, he only allowed them two ships, for the remainder of the fleet had returned with Antonio de Torres or had sunk with Caonabó. Columbus’s authority never recovered.

  Before setting off, the Admiral wrote to the King and Queen in Spain. This letter was full of interesting exaggerations: the River Yaquí was described as being more broad than the Ebro, the province of Cibao was said to be larger than Andalusia, and in this Cibao there was more gold than anywhere else in the world. Once again he said that nothing was preventing him from converting the Indians to Christianity save that he did not know how to preach in their language. (Actually, “Diego Colón,” an Indian whom he had captured on the first voyage, by now knew the elements of Castilian, so at least the Admiral had an interpreter into Taino.)

  This letter of Columbus could not be immediately sent back to Spain. No ship was ready to sail. So for the moment the “memorial” of Columbus to the monarchs taken back by Torres was the basis for the latest that the court had about the new Indies.

  Torres with his twelve ships had taken thirty-five days to reach Cadiz, arriving on March 7, 1494.17 Some of those who returned with him brought bad news: so many of Columbus’s claims were laughably exaggerated, there was a shortage of food at Isabela, Columbus had unjustly jailed the controller Bernal Díaz de Pisa, and the system of tribute imposed on the Indians was not working. There was little gold and no mines.

  The monarchs and the court were at this time at Medina del Campo, staying in the brick castle of La Mota, built some sixty years before, the courtiers being billeted in the grand houses of th
e town whose owners had been made wealthy by the wool trade to Flanders. One belonged to the family of the novelist Garcí Rodríguez de Montalvo, author (or renewer) of Amadís de Gaula, whom we must presume to have been even then at work on that astonishing masterpiece, and another to the family of the future chronicler of the conquest of Mexico, Díaz del Castillo. The Queen had always liked Medina del Campo; it was no distance from her birthplace, Madrigal de las Altas Torres, and was close to Arévalo, where she had been brought up.18

  The two rulers of Spain had many preoccupations at that time apart from any concern that they might have had about the Indies. They were being urged by the Inquisitor-General, the Dominican Fray Tomás de Torquemada, to make over the site of the old Jewish cemetery in Ávila for a new convent, to be named for San Tomás.19 Several autos-de-fe were held and other strange punishments given to those who confessed their theological guilt.20 From a judgment made that month, the Pope confirmed that his view of the Inquisition was disagreeably close to that of the Queen.21

  Torres, clever though he was, brought only a little more than 11 million maravedís’ worth of gold from Columbus, as well as some inferior spices and urgent requests for supplies.22 Fernando was disappointed, for he needed money in Europe and he had been dreaming of using Indian gold for Italian purposes. When, in April, Torres arrived at court, Peter Martyr and a courtier from Seville, Melchor Maldonado, talked with him. There also came Peralonso Niño, the pilot, and Ginés de Corvalán, who had been with Hojeda on his expedition into the interior of La Española in search of gold. All rather surprisingly spoke positively about the Admiral, for Martyr, impressed, wrote to an Italian friend, Pomponio Leto, about the quantity of gold to be found: “a great abundance.”23 The Crown also welcomed the second son of the Admiral, Fernando, as a page to the Infante Juan as well as his elder brother Diego.24

  Ten days later, on April 13, the monarchs wrote to Columbus encouragingly and ordered the Admiral’s brother Bartolomeo Colón to prepare to go to the Indies with three caravels of provisions. Bartolomeo was at last back from his frustrating journeys to France and England, and was anxious to join his elder brother. Columbus’s Florentine friend Berardi advanced Bartolomeo what he needed for his voyage.25

  Bartolomeo set off, loaded on board a hundred head of sheep in Gomera, and was on his way across the Atlantic by May.26 In the meantime, one of the royal secretaries, Fernando Álvarez, on behalf of the Crown, replied to every chapter of the “memorial” sent by Columbus through Torres. In doing so, he passed on one or two rather demanding requests to Fonseca, who was still the royal official in charge of the Indies—for example, that “in respect of the meat to be sent to the Admiral, please make sure that it is of good quality.”27

  A more pressing consideration for the monarchs in the early summer of 1494, however, was their negotiation with Portugal about their joint rights in the New World. Several Portuguese courtiers reached Medina del Campo in April. One of them was Ruy de Sousa of Sagres, a confidant of King João and an experienced sailor and diplomat, who had not only been ambassador to England but had commanded a fleet that had sailed to the Congo. It had been he who in 1475 had taken to Queen Isabel the declaration of war in the name of King Afonso V. With him went also his son Pedro, chief constable of Portugal; and Aires de Almeida, also an ex-ambassador to England. These three men were all members of the Portuguese royal council.

  Four “experts” accompanied them: Duarte Pacheco, a famous sailor and cartographer, who had been to Guinea and would, in his book Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis (to appear ten years later), make a major contribution to the geography of Africa; Rui de Leme, who had been brought up in Madeira and whose father, Antonio de Leme, had been one of those said to have discussed the Atlantic with Columbus in the 1470s; João Soares de Siqueira; and Estaváo Vaz, a secretary to João II who had endeared himself to the Spanish monarchs by taking a cargo of gunpowder to assist them in the siege of Malaga. Later he had been in Castile as an ambassador charged to tidy up the affairs of the Duke of Braganza after the latter’s execution in Lisbon as a traitor. All knew the eastern Atlantic well.

  Castile, on the other hand, was represented by grandees whose knowledge of the Atlantic was sparse. There was thus Enrique Enríquez, mayor domo of the court, uncle of the King, and, despite his title of Admiral of Castile, an aristocrat without knowledge of any sea. His presence is only explicable because he was the father of María, the bride of one of the Pope’s sons, and a correspondent of his co–father-in-law, Alexander Borgia.28 There was Gutierre de Cárdenas, the chief accountant, the long-standing courtier who had introduced Fernando to Isabel in 1474 and had made money, especially in the Canaries, from the import of the lichen orchil, but whose knowledge of marine matters probably did not even stretch to the journey from Cádiz to Gran Canaria. There was also Rodrigo Maldonado de Talavera, a lawyer of the Council of the Realm, and three geographical experts: comendadores Pedro de León, Fernando de Torres, and Fernando Gamarro. Perhaps Jaume Ferrer, the Catalan cartographer, was present some of the time, as suggested by Cardinal Mendoza. But man for man, the Portuguese representatives were superior in quality to the Spanish ones, and the history of the world ever since that time would reflect that.

  The negotiations took place at the convent of Santa Clara in Tordesillas. On May 8, 1494, Queen Isabel, King Fernando, and the court reached it from Medina del Campo. The distance was a mere morning’s ride of fifteen miles. The court would remain there till June 9. The monarchs formally met the chapters of the Orders of Santiago and Calatrava, and then discussions began.29 There is a picture of the meeting, or at least of the conclusion reached, in the Museo de la Marinha, Lisbon, depicting a group of wise men presiding over a confusion of maps, under the coat of arms of the two kingdoms. The “Treaty Houses,” Casas del Tratado, the buildings where the discussions occurred, can still be seen.

  After a month’s talk, on June 7, agreement was reached between Castile and Portugal, first, about the rights of the two Crowns to the navigation, commerce and fishing, and establishments in the Canaries and on the coast of Africa. This was no more than a confirmation of the treaty of 1479 at Alcáçovas.30 But the same day another treaty was concluded for the “division of the ocean” (partición del mar). The Portuguese had obtained a substantial change, in their favor, in respect of the arrangements agreed with the Pope a year before. A new line would be imagined: “a partition or a line drawn from the North to the South Pole, not 100 leagues, but 370 leagues, to the west of the Cape Verde Islands.”31 To the west of the line all would be Spanish; but to the east, with the exception of the Canary Islands and the African territory opposite, all would be Portuguese. “To cut the air with a saber or cut the sea with a knife”: that was one definition of the Treaty of Tordesillas. With this, Portugal was given a substantial segment of what would eventually become Brazil. A mixed commission, as the modern world would express it, of one or two caravels from each side was to establish the line in “the ocean,” but alas that body never took shape.

  How did this Portuguese victory come about? The rulers of Spain, after all, were used to getting their way internationally. Spain’s first defeat at Tordesillas was to accept that there was need for a new agreement. The Spanish monarchs, or at least their advisers, also seem to have been unduly worried about the possibility of a Portuguese fleet leaving for the Indies. But Columbus had not been consulted, nor indeed had Antonio de Torres, who might have been supposed an ideal adviser and who was then in Castile. Could Portugal’s insistence have been because Brazil had already been secretly discovered?32 That would seem fanciful. The Portuguese were preoccupied by the African route. They wanted to guarantee their way to the lucrative Spice Islands, as charted by Bartolomeu Díaz. The allocation to them of 370 leagues westward—270 more than in 1493—meant that their ships could sail south in a broad arc and so avoid the winds and tides off the African coast. It is not clear how the distance of 270 leagues was reached, but such matters constitute the essence of diplomatic
compromises. One historian thinks that probably each side thought that the other had been deceived.33

  While these important decisions were being made, Columbus, who, of course, was the man who created the need for the negotiations, was off the coast of Cuba with his three caravels, one (the San Juan) of seventy tons, the other two much smaller. With him were one or two friends, such as Miguel Cuneo of Genoa; Fernán Pérez de Luna and Diego de Peñalosa, who were both notaries from Seville; and Juan de la Cosa, the Cantabrian whom he had met in the house of the Duke of Medinaceli in Puerto de Santa María and who had been the master, indeed co-owner, of the doom-laden Santa María on Columbus’s first voyage but was now a simple sailor, laying the foundations of his fame as a cartographer.34 There was also the New World’s first tourist, the “rich and pious abbot” of Lucerne, who had come to the Caribbean “solely for his own pleasure and to see something new.”35

  Columbus and his expedition first found a beautiful island that they named Tortuga, for the rather obvious reason that there they saw a big turtle. They then sailed through the Windward Channel and along the south coast of Cuba for a thousand miles. No mere island surely could be so long: “I held this land to be mainland, no island,” commented the Admiral, who found the footprints of what he believed to be a griffin.36

  The Admiral’s fleet passed the now famous Bay of Guantánamo and observed five big canoes there. Then they made for the island of Jamaica and on May 5 reached what is now St. Ann’s Bay, on the north coast. They landed. Columbus named the place Santa Gloria on “account of the extreme beauty of its country,” and he later told the historian Fray Andrés Bernáldez that the gardens of Valencia were “nothing in comparison.”37 The Tainos there seemed benign, for they had no experience of war; the Caribs had as yet never reached there. After spending a night offshore, they sailed west to “Discovery Bay” where he was faced in fact with a hostile group of Tainos. Columbus set a dog on them. He also used crossbows, and formally took possession of the island, which he called Santiago. The Tainos then came forward and gave the Spaniards a feast. On May 9, the Admiral sailed west to reach El Golfo de Bueno Tiempo (Montego Bay), then sailed away, arriving back in Cuba at Cabo Cruz (which Columbus so named) on the eighteenth. Passing through Los Jardines de la Reina (as he called the islands) he reached San Juan Evangelista (the modern Isle of Pines) about June 13.38 There the Spaniards spent ten days, and for the first time came upon the iguana.