Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  On August 5, 1495, Juan de Aguado, the butler royal, left Seville for La Española with four ships, with supplies but also with the explicit task of carrying out a residencia (an inquiry into the mandate) against Columbus.36 That was normal Castilian practice, used often in relation to corregidores; but the proposal was a striking change of royal policy toward Columbus, and the end of his dream of a private empire.37

  Aguado carried with him a document listing exemptions and rights. From this Columbus would know that his monopoly was henceforth limited to La Española and that the rest of the Indies, including places he had already discovered, would be governed by a different system. Even in La Española, the Crown had restrictions to impose; for example, it seemed to the court that the number of persons who were receiving a salary was excessive. Would it not be desirable to establish a maximum of five hundred such settlers?

  Aguado’s sailors and the captains of his four vessels were instructed to return after only a month in the Indies. But their ships were all wrecked at Isabela soon after they arrived, in a hurricane in the autumn of 1495. The reports of this functionary were lost then too, but hearing of them, the Admiral began to think that he could deal with his enemies only by returning to Spain.38 On October 15, he wrote to Fernando and Isabel from Vega de la Maguana. It was a letter mostly about the cacique Caonabó and his crimes, and about how Aguado’s ships had been lost. But he did suggest that the monarchs should send out to the Indies “some devout friars who were above greed for the things of the world”—presumably a reproach to Fray Boil, whom he now saw as the chief of his enemies.39 It is true that there was much sardonic comment at court about the Admiral’s claim to have found “the Indies.” On August 9, 1495, Peter Martyr in Tortosa was wondering, in a letter to Bernardino de Carvajal, whether La Española was, after all, the Ophir of Solomon.40

  The achievements of Columbus were all the same beginning to catch the imagination of many thinking people in Castile. Thus Juan del Encina of Salamanca (where his father had been a shoemaker), who had joined the household of the Duke of Alba as actor and courtier as well as poet, wrote an introduction to his book of ballads (his Cancionero) called The Art of Castilian Poetry, which was dedicated to the Infante Juan. This included the splendid words: “Since, as the most learned maestro Antonio de Nebrija says (he, that is, who flung out … the barbarisms that had grown in our Latin language), one of the reasons which moved him [Encina, that is] to devote himself to romance was that our language up to now is more exalted and polished than it has ever been, so much so that one might fear that the descent might be as fast as the rise.…”41 Language of empire, indeed!

  Columbus decided finally to go back to Castile. On March 10, 1496, he left Isabela with 30 Indian slaves and 225 disillusioned Spaniards, including most of those who had gone out with Aguado and who had not been able to return before. This return journey was made in two ships that had been built in the Indies—the first such, it seems.42

  Just before he left, Columbus found a new goldfield south of Vega, to which he gave the name San Cristóbal. He again left his brother Bartolomeo as governor. Diego Colón would be the second in command.

  In a letter to Fernando and Isabel two years later, in 1498, the Admiral explained that at this time “evil words arose in Spain with a belittlement of the enterprise which had been begun, because I had not at once dispatched home ships laden with gold, not allowing for the brevity of the time that had elapsed or everything else I had said of the many problems … for my sins or for my salvation, I was placed in abhorrence, and obstacles were erected against whatever I said or asked. I decided, therefore, to come before your Highnesses and to show my incredulity at this and also to show that I was right in everything.” He also recalled how Solomon had sent ships to the Orient to look for Ophir; how Alexander had sent others to seek the government of “Tapóbrana”; and how Nero sent others still to find the sources of the Nile, and even the kings of Portugal caravels to discover Guinea.43 Columbus considered himself in excellent company.

  13

  “Malevolent jokes of the goddess Fortune”

  These shouts of laughter and malevolent jokes of the goddess Fortune …

  Peter Martyr1

  Columbus sailed home through the Lesser Antilles, stopping on April 10 at Guadeloupe, where he seized some Caribs to be slaves, and leaving on April 20. He visited no islands that he did not know and reached Cadiz on June 11.

  The Admiral then made his way, dressed, surprisingly, as a Franciscan monk in gray, toward Seville. He had always seemed something of a friar and had had excellent relations with the order ever since his sojourn at La Rábida. He stayed for a time in the house of Andrés Bernáldez, the priest of Los Palacios, later the author of The History of the Reign of the Catholic Kings, whose chapter about the discovery of the Indies and the second voyage was much influenced by what the Admiral now told him. Bernáldez’s parish was fifteen miles south of Seville, but he was all the same a chaplain to, and protégé of, Fray Diego de Deza, Columbus’s friend at the court of the Infante Juan. He was anti-Jewish, and his laughter at the sufferings of the Jews who in 1492 left Spain for Morocco makes sad reading.2

  When he arrived in Seville, Columbus would have observed his old comrade of the first voyage, Peralonso Niño, making ready to leave for the Indies (he did so on June 16). It was Fonseca’s new fleet, consisting of two caravels and a Breton vessel, as well as a brigantine bought in Cadiz, with fourteen oars. Like other such flotillas, they were to buy a hundred sheep and some goats in La Gomera.3 They were to sail out to La Española and sail back; nothing was mentioned about further expeditions. Here was a voyage that had not been authorized by the Admiral-Viceroy, and he was ignorant of it before it sailed. Columbus would have learned, too, that Alonso Fernández de Lugo had completed his conquest of Tenerife at last in 1496; and how in June he had paraded his Guanche captives before the monarchs at Almazán, the town on the River Duero and on the border of Castile and Aragon that would become the seat of the short-lived court of the Infante Juan.4 He would have found that, however important his own enterprise had seemed in 1492, four years later it was just one more activity of the monarchs, perhaps as interesting as the Canary Islands but nothing like as tempting as Italy.

  Columbus found, however, that on the surface there was no real weakening of the support that the King and Queen were giving him. They wrote a friendly letter from Almazán.5 Columbus, still in his Franciscan robe, traveled to meet them in Burgos at the beginning of October. They saw him in the Casa del Cordón, a splendid palace begun by the late Constable of Castile, Pedro Fernández de Velasco, and completed by his widow, Mencía. The Admiral gave them a “good sample of gold … and many masks, with eyes and ears of gold, and many parrots.”6 He also presented to the monarchs “Diego,” the brother of the dead cacique Caonabo, wearing a gold collar that weighed six hundred castellanos.7 This hint that more gold might be forthcoming was most encouraging to them. Legend also insists that some of the gold brought back in 1496 was given to Diego de la Cruz to gild the retablo in the chapel of the Carthusian monastery of Miraflores, outside Burgos, where the mad, sad mother of Queen Isabel, who at last died in 1496, would shortly be interred.

  The Admiral wanted to return to the Indies immediately, and the King and Queen thought that he should indeed go, with eight ships, to discover more of the mainland—that is, presumably, Cuba and South America. Columbus must have rehearsed his achievements as an explorer eloquently, for despite the criticisms of Margarit and Boil that the monarchs had previously heard, his “Privileges” of 1492 were again confirmed. Peter Martyr was as usual at court and wrote to Bernardino de Carvajal in Rome enthusiastically of Columbus.8 The latter’s brother, the unpopular Bartolomeo, was confirmed by the Crown as adelantado, the grand office that had been given him by the Admiral.

  There were delays, however, before Columbus returned to his new lands. Fonseca was reluctant to authorize any further voyage by Columbus, and he made excuses in or
der to obstruct him. Completely unsentimental, he knew that discovery was one thing, administration another. He thought that for the moment Columbus was best occupied in Castile; and, sitting about in the court and following the monarchs through Burgos, Valladolid, Tordesillas, and Medina del Campo, the Admiral had time on his hands, and he seems to have spent it with books (much of his serious reading probably dates from these years). It was in 1496 that he obtained from England his copy of the The Travels of Marco Polo (which he probably now read for the first time) and that he bought Albertus Magnus’s Philosophia Naturalis, as well as Abraham Zacuto’s Almanach Perpetuum.9 These purchases are a happy reminder that now for the first time the ordinary man could buy real, printed books. Next year Columbus would send for the latest information about the Venetian John Cabot’s recent crossing of the North Atlantic to Newfoundland from Bristol (a journey probably only made because of the news of Columbus’s success).10

  Columbus now made new summaries of the size of the world and compared its shape to a walnut, with the sea the shell. He talked, of course, and he may even have listened; presumably he took in that, in December 1496, Pope Alexander had granted Fernando and Isabel the joint title of “the Catholic Kings,” Los Reyes Católicos, an action that infuriated King Charles of France, who was already known as “the most Christian King.” The gesture was the consequence not only of the war in Granada, but also of the commitment of the two to send an army to Naples and to assist the papacy against France (so Alexander VI interpreted the landing of the Gran Capitán and his men in May 1495).11 They received no such formal designation for their patronage of Columbus in the New World.

  Columbus probably participated, in early 1497, in the celebrations that attended the arrival in Spain of “the so much desired archduchess Margaret” (Martyr’s words), the seventeen-year-old daughter of the Emperor Maximilian, in order to marry the Infante—the culmination of the monarchs’ dynastic policy, complemented by the long-awaited marriage of their daughter Juana to Margaret’s brother Philip. “The white throats of the Queen and her ladies were heavy with jewels,” Peter Martyr wrote in the same exaggerated style as Columbus was wont to write of the Caribbean landscape.12

  Columbus would also have witnessed the court’s sadness after the death of the Infante Juan in October of the same year in Salamanca, in his father’s arms, bringing to an end not only that remarkable little court of Almazán organized so imaginatively by Fray Diego de Deza, but also the old royal family of Spain.13 There was no legitimate male heir to the house of Trastámara, and it seemed certain that the throne would pass to the Habsburg descendants of the Infanta Juana. We observe now the exquisite tomb of the “hope of all Spain” in the Dominican convento of St. Thomas at Ávila, designed by the Florentine Fancelli—it was his first major commission—and can still imagine the consternation that marked his death.

  Neither Fernando nor Isabel recovered from this tragedy, which was soon to be compounded by the death the next year, in 1498, of their eldest daughter, Isabel, the Queen of Portugal, and then (in 1500) of her infant son, Miguel.

  After the Infante’s death, the monarchs went to stay with Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros at the episcopal palace at Guadalajara, where they remained in virtual seclusion for six months, till April 1498. This was the time when Cisneros, even though busy with his plans for the new university of Alcalá (the Complutense University),14 confirmed his position as the de facto chief minister for the Crown. One must assume that he comforted the monarchs with prayers. Or were they more cheered by being reminded of verses written by Jorge Manrique to recall his own dead father:

  Popes, emperors

  And Princes of the church

  Are treated by Death

  As if they are poor

  Cattleherds.

  Or:

  Our lives are rivers

  Which run into the sea

  Of Death.

  There, too, go their Lordships.15

  The Habsburg family would always assert that the prince died because he had made love too assiduously to Margaret. A more convincing explanation is that he ate a bad salad at the fair in Salamanca.16

  The members of the court of the Infante, of course, sought other places of employment. Columbus’s friend Dr. Deza became bishop of Salamanca and then archbishop of Seville, with other honors later falling to him. The young Columbus brothers, Diego and Fernando, sons of the Admiral who had been attached to the Infante as pages, moved to the household of the Queen. Most other members of the household had successful careers, some in the Indies, often dining out on their experiences with the Infante for the rest of their days, like Cristóbal de Cuéllar, the Infante’s treasurer. He would frequently be heard saying in Cuba, as in Castile, that the wild happenings at Almazán “would have earned him one or two tumbles in Hell.”17

  The same autumn, Peralonso Niño returned to Spain from La Española. Rumor had it that he was carrying much gold, but in the event, his main cargo was only more slaves, sent by Bartolomeo Colón, as well as a little brazilwood. He handed over about three hundred of the former to Nicolás Cabrero, a merchant of Seville.18 Peralonso Niño brought little in the way of news from La Española except that Bartolomeo Colón had put to death some of the cacique Guarionex’s men because they had buried some Christian images.19

  Columbus was still trying to organize his new, third, voyage. He was given financial backing of 6 million maravedís by the Crown, but that seemed to him inadequate. Had not the monarchs spent that sum merely defending Perpignan against the French? Columbus was also now finding it difficult to enlist volunteers to accompany him. Too many bleak stories had been told of the rough life in the Indies. Those who had been in La Española made bad propaganda for the cause; they were, said the historian Oviedo, “of the color of gold, but they did not have its shine.”20 At this time the “Catholic Kings”—they fully embodied that title now—asked Antonio de Torres to take over from Fonseca as chief organizer of the expeditions to the Indies. That marked a triumph for Columbus, since Torres at least knew the Indies, which could not have been said of Fonseca. The King and Queen also wrote saying that Columbus was to be allowed to buy what he wanted.21

  But whether Fonseca or Torres constituted their executive arm, the monarchs were determined to impose their own conditions on Columbus. The colony had to be constructed as a collaboration between soldiers and workers, and the Crown wanted to be able to say who these should be and how many there should be. As for policy toward the indigenous people, that was to be characterized by conversion: natives were to be made to serve the Crown peacefully “in benign subjection … so that they could be converted to our Holy Catholic faith.”22 A few monks and priests, “good people,” would administer the sacrament to those who were there, as well as convert the Indians to Christianity, and would take with them what was needed for the administration of the religion.23 By a special decree, many criminals could take part in the new colonial experience. But murderers, counterfeiters, arsonists, “sodomists” (any kind of homosexual), traitors, heretics, and anyone who had illegally exported money from Castile were excluded from such possibilities.

  Other decrees followed throughout the summer of 1497, sometimes emanating from the castle at Medina del Campo, sometimes from the monastery of La Mejorada, sometimes directed at Columbus, sometimes at Torres. Reading the texts, we get a sense of the outlines of an imperial policy being painfully worked out by monarchs feeling their way in quite new circumstances. Of course, the reconquest of Spain from Islam and the conquest of the Canary Islands were precedents of a sort, but not entirely so. Soon, Fonseca would return to direct the affairs of the Indies, for Torres imposed so many conditions for his collaboration that the monarchs became annoyed.24 But that did not stanch the flow of decrees.

  In one of these, the Crown went back on its general permission to Castilians to equip expeditions for the New World and once again accepted Columbus’s monopoly. But Columbus himself had also changed his mind on this score: “It seems to m
e,” he wrote, “that permission ought to be given to all who want to go.” Perhaps this opinion derived from his realization that he was losing money from his insistence on monopoly, recalling that he could have an eighth share of every cargo shipped on vessels not his own to the New World.25 The consequence seems to have been that, in the next few years, many captains received permissions, some perhaps finding new territories without leaving a record.26

  More significant perhaps, on July 22, 1497, Columbus was given the authority to distribute land in La Española, provided that the new proprietors committed themselves to four years’ work on the property concerned, growing wheat, cotton, or flax, or building sugar or other mills. All metal-producing estates and those that could produce brazilwood would be reserved to the Crown, and everywhere else, if not fenced, would be looked on as common land.27 That in theory meant that Columbus would be able to create something like a landed oligarchy.28 Columbus was also asked to found a new town in La Española near the gold mines.29

  The Admiral’s third journey continued to be delayed. He spent much of the summer of 1497 at La Mejorada, the Catholic Kings’ favorite Jeronymite monastery, near Medina del Campo. Fernando and Isabel were also there for a spell in July.30 We may imagine that they sometimes met in the vast courtyard or the cloisters. Columbus wrote a brief to support his masters in a protest that they were planning against any breach of the Treaty of Tordesillas. The document talks of how he “had gone to the said islands and mainland of India,”31 and how he had had to put into Lisbon at the end of his (first) voyage. Then without success King João of Portugal, having been informed of the journey, sent his own fleet to those same lands with the help of Portuguese sailors who had been with the Admiral.32 But it did not seem to have reached the Caribbean.