Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  It seems certain that in these years there were further journeys to the New World unauthorized by any government, some of them leaving Spanish ports, some Portuguese, and some even setting off from England or France. In an affidavit of June 19, 1505, for example, signed at Rouen by a certain Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, we hear of “mariners from Dieppe and St. Malo as well as other Normans and Bretons who, for years past, have gone to the West Indies in search of dyewood, cotton, monkeys, parrots, and other articles.”77 He was not the first French pirate to dispute the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas. To the modern world it must seem curious that no captain bound for the Americas could by law raise anchor in any European port without seeking official permission. But so it was, since all governments wished to tax ships on their way out as on their way in. The consequence was inevitable: illegal journeys.

  King Fernando and Queen Isabel pray, attended by the royal children, Juan and Juana. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Dominic hover in the wings.

  Fernando the Catholic, King of Aragon. Macchiavelli considered him the cleverest monarch of the age.

  Isabel the Catholic, Queen of Castile. “Her will was of iron.”

  Fernando preferred Italy to the New World after 1492.

  An older Queen Isabel. Public triumphs were spoiled by private tragedies.

  The second wife: After Queen Isabel’s death, King Fernando married again. Germaine de Foix, thirty years his junior, failed to give him an heir.

  The Infante Juan, “the prince who died of love.”

  Philip the Fair. The infidelities of this heir of the Habsburgs were as extensive as his realms.

  Juana “la loca” (the mad), who was unhappy as a princess, queen, and prisoner; but her son founded a dynasty.

  The banker Jacob Fugger, the richest man of the century, financed the election of Charles to become Holy Roman Emperor, and never allowed that to be forgotten.

  Margaret, the talented archduchess. Married when young to the King of France, then to the heir of Spain, then to the Duke of Savoy, she became governess-general of the Netherlands and brought up her nephew, Charies V.

  The new king, crowned Charles I of Spain in 1516, when aged seventeen, became Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at nineteen.

  King Fernando met his son-in-law Philip the Fair in 1506 at Remesal, a tiny place in northwest Castile.

  A bullfight at Benavente offered in honor of Philip the Fair.

  Cardinal Cisneros led Spanish troops to capture Oran in 1509.

  THE ARMS OF CONQUEST

  The Spaniards took over their enemies’ weapons: This is a sword for horsemen, perhaps Muslim in origin.

  A crossbow, as effective in the sixteenth century as it had been in the Middle Ages.

  The pike was still in use during the Renaissance.

  Victors: Cardinal Mendoza, Queen Isabel, and King Fernando enter Granada.

  Fadrique, Duke of Alba, King Fernando’s most reliable friend.

  Íñigo López de Mendoza, poet, statesman, and grandfather of the Castilian aristocracy.

  Our Lady protects Granada, about 1498. The city would soon be changed by the appearance of new churches.

  15

  “The greatest good that we can wish for”

  We wish that the Indians be converted to our holy Catholic faith, and that their souls be saved, for that is the greatest good that we can wish for.

  Instructions to Nicolás de Ovando, governor of the Indies, 1501

  Fray Nicolás de Ovando was fifty-two when he was selected by the Catholic Kings to succeed Bobadilla as commander in chief of Spain in the Indies. The Order of Alcántara, to which he belonged, like that of Santiago and Calatrava, had been in the vanguard of the Castilian armies in the Reconquista and was now, for obvious reasons, losing its importance. But all the orders still had prestige and their lands brought profit. It was symbolic that the new Governor of the Indies should be an official of an order founded to garrison newly conquered Christian outposts in Old Spain.

  Ovando was known as honest and straightforward in his person, as in his acts, and “an enemy of greed and avarice.”1 His place in the Order of Alcántara gave him standing in the court. But he was wellborn, too. Through his ancestors, the Blázquezes, he descended from a bastard of King Alfonso IX. A Blázquez (originally of León) had been given the city of Cáceres when it was liberated from the Moors. Nicolás’s father, Diego de Cáceres Ovando, “El Capitán,” had also received many concessions when Queen Isabel visited Extremadura in 1477 during the war against La Beltraneja and the Portuguese.

  Ovando’s mother had been Isabel de Flores Gutiérrez, a lady of the bedchamber of Queen Isabel the Catholic’s mother, the Portuguese Isabel. She came from Brozas, a town in the northwest of Extremadura, near Alcántara, where Ovando was brought up and where he had his house.

  Fray Nicolás had been a companion of the household of the Infante Juan. He had been among the ten knights always with him. He was also the first of many Extremeños to play a decisive part in the history of Spain in America.2

  Ovando was named governor on September 3, 1501, when the court was still in Granada. The order appointing him repays examination.3 He was given the government and magistracy of the new Spanish islands as well as the right to appoint lesser magistrates, mayors, and constables.4 But he would not be asked to govern that part of the mainland of South America where Alonso de Hojeda and Vicente Yañez Pinzón had been and where their responsibility had now to be considered.

  Ovando was charged to see if there were foreigners in his new fief and, if so, to send them back to Spain: the New World was not to be exploited by an international brigade but by Castile alone. If, though, some foreigners had reached the Indies in the service of the Admiral, their status would be considered, and, anyway, Ovando was allowed to take five Portuguese with him.5 He was specifically prohibited from carrying to the Indies “Moors, Heretics, and any Jews who had been punished for trying to pretend that they were not so [reconciliados] and conversos.” But he could take “black and other slaves who had been born in the power of our Christian subjects.”6 Though one or two black African slaves may have slipped into the New World before,7 and as we have seen, Columbus may have carried some on his third voyage, this was the first reference to them in an official document.

  Some other relevant decrees were issued on the same September 3, including one that prohibited journeys to the New World without royal permission. Anyone who carried out such a voyage would be punished. Licenses would henceforth always be required.8 This was not only because the Crown wanted port taxes but also to control the size of the population of the new empire. It was a reversal of the liberal policy that had been introduced in 1495. No doubt, as in respect of so many laws, there continued to be many breaches of it. Perhaps that was one of the reasons for it. But this rule was one that would last.9

  Ovando’s instructions were refined when another royal document was issued on September 16, 1500, signed by Gaspar de Gricio, the royal secretary for imperial matters, who had succeeded Fernándo Álvarez de Toledo in that position.10 This gave Ovando certain absolute powers: no one was to establish or even seek gold mines without his permission; and of the product, half (later reduced to a third and later still to a fifth) would go to the Crown. All the same, production was to be stimulated. Miners would go about the settlement in teams of ten under a reliable leader. All grants made by Bobadilla would at the same time be revoked.11

  Another order for Ovando included the statement:

  We wish that the Indians be converted to our holy Catholic faith and their souls be saved, for that is the greatest good that we can hope for and, because of this, they must be informed of the details of our faith. You are to take great care in ensuring that the clergy so inform them and admonish them, with much love and without using force, so that they may be converted as rapidly as possible.

  Ovando was to assure the surviving caciques of the protection of the Crown, and they were to pay tribute in the same way as the r
est of the Crown’s subjects. That tribute was to be agreed with the caciques so they would know they were not going to be treated unjustly.12

  Ovando was naturally to carry out an official inquiry (residencia) into the rule of Bobadilla and his officials and then send them back to Spain in the same fleet in which he himself had come.13 The new Governor was to be paid twice what his predecessor received (360,000 maravedís a year instead of 180,000), and a hundred new officials would be selected by Ovando.

  The instructions were signed not only by the King, Queen, and Gricio, but also by the Archbishop of Granada, the Queen’s sometime confessor, Talavera, and by Licenciado Luis Zapata. Zapata was an important intriguer, a Madrileño converso, of small build, soon to be spoken of, because of his importance, as “El Rey Chiquito” (as Boabdil had been), known to be both corrupt and miserly, if mellifluous in speech. He was an official who protected in Spain all the “Aragonese clique” that would soon succeed in establishing itself in La Española.14

  None of these arrangements was kept secret. They were indeed proclaimed in Seville on October 2, 1501, by the town crier, Francisco de Mesa, on the steps of the cathedral (the famous gradas), in the presence of various notaries of the city. The same was done in Gran Canaria.15

  The expedition of Ovando was organized by Diego Gómez de Cervantes, the corregidor of Cadiz, one of those essential officials in the royal reforms increasing the Crown’s authority in municipal councils. Jimeno de Briviesca, a converso who had assisted Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca in the overall administration of the Indies, was to be in command of expenditure in Seville.

  Several other voyages were approved at this time. Thus Luis de Arriaga, a hidalgo of Berlanga, in Castile, who had been on Columbus’s expedition in 1493, and had served for a time as deputy to Margarit and then commander of La Magdalena (where he had resisted some serious Indian attacks headed by a cacique whom the Spaniards called Juatinango), was ordered to try to colonize La Española with sound Spanish families.16 There would be four towns with fifty settlers in each, two hundred people in all.17 They were not to have any income. But they would be given free passage and, after five years, would receive as their own the property that they had been allocated. The cost of seeds, cattle, and so on would be theirs to bear. They would be permitted to explore further coasts.18 This expedition left Seville in February 1502, at much the same time as that of Ovando.

  The persistent adventurer Alonso de Hojeda also again left Cadiz early in 1502, with four ships. Two of his vessels were wrecked either in Bahía Honda or Santa Cruz Bay in Cuba at the beginning of May. On a third, Juan de Vergara sailed off in insubordinate rebellion, bound for Jamaica. Hojeda went in pursuit, as the responsible captain, on the caravel La Magdalena, but he was captured by his enemies, who carried him, bound, to Ovando, by then in Santo Domingo.19 The Caribbean was beginning to seem like Extremadura before the coming of the Catholic Kings.

  Columbus, meanwhile, was in Spain arguing for a new approach to the recapture of Jerusalem, which he thought, optimistically, would constitute the court of “the last world emperor.”20 After all, the world would soon end, as St. Augustine had predicted. Columbus had an elaborate correspondence on the matter with his Carthusian friend Fray Gaspar de Gorricio. He also wore down the monarchs with his continual demands and letters: “I would rather be to your Highnesses a source of pleasure and delight,” he wrote, “than of annoyance and surfeit.” This touching letter was full of dubious scientific reflections about the consequence of the world being a sphere.21

  Then the Admiral received from the monarchs permission, in January 1502, for “another voyage in the name of the Holy Trinity,” as he put it to both the Pope and the Bank of Genoa. For on March 14 the monarchs wrote him a most friendly letter from Valencia de la Torre: “Your imprisonment was very displeasing to us, as we made clear to you and to all others, for as soon as we learned of it, we set you free. You know the favor with which we have always treated you, and now we are even more resolved to honor and to treat you very well. All that we have granted you shall be preserved intact … and you and your heirs shall enjoy them, as is just.… Pray do not delay your departure.”22 The King and Queen obviously realized that Columbus excelled at discovery as he was incompetent at administration.

  In these months, Columbus’s correspondent Pope Alexander confirmed his interest in what his compatriots the Spaniards were doing. Thus, on December 16, 1501, the bull Sinceritas Eximie Devotionis repeated the “Privileges” granted in 1493. The Pope also guaranteed the grant of tithes in the Indies to the Catholic Kings, not the Church.23 Columbus himself wrote again to Alexander in February 1502 that he had wanted to come and “talk personally to His Holiness about his discoveries.” But he had been prevented from doing so by the difficulties between the monarchs of Spain and the King of Portugal. Still, he wanted the Pope to know that he had discovered 1,400 islands and had found that there were no fewer than 333 languages on the tierra firme of Asia, where there were also all kinds of metals, including, of course, gold and copper. As for La Española, it should be thought of as a combination of “Tharsis, Cethia, Ophir, Ophis, and Cipanga.” He recalled that he had also been to some land to the south of these territories and seen “the earthly Paradise” where there was, appropriately, a large oysterage, with pearls. But Satan had disturbed the proper management of these things, Columbus added: “The government that had been allocated to me forever has with fury been seized from me.”24

  Ovando, for his part, sedately left Sanlúcar de Barrameda on the Santa María de la Antigua on February 13, 1502, with twenty-seven ships. It was far the largest fleet that had yet set out for the New World—bigger even than that of Cabral. It carried 2,500 would-be settlers, including many women, priests, Franciscans, and artisans. It shipped enough mulberry shoots to permit the foundation of a silk industry, and much sugarcane.25 Arriaga followed with another three ships, taking with him seventy-three of his planned two hundred families. Fonseca gave him the right to collect tithes in La Española. On the fifteenth, Alonso Vélez de Mendoza, the hidalgo from Moguer, who, as we have seen, had been down the coast of Brazil into what was plainly Portuguese territory in 1500, set out on another expedition that was intended to be a copy of Arriaga’s.26

  Twelve hundred of Ovando’s “settlers” seem to have come from Extremadura, including several from his own town of Brozas. Some were hidalgos, such as his secretary, Francisco de Lizaur,27 and Sebastián de Ocampo, from Noyia, Galicia, who may also have been on Columbus’s second voyage.28 Many were poor men driven to consider emigration as an alternative to an uncertain economic future at home, a consequence of poor harvests or perhaps the royal favoring of the Mesta, the famous wool monopoly. Ovando had, as his second in command, Antonio de Torres, that well-connected and experienced captain who had been back and forth so often across the Atlantic. (He had been governor of Gran Canaria for a year before this new mission.)

  The accountant of the expedition was Cristóbal de Cuéllar, a Castilian whom Ovando had known in the household of the Infante Juan at Almazán, with his six servants. The supervisor was Diego Márquez of Seville, a onetime page of Fonseca who had had the same role on the second expedition of Columbus. The fundidor who was responsible for melting down gold was Rodrigo del Alcázar, a member of a rich converso family of Seville, who took with him nine servants.29 A kinsman of Ovando, Francisco de Monroy, of that talented but undisciplined Extremeño family, traveled as factor, with six servants.30 Rodrigo de Villacorta, from the Castilian pueblo of Olmedo, famous in the civil wars of the previous century, was treasurer. He had been with Columbus in the same capacity on his second voyage. The Admiral regarded him as “a hardworking person and very loyal to the service of the Crown.”31 Alonso Maldonado of Salamanca went with Ovando as chief magistrate. He turned out to be the best of the early judges of the New World, according to both of the historians Oviedo and Las Casas, for once united in their judgment.32 He took two servants.

  The commander in overall
charge of the ships was Andrés Velázquez, who had two servants. He was presumably from the large Velázquez family that played such a key part in the early history of Spanish America. Alfonso Sánchez de Carvajal, the factor of the Admiral, returned to La Española with Ovando to take charge of the Columbus family’s possessions. On board, too, were Cristóbal de Tapia, a protégé of Bishop Fonseca from Seville, and Rodrigo de Alburquerque from Salamanca, men who, with Francisco de Puértola, were to command the three new fortresses that they were instructed to build along the line from Isabela to Santo Domingo.33 Others included the comendador Gabriel de Varela, Cristóbal de Santa Clara, a converso merchant, and a Sevillano converso named Pedro de las Casas and his son Bartolomé, the future apostle of the Indies. The twenty-year-old Hernán Cortés, another remote relation of Ovando’s from Extremadura, planned to travel with him, but at the last minute he hurt his leg jumping out of the window of a lady in Seville whom he had been trying to seduce, and could not leave.34

  There were also on these ships seventeen Franciscans35 and four priests.36 The former were to found the first house attached to their order in the New World. While important, certainly, as the beginning of Atlantic commerce, this was also going to be a serious journey in search of souls. Nearly sixty horses sailed, too.37 The monarchs optimistically forbade any who traveled with Ovando to resell the slaves that he was taking home. This was the first occasion that Indian slaves already in Spain were returned to the New World.

  Ovando sailed away attended by celebrations and music, as was normal when major expeditions left Spain. The port that he left, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, was now established as the daughter city of Seville in respect of its trade with the Indies, for most of the cargoes were loaded there, and many passengers preferred to ride there or travel there by a separate boat rather than board the fleet at Seville. The benefit for Juan de Guzmán, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who had his palace on the hill behind the town, was considerable, since many profits of the commerce with the Indies flowed into his hands. It is easy even now, as one stands on the shore at Sanlúcar looking at the little group of houses at Las Paletas, at the mouth of the River Guadalajara, to imagine the fleet of Ovando disappearing into the sunset over the sea.38