Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  Vicente Yáñez visited the island, landing probably on the south coast, built a stockade, and took livestock there. But he did nothing more permanent. He could not even have seen the central mountain range that forms such an interesting variation to other Caribbean landscapes. For the moment, no one declared an interest in settling there. La Española, small though it is, seemed large enough. Also, like Columbus, Yáñez was a great sailor, not a colonial administrator, though he, again like Columbus, was tempted by land grants: to an adventurer, land is always an attraction. Yet one important point had been made: La Española would not be simply a colony on its own, it would be a center for expansion.

  Nothing happened in Boriquen until August 12, 1508, when Juan Ponce de León, having sailed out from Higuey, in eastern La Española, which he had helped conquer and where he had been living, disembarked in the pretty bay of Guánica, on the southwest shore of Puerto Rico, with forty-two potential settlers and eight sailors.3

  Ponce de León, as has been explained before, was a cousin of Rodrigo Ponce de León, Count of Arcos, and he was indeed a Ponce de León on both sides.4 He had fought against the Moors in Granada and had been a page at court. Apparently a volunteer with Bartolomeo Colón in 1494, he was also probably among those so optimistic emigrants on Columbus’s second voyage in 1493.5 He was a friend of Bishop Fonseca. He helped his fellow Sevillano Esquivel in his campaign to conquer Higuey. Settled there, he obtained an encomienda and for a time made money selling cassava bread to passing Spanish ships, perhaps operating this business from a house that still stands and is recalled as his.6 Ponce de León himself owned (with Alfonso Sarmiento) at least one ship: the Santa María de Regla.7 He persuaded Ovando to give him authority to conquer Puerto Rico.

  Ponce’s personality escapes us. Las Casas allows himself to say no more than that he was “very clever and served in many wars.”8 Oviedo was more expansive, saying that he was “spirited, sagacious, and diligent in all warlike matters” and “a hidalgo and a man of elegant and high thoughts.”9 The naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, the pride of Harvard, said that he was a typical Andalusian, but gave no reference for that innocent reflection.10 Judging by his actions he was obviously resilient, strong, and brave, but he was probably unimaginative.

  The conquistadors who accompanied him included his own son, Juan González Ponce de León (who had apparently learned the language of the Tainos), who sailed as interpreter, and some other captains, such as Miguel de Toro, who had also been in La Española with Columbus, and Martín de Ysasaga, a Basque. There also traveled several Sevillano servants of the Ponce de León family. One adventurer who accompanied Ponce de León was an interesting free black of Portuguese origin, Juan Garrido.11 The King designated Ponce as interim governor of the island. He was given the old title of adelantado, a designation that had been given by Columbus to his brother Bartolomeo and that meant the holder had political as well as military duties. The long list of other responsibilities and powers that went with the title had in this instance no significance.12

  There seems to have been no justification for the invasion other than conquest. Perhaps, though, Ovando perceived a need to avoid having the island next to La Española as a potential base for Caribs. Of course, he hoped to convert the Indians. But the ambition of Juan Ponce de León to possess a colony of his own probably played a part. Possibly, Ovando desired to see that adventurer established in another island. The terms of the agreements concluded with Ponce de León seem to have imagined the indefinite survival of indigenous principalities.

  The best description of the conquest of Puerto Rico derives from a declaration by the son of Ponce de León, Juan González.13 The account makes obvious that the expedition of his father was intended from the beginning “for the conquest and settlement” of the island. After landing at Guánica, the party reembarked and made for Aguadilla, at the extreme west of the island, near a river known to the indigenous people as the Guarabo—where Columbus had anchored on his second voyage in 1493, perhaps indeed accompanied by Ponce de León. There Juan González talked to some Indians armed with bows and arrows, apparently successfully, and took two back to the fleet to meet his father, who gave them combs, shirts, beads, and mirrors. (Andrés López, a servant in the Ponce de León household, later said that these presents included diamonds, but that would seem improbable; probably he did not know a diamond when he saw one.) The next day, Juan González returned to Aguadilla, and his father and most of his followers accompanied him. A witness, Francisco Rodríguez, recalls that they all went “very happily and contentedly and leapt onto the land,” Juan González with them. “They went to the caciques of the Indians and were there talking with them till the sun went down when they set about embarking. Many Indians accompanied him as far as the boat. Juan González told his father how he had talked to many caciques and lords and how they were happy with our coming.”

  This was the territory of the cacique Agueybana, an Indian leader who at first impressed all the Spaniards who met him as “human and virtuous.” He welcomed Ponce, offered to exchange names with him, and they reached various territorial understandings. He even explained where gold could be found.14 Again according to Andrés López, this gold was used by the Indians “for earrings and nose rings.”15

  Juan González, the interpreter, and twenty Spaniards then sailed off to discover a better port, and they found it, a hundred miles to the east in what became the Bay of San Juan. There they transferred their equipment and baggage, the Indians helping. They found gold in several streams nearby. But then the Indians attacked.

  The historian Oviedo has a story of how the indigenous people of the island supposed that white men could not die. A small group of Indians persuaded a certain Salcedo to go with them to a beautiful place on horseback and then seized him and pushed him underwater and held him there. They found that the Spaniard quickly died and, after three days, began to smell. That persuaded the people that their previous information was wrong. They, therefore, prepared for war with the Spaniards.16

  Juan González Ponce de León disguised himself successfully as a native, painting his skin and dyeing his hair, and, according to his own account, eavesdropped on the plans that the Indians were making. He also canoed out farther toward the east, passing Culebra and Vieques, into the pretty archipelago of the Virgin Islands (as Columbus had named them) and seized some Caribs, whom he later took back as slaves to Santo Domingo. He reported that he had heard Indians say they intended to kill all the Spaniards.17

  The Indians soon destroyed the little Spanish settlement at Aguadilla, where they killed most of the colonists. Juan González escaped with thirty-six arrow wounds. This marked the parting of the ways, for the Spaniards never forgave such a violent reaction. It was the beginning of a brutal war.

  There seems to have been about a year of skirmishing and traveling, during the course of which, again according to his own account, the skillful Juan González was always in and out of the enemy quarters in one disguise or another. A new settlement was established at San Germán, in the southwest, named after Fernando’s new queen, Germaine de Foix. Juan González also ensured the capture of some seventeen caciques who were sent to Santo Domingo by his father. This seems to have marked the end of the resistance. Ponce de León established himself near what is now San Juan, at Caparra, which still bears that name and where tiles from Triana, the port opposite Seville on the River Guadalquivir, which were introduced in these early days of empire, can still be identified.

  Further proclamations confirmed Ponce de León’s position on the island, though he was specifically forbidden by the Crown to use Indians in any mines. He established himself in a hacienda at Toa, near San Juan, where he undertook numerous plantings.18

  The arrival of Diego Colón in Santo Domingo altered matters in San Juan. The new Governor of La Española had apparently not known of the King’s designation of Ponce de León as governor of Puerto Rico (or pretended not to have) and wanted his own man there. So the ne
w Admiral named a comrade, Julio Cerón, to that post, with an old friend of his father’s, Miguel Díaz de Aux, one of the few Aragonese to interest themselves in the Indies, as chief magistrate.

  Cerón expelled Ponce de León from Puerto Rico, even from Toa, his new property. But Ponce had his grant of office sent to the island, and in the subsequent confusion, he seized both Cerón and Díaz de Aux and, accusing them of “excesses,” sent them home to Spain as prisoners in a boat belonging to Juan Bono de Quejo, a Basque captain who was a friend of his. In a politically astute move, Ponce de León also named one of Diego Colón’s friends, Cristóbal de Sotomayor, as his own chief magistrate. An aristocrat of Portuguese origin (he was a brother of the Count of Caminha and a kinsman of the first governor of the Portuguese colony of São Tomé, Álvaro de Caminha), Sotomayor had been a secretary to the late King Philip and became an effective second in command. He had come out to the Indies in a flotilla of his own in May 1509.

  Ponce de León did his best to have his authority in the new colony confirmed. For example, he gave a gold entrepreneur, Gerónimo de Bruselas—presumably a Fleming, and a protégé of Conchillos—permission to bring in Indians from outside the island. A similar license was given to Sotomayor.19 But a bigger provider of Indians to the colony was the Triana converso who had initiated the pearl trade, Rodrigo de Bastidas, now established in Santo Domingo, who was laying the foundations of what would become a great fortune.20 Ponce de León then did all he could to ensure the final conquest of the island.21

  The Spanish upheavals and uncertainties, however, had provoked the indigenous Indians of Puerto Rico to protest, and at the beginning of 1511 the cacique, Agueybana, previously looked upon as amiable, convertible, and friendly, organized a rebellion of what were said to be about three thousand men, apparently including some Caribs from Santa Cruz, probably brought to Puerto Rico by Sotomayor after a murderous trawl through the Lesser Antilles. They burned the hacienda of Sotomayor and killed both him and his nephew Diego, an event that led to a cruel “pacification” carried out by Captain Juan Gil of Corunna on behalf of Ponce.

  The Spaniards had been drawn into war with the natives and the Caribs largely because of the settlers’ desire for slaves from the Lesser Antilles, and Puerto Rico, therefore, was very exposed.22

  The Council of the Realm in Castile, meanwhile, decided in favor of Cerón as governor and Díaz de Aux as chief magistrate, and Ponce de León was pushed to one side. He was substituted for as lieutenant-governor by Rodrigo de Moscoso, and then by Cristóbal de Mendoza, another aristocrat of whom Oviedo thought highly: “a man of good birth and a virtuous one, suitable for the job, and even for something much more important.”23 Yet Mendoza soon gave up and was succeeded by Pedro Moreno, from Seville, who imposed an effective calm on the island, the Indians being cowed and their leaders either dead or enslaved. A judge of residencia and member of the large Velázquez family, Sancho Velázquez, arrived as supreme magistrate in 1512.

  Two years later, Ponce de León, back from other adventures, principally in Florida, was again formally named deputy governor—but in effect governor—of Puerto Rico.24 An ambitious intriguer, Francisco Lizaur, Ovando’s ex-protégé, was named chief accountant in San Juan.

  At the end of 1515, the only two surviving caciques of San Juan, Humaco and Daguao, again rose against the Spaniards, the cause being an attempt by Íñigo de Zúñiga to conscript ten Indians to help him against the Caribs. These fights against the Caribs were the most serious of the battles to date with the Indians in the Caribbean, in which the Governor’s large red dog, Becerrillo, played a famous part. He received a salary of the rank of a cross-bowman. By late 1516 the lovely island of Puerto Rico (once Borinquen) was finally in Spanish hands.25

  Columbus had discovered and almost circumnavigated Jamaica in May 1494. He had spent a most uncomfortable time there in 1503–04 at what is now St. Ann’s Bay. That made it even more irritating to his son Diego Colón that, in 1508, the King should have granted the use of it as a base to Alonso de Hojeda and Diego de Nicuesa, two adventurers with whom he was not on good terms. What his father had discovered, he thought, belonged to him. Had not the Admiral spoken of Jamaica as “the most beautiful of the many islands which I have seen in the Indies”?26 (He had, of course, said much the same about Cuba.) This memory led to Diego Colón’s determining to have Jamaica conquered under his own auspices. He put this in the capable hands of Juan de Esquivel.27

  Esquivel is even more anonymous in history than Ponce de León. We have no likeness of him, and little is known of his life. As has been noted, he was a converso of Seville, of a family converted in the late fourteenth century. He probably came to the New World on Columbus’s second voyage. He had been responsible for the subjugation of the east of La Española, with Ponce de León as his deputy.

  Pánfilo de Narváez, Esquivel’s second in command in Jamaica, was, on the other hand, a figure larger than life. He came from Old Castile, being born in the village of Navalmanzano, between Cuéllar and Segovia. He seems to have come out to the New World with one of the minor expeditions of 1498, perhaps with Peralonso Niño. Bernal Diaz wrote of him as a man with a natural authority, tall, with fair hair and a beard tending to red, honorable, sometimes wise but more often imprudent, a good conversationalist with a deep voice, and a good if often careless fighter. He was, as an incident in the later conquest of Cuba made clear, alarmingly capable of serenity when in difficulty.28

  At the request of Diego Colón, and again without any apparent royal instruction, Esquivel and Narváez established the settlement of Sevilla la Nueva, in the north of Jamaica, near the Bay of Glory (La Bahía de Santa Gloria), close to where Columbus had been wrecked in 1503.

  There is a distinction to be made between two accounts of the subjugation of this island. Las Casas wrote that as usual the conquerors treated the Indians with brutality based on trumped-up accusations, and immediately assigned them to properties in order to produce cassava, maize, and cotton for the other islands.29 Oviedo, however, thought that Esquivel carried through his mission as “a good knight,” placing the island under the Spanish flag through the use of force, of course, but also by persuasion, without shedding blood unnecessarily.30

  In 1510, King Fernando was informed of the inadvisability of letting Indians be captured in Jamaica by Spaniards from other islands, because, unlike the Bahamas (Lucays), it was not a “useless island”; it was relatively large and therefore agriculturally promising.31

  Esquivel remained on the island for about three years after its conquest, until he fell from favor both with the Crown and with Diego Colón. He was succeeded in quick order by two hidalgos who were friends of Diego Colón, a certain Captain Perea and then a Burgalés, Captain Camargo. But they lasted only a short time, since the rich chief constable of Santo Domingo, Francisco de Garay, had other ideas. Ambitious and competent, he had married an aunt of Diego Colón, Ana Muñiz de Perestrelo, sister of Columbus’s Portuguese wife, Felipa. He, like Esquivel, had probably come to the New World in 1493 on Columbus’s second voyage. He had found gold and was famous for building one of the first private houses of stone in Santo Domingo. He now returned to Spain and persuaded the King to name him governor of Jamaica. Garay, who had earlier tried and failed to establish a settlement in Guadeloupe, was a Basque. He founded two more settlements in Jamaica that he named Melilla and Oristán; afterwards, he brought cattle, pigs, and horses, many of which ran wild over the island. Peter Martyr, who would soon receive an improbable nomination as abbot of “New Seville,” near St. Ann’s Bay, described the island, from hearsay, as a garden of Eden.32

  Juan Ponce de León, meanwhile, traveling back again from the Old World, made an effort to seize Guadeloupe. This was the largest of the Lesser Antilles and had received its name from Columbus in 1493. But he received a severe check. Peter Martyr left an account:

  When the [Caribs] beheld the Spanish ships, they concealed themselves in a place from which they could spy on all the move
ments of the people who might land. Ponce sent some women ashore to wash shirts and linen, and also some foot soldiers to obtain fresh water, for he had not seen land since he had left Hierro in the Canaries.… The cannibals [sic] suddenly attacked and captured the women, dispersing the men, a small number of whom managed to escape. Ponce did not venture to attack the Caribs, fearing the poisoned arrows that these barbarous man-eaters use with fatal effect. The excellent Ponce, who had boasted that he would exterminate the Caribs as long as he was in a place of safety, was constrained to leave behind his washerwomen and retreat before the islanders.…33

  Among the conquistadors here was the veteran Portuguese black Juan Garrido, who had already been with Ponce de León in Puerto Rico and Florida, and had also been in Cuba.34 The lost women were most probably Canary Islanders.

  But it was not only the West Indies that received the attention of the new generation of conquistadors-cum-explorers. There was tierra firme, that mysterious mainland that people were coming to realize, pace Columbus, was nothing like India or Asia. Thus Juan de la Cosa, with Pedro de Ledesma as constable, set off in 1505 with four caravels for the north coast of South America, which he had visited before, in 1499, with Hojeda and Vespucci. It was la Cosa’s fourth journey across the Atlantic, for even before 1499, he had been on two voyages with Columbus.35 Ledesma and Martín de los Reyes, of Seville, were the financiers.

  As had become de rigueur, the expedition stopped in the Canaries, went toward Guadeloupe, and made landfall in the pearl island, La Margarita. There they offered the usual presents of beads and mirrors to a diversity of Indian caciques and received in exchange parrots, cochineal, pearls, and a great new luxury, potatoes, whose potential was not immediately appreciated. They sailed on to the nearby island of Cubagua and, in the Gulf of Cumaná, found few pearls but much brazilwood. They seized some Indians as slaves and continued on to what later became Cartagena de las Indias, in whose ample bay they met, to their surprise, a flotilla of four ships, led by Luis Guerra of Triana. His elder brother, the merchant Cristóbal, had just been killed by the Indians, and Luis longed to go home. Their expedition had sailed the year before to the Pearl Coast. La Cosa gave him two-thirds of his supply of brazilwood to take back to Spain, as well as half the slaves he had seized.36