Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  These were extraordinary journeys in utterly unknown territory, carried out with determination and imagination despite the hardships deriving from heat or attacks by insects and beasts of the jungle, as well as uncertainties about the route.

  It is not easy to identify the tribes of this territory. But the region was inhabited by people speaking either Coiba or Cuera, or dialects of them. They cultivated many vegetables, with maize and manioc predominating. Meat was preserved by smoking—deer, iguana, turtles, and duck. Birds were caught in nets. Fish and shellfish were important in the diet. Chicha, beer from maize, was the customary drink.

  These tribes lived in towns of often up to 1,500 people, usually fortified by log palisades and with houses of various sizes, those of the caciques sometimes being large. Inside there were, as usual among indigenous Americans, hammocks or benches, blankets, baskets, and aprons.

  Most of these peoples painted themselves or were tattooed, and most leaders wore ornaments—helmets of gold, feather headdresses, nose plugs, labrets, necklaces, and so on. Metalworking was highly developed among these people, who had invented many methods of casting, plating, soldering, and cold-hammering. They had pottery and made baskets. Their chiefs lived in luxury; there were many slaves, unlike what prevailed among the Tainos.

  All in this territory seem to have had standing armies of sorts, equipped with spears, darts, and bows and arrows. There were ball games of the same kind as those in the Taino territories, but the ceremonies were richer.22

  After many delays and one or two false starts, Pedrarias left Sanlúcar de Barrameda on Holy Tuesday, April 11, 1514. He had twenty-three ships, of which nine were caravels (four Portuguese), two were old caravels for the transport of passengers or cargo, four were brigantines, similar to pinnaces, and eight were fishing boats. Fourteen of these vessels belonged to the King, and three had been privately hired (one jointly by Fernández de Enciso and a biscuit merchant, Juan López). One had been provided for merchandise by the Madrid banker Alonso Gutiérrez, who was then involved in every kind of maritime adventure. A converso from Burgos (and future conquistador in Mexico), Juan de Burgos, owned another ship, while the land distributor of La Española, Rodrigo de Alburquerque, possessed another, and Pedrarias himself was the proprietor of a third, which sounds like a large barge.

  Another caravel, the Santa María, was added to the fleet in the Canaries. This carried a soldier, Juan de Zurita, and two other men whose mission was to train Canary Island soldiers who, it was thought, would play a helpful part in the conquest. This was the only ship in the fleet whose captain, Juan de Camargo, had permission to stop at Santo Domingo.

  In the end, the fishing boats did not sail, nor did the brigantines, either because they were in a bad state or because they had been overloaded. Four other vessels were taken instead, under the command of a carpenter of Sanlúcar, Cristóbal Márquez.23 All these were carefully stocked so as to avoid the overloading that was officially held accountable for the disaster that had occurred at the beginning of Ovando’s journey in 1502.

  The cost of the expedition was over 10 million maravedís, a figure that made it much the most expensive undertaking yet mounted by Castile in the New World.24

  The commander, Pedrarias, was an unusual choice. Whatever justifiable complaints may be made about his cruelty, his arrogance, and his impetuosity, his audacity at leading a great expedition to the New World in his sixties cannot be gainsaid. He came from a very interesting and famous converso family of Segovia, though in behavior he was far from what is usually associated with Jewry, being turbulent, intemperate, unpredictable, and the reverse of an intellectual. He was the younger brother of the Count of Puñonrostro, and had been variously known at court as “the Jouster,” “the Gallant,” and “the Great Courtier.” His grandfather had been Diego de Arias, “Diegarias,” treasurer of Castile under Enrique IV, while his father, the second Count of Puñonrostro, had also been known as Pedrarias “the Brave.” An uncle, Juan de Arias, had been for years Bishop of Segovia and a pioneer of Spanish printing. Later, he became the effective leader of those in Segovia who protested against the high-handed behavior of the commander of the Alcázar, the favorite of Queen Isabel, the Marquis of Moya, Andrés de Cabrera, by whom he was exiled. The Inquisition had preferred a charge of heresy against Bishop Arias in 1491, and the Crown supported the Holy Office, winning a subsequent argument with the papacy. But Bishop Juan died before the matter could come to court.

  Pedrarias the conquistador was tall, with a pale complexion, green eyes, and red hair. He had probably been born in 1450. Thus, in the words of Las Casas, he was “a man of a considerable age and was over sixty” when he went to the Indies.25 He had been page to two kings of Castile, first Juan II and then Enrique IV. He married Isabel de Bobadilla, daughter of the Francisco de Bobadilla who had governed La Española between 1500 and 1502 and had been drowned after sending home the Columbuses in chains. She was therefore also the niece of Beatriz de Bobadilla, the great friend of Queen Isabel, and had been a lady-in-waiting to Isabel’s daughter, poor Juana, at her ill-fated wedding in Brussels.

  Pedrarias had been one of the deputies to Pedro Navarro, the great specialist in mines, in the African campaign of 1510. The grant of arms of 1512 mentions him as having been in “the Holy Conquest of Granada and Africa … in the capture of Oran where you stood out honorably and also in the capture of Bugía.”26 But there was more to report than just hard work by him in that war. Pedrarias having apparently been mortally wounded in Africa, his relations decided to bury him in the monastery of Our Lady of the Cross, on the outskirts of Torrejón, near Madrid, but when he was already in his coffin, one of his servants, giving him a last embrace, found that he was alive. This incident decisively affected “the Gallant,” and he obtained yet one more nickname, “the Revived One.” Thereafter, every year he had a solemn requiem in a coffin to thank God for saving him at the last minute.

  Pedrarias’s salary in Castilla de Oro would be a little more than what had been paid to Ovando: 366,000 maravedís a year, with half advanced to him on his nomination.

  His principal bankers and suppliers were Juan de Córdoba, the silversmith of Seville who was a friend of the Columbus family, and the every-year-more-powerful Genoese bankers, the Centuriones and the Grimaldi.27 Indeed from this time onward, Gaspare Centurione (Gaspar Centurión), whose money depended originally on the wheat trade to Seville, was to be found at the heart of every expedition to the New World. Other Genoese, Agustín Vivaldo and Nicolas Grimaldi, were expressly allowed to establish themselves and their agents in tierra firme and “conduct trade there as if they were Spaniards.”28 In addition, Pedro Báez, Pedrarias’s majordomo, declared before leaving Castile that he had received 10,500 maravedís from another Grimaldi, Agustín, in the name of Bernardo, his brother, to buy supplies in Seville.29 A conquistador named Hernando de Soto, from Villanueva de la Serena, in Extremadura, later famous in Florida, explained that he obtained a loan of 3,000 maravedís from Juan Francisco de Grimaldi, while Fernández de Enciso, Pedro Camacho, Juan Fernández de Enciso (perhaps a brother of the geographer), and the merchant Gonzalo de Sevilla undertook to return 225 ducats to Juan Grimaldi and Centurión, which they had been lent for the equipment of their ships.30 Sancho Gómez de Córdoba, a courtier, gave authority to Juan Francisco de Grimaldi and Gaspar Centurión, as well as to Juan de Córdoba, so that they could take three black slaves with them. Thus this second great royal expedition to the New World had, even more than the first under Columbus, a distinctly Genoese flavor.

  Despite this participation of the Genoese, the expeditionaries were of course mostly Spaniards. Peter Martyr even had difficulty in getting a passage for an Italian botanist, Francesco Coto; he finally did, thanks explicitly to the King.31

  Pedrarias took with him about two thousand men, “all chosen from hidalgos and distinguished men,”32 who included, according to Pascual de Andagoya, one of his captains, “the most lucid people from Spain that had ever
left those shores.”33 Estimates for the number of participants also reach three thousand.34 In fact, the original list had been fixed at eight hundred.35

  The list of those who accompanied “the Gallant” included many of his special friends, among them Pascual de Andagoya himself, whose part in subsequent conquests in Peru would be important.36 There were also Martín Fernández de Enciso, who was invited because “he had experience of the things of the mainland and also of the activities of the fleet.”37 Sebastián de Benalcázar, also later to become famous in Peru; Hernando de Luque, a lay brother who, too, would fight alongside Pizarro; Bernardino Vázquez de Tapia, who would fight at the side of Cortés in Mexico; Hernando de Soto, of fame in both Peru and Florida; Diego del Almagro, the ally and then the enemy of Pizarro; and Diego de Tovilla, a chronicler of Pedrarias’s regime (in the book La Barbárica).38

  There were, too, Alonso de la Puente, treasurer, once secretary to the Infante Fernando; Diego Márquez, accountant, general supervisor on Columbus’s second voyage, who had been lost for six curious days on Guadeloupe in 1493; Juan de Tavira, supervisor and a protégé of the Queen of Portugal; and the future historian Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, a protégé of Fonseca’s who, though already thirty-six years old, had not yet found his métier. He was to concern himself with mines in Castilla de Oro and the melting down of gold.

  Oviedo, whose family was from Asturias, seems to have derived from a long line of converso notaries. He had begun his career in 1485 as gentleman-in-waiting of the Duke of Villahermosa, bastard of King Juan II of Aragon and the first commander of the national Hermandades. He went in 1491 to the court of the Infante Juan and was then in Naples with Don Fadrique, Duke of Calabria. He married first Margarita de Vergara, said to have been the most beautiful woman in Toledo, whose fair hair was famous for reaching to the ground and who died in childbirth; and then Isabel de Aguilar, by whom he had two children. He had been notary of the Inquisition in 1507 and was then at the court of Naples. He would have liked to return to Italy but never did.39

  As we have seen, a Bishop Quevedo also accompanied Pedrarias. That prelate had been designated bishop of “Betica Aurea” in Castilla de Oro, with his seat at Darien. He was supported by a dean, Juan Pérez de Zalduendo, the priest of Torrijos (who had already been to Santo Domingo) as well as an archdeacon, a precentor, various canons, three sacristans, and an archpriest, not to mention at least six Franciscans.40 The Bishop was equipped with an episcopal ring, of course, a silver staff, and a pectoral cross, as well as chasubles, holy candles, carpets, missals, altars, incense burners, chalices, several silver crosses, and six religious pictures. No concession in these consignments was made to tropical living.41 Pedrarias’s passengers included many well-dressed Castilian gentlemen; some reached Darien in “silk tunics and many were in brocade.”42 Some of these gallants had been in the wars in Italy, where, as the King himself said, they had become “accustomed to very great vices.”43

  Travel was free for all passengers or emigrants, as were provisions for the first month after arrival. By then it was supposed that all would have found enough to live on. But in order to avoid shortages, food for another year and a half was also loaded, to be sold later at reasonable prices. For four years emigrants could take back to Spain, free of all taxes, salt, pearls, and precious stones—once the royal fifth had been paid, of course—and during the same period they could count on being free of all lawsuits!44

  Several native slaves originally from tierra firme (though not that part of it to which Pedrarias was going) accompanied this expedition, as well as fifty so-called Indians who had been shipped to Spain from La Española and who were supposed to know about gold mining.45 Finally, the King, though ill and tired, invested 20.75 million maravedís in the journey and concerned himself in many details of the planning, more than in any other such endeavor since 1492. Like his subjects, he had been mesmerized by the letter of Núñez de Balboa that had told of the gold resources of the colony. He thought the enterprise “one of the most important in the world.”46 He believed that to delay departure even a single day would be a great loss to the expedition.

  Money did not seem to be in short supply. Cristóbal de Morales, a painter from Seville who had decorated the audience room of the Casa de Contratación, designed for Pedrarias a splendid royal swallow-tailed pennon, with lions and eagles. There were, too, three silk flags painted by Pedro Ramírez, one of Our Lady of La Antigua, one of Santiago the Apostle, and another of the Cross of Jerusalem. Firearms were bought at the royal factory in Malaga, while most of the rest of the war matériel was obtained in Vizcaya. Diego Colón was asked to send interpreters to Pedrarias, though the order did not take into account how the languages of La Española differed from those of the Panamanian isthmus.

  Pedrarias went out of his way to hire the best pilots: the pilot of his flagship, also appointed by the King, was Juan (Giovanni) Vespucci, a nephew of Amerigo, who, like his uncle, had been born a Florentine. Juan Serrano (afterwards with Magellan) became the chief pilot of the fleet. Vicente Yáñez de Pinzón was to have been pilot on the Santo Espíritu but had to withdraw for reasons of health, and was succeeded by Rodrigo Yáñez, probably his son.47

  Most of these expeditionaries were attracted by the promise of land as well as of gold; after all, the King had said: “It is our wish that we will divide up houses, sites, lands, farms … making a distinction between infantry and foot soldiers, and those of a lesser grade and worth.”48

  The King recommended to the Casa de Contratación that neither the children of those “reconciled” with the Inquisition should be permitted to go to the Indies, nor the grandchildren of those who had been burned as heretics on the advice of the Holy Office. Several such persons in fact found their way on board, for example, Maestre Enrique, a Portuguese surgeon. The prohibition would have excluded Las Casas; perhaps that was one of the intentions. Lawyers were also forbidden, an unprecedented restriction.49

  Numerous servants traveled with the expedition, some specially hired for a two-year period. There were also a number of black slaves, for example, twelve attached to Pedrarias himself, ten to Alonso de la Puente, and three to Sancho Gómez de Córdoba.

  The military equipment is of much interest, since it was a mixture of the old and the new, for Pedrarias took with him forty arquebuses, two small falconets (light cannon), six ribadoquines (bronze cannon), nearly two hundred swords with decorated scabbards, five hundred pikes, fifty lances for use on horseback, eight hundred short lances, fifty iron maces, and two hundred daggers from Villareal, their sheaths sold to the expedition by a certain Bartolomé Muñoz of the Calle Sierpes in Seville.

  There had been discussion as to what kind of armor would be best. Some thought that tortoiseshell was adequate; others favored a type of doublet padded with cotton or wool, known as an escuapil. The Indians, after all, never had more than this. In the end, that self-styled specialist in the Gulf of Urabá, Fernández de Enciso, had the last word: he recommended tin breastplates, with attached sidepieces, available at 500 maravedís each. Once arrived at Castilla de Oro, every man given this armor would be asked to pay 3 ducats for it, the equivalent of two months’ salary. Pedrarias also took with him over seven hundred helmets with little wings. He bought one thousand wooden shields made from “dragon trees” from the Canary Islands.

  Much of this equipment was supplied by Basque merchants, mainly from Azpeitia, Eibar, San Sebastián, and Durango.50 Indeed, nearly 700,000 maravedís were spent in the Basque country, and with these purchases, families later so famous as the Aguirres, Motricos, Ibarras, and Arriolas enter into Spanish economic history. The guns themselves, however, came mostly from Malaga.

  Pedrarias carried thirty-five pipes of wine and corn, two barrels of honey, sixty arrobas of vinegar, and sixty of oil. Licenciado Barreda and his chemist, Solórzano, stocked up with many medicaments for “the first pharmacy of the New World.”51 Carters were among those who profited—people who carried the goods from Sanlúcar e
l Mayor, Malaga, or the Basque country.

  Pedrarias had planned to leave behind in Spain his wife, Isabel de Bobadilla. But she came of a tough, experienced family, and when he proposed this, she wrote:

  My dear husband, we have been united from our youth, as I think, for the purpose of living together and never being separated. Wherever destiny may lead you, be it on the tempestuous sea or be it among the hardships that await you on land, I should be your companion. There is nothing that I should more fear, nor any kind of death that might threaten me, which would not be more supportable for me than to live without you and be separated by a great distance. I would rather die or be eaten by fish in the sea or devored on land by cannibals than to consume myself in perpetual mourning and unceasing sorrow awaiting not my husband but his letters.… The children whom God has given us [there were nine of them] will not stop me for a moment. We will leave them their heritage and their marriage portion, sufficient to enable them to live in conformity with their rank, and, besides, I have no other preoccupation.52

  In the end, she took two of her children with her. Isabel was not the first governor’s wife to accompany her husband to the New World. That honor had fallen to María de Toledo, the wife of Diego Colón. But Isabel went to a far more savage colony.

  25

  “A man very advanced in excess”

  He is very old for these parts and suffers very much from the great illness that has never left him for a day since he arrived. He is a man very advanced in excess.

  Balboa on Pedrarias, 1515

  Pedrarias’s fleet set off, he himself on the caravel Our Lady of the Conception. The most interesting ship’s captain was Alonso Quintero of the Santa Catalina. A native of Palos, he had been carrying passengers and merchandise from Seville to Santo Domingo for ten years and more. Among his clients in 1506 had been Hernán Cortés, who by 1513 had of course moved from Santo Domingo to Cuba.