Toward the Setting Sun

by David Boyle

  At least Ferdinand and Isabella had believed they would convert, but Manuel had no such excuse. So when Portugal’s Jewish community—many of them facing this kind of deadline for the second time—arrived at the dockside to leave, they were met by mobs backed by soldiers and priests who had them forcibly baptized. But even then they were not left alone. From a haven of safety for Europe’s Jews, Lisbon became the scene of one of the most horrific series of brutal riots, leaving thousands of converted Jews dead.

  All was not well with Columbus’s company in Seville. Vespucci was dealing with the complexity of his and Berardi’s effective monopoly on equipping supply ships for the Indies. His former employers in Florence were now fighting for their very survival and he could hardly rely on them. Berardi was increasingly infirm—exacerbated by the stress of the heavy debts he incurred as a result of financing Columbus’s original voyage. There was also little prospect that the meager returns from the voyages to the Indies—a little gold and an embarrassing and unsaleable profusion of slaves—was ever going to pay them off. At this difficult time, the most dangerous threat yet to their business venture emerged. Fonseca, now appointed bishop of Badajoz, though he hardly ever went there, was determined to wrest the monopoly on equipping the ships from Vespucci and Berardi. As a consecrated bishop, Fonseca was growing into the personality that would dominate business to and from the Indies for the coming decades. Proud, impatient, bullying, and scrupulously honest, he was also implacably opposed to everything Columbus stood for.

  Berardi had a consummate business mind. His first proposal was to slash the guaranteed cost of fitting and supplying ships from the usual rate of three thousand maravedis per ton to two thousand, plus undercutting the lowest bid by one thousand maravedis, whatever it was. On this basis, he and Vespucci signed a contract to supply twelve ships, four large supply ships in Cadiz to be ready that summer, and two more groups of four ships, also in Cadiz, to be ready within six months. A stream of complaints now issued from Fonseca’s office, claiming that cutting costs on that scale would make the ships unseaworthy. When Vespucci discovered that Fonseca was chartering other ships, Berardi appealed to the sovereigns. Some agonizing weeks later, they were vindicated. Ferdinand and Isabella wrote back: “The bishop will use your ships and not others, and we have so instructed him, even though he has them loaded.”

  At the same time, Berardi was receiving letters from Columbus by way of the returning ships, urging him to resupply the colony. The problem was that most colonists actually wanted to come back and Hispaniola was already in debt to the sum of between 10 and 12 million maravedis, with no prospect of repayment. Columbus’s miscalculations may have been a source of personal embarrassment, but for Berardi it was a very serious threat, especially as he was not well and was relying increasingly on Vespucci to do the work. Something had to give and it was at this point that Berardi put forward a plan of his own.

  The idea was to populate the new islands in such a way that they could increasingly provide for one another’s needs, and to earn money by trading with one another and with Spain. To reach that position required a considerable investment—probably the same amount as had been invested so far—but this time it would be properly managed. The sovereigns retained the right to a fifth of all precious metals and pearls found in the Indies, and if enough colonists went there and brought them back, then this fifth could pay back the investment. What was required was other ways in which new colonists could make fortunes in the Indies. The twelve ships would therefore carry tools, seeds, cattle, and more colonists. These would then stay based in Columbus’s islands and be available to travel and trade between new colonies there or to discover more islands. Notaries, lawyers, and accountants would have to go on the same ships to begin tallying up exactly what was owed to the crown.

  Of the 12 million maravedis required, two would be amortized and 10 million more would be provided by the crown. But at the end of six months, those fifths owed to the sovereigns would begin to pay off the mortgage in such a way that no further investment would be required, and, it might be added, a means would have been created to pay Berardi’s debts as well. The amortization plan would have to be underpinned by new rules that governed investors. Anyone who wanted to try their luck in the Indies would be assigned to a commander and would have to buy a license to conquer and settle some land. They would have to finance their basic costs, and a fifth of the profits they made over and above that investment would go to the crown.

  It was a bold proposal and, as much as anything else, the foundation of the economic underpinnings of Europe’s transatlantic empires. It also subtly recognized what Vespucci had begun to suspect, that Columbus might not have discovered islands near the Indies after all, so gold and spices might never be forthcoming. The difficulty was that combined with the cost-cutting they had agreed to with the ship supply contracts, the exhausting workload could only get heavier. But Vespucci, ever efficient, managed to prepare the first four of these supply ships by August 1495, and Columbus’s former friend, the royal butler Juan Aguardo, was appointed to command them. He was charged also by the sovereigns to investigate the complaints made by Boyle and Margarit and report back.

  With the slave shipments from Hispaniola finally suspended, the Columbus brothers were back where they had been before with no way of paying their debts. Most of the inhabitants of Isabella were seriously weakened by malnutrition, syphilis, dysentery, and malaria. The ability of the new colonists to feed themselves depended on supplies from Castile, and they had to be paid for. There had to be a way of extracting gold from the island.

  The system devised by the Columbus brothers was brilliantly simple. It was also, according to Las Casas, “a moral pestilence… invented by Satan.” But it was not unprecedented, and related systems were to emerge in many other empires over the centuries, from Mexico and Peru to British India. The gold was to be extracted by taxation. Every adult native of the island over the age of fourteen had to provide a tiny brass bell, called a hawk’s bell, of gold, about a thimbleful, exhaustingly panned from the rivers. If they lived in an area that was known to have little gold, or too far from the rivers, they could pay the tax with twenty-five pounds of spun cotton instead. It was a tragic irony that the hawk’s bells, brought over by Columbus to delight the Indians, were now to become a symbol of their oppression.

  For a race that was unused to heavy work, this was disastrous. Their agrarian economy provided the Tainos with sufficient food for their needs without hard labor. Like later imperial administrations, it may even have been that Columbus’s council, which had once hailed the natives as noble innocents, was offended by the Tainos’ slow pace of life and their easy access to necessities. Either way, what small amounts of gold the Tainos possessed was the fruit of generations of work, and extracting it from the soil or riverbeds was extremely difficult and impossibly exhausting and humiliating, especially when the lowest Castilian convict demanded to be treated by any passing Taino as if he were royalty. Those that managed to pay the tax were rewarded with a copper token. Those without copper tokens were hunted down with hounds and hanged in groups of thirteen—in memory of Christ and the apostles. By the end of the decade, there were 340 gallows across Hispaniola. Some Tainos escaped to the mountains; others fought back, incurring the most horrific reprisals against their families.

  Regimes that institutionalize even the mildest tyranny seem to in effect remove any qualms rulers might have about further brutality, and so it was on Hispaniola. The new taxation regime was enforced with a series of campaigns all over the island led by Ojeda and Bartholomew Columbus, who was gaining a reputation for severity almost as fearsome as Ojeda’s. These campaigns were partly to install a chain of forts across the island, partly to seek out sources of gold, and partly to reinforce the message that rebellion would be a serious mistake. When rumors emerged about gold in any location, brutal roving bands would descend on the locals and terrify them into providing more information about the source, even wh
en it never existed. “Infinite was the number of people I saw burned alive,” wrote Las Casas a few years later, describing how they forced this information out of the miserable Tainos.

  It was said that what horrified the Tainos most about the new arrivals wasn’t their violence or their greed, it was their coldness—their lack of human emotion. Often there was no purpose in the brutality at all. Las Casas describes how groups of colonists “made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head with one blow; or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babes from their mother’s breast by their feet, and dashed their heads on the rocks.” There were horrific descriptions of villagers watching while colonists honed the blades of their swords, only to have them test the sharpness by putting the observers to death.

  The combination of all this cruelty was disastrous for the miserable Tainos, who had so enchanted Columbus less than four short years before. As well as the brutal killings—organized or spontaneous—the diversion of farmers away from the land was even more fatal as the effects of famine were beginning to appear. Columbus had also brought cattle with him on the second voyage and began using the Castilian methods of cattle ranching, which tended to devastate everything that grew in the area, leading very quickly to soil erosion—just what had happened on the Cape Verde Islands and Madeira. Those natives who worked with the colonists found themselves shunned by their own people. Even Chief Guancanagarí, who had helped Columbus save the stores from the stricken Santa Maria, died ruined and wandering alone in the mountains.

  By 1495, according to Peter Martyr, up to 50,000 Tainos had died. The population of Hispaniola at the time has been variously estimated at between 300,000 and 8 million. The speed of the destruction of the Tainos population depends on which figure you believe. But two years later, after the imposition of the taxation system, perhaps a third of the population of the islands had been killed or died from the famine or the diseases brought over by their conquerors, mainly influenza. By 1507 only 60,000 were left; by 1542, only 200.*

  What has become apparent only recently was that the agents of this oppression, the settlers who had joined Columbus so greedily and hopefully on his second voyage, were themselves suffering under a form of tyranny. It was milder than that suffered by the Tainos, but it was just as bitterly resented. To be fair to Columbus, he clearly decided that fear was the only option open to him to control his disparate and recalcitrant followers, but his judgment was nonetheless disastrous and his policies erratic.

  It soon became clear that he was ignoring instructions from Queen Isabella, not just about slavery, but about the prices he should charge for food, the rations he should allow, and the punishments he should inflict. His strict policy on baptism—only for children—was designed to maximize his choice of slaves, because Christians could not be enslaved. It was bitterly resented by the colonists, especially when their native mistresses were refused baptism because it meant they could not marry them. Columbus’s insistence that colonists should attend mass was equally unpopular, as was his refusal to allow rations to be given to anyone who was ill. Those caught swapping gold for food were whipped through the streets. Those selling it were hanged.

  Queen Isabella had also insisted that all malefactors should be sent home, with records of the evidence against them, for punishment in Castile. But the Columbus brothers preferred unexpected and often brutal punishments instead, often on the basis of rumor alone. “His guilt is written on his forehead,” Columbus said, condemning one colonist. Others were tortured to death.

  In October 1495 the beleaguered colonists in the new city of Isabella were relieved at last by the sight of four sets of sails on the horizon, cautiously making their way around the reefs of Hispaniola. But the relief Bartholomew Columbus felt about the badly needed supplies was tempered by the discovery of who was on board.

  Landing by the makeshift dock at Isabella, Juan Aguardo had the trumpets sounded to herald his arrival, followed by a contingent of soldiers. Marching up to the government building, he immediately began counter-manding Bartholomew’s orders. There was a scene outside as Bartholomew tried to delay him by questioning the authenticity of his papers. Aguardo responded by taunting him about how displeased the sovereigns had become. Bartholomew sent an urgent message to his brother to return as soon as possible to tackle the most serious threat to their authority so far.

  Aguardo began immediately investigating the situation on Hispaniola. He discovered that almost everyone on the island was ill and desperate to go home, and this was the main reason the new colony was still so dependent on supplies—few had either the health or the will to start cultivating crops. Almost nobody was interested in putting down roots. They just wanted to leave. It had not been Aguardo’s intention to stay on Isabella any longer than he absolutely had to. But shortly after his arrival, a hurricane swept through the Caribbean, tearing off the roofs of houses and swamping part of the shore. This was the storm that ended Columbus’s ambitions to explore northward but it also flung Aguardo’s ships onto the beach, smashing them beyond repair. Of all the ships anchored off the coast, only Columbus’s favorite, the Niña, escaped. Until the next fleet arrived from Castile, or they could rig up some interim solution, Aguardo was trapped with Columbus.*

  If the Italian Renaissance was, at its heart, about money, banking, and investment as much as it was about art, as historians say today, then Berardi epitomized it. In his house in Seville, where he lived with Vespucci—a small piece of Florence transported to Castile—they had debated the emerging shape of the world, tried to teach groups of Tainos to speak Castilian Spanish, and soothed Columbus’s tortured brain on his visits. But now the period of Vespucci’s life dominated by his great friendship with Berardi was coming to an end. Berardi was on his sickbed, exhausted by months of political battles with Fonseca and the overwhelming tasks of supplying the vessels for the Indies, carrying the weight of Columbus’s debt, and lobbying at court on Columbus’s behalf about money he believed was owed to him.

  There was some respite in October when 40,000 maravedis from the sale of slaves from the Indies appeared in the accounts, just before the ban, allowing the company to cobble together more supplies for Columbus. Berardi continued to work on his fleets, but his health was failing fast. On December 14, 1495, he wrote his will, setting out in some detail how to handle his personal debts. The will undertook to pay all his creditors, but it was also realistic: Paying his creditors depended on Columbus repaying the 180,000 maravedis, which were to be paid to his executors, one of whom was Vespucci, who he described as “my agent and special friend.”

  The following morning the lawyers gathered around his bed to witness the signing of the will, only too aware that the prospect of Columbus ever being able to repay his debt was increasingly remote. By now Berardi was too weak to hold a pen. But he made his mark and slipped into a coma and died in the evening. He was only thirty-eight. Businesses then tended to be inherited by the partners, so Vespucci was now alone as agent for an undertaking that was both exhausting and possibly unviable.

  I

  “One crew member on the topsail called Navarro shouted ‘Land ahoy! Land ahoy!’ Everyone was so excited that he who expressed it least came across as the craziest, as anyone would feel in such a state.”

  Spanish transatlantic sailor, 1521

  Cabot was in London. He had been employed by some of the Bristol merchants a few months earlier to put their case to the Danish ambassador about Bristol’s trade with Iceland. It was more evidence of his peculiar charisma that he should have been employed in this way by Amerike’s faction among the Bristol merchants and so soon after his arrival. But this time, armed with introductions arranged by Amerike, he was there—probably around November 1495—to put forward the case that he lead an English voyage of exploration and trade to the Indies. And these would be the real Indies, he emphasized, not those islands discovered by Columbus.

  Cabot was not a man to operate in a city quietly, and he soon became known
to one of the few others in London with genuine knowledge and interest in the Indies. This was a rare thing in Cabot’s recent life—a genuine stroke of luck. Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis was an Augustinian or Austin friar. He may have been sworn to poverty, but he was also an emerging prince of the church, the deputy papal tax collector in England, and a recognized theologian, originally from Pavia in Italy but now living in London. He was in close contact with the Minim friars, who had led the expedition under Bernardo Boyle, and through their stories—and scandalous descriptions of Columbus’s attempt at colonization—had become fascinated with the whole idea of exploration. But he had also been Henry VII’s emissary to Milan, in which role he must have met Cabot when he was living there. Carbonariis had the contacts and the interest to drive Cabot’s plans to fruition, and with his protection and friendship, and leaving his family in Bristol, Cabot moved into the palatial London abbey of the Austin Friars.

  Austin Friars, with its dominating spire, included an abbey, a famous library, and extensive grounds, with Throgmorton Street on its south side and the city walls on the north. From the accommodation there, visitors could gaze over the walls across the Moorfields, with its skaters on the frozen ponds in winter, to the fields of Finsbury and the village of Islington in the distance. That was where, amid the black habits, Cabot spent his evenings. But during the day he was following up on any contacts in the city who might provide him with the investment he needed.

  The original scheme with the Columbus brothers had involved generating investment from the Spinola family—who had recently been helping Bartholomew Columbus—and there Cabot proceeded, past the other offices of the Italian banking houses on Lombard Street, to the Genoese bankers Agostino and Benedetto Spinola, with whom Carbonariis had close links. It was they who agreed to back Cabot’s voyage, conditional of course on getting royal backing. Then the area of activity shifted westward, down Ludgate Hill, across the Fleet River, and past the great palaces of the Strand to Westminster, and the lawyers and court officials Cabot and his backers now needed.