Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  This time their expedition was to include soldiers, settlers, judges, priests and all the paraphernalia of colonisation. Skilled technicians in irrigation, animal husbandry and mining were hired. Isabella and Ferdinand ordered taxes and customs dues dropped on goods bought for the new journey. Penalties were decreed for those refusing goods to Columbus and his men. Provisions had to be bought in the great fair at Medina del Campo and as far north as the sailing ports of Vizcaya. The monarchs wanted strict control over the fleet of seventeen vessels and 1,200 to 1,500 men and women, with royal accountants to track cargoes and crews, both outgoing and on the return. All was to be carefully controlled and logged by the expanding royal bureaucracy, with copies sent to Isabella and her husband. A special customs shed was to be organised in Cadiz to receive the bounty sent home, though this was still a royal monopoly with Columbus due to receive an eighth share of the profits. The trip was to have two aims. The first was to colonise and extract gold or whatever other wealth could be found, mined or harvested, and the second was to win souls. ‘Treat the Indians well and lovingly, without upsetting them in any way,’ was the clear instruction. A senior Catalan friar, Bernat Boïl, was to lead the attempt at capturing converts. Special customs sheds in Cadiz were to house the expected treasures.22

  Only 15,000 gold ducats (or 5.625 million maravedís) could be found directly, by raiding funds from the Hermandad. This was almost three times the entire budget for the first voyage but it was still insufficient.23 Royal officials cast around for liquidity and their gaze soon came to rest on a new source of income reaching the royal coffers – the goods confiscated from the Jews whose expulsion had been completed the previous August, just a week after Columbus set sail on his first voyage.24 Envoys were sent out to points along or near the border with Portugal where tens of thousands of Jews crossing the frontier had been searched by zealous local officials who confiscated their gold, silver and other things they were banned from taking with them. Almost 2 million maravedís – enough to have financed the first voyage – had been confiscated from financiers like Rabi Efraim and Bienveniste de Calahorra before they joined the forced exodus, as well as a sum at least twice as much as that which was still owed to them by various debtors. Among the objects taken from Jews and used to raise funds were those made of gold or silver – including coins, rings, jewels, toothpicks, thread, clasps, buckles, cups and spoons. An accompanying haul of silk cloths, shawls, blankets, three Torah covers and at least twenty Torahs also appears to have been sold off to raise funds. Isabella and her husband also wanted the 580 gold pieces found in a mysterious leather bag, apparently abandoned by a group of expelled Jews in Zamora, to be tracked down and its contents handed over.25

  Much of this went into the funding pot for Columbus’s second voyage. Spain’s outcast Jews, whose fate Columbus himself had linked with his first expedition, thus provided more than 5 million maravedís – or funding for five of the seventeen vessels.It was as much as Isabella and her husband had been able to raise from their own funds, via the Hermandad. The rest they took as loans. But money was tight and this time the outlay was large, with costs including the arming of 230 soldiers with armour, guns, crossbows and short lances. Cows, bricks, mortar, plants and quantities of oats, barley, rye and wheat were loaded before the fleet left from Cadiz to the sound of drums, trumpets and broadsides fired by some visiting Venetian vessels recently arrived from England. Calves, goats, sheep, pigs, chickens, wood, sugar and seeds that were to be introduced into the islands were picked up in the Canaries, where they were cheaper and the animals would not need so many days’ feed after they set sail from El Hierro on 13 October. Many of those who sailed on the trip would have to wait one, two or more years for full payment.26

  This was ‘the fleet that we have ordered be prepared for sending to the islands and mainland that we have in the region of the Indies and those [lands] that will be discovered there’, wrote Isabella and Ferdinand.27 A separate, defensive fleet of Basque ships was also on hand in case the Portuguese decided to set out on their own.

  Columbus made the second crossing much more quickly than the first, taking just twenty-one days to reach (and discover) the island of Dominica. The fleet then sailed slowly towards Hispaniola and the settlement at La Navidad, discovering other islands along the way, including Guadalupe – where leg bones and skulls hanging in the doorways of some houses appeared to provide proof of cannibalism. They followed the arc of the Antilles as far as Puerto Rico,28 with Columbus feeling his way towards Hispaniola and eager to push on to La Navidad in order to meet up with Rodrigo de Escobedo, the man he had left in charge. Columbus had ordered de Escobedo to keep for him the ‘four large houses and five small ones’29 that Guacanagari had given him as a present.

  They reached Hispaniola on 22 November and, although the native people were still friendly and willing to barter, the discovery of the decomposed bodies of two unidentifiable men, one with his arms tied to a plank of wood, provoked a growing sense of nervousness. When the following day they found a corpse with a beard – something they had never seen on any of the natives – they knew that at least some of the Spaniards were dead. Messengers from Guacanagari claimed that all the Spaniards had disappeared, some dying from illness while others had trekked inland with a group of women. When Columbus finally reached La Navidad, all he found were the charred remains of the settlement and some old clothes.30 The local people now blamed two other island chiefs, Caonabo and Mayreni, for the massacre, which had taken place just a month earlier. The Spaniards’ greed and pursuit of women had, they said, provoked Caonabo’s attack. A weeping Guacanagari at first claimed he had been injured by the attackers and then, after visiting Columbus on his flagship, helped some of the women picked up on other islands to escape and disappeared with them. Columbus’s vision of the indigenous peoples cowed by his technology and convinced of the heavenly origins of their visitors lay in tatters. More importantly, he had lost the men who were meant to have gathered information that would allow him to start exploring for gold – though it seems they had found little of it, as nothing was discovered when Columbus ordered a search of the settlement’s well (where he had ordered any gold finds to be secretly stored).31

  This time, however, he had Isabella and Ferdinand’s troops.32 If the natives could not be persuaded by good words and gifts into co-operating, or if they actively resisted, force could now be used.

  33

  Dividing Up the World

  Barcelona and Tordesillas, 5 September 1493 to 7 June 1494

  Isabella needed a map. A line had to be drawn in the ocean, dividing the world in two. New lands found on one side of this north–south line would belong to her and Castile.1 Those on the other half belonged to her rivals from Portugal. She also needed a record of the lands found so far to share with her officials and, if necessary, other captains she might choose to despatch west across the Atlantic. ‘The sea chart that you must make for me, once it is ready, you may send later; and, in order to serve me well, give great urgency to your departure so that, with God’s grace, this may happen without delay as, you will understand, this will benefit the whole enterprise,’ she had written to Columbus from Barcelona in September 1493, shortly before he set out on the second voyage. ‘And write to tell us all that there is to know from over there.’

  Columbus had argued for, and thought he had obtained, a dividing line that was a hundred leagues from Portugal’s Cape Verde islands – but Isabella that the matter was still open to negotiation.2 ‘Nothing has been decided with the envoys here, although I believe their King will come to see reason in the matter,’ she said, unaware that Portugal’s João II was determined to strike a much tougher deal. A year later she was still worrying about dividing lines, apparently because she also wanted one in the east – a project that proved impossible. ‘We should like you, if possible, to play a part in the negotiations … See whether your brother or anyone else you have with you can master the question. Brief them very fully orally,
in writing and perhaps with a map, and send them back to us with the next fleet,’ she wrote.3

  Isabella was clear, too, that these new lands belonged to her and Castile alone, rather than to her husband’s Aragonese kingdoms. ‘The discovery and conquest was paid for by these kingdoms of mine and their people,’ she wrote at the end of her life. ‘And that is why the profit from them is something to be dealt with and negotiated in my kingdoms of Castile and León and why everything that comes from them must be brought here, both from the lands that have been discovered so far and from those to be discovered in the future.’4 Even she could not know, however, just how extensive those ‘lands to be discovered’ would eventually prove to be.

  In Christopher Columbus Isabella had found a magnificent explorer, and a disastrous administrator. But Columbus had his titles – as admiral, viceroy and governor – and, as such, was almost a monarch in his new lands. He was still intent on proving that he had discovered a gold-laden arcadia on the eastern edge of Asia. Once he had found La Navidad in ruins and after his ally Guacanagari had run off, he set sail again, seeking a spot closer to the supposed source of gold in the Cibao region of the island where he might build a proper town. Eventually he picked a windswept harbour beside the mouth of the River Bajibonico. Here he would build a town named after Isabella herself, La Isabela. First, however, he sent one of his captains on a forty-five-day round-the-island journey to chart the coastline – thereby obeying Isabella’s instructions to provide her with a map.5

  Columbus was in a hurry to explore further and, crucially, find a source of gold. He needed to disembark his people and send some of the fleet home. His descriptions of the site of La Isabela were idyllic – close to fresh water, well protected by the jungle, with fields that could be easily cultivated and a huge harbour. They were also exaggerated. The harbour was exposed to strong northerly winds, vessels often had to anchor more than half a mile from shore and drinking water was a full mile away. La Isabela would turn out to be a poor emplacement, but, rather than think about geography, Columbus based his choice on his conviction that this was a good place from which to hunt for gold mines.6

  The colonisers set about the construction of the first European town in the Americas with verve, using good local stone for the public buildings. Among the most important buildings was the combined customs house and armoury that would house Isabella’s officials – and symbolise her rule over this lush, verdant spot. A church that Isabella would fill up with statues and silver ornaments sent from Spain, as well as an altar cloth from her own collection, was built in under a month. A governor’s house known as the Royal Palace and a hospital were also at the top of the list of new public buildings. They sounded grand, but were almost certainly modest in size. At the same time Isabella’s bureaucracy at home had set about establishing the system and institutions that could both govern and manage the profits that her new lands were expected to deliver. That profit was meant to come, above all, from gold. Columbus despatched an expedition of twenty men into the interior, convinced that they were just three or four days’ march from where he imagined the gold mines were. They returned without finding any mines, but with samples of gold provided by local Indians and reports that the precious metal could be found by sifting in rivers.7

  On 4 February 1494, Columbus sent most of the fleet – twelve of seventeen vessels plus 300 or more men – back to Spain. The fleet was captained by Antonio de Torres, who was given written instructions about what to tell Isabella and Ferdinand when he arrived. The truth was that Columbus had little to boast about. For many of his men, the grand adventure had already turned sour. Sickness, hard work and scarce supplies made life on Hispaniola miserable. ‘On top of all these hardships was the anguish and sadness of realising that they were so far away from their homeland and so far from finding a quick solution to their problems while also seeing themselves cheated of the gold and riches which they had promised themselves,’ said Las Casas. With La Navidad destroyed and its inhabitants dead, Columbus had been forced to start the process of reconnoitring Hispaniola – which was almost as big as mainland Portugal – from scratch. He had little more to show Isabella and her husband than his charts, some tropical fruits, his colourful accounts and a small amount of gold. The vessels made the return crossing without trouble, reaching Cadiz on 7 March. An excited Isabella and Ferdinand immediately ordered Torres to travel to Medina del Campo to see them.8

  Columbus’s instructions about what Torres was to say to Isabella and her husband see him desperate to paint a rosy picture of what – to all effects – was a disaster. Torres told her that many of the men had fallen sick, others were refusing to obey orders and they were desperate for food, wine and medicines from home. The supposedly fertile land was not producing what they wanted, gold was, he claimed, easy to find yet – mysteriously – he had been unable to obtain any. And the peace-loving natives were turning out to be much more warlike than he had thought, especially those led by a chieftain called Caonabo. He needed more men, more supplies and specialists in sifting9 for gold in rivers, as he had failed to find any mines.10 He had nothing to pay for them except for the one export good that was sure to find an easy market – slaves.

  Torres informed Isabella and her husband, however, that success was assured. La Isabela was well positioned, he claimed, and lay in a rich region where the rivers were full of gold and mines could not be far away, while spices were clearly set to prove another lucrative source of income. ‘Tell their Highnesses that I wanted to send them a far greater amount of the gold to be found here, and would have done so had most of our people here not suddenly fallen ill,’ Columbus had written in his instructions, adding that his men also risked being attacked if they did not go out in force. ‘These are the reasons why the fleet has not waited and they are only being sent samples.’11

  With his men ill, Columbus wanted Isabella and her husband to know that he was having trouble constructing a well-defended settlement and, though the local indigenous people seemed completely peaceful, he dared not drop his guard. ‘The other men who remained here [after the first voyage], though they were few, failed to take proper precautions,’ Torres was to tell the monarchs. ‘Yet [the Indians] would never have dared attack them had they seen that they were properly prepared.’ He put the illnesses that now smote the men and women with him down to the change of air and water. They missed their normal diet of fresh meat, bread and wine and he asked for honey, sugar, raisins and almonds to be sent to help restore their strength. He also hoped that the gold he was sending would be enough for a local Seville merchant to pay – or provide an advance for – two caravels laden with wine, wheat and other goods.12

  There was barely anything else to send back. The attempts at farming and self-sufficiency had, so far, failed. Sugar cane, which had proved an important crop in the Canaries and Azores, looked promising, but would take time. In the meantime, the colony was costing more than it produced. That left just one form of trade that was both easy and lucrative – in human beings. Columbus justified his decision to send back slaves by claiming that the people he had caught were cannibals and so were fair game. ‘In these ships are being sent some cannibals – men, women, boys and girls – who their Highnesses can order to be placed in the power of people with whom they can best learn our language, teaching them also other skills,’ Torres was to tell Isabella and her husband. ‘They will learn more quickly over there than here, and will become better interpreters.’ At first sight, then, his main interest was in giving his captives an immersion course in Spanish or preventing them from eating other people, but his letters to Spain revealed deeper, financial needs. ‘The more we send over there the better. And their Highnesses could be served in the following way: that given how bad the need here is for cattle and for working animals in order to sustain the people who will eventually be here … their Highnesses can award licences and permits for a sufficient number of caravels to come every year, bringing the cattle and other goods so that the countr
y areas can be populated and the land worked,’ he said. ‘These things could be paid for in slaves taken from among these cannibals, who are so wild and well built and with a good understanding of things, that we think they will be finer than any other slaves once they are freed from their inhumanity, which they will lose as soon as they leave their own lands. And there could be many of them … with their Highnesses receiving their dues over there.’13 Isabella, in other words, could make a lot of money out of the relatively simple business of capturing people and sending them to Europe as slaves. He initially preferred not to enslave any of the friendly Taíno of Hispaniola who were ‘your Highnesses’ vassals’, saying that he would rather capture slaves from the rival Carib people who lived on the islands and, he reported, were cannibals.14