Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  Isabella’s new admiral had returned determined to defeat the naysayers who claimed his voyages were a waste of time and money. He dressed in one of Isabella’s favourite male outfits, the habit of a Franciscan friar. He also clothed himself in a heady mix of messianic religiosity, self-interested interpretations of the scriptures, scholarly wisdom, history and myth. In addition he brought with him a fist-sized piece of gold, or gold ore, handed to him by a local chieftain.38 Caonabo, the chieftain who had wiped out the first settlement at La Navidad, travelled with Columbus, along with his brother and thirty other Taíno. Caonabo had died on the journey, but a few months later Isabella met his brother, who had been given the name Diego. He wore a gold chain of 600 castellanos, or some 2,760 grams.39 Isabella soon found herself bombarded with memoranda defending Columbus’s projects and insisting on his personal rights as admiral, governor, viceroy and discoverer. Much of his energy went on ensuring recognition that all this could be passed on to his descendants, cementing their position among the highest families of the land, while he also made vague threats about taking his family back to Genoa. His extravagant financial claims, calculated at up to a quarter of the wealth extracted from the Indies, were secondary. Glory, self-justification and rank were what most preoccupied him.40 Nor was he above the odd resentful reference to the sovereigns’ original disbelief in his project. ‘Their Highnesses gave me the right and powers of conquest and to reach, thanks to Our Lord God, this entailed estate, though it is true that, after I came to propose this enterprise in their kingdoms, they took a long time before giving me the means to put it into practice,’ he wrote in the document in which he laid down the terms by which his titles should be passed on.41

  Isabella continued to receive complaints from him about how certain people at her court had begun ‘to criticise and belittle the enterprise that had started there, because I had not sent ships full of gold, without taking into account the short period of time that had passed or what I had said about other difficulties’. That was why he had come to see her and Ferdinand to explain ‘about the different peoples I had seen and how so many souls could be saved, bringing with me the obedience of the people of the island of Hispaniola, who agreed to pay tribute and have you as their sovereigns and masters’.42

  He reminded Isabella of all those other great monarchs and emperors – from Solomon to Nero – who had searched in vain for the oriental lands that he was now convinced he had found. Isabella’s Castile, he was telling her, had achieved something that previous great civilisations – Roman, Greek and Egyptian – had failed to do. ‘Not that this was good enough to stop some people who felt like it from criticising the enterprise,’ he wrote. ‘Nor did it help to say that I had never read before of any Princes of Castile who had ever conquered territory outside it … or to point out how the Kings of Portugal have had the heart to persist in Guinea [west Africa] and its discovery.’43

  Isabella and Ferdinand had by now realised that the open-ended project they had started when they sent Columbus off on his first voyage had vast potential, not least because it seemed obvious that there were new lands still to discover. They were grateful to him, aware of his exceptional talents as a navigator, and not that worried about the complaints they were receiving. ‘Your Highnesses’ reply was to laugh and say that I should not worry about anything because you gave no credence or respect to those who spoke badly to you about this enterprise,’ he recalled.44 That did not mean he was the right person to continue leading this remarkable expansion of Isabella’s domains.

  34

  A New Continent

  Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Late May 1498

  The convicts who clambered aboard Columbus’s boats in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River, in the final week of May 1498 were proof that the gold-rush fever that had accompanied previous voyages to Isabella’s new overseas possessions had dimmed. Isabella and Ferdinand had offered reduced sentences to convicts who joined his fleet, in order to find men prepared to go to a place whose reputation diminished with every returning shipload of disgruntled colonists. This time there had been less of a rush to send Columbus back, too, and he had spent part of his two years in Spain thinking up new and extravagant plans, which he sent to Isabella and her husband, for sailing to Calcutta or launching a crusade against Mecca.1 They can have done little to boost her confidence in the Genoese adventurer, whom she nevertheless continued to treat with kindness. She had written to him on separate business, calling him ‘a very special and faithful servant of mine’ and thanking him for his advice and ‘the goodwill and love with which you give it to us, as we have always found with you in all the ways you have served me’.2

  Columbus split his fleet in two. Five ships carried supplies directly to Hispaniola, where Bartolomé was governing in his absence. He himself led an exploratory squadron further south, sailing on the same latitude as Sierra Leone – where the Portuguese had found gold – in the belief that land along the same parallel was often similar. There were also rumours (which he claimed to have heard from Portugal’s João II) that another continent lay to the south of the islands he had found. ‘May Our Lord guide me and allow me to be of service to him and to the king and the queen, our lords, and to the honour of all Christians, as I believe that this route has never been sailed by anyone, and that this sea is completely unknown,’ he wrote. Columbus was right in the latter judgement. It began as another gruelling voyage. They spent eight days becalmed in the doldrums in boiling heat. He then sailed west for as long as he dared without spotting land, but eventually decided to head further north towards the islands he knew. Amazingly, he was right for the second time about the existence of unknown lands across this stretch of unnavigated water. When he finally saw three hills on the horizon and reached an island that he named Trinidad, at the south of the curve of the islands that would be known as the Antilles, he also sailed into the waters flowing out from the vast River Orinoco on the north coast of what is now Venezuela. He was at first perplexed by the presence of this deluge of fresh water, which created fierce currents. Then he realised that such a spate could have been collected only by a land mass of considerable size, even though this did not fit his expected location of Asia. ‘I believe that this is a very large continent that nobody before me has known about,’ he wrote in his diary as he sailed off, effectively noting down the European discovery of South America. But he was not sure and, although his men became the first Europeans to set foot on the new continent when they went ashore on the Paria peninsula, he soon set off north for Hispaniola, while vowing to return at a later date. He could not know just how large this land mass would prove – or how much land it would eventually yield for Spain. By now Columbus had gone almost blind from staring out to sea with squinting, bloodshot eyes and relied on his sailors and pilots to inform him of all they saw.3

  Columbus was now on something more than a mere voyage of exploration and colonisation. A sea captain’s life could be solitary and more so if one was accustomed to keeping secrets from one’s crew or constantly falling out with trusted aides. In moments of great strain he turned to higher forces. The great sailor increasingly saw himself as an agent of God, specially chosen to help spread Christianity and recover Jerusalem.4 Isabella and Ferdinand’s Spain, he declared, had been chosen to fulfil the predictions of Christendom’s revival with the Old Testament prophet Isaiah long ago proclaiming ‘that it was from Spain that the Holy Name would be spread’.5 He continued to fret about gold and spices, but with his position among Castile’s nobility now cemented he appeared more interested in his prominent role in God’s projects than in the annoying administrative details of governing a colony. ‘I do not suffer these hardships in order to find wealth or treasure for myself since I know that all that is done in these times is vain except for that which is for the honour and service of God, which does not mean amassing riches, magnificence or the many other things that we use in this world, to which we are more attached than those things that can
save our souls,’ he wrote. He began to imagine, too, that he was close to discovering the Garden of Eden, traditionally considered to be somewhere in the east.6

  Few of those who travelled with Columbus shared his messianic vision, romantic ideals or occasionally delusional nature. This was driven home as soon as he returned to Hispaniola, where he found the colonists in revolt. The man Columbus had appointed mayor of La Isabela, Francisco Roldán, had rebelled and persuaded fellow colonists that Columbus and his brothers – who were, after all, foreigners – were deliberately preventing them from returning to Spain. He set up a free-wheeling alternative settlement in Jaragua where ‘each had whatever women they wanted, taken by force from their husbands, and they also took girls from their parents to serve as maids, washerwomen and as many other Indians as they desired to serve them’, according to Las Casas.7

  Columbus now sent a fleet of five vessels back to Spain with 600 Indian slaves on board – even though Isabella and her husband had obviously not finished consulting canon law experts on the rights and wrongs of the slavery issue. He also wrote to them claiming that the rebels were a threat to their sovereignty. ‘This Roldán and his men and their supporters had a way of forcing everyone to join them, promising them no work, a free rein, lots to eat, women and, above all, the freedom to do whatever they pleased,’ he told them.8

  Isabella and Ferdinand were asked both to ensure a constant supply of fresh men and to provide a handful of trustworthy friars to improve the settlers’ morals. ‘Of our people there, neither the good nor the bad have fewer than two or three Indians to serve them, dogs to hunt for them and, though one should not say so, women who are so beautiful that it is a wonder,’ they were informed.9 The men had expected gold and spices simply to fall into their hands. ‘They were so blinded by greed that they did not think that, if there was gold, it would be down mines like other metals, or that the spices were on trees, and that they would have to dig for the gold while the spices would have to be gathered and cured … all of which I made clear to them in Seville.’10 But the reality of life in Columbus’s colony was far worse than even the hardiest settlers could have expected and the death rate in the semi-ruined La Isabela was terrible. Syphilis was rife, with up to 30 per cent of the colony suffering. The disease would be yet another, if unwanted, novelty introduced into Europe by Isabella’s returning colonisers.11 Smallpox, typhus, measles and cholera would travel in the opposite direction, to devastating effect.

  Columbus began to panic about the messages reaching Isabella and her husband. He accused Roldán’s faction of telling lies and appealed to Isabella’s lowest instincts by blaming the converso colonists and their Jewish blood for the rebellion.12 ‘This would never have happened had a converso not hatched the plan, because the conversos are enemies of your Highness’s prosperity and of all Christians,’ he wrote. ‘They say that most of those with this Roldán are from their ranks.’13

  Isabella was hearing a very different story from other sources. Returning colonists rioted in front of her, denouncing the Indian project as a monument to Columbus’s deluded vanity. Already Isabella and Ferdinand were licensing other explorers, with the first arriving in May 1499.14 And even before Columbus set sail on his third journey, he had astonished them by reacting violently to a visit by a royal official, Jimeno de Briviesca, whom he attacked, ‘giving him many kicks and tearing at his hair’. Las Casas admitted that the admiral had gone too far. ‘In my opinion, that was the main reason, above all the other complaints and rumours against him … that the highly indignant sovereigns decided to take away his governorship, sending the comendador Francisco de Bobadilla to govern that island and those lands,’ he wrote.15

  In May 1499 Isabella and Ferdinand signed documents appointing Bobadilla – whose original task had been simply to investigate the Roldán rebellion – as governor, ordering that he take back some of the slaves with him. Even then, though, Isabella and Ferdinand hesitated, and Bobadilla had to wait a year before he was given permission to set out. Perhaps they hoped that Columbus, who was much closer to Isabella than to Ferdinand, would resolve the problems himself or, with his undoubted navigational skills, discover new lands that would provide the wealth they had been promised.16

  Bobadilla sailed into Santo Domingo in August 1500, accompanied by just nineteen of the freed Indian slaves. The limp bodies of two men swung from scaffolds on either side of the river mouth. He soon discovered that seven men had been hanged for rebellion that week and a further five were awaiting their turn, while the Columbus brothers had set out on expeditions to track down more rebels. Bobadilla announced that he had come with orders to pay all outstanding salaries – a move guaranteed to win the colonists’ support. Columbus returned to Santo Domingo from his expedition in September, was interrogated by Bobadilla, arrested and sent home. ‘As I was awaiting, confident and happy, for ships that would take me to your mighty presence with great news of gold and victory, I was taken prisoner and thrown with my two brothers into a ship, weighed down with chains, stripped naked and treated very badly,’ Columbus recalled bitterly in a later letter to Isabella and Ferdinand.17 Columbus allegedly turned down an offer to have his chains removed, because he wanted to wear them on his arrival as proof of how he was being maltreated. In the meantime Bobadilla formally interrogated twenty-two witnesses, asking them if Columbus had tried to organise armed resistance, planned to hand the colony over to a foreign power or deliberately stopped Indians being christened so that they could be enslaved.18

  Isabella must have been shocked by the contents of Bobadilla’s report. The witnesses claimed that Columbus often refused to give priests permission to baptise the Indians because he wanted them as slaves. He also refused to allow the pregnant girlfriends of several colonists to be baptised, thereby preventing mixed marriages – apparently on the instructions of Isabella and Ferdinand. None of that had stopped the colonists cohabiting with Indian women, seeking out the daughters of local chieftains or caciques, thereby winning themselves powerful allies.19 Men were hanged for thievery or disobedience. One man escaped the noose only to have his ears and nose cut off instead. A woman who spoke badly of Columbus had her tongue cut out and another was lashed to a donkey and whipped because she was thought to be pregnant.

  Bobadilla’s finding that Columbus had also slowed down the number of baptisms shows that expediency had trumped ethics in the slavery debate. Some of the raids made against the Indians appeared to have no other purpose than to capture them, which also went against the more restrictive versions of what was acceptable. Moreover Columbus saw fit to enslave Indians who had failed to pay him the tribute he demanded, using trickery and false promises of an amnesty to capture them. The greatest quantity of slaves were on Hispaniola itself, where he was able to demand one or two from each colonist in 1499 in order to send them to Castile. Colonist Juan Vallés could not quite remember, just a year later, whether he had handed over three or four – suggesting that he had many more than that. Columbus had seen the Portuguese selling black Africans in Cape Verde for 8,000 maravedís a head and thought the people he was sending for sale would fetch at least 5,000. He dreamed of selling 4,000 of them. It was a lucrative and easy trade, as long as they did not die on the way to Europe, which often happened to begin with. Columbus thought it best that they be given meagre rations. They ate little, he said, and ‘if they ate too much, would fall ill’.20

  Isabella’s patience finally broke when she found out that Columbus was giving away slaves to his own colonists. ‘What power does my admiral have to give any of my vassals away?’ she allegedly asked. Yet Bobadilla’s miserable cargo of nineteen returnees was a fraction of the 1,500 slaves who had been shipped by 1500 and an investigation had to be launched into their whereabouts. But in 1501 Isabella andFerdinand continued issuing permits for cannibals to be enslaved.21 Isabella repeated them two years later, saying that cannibals who refused to surrender and reform could be ‘captured and brought to these my kingdoms … and sold … paying
us the part which belongs to us’.22 Instructions were, however, issued to end enslavement of the Taíno of Hispaniola, because there were no cannibals on the island. This was confirmed in 1501, when Isabella wrote to her new governor Nicolás de Ovando: ‘You will try to ensure that the Indians are well treated and can move safely everywhere and that no one will exercise violence against them or steal from them, nor inflict any other damage or wickedness.’ Indians were now to be treated ‘as our good subjects and vassals’, she insisted. ‘If from hereon anyone harms them or forcibly takes something from them, they should tell you because you will punish them [the perpetrators] in such a way that no one will ever again dare to do them any harm.’23

  The indigenous people of Hispaniola, however, must have felt that little had changed, as a forced-labour system called the encomienda, in which the Indians effectively paid a Spanish encomendero for their ‘protection’ in either work or goods, was introduced.24 A decade later, the firebrand friar Antonio Montesinos summed up the situation in an angry sermon preached in Santo Domingo: