Columbus was still suffering from exhaustion, so weak that his crew carried him from the flagship to the shore. There he spent the winter months recovering, until the end of February 1495. He suffered from the combined effects of several ailments, some more apparent than others. The reliable Las Casas specified arthritis, by which he probably meant the painful and debilitating condition of rheumatoid arthritis, and it appeared that Columbus had begun to deteriorate mentally as well as physically. He was particularly distressed to hear that the Indians had risen in revolt against Pedro Margarit, whom Columbus had appointed to supervise the mines of the Cibao. With his petty authoritarian ways, Margarit had made a mess of things, having “paid no heed to the Admiral’s wishes,” says Ferdinand, and seemed hell-bent on making himself the new leader of the expedition.
Right after Columbus’s departure with his three ships, Margarit had ignored his orders to occupy large swatches of the island, and instead took his men, nearly four hundred strong, to the Vega Real, ten leagues away, where he devoted his energies to “scheming and contriving to have the members of the council established by the Admiral obey his orders, and sending them insolent letters.” Frustrated in his plan to usurp Columbus, “to whom he would have had to account for his actions in office,” he had caught the first ship bound for Spain, without explanation or placing someone else in charge of the 376 men left behind, who rapidly deteriorated into predators. “Each one went where he willed among the Indians, stealing their property and wives and inflicting so many injuries upon them the Indians resolved to avenge themselves on any they found alone or in small groups.” As a result, “the Admiral found the island in a pitiful state, with most of the Christians committing innumerable outrages for which they were mortally hated by the Indians, who refused to obey them.” Still inflamed, Guatiguaná slaughtered ten Spanish guards and stealthily set ablaze a shelter containing forty others, all of them ill. Peter Martyr wrote in anguish of the Spanish “injustices” that had occurred in Columbus’s absence: “Kidnapping women of the islands under the eyes of their parents, brothers and husbands . . . rape and robberies.”
With Margarit gone, Columbus had no choice but to apprehend Guatiguaná. Failing to accomplish that task, he seized some of his followers and sent them as prisoners to Spain aboard the fleet led by Antonio de Torres. The four ships departed on February 24, 1495.
But troubles with the Indians were just beginning.
At La Isabela, Columbus belatedly learned that the Indians served four chiefs, Caonabó, Higuanamá, Behechio, and Guarionex, each of whom commanded “seventy or eighty caciques who rendered no tribute but were obliged to come when summoned to assist them in their wars and in sowing their fields.”
One of these many caciques stood out—Guacanagarí—Columbus’s occasional ally and overseer of that part of Hispaniola where La Isabela was located. Hearing that Columbus had returned after a long absence, Guacanagarí immediately visited to declare his innocence. He had done nothing to aid or encourage the Indians who had slaughtered the Spanish, and to demonstrate his longstanding goodwill, recalled the goodwill and hospitality he had always shown the Christians. He believed that his generosity toward these visitors from afar had provoked the hatred of the other caciques, especially the notorious Behechio, who had killed one of Guacanagarí’s wives, and the thieving Caonabó, who had stolen another. Now he appealed to the Admiral to restore his wives and obtain revenge. As Guacanagarí narrated this tragic tale he “wept each time he recalled the men who had been killed at La Navidad, as if they had been his own sons.”
Guacanagarí’s tears won over Columbus, restoring the bond between the Admiral and the cacique.
As he considered the situation, Columbus realized that the emotional cacique had provided valuable intelligence about conflicts among the Indians, conflicts that Columbus could exploit to punish enemies of them both. An alliance with Guacanagarí would enable him to settle all scores.
Recovering from his breakdown, Columbus “marched forth from Isabela in warlike array together with his comrade Guacanagarí, who was most eager to rout his enemies,” Ferdinand wrote. It was March 24, 1495, almost six months after the Admiral had arrived. The military task ahead presented impossible odds. Columbus and Guacanagarí jointly commanded a regiment of two hundred Spanish guards, bolstered by twenty horses and twenty hounds—beasts who were far more terrifying to the enemy than any European biped. But they faced an immense force, “more than one hundred thousand Indians” defending their own territory against a small band of invaders. Given the Indians’ growing anger at the Spanish, it seemed this battle would be the last of Columbus, his mission, his men, and his ships. A massacre in the making, the plan had an air of doom about it, as if Columbus, too skillful a navigator to perish at sea, had deliberately chosen instead to martyr himself—and his men—on land.
Believing that he now understood “the Indian character and habits,” Columbus began his campaign by leading his little force on a ten-day march from La Isabela. He divided the men into two groups, one under his command, the other under his brother Bartholomew. Relying on their steeds’ ability to strike absolute terror into the enemy, the two brothers would try to trap the massed Indian forces in a pincer movement. Columbus “believed that the Indians, frightened by a din arising simultaneously on various sides, would break and flee in panic.”
At first, the “infantry squadrons,” as Ferdinand grandly called them, attacked the Indians, beating them back with crossbows and arquebuses. At that point, the “cavalry and hounds” interceded to sow panic amid the enemy, which they did, chasing the Indians into the jungle, and pursuing them wherever they went, “killing many,” according to Ferdinand, “and capturing others who were also killed.”
The Spanish soldiers chased the Indians into the subtropical thickets, and when they could no longer advance, they unleashed twenty greyhounds. The ravenous beasts, wrote Las Casas, “fell on the Indians at the cry of tomalo.” Take it! “Within an hour they had preyed on 100 of them. As the Indians were used to going completely naked, it is easy to imagine the damage caused by these fierce greyhounds, urged to bite naked bodies and skin much more delicate than that of the wild boars they were used to.”
The Spanish forces succeeded in capturing Caonabó alive, together with his wives and children. Ferdinand exaggerated the number of Indian warriors participating in the battle, although they greatly outnumbered the Spanish, whose victory, aided by horses and superior weapons, inspired confidence that had been lacking ever since Columbus first arrived in the Indies. “There is not a single one of our weapons which does not prove highly damaging when used against the Indians,” Las Casas reported from the front, while the Indians’ weapons amounted to “little more than toys.”
After the battle, Caonabó “confessed that he had killed twenty of the Spaniards who remained under Arana in La Navidad when the Admiral returned to Spain from his discovery of the Indies.” So he had been the prime malefactor all along. And, if his confession was to be believed, there was worse. He had subsequently visited the Spanish at La Isabela “feigning friendship,” but with “the true design (which our men suspected) of seeing how he might best attack and destroy it as he had done to the town of La Navidad.” Columbus’s obdurate aide, Alonso de Ojeda, at first tried to broker a “pact of friendship” between Caonabó and Columbus, Peter Martyr related, and wound up threatening the chieftain “with the massacre and ruin of his people if he would choose war rather than peace with the Christians.”
The Italian chronicler skillfully analyzed the chieftain’s political dilemmas and pretensions, as they appeared to Columbus. “Understandably, Caonabó was like a reef in the middle of the sea, tossed this way and that by opposite currents, distressed also by the memory of the crimes he had committed, since he had deceitfully murdered twenty of our defenseless men; although he seemed to desire peace, he was nonetheless afraid to go to the Admiral. Finally, after elaborating a plot with the intention of killing the Admiral
and the others when the opportunity presented itself and pretending to want to make peace, he set out to meet the Admiral with all his retinue and many others, armed according to their custom.” With effort, Ojeda enticed the exhausted Caonabó to appear before Columbus and make peace. As a reward, Caonabó would receive a coveted bronze bell from the church.
Ojeda brandished steel handcuffs and foot restraints, explaining that no less a personage than King Ferdinand wore these decorative items on horseback. Out of special consideration, Caonabó could try them on and see how it felt to be a king. Ojeda arranged for Caonabó to be mounted on horseback directly behind him, as the Spaniards tightened the restraints so that Caonabó would remain securely astride the horse. At that moment the Spanish soldiers scared off Ojeda’s guards, and Ojeda spurred the horse, which galloped across a river with both men. Caonabó had been kidnapped.
Ojeda rode on, pausing only to tighten the restraints of his prisionero, until they reached La Isabela, where Caonabó, now a captive, spent his time, in the words of Peter Martyr, “fretting and grating his teeth as if he had been a lion of Libya.”
Pressing on with his pacification of the Cibao, Ojeda rounded up other recalcitrant chieftains, although at least one, Caonabó’s brother-in-law, Behechio, escaped. When the action was over, Columbus staged a victory march through the subjugated countryside.
That was the Spanish side of the story, recorded for posterity by the chroniclers Ferdinand Columbus, Peter Martyr, and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. But there was another, more troubling perspective, that of the Indians, which emphasized the European rape and kidnapping of the naive Taínos. Even Columbus’s sympathies were divided at times between the men he led and those he sought to conquer, but once he had purged himself of compassion, his attention returned to his obsession with gold, glory, and conquest.
Illuminating the moral stakes in the conflict, Las Casas declared, “Such an execrable victory certainly did not redound to the glory of God.” To try to make up for these sins in some small way, he would bear witness to their suffering, and serve as their advocate for posterity.
Columbus intended to dispatch Caonabó and his brother to Spain, “for he was unwilling to put to death so great a personage without the knowledge of the Catholic Sovereigns,” according to Ferdinand. He judged it sufficient to punish many other Indians. It was a curious decision for such a vindictive man, and stemmed from the fact that Columbus and Caonabó had developed a rapport, from one leader to another, across their vast political and linguistic gulf. They shared an interest in the eternal mysteries of life and death, as Columbus attempted to conquer the Indians’ sturdy spiritual realm with the same vigor he had brought to their fragile temporal existence, and with equally baffling results.
“I have taken pains to learn what they believe and know where the dead go, especially from Caonabó,” Columbus wrote in a remarkable reappraisal of his former antagonist. “He is a man of mature age, very knowledgeable and sharp-witted,” and he gave Columbus his first convincing idea of what the life of an Indian cacique was like: privileged, indulgent, and Edenic. “They eat, have wives, enjoy pleasures and comforts,” Columbus marveled. In and around the outbreaks of hostilities, the Spanish had learned more about the lives and resources of their hosts, as Ferdinand noted, their mines of “copper, sapphires, and amber; brazilwood, ebony, incense, cedars, many fine gums, and different kinds of wild spices,” including cinnamon (“though bitter to the taste”), ginger, pepper, everything except the gold Columbus ardently sought. There were even “mulberry trees for producing silk that bear leaves all year round, and many other useful plants and trees of which nothing is known in our countries.”
What sounds like an idyll, at least in Columbus’s words, was anything but. With his two brothers, he established three more fortresses, which he used to enforce a system of tribute that ruined the island’s previously resilient economy.
Henceforth, every Indian over the age of fourteen had to give the equivalent of a hawk’s bell filled with gold. Caciques were required to give even more to the Spanish occupiers. Indians who lived in regions where gold was scarce could substitute cotton—spun or woven, not raw—if they wished, but everyone had to give his tribute, on pain of death. Those who complied received a stamped copper or brass token to wear around their necks in what became a symbol of intolerable shame. (Of this system, Las Casas charged: “Even the cruelest of the Turks or Moors, or the Huns and Vandals who laid waste our kingdoms and lands and destroyed our lives, would have found such a demand impossibly onerous and would have deemed it unreasonable and abhorrent.”)
In time, the Indians depleted the island’s limited supply of gold, and what seemed like a modest amount became increasingly difficult to acquire, even with unremitting effort picking through sand and shrubs. The system was in some ways worse than slavery, and it obliterated any chance that the Indians would assist or cooperate with the Spanish in any other endeavor besides the pointless tributes of gold. By imposing this system, Columbus ensured a modest supply of gold would be his, at the cost of everything else he needed or could have wished. For example, Guarionex, the influential cacique, argued that the land used to provide a minimal amount of gold could grow enough wheat to feed all of Spain, not just once, but ten times, but Columbus refused to consider the idea, deciding instead to halve the tribute and perpetuate the offense.
Recounting this policy, Las Casas howled with indignation. “Some complied,” he noted, “and for others it was impossible, and so, falling into the most wretched way of living, some took refuge in the mountains whilst others, since the violence and provocation and injuries on the part of the Christians never ceased, killed some Christians for special damages and tortures that they suffered.” The Christians responded by murdering and torturing their antagonists, “not respecting the human and divine justice and natural law under whose authority they did it.” There is no denying the force of Las Casas’s outrage, but Indians were not the innocents of his imagination; they had been slaveholders long before the Europeans arrived. Fernández de Oviedo noted that in war, contesting Indian tribes “take captives whom they brand and keep as slaves. Each master has his own brand and some masters pull out one front tooth of their slaves as a mark of ownership.”
Demoralized by the Spanish tribute system, and unnerved by their own prophecies, many Indians took steps to escape in the only way left to them. Columbus became aware of the dimensions of the tragedy decimating the Indians when “it was pointed out to him that the natives had been vexed by a famine so widespread that more than 50,000 men had died, and every day they fell everywhere like sickened flocks,” in the words of Peter Martyr.
The reality was even more terrible than famine; it was self-inflicted. The Indians destroyed their stores of bread so that neither they nor the invaders would be able to eat it. They plunged off cliffs, they poisoned themselves with roots, and they starved themselves to death. Oppressed by the impossible requirement to deliver tributes of gold, the Indians were no longer able to tend their fields, or care for their sick, children, and elderly. They had given up and committed mass suicide to avoid being killed or captured by Christians, and to avoid sharing their land with them, their fields, groves, beaches, forests, and women: the future of their people. It was an extraordinary act of despair and self-destruction, so overwhelming that the Spanish could not comprehend it.
All of them, fifty thousand Indians, dead by their own hand.
The Spanish refused to shoulder the blame. The mass suicide resulted from the Indians’ “own stubbornness,” said Peter Martyr. “The Indians purposely destroyed all their bread [cassava] fields,” Columbus told his Sovereigns in October 1495. “To prevent my searching for gold the Indians put up as many obstacles as they could.” At the same time, he acknowledged that “nothing else makes them so sad and upset as the fact that we are coming into their territory.” But in reality, the Indians had little interest in gold, especially in comparison to Columbus. In his version, the Ind
ians, after realizing that they would not be able to divert him from his hunt for gold, belatedly “resumed planting and seeding the land because they were starving, but heaven did not help them out with rain this time and they were ruined and died and are dying at an incredible rate.” He ascribed their deaths to “starvation.”
The dwindling number of survivors found themselves trapped in a survivalist endgame. Some took refuge in the mountains, where Spanish dogs set upon them. Those who avoided the dogs succumbed to starvation and illness. Although estimates of the population are inexact, the trend is plain. Of the approximately 300,000 Indians in Hispaniola at the time of Columbus’s first voyage in 1492, 100,000 or so died between 1494 and 1496, half of them during the mass suicide. Las Casas estimated that the Indian population in 1496 was only one-third of what it had been in 1494. (“What a splendid harvest and how quickly they reaped it!” he wrote acidly.) Twelve years later, in 1508, a census counted 60,000 Indians, or one-fifth of the original population, and by 1548 Fernández de Oviedo found only five hundred Indians, the survivors of the hundreds of thousands who had populated the island when Columbus arrived, and who had seen him as the fulfillment of a longstanding prophecy. It was only now that the meaning of that prophecy became clear: his presence meant their extinction.
In time the Taínos made peace with their adversaries. A tribe combining both Caribs and Taíno emerged, and seemed to point the way to coexistence. The arrival of Columbus’s fleets, one after the other, disturbed the spontaneous compromise, and added a new level of stress and conflict to this volatile society. The leading figure was Columbus’s adversary, Caonabó, the Carib cacique who married a Taíno wife, Behechio’s sister, Anacaona. Not long before Columbus’s arrival, other Taínos had married Caribs who renounced cannibalism; in this, Caonabó and Anacaona were not alone. A third tribe, the Ciguayo, appeared to be a hybrid of the two former adversaries. Las Casas reported that they had forgotten their native tongue and instead “spoke a strange language, almost barbaric” that might have combined their idiom with the Taínos’ speech. Like the Caribs, they grew their hair long, and used liberal applications of red and black war paint, but unlike them, the Ciguayo did not poison their arrows. It was the Ciguayo who fired off arrows at Columbus when he first arrived at the Dominican Republic, and to memorialize the attack, he named the scene of the battle the Gulf of Arrows.
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