As a competitor supported by the Spanish crown, Ojeda posed a graver threat to Columbus’s legitimacy than the scheming Francisco Roldán. Believing that Columbus could be assailed with impunity, Ojeda resorted to causing “all other mischief he could,” including spreading a false rumor that Queen Isabella “was at death’s door and that on her death the Admiral would be without a protector.” At that point, Ojeda “could do what injury he pleased to the Admiral.”
Treasonous sentiments like these were calculated to inflame Columbus’s old adversary Roldán. To Ojeda’s dismay, Roldán, having made peace with the Admiral, gathered a force of twenty-six men to pursue their new common enemy, Ojeda, who had taken up residence in an Indian village in Hispaniola. Energized, Roldán searched for his prey by night, but word of his mission reached Ojeda, who came out to confront his adversary.
Posing as a supplicant, Ojeda feebly explained that he had taken refuge on Hispaniola only because his supplies had run out; he meant injury to none. He distracted the skeptical Roldán with an account of his voyage, claiming he had explored six hundred leagues of coastline extending from Paria; survived a furious battle with Indians, who wounded twenty Christians; and yet despite these tribulations, he had bagged “stags, rabbits, tiger skins and paws,” examples of which he displayed to Roldán. Refashioning his agenda, Ojeda claimed he would depart immediately to deliver a full report of his exploits to Columbus in Santo Domingo.
Chaos threatened to overwhelm other parts of the island empire. Columbus and his brother crisscrossed the island throughout much of 1499, avoiding peril until the end. “The day after Christmas Day, 1499,” wrote Bartholomew, “all having left me, I was attacked by the Indians and bad Christians, and was placed in such extremity that fleeing death, I took to sea in a small caravel.” In his vulnerable state, Bartholomew sought God’s protection. “Then Our Lord aided me, saying, ‘Man of little faith, do not fear, I am with thee.’ And he dispersed my enemies, and showed me how I might fulfill my vows.”
Ojeda’s encounter with Roldán occurred in late September 1499, but not until February 1500 did Ojeda set sail for Xaraguá, Roldán’s former haunt. On arrival, Ojeda did all he could to supplant Roldán, trying to convince his former supporters that Ferdinand and Isabella had actually appointed him as a minder to Columbus, “lest the Admiral do something harmful to the royal interests.” To make his claim more appealing, he insisted that the Sovereigns had ordered Columbus to pay those who had served the crown, but Columbus had stubbornly refused to comply, or so Ojeda argued, and he offered his services “to lead them to Santo Domingo to force him to pay up immediately; afterward they could throw the Admiral out of the island dead or alive.”
Ojeda’s scheme won the support of many former rebels. Under cover of night, he formed a group of the most insistent, or desperate, to attack the others. Ferdinand Columbus related that “there were dead and wounded on both sides.” Those who emerged from the fray on Ojeda’s side concluded that Roldán had betrayed them. Now loyal only to Ojeda, and his particular brand of mayhem, the misguided insurgents planned to capture Roldán, who learned of the conspiracy and “marched with strong force to punish Ojeda and crush the revolt.” Afraid for his life, Ojeda took refuge aboard his ships, where he negotiated with Roldán, who had retreated to his ship. They bickered farcically about where to anchor the vessels, “each fearing to place himself in the power of the other.”
Ojeda refused to leave his ship. Roldán proposed to parlay there with him, so long as Ojeda sent a boat to take him. After Roldán and his men climbed aboard the vessel, they attacked Ojeda’s loyalists. When they had taken control of the boat, they rowed to shore and safety. Humbled, Ojeda realized he had to negotiate with Roldán as best he could.
When the two adversaries finally met, Ojeda apologized for his excesses and vowed to release several of Roldán’s men who had been taken hostage. In exchange for these concessions, he pleaded for a “boat and crew.” Without it, “he faced certain ruin, having no other boat fit for use,” in Ferdinand’s account. Conscious of his former status as a rebel, Roldán wanted only to rid himself and the island of Hispaniola of Ojeda, without giving him grievances to carry back to Spain and the Sovereigns, and so he agreed to the request, on condition that Ojeda and his men depart by a certain date. And to make certain that Ojeda complied, he “kept a strong guard ashore.”
The leaders and usurpers had changed places. Roldán found himself in the position formerly occupied by Columbus, trying to foil the designs of Ojeda, who played the rebellious role once embraced by Roldán. But none of the men had grown wiser as a result of the conflict, only more cautious and wily. The three-way tussle was symptomatic of the sense of decline afflicting the Enterprise of the Indies; no one even pretended to invoke religious or political ideals anymore.
Roldán and Columbus believed they had rid themselves of Ojeda and other troublemakers. But, Ferdinand observed, “just as a bad weed is not so easily uprooted that it will not grow again, so men of evil habits are with difficulty kept from relapsing into their own old courses after Ojeda had sailed away.” The latest threat came from a troublemaker named Fernando de Guevara, who resented Roldán for preventing Guevara’s marriage to a young woman who happened to be the daughter of Anacaona, “the principal queen of Xaraguá.” With Roldán married to another Indian woman, it became increasingly likely that the affiliations of the women of Hispaniola lay behind this conflict. The longer the Europeans remained on the island, the more their loyalties aligned with their hearts rather than their homeland.
Now Guevara, plotting to supplant Roldán “as lord of misrule,” in Ferdinand’s words, formed an alliance with another hardened rebel, Adrián de Mújica. By June 1500 they were planning to capture or kill their target. Learning of the conspiracy against him, Roldán rounded up the outlaws, informed the Admiral, and waited for instructions.
Columbus, for once, responded decisively. The men posed a threat to the island’s security; they should be punished “as the law required.” So Roldán, in his official capacity as the mayor, tried the group, and ordered the apparent ringleader, Adrián de Mújica, to be hanged. Roldán deported the other conspirators and imprisoned Guevara until June 13, when he was conveyed to the Admiral, then in the island’s interior, for safekeeping.
Peace had come to Columbus’s realm at last.
CHAPTER 10
“Send Me Back in Chains”
On February 3, 1500, Columbus returned from the interior to Santo Domingo, where he made plans to sail to Spain and present his version of events to the Sovereigns. “Throughout these disorders,” Ferdinand noted, “many of the rebels, writing from Hispaniola, and others who returned to Castile continually conveyed false information to the Catholic Sovereigns and their royal council against the Admiral and his brothers, claiming they were most cruel and unfit to govern.” Why? “Because they were foreigners and had no experience in dealing with people of rank.” Columbus was a stranger, speaking in a foreign accent, surrounded by one brother or another, rarely mingling, an aloof, determined, enigmatic mystic. But his accomplishments loomed over all. Everyone on the island toiled in the shadow of Columbus. Even in near disgrace he remained the most powerful European in the Indies. If the Sovereigns did not rescue Hispaniola from his influence, the critics warned, “the total ruin of the Indies would come about.” They predicted Columbus would “form an alliance with some foreign prince, claiming the Indies as his possession.” And they resorted to more obvious libels—Columbus had hidden the actual wealth of the Indies from Spain; he was planning to use his Indian forces against the Sovereigns—calculated to appeal to his enemies in Castile.
Ferdinand Columbus recalled that when he visited Granada, “more than fifty of these shameless people brought a load of wine and, sitting in the court of the Alhambra”—the Moorish fortress later occupied by the Sovereigns—“loudly proclaimed that Their Highnesses and the Admiral reduced them to the pitiful state by withholding their pay, besides tho
usands of other lies that they concocted.” So great was their resentment, however illusory its basis, that whenever King Ferdinand rode by on his royal steed, they would surround him, blocking his way and bellowing, “Pay! Pay!”
Columbus’s son Ferdinand cringed at the memory of his own youthful encounters with the rabble. “Any time my brother and I, being pages to the Queen, would run into them, they would shout and persecute us, chanting, ‘Here come the sons of the Admiral of the Mosquitoes, of him who discovered lands of vanity and deceit, the grave and ruin of Castilian gentlemen.’”
To minimize humiliating confrontations with Spaniards angry with Columbus, Ferdinand confided, he and his half brother “carefully avoided their presence.” So it was that the offspring of Spain’s most influential, transformative explorer went about the countryside incognito, out of fear for their lives.
Mindful of his descent into royal disfavor, Columbus recalled that he prayed “many times” to the Sovereigns to send “someone who might have charge of the administration of justice,” and he asked others to make the request on his behalf “since my reputation is such that although I were to build churches and hospitals, they would always be called liars or robbers.”
Ferdinand and Isabella listened to the many complaints about Columbus reaching Spain, and they acted as political leaders do: they appointed a special prosecutor. The date was May 21, 1499, and their choice was a man of impeccable credentials: Francisco de Bobadilla, a knight of the Order of Calatrava, the military wing of the Cistercian order, a venerable religious community of monks and nuns. His record reverberated with the pieties of Reconquista, and his new orders expanded on them, making him “Governor of the Islands and Mainland of the Indies.” On this basis, he had every right to believe that he, not Columbus, would soon rule the Indies. His mission would be to rid Hispaniola of the corruption wrought by Columbus. On arrival in the Indies, Bobadilla was to investigate Columbus—the presumption in Spain was strong that the Admiral would be found blameworthy—and, Ferdinand related, “should he find the Admiral guilty, he should send him back to Castile and take over the island.”
No one, not even Columbus, believed that the administration of Hispaniola had been handled properly. But no one besides Columbus was willing to leave Spain to manage it. Each voyage—and there were now three—demonstrated that Columbus was a brilliant navigator, canny, determined, able to learn from experience and mistakes with breathtaking speed—his Chinese delusion notwithstanding—but that he was ill equipped to serve as a governor of the lands he had conquered. Nearly every landfall showcased his brilliant and fearless navigation even as it exposed his inability to guide men, settle disputes, or instill loyalty.
At the moment Bobadilla’s fleet approached Santo Domingo in August 1500, Columbus was at Concepción, putting down the latest Indian revolt. His brother Bartholomew, the Adelantado, was in Xaraguá with Roldán, arresting the allies of Guevara, who had attempted to kill the mutineer. And Diego Columbus remained behind in Santo Domingo, ordering the execution of other rebels. “The Admiral and the Adelantado,” explained Las Casas, “anxiously went about arresting those who had again rebelled. They hanged those that they could arrest, and he brought a priest with him to confess them so that he could hang them wherever he might find them.” At that point, “he could subject the Indians and constrain them to pay the tribute that he had imposed upon them and that Francisco Roldán had relieved them of during his rebellion.” He did all this simply to send money to Ferdinand and Isabella to repay them for their expenses, and to silence his critics. His master plan consisted of baptizing every Indian in the major towns and hamlets of Hispaniola so they could “serve Their Highnesses like the vassals in Castile,” in the opinion of Las Casas, who estimated that the scheme would generate sixty million maravedís a year for Spain. If Columbus’s plans came to fruition, AD 1500 would mark the turning point in the economics of the Indies, the year the empire began sending revenue to Castile. “But, while preparing his loom, God cut the thread of the cloth that he planned to weave.” The instrument was Bobadilla.
At about seven o’clock in the morning of Sunday, August 23, Bobadilla’s ships—La Gorda, named for her master, Andrea Martín de la Gorda, accompanied by Antigua—appeared at the entrance to the harbor, but were forced to tack one way and then another before an offshore wind until late in the morning, when the breeze reversed direction and blew ashore, bearing the caravels before it.
Diego dispatched a canoe bearing three Christians and several Indians to meet the newcomers. One was Cristóbal Rodríguez, a sailor known as the first visitor to master the Indian language. The other two Christians were Juan Arráez and Nicolás de Gaeta. The Indians, whose names have not been recorded, paddled.
As the canoe approached, Bobadilla, “who had traveled in the caravel Gorda, then leaned out and said he was sent by the king and queen as judicial investigator of those who were rebelling on this island.” Andrea Martín de la Gorda demanded news of Hispaniola, and learned that “seven Spanish men had been hanged that week.” Five more were incarcerated, awaiting hanging. The fact that all the victims were Spanish alarmed Bobadilla. What sort of rebellion had occurred? Had Columbus allowed it to get out of hand? The investigator immediately asked for the Admiral and his two brothers, but only Diego was nearby. The Admiral was in Xaraguá, busy preparing still more executions. And to whom did he have the pleasure of speaking? Cristóbal Rodríguez inquired.
Francisco de Bobadilla, the judicial investigator.
The canoe returned to the shore, where expectations ran high that the arrival of the two ships meant better days ahead for the long-suffering colony: supplies, or women, or weapons, or other comforts from home. When they learned that the ships carried a “judicial investigator,” said Las Casas, “those who felt guilt reacted with fear and sadness. Those who felt aggrieved by the admiral and his brothers were bursting with joy, along with those who were there involuntarily, mostly those who earned their salary from the king, who had not been and were suffering great need of food, clothing, and necessities from Castile.”
When the wind died down, the caravels rode the tide into the harbor. Two scaffolds came into view, “one on this side of the river, which is the western shore where the city has now been built, and the other on the opposite side.” Two hanged Christians, imprisoned several days before, dangled from the gallows.
Amid this macabre scene, “people came to and from the ships. They made their courtesies and reverences to the investigator Bobadilla. They asked and they answered, but always with some reserve until they saw what in the world was going to happen.”
The next day, August 24, Bobadilla disembarked to hear Mass in the small, ragged settlement that claimed to be the capital of a new global empire. The contrast between the empire of the Indies’ aspirations and its shabby reality could hardly have been greater. Bobadilla walked among flimsy, thatched structures housing the Europeans and compact stores of supplies. Most of the business of the settlement was still conducted aboard the ships, in tightly confined spaces, where men felt safer in fetid holds than on land, exposed to mercurial Indians and menacing snakes, flies, and mosquitoes. To an outsider, the settlement would have appeared more of a negligible, makeshift eyesore than an outpost of Christianity and the might of Spain. In contrast, the Indians’ villages, huts, hammocks, drums, and fires, graceful canoes and tiny cemís, and especially their carefully tended fields of cassava plants, appeared thoroughly in place. Only the Europeans’ expansive ships riding at anchor in the harbor or offshore suggested that these white men from afar were capable of better things than violence, rape, and an obsessive quest for gold.
When the observance concluded, the investigator ordered the king’s scribe, who had traveled across the ocean with him, to read a letter from Ferdinand and Isabella, in which they summarized the rebellions of Roldán and others, and stated their purpose for sending Bobadilla to Hispaniola: “As we see it, because it was and is a bad example, worthy of punish
ment and chastisement, and because it pertains to us as king and queen and lords to provide the resolution of it, we command you to go to these islands and mainland of the Indies and gather your information using ways and means you need to find out best and most completely . . . who and which persons were the ones who rose up against the admiral and our justice and for what cause and reason, and what plundering, evil deeds, and damage they have done.” When he had completed his investigation, Bobadilla was to “detain those whom you find guilty of it and confiscate their goods.” The orders were clear, and, on the face of it, equal to the dire reports from Hispaniola that had reached Ferdinand and Isabella. “Once they have been arrested, proceed against them and against those absent with the greatest civil and criminal penalties you can find by law.” Anyone who dared to obstruct Bobadilla’s investigation would be fined ten thousand maravedís, a sum larger than any but the wealthiest nobleman could afford.
In the morning, Bobadilla commanded that another royal proclamation be read to remind everyone within hearing that he enjoyed the unreserved backing of the Sovereigns. But skepticism concerning his legitimacy lingered. Having anticipated this reaction, he ordered a clerk to recite still another letter from Ferdinand and Isabella to Columbus himself, with a set of humiliating instructions for the thin-skinned Admiral: “You are required by this letter that without any excuse or delay you give and turn over . . . the fortresses, houses, ships, arms, munitions, provisions, horses, livestock, and whatever other of our things that we possess in these islands” to “the Commander,” that is, Bobadilla. If Columbus complied, he could keep whatever personal wealth he had acquired, but if he refused, he would incur the “pain of our displeasure,” buttressed with ominous threats about the fate of “those who defied the Sovereigns.” Finally, Bobadilla displayed a royal certificate instructing him to pay those owed money by the Sovereigns, implying heavily that even though Columbus had failed to comply with these demands, they would honor the obligations to clear the slate. There was no mistaking the import of these words: the Sovereigns had turned on Columbus, and placed Bobadilla in charge.
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