The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

The towns of Hispaniola had a different character. For the moment, until Cortés and his successors conquered vast tracts of the American mainland, this was the end of the line. Columbus had not had much luck with his town foundations. The inhabitants of La Navidad, constructed out of the timbers of the Santa María on Christmas Day, 1492, had met with disaster – all the Spanish settlers were dead, turned on by the Taíno chief and his men, by the time Columbus returned to Hispaniola. The next settlement on the north of the island, named after Queen Isabella, was founded a year later, but the site was unhealthy and the settlers quarrelled among themselves. La Isabela had slightly better fortune than La Navidad: it lasted four years. Columbus did not see the town as the capital of a new Spanish province, so much as think of it as a trading station, or feitoria, modelled on Elmina in west Africa. Just as Elmina functioned as a funnel through which great quantities of gold from the interior were channelled to Portugal, so La Isabela would be the collection point for the gold and spices of the Indies.5

  The settlers needed to eat as well as to trade, and their numbers were much larger than the small team who kept Elmina in business. Excavations at La Isabela show that it was built with defence in mind, as one might expect after the experiences at La Navidad; it was constructed mainly of packed earth, but the builders used a limited amount of stone as well, and what was probably Columbus’s own house had a stone doorway. Many colonists had to make do with thatched huts not totally dissimilar to the houses of the Taínos. But the Spaniards tried to be as self-reliant as possible: there was a sizeable community of artisans, not just masons but workers in wood and metal, makers of tiles and bricks and boat-builders. Some people lived on a second, satellite, site at Las Coles, on the opposite side of the river, which, it was hoped, would help feed the new town, for the main business there was agriculture, along with pottery-making. The Spaniards were none too happy with the Taíno diet of cassava bread, along with the occasional iguana, manatee, conch and large rodents. Las Casas thought the Spaniards ate in a day what the Taínos would eat in a month, adding, ‘just think what 400 of them would consume!’ The Indians marvelled at the voraciousness of the settlers, and wondered whether they were so hungry because they had run out of food at home.6

  The Spaniards within La Isabela and the Indians outside its stockade kept apart; yet children of mixed origins must have been common, because there were so few Spanish women in early Hispaniola. For the moment, though, sharp lines were maintained between the communities. The Spaniards had little interest in Taíno products, and made only limited use of Taíno pottery. The proportion of Spanish pottery found on the site of La Isabela is actually higher than one would expect to find on a contemporary archaeological site in Spain, where plenty of Italian and other foreign goods normally appear. The style of Spanish goods found on the site is typical of the arabized culture of southern Spain, and includes plenty of glazed maiolica that was brought from Seville and its sister ports during the brief life of the town.7 Columbus attempted to place all trade with the Indians under his own control, acting in the name of the Crown. No gold objects have been found; any golden artefacts or nuggets of gold passed quickly through the colony to the Old World. On the other hand, over a hundred Spanish coins have been found, mainly low-value coins made of the heavily debased silver alloy known as billon; real silver coins were a rarity. The coins themselves were not just from Spain but from Genoa, Sicily, Portugal and elsewhere, palely reflecting the trading world of latemedieval Seville.8 So it is clear that the residents did business among themselves, operating a modest money-based economy, but mixing little with the Taínos.

  II

  In 1498, as it became more and more obvious that La Isabela was never going to flourish, Bartholomew Columbus, Christopher’s brother, made the fateful decision to move the centre of Spanish operations right across the island to the shores of the Caribbean. In deference to his brother he at first called his new capital Nueva Isabela, but Santo Domingo was the name that stuck until 1936, when the ruthless Dominican dictator Trujillo modestly renamed it Ciudad Trujillo – it has been Santo Domingo again since his fall. Even then the Columbuses did not get it quite right. The city lies on the River Ozama, in those days a broad passageway offering a reasonable harbour for ships arriving from Seville; but Bartholomew’s town was blown to smithereens by a hurricane, and within a few years the town was moved across the river to what was thought a better-protected site.9 There, Nicolás de Ovando, who had replaced Christopher Columbus as governor of the Indies in 1502, decided to build a true Spanish city, so Spanish that he and his successors brought stonemasons and carpenters from northern Spain to construct monumental palaces and churches in the latest Iberian styles. A longstanding rival of Columbus, Ovando had arrived in the New World accompanied by the largest number of sailors, soldiers and settlers yet seen there, well over 2,000.10

  Ovando’s aim became the creation not just of a Portuguese-style feitoria, but a city with broad streets, stone houses and, above all, a permanent population. The Zona Colonial of Santo Domingo is the oldest, largest and best-preserved colonial quarter anywhere in the Americas. Ovando’s palace, now a luxury hotel, still survives as testimony to his sense of grandeur, and he built at least fourteen more substantial stone houses. His immediate successor, Diego Colón, son of Christopher Columbus, who took up office in 1509, constructed a particularly imposing residence with an excellent view over the harbour and out to sea. These governors of the Indies, later graced with the title of viceroy, were keen to place their capital at the centre of the New World. At first they could only see as far as Spain; but as new explorations and conquests opened up first Cuba, in 1511, and then Mexico, whose capital fell to Cortés (an old Santo Domingo hand) in 1520, Ovando’s city seemed poised to become the nerve centre of an entire western Atlantic trading network.

  Making Santo Domingo work would present many challenges. In the early days food supplies were scarce; the Spanish settlers came to rely on imported grain brought all the way from Spain, though this was good news for Spanish businessmen, since they needed to fill the outbound ships with something saleable. Wheat was the food of the rich, maize the food of the relatively poor, and cassava was left for those at the bottom of the social pile, who, by definition, were not Spaniards.11 Royal officials were set in place in Santo Domingo, where an imposing headquarters was built; their function was to record what passed through the port, especially the gold brought from the mines, while keeping an eye out to make sure that the Crown received its fair share of the profits. Columbus had pointed out that the areas poor in gold were very rich in cotton; but no one in Europe was terribly interested in New World cotton, since there were plentiful supplies that arrived from the Mediterranean. Even Columbus realized this and began to argue that the inhabitants of Cathay and Cipangu, China and Japan, would surely snap up the cotton of the Indies – a good example of the fantasies that often wandered across his brain.12 Rather later, salt would become a prized asset of northern Hispaniola, picked up by Dutch ships that were not really supposed to visit Spanish territory; but for now gold, gold and more gold was what people sought.

  By 1508 forty-five ships were coming each year to the island, and Santo Domingo was firmly established as the prime port of call in the Spanish Indies. Some of its settlers came from well-connected families, such as the Dávila of Segovia, and it is no coincidence that many of the stone buildings recall those of Segovia itself.13 Santo Domingo attracted the attention of the two busiest men of affairs in Seville, who were of Genoese origin, Juan Francisco de Grimaldo and Gaspar Centurión. In 1513 and 1517 their loans to merchants and ship’s masters sailing to the new port mounted higher and higher, one loan being worth 214,000 maravedís. Admittedly, the sort of product the settlers required was at first relatively modest, as had been the case when the Canaries or the Cape Verde Islands had first been settled: chickpeas, vinegar, paper, coarse cloth. But there was every hope of bringing back gold by return. By the middle of the sixteenth century, demand for
luxury goods in the new colonies had begun to rise, including fine cloths from all over Europe, and increasing numbers of African slaves, all of which (or whom) helped to make the fortune of yet more Genoese families. One not very popular imposition by King Ferdinand was a tax of 7½ per cent on imported European goods, which included silk shirts, velvet hats and other luxuries for the Spanish elite. If one compares the excavated remains of La Isabela with the grandeur of Ovando’s city of Santo Domingo, one can see how the standard of living of the colonial elite was beginning to soar.

  In the early days, the Taíno Indians had simply panned for gold in river beds, but the point came when the large lumps had, by and large, been collected, while other lands across the Caribbean began to look much more promising as sources of gold – on his final expedition Columbus had uncovered evidence of gold-rich peoples some way inside Central America. The Spaniards now resolved to transform the island economy in new ways, always with an eye on demand from Europe: just as Madeira, the Canaries and São Tomé had become major sources of sugar, there seemed to be no reason why the same should not happen in Hispaniola.14 The tropical climate guaranteed heavy rainfall, and water was essential in sugar production. The newly arrived African slaves were thought to be better suited than the vanishing Taínos to the exceptionally harsh conditions within a sugar mill: punishingly high temperatures as the sugar was boiled, not to mention very demanding work in the fields cutting the thick and fibrous stalks of the sugar cane with knives or machetes. Even so, the history of sugar production in Hispaniola is a story of mixed success. In 1493 Columbus apparently took sugar cane from La Gomera in the Canaries to Hispaniola, though several attempts were necessary before the Caribbean sugar industry took off.

  The first serious attempts to start sugar production in Hispaniola began in 1503, and the first proper mill was only built in 1514, on the initiative of a Spanish landowner named Velloso; growth was slow, depending as it did on securing experts who could advise on the machinery needed in the mills, some of whom Velloso brought over from the Canaries.15 An even more important problem was lack of capital, in short supply before the Genoese and the Welsers became involved. A state-of-the-art mill could cost as much as 15,000 gold ducats, way beyond Velloso’s modest means; however, he did enter into a partnership with wealthy local officials, and his project was soon under way. More money was pumped into this industry by the Jeronymite friars, who had become a major influence in the government of Hispaniola by 1518 and who petitioned the Crown for investment in what they advertised as a golden opportunity. Royal loans enabled dozens of settlers to build sugar mills in the years around 1520, and they made little effort to pay the money back; the whole sugar industry was littered with debt to the Crown, to Genoese investors and to merchants in Seville.16 Thereafter sugar mills spread across the island and the income from sugar was, for a while, handsome: over half a million pesos each year in the 1580s, from about 1,000 tons of exported sugar. Labour supply remained a problem because the African slaves rarely lived much longer than seven years before overwork and disease took their toll. The answer was to increase the number of imported slaves; some of the largest estates had a workforce of 500 slaves, and many had 200.17

  Among the pioneers of the Caribbean sugar industry were pioneers of the sugar industry in the Canaries, such as the Genoese businessman Riberol (a victim of local xenophobia), and the Welsers, a German banking family from Augsburg that was keen to profit from the new discoveries across the Atlantic, and that would eventually send expeditions deep into Venezuela in search of the gold-rich kingdom the Spaniards called ‘El Dorado’. For the moment, in 1526, the Welsers were content to set up a branch of their bank in Santo Domingo managed by two Germans, one of whom would go on to become governor of Venezuela. They valued Santo Domingo not just as a source of goods such as sugar, but as the capital of the Spanish Indies, the place where they would be able to work side by side with the viceroy and the king’s other agents.18

  European participation went much further, thanks to the presence on the Spanish throne of a king who was also ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles V; he was in hock first to German bankers and later to the Genoese. The Welsers of Augsburg responded with enthusiasm, even though this stretched their existing resources to and beyond wise limits. In the seventeen-year period beginning in 1518, 1,044 ships sailed from Seville to Santo Domingo, an average of sixty-one each year, and of these ninety-three were owned by the Welsers – a number were then put to use in intra-Caribbean trade towards Venezuela.19 They overextended themselves both in Venezuela and in Hispaniola, and when it became obvious that they would never find El Dorado and be able to use its fabulous wealth to pay off their mounting debts they closed up shop in both places in 1536.20

  Then the conquest of Mexico and Peru pulled the centre of gravity of the Spanish Indies much further westwards, so that by mid-century Santo Domingo had become a seat of government but had lost its pre-eminence in trade – not just to Mexico but, as will be seen, to newly subdued Cuba. Santo Domingo was no longer the focal point of the Spanish Empire in the Indies; its governors were looking for new ways to maintain the status and wealth of Hispaniola, and another option was to import cattle and to try to make a profit from ranching.21 The sale of hides from Hispaniola on the other side of the Atlantic became big business, but turning the land over to cattle also spelled the end of the old intensive cultivation practised by the Indians (of whom, in any case, there were now very few), and generated increasing dependence on food supplies, other than meat, from outside the island. Had the Spaniards been willing to change their diet things might have turned out differently; but, rather like British colonial officials in India who expected to be served English food, the Spaniards were slow to adapt to Caribbean tastes. Once the ranches were in place, meat and more meat became the daily diet of the entire white population – it has been suggested that in Hispaniola a plate of beef cost one hundredth of what one would have paid in Spain. Before long there were forty cattle for every person on the island. Since Spain required leather, not fresh meat, which would hardly survive an Atlantic crossing (although some was taken on board to feed the sailors), there was a glut of beef in Hispaniola. Nearly 50,000 hides were exported in 1584, though that was about a quarter of the number of hides exported from the Caribbean islands, for the passion for ranching went far beyond Hispaniola.22

  The city of Santo Domingo stood frozen in time. Its magnificent Gothic cathedral was completed just as the downturn was beginning. The remarkable survival of its buildings is testimony to decline, not to success. Other ports were seizing the lead: Veracruz in Mexico and Nombre de Díos in Panama.23 So long as Santo Domingo was the redistribution point for the goods being sent to Europe, it had some role to play, but a powerful rival emerged that was better placed to handle the wealth of Mexico: the new capital of Cuba, Havana.

  III

  The pre-eminence of Havana within the Spanish Indies was clear by 1571, when an English observer wrote:

  Havana is the principal and most important port of all the king of Spain has in the Indies: because all the ships coming from Peru, Honduras, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Jamaica, and other parts of the Indies, touch there upon their return to Spain, this being the port in which they take food and water, as well as the largest part of their cargo.24

  This was not the result of any great resources that Cuba could offer; indeed, it was slow to develop the sugar industry for which it eventually became so famous, and was generally a tardy developer within the Spanish world, for it had only been conquered twenty years after its discovery by Columbus – if Las Casas is to be believed, the conquest was accompanied by hideous acts of violence. Even so, the conquistador Diego Velázquez seems to have been an urbane man who made some attempts to treat the native population with consideration; after all, it was by now obvious that the treatment of their cousins in Hispaniola had led to utter disaster and population collapse. Realizing that the island had little gold to offer, Velázquez tried to in
troduce cattle and pigs, in the hope of re-creating Mother Spain on its soil. The production and export of hides exceeded even that of Hispaniola, but the price that had been paid was the same: nothing could protect the Taíno Indians from disease, and they too disappeared within a few decades.25

  Havana was founded in 1519. Its real strength lay in its position astride the Gulf Stream, which made it the ideal transit point between the two American continents and Europe.26 Settlers were attracted by the excellent natural harbour and by the quality of fresh water in the nearby river. Havana was able to supplant the original capital of Cuba, at Santiago, which lay well within range of Santo Domingo but shrank rapidly in the face of competition.27 This was the point where fleets coming from all over the Caribbean, including those bringing the silver of Mexico and Peru, converged, which also made it a very attractive target for pirates. As early as 1538 a French pirate had a go at Havana, and in 1555 another one managed to sack the town; old Havana had been built by Taíno labour, but new Havana was built by African slaves, for lack of native manpower.28 And then it flourished: it was the great centre of inter-colonial shipping, that is, trade within the Spanish Indies, with ships arriving from the Yucatán peninsula, Florida, Honduras, Colombia, Trinidad and Hispaniola; but it also received goods (some in human form) from Africa, the Canaries, Spain and Portugal, and the inter-colonial trade fed and was fed by the transatlantic connections – literally in the case of the Canaries, which in those days were celebrated for their wines, and which were also the home base of some of the liveliest merchants trading through Havana. In the last fifteen years of the sixteenth century, the volume of trade conducted by Francisco Diáz Pimienta of La Palma in the Canaries reached 1,800,000 reales. He was mainly a wine merchant but he did not scorn the slave trade out of Angola.