by Marie Arana
When a disgraced Columbus arrived in Seville in 1500, the royals were aghast to learn that the great man was in chains. He was freed immediately, his reputation swiftly reinstated. He would continue to be admired for his bold explorations, his expansion of Spain’s influence in the world, his evangelical service to the Church, his maritime genius. But unfulfilled promises of gold would dog him. And questions about the lengths to which a conquering power should go would throw Europe into a lengthy and heated debate: Were the indigenous humans, after all? Could they be herded and bound like beasts of burden? The titles of “Admiral of the Ocean Seas” and “Viceroy of the Indies,” which had been revoked when Seville’s enforcers had put Columbus under arrest, were never restored. The world would continue to think of him as a man of formidable deeds and riches, but in truth he was deeply in debt, his finances in disarray, his income nonexistent. By 1506, the year he died, Columbus had been reduced to living out of a common boardinghouse in Valladolid, fighting stubbornly to claim what he believed to be lawfully his: one-tenth of all royal profits in the New World, a percentage of future trade, and one-third of the profits due him as Admiral of the Ocean Seas. In all, his wage would have amounted to more than half the income from the Indies, far more than “the royal fifth” the Crown demanded for itself.
Columbus would never find the fame and fortune he sought. He had seen more parrots than gold, more naked Indians than richly bejeweled headsmen. In all his travels through lands he had mistaken for Ophir, Ophaz, and Cipango, he had never seen a city. There had been little more than makeshift villages to plunder. He would die a bitterly disappointed man. He had lost his riches, his reputation, his eyesight. Ferdinand and Isabella would fear he had also lost his mind. For the rest of their lives, his sons, Diego and Fernando, would struggle in vain to claim what the king and queen had promised him in the first place. Ships would come and go from the New World, making thousands of crossings with more dreamers and schemers aboard—all of them with impossible visions dancing in their heads. It would take two bold excursions and three more decades for a new generation of scrappy adventurers to transform America into Spain’s shining prize.
THE BARBARIAN’S BAUBLES
Fateful omens in the sky. One like a spark of fire, one like a flame of fire, one like a false dawn: as if it were bleeding, as if it were piercing the sky.
—Nahua witness, 1517
Even as Columbus was limping from ship to shore in Jamaica—casting about for gold, crippled by gout, fending off mutineers—a young notary from Spain’s Extremadura joined the westward passage and scudded across the seas to Hispaniola. He was Hernán Cortés, barely eighteen, slightly older than Columbus’s youngest son, and a distant relative of another adventurer, Francisco Pizarro, who would ply those same waters a few years later. It was 1504. Ten thousand pesos of gold had been harvested from Hispaniola; a ruthless, new governor had been installed in Columbus’s place; and Queen Isabella, who had never quite recovered from the sudden, unexplained death of her only son, the crown prince, had taken ill and begun to withdraw from government affairs.
It didn’t take long for Cortés to grasp how haphazard and unproductive earlier expeditions had been—how flagrant the mismanagement, how tragic the devastation. His generation of conquistadors, that of Pizarro, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, and Hernando de Soto, would take the conquest to new heights and to more remote reaches of the hemisphere, but Cortés was perhaps first to recognize that to achieve long-term success and to best exploit the potential wealth of these new lands, Spain would need to put down roots and establish a permanent presence.
He had a point. Spain had not approached the conquest of the Indies in any systematic way. There had never been a true, declared commitment to discovery: no armies and navies employed to the task, no grand investment in the enterprise. Even as King Ferdinand took Spain’s soldiers into wars in Europe, hoping to expand his power in the Old World, Isabella was essentially approving New World expeditions that were undertaken by civilians, funded by independent investors, and joined by ambitious young hidalgos from the poorest outposts of the peninsula. The understanding was simple enough: the Crown would give a fortune seeker its blessing, expect one-fifth of all mineral profits from his venture, and he would be expected to shoulder the lion’s share of the costs, either with his own money or with additional funds from underwriters. Some, like Columbus, had experience in the gold or slave trade in Africa. More often, the conquistadors were jobless, rootless, wild—raised by generations of men who had taken violence to new heights in wars against the Muslims of Granada. They were, in short, children of crusaders, and they held God’s banner high as they set out to conquer infidels and scour the Indies for treasures.
* * *
The governor of Hispaniola in 1504, Nicolás de Ovando, was a pugnacious former commander in the Moorish wars who had been sent by Queen Isabella with express instructions to liberate Columbus’s Taíno slaves and treat them as well as any Spanish subjects. But once declared free, the Taíno refused to mine, and Ovando swiftly reinstated Columbus’s harsh measures. The Crown looked the other way. “Forasmuch as my Lord King and Myself have ordered that the Indians living on the island of Hispaniola be considered free and not subject to slavery,” Isabella instructed Ovando from her sickbed, “I order you, Our Governor . . . to compel the Indians to cooperate with the Christian settlers on said island, to work on their buildings, and to mine and collect gold and other metals.” In other words, killing and genocide were un-Christian, un-Spanish, and intolerable, but “compelling” the Indians to mine was a necessary sin.
Cruel in nature and a former commander in Ferdinand’s brutal war against the Moors, Ovando proceeded to inflict a series of gruesome massacres on the Taíno as he applied himself to exploiting the mines at all costs. By then, Isabella was dead, Ferdinand was engaged in one Machiavellian scheme after another, and the conquistadors were learning that they could feign obedience to the Crown and do exactly as they pleased. Spain was very far away. All a conquistador needed to do was shout the king’s requerimiento in Spanish from a far hill, command uncomprehending natives to surrender to Spain and Jesus, and, with a notary present to record things, he could then wage war, round up slaves, and force them to work the mines. Within three years, even as young Cortés romanced the island’s women, acquired an appetite for derring-do, and kept books for the governor, Ovando extracted a quarter million more pesos of gold from Hispaniola. He did so by virtually sacrificing the Taíno people. Indians who refused to labor in the mines were killed outright. This single-minded obsession with mining meant that Indians did not plant or harvest; eventually famine, disease, and suicide reduced that robust community of a half million to a feeble sixty thousand. Forty years after Columbus’s landing, the Taíno would be virtually decimated and the gold of Hispaniola gone.
When Cortés landed in Santo Domingo, he was received warmly in the house of Governor Ovando, whom he had met in Spain. Told he would be given a sizable tract of land to settle, the youth was taken aback. “I came to get gold!” he sputtered in amazement, “not plow soil like a peasant!” The governor assured him that husbandry was the best way to build funds for his exploits. Accordingly, Cortés was given a generous plot in that perpetually verdant land and a repartimiento of Indians to work it. For several years, he oversaw their labors in his fields and worked as a notary in a nearby settlement, breaking the monotony with love affairs that often landed him in trouble. From time to time, he joined efforts to suppress the violent insurrections that bedeviled the conquistadors on that unhappy island, and so learned much about indigenous warfare and the brutal tactics necessary to foil it.
He was dashing, handsome, physically agile, irrepressibly genial, and a lively conversationalist, so he swiftly became a favorite among his fellow Spaniards. He also acquitted himself admirably in skirmishes against rebellious Indians, which won him a place in the expedition that set out to conquer Cuba in 1511. The adelantado in charge, Diego Velazquez de Cuéllar, w
as quick to see the natural leader in Cortés and rewarded him generously for his valor. He was granted an even more enviable tract of land in Cuba and a larger contingency of indigenous slaves to tend it. By the age of twenty-eight, Cortés was a relatively wealthy young man. His work as a notary had predisposed him to be an able manager of his Cuban estate, and, given his rare talent for recognizing opportunity and persuading others to his side, he was soon making his name as one of the most successful importers of sheep and cattle to the Indies. He was, in other words, a rancher—albeit a restless one—whose most pressing concern, until his marriage to the governor’s sister-in-law, was his consuming passion for the ladies. There was, in all this, little evidence of the lust for gold he had expressed so early upon his arrival. But all that would change when Vasco Núñez de Balboa, a petulant, debt-ridden hog farmer from Cortés’s home province, discovered a way to the Pacific in 1513, and slave hunters, returning to Cuba after hair-raising raids on Indian villages, told of unimagined riches in a land they called Castilla de Oro. The Gold Castle. Panama.
* * *
Vasco Núñez de Balboa, as charismatic an adventurer as any, had escaped his creditors in Hispaniola and sailed to Castilla de Oro as a stowaway, tucked into a ship’s barrel along with his dog. When he was discovered, the captain threatened to strand him on the nearest island, but Balboa won him over with wit and acuity. Within a few years, he had reconnoitered the area with a contingent of men, subdued a number of recalcitrant tribes, and founded Santa María, the first permanent settlement on the American mainland. It was there that Balboa’s men began to hear that there were wealthier tribes elsewhere, and an impulse to mutiny began to rise among those who wanted to pursue those chimeras. The men had already appropriated what little precious metals and stones the local tribes possessed. Squabbles over gold reached such a fever that one day, as Spaniards were weighing a chieftain’s gifts and arguing over the distribution, the Indian, appalled at the crass cupidity, knocked over the scales and shouted, “If you’re so ravenous for this that you abandon your homes to wreak havoc in distant lands, I’ll show you a province where you can gorge yourselves on gold and satisfy your desires!” He pointed firmly south.
Balboa’s gold ambitions were so extreme that eventually they took him across the isthmus to the other side. At noon on September 25, 1513, accompanied by Indian guides, he stood on an Urrucallala mountain peak and thought he detected a seductive shimmer on the far horizon. Days later, with sword in hand and the banner of Virgin Mary on high, he waded into a vast ocean, claiming it and all the lands it touched for the Spanish Crown. He named it Mar del Sur—South Sea, because he had been on a southern course to reach it—and so it was that a new coast of the Americas opened to European exploration. The Pacific Ocean. The sea that lapped the Asian shores Spain had been looking for all along.
The coming years brought a flurry of discoveries as ships set sail from Cuba and Hispaniola and conquistadors streamed back and forth with slaves, gold, pearls, and all they had seized, traded, or stolen outright. Although Balboa had established himself as governor of the South Sea and begun to explore the Pacific, the very body of water that Columbus had been searching for all along, he would not live much longer. Resentment quickened among his fellow conquistadors, and in early 1517 his father-in-law, Pedrarias Dávila—known as the “Wrath of God”—accused him of high treason. One of Balboa’s men, the shrewd and opportunistic Francisco Pizarro, was assigned to take him prisoner and drag him to the dungeons of Acla in irons as an example to any Spaniard who would defy his master and take fortune into his own hands in the Americas. The hapless discoverer of the Pacific was judged, sentenced, and put to death in the public square. After one swing of the axe, the executioner hoisted Balboa’s severed head, thrust it on a pole, and left it to the mercy of flies.
* * *
The dreamers were not deterred. When an expedition returned from Panama a few months later with rumors of a gold-rich civilization in the North, more Spaniards yearned to take fortune into their own hands. Hernán Cortés, fed up with domestic ventures, longed to return to the golden dreams of his youth. He let Cuba’s governor—his father-in-law, Diego Velázquez—know that he wanted to lead a gold-hunting expedition, and when Velázquez took him up on it, Cortés accepted the commission immediately. But even as Cortés busily prepared for an expedition, Velázquez, whose greed was boundless, began to worry that the young man was in it for himself. Indeed, Cortés had liquidated all his businesses, mortgaged all he owned, recruited five hundred of Velázquez’s men, and outfitted a fleet of eleven ships with scant help from anyone else. Suspecting that the governor was about to withdraw his commission, Cortés rushed to set sail. “Fortune favors the daring!” he later wrote to the only man he would now obey: the newly crowned boy sovereign of Spain, King Carlos I, grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella. Daring would turn out to be Cortés’s stock in trade.
Even as Cortés’s ships skimmed away from Santiago de Cuba one gusty November night in 1518, the morbidly obese Governor Velázquez paced the shore, panting, roaring with rage, charging his brash young captain with mutiny. The governor had yet to receive permission from Spain to conquer new soil, and Cortés was well aware of it. The young man’s precipitous departure under a starless sky could mean only one thing: he would wrest glory for himself.
With all the cunning and charm he could muster, Cortés worked to win Velázquez’s troops to his side. As they headed for the promised bounty, he played on their greed for gold, convinced them that the governor was intent on cheating them out of it, and argued that their allegiance, in any case, should not be to Velázquez but to the Spanish king. Although a number of soldiers would remain loyal to the governor throughout the expedition, most did not argue. They were, after all, eager recruits, recent fugitives from penury and adolescence, fleeing a drab, desolate Spain with only one goal in mind: to get rich or die trying. They understood little about these latitudes and what it would take to lay claim to their precious store, but they knew they would need to be resolute. The Old World had to prevail over the New.
They hardly knew where the “gold-rich” ground might be, whether it was arable or sand, what human life inhabited it. For all the insistence that they were on a mission to save souls, precious few cared about the spiritual welfare of the indigenous. What they did care about was crystal clear: there were fortunes to be made, slaves to be pressed into service, treasures to ferry home. If Spain demanded that priests and notaries accompany them, they would comply, but it was seizure and booty that mattered most, not missionary work or the letter of the law. As one of them described it, they were sure of but one thing: “God would see to it that the lands we found were teeming with gold, pearls, or silver.” The rest would be up to them. They would fight those lands into submission if need be, take and divide the spoils. Even the pope had decreed they had every right to do this. And they would make very sure that the king got his royal fifth.
BELLA DURMIENTE
Mount Ananea, 1965
There she is, the mountain we call Sleeping Beauty, in my town of tears.
—Resident, La Rinconada, 2013
In 1965, when Leonor Gonzáles was little more than two, her father, whose ancestors had been miners on the Bolivian side of the Carabaya mountains, left those lands for Sleeping Beauty, la Bella Durmiente, the legendary mountain where it was said gold was good and government, minimal. Like generations before him, her father was trying to make a living for his woman and children, but he had watched his own father fail in the mines of Untuca, where the business of gold had ground to a standstill; and his grandfather, too, had not done well in the ancient Inca quarries at Gavilán de Oro. Born in that unforgiving cordillera, where failure had hardened failure, Leonor had watched her father set out with his pickax before dawn, heading into the dark even as he gulped down his soup. Pig soup, that fortifying elixir she had learned to conjure from the animal’s ear and serve one man after another in generations of the hunt for El Dorado.
Times hadn’t changed much. Gold was still the object. The irony was that the precious dust was there often enough; certainly enough to encourage the clamor. The potential win for any of them was but a fraction of the overall discovery, but her people had done this before: endured a bitter reward after the removal of “the royal fifth,” after the contractors’ thirty-to-one, after the ceaseless drain to a world elsewhere. There remained, in that hard calculus, overseers to obey. A punishing quota to satisfy. The physical toll of survival. One day, as she tended to her two small children in the freezing confines of her grandfather’s one-room hut where her little family lived, she watched her man don his coat and cap and go off into the black of night, never to be seen again. They told her he had been swallowed whole by the mine’s god, the unpredictable, insatiable El Tío. They told her he had drunk too much at one of the brothels and met his match in a fatal brawl. Some said he had staggered out of the mine in a daze, onto the freezing altiplano, and been carried off by two hard-eyed vultures.
He was gone.
NORTH FROM YUCATÁN
