by Hugh Thomas
The essence of these instructions was, after a section devoted to the needs of evangelization, the disciplined organization of the future colony, with provisions to ensure an economic monopoly for the Crown, and loyalty and obedience to it. The word rescate (ransom) summed up the economic life. No one was to carry off goods “de rescate,” neither of gold nor of anything else. That could only be done by the Admiral himself or the royal treasurer, in the presence of a royal accountant. There would be a customs house in La Española that would store all the goods the government would send from Castile, while another would be set up in Cadiz to hold everything sent from the Indies. The prime purpose of the expedition was agriculture and commerce, even though gold was, of course, not forgotten. All expeditionaries would be paid. Presumably the able Fonseca was the real author of these words. Here we find the beginning of the Spanish commercial system as it evolved in the next hundred years.39
There followed a firm instruction on June 7 to Bernal Díaz de Pisa, who was to be deputy to the royal accountant in the Indies, and to Juan de Soria.40 The former’s orders were elaborate: he had to list everything sent in the ships; he had to note, too, the people who were to travel; he had to record everything loaded en route, and also to enumerate what was sent home and when. It was he who was to establish the customs house in the Indies.
On June 12, the monarchs wrote to Columbus assuring him of the good intentions of the King of Portugal.41 But in a sermon in Rome on June 19, the diplomatic Bernardino Carvajal all the same declared: “It pleased our Lord Jesus Christ to subject to the empire [imperium] of the kings of Spain the Fortunate [Canary] Islands whose admirable fertility is so noticeable. And now the Lord has given many other islands lying in the direction of India, previously unknown, but it appears that there are in the whole world none more precious or more rich.”42 He talked of the prophecy in the book of Isaiah that the lion would lie down with the ox, recalling that the latter was the emblem of the Borgia. This sermon was widely distributed.
Soon after this, Carvajal’s brother, García López Carvajal, who had not previously played any part in diplomacy, and the protonotary Pedro de Ayala presented themselves before João II in Lisbon with a Castilian counteroffer to the scheme that Rui de Sande had taken to Barcelona. This derived from an idea of Columbus’s but was somewhat altered: a latitudinal division in the ocean would run west from the Canaries. To the north would be the possessions of the Crown of Spain, to the south those of Portugal, with the exception of lands previously granted. Had this plan been adopted, only North America would have been Spanish.
Pedro de Ayala was furious at the proposal that he was charged to offer, since it would have given such a large slice of the New World to Portugal, whose possessions, he and others had hoped, would be confined to Africa. On the other hand, King João II was irritated by the obstinacy of the Spaniards and said: “This delegation has neither hands nor feet.” He thought Carvajal a fool and complained that Ayala was lame. All the same, the negotiators were successful, since they could point out that Columbus would not be returning through Portuguese waters. The consequence was that a committee was named in Portugal to consider the rights of the two countries.
Fonseca, the bureaucrat-archdeacon, had already left for Seville to “help Columbus prepare for the new voyage.”43 Probably he owed this mission to the support of Talavera, the Archbishop and confessor for whom he had worked previously. These preparations were marked by arguments, and not only the Archdeacon but also Juan de Soria was every day more irritated with the Admiral, so much so that the monarchs had to write and tell them both to treat Columbus with all respect, because it was he who would, after all, captain the fleet.44
The King and Queen had their representatives on this second expedition of Columbus’s in the form of priests and monks. They were to be given all the powers that they needed.45 The monarchs were fortunate to obtain the attention of His Holiness to such concerns in those days, for he was busy with the wedding in the Vatican of his daughter, the beautiful Lucrezia, to Giovanni Sforza.46 Still, there was time for the drafting of the bull, named Pius Fidelium, of July 25, 1493, the basis for the recruitment of missionaries. It authorized a prominent churchman, Fray Boil, to go on Columbus’s expedition and removed any prohibition on founding monasteries without license from the Holy See.47
The same day, Fernando and Isabel wrote to Fonseca urging speed in arranging the departure of Columbus.48 Pero Dias and Rui de Piña, ambassadors from Portugal, were now proposing to the monarchs in Barcelona a new line (raya) dividing the Portuguese from the Spanish possessions. They said that unless the Admiral suspended this second voyage of his, the King of Portugal really would send ships west—the threat being that some Portuguese captain would go to Cuba, say, and assert his control. But the Spanish armada of Vizcaya seems to have prevented the latter threat from being tried.49
For this reason, on August 18, 1493, Isabel wrote to Columbus himself, asking him to set off as soon as possible because a delay of one day now was like twenty a little time ago, and because “winter approaches.…” There was real anxiety about Portugal. Columbus heard that King João was sending a caravel from Madeira toward Spain. The monarchs thought it wise for Columbus to be prepared for this with some of his own ships, but he was to take care not to touch Guinea—an instruction that suggested a very inadequate grasp of the geographical implications of the first journey of Columbus.50
On September 5, 1493, Isabel wrote again to the Admiral mentioning her concern about Portugal and asking him, in a friendly style, always to let her know what he was doing.51 The same day both monarchs urged Fonseca to insist on an early departure.52 Yet another letter from them both to Columbus implored him to leave without further delay. They told Columbus about the state of negotiations in Lisbon over the line dividing the zones of influence, and talked of recent Portuguese discoveries. For that reason alone, they said, in yet another letter of the same date, they needed to know the degrees within which “fall the islands and land which you discover and the degrees of the path which you traveled.”53 Not all these letters arrived, or, at least, not in time. For on September 25, Columbus had left on his second voyage, with seventeen ships.
10
“As if in their own country”
Lured by the ease of taking possessions of those islands and by the richness of the booty … many of the Spaniards began to live there as if in their own country.
Guicciardini, HISTORY OF ITALY
Queen Isabel and King Fernando spent most of the autumn of 1493 in Barcelona, with the exception of a journey in September to Gerona, Figueras, and Perpignan. As usual, they were accompanied by dukes, counts, secretaries, confessors, bishops, soldiers, archives, chests, and tapestries.
Columbus, triumphant, was on a different expedition. His ships included the Niña, the San Juan, and the Cordero, under his own direct captaincy. The latter were carefully chosen by the Admiral for their lightness: he did not want another clumsy large vessel, such as the Santa María. But in the end he had five big ships along with twelve small ones. It was a diverse fleet: fifteen of his vessels had square sails, while two had triangular lateens.
Probably between 1,200 and 1,500 men and a few women sailed on these caravels. A complete roll has never been made,1 but the crews were recruited much as those of 1492 had been and, as before, paid 1,000 maravedís a month if they were experienced, 600 if not. The majority of crews were again from Niebla or Palos; but there were a few more Basques than in 1492. Some of those who sailed were Genoese, including Columbus’s brother Diego (Giacomo), always dressed as if he were a priest; a childhood friend, Michele Cuneo, who would write an account of the voyage;2 and another “Ligurian,” Tenerin, who became contramaestre (boatswain) of the Cardena. Several other old friends of Columbus were officials of one sort or another. About twenty-two of his new companions had been with him on the first voyage.3
The accountant, Bernál Díaz de Pisa, a childhood companion of the Infante Juan, who was v
ery much a royal appointment, also sailed, as did Sebastián de Olano, who later succeeded him. Thus the finances of the expedition depended on the Crown, whatever authority the Admiral might suppose that he had. Other friends of the monarchs included Antonio de Torres, brother of the Infante Juan’s nurse, Juana Velázquez de la Torre, and a veteran member of the Infante’s circle if, too, a mature courtier. Columbus intended him to command the fortress at La Isabela, but he had instructions from the monarchs to return to Spain with some of the ships as quickly as possible.4 His mission was to see La Española for himself as if with the eyes of the monarchs. But Columbus’s son Fernando thought highly of Torres and called him “a man of great prudence and nobility.”5
The chief inspector was Diego Marquéz, a hidalgo from Seville who had once been a page to Archdeacon Fonseca—another appointment to make the Admiral wary.
There were also about two hundred unpaid volunteers, probably among them footloose aristocrats such as Diego de Alvarado, son of a comendador of Hornachos, in Extremadura, and the uncle of the Alvarado brothers later so important in the history of Mexico; Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, the future governor of Cuba; Juan de Rojas, future founder of Havana, like Velázquez from Cuéllar, in Castile; as well as Jaime Cañizares, a young lawyer, who years later would be chamberlain of the Emperor Charles V. Another aristocrat with Columbus, who had been sent to Rome as ambassador, was Melchor Maldonado, of Seville. There were also from that city Pedro de las Casas and his brothers Gabriel and Diego de Peñalosa, both notaries, as well as their fourth brother, Francisco de Peñalosa.6 These were respectively the father and the uncles of the historian Bartolomé de las Casas, and all were conversos. Another knight was Juan Ponce de León, a cousin of Rodrigo, Count of Arcos, and future conqueror of Puerto Rico; and Sebastián Ocampo from Galicia, later the first circumnavigator of Cuba. These men were to be among those who in the next generation laid the foundations of a vast empire.
Another courtier who captained a ship was Pedro Margarit, who came from a noble Catalan family, with a property at Montgri, a mountain castle that can be seen from miles away in the Ampurdán. He was the great-nephew of a famous bishop of Gerona, Cardinal Joan Margarit, who had worked for many years in the Roman Curia on behalf of both Kings Alfonso V and Juan II of Aragon, had protected Queen Juana Enríquez and her son Fernando in 1461, and had once remarked that the administration of a monarchy requires prudence, not morality. The Bishop had been an eloquent humanist, interested in the idea of Hispanic unity.7 A cousin succeeded him as bishop of Gerona. Another cousin, Luis Margarit, was in the 1480s the King’s councillor for Catalonia. Pedro Margarit was among the oldest as well as the best connected of the expeditionaries. As early as 1477, he himself had been in Saragossa as a magistrate, and in 1478, he had fought in a famous tournament in Seville, in honor of the monarchs during their stay there. He had also performed some services for the Crown in the war against Granada, for which the King gave him the right of receiving the tolls for cattle (montazgo) in the city of Daroca, in Aragon.8
A more ambiguous character among the captains of this second voyage of Columbus was Alonso de Hojeda, a man of about twenty-five from Cuenca, in Castile, whom the Admiral had first met in the house of the Duke of Medinaceli in the Puerto de Santa María in 1490. He was a clever, good-looking man, small in build, with large eyes, always the first to draw blood in any fight and, according to Las Casas, “uniting in his person all the bodily perfections that man could have, despite his small size.”9 Columbus admired him but would have much trouble from him in the future, partly because he transferred his loyalty from Medinaceli to Fonseca. The Queen also admired him; in her presence, he had walked out along a beam of the scaffolding encasing the Giralda, the 250-foot-high Muslim tower, during the building of the cathedral in Seville, without any sign of vertigo.
Most of these men were more experienced in the ways of the court in Spain than was Columbus, and were by instinct certain to be loyal to the Crown rather than to the Genoese who was in command.
Then there were twenty knights, five of them, with two horses each, from Granada. They had been members of the Hermandad of that city and had, as we have seen, been specifically named by the royal secretary, Hernando de Zafra. All seem to have been connected with later individuals whose names would figure in the history of the early Spanish Empire: Coronado, Cano, Arévalo, Osorio, Leyva, Sepúlveda, and Olmedo.10 The presence of these men-at-arms, not sought by Columbus, as well as the two hundred knightly volunteers, troubled the Admiral: they were of a different class from men to whom he was used.
Two doctors traveled with him: first, Diego Álvarez Chanca, from Seville, who had once been a medical adviser to the King and Queen and who underestimated the likely discomforts of the voyage. The monarchs seem to have paid him a salary. He had been a member of the household of the successful knight Rodrigo Ponce de León, and would later write an important letter about what he saw. The second doctor was Guillermo Coma, from Barcelona, who would also write of his experiences.11
The majority of these men were people whom Columbus had never met before and who surely found their Genoese Admiral a curious leader: a wonderful sailor, no doubt, but with many odd fancies that he would express in his strange Portuguese Spanish. In general, “So many offered themselves that it was necessary to restrict the number …,” wrote Columbus’s son Fernando.12
As we have seen, Columbus also had with him several priests and monks, and some of them seemed to be royal agents. Their leader, Fray Juan Boil (Buil), an Aragonese who had begun life as a Benedictine, had been a childhood friend and secretary to King Fernando and ambassador to France and Rome; he then joined the “Minims,” the hermits of St. Francisco, a society that had grown up in the mid-fifteenth century around Francisco de Paula, a holy man from Cosenza. Boil had negotiated with France on behalf of Fernando and Isabel the future of Cerdagne and Roussillon in 1490, a most delicate task. He was therefore a man of weight and reputation. Boil became the self-styled “Apostolic Vicar for the Indies.” His mission is not quite clear; perhaps the monarchs wanted a continuous supervision of their protégé, the Admiral. Fernando and Isabel had written to Columbus: “We send our devoted father Boil, together with other religious persons, so that … the Indians may be well informed about our faith and understand our language.”13 How the good father was going to communicate was uncertain; and perhaps his long experience of life on the fringes of power made him more a political commissar of the expedition than a priest.14 Further, he neither liked nor admired Columbus, and conditions at sea (as later on land) were intolerable for him, austere hermit though he proclaimed himself.15 At all events, the combination of Margarit and Boil meant that King Fernando had agents in the most important positions on Columbus’s second voyage.
Other religious men included Fray Pedro de Arenas, who would celebrate the first Mass in the Indies;16 Fray Jorge, commander of the Knights of Santiago;17 and a Jeronymite anchorite, Fray Ramón Pané, a Catalan whose Spanish was imperfect: “a simple-minded man,” Las Casas wrote of him, “so that what he said was sometimes confused and of little importance.”18 All the same, he would write the first account of the deities of La Española.19 There were also on the expedition Father Juan de la Deule and Father Juan de Tisin, both Belgian, Franciscan lay brothers of the Picardy connection, as well as Juan de Borgoña, another Franciscan, from Dijon.20 Thus the expedition had a broad, almost cosmopolitan foundation.
A few women sailed in 1493; we hear of them in the Admiral’s diary: “And I ordered him to give a native boy discovered in one of the Lesser Antilles to a woman whom I had brought from Spain.”21 Who these women were is obscure: servants, nurses, or mistresses, anything is possible.
Columbus also took back with him three Indians whom he had captured in 1492 and of whom Peter Martyr wrote: “All this was recounted through the native interpreters who had been taken back to Spain on the first voyage.…”22 He had originally kidnapped more Indians to train as interpreters, but by no
w the others had died. There may also have been some African slaves, berbers, mulattoes, or negroes from West Africa.23 Las Casas certainly thought that there were black slaves on board. According to the historian Bernáldez, Columbus carried twenty-four horses together with ten mares and three mules, but presumably these included the mounts of the knights.24 There were other animals: some pigs, goats, and sheep.
The majority of the expedition were laborers whose plan was to till the soil of La Española or to find, and mine, gold there. They were going in order to make money, to become someone, if not a hidalgo. The royal secretary, Hernando de Zafra, had been asked to seek in Granada “twenty country laborers and one other who knows how to make irrigation ditches. And he was not to be a Moor.”25 These men were also to bring horses, mares, mules, and other beasts, as well as wheat and barley seeds, and all kinds of “little trees and fruit bushes.”26 Las Casas later wrote, “If these men had known what the work would be, I do not believe that any one of them would have gone!”27 But Columbus planned a trading colony in the Genoese tradition (such as he had seen in Chios and in Guinea), able to send home mastic (a gum that he thought he had seen on his first voyage), cotton, and gold, as well as enslaved cannibals.
Perhaps we see here already a divergence between the Crown’s and Columbus’s expectations. The Crown hoped for political control of territory. Columbus wanted with him family men who would give stability to the colony, and also craftsmen and industrious prospectors. “Even the Nereids and the Sirens were stupefied when the fleet set off,” wrote Dr. Guillermo Coma.28 In these respects, as in many others, the Crown was copying in the Indies what had been done with success in the Canary Islands.29
