Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  On October 2, Columbus’s fleet reached Gran Canaria, where they repaired a leaking ship.30 They also stopped at the island of La Gomera, where Columbus bought eight pigs at 70 maravedís each, three mules, and some chickens—birds and beasts that, after a few years’ breeding, would transform the new Caribbean in a way that astonished all the Europeans. There was a celebration in honor of the acting governor, Beatriz Bobadilla.31 The one thing that Fonseca had underestimated, the need for a year’s supply of food for two thousand people, was partially, though not completely, made up for.

  On October 13, 1493, the expedition sailed from the Canaries. Columbus had decided this time to approach the Caribbean from the southeast, not the northeast. He does not seem to have discussed this plan with the monarchs or with Fonseca, or indeed with anyone in authority. His star at that time was standing so high that his will was automatically accepted; and that was to try and visit some of the other islands of which he had heard talk, much of it wild talk, of Amazons and giants—neither of whom the other Spaniards particularly wanted to meet.

  After only twenty days’ sail, the expedition encountered several islands that the Admiral took to be those of the Caribs. The first was one that he named La Deseada, for the innocent reason that he and his crew desired so much to see land again; the second, the mountainous Dominica, because it was a Sunday, Domingo, when they saw it; and the third, María-Galante (named after the flagship), where they soon found a suitable anchorage: “The Admiral and many people with him, and with the royal standard in their hands, took possession of the place.”32 Here the inspector, Diego Márquéz, went inland with eleven men and was lost for several days, but Columbus dispatched Alonso de Hojeda and forty men to find him. They had seized twelve fat but beautiful indigenous girls and two slave boys who, they said, had been castrated by cannibals. All these “Indians” were eventually sent to Spain.33

  These wonderfully green islands were about halfway up the Lesser Antilles, and so Columbus on this journey missed visiting Martinique. According to what Antonio de Torres told Peter Martyr, Columbus was (again) assured that there were Amazons in that latter island, being visited by men at regular times of the year. If attacked, the women repaired to secret caves where they defended themselves with bows and arrows. That was not good news: the Amazons were thought to constitute the most potent of dangers to the Europeans.34 Amazons had been known (if that is a permissible way of putting it) in Greek mythology, a people always on the edge of the civilized world. Alexander was said to have met the Amazon Queen beyond the River Jaxartes, which flows into the Sea of Aral. Columbus was thus in good company.

  The fleet then sailed on to Guadeloupe (which was now named after the Jeronymite monastery in Extremadura) and anchored in a bay that is today known as La Grande Anse (the Great Bay). They found a fine waterfall and also houses with straw roofs in which were parrots and human bones: the first sign of anthropophagy. The idea of the Carib as a man-eating savage was strengthened. Some natives were captured, including a boy, with twenty female Tainos who had been seized in “Boriquen,” or Puerto Rico. The Castilians also came upon calabash, geese, and parrots, as well as stores of provisions and well-woven cotton cloth. There were canoes, but the Spaniards found that ten of them had been taken to raid other islands, for in the words of Dr. Álvarez Chanca,

  the people are all friendly to one another as in one large family. They do not harm each other but make war on the neighboring islands. They then carry off all the women they can. In fifty houses, we found no males again except for two castrated youths. More than twenty of the captives were girls. These said that they had been treated with a cruelty that seems incredible.

  The Caribs were reported by Álvarez Chanca to think that

  human flesh is so good that there is nothing like it in the world; and this must be true, because the human bones which we found in their houses were so gnawed that no flesh was left on them except what was too tough to be eaten. In one house, a neck of a man was found still cooking. They castrate the boys whom they capture and use them as servants till they are men. Then, when they want … a feast, they kill and eat them. They say that the flesh of boys and of women is not good to eat.35

  Antonio de Torres, the alcaide-designate of the fortress of La Isabela, later related much the same: “In their pots [were] geese mixed with human flesh, while other parts of human bodies were fixed on spits, ready for roasting.… [In] another house, the Spaniards found bones that the cannibals carefully preserve for points of their arrows; for they have no iron.… The Spaniards discovered the recently decapitated head of a young man still wet with blood.”36

  On this island, Miguel Cuneo was given a beautiful girl by his fellow Genoese, Columbus. He wrote that he had had to beat her to accept his advances, but in the end, “we came to an agreement” and “she appeared to have learned her arts in a school of whores.”37 This was the first account of love-making in the New World.

  These encounters gave rise to foreboding. Perhaps conquests would not be so easy after all. Yet the evidence that these bones and this flesh were of humans is weak. Could sailors from Seville have told the difference between the flesh of men and that of monkeys?

  After six days in Guadeloupe (November 4–10, 1493) Columbus sailed on to Santa María de Montserrat, so named because its central mountain seemed to resemble that on which there stands the famous monastery in Cataluña and whence captives said that the Caribs had removed the whole population. Nearby, at Santa María la Redonda, which gained its name from its rounded hills, they dropped anchor but, again, they did not land. They continued to Santa María de Antigua, so called by Columbus after the famous Virgin in the cathedral of Seville. Finally, they landed at what the Admiral designated San Martín, which seemed well populated. A canoe remained motionless “two lombard shots” away, her crew of seven stupefied at the sight of the Castilians. The Spaniards captured these men with ease, though not quite without a battle. Two of Columbus’s men were wounded and one, probably a Gallego, killed—the first casualty of the voyage. They then proceeded on November 14 to Santa Cruz (now Saint Croix): “Very high and mostly barren: it seemed to be the sort of place where there might be metal, but we did not go ashore.” It appeared uninhabited.38 Nor did they go ashore on any of the pretty islands that Columbus named “the Virgin Islands” after St. Ursula, martyred in Cologne with, allegedly, “eleven thousand” virgins in the third century (the figure derived from a medieval misprint for eleven).39

  The next day they reached Boriquen, a word that means “crab” in Taino and that Columbus now called San Juan Bautista. It became Puerto Rico within a generation or so, and San Juan remains its capital. Álvarez Chanca thought it

  most beautiful and appears very fertile. The Caribs come here in raids and take off the people. The natives have no canoes [that was not the case] and no knowledge of navigation, but according to Caribs whom we captured, they use bows very like their own, and if they manage to capture any of the raiders, they eat them in the same way as do the Caribs themselves. We stayed in a harbor on this island for two days, and many of our people landed. But we were never able to have speech with the people, for they were terrified of the Caribs and all fled.…40

  This place was probably Aguadilla, on the western coast facing what later became the island of Mona and the perilous straits there. Columbus himself simply said that the inhabitants ate human flesh, for which accusation there seems no other evidence.41

  Columbus also christened in these days a number of other islands: Nuestra Señora de los Nieves, later Nevis; Santa Anastasia (now Saint Eustatius); and San Cristóbal (now Saba).

  At last, the expedition reached La Española. With it were now about thirty Indian prisoners from the lesser islands that Columbus had just visited. The possibility of a serious trade in slaves captured in these islands was every week becoming more appealing in the mind of the Admiral.42

  The fleet went first to Samaná Bay or Cabo Engaño, on November 22,43 then to Monte Cris
ti from November 25 to November 27, and finally on the twenty-eighth reached the colony founded on the previous journey, Navidad, to which such expectant thoughts had been directed. It had been destroyed.44 The expedition “found all Navidad reduced to ashes, while a profound silence reigned over the place. The Admiral and his companions were deeply moved … thinking, and hoping, that some of the settlers might be still alive and, wandering inland, he ordered guns to be fired, so that the noise of these formidable detonations might serve as a signal of his arrival.… It was in vain; for all were dead.”45 In a village of seven or eight houses on the coast, Columbus’s men found many possessions that had once belonged to their compatriots; among them were a Moorish cloak that had not been unfolded since it had been bought in Spain, some stockings, and some cloth, as well as the anchor of the shipwrecked Santa María.

  The first battle in the New World between Europeans and indigenous people was thus won by the latter. The truth of what had happened never became known, but a brother of Guacanagri, the local cacique, later said that the Spaniards under Araña had gone on a campaign of stealing women as well as of hunting for gold. Many men were killed, and Guacanagri had himself been wounded. The battle had been less than two months before, judging from the state of the bodies that were found. But Columbus thought that Caribs from another island might have been responsible. Some of his party, including the austere Minim Fray Bernardo Boil, wanted to avenge the dead by seizing Guacananagri, but Columbus merely visited him and obtained some gold by barter.46

  In early December,47 probably either the seventh or the eighth, the Admiral “decided that we should turn back up the coast by which we had come from Castile because the news of gold was from that direction … [but] with the bad weather, many weeks passed before we landed.”48 Las Casas says that the “people arrived at another place of disembarkation very tired and the horses exhausted.”49 Probably some of the horses never recovered.50

  After this difficult voyage, the Admiral and his ships at last arrived in early January in Monte Cristi. Columbus went ashore some forty miles to the east, where he disembarked nearly everyone on the expedition, twenty-four horses, ten mares, and three mules—very few men had as yet been lost.51

  The Spanish expeditionaries were soon restored by eating yams and some local fish. The place where they had landed was well populated by Tainos, whom Álvarez Chanca found so well disposed “that they could be easily converted if we only had an interpreter, for they imitate everything that we do. They bend their knees at the altars at the Ave María and cross themselves. They all say that they wish to be Christians. Yet there are idols of all kinds in their houses which they say belong to the sky.”52

  Columbus set about founding a settlement, which he christened Isabela, after the Queen. He chose the site because it was close to the inland valley of Cibao, where he understood, from the encouraging report of Martín Alonso on the previous voyage, that there were gold mines.53 About two hundred cabins or huts were shortly built on a rectangular plan that would have pleased or amused Vitruvius. The water was good, though Columbus exaggerated, as he so often did, when he said that it came from “a powerful river with water better than the Guadalquivir from which, by a ditch, one can carry it into the central square of the town, making use of a large vale to the southeast of that place. There is here wonderful land incomparably superior to anything in Castile, and it has tall grass.… Two leagues from the town, there is a marvelous beach and the best port in the world.…”54 In fact, Isabela had a bad harbor, and the site had been chosen foolishly. The river was unsuitable for building water mills.

  Columbus showed himself incompetent as governor, and he was unable to control the rapacity of his followers. He had no experience of civil administration and had developed none of the arts of the politician. The Spaniards with him had been chosen at random or had chosen themselves. Most of them had no idea what to do, and they expected to be paid, but that did not prove to be immediately possible. Columbus’s aim had at first been to exploit La Española for its gold, making the local chiefs responsible for its collection as a form of tribute. The plan assumed that there was much gold (there was not) and that the Indians were weak (they were not, only good-mannered). Some of the settlers wanted to go home. Others were brutal to the Tainos while a few (including enemies of Columbus such as Fray Boil and Pedro Margarit) were critical of any ill-treatment of them. When hostilities with the local Indians began, as a result of generally worsening relations in which the kidnapping of Taino women played a part, some slaves were taken. The mood was one of confusion. The idea of substituting a slave trade for the pursuit of gold became appealing. The same idea had occurred to the Portuguese when their captains in Africa found that people ready to be enslaved, or indeed already slaves, were more available than precious metals.

  Within a week of landing at Isabela, in the “middle of January,” the Admiral sent Alonso de Hojeda, the good-looking captain from Cuenca, with Ginés de Corvalán as his second in command, into the interior with fifteen men to seek gold. This immediately brought the Admiral into difficulties with “the jinetes” (knights) provided by the Hermandad of Granada. Columbus wanted their horses for Hojeda, but they refused to surrender them. Even those who were ill after the voyage were adamant that they were going to keep control of their mounts. This insubordination, for such it was, caused Columbus, in a fit of pique, to cut off the supply of fodder for the horses. With such petty preoccupations did the conquest of the world begin.55

  Hojeda set off on foot with his fifteen men, and walked sixty miles toward what is now the town of San José de las Matas. He and his companions were lucky: when they returned, they reported overoptimistically, “Wherever you look in this province, you will find gold.” Hojeda talked of “much gold in three or four places.” Álvarez Chanca became carried away and wrote home that “our sovereigns can certainly consider themselves henceforth the richest and most prosperous rulers on earth, for nothing comparable has ever been seen or read of till now in the whole world. On the next voyage which the ships make they will be able to carry away such quantities of gold that those who hear of it will be amazed.”56 At last the explorers seemed to have discovered what they most needed: the physical attraction of gold exercised men’s minds in those days in a way impossible now to recapture.

  Michele Cuneo commented that “the pursuit of gold was what had really inspired the journey that Columbus had embarked upon.”57 He recalled that the Admiral now told the monarchs he could find as much gold in La Española as there was iron in the Basque country. Cuneo also said that though conditions were bad on Columbus’s first journey inland in 1494, “the desire for gold caused us to maintain ourselves strong and magnanimous.”58 The historian Fernández de Oviedo, at that time a mere page at the court of the Infante Juan, would later say of the majority of the conquistadores whom he came to know: “They are the sort of men who have no intention of converting the Indians or of settling and remaining in this land. They come only to get some gold or wealth in whatever form they can obtain it. They subordinate honor, morality, and honesty to this end and apply themselves to any fraud or homicide and commit innumerable crimes.…”59

  The conquistadors’ thirst for gold was less commercial than it was comparable to the Moorish and Christian warriors’ hunger for loot in the Middle Ages. The desire was not for credit or for wealth in the abstract, but for the actual golden metal. Yet a modern historian qualified these matters: “The incentive provided by the gold of the Indies was doubtless a great attraction; but the dream of great personal achievement … was a stimulus more in the foreground.…”60

  On February 2, 1494, Antonio de Torres, the monarchs’ man in La Española and whom Columbus had intended to command the fortress of Isabela, sailed home to Spain with twelve of the expedition’s ships (leaving Columbus with five), taking back a formal “memorial,” or letter, from the Admiral, a letter from Álvarez Chanca, and indeed Álvarez Chanca himself, as well as gold worth 30,000 ducats, some c
innamon, some peppers, some wood, a few Indians who had been enslaved, and sixty parrots. Torres also took back several hundred of those who had set out in 1493 and had expressed their disillusion. This was, as will be seen, the voyage that carried syphilis to the Old World—the first negative contribution of the New World to the Old.61

  This “memorial” of Columbus to the monarchs was a rambling document which insisted that Hojeda and Ginés de Corvalán (who were among those returning to Spain) had found “rivers of gold.” He explained that the homesickness, which Torres would report, was caused by a change of air inevitable on arriving in new territory. Columbus also explained that he was sending back cannibal slaves so that their Highnesses could place them in the hands of those who would teach them Spanish. Columbus was equivocal about cannibals, for he also said, in relation to the settlement of bills for cattle and other supplies that he hoped would thenceforth be brought every year from Castile, that they might be paid for in slaves, who seemed wild but were well proportioned (a “people … suitable for the purpose”). He was sure that if they could only rid themselves of their “savagery,” they would prove to be the best slaves of all. By this time he was talking of “Indians” without any embarrassment.62

  This letter included admissions that some of his expectations—about gold, climate, and the Indians—had been excessive. But even now Columbus predicted that, in the future, the island could be planted with wheat, sugarcane, and vines and that Castilian livestock would prosper there. He urged the dispatch of laborers who had worked in the mercury mines of Almadén. He made some complaints about the knights’ insubordinate refusal to contribute their horses to the expedition’s general purposes, saying, too, that the accountant, Juan de Soria, had at the last minute slipped in on the boats some bad horses that Columbus had not been able to inspect. Columbus was in two minds over what to say about the knights: on the one hand, he needed them to defend the camp at Isabela, but, on the other, he did not want them to consider themselves beyond his authority.