by Hugh Thomas
The Admiral also wrote an interesting summary of the events leading up to Tordesillas. It pointed out that since the world was round, there was still a doubt about what would happen in the East. Where in the Far East (it was not so called at that time) was the dividing line between the Portuguese and Spanish zones?33 Surely that matter was one that should be resolved as soon as possible.
That summer, incidentally, the dominions of Spain were expanded in a new way—not in the “Indies” but in Africa, for this was the year when Pedro de Estopiñan, a captain in the household of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, besieged and occupied the Moroccan port of Melilla, which was near Tafilat, a hub of the gold exchange between the coast and the Sahara.34 The monarchs were also busy with the creation of a new currency and the coordination of the monetary situation in Castile, which had been untidy since the reign of Enrique IV.35
Columbus was at Seville in the winter of 1497–98, obviously supposing that he would soon be off to his Indies. His son Fernando later wrote that the delays were the clear responsibility of Fonseca, who hoped to prevent the proud, unpredictable Admiral from ever returning to La Española.36 The ships earmarked for him had even been used by Pedro de Estopiñán. Later, the Admiral would say that he undertook his third voyage in order to provide some alleviation to the Queen for her sorrow at the death of the Infante, a claim more loyal than exact.37
That winter Columbus seems to have written down his ideas about the size of the earth for the first time; he thought that the circumference was 4,000 miles, “as confirmed” by José Viziñho, the Portuguese cosmographer. (It is 25,000 miles at the Equator.)38 Columbus was still determined to prove that he had reached Asia, recalling again and again Pierre d’Ailly’s statement in Ymago Mundi (which he attributed to Aristotle) that “the sea is small between the western part of Spain and the eastern part of India and is navigable in very few days.”39 That must have proved his point.
But Columbus’s protractions continued: in January 1498, his friend Pedro Fernández Coronel, who had been constable (alguacil mayor) on the second voyage, set off for La Española with two supply ships. They included the Vaquina, of which “half belonged to your Highnesses and the other half to a widow in Palos.”40 It was understood that this flotilla was an advance guard for Columbus himself. But still the Admiral tarried, not yet having found the backing that he required and having had personal matters to attend to. Thus, in February he drew up an entail (mayorazgo) for his estate, presumably a sign of continuing royal favor.41 His titles were to go first to his son Diego, and if Diego had no heirs, to his son Fernando. His brothers Bartolomeo and Diego would be the residual beneficiaries.
In this document, Columbus spoke warmly of Genoa as “a noble and powerful city on the sea.”42 He also compared himself to the Admiral of Castile.43 He “recalled” that it was the Holy Trinity “which put into my mind the thought, which later became perfect knowledge, that I could sail from Spain to the Indies by crossing the Ocean sea to the west.” He insisted that he had been granted 25 percent of the yield of the New World (the Crown never had conceded more than a tenth of their royal fifth). Columbus also spoke of his share of the Indies as beginning a hundred leagues to the west of the Cape Verde Islands. He wrote as if he had never heard of the treaty of Tordesillas.44
On April 29, 1498, Columbus was finally able to write to his son Diego, saying goodbye, ending: “Your father loves you as much as he does himself.”45 On May 12, having slipped down the River Guadalquivir with five ships, and being already at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, he wrote to his new confidant, Fray Gaspar Gorricio, to say that he had loaded his cargo but so many people wanted to travel with him that he needed another vessel; hence his further delay.46 (Fray Gaspar was a Carthusian from Novara, near Milan, and was then at the monastery of Las Cuevas, just outside Seville.) On May 28 the Admiral wrote again to Gorricio saying that he had bought an extra ship in Palos but he still could not leave, since the French were known to be raiding on the high seas and had even seized a Spanish ship full of wheat destined for the Indies.47
Finally, he left Sanlúcar de Barrameda, sailing, he said, in the name of the Holy Trinity, on May 30, 1498, with five caravels—the Castilla, the Rábida, the Gorda, the Garza, and the Santa María de Guía, all of which had been built in Palos.48 These ships carried over two hundred men, including eight men-at-arms, forty-seven crossbowmen, and sixty sailors. There were also twenty civil servants, ten gardeners, thirty gold-panners, and, in the end, about twenty women (at least two of whom were Gypsies). Another fifty agricultural laborers, a few priests, and some other specialists made up the numbers. Columbus had had all his old rights confirmed. He would be allowed to divide the land among his followers. Native rights were this time not mentioned.
This “third voyage” was financed largely by the Genoese bankers the Centurione, Columbus’s old employers in the 1470s and a family ever more important in Seville. Another Genoese associate, Bernardo Grimaldi, helped. Columbus’s voyages would never have occurred had it not been for the backing of these imaginative and independent-minded Genoese, who have never received the credit they deserve.49
Columbus and the Crown still had divergent views of the purpose of colonization in the Caribbean. To Columbus’s mind, the ideal was still that La Española would become a trading colony in which, though there would eventually be Castilian crops to feed the colonists, the main task would be the procurement of primary goods such as gold, cotton, dyestuffs, spices, and slaves. But the monarchs, commending this new voyage to, for example, the cities of Spain, spoke of colonizing the island of La Española and the other islands “which are in the said Indies, because thereby Our Lord God is served, His Holy Faith extended, and our own realms increased.”50 They still wanted Columbus to share out La Española among the settlers, much as the Canaries had been distributed. They also seem to have wanted in the Indies a new agriculture in the style of the Canaries (with sugarcane), and they wanted to obtain the precious metals and the brazilwood (for dyes).
As for the Indians, Columbus was told to
try, with all diligence, to inspire and draw the Indians into the paths of peace and tranquillity, and impress on them that they have to serve and live beneath our lordship in benign subjection and, above all, that they may be converted to our Holy Faith and that to them and to those who go and live in the Indies be administered the holy sacraments by the clerks and friars who are or shall be there.51
There was nothing in these instructions that talked of discovery of other lands, though it soon became obvious that that was what Columbus himself now had in mind.
The Admiral divided his men into two flotillas of three ships each. One would be led by his friend Alonso Sánchez de Carvajal, who had once been a regidor (council member) of Baeza and who had already done many minor things for the Admiral. One of his ships would be captained by Columbus’s nephew Juan Antonio Colombo, who was probably an illegitimate son of either Bartolomeo or Diego.52 Another ship was commanded by Pedro de Araña, a cousin of Beatriz, the Admiral’s old mistress in Córdoba. These first three ships would go direct to La Española via what would soon be known as the Dominican Passage.
The other ships, under Columbus himself, would go first to the Cape Verde Islands and from there across the Atlantic to approach La Española from the south. He had with him his old companion Alonso de Hojeda. Columbus’s aim was to explore the veracity of tales in Lisbon that there was between the Indies and Europe a new continent “in the south.”53
On the way to the New World, Columbus visited all the Atlantic islands. He was in the Azores on June 7. Then he visited Madeira, where his wife, Felipa, had long ago died giving birth to his youngest son, Diego. He also had memories of working there selling sugar for the same Centuriones who were now financing him. Next he sailed to the Canaries, also known to him from other journeys. By that time the entire archipelago had been annexed by Castile after the conquest of Tenerife by Alonso de Lugo, who remained governor both of Tenerife and of
La Palma. Lugo was not an especial friend of Columbus, even if he was already being accused of favoring the Genoese and Portuguese instead of his fellow Castilians. The fact is that those Genoese had the capital that the Canaries needed. Portuguese laborers and farmers were also made welcome, especially if they had experience of sugar manufacture in Madeira. But the Genoese were as ever prominent as entrepreneurs.54 The local people, the Guanches, soon vanish from history, but slaves from there must have had descendants in Spain.
Finally, Columbus made for the Cape Verde Islands, where he arrived at Fogo on July 1. There were there about fifty settlers, mostly criminals. The Portuguese Governor, Álvaro da Caminha, was busy buying and selling slaves from nearby Africa, copper objects, and sugar. He also had with him at that time two thousand Jewish boys and girls who had been separated from their parents in Lisbon after King Manuel had introduced laws expelling the Jews the previous year, at the time of his wedding to the princess Isabel of Spain. The parents of these children had not had enough money to pay the fine necessary to ensure their continued residence in Portugal. The scene in Fogo must have been colorful: impoverished lepers seeking turtles’ blood, mingling with optimistic gatherers of orchil for dyes. On the island of Boa Vista there were wild goats. The Admiral had been there in the 1480s but this time thought that these islands were “so dry that I saw nothing green.” But he was impressed that the worst African slave could be sold for 8,000 maravedís.55 That perhaps influenced him to buy some slaves himself.
On July 5, 1498, Columbus set off westward. The ships hit the doldrums, met terrible heat in a calm that rotted some of the supplies, and then, on July 31, reached an uncharted island that the Admiral named Trinidad (he saw three hills there and, anyway, he had dedicated this journey to the Trinity). Columbus first anchored off the east end of the island (Punta Galeta) and took on water. A canoe with twenty-four men on board appeared, “armed with bows and arrows and wooden shields, the people being fairer than other natives that I had seen,” the Admiral commented with his usual enthusiasm. They wore what seemed to be Moorish headdresses. Columbus tried to attract them by shining swords or even saucepans at them, but they were even less attracted by Juan de Guadalajara, who played a tambourine and whose charming music (to which some of the Spaniards danced) led them to begin shooting arrows. Columbus ordered crossbows to be fired. The natives rowed away.56
The Admiral next sailed south to a cape that he named the Puente de Arenal, which must have been close to the present-day Punta Araguapiche. There he saw the colossal outflow of the Orinoco, by far the largest river the Europeans had yet seen in the New World. This suggested that they must be off some kind of mainland, a judgment confirmed by the sight of a volcanic wave that the Admiral feared might sink his ship.
In 1513, in the here often-cited inquiry in Seville into Columbus’s activities, witnesses were asked whether they thought that when the Admiral said he had discovered Paria on the hinge of Venezuela, he had only touched the island of Trinidad. Alonso de Hojeda said that the Admiral had sailed to the south, expecting to find islands about which he had been told by Indians, and that he had passed between Trinidad and the mainland through a strait that was soon named “the Dragon’s Mouth,” at the end of the Gulf of Paria. Then Pedro de Ledesma, a pilot in 1498, testified (in 1513) that Columbus did not discover any land that could be called Asia but instead saw (and did not land on) the island of Margarita before turning north for La Española.
In fact, the fleet anchored off what was undoubtedly South America, and Pedro Romero de Torreros took possession of the territory in the name of the Catholic Kings.57 Hernando Pacheco, a Sevillano, who was fifteen at the time, had been among those who had leapt onto the land and helped to raise a cross, at which the natives marveled: “The Admiral asked the pilots where they thought they were, and some said that they thought that they were in the sea of Spain, others in the sea of Scotland.” But the sailors added that “it must have been the devil who had persuaded them to sail with the Admiral.”58 Hojeda said that “he saw cats in Paria and footprints as big as those of a mare and also goats and pigs.”59 Some of the Spaniards found the trees were “as lovely as the orchards of Venice in April.”
The people whom Columbus met were friendly, wearing “pearls around their arms and gold around their necks. We went to see them in a very large house with a double-pitched roof. We drank some of their intoxicating beer.” Some of it had obviously been made from maize, of which crop Columbus had already brought some back from the Caribbean, so that there was now “much in Castile.”
This discovery of alcohol—of which there was none in La Española or Cuba—was almost as interesting as that of the gold.60
The Spaniards were given two dinners on shore, one by a father, one by his son. They were told that both gold and pearls came from islands farther to the west. But they were advised not to go there, since the people were cannibals. This was when the Admiral decided that the earth was not round “but shaped like a pear which is round everywhere except at the stalk, where it juts out a long way; and that, though it is generally round, there is a part of it on which there was something like a nipple.” That protuberance, he thought, lay below the Equator and in the Atlantic Ocean, “at the farthest point to the east.” (It may be recalled that the sphericity of the earth was first conceived of by Anaximander in the sixth century B.C.)
The Admiral and his companions considered that the mouths of the River Orinoco were, like those of Paradise, four in number. It had been assumed during the Middle Ages that East Asia did harbor the Garden of Eden. Columbus was sure that the Orinoco was one of these four rivers and that he had found the original site of the terrestrial Elysium, “which none can enter, save with God’s leave.… It lies at the summit of what I have described as the stalk of a pear, and … by gradually approaching it, one begins … to climb.… I do not believe that anyone can ascend to the top.… If this river does not flow out of the earthly paradise, the marvel is still greater, for I do not believe that there is so great and deep a river anywhere.”61
All the people whom Columbus met at this time, both in Trinidad and on the mainland, were part of what is now known to anthropologists as “the Caribbean family of tribes.” They were sophisticated, for they depended on an advanced type of horticulture. Bitter manioc was the staple product, and the coca tree was the most prized of those cultivated, being grown for its leaves. Another tree was produced for resin. Maize, sweet manioc, sweet potatoes, calabashes, chili peppers, pineapples, and guava were also grown extensively. These people had a regular system of canals and ditches, even though their fields were customarily abandoned after being used for two years. Many wild fruits were also gathered. Deer, porcupines, rabbits, squirrels, tapirs, rats, and tortoises were killed for food, as were many birds (quail, doves, ducks, partridges), the main weapon being a longbow with arrows tempered by cane. Hunters used both nets and fire. There seem to have been turkeys. A kind of palm wine was made, as well as maize beer. It is hard to believe that reckoned by diet their standard of living was below that of Europe.
As a rule, villages consisted of about two hundred large round houses shaped like tents and with roofs of bark, palm leaves, reeds, or straw. They were usually arranged around a central square. Caciques might control a large collection of buildings, including room to accommodate a substantial harem, as was the case of the cacique Guaramental on the River Urare. Inside the houses in this territory, hammocks would be found for sleeping, and sometimes at night fires were lit underneath them to keep off mosquitoes. Many houses boasted carved ebony stools.
Men wore decorative cottons around their private parts, sometimes a cotton loincloth that stretched to their knees, sometimes aprons, and women wore the latter also. Often women tied tight plates around their breasts. Both sexes might wear strings of teeth or claws of animals that they had killed or other necklaces, anklets, bracelets, earrings, pearls, coral beads, and flowers. Both men and women painted their bodies and sometimes covere
d themselves with resin, to which they attached feathers.
Like the Tainos, all the peoples of the northern shores of South America used canoes, which they paddled dexterously.
The customs of these Indians were unexpected. Homosexuality was accepted, widows were inherited by the dead man’s brother, and women harvested, spun, and made pottery. But they also went to war and apparently managed bows and arrows expertly. Old men were respected. Caciques were sometimes hereditary, sometimes elected. Justice was usually placed in the hands of the injured person. Unlike what obtained in the Caribbean, slavery was usual, while war was ceremonially announced. Drunkenness was permitted in wild bouts, tobacco was smoked, drums as well as flutes and rattles were used at dances, while the year was divided into lunar months.62
Columbus sailed along the territories where these peoples lived as far as the island to which he gave the name of Margarita, for there he found pearls. A little later he wrote that this was “another world” (otro mundo). So it was, but he never realized or could accept that it was a new continent, something utterly new to his experience.63
This discovery of pearls was the most important consequence of this third voyage of Columbus. It changed the judgment of people at home in respect to the financial promise of the New World and led to great interest in it in the next few years, something that Columbus could not control.64 Columbus’s landfall of August 1, 1498, on the south of the peninsula of Paria, marked the discovery of South America, however much others have sought to disprove both the landing and its significance, which (it is true) Columbus did not himself appreciate. He wrote on August 13, 1498: “I believe that this land is a large mainland [tierra firme, grandísima] which, up till now, no one knew existed.”65 Yet the Admiral still thought that he was in the East.
