by Hugh Thomas
In late 1502, the new governor decided to investigate the territory to the east of Vega Real, the goldfield in the northern center of the island, where there had been little fighting in Columbus’s day and where Ovando thought that he could persuade the indigenous population to work for the Spaniards. He also began to build a new port on the north of the island, at Puerto Plata, a place that still bears that name. It lies in a bay that offers the best harbor in northern La Española and was superior for maritime purposes to Isabela. It gained its name because Columbus, sailing past on his first voyage, imagined that the mountains there resembled silver.
Then, after a preliminary investigation by a voyage of eight men, the Governor sent an expedition around the eastern end of the island. It stopped at the island of Saona, where Columbus had been in 1493, in order to buy cassava. One of the Spaniards’ dogs, perhaps a mastiff, possibly a lurcher, even though called a lebrel (greyhound), killed a local cacique. Not surprisingly, a “rebellion” of Indians followed and eight Spaniards were killed. Ovando sent a party of four hundred men under Juan de Esquivel, a Sevillano with a cold heart, to pacify this territory.74
Esquivel, like so many of the first generation of settlers, came from a converso family, being the son of Pedro de Esquivel and Constanza Fernández de Arauz, herself the daughter of Gabriel Sánchez, a converso who had been the controller of customs in Seville. Pedro de Esquivel had been captured by the Moors in the mountains of Ajarquía, north of Malaga, when the Order of Santiago had met such a bad defeat in 1483 and, having escaped, for that reason benefited from royal favor. But the Esquivels never quite escaped the stigma of being conversos.75
Juan de Esquivel’s instructions were to impose peace with the Indians. But King Cotubanamá, the cacique of the east of La Española, with his headquarters more or less at the site of the present city of Higuey, was not disposed to consider any terms. His people, including his women, prepared for war. But their armaments were inadequate, they were defeated, and Saona was depopulated. Many were made slaves, “legally” because they had been captured in “a just war.”76 Esquivel and Cotubanamá eventually agreed that the port near Higuey would now supply such Spaniards as stopped there on the sea with the cassava they needed. Cotubanamá accepted a position as a tributary.
In the west of the island, in the autumn of 1503, Ovando embarked on an even more ferocious pacification. Some unattached Spaniards left behind by Roldán still had their illegal encomiendas, and they were reluctant to accept control from Santo Domingo. There were also misunderstandings with the Indians. The indigenous leader there was now Queen Anacoana, sister of Behechio and widow of Caonabó. She did what she could to charm the Spaniards, but she was unable to discipline her own people, who often skirmished with the settlers and interfered with their optimistic attempts to create a new agriculture reminiscent of that of Castile.
Ovando resolved to put an end to what he judged to be a double-headed disorder and set off for Jaragua with seventy horsemen and three hundred foot soldiers. Ovando seems to have decided to conquer the whole island and reduce all the Indians to subjection. He believed that they would live better under Spanish direction than under their own caciques, whom he regarded as cruel and incompetent wastrels. Las Casas wrote kindly of him that he was indeed “worthy of governing many people but not Indians.”77 He was determined to introduce a system of subservience deriving from the practice of the military orders with which he was familiar in Spain.78 This implied the enlightened management of land by a disinterested upper class—a form of nationalization, it might be said. Ovando thus made his decision to bring to an end the old polity, apparently without any consultation with his monarchs and without any discussion even in Santo Domingo. As governor, his word was law, though perhaps he had discussed the future of Spanish rule in La Española privately with Fernando and Isabel before leaving Spain.
Oblivious of impending doom, Anacoana gave a fiesta in honor of Ovando. She summoned a substantial number of her noblemen (perhaps a hundred) and many other of her subjects, and received the Governor. There were entertainments, prolonged dances, and an elaborate game with sticks (juego de cañas). The music of the Spanish guitars and the parading of the horses mingled with the native dances and the games. There seemed a mood of real friendship. This lasted for three days.
But then there were rumors that the Indians were mounting a conspiracy. Such reports would play a major part in the history of the Spanish conquests in the Americas.79 (They were not all delusions: the Spaniards in 1503, as often in the future, were heavily outnumbered.) Ovando’s men came to suspect that they would be attacked at night, and slaughtered to a man. The Governor promised a display of arms. The Indians were delighted at the idea. Then Ovando’s men opened fire when their commander placed his hand on the gold cross of the Order of Alcántara, which he wore around his neck. Horsemen surrounded the large house in which the caciques had gathered, and the foot soldiers prevented anyone from escaping. Then the house was set on fire. Anacoana was captured and later hanged in the Plaza de Santo Domingo for “rebellion.” The resistance of the surviving Indians in Jaragua was bitter but ineffective; forty Spaniards were killed, but the conquest was complete.80 Castile was now in full control of the west of the island.81
Ovando appointed as his deputy for that territory Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, a conquistador who had sailed to the Indies first with Columbus in 1493. He had been present at the massacre, but the responsibility lay with Ovando. All the same, Velázquez had participated in what had happened, and it was never suggested that he had been unwilling to participate in the brutalities.
Ovando, the Governor, was now the unquestioned ruler of a large island that had been discovered only eleven years before. All the native rulers encountered by Columbus in his first years were dead. Ovando was building a house for himself, now the Hostal Nicolás de Ovando. The church in the center of Santo Domingo still had a thatched roof, but there were plans for a serious cathedral—though it was not embarked upon for another twenty years. The Capilla de los Remedios preceded it. The convento of San Francisco was soon under way, too.82
Other buildings in what is now the center of Santo Domingo were begun by Ovando, including the so-called Governor’s Palace, now the Museo de las Casas Reales. Ovando founded the Hospital de San Nicolás de Bari, for many years a popular asylum though until 1508 it seemed just one more large, thatched-roofed bohío.83 Another big house was that of the Genoese merchant Jerónimo Grimaldi, who established himself with his uncle Bernardo as the most powerful entrepreneur in the Indies. (Bernardo had helped finance Columbus’s third voyage.) The Grimaldis had originally been shippers of wool. Now their interests were multiform. Ovando also began the building of a large, open, triple-towered fortress (the Fortaleza de Santo Domingo) on a bluff overlooking the point where the Ozama flows into the Caribbean.
These buildings, of which some survive, were the first examples of Spanish architecture in the New World. Columbus had left nothing behind. Ovando’s work marks the beginning of a great tradition. Sweeping changes have come to the peoples, the landscapes, and the economic circumstances of the vast territory soon claimed, and then ruled, by Castile. New countries have come into being. Eccentric, revolutionary, intransigent, military, brutal, and sometimes liberal governments have had their day. But buildings such as those ordered by Ovando still cast their magisterial shadows over the centers of decaying capitals, the bolts on their doors still call up long memories, and the very stones suggest legends of endurance.
16
“Teach them and indoctrinate them with good customs”
Our main aim was to arrange the introduction there of our holy Catholic faith and to ensure that the people there accepted it, and also to send prelates, monks, and priests and other learned people who fear God to instruct the people in the faith and to teach and indoctrinate them with good customs.
Codicil to the will of Queen Isabel, 1504
Among those who observed the massacre in Jarag
ua was Diego Méndez, who had been with Columbus on his fourth voyage to La Española as chief clerk, and who had now returned to Santo Domingo by canoe from Jamaica after some extraordinary adventures. He was able to tell Ovando that the Admiral was then not far away, in Jamaica. Ovando was unimpressed. Like most Spanish hidalgos, he thought of “the pharaoh” neither with respect nor with enthusiasm. He did nothing to help him; but help at that time was what Columbus needed.
From his refuge in the storm of 1502 in the bay of Azúa, fifty miles west along the coast from Santo Domingo, to which his four ships had been refused entry,1 Columbus not only saw and weathered the hurricane that destroyed the city and homegoing fleet, but while in the bay of Santo Domingo, he also saw the recent charts of Bastidas, then returning home. Las Casas says that he witnessed the encounter.2 Then Columbus set off on July 14, first to Yaquimo, in the west of La Española, a place known for its brazilwood, and then farther west still. His aim had been, apparently, to go first to Jamaica and then to strike land in Central America at a point close to where Bastidas had been. In the event, he and his vessels were carried by the storm through the islands that he had himself named the Jardines de la Reina, off Cuba, and then past Cayo Largo and the Isle of Pines to other islands of Central America, now known as the Bay Islands, off Honduras.
The journey across the Caribbean was appalling. The Admiral himself recalled:
Rain, thunder, and lightning were so continuous that it seemed the end of the world.… During eighty-eight days, this intolerable storm continued in such a way that we saw neither the sun nor the stars as a guide. [It could have been nothing like that length of time.] The ships were lying open to the skies, the sails broken, the anchors and shrouds lost, as were the cables … and many supplies went overboard; the crews were all sick and all were repenting their sins and turning to God. Everyone made vows and promised to make pilgrimages if they were saved from death, and, very often, men went so far as to confess to each other. We had experienced other storms but none had been so terrifying. Many who we had thought were brave men were reduced to terror on more than one occasion.
The distress of my son [Fernando] who was with me racked my soul, for he was only thirteen years old, and he was not only exhausted but remained so for a very long time. But the Lord gave him such courage that he cheered the others, and he worked as hard in the ship as if he had been a sailor for eighty years. He comforted me, for I, too, had fallen ill and was many times at the point of death. I directed our course from a little shelter that I built on the deck. My brother [Bartolomeo] was in the worst and most dangerous ship, and my grief was even greater because I had taken him with me against his wish.3
Eventually, after this dark journey, Columbus and his friends reached the north coast of what is now Honduras, Central America, probably the island known as Guanaja, forty miles offshore. There, he mended the boats and gathered supplies, while the local people told him, by signs, of gold mines to the south, just as the natives of San Salvador had done in 1492. Columbus assumed that he was in a land that Marco Polo had called Cochinchina. He heard of a province of great wealth, which would appear to have been Yucatan.4 But he also believed that he was only ten days’ sail away from the River Ganges.5 By this time most people in Spain and Italy, and no doubt elsewhere in Europe, realized that Columbus had discovered something new. But the poor Admiral still lived in his world of Oriental dreams.
These “local people” who talked of gold were either Paya or Jicaque Indians, probably the former. They had a “slash-and-burn” method of agriculture, and planting was done by women with digging sticks. Pineapples and sweet and bitter manioc were their main products. The latter was ground into flour, then made into dough and baked. Men used four-foot-long bows and obsidian-tipped arrows for hunting, and both men and women used bone hooks for fishing. Fish were sometimes shot by arrows, and large specimens were caught with harpoons. Honey and liana sap were used as the basis for a light alcohol. Live turtles, as in Cuba, were kept in corrals behind stockades in shallow water. The villages of the Paya Indians usually had about one hundred to five hundred inhabitants, who lived in elliptically shaped communal houses that appear to have contained beds placed on platforms.
Clothing customarily consisted of only a loincloth and a poncho. Women usually wore a knee-length bark-cloth skirt, wrapped around the body. Paya Indians wore their hair short. Men painted themselves black and women red, both as decoration but also to protect themselves against insects. These people made baskets of wickerwork, pottery of clay polished by pebbles, wooden spoons, wooden stools, and blowguns. They were highly inventive.
It seems that political leaders were elected by village elders. As in most places in the Indian world, dancing and music went together, almost never one without the other. The Paya and Jicaque believed in two benevolent deities and in a female god of evil. After death, the Paya imagined a journey by the soul to a lower world of plenty. All believed that the natural world was full of spirits.6 All in all, these Indians lived a peaceful life in which wars only rarely figured.
The meeting between the Indian and the Spanish worlds occurred thus. One of the Admiral’s sailors, Ramiro Ramírez, recalled that “the Indians left two girls on the beach, and the Admiral ordered them to be captured and put in one of his boats and he made them dress and put shoes on, and then he left them where he had found them … and the Indians returned for them and took their clothes off.…”7
But by far the most interesting event in this part of Columbus’s journey was his encounter, while still in the Bay Islands, with “a canoe as long as a galley and eight feet wide, made of a single tree trunk … freighted with merchandise from the western regions around New Spain.… It had a palm leaf awning like that which the Venetian gondolas carry; this gave complete protection against the rain and waves.”8 On this canoe the Spaniards encountered twenty-five traders from what has usually been identified as the Mayan territory of Yucatan. They were carrying embroidered shirts of dyed cotton, cotton cloaks, loincloths, long swords of wood with a groove on each side into which flints had been set, good copper hatchets, what seemed to be hawks’ bells of copper, and “a certain wine made of maize, like the beer of England.”9 This was, as we now know, pulque. Women and children traveled under the awning, surrounded by tools of onyx and some of the cocoa beans that were used in the land of the Maya as a form of coinage. The Indians displayed “admirable modesty” because, “if one had his loincloth taken from him, he would immediately cover his genitals with his hands … while the women covered their faces, as if they had been Moorish women in Granada.”10
This meeting made a considerable impression on the Spaniards, especially, one must assume, on one of the cabin boys, Antonio de Alaminos, who would spend most of the rest of his life as a pilot pioneering expeditions in this region. The sophistication of these people was much greater than that of the Tainos or the Caribs; and what a relief to the Spaniards to find alcohol among indigenous people. “Columbus took one old man, a certain Yumbe, from among them as a translator and detained him until the ships reached the Costa de las Orejas, beyond which his language was not spoken, and then he sent him home.”11
At this point, Columbus made a decision for which he was later reproached. He sailed along Central America not north and west, toward the higher civilization of the Maya, but east and then south. This route took him past Cape Gracias a Dios, Nicaragua; Caray (now Puerto Limón in Costa Rica); and the Bay of Chiriguí, to the bay he named Portobelo, in Panama, which Bastidas and Hojeda had once reached, coming from the east.
Columbus took this route because the natives whom the Spaniards had met at Guanaja had talked of a strait that Columbus thought must lead via the “Chersonese” (Malaya) to India.12 He recorded this journey with his usual superlatives. He heard Mass on the coast in northern Honduras at a place to which he gave the name of Costa de las Orejas, and then he discovered Caray, “the best country and people that we had yet seen.” To the south, “Veragua” (a terr
itory probably so called after an ill-remembered indigenous name), in what is now western Panama, seemed to have gold. From it, the Columbus family eventually took a title that their descendants still hold.13 Columbus wrote from there to the Catholic Kings optimistically; he was convinced that his masters were “just as much lords of this land as of Jerez and Toledo.”14 He had found a building of stone and lime, and he observed the extensive planting of maize. Lower down the coast, palm and pineapple wine flowed.
Another storm drove the Admiral and his little fleet to the mouth of the River Culebra, about whose dangers the Admiral exhausted his most passionate adjectives. They entered the Bay of Portobelo, which over the next few centuries was to be the scene of so much commerce and so many naval encounters. They continued to another bay, which they named Nombre de Dios, and then returned to Portobelo and Veragua, where they were in time to celebrate the Epiphany in 1503 in a valley that Columbus christened Belén. There they attempted to trade with the Indians. An expedition under Bartolomeo Colón found some signs of gold up the river, but waterfalls made it impossible for the boats to reach it. The Admiral thought of leaving Bartolomeo near Portobelo and returning again to La Española, against instructions, in order to mount a proper gold expedition, but the mood of the local Indians was turning sour, so he thought better of it.15 To make matters worse, he observed that his ships had been damaged by termites.16
