Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  In desperation, Columbus went up to the crow’s nest of his ship, where he communed with God at some length and also, it would seem, effectively.17 In a short time, he managed to set sail for Santo Domingo. They reached the Jardines de la Reina at the beginning of May 1503, touched at Macaca, Cuba, near what is now known as Cabo Cruz, and finally arrived in Jamaica at the end of June, with crippled boats that could be sailed no farther. They anchored off Puerto Bueno, first, and then Santa Gloria (St. Ann’s Bay), where Columbus had been in 1494.

  What was known and unknown in 1511: the official map of the time.

  The Admiral had no choice but to build shelters from the timbers of the wrecked ships and fit them with straw roofs. When the expedition had divided the last rations of wine and biscuits, Diego Méndez, Columbus’s great friend, set off into the interior and procured food (cassava bread and fish) from the natives. Indeed, he made arrangements for food to be brought every day. But how could the expedition return to Castile? By canoe to Santo Domingo across 120 miles of sea? No one volunteered save for Méndez, who at first had said that the journey was impossible. Then he told Columbus:

  “My lord, one life have I and no more. I am willing to risk it in your lordship’s service and for the welfare of those present, because I have hope that our Lord God, seeing the good intention with which I shall do it, will deliver me, as He has done many times before.” When the Admiral heard my decision, he arose and embraced me and kissed me on the cheek, saying, “I well knew that there was none who would dare to undertake this enterprise but you.”18

  In July 1503, Méndez left in a canoe with six Indians, accompanied by Bartolomeo Fieschi, the Genoese captain of one of Columbus’s four caravels.19 He took with him letters, including one from the Admiral to Fray Gaspar Gorricio, as well as a relación for the Catholic Kings, which ended: “I beg your Highnesses’ pardon. I am ruined, as I have said. Up till now, I have wept for others. May heaven now have pity on me and the earth weep for me. Of worldly possessions I have not even a maravedí to offer for my soul’s good.…”20 This was a gross underestimate of his financial position. All the same, Columbus evidently felt it to be true.

  Threatened by an attack from hostile Indians near Port Antonio, Méndez and Fieschi returned to St. Ann’s Bay to pick up Bartolomeo Colón, who escorted them to the eastern end of the island. The plan was that once the two men reached La Española, Fieschi would return quickly to say that Méndez had arrived and was looking for boats to take the whole expedition home.

  Méndez and Fieschi, with the Indians, paddled all night across what is now known as the Windward Passage. The two captains took turns with the paddles. The Indians drank all the water, heedless of future needs. The heat was intense the next day, and the Indians refreshed themselves from time to time by swimming. One of them died of thirst. The expedition eventually found a bare rock on which, miraculously, they gathered rainwater and ate a few mollusks. They arrived exhausted at Cape San Miguel, at the western end of La Española, four days after their departure.

  Fieschi, heroically, wanted to return there and then to Jamaica to tell Columbus of his and Méndez’s success, but the Indians refused to go with him: they never wanted to paddle again. So both Méndez and Fieschi set off for Santo Domingo on foot, just as Bastidas had done a year before. They had reached Azúa, on the south coast of La Española, the bay where Columbus had sheltered from the storm the previous June, when they learned that Ovando was in Jaragua, 150 miles to the west.21 Leaving Fieschi to go on alone to Santo Domingo, Méndez walked back to Jaragua, and found the Governor, who “kept me with him several months.”22 Ovando promised nothing. He was in no hurry to do anything to assist Columbus. So Méndez walked back the 200 miles to Santo Domingo. There he waited until some ships came from Spain. There was a long delay before three at last arrived. One of these was bought by Méndez in order to send it to Jamaica with supplies. But that was not till May 1504.

  Back in Jamaica, there were many grumbles and denunciations. Food was a constant preoccupation. The Admiral and his companions ate rabbits, rats, and cassava bread. Finally, a rebellion broke out, led by Francisco de Porrás (once the captain of the Santiago de Palos) and his brother, Diego (the notary).

  The Porrás brothers had been unwelcome to the Admiral from the beginning. They had been imposed on him by Morales, the royal treasurer, as will be recalled. One day at St. Ann’s, Francisco de Porrás went to see Columbus and said, “Señor, what do you mean by making no effort to return to Castile? Do you wish us to stay here and perish?” The Admiral realized that this was a challenge, but merely replied that he knew no way of going home till a ship was sent. If Porrás had a good idea, he should submit it to the next council of captains. Porrás said that there was no time to talk; the Admiral should decide either to embark or to stay. Then he turned and shouted, “I’m for Castile. Who’s with me?” All the men outside said, “We’re with you,” and running about in great disorder, these rebels soon occupied the castles and roundtops of the mainmasts of the wrecked ships, some wildly crying out, “To Castile, to Castile!” or “Death to them!” or “Señor captain, what now?”

  The poor Admiral was at that time so crippled with gout that he could scarcely stand. But even so he hobbled forward with his sword drawn. His servants, however, dissuaded him from fighting and even prevailed on his more bellicose brother Bartolomeo to drop his lance. Porrás and his friends thereupon seized the canoes that Colón had procured, first to use themselves, and second to prevent their being seized by the Indians. They set out for Santo Domingo as gaily as if they had been sailing in a regatta. Many desperate men who had not been mutineers piled into these boats. Later, they picked up a few Indians and ordered them to paddle. The few loyal men and the sick remained behind, aghast.

  The Porráses’ expedition had to turn back less than twelve miles out from the east of Jamaica. The boats were overloaded and the winds variable; the mutineers became frightened and decided to lighten the boats. The obvious thing was to kill the Indians and throw them overboard. This they did; eighteen were so disposed of. They then landed at an Indian village in eastern Jamaica, near what is now Port Antonio, and made two further efforts to cross to La Española. They failed again because of contrary winds. So they made their way back sixty miles on foot to Columbus, robbing Indians as they went.23 Then, as Columbus wrote with justifiable complacency, they were all “delivered into our hands.…”

  While the Porrás brothers and their friends were absent, Columbus broke up a protest by local Indians who wanted to stop supplying him with food. He did this by predicting successfully, after consulting his books, an eclipse of the moon.24 The Tainos were impressed, and for a time the Admiral could do no wrong. Finally, in May 1504, Diego de Escobar, a Sevillano, arrived from La Española on behalf of Ovando to verify Columbus’s plight. He had been a gentleman volunteer on the Admiral’s second voyage and afterwards a rebel with Roldán against Bartolomeo Colón. He brought a barrel of wine and a haunch of salt pork, a modest contribution, it might be thought, to the marooned expedition, as well as a friendly letter from Ovando. He sailed off again almost immediately, taking with him a reply in which the Admiral stated his “hope … that you will not spare yourself to save me.”25 Columbus later explained that he had encouraged Escobar to sail home quickly because his ship had been too small to take everyone off. The Porrás brothers continued to plot, living separately, even coming to think that the caravel of Escobar had been a myth. Surely a real caravel would not have left so soon. Bartolomeo went to negotiate with them, but they attacked him. But instead of the swift victory that they had expected, several mutineers were killed by Bartolomeo and his friends, including the chief pilot, Juan Sánchez de Cádiz. Francisco Porrás was captured. On May 20, 1504, he and his companions sued for peace.

  At last, in June, two ships did arrive from La Española, thanks to Diego Méndez, though Méndez himself had judged it better to return to Spain to tell the monarchs what had happened. All the S
paniards left Jamaica on June 28. They had a difficult journey across the Windward Passage but arrived in Santo Domingo on August 13. Ovando decided at last to appear generous and lodged Columbus and his brothers for a day or two in his own house. But, Fernando wrote, that was a “scorpion’s kiss” since Porrás was released by Ovando, and he vowed to punish those responsible for his previous imprisonment.

  On September 12, Columbus, with his brother Bartolomeo and his son Fernando, left for Spain. When at sea, the mainmast of the first ship of the flotilla split. Another mast also broke in a storm. Yet the skill of the Columbus brothers was such that they arrived safely in Sanlúcar, where they learned that the Queen, Columbus’s benefactor in so many ways, was on her deathbed in her favorite city, Medina del Campo.

  During the years that Columbus was away, the monarchs had shown as usual only a sporadic curiosity about the new empire in the Indies. No one even called it an empire yet, and the maintenance of Spanish interests in Naples (to which cause King Fernando gave increasing attention) seemed more imperial as well as more important. But the Crown now plainly conceived of the New World as theirs, not Columbus’s, and certainly not as belonging to its indigenous monarchs. That world was still thought of as “the Indies.” Whether it was still believed that these Indies were close to the real India is curiously difficult to ascertain. As early as 1494, Francisco de Cisneros, a clerk of Seville, had declared that “these new islands … are not in India but are in the Ethiopian ocean sea, and are [should be] called the Hesperides.…”26 Peter Martyr always thought much the same. But Columbus continued to insist that he had been to India, Malaya, and China, as well as Japan, and he still enjoyed the fame of being the great explorer, however bad he had shown himself to be as an administrator. A bull of 1504 in Rome mentioned the conquests by Spain as having occurred “in parts of Asia,” and even named three new episcopal sees there.27

  Spain’s links with La Española were by then continuous. Despite the delay in 1504 that had so distressed Diego Méndez, twenty or thirty ships a year seem usually to have plied between Seville, or Sanlúcar, and Santo Domingo or Puerto Plata.28 Sometimes Ovando would send back caciques to Spain to learn Spanish; they would be received by a friend of his, Juan Vázquez, and would stay for two years. Some of them later returned with Juan Bermúdez, who had been captain of the Santa Cruz on Columbus’s third voyage to the Indies and would soon give his name to the lonely island due east of what became Georgia.

  Commerce was growing every year. Thus, on September 12, 1502, we find a license granted to Juan Sánchez de la Tesorería, a prominent Aragonese merchant (a converso) and dealer in olives in Spain, and Alonso García Bravo, described as a messenger of the Queen, to take five caravels to La Española with a varied cargo of goods. The two merchants had to give the royal secretary Jimeno de Briviesca proof of the value of their goods so that, once these were sold, the Crown would receive a quarter of the profit.29 Columbus, or his representatives in Spain, would still be able to contribute an eighth of the goods carried, and Governor Ovando would also be able to carry seventy tons free of tax. One ship on this voyage carried a rood screen on which were depicted scenes of Spain and Flanders, done by two painters of Seville, Diego de Castro and Francisco de Villegas. But the most important items taken to the Indies were clothes, many made in northern Europe, sometimes in London; and there was Dutch linen, and velvet from Flanders. These ships indeed took the most complete range of goods that “one could imagine.”30

  The monarchs were at Toledo in early 1502, and Fernando spent part of the summer in Aragon, where he persuaded the Cortes in Saragossa to accept his daughter Juana as his heir if, as now seemed inevitable, he had no son. Both monarchs then went to the Alcázar at Madrid, where they remained most of the rest of the year. News was brought to them sporadically of the Indies, but their minds were more concerned with things nearer at hand, such as a famine caused by harvest failures. They must have heard that in Aznalcóllar, twenty-five miles northeast of Seville, the populace went to the mayor to demand the wheat that they knew to be in a warehouse; “if they were not given the wheat, they said, they would break in and take it in order to avoid seeing their children die.”31 The monarchs also approved an innocuous-sounding decree that provided that authors had to obtain a license and pay a fee to magistrates before printing books. The import of books from abroad would also thenceforth require a license from the Council of Castile.32 The shadow of censorship began to lie across the life of Spain. But it was still faint in a world where books themselves were such novelties.

  The problems of Jewry and conversos also affected the Queen: she had to face the fearful rumor that Archbishop Talavera, her longtime friend, adviser, and onetime confessor, as well as the bishops of Jaén and Almería, the chief ecclesiastical judge, Juan Álvarez Zapata, and royal secretary, Juan de Zafra, not to speak of the treasurer Ruy López, were all “crypto-Jews,” plotting, according to their accusers, to send preachers of the Mosaic law to the court to announce that not only Elijah but the Messiah himself had come.33 (There is nothing that recalls Isabel’s reaction to these alarming accusations.)

  Presumably, too, in these months the Queen learned of various punishments inspired by the Holy Office; how in July 1502, in Tablada, just outside Seville to the southwest, five people were burned at the stake. Three of them were women punished for heresy, “one of those being the mother of Diego de la Muela, one of the royal accountants.… Deo gracias.…”34 But there was no chance that the Queen would intervene in such matters, and, anyway, in the summer of 1502, she had begun to suffer from a severe illness that was probably a form of cancer. All the same, she was still active for many months. For example, in October 1502, she ordered the corregidor of Toledo and the treasurer of Madrid, Alonso Gutiérrez, to begin an inquiry into the way that so much gold was leaving her kingdom because of the activities of bankers.

  Gutiérrez was one more important person close to the court who was a converso in origin. He was a councillor (veinticuatro) of Seville, where he lived after 1510, and was also treasurer of the mint and then of the Santa Hermandad, in which capacity he had swiftly resolved the question of the payment to the knights whose horses were taken by Columbus to La Española in 1493. He and a colleague, Fernando de Villareal, had also been asked to pay 15,000 ducats, which would otherwise have gone to the treasury of the Hermandad, toward the costs of Ovando’s armada to the Indies.35 In the next twenty years, Gutiérrez would accumulate a fortune and become a controversial individual of considerable influence.36

  This investigation into the loss of Spain’s gold began in the early months of 1503. Special attention was paid to Francisco Palmaro and Pedro Sánchez of the Bank of Valencia, which, with its easy access to Italy and other Mediterranean markets, seemed responsible. After the inquiry, the papers were passed to the Council of the Realm to initiate a trial. Bail of 10 million maravedís each was given for Palmaro and Sánchez.37 In fact, at that time the Queen personally owed them 12 million maravedís. The prosecutor of the Council presented a criminal accusation against the two men, stating that they had taken 150 million maravedís in gold out of Spain in the last four years, and asked for a death sentence. As so often happened, the sentence was approved but never carried out. The simple reason for the flight of the gold was that Italians, especially the Genoese, sold more products in Spain than they exported.38

  Fernando spent most of 1503 in Aragon trying to shore up his position in southern Italy, which had been diminished by an arrangement concluded by his unpredictable son-in-law Philip. This arrangement had stipulated that Naples would pass to Philip’s son, the baby Charles (the future Charles V), and the French princess Claudia, the daughter of the heir to the French throne, Louis, Duke of Orléans, whom Charles was expected to marry. In the meantime (which might be a long time), Naples would be ruled jointly by the Flemings and the French. Fernando was not prepared to accept that arrangement and was soon sending more troops to his general in Italy, the brilliant Gran Capitán. T
his dispute between father-in-law and son-in-law augured badly for their future collaboration in Spain.

  In 1502, meanwhile, the Indies forced themselves upon the monarchs’ attention when one of Columbus’s friends in Seville, Francisco Piñelo, whose multitudinous commercial activities have been amply noted, wrote a paper entitled “What Seems Necessary to Regulate Business and Contracting in the Indies.”39 This sketched out a plan for what would become the Casa de Contratación de Indias (the House of Trade in the Indies). That would be to some degree a copy of the Casa da Guiné, a body in Lisbon that organized the African trade of Portugal (Lisbon had since 1498 also had a Casa de India). It would owe something, too, to the Consulado of Burgos, established in 1494, and there were similar organizations in Valencia, Palma de Mallorca, and Barcelona. (Burgos was then the major wool city of Castile. Though one hundred miles from the sea, it organized shipments of wool from Basque and Cantabrian ports such as San Sebastián and Laredo.)

  To direct this proposed new institution Piñelo proposed that there would be an agent, or factor, a treasurer, and two accountants, who would be able, with specialist’s eyes, to inspect ships to ensure that they were not overloaded and, where necessary, advise the captains bound for the Indies as to the best route to take.

  As a consequence of Piñelo’s memorandum, the Catholic Kings, on January 20, 1503, ordered this “Casa de Contratación” to be established in Seville.40 The institution followed closely the proposals of the previous year, though there would be only one accountant. Francisco Piñelo himself would be the first factor, and a Sevillano canon, Sancho de Matienzo, from Villasana de Mena, in the foothills of the Cantabrian mountains, where he had founded a monastery, would be the first treasurer. No doubt his Burgos antecedents commended him. Jimeno de Briviesca (Fonseca’s converso assistant) would be the first notary. The Casa would initially be set up in part of the Alcázar of Seville known as the Atarazanas, but it was soon moved to another part of that palace, facing the river. The square in front of the Casa would soon be known as the Plaza de Contratación, as it is today. By March 1503, Piñelo and Matienzo were both installed, and Briviesca was about to arrive. Matienzo was a competent civil servant; one who has studied the accounts of the Casa said that “his work surpassed that of any treasurer or comptroller who followed him.”41