Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  Medina Sidonia then formed an alliance with the Archbishop of Seville (Deza), Priego, and the counts of Ureña and Cabra, who declared that they intended to free Juana from the control of Cisneros. Archbishop Deza resumed his generalship of the Inquisition. (He even defended the cruel inquisitor Lucero, against whom there had been a riot in Córdoba.) But then Juana, in a lucid moment and advised by the Cardinal, annulled all her husband’s decrees on the Inquisition.

  The year 1506 was yet another terrible one for the supply of food in Spain, with wheat selling at nearly 250 maravedís per fanega in comparison with under 100 maravedís in 1501.29 It would seem that in October alone, eighty ships arrived with grain from Flanders, Brittany, Barbary, Sicily, and Italy.30 Then Basque shippers brought wheat from Flanders, and others followed, including Genoese merchants such as Bernardo Grimaldi, Giuliano Lomellini, Francesco Doria, Gaspare Spinola, and Cosmo Ripparolo (Riberol)—all the great names of Genoese commerce, many of whom were already associated with the Indies and others would soon be.31 (Bernardo Grimaldi, an old supporter of Columbus, gave the King 30,000 ducats in January 1507 for the right to be considered Castilian and to trade freely in America. He was the only foreigner with such rights, though they turned out to mean little.)32

  This widespread confusion played into the hands of King Fernando. He calmly sailed on from Savona to Genoa and then to Portofino, in whose charming bay he received an urgent message from the regency in Spain asking him to return immediately to act as governor of the realm. But with the serenity that was one of his attributes, he continued to Naples, promising to incorporate himself in future in the government of Castile if he was needed, and endorsing such actions as the regency might take. He wrote to the Council of the Realm accepting that Cisneros should remain in charge until he returned. He also appointed the Count of Tendilla as viceroy in Andalusia and the Duke of Alba as his lieutenant in Castile. Those two, along with Infantado and Velasco, now committed themselves fully to Fernando. Juana remained in Burgos till the end of the year. It was Cisneros, however, who had saved the day. The great Cardinal showed himself at his best: he never shied from decisions, he reveled in both crises and the exercise of power, he was at ease with every kind of demand.

  Fernando reached Naples on October 27, making a solemn entry on November 1, with his new queen, Germaine, receiving the homage of the Gran Capitán, Fernández de Córdoba, whom he would shortly dismiss.33 The King remained in Naples till the summer of 1507. There is no way of knowing whether he observed that all the beautiful things said about this city were true. But he was plainly pleased to be in command there.

  Back in Castile, the Duke of Alba and Constable Velasco reduced the confusion. Once again the former’s lancers acted decisively for Fernando; and in the winter of 1506–07, the Duke of Infantado established peace among the factions in Toledo. Tendilla did the same in Andalusia, ultimately securing the main ports of Malaga, Gibraltar, and Cadiz for Fernando. The nominal Queen, Juana, even began to travel in her supposed dominions, if to little effect.

  Fernando waited in Italy till his allies had restored his position in Spain. Then he left Naples on June 5, stopping at Gaeta, Portovenere, Genoa and Savona (where he met King Louis XII of France), Villafranca, Cadaqués, Tarragona, Salou, and, finally, El Grao de Valencia, which he reached on July 20. He was accompanied by the Gran Capitán. Fernando had embraced him “as if he were another monarch.”34 But the flattery was ephemeral. Fernández de Córdoba never had another appointment under the Crown. Fernando did not stop at Ostia to meet Pope Julius, though the latter had gone there specifically to see him.35 But he did make a solemn entry, with Queen Germaine, into Valencia on July 25.36 There Pedro de Fajardo, the adelantado of Murcia, the most splendid nobleman of the region, greeted him with five hundred horsemen.

  Then Fernando reentered Castile, at Monteagudo, where on August 21 he resumed the government in the name of Juana. He was generally accepted as Regent in place of Cisneros and his colleagues, and made his way slowly to Burgos, stopping briefly at such places as Aranda de Duero, Tortolés (where he met Juana on August 29), Santa María del Campo (where he stayed from September 4 until October 10), and Arcos (where Fernando saw Juana again and introduced her to his new wife). He reached Burgos on October 11, where he remained till early February 1508. The only serious exchange between father and daughter was when Fernando said, “You, my dear daughter, as sovereign of the realms, must choose the place where you would like to live.” In reply, Juana ventured: “Children must constantly obey their parents.”37

  All in Spain now agreed that Juana would never be able to govern and that Fernando should therefore act as Regent for his eight-year-old grandson, Charles of Ghent. Secretaries still spoke of “la Reyna Doña Juana,” but her letters were written on Fernando’s orders, and Juana herself remained behind closed doors in Tordesillas. The nobles had thus to choose between returning to support Fernando or seeking, like Juan Manuel, to ingratiate themselves with the Flemings, who seemed likely in the future to play a part in the politics of Spain; the heir of both Juana and Fernando, Charles, was then being educated by Fernando’s clever and interesting ex-daughter-in-law Margaret, the sister of the late Philip and widow of the Infante Juan.38

  Fernando now revived his old group of advisers on matters relating to the Indies. He decreed that all dispatches about these dominions should again go first to Bishop Fonseca, who had maintained his distance effectively during the reign of King Philip, or to Lope Conchillos, who was now out of prison where he had suffered so much. Fonseca was a member of the Council of the Realm, which had a collegiate character, but he acted in respect of the Indies in a high-handed and quite independent manner.

  Can one say that Fonseca and Conchillos constituted already a fledgling Council of the Indies? Not really, for the other members of the Council of the Realm—García de Mújica; Francisco de Sosa (Bishop of Almería); Fernando Tello, a Sevillano; and the lawyer, Juan López de Palacios Rubios—were responsible for all judicial matters, whether related to Castile or to the Indies. Yet Fonseca and Conchillos were considered essential as far as the administration of the new lands was concerned, and while King Fernando lived, they had their way. Though they themselves benefited financially from the arrangements (as the list of encomiendas in La Española in 1514 would show), they were efficient. For example, they arranged a new postal service, modeled on the innovation made in respect of the Casa de Contratación, by horseback between Seville and the court, wherever it might be; this took only four days, inspiring an arrangement whereby every city had to have a boat always ready to cross rivers “at whatever hour the postboy arrived without any delay.”39 The King trusted them, and he had the gift of being able to delegate effectively.

  Thus stability in Castile was restored by the beginning of 1508. But the interval since Isabel had died had been long, and more than one change had occurred. First and foremost, in respect of the history of the Indies, there had been the death of Columbus.

  It will be remembered that he arrived back in Seville after his fourth voyage only a few weeks before the death of the Queen. He had planned to go to the court, which he supposed would be at Valladolid. To take him to that city, he gained approval for his use of the same stretcher that had brought the dead body of Cardinal Hurtado de Mendoza down to the cathedral at Seville to be interred: “If I travel on a stretcher, I think it will be by the silver road [la plata, that is, the road north from Seville],” Columbus wrote to his son Diego, telling him a few weeks later that he had not been paid anything for his last voyage, and in consequence he was so poor that he “lived on loans.” (As usual, this was a gross misrepresentation of his true wealth.) He hoped that Diego at court would inform Archbishop Deza of any difficulties.

  Columbus as usual delayed before traveling. It was not until May 1505, six months after the death of Isabel, that he set out for the court, accompanied by his brother Bartolomeo and by much luggage. But King and court were on the move, so it was hard to catch up.
Columbus did not abandon his aims. He wrote to the King in June 1505 that “the government and the possession that I had was the height of my honor; I was unjustly expelled from there; very humbly I beg40 your Highness that you give orders to put my son in possession of the government which I once had.”41 The King received Columbus courteously in August but, according to Fernando Colón, treacherously, for he was determined now to establish his own control over the Indies. He proposed a new contract with Columbus, but for a time the idea was dropped because of his need to face the arrival of his son-in-law Philip.42 Columbus, meanwhile, wrote to Philip and Juana asking to be looked on as their royal vassal and servant.43

  On May 20, 1506, Columbus died in his bed in Valladolid. Of old age? He was only fifty-seven. No disease was obvious. His will, which spoke chiefly of Genoese friends, had been dated the previous day. In a codicil, he still wrote of his own share of the Indies as beginning “a hundred leagues” (three hundred miles) west of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands.

  Columbus’s body was first interred in Valladolid. In 1509, it was taken to the Carthusian monastery of Las Cuevas, Seville, and thence it traveled first to Santo Domingo; then in the nineteenth century to Havana; then, after 1898, back to Seville, where it probably remains in its splendid tomb in the cathedral.44

  Columbus’s achievements had been “marvelous,” to use his own favorite word. He had persuaded the Spanish Crown to support an expedition that he had himself conceived and that led to the conquest and settlement of half the Americas by Spain. He died still thinking that the large continent south of the Caribbean that Vespucci had called a New World was part of Asia; he had no idea that the continent of North America existed. He was, though, in addition to being a wonderful sailor, a man of vision and determination who prevailed upon the monarchs of Castile to do something for which they had no inclination. It is easy to say that if it had not been for Columbus, someone else would have discovered the New World, since it was so obvious a thing to sail westward once it was known that the world was round. But the obvious is not always done.

  For much of the last part of his life, Columbus was preoccupied by what he thought would occur in respect of the expected coming of the Antichrist and the last judgment of mankind. In 1498, when drawing up plans for an entailed grant (mayorazgo) for his son, he talked of his hopes for the recapture of Jerusalem. That had earlier appeared as an injunction at the beginning of one of his favorite books, Mandeville’s Travels. In his Book of Prophecies, a collection of fancies written in 1501, Columbus wrote to the Catholic Kings that Jerusalem and Mount Zion would soon be rebuilt by Christian hands and, as the Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore had prophesied, those would be Spanish ones.45 Columbus was a dreamer. Had he lived longer, he would have concentrated, probably, on Jerusalem more than on plans for the Indies. But his magnetic personality had attracted the Catholic Kings precisely because he was partly a seer. In his time, much favor was shown to Sor María de Santo Domingo, the “Beata de Piedrahita,” a laywoman of the Dominican Third Order. She became, thanks to Cisneros, the reforming visitor of the Dominican monasteries in Castile. Columbus must sometimes have seemed to the monarchs a comparable person.

  King Fernando wrote to Ovando seeking to ensure that the gold and other income that were the due of Diego Colón the younger should be made over to him. He would inherit the title of Admiral, after all, and he had been at court most of his life.46 Columbus had not died poor, however much he complained. His property in La Española was considerable, and he had enjoyed a substantial subsidiary income from many concessions. On November 26 of the same year, 1506, Fernando wrote to young Diego repeating his assurance of friendship.47 That was shortly to be confirmed in a striking way.

  18

  “You ought to send one hundred black slaves”

  The Governor wrote to me that you had sent him seventeen black slaves and that you ought to send more. It seems to me that you ought to send one hundred black slaves and a person in your confidence ought also to go with them.

  King Fernando, 1507

  The political confusion in Castile, meanwhile, gave Ovando a free hand in La Española. During the brief reign of King Philip, there had been no guide on the subject of the Indies. Fonseca’s letters were few and far between. The Governor found a friend in Cristóbal de Santa Clara, whom he appointed chief accountant of the colony after the death of Pedro de Villacorta. Santa Clara was a new converso, since his father, David Vitales, had been a well-known Jewish merchant of Saragossa and the bones of his mother, Clara, had been buried as having been those of a heretic in 1495.1 But that dubious origin did not prevent him and his brothers Bernardo and Pedro from having long, prosperous careers in the Indies. Cristóbal was known for extravagance: once he served a dinner in Santo Domingo where the saltcellars were filled with gold dust.

  Ovando’s successful but brutal rule had seen the increase of the Spanish population of La Española from three hundred to several thousand. That was partly because the Crown had made evident in a decree of February 2, 1504, that “our will was, and is, to populate and ennoble those islands with Christians.” That in turn permitted all future residents to import to the island, free of taxes, all kinds of clothing, cattle, mares, seeds, food, and drink needed for their maintenance and the development of their land. Only slaves, horses, arms, gold, and silver objects were excluded from the concession.2 Andalusia naturally was the chief beneficiary of this emigration. Soon, Ovando would ask that no one else for the moment be sent to the island because there was no more work there. Two procuradores, Diego de Nicuesa and Antón Serrano, returned to Castile in 1507 to discourage further settlement. (A procurador, in the past in the New World as well as now in Castile, was supposed to represent the ordinary citizens with the Council of the Realm and to ensure that what was discussed there was for “the common good.”) Nicuesa and Serrano had, too, the mission to secure permission from the King to import slaves from neighboring islands, such as, for example, the Bahamas, then known as the Lucays, or “the useless islands.”3 They were “useless” only because they had no gold. But the people who lived there were of the same race as the Tainos of La Española.

  Ovando had already begun to organize the island of which he had made himself the supreme authority, as if it were one large estate. Cattle increased fast on the pastures, which the decline of the Indian population made possible. So did horses and hogs. Yucca provided all the cassava bread that was needed. Ovando obtained oxen to help the natives carry goods from the mines to the boats, and he also concerned himself with roads.4 He sent back to Spain a substance that appears to have been rubber, as well as roots that may have yielded the dye madder. The Crown, in return, sent seeds, hoping that silk would eventually come from the mulberry trees that were being planted.5 Ovando also thought that he had found copper near Puerto Real. He had “a hardworking foreigner” (probably an Italian) soon busy at work on the matter.6

  Tainos captured in the wars in Higuey or Jaragua had been defined as slaves and were the property of those who had captured them. Ovando had secured royal approval of this interpretation.7 He also persuaded the Crown that they would obtain more wealth in the long run if they accepted only a fifth of profits of harvests and mines in the colony. This quinto became a permanent feature of colonial rule in 1508.8

  The conquests of Jaragua, in the west, had been followed by a new war in the east, near Higuey, the consequence of a fire in a wooden fortress and the death of eight Spaniards out of the nine who were there. Ovando sent a new punitive expedition. It was again led by the Sevillano Juan de Esquivel. His two subordinates were, first, Diego de Escobar (Columbus’s reluctant savior), who came in from Concepción; and, second, Juan Ponce de León, a bastard member of the great family of Seville of that name, being a cousin of the redheaded Rodrigo, who had been such a hero in the war against Granada.9 The forces led by these men came together at Yacyagua, near Higuey. They totaled four hundred, supported by Indians working as porters or servants. The battles
with the untamed Indians were as usual unequal because of the superiority of Spanish weapons, especially their swords. The Christians sought to corral the Indians as if they had been bulls and then kill them. But there were some single combats. The Indians sometimes threw themselves into ravines in order to tempt the Spaniards into similar leaps, and some Indian women killed themselves. Cotubanamá was seized—the last of the indigenous caciques. He was hanged in Santo Domingo. Most of those captured were made into slaves, as the conquistadors thought fit; and a fifth of them were sent home as slaves of the Crown.10

  With Higuey and the east of the island of La Española crushed and as subservient to Castile as the west, Ovando busied himself with founding towns. As mentioned earlier, the royal plan was that “the Christians living on the said island should not live isolated.” Ovando agreed with this; he knew that dispersal under Columbus had wrecked all hope of the Crown’s policies being put into practice.

  These new Spanish communities were mostly built near old Taino ones and were known as villas, in contrast with the Indian towns, which were known as pueblos. The new places (founded or confirmed) were Bonao, Concepción de la Vega, and Buenaventura, all service stations for the pursuit of gold; Puerto de la Plata (subsequently Puerto Plata), the new port on the north coast; Salvaleón de Higuey and Santa Cruz de la Haniguayana, the headquarters in the east of Ponce de León and Esquivel, respectively; Puerto Real, near Columbus’s Navidad; Lares de Guahaba, also in the northwest; and San Juan de la Maguana, near the old capital of the cacique Caonabó. There were, too, Santa María de la Vera Paz and Villanueva de Yaquimao, both close to Jaragua; and, finally, in the west, Salvatierra de la Sabana, the headquarters of Ovando’s deputy, Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar.