Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  All these places were given councillors, justices, notaries, and coats of arms, as if they had been cities in Old Spain. Two of the towns concerned, Concepción de la Vega and Buenaventura, had two foundries each. Ovando was as ever seeking a revised version of a peninsular tradition. The main element in the recovery of land from the Muslims in Spain had been the creation of cities, usually Christian establishments on Moorish foundations. Ovando and other conquistadors would also found Castilian towns on, or near, indigenous sites, give them some legal being, and place their friends in the municipal offices. As in Castile, the towns would be laid out in the style of a gridiron, except in the center, where the main square would have upon it a mayor’s house, a town hall, a church, and probably a prison. The town would dominate the neighboring countryside. The grandees of the place might farm or use (but not own) sections of the country, but they would still probably live with their families in houses near the main square.11 Towns based on these principles would soon be seen everywhere in Spanish America. Ovando had also been granted the right to name all the officials in his cities. This in effect negated an agreement made, for example, with Alonso Vélez de Mendoza, according to which all the residents should elect their own alcaldes and other officials.12 But Ovando was the proconsul of the moment, and his decisions were as important as they were long lasting.

  Santo Domingo, meanwhile, was beginning to look more like a capital. The building of the new city, on the west bank of the Ozama, was nearly complete. By 1507, a stone fortress, the Torre del Homenaje, was in position. It had been designed by an Italian architect, Juan Rabé. When, in August 1508, another hurricane hit the port of Santo Domingo and destroyed half of the transatlantic fleet and damaged the city, the Governor decided to substitute stone houses for wooden houses roofed with straw: “It is a noble thing for the city to have houses of stone,” wrote Juan Mosquera, a notary who was one of the councillors. The architect of the victories in the east of the island, Juan Esquivel, said the same: “It’s a matter of honor for the place.”13 Thus by 1509 there were in Santo Domingo at least four private mansions of stone: those belonging to the Basque Francisco de Garay; to Fray Alonso del Viso, of the Order of Calatrava; to a well-known pilot, Bartolomé Roldán; and to a converso merchant from Seville, Juan Fernández de las Varas.14

  The Spaniards in the new towns needed entertainment. To serve them, books, those new jewels, began to be imported. Thus we hear how, in January 1505, there left from Sanlúcar the caravel Santa María la Antigua, belonging to Alonso Núñez and Juan Bermúdez, the discoverer of Bermuda, with “138 sheets of paper for reading; fifty Books of Hours, thirty-four romances, all bound, and sixteen works in Latín.”15 These romances would probably have included the most famous of them all, Amadís de Gaula.

  This romantic work of chivalry was the supreme literary success of the early sixteenth century, being soon published in all the main European languages, including French, German, Italian, English, Dutch, and Portuguese, as well as Hebrew. Originally composed probably at the end of the thirteenth century, Amadís had been rewritten at the end of the fifteenth by Garcí Rodríguez de Montalvo, a town councillor of Medina del Campo, the famous mercantile city in Castile. It was probably first published in the mid-1490s, though the first surviving edition is that of the printer Coci of Saragossa, of 1508.16 But there were earlier editions, and we can assume that any shipment of novels to Santo Domingo in 1505 would have included copies of it.

  The book would have introduced its readers on the cramped boats and in the makeshift lodgings in the New World itself to a heroic knight, Amadís, a love child of the King of Gaul, who has fallen in love with Oriana, daughter of Lisuarte, King of Great Britain. He is not only the epitome of the seven virtues but also very successful as a warrior. He kills everyone who challenges him, both as a knight errant and as the commander of an army. He is faithful to his delightful lady Oriana, with whom eventually he goes to bed and to whom he soon gives a son, Esplandián. Since Amadís’s birth is unacknowledged, he has to prove himself and travel the world—Europe, that is—engaging in duels, carrying out rescues, killing both monsters and evil knights, and capturing enchanted islands.

  There are some charmingly amatory scenes in Amadís, even if they do not dwell on the details of seduction. The leading characters are nevertheless allowed nights of love with their beloveds in a way that, because of the influence of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, would be surprising to meet in Spanish literature again till the nineteenth century. These moments take second place, however, to the tremendous combats.

  Amadís remains a wonderful story, compulsive in its appeal. No doubt some Spanish adventurers who traveled with a copy of Amadís in their traveling chests allowed it to influence them. Some perhaps thought that if Amadís could kill one hundred thousand men with no difficulty, so could they—hence possibly the wild exaggerations (of numbers) in Bernal Díaz’s famous book about the conquest of Mexico. Some were probably as besotted by it as Cervantes represents Don Quixote to have been—and, indeed, that great novel was in its way a tribute to Amadís (Cervantes gives his book, as epigraphs, some poems purportedly by characters in Amadís).

  One of the cities of the New World founded by the Portuguese in Brazil, Olinda, is named after a princess in Amadís. The magic word “California,” the realm of Queen Califia, derives from episodes relating to Amazons in a sequel to Amadís, Las Sergas de Esplandián, published first in 1510. The word “Patagonia,” the southernmost of the Spanish dominions in the Americas, comes from another novel, while the great River Amazon takes its name from the fact that the intrepid Extremeño Orellana identified the river with a place where Amazons lived.17

  The success of Amadís led many people to copy it, and would-be sequels as well as parallel series soon began to appear, such as that featuring Palmerín de Oliva, whose first publication was in 1511. The author was probably a certain Francisco Vázquez.

  The reading public of the sixteenth century was entranced by these chivalrous stories. Those readers constituted, we should never forget, the first generation of men and women able to read books as a source of entertainment. The brilliant Spanish commander in Italy of the next generation, Fernando de Avalos, read Amadís as a boy and himself said that in consequence he was inspired to deeds of glory.18 Other Spanish soldiers in Italy read Amadís with profit.19 Garcilaso de la Vega, who wrote the first true American history, The Royal Commentaries of the Indies, also loved these novels as a youth.20 Nor was it just adventurers with time on their hands on long voyages across the Atlantic who became so preoccupied. For example, St. Teresa of Ávila wrote that as a child she, too, “began to fall into the habit of reading them [the romances of chivalry] … and it seemed to me that it was not wrong to spend many hours of the day and night in such vain exercise, though I concealed it from my father. I became so absorbed that if I did not have a new such book to read, I did not feel that I could be happy.”21 St. Ignatius had a similar experience: when wounded at the siege of Pamplona in 1521, he asked to be given a copy of Amadís, and perhaps it influenced his life as the founder of the Jesuit order. Certainly the coming together of himself and his first followers in the crypt of Sainte-Marie in Montmartre had much in common with the establishment of a band of knightly brothers.

  Other entertainment in the New World was provided by drink; and we find the veteran of the expedition of 1501, Rodrigo de Bastidas, from Triana, now more of a merchant than an explorer, not only selling wine—perhaps the popular fortified wine of Calzada de la Sierra—to Santo Domingo but obtaining a 300 percent profit.22 In 1508, Alcalde de Espera would tell a royal pilot (comitre), Diego Rodríguez, that the goods that he had given him to sell, worth 600 ducats, had raised 2,000 ducats—a profit, that is, of over 200 percent.23

  Ovando by now thought his achievements were such that he ought to be able to retire: on May 20, 1505, he wrote to his brother Diego in Castile: “May God be praised that this island is now so pacific and with such desire to serv
e His Highness … I really believe that this will give me a license [to return home].…”24 But he did not receive that for many months.

  On September 18, 1505, Fernando, having heard good reports about the possibility of finding copper in La Española, dispatched three caravels from Seville25 with all the equipment needed for such an enterprise. He sent not only equipment, but a hundred African slaves.26

  Ovando had been hostile at first to the idea of black labor because he had found that Africans created trouble among the Indians. But he had come to realize that African slaves could contribute substantially to all these undertakings. Everyone in La Española noticed how the few black Africans there worked harder than the indigenous Indians, who were developing many clever ways of avoiding the excessive work that the Spaniards wanted of them. Two days before, King Fernando himself had told the officials of the Casa de Contratación that “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 of your confidence ought to go with them.”27

  As we have seen, a few black slaves had been sent to the New World in the first years of the sixteenth century. But previously they had gone in twos and threes, never as many as a hundred. So 1507 marked a new phase in the history of the Indies, of Africa, of Europe, and of human population.28

  The island of La Española had by now been divided among the conquerors. It was well organized in respect of the discovery of gold, its first preoccupation. The benefits gained by those who produced this were considerable: the quinto of the Crown alone in 1505 had been over 22 million maravedís. The total must therefore have been about 110 million.29 The years 1503 to 1510 would produce in total nearly 5 million grams of gold, which was something that impressed the King.30 Those were the years when Ovando was also bringing in cattle to the colony, at his own cost, ensuring that they were kept for breeding.31 By 1507, he could even write to the King saying that it was not necessary to send any more mares: there were already enough horses to enable the conquest of nearby islands.32 Ovando had also commissioned the experienced pilot Andrés de Morales to draw a map of the coasts of the Antilles. His maps were soon thought to be the best and most accurate available. Morales, who was probably from Seville and in 1508 would have been just over thirty, was also the first man to describe methodically the ocean currents in the West Indies.

  Ovando began to be criticized, however. For example, he mishandled the case of Cristóbal Rodríguez, a conquistador who had learned the Taino language, having spent several years without talking to any Spaniards. He had gone to treat with Roldán, at the request of Columbus, and he had been the first to go down to the port in Santo Domingo on the Admiral’s behalf to see who Bobadilla’s fleet was bringing in. He had interpreted at a wedding in 1505 between a Spaniard, Juan Garcés, and an Indian, at Concepción. For acting thus without permission, he was fined 100,000 maravedís by Ovando and sent back to Spain. But the King saw him and warmed to him, and decided that Rodríguez would be of value to the colony. To Ovando’s displeasure, he was sent back to La Española, with a horse and even a mare, and with instructions to try to work out a constitutional arrangement for the Indians. Rodríguez then challenged Ovando on the benefits of his recent allocation of Indians.33

  More serious was Ovando’s quarrel with the Tapia brothers of Seville. Cristóbal de Tapia, backed by Bishop Fonseca (of whom he was a distant relation), reported from Santo Domingo to the King that Ovando “did not fulfill the instructions in the letters that their Highnesses sent him asking him to allocate Indians to various specified persons.” Yet at the same time the Governor was treating his own Extremeño friends very well, among whom even “the assistants to the assistants of the cooks have Indians in large numbers.”34 Ovando had made his cousin, Diego de Cáceres, the commander of the fortress in Santo Domingo in place of Cristóbal de Tapia, who had lost his land on the west bank of the Ozama. The truth was that Ovando preferred Extremeños, especially men from his own towns of Brozas and Garrobillas, to Sevillanos. He even named an unknown young notary from Medellín, Hernán Cortés, his own distant cousin, to be notary of the new town of Azúa soon after he reached La Española in October 1506.35

  The Tapias were supported in their accusations by Miguel Pasamonte, an Aragonese converso from Judes, near Ariza, who arrived as royal treasurer in 1508 and was henceforth to represent Fonseca’s interests in the Indies.36 He acquired power in La Española and was responsible for many grants of Indians and franchises from which money could be made.

  A sign of the King’s growing interest in the Indies was his determination to assure himself of control of the appointments of bishops in the New World. It was an important change, for he had more authority over these prelates than any monarch had ever had anywhere. Yet it was three more years before any such were named. By that time, there were three projected monasteries, one of which, the Franciscan, was already nearly finished in Santo Domingo. There were no churches of stone as yet, but hospitals of that material had been constructed at Buenaventura and Concepción and a provisional one, of St. Nicolas, in Santo Domingo itself. The authority of religion was something that the monarchs could increasingly count on in their plans to control both Indians and settlers.

  By the summer of 1508, Cristóbal de Tapia considered that he had enough material to use against Ovando to return to Spain and present Fonseca with the case for that Governor’s dismissal. Fonseca proposed that Francisco de Tapia, brother of Cristóbal, should take over as commander. Cristóbal, delighted, returned to Santo Domingo to collect more material against the Governor. The rumor even spread that he was planning a rebellion of settlers. Ovando held up a letter he had intercepted on its way home to the King that purported to prove this. He sent Tapia to jail, and confiscated his Indians. Fonseca ordered Ovando to free Tapia. Conchillos came to hear of the censored letter and inspired the King to state liberally: “All who want to write to us should be free to do so, and any information received we will inquire about and make our decisions on the basis of the whole truth; and the truth once known, we shall decide on the issue.”37 This seemed a blast in favor of liberty of expression on the part of the Crown. But it was not to dictate a rule.

  The King, who went in state to Seville in 1508 with his new wife, Germaine, decided to replace Ovando. In Arévalo, Castile, where the young St. Ignatius was at that time learning the arts of life and chivalry as a member of the household of Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, the King explained on August 9, 1508, that he had asked Diego Colón, the new Admiral in succession to his father, to go and live in and govern the Indies.38 Diego’s formal nomination (in Seville) was on October 29, 1508. The letter instructed all the officials of the New World to make the oath necessary to the said Diego and receive him as “my magistrate and governor of these isles and mainland.”39 Diego was thus confirmed in his hereditary title of admiral, but nothing was said about his being viceroy. He was called Admiral of the Indies, but not of the Ocean Sea. Were these mistakes?40 Surely not. Fonseca and Conchillas did not make mistakes of that kind. Diego Colón’s powers were being deliberately limited.

  The explanation for this appointment was no doubt that the King, sensitive to opinion at court, perceived, thanks to the complaints that he had received, that Ovando’s time was up. He had, after all, been governor for seven years, since 1501. As to the appointment of Diego Colón, Fernando felt warmly toward him, having seen him often at court, first as a companion of the dead Infante, and afterwards as a member of the household of Queen Isabel. Fonseca, too, must have been in favor of the nomination.41 But more important, Diego Colón had recently married María de Toledo, the niece of the Duke of Alba (she was a daughter of Fernando de Toledo, comendador of León). What Alba requested in these days was usually immediately granted by a King always grateful to him for his support in times of danger—a support that, indeed, it might be necessary to call upon again.

  Fernando gave his instructions to Diego
Colón on May 3, 1509, and the same day he gave permission to Ovando to return to Spain, something for which that proconsul had often asked but that seems, as often happens in such cases, to have surprised him.

  Ovando left the island of La Española Spanish but cowed. All authority was in the hands of the governor. No alternative source of power survived. But partly as a result of that eclipse of indigenous governments and the consequent communal melancholy, the native population had begun to decline. No one had thought much about this while Ovando was in office, even if it would soon become the main preoccupation of the settlers.

  19

  “And they leapt onto the land”

  They all went very happily and contentedly and they leapt onto the land. They went to the caciques of the Indians and were there talking with them till the sun went down.

  Francisco Rodríguez, in evidence for Juan González Ponce de León, 1532

  On April 24, 1505, while at Toro, some months after the death of Isabel, King Fernando agreed to name the old companion of Columbus’s, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, of Palos, to be corregidor and captain of the Isle of San Juan. Puerto Rico, as it soon became known, Boriquen, as the Indians called it, was the island next door to La Española; before 1492, Tainos in the west of La Española had made daily visits to Boriquen across the deep and narrow sea.1 San Juan, it was thought, could become a new colony if enough Castilians declared an interest in going there. It was about 150 miles long and 75 wide. Much as had happened in La Española, the land would be divided among the new settlers, who would have to undertake to stay at least five years. Yáñez was to build a fortress of which he would be governor.2