Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  King Tumanamá even had a golden kitchen, the young Indian said. Gold was considered there of no more value than iron was in Europe, he went on airily. Young Comogre offered to go as guide. He said: “Summon a thousand warriors, well armed for fighting, so that by their help and assisted by the warriors of my father … we may shatter the power of our (and your) enemies.… In this way, you will obtain the gold that you want.” “The love of gain and the hope of gold fairly made our men’s mouths water …,” commented a sailor who talked to Peter Martyr.35 There were, of course, many parts of this story that owed much to the imagination.

  An expedition to what is now Florida was mounted in 1513; the Spaniards called it Bimini. The indigenous people there were tougher than the Tainos in the Caribbean; their arrows were poisoned, unlike those of the Caribbean Indians and, indeed, those of Mexico. They were hunters, but nevertheless they grew maize and corn. They may have been similar to the mysterious Guanahatebeyes in Cuba, with whom they perhaps had some contact.36

  Juan Ponce de León was commander of the Spanish expedition.37 Presumably that was a compensation for having been dismissed as governor of Puerto Rico. He took three ships, first the Santiago, commanded by Diego Bermúdez, a brother of the Juan Bermúdez who had discovered the island of Bermuda. Antonio Alaminos was the pilot—an outstanding sailor who had been with Columbus in 1502–04 and would later be the pilot of the conquest of Mexico.38 The second ship was the Santa María de Consolación, whose captain was Juan Bono de Quejo, a Basque from San Sebastián who would also have a long history of marine activity in the Caribbean, ending with the conquest of Mexico, in the second phase of which he also participated. The third ship was a brigantine, the San Cristóbal.

  Two women sailed on the Santiago, in what capacity is obscure. Among the others was Juan Garrido, the black Portuguese who had been with Ponce in Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe and had fought in Cuba. He would afterwards sail with Cortés and be the first European to plant wheat in the New World.39 Ponce de León also took with him his son, Juan González Ponce de León, who had been the interpreter in his father’s conquest of Puerto Rico.

  Ponce de León’s expedition set out in March 1513 and made landfall in Florida near what is now Palm Beach on Easter Sunday, March 27. He sailed south past the sites of famous modern resorts—Cape Canaveral, Daytona Beach, and Miami—and then turned north into the Gulf of Mexico. He was looking, Peter Martyr tells us, especially for “a fountain of youth”—a fountain with the miraculous power of restoring to old men their fading capacities.40 This marvel had been mentioned in the work of Sir John Mandeville, the mythical traveler of the fourteenth century. The idea was spoken of in Palmerín de Oliva, a romance that had appeared in 1511, where it was alleged to have been found on the magic mountain of Artifaria, belonging to Palmerín, King of England.

  But Ponce de León found neither fountain nor gold. What he did find was the Gulf Stream, as important a discovery as Florida itself, though he did not know it.41 On his way back to Puerto Rico, he stopped in Yucatan (probably near Progreso, Mérida)42 while the pilot Alaminos returned through the Bahamas (the Lucays). Ponce de León, however, seems not to have explored anywhere in Yucatan. He reached Puerto Rico on October 10, 1513, completing a journey that had been far more important than expected or than its commander, thwarted of his fountain, reported. He named the “island” that he had discovered to honor the day he first saw it: Easter Sunday, otherwise the day of the spring festival (La Pascual Florida). Then, in 1514, Ponce de León returned to Spain to receive a confirmation of his title to Puerto Rico.43

  Book Four

  DIEGO COLÓN

  A captain says a prayer.

  (Illustration credit 4.1)

  21

  “A voice crying in the wilderness”

  I … am a voice of Christ crying in the wilderness of this island … the freshest voice that ever you heard, the sharpest and hardest and most awful and dangerous that you ever expected to hear.…

  Advent sermon of Fray Antonio de Montesinos Santo Domingo, 1511

  Diego Colón, the elder, legitimate son of the Admiral, arrived in Santo Domingo from Spain after a happy voyage on the Que Dios Salve with “a large household”1 including María de Toledo, his fashionable wife, the Duke of Alba’s niece, on July 9, 1509. María brought with her a number of wellborn girls who would be maids of honor suitable for the wife of a viceroy.2

  Diego was then aged thirty. Like all Spanish proconsuls, he came to his new mission with new friends in addition to his younger brother, Fernando, and his uncles, the once notorious Bartolomeo (who became chief constable) and Diego, not to speak of cousins, such as Juan Antonio and Andrea Colombo. It was a measure of the success of Ovando’s administration that the return of these old members of the Columbus family did not inspire a revolution on the island. Diego had with him, too, an experienced magistrate, Marcos de Aguilar from Écija, whom he made chief justice. Important merchants of Castile sent goods with him, for example, Alonso de Nebreda, a successful trader of Burgos, connected by blood with all the important converso businessmen of that city. Among others who accompanied Diego Colón was García de Lerma, an entrepreneur of Burgos who has been described as a pioneer capitalist in the Caribbean.3

  Diego was a courtier, not a sailor. He had spent his entire life either at the court of the Infante Juan or at that of the Queen, and subsequently at that of the King. His father had been fond of him, usually ending his letters with the phrase “Your father who loves you more than himself.”

  Columbus had had dreams for Diego. It may be remembered that in 1493 he asked for a cardinalate for him. Then he had hoped that Diego might marry Mencía, a daughter of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who wielded such power near Gibraltar. But the King refused his permission. In the end, he made an even more advantageous match in 1508 with Maria de Toledo. Las Casas wrote of Diego Colón that he “was more the heir to the anguish, the labors, and the setbacks of his father than to the status, the honors, and the privileges that had been gained with such effort.”4 It was true. Diego was recognized as hereditary admiral, but nothing was said about his being viceroy. There were other privileges in relation to his father that had been included in the famous contract of Santa Fe in 1492 that were missing in Diego’s designation in 1509. So he embarked on a lawsuit against the Crown that was a curious accompaniment to his departure on his new mission.

  He took with him elaborate instructions.5 First, he was told that it was desirable to rely on the treasurer, Miguel de Pasamonte, for everything to do with the Church. A second clause spoke well of Ovando—“I am informed that Fray Nicolás had a very good way of conducting himself.” Diego Colón was asked to obtain from his predecessor, Ovando, a memorandum as to how he had conducted the government of the island.6 Then the new Governor was enjoined to look after the hospitals that had been founded at Buenaventura and La Concepción.

  The King added that his main desire for La Española was to convert the Indians and to keep them Christians, and to that end there had to be in every town a clerical person, not necessarily a priest, with a house near the church. The Governor was also to assure the Indian caciques that he wanted them to be “well treated, not robbed.” They in turn had to look after their own Indians generously. The Indians were not to have fiestas except “in the style of the other people of our realms,” that is, in Spanish style. Everyone, Spaniards and Indians alike, was to live in towns. Indians who inherited property were not to sell it below its value. No Spaniard was to sell or give arms to Indians.

  The Governor and the treasurer, Pasamonte, were also to ensure that they obtained as much gold from the mines as possible. The gold was to be melted down by teams of about ten men, or whatever number was thought right, under the control of a trustworthy person. Fernando hoped that a third of the male Indians on the island of Española would be employed in the discovery of gold, to be found in the sandy beds of rivers or in rock. Diego Colón was to find out how many Indians there were on the island
and carry out a census—unless, indeed, that had already been done by Gil González Davila, a courtier of the royal household who had been named accountant. The rise and fall of the population was to be noted. The Governor was to ensure that no one was idle, because “idleness was dangerous.”

  Diego Colón was further to ensure that no foreigners established themselves in the Indies. Neither Moors nor Jews nor heretics nor anyone who had been castigated by the Inquisition (reconciliados) nor people newly converted should go there; though, if they were black slaves or others born in Christianity, they could do so, provided a license had been obtained for them. Even descendants of those punished by the Inquisition were also prohibited from going. Two fortresses, approved in the days of Ovando but not carried through, were to be built, one at Concepción, the other at Santiago; and no one was to go about exploring the island without royal permission. The Governor was to find out and write at length and often about “everything that was going on.”7

  As was often the case, these instructions gave a better impression of what the Crown hoped would happen in La Española than what Diego Colón would achieve. But they did show that the Crown assumed that much of the real power would be exercised by the treasurer, Pasamonte, and that the Governor would be a figurehead.8 Perhaps it was assumed in Spain that he would be happy to sit in the new stone house built for Ovando and read. For he and his friends had set out with many books. Even the new apothecary took five books of medicine; Cristóbal de Sotomayor, the future deputy governor in Puerto Rico, took nine books, of which eight were bound in gold, a map of the world, and a bundle of other unbound volumes. He later gave Fernando Colón two manuscripts, a sure sign of friendship. The lawyers also took their books: Álvaro de Sandoval had the Siete Partidas, the legal code of King Alfonso X, while Marcos de Aguilar had three boxes of unnamed books.9 One or two copies of the novel Amadís de Gaula, in its edition of 1508, were perhaps among them.

  In keeping with the tradition of disasters that most of the early governors of La Española encountered, nearly all the ships in which Diego Colón arrived were destroyed in a storm in the Bay of Santo Domingo soon after he arrived. As a result, the colony was unable to communicate with the mother country until October. Diego did not mind, since he was determined to control all the movements of his fellow countrymen in the Caribbean. No new expedition was to occur unless it and its leader had been approved by him, at least while he was himself in litigation over the fate of the whole New World, which he believed he had inherited.

  Despite the overbearing presence of the treasurer, Pasamonte, Diego Colón set about preparing his own solutions to the problems of the island. He was advised by three Franciscans: Fray Alonso de Espinal, who had come to La Española with Ovando and had managed to arrange that his own order should be able to receive lands in the New World despite their vows of poverty; Fray Pedro de Melgarejo, a Sevillano, who would later take part in the second stage of Cortés’s expedition in Mexico; and Fray Pedro Mejía, an Extremeño. With these men he set about inspiring a new general division of the land on the island. The idea was that the Governor would hand over one hundred Indians to officials and commanders of fortresses named by the Crown. Any caballero (knight) who brought his wife to the Indies would receive eighty Indians, while any foot soldier who brought his would receive sixty. Common laborers from Spain who similarly came with wives would receive thirty Indians. Diego was able to act without the fear that native rulers would interfere with his plans, for they no longer existed. But the decline of the native population carried its own anxieties.

  The eighteenth-century historian Muñoz, who studied the archives on the matter, declared that this division concerned 33,528 Tainos. The details, however, seem to be lost. So there is no way of knowing how far that estimate of the Indian population was below the figure for 1492 and how many Indian slaves there also were. All calculations of population (suggesting a catastrophic decline) suffer from having been made by interested parties. It would seem certain that this number was below what was found at contact with the Europeans. But in 1509 there was little expression of anxiety about this, which makes it legitimate to think that it could not have been so very much below the previous figure. Had the decline been of the disastrous order suggested by Bartolomé de las Casas or, in the twentieth century, by the California school of historians (Lesley Byrd Simpson, Woodrow Wilson Borah, and Sherburne Friendly Cook), there would already have been alarm expressed, if not consternation.10

  Instead, by a decree of 1510, the hundred Indians provided by the division for officials and commanders of fortresses was increased to two hundred.11 Slaves, the King agreed, could be brought in from neighboring islands if they were necessary.

  Slaves close to the European definition of the term were well known in the Americas before the Europeans arrived, though not in Taino societies. To the conquistadors, it was one of the many comforting similarities between the two worlds. The two main settled monarchies, the Mexica and the Inca (as yet undiscovered), both had substantial slave populations.12 The Caribs, too, used Tainos and other captives as slaves.

  So it was scarcely an innovation when a dozen colonists in La Española received permission in August 1509 to build caravels to seek slaves in neighboring islands.13 That same month the Governor approved an offer by a consortium of merchants to procure Indians either from the Bahamas or the mainland. If the captives went willingly, they would be called naborías (indentured servants); if they resisted, they would be looked on as slaves.14 But unlike the naborías in La Española, these Bahamians (Lucayos) did not have land of their own to cultivate. So the difference between them and slaves was slight in practice.

  The leader of those interested in these adventures was the treasurer, Miguel de Pasamonte.15 He was an official, but neither he nor any other contemporary civil servant supposed that public service should interfere with commercial dealing. In that view, he was supported by the accountant, Gil González Dávila. The fact was, as was said in a later court, in respect of Bishop Fonseca’s protégé in Santo Domingo, Cristóbal de Tapia, “the properties of this land are nothing without Indians.”16

  The King was interested. Early in 1510 he wrote to Diego Colón: “I saw the letter that you sent home with your brother Fernando.… Now I reply to that section of it which concerns the mines. Since the Lord gives it [gold], and I need it for the war in Africa [against the Barbary pirates], one cannot discount what is produced. And because the Indians are feeble at breaking up rock, please put into the mines the [black] slaves, of whom I am sending you another fifty, through the officials of Seville.”17 On February 10, 1510, the King, by then in the pueblo of Guadarrama, gave permission for another two hundred African slaves to be sent to the New World.

  Most of these had been brought back originally to Lisbon or Seville by the Portuguese from the Gulf of Guinea or the Cape Verde Islands. Some of them were Negroes, others were Berbers. A few of them, or even their fathers, had been in Europe a long time. Two hundred, however, was a substantial figure, and this decision of the King’s, even more than the action in 1507 to which reference has been made earlier, was another important date in the history of the African slave trade to the Americas. At that stage no one worried about the condition of these Africans, who were admired as slaves wherever they went. As many as 150, bought in Portugal by the Genoese merchants of the Salvago family, Balian and Antonio, seem to have been sent in 1510, dispatched to La Española in boats belonging to the King.18

  The King observed that every year the import of gold from La Española seemed to be increasing. Thus 445,000 pesos of gold had been imported in the three years 1503–05, of which 116,000 came from royal mines. Between 1506 and 1510 this figure grew to nearly a million, of which the contribution to the Crown was over 250,000 pesos.19 This was a side of the Indies that interested Fernando; it was still hard to see what else did.

  To take account of these opportunities, the comendador Ochoa de Isasaga, the new factor in the Casa de Contratación, wh
o had succeeded the Genoese Francisco Piñelo (he had died in 1509), suggested some changes in the Sevillano institution’s organization. Sitting in Monzón, where the court spent March, Isasaga proposed thirty-six new ordinances (approved on June 15, 1510, by the King, Fonseca, and Conchillos). They were important, but they did not mention the Indians. They insisted that all transactions had to be entered in a book. There would be records to account for all money, both incoming and outgoing, and another for the registration of all kinds of objects. Business would be conducted twice a day, from 10 to 11 A.M. and from 5 to 6 P.M. In the summer, the morning hours would be from 9 to 10 A.M.

  The Casa had also to concern itself with the administration of the goods of those who had died in the Indies, which were to be kept in a chest with three locks, as was all the gold. Though still no one condemned for religious or other reasons would be allowed to go to the Indies, anyone else could go if they so desired, providing that they registered with the Casa de Contratación.20 Every big vessel would henceforth have a notary on board. There was to be a clever manager in the Casa as well as a treasurer, an accountant, and, again, a notary. Anyone who wanted to set off for the Indies would have to have his vessel inspected first.21 The benefits of these arrangements to the Crown included that those who went to the New World would be taxed.

  Further refinements were added the next year, when the Casa de Contratación was given civil and criminal jurisdiction, and as much time as it needed to deal with all matters relating to the trade to the Caribbean. Prisoners of the Casa would, however, be held in the public prison of Seville.

  Far more important in the long run than these bureaucratic arrangements was the dispatch of six Dominican friars to Santo Domingo in August 1510, as a result of a decree of King Fernando signed the previous November. These friars were all from the reformed section of the order, the “province of San Gabriel de Extremadura.”22 The idea of sending Dominicans to the Indies was that of Fray Domingo de Mendoza, a learned, pious preacher who knew how to put good ideas into practice.23 At first, these Dominicans seemed a challenge to the Franciscans, who were by then well established in the island of La Española. But within a few months they would constitute as well a threat to the established order, for these friars were the great reformers of the early days of Spanish rule. Their magnificent monasteries, constructed over the next generation in the New World, were landmarks as important as cities.