by Hugh Thomas
The coast of Pedrarias’s territory, and the land a little to its north in Central America, had become the focus of raids for slaves from Cuba: in 1516, for example, an expedition of two ships went from Santiago de Cuba to Guahabo. One ship seized its cargo and returned home via Havana. On the bay island of Santa Catalina, in the Gulf of Honduras, some captured Indians rebelled and managed to kill the Spanish crew, except for two whom they forced to sail back to Guahabo. Diego Velázquez sent a punitive expedition. There ensued a fierce battle in which the Spaniards defeated the Indians and returned to Cuba with four hundred slaves.23 The pursuit of slave labor from the mainland for the islands was in fact becoming the stimulus for expansion.
In the summer of 1516, the authorities in La Española thus permitted a flotilla to go to the large island off the north coast of South America known, since Columbus’s visit in 1498, as Trinidad. The only purpose was to look for Caribs who could be brought back as slaves. It was, as usual in such Spanish expeditions, a mixed enterprise: royal officials (including judges) and independent entrepreneurs collaborated. Some of the latter (Becerra, Bardeci, Bastidas) had wanted to manage the expedition, offering to bring back the slaves cheaply, giving away the children and the old. The judges rejected the offer, for they themselves wanted to share in the profits.24 The commander of the expedition was Juan Bono de Quejo, an old hand in the Caribbean, a Sevillano but one who had been born in San Sebastián. He had been on Columbus’s fourth voyage, as on Ponce de León’s to Florida, and he had powerful friends in Spain. One of the captains of his three ships was a nephew of Diego Velázquez, Juan Grijalva, also from Cuéllar, near Segovia.
On arriving in Trinidad, the Spaniards were well received by the Indians, but they kidnapped a hundred and sent them in one of the ships to La Española. Their arrival provoked an immediate protest, not only by the Dominicans but also by some shipbuilders who had been prevented from joining in. The former demanded the return of the Indians, but these were proclaimed Caribs (cannibals) and so their capture was deemed legitimate.
In December 1516, Bono returned with his remaining two vessels to San Juan, Puerto Rico, with another 180 slaves. He arrived just when the three Jeronymite priors had reached there after a calm voyage. The San Juan had been expected to go straight to Santo Domingo, but in the event, it stopped in Puerto Rico for repairs. Las Casas then joined them on the Trinidad. On the beach in San Juan he saw Bono’s 180 Indians, manacled, of course, and many of them wounded. Bono welcomed Las Casas, whom he had known for years, and, after offering him dinner, went straight to the point: “By my faith, Father,” he said to Las Casas, “because I know that you would hand me over to destruction if you could, it is good for you to know that if you cannot capture slaves peacefully, you have to do so by war”25—the reference to destruction being a pun on the “instruction” he had received not long ago from the judges, his partners. Las Casas was furious that the priors did not seem interested in the iniquities of Bono, whom he hated: “Juan Bono, malo” was his rather obvious comment.
The priors sailed on to Santo Domingo on December 20 and put up first in the new monastery of the Franciscans, then in a building belonging to the Casa de Contratación. They summoned the three judges (Vázquez de Ayllón, Villalobos, and Ortiz de Matienzo), the treasurer (Miguel de Pasamonte), the factor (Juan de Ampiés, an Aragonese friend of Lope de Conchillos), the magistrates (Columbus’s onetime secretary Diego de Alvarado and the converso Cristóbal de Santa Clara), as well as two councillors (Francisco de Tapia and Antón Serrano).
The priors wanted, of course, to know the local problems. They found that by then not all Ovando’s cities survived: Verapaz, Salvatierra, Villanueva, and Lares had vanished. The population of La Española in 1516 constituted about 4,000 Spaniards, perhaps 6,000 fewer than in the days of Ovando, for many settlers had gone to Cuba in search of better fortunes. Apart from Santo Domingo, the cities that did remain still seemed to be labor camps at the service of the mines.26 But it was the decline in the Indian population that constituted the most obvious catastrophe. Las Casas had argued that the population of working age had been 60,000 in 1509, Diego Colón 40,000 in 1510, while Peter Martyr repeated what had been stated by Las Casas in Madrid, namely that Bartolomeo Colón had estimated there to have been 1.2 million Indians in La Española in 1496.27
These figures are all guesses, or even just inventions, especially the higher ones, but that there had been a decline since 1509 is certain. Gil González Dávila had been saying in Castile that this was due to the constant moving of Indians from one place to another. Others more recently have thought that “the excellent but delicate ecological balance had broken down.” The indigenous people had continued to live on cassava bread, but their fishing and hunting had been suppressed.
To begin with, the priors did their best. Las Casas had been too pessimistic about the new rulers’ prejudices. They sought to distance themselves from the settlers and from officials such as the egregious Pasamonte. They attempted to encourage immigration and sought ways to convince more Spaniards to come out to the Indies, with seeds and cattle. They tried to do away with abuses and, following Cisneros’s lead, set at liberty Indians belonging to absentee owners, even those who were the property of such powerful men as Fonseca and Conchillos.
The priors also traveled to the gold mines in the center of the island. They tried to arrange for surviving Indians who had been moved from the mines to be resettled in towns of four to five hundred people with a church and a hospital, where there would be common lands and where they would pay a fixed tribute as a tax. The priors thought that the Indians should cease to be asked to look for gold but should grow agricultural products instead—Spanish crops, for few Castilian settlers, except those in Cuba, were interested in American products, not even maize. As yet, sugarcane had only been grown on a small scale. But the success of that crop in the Canary Islands suggested that it could be planted in the Indies, too. There were over thirty sugar mills in the Canaries by 1515. Soon they would be built in the Caribbean, with Genoese capital playing the same kind of role that it had in Tenerife and Gran Canaria. It was the beginning of the long sugar history of the Caribbean, which is even now not quite finished.
The priors immediately, however, came up against the reality of America: the shortage of labor, the reluctance of the Indians to assimilate, the shortages of Castilian food and wine, the sweaty heat, the sense of distance, the uncomprehending ignorance of the settlers, and the deceptive beauty of the landscape. The arrival of Bono’s slaves from Trinidad was accompanied by requests from the older colonists, backed by Franciscans and even some Dominicans, for artillery and gunpowder for defense against the cannibals. The priors, on the other hand, believed that such things were incompatible with “peaceful evangelization” and published another condemnation of the slave raids.
On inquiry, most sailors and others who had been to the Pearl Coast testified that the Indians carried back from there had been Caribs and had been given to the Spaniards by local leaders. But the Jeronymites were unconvinced and sought to ban all dealings with the Pearl Coast. They were constrained to relax their stand, however, and even to name Juan de Ampiés as responsible for that coast—a curious decision since, though certainly knowledgeable, he had been much implicated in the business of trading Indians. Two vessels were permitted by the priors to sail there, one of them owned by Diego Caballero de la Rosa, a powerful merchant and accountant in Santo Domingo (son of a converso, Juan Caballero, who had been “reconciled” at an auto-de-fe in Seville in 1488). The captains, Juan Ruano and Juan Fernández, kidnapped between 150 and 200 Indians and on their return, as in the past, declared that they were Caribs, though the priors insisted that they had to be considered free laborers. The individuals concerned were handed over to Ampiés.
The priors now decided to arrange an inquiry into the working of the colony. In April 1517 seven questions were put to the twelve oldest inhabitants.28 Question three asked if the witness believed “tha
t these Indians … are of such capacity that they should be given liberty. Would they be able to live in the same social circumstances as the Spaniards?” Could they be expected one day to support themselves by their own efforts, by mining or tilling the soil or performing daily labor? Did they know or care what they might acquire by such work, spending money only on necessities, as if they were Castilian laborers? Could they in fact become good Spaniards?
Marcos de Aguilar, the chief magistrate, from Écija, in Andalusia, a survivor from the days of Diego Colón, thought that continuous contact with Christians might eventually teach the Indians enough to let them live alone; but Juan Mosquera, a landholder who had received 257 Indians in Alburquerque’s division of 1513, thought that most Indians were so steeped in vice that they did not even want to see Spaniards and often fled when they saw them coming. Jerónimo de Agüero, a councillor who had always been a strong supporter of the Columbus family (had he not been tutor to both Diego and Fernando Colón in his and their youth?) and the master of about eighty Indians, said that the Indians he knew could only be induced to work by large rewards. They lacked any sense of value: why, an Indian would exchange his best shirt for a pair of scissors or a mirror! Antonio Serrano, who had recently been to Spain as a procurador, thought that the curious lack of acquisitiveness of the Indians meant that it was impossible for them to live in society unless supervised by Spaniards. Juan de Ampiés said that even if Indians were beaten or had their ears cut off, they would not be considered any the less by their Indian friends; but Pedro Romero, another councillor, who had lived with an Indian wife for fourteen years, thought that if Indians petitioned for liberty, they should be given it. The treasurer, Pasamonte, on the other hand, considered that Indians should never be given full liberty because of the dangerous friendships many had with black slaves.
Gonzalo de Ocampo, an Extremeño who had been befriended by Las Casas, observed that the Indians must have had some capacity for self-reliance because after all they had raised crops, built houses, and made clothes before the Spaniards came. Judge Vázquez de Ayllón thought that it was better for the Indians to be tied servants than wild beasts who were free. Diego de Alvarado, from Extremadura, a former secretary of Columbus’s and uncle of the famous Alvarado brothers who would be so prominent in the conquest of Mexico, believed that, left to themselves, the Indians would do nothing except drink, dance, and plot. Another landowner told a sad story: Ovando, when governor, had set at liberty two Indian caciques, giving them the names of Alonso de Cáceres and Pedro Colón. These men soon learned how to read and write, for they had lived with Spaniards for years. Ovando favored them, but afterwards Mosquera said that during the six years from 1508 to 1514, while they had had their freedom, they neither tilled the land nor raised pigs, nor could they clothe and feed themselves. So Alburquerque’s division in fact removed their liberties. That first experiment ended “in poverty and without honor.”
In another inquiry, witnesses such as the merchants Jacome de Castellon, Juan Fernández de las Varas, Sancho de Villasante, and Gonzalo de Guzmán gave a good picture of life in La Española. Guzmán also described the great slave hunts of the coast of what is now Venezuela in which he had participated; and Francisco de Monroy, of the Extremeño family of that name, told how in 1516 a certain Pedro de Herrera had raised the dangerous cry “Viva el ynfante don Fernando.…”29
While these inquiries were ending, leaving the priors even more puzzled as to what actually to do, new men reached La Española. The first was Judge Alonso Zuazo, who in April 1517 arrived with fourteen servants, a mule, and some costly luggage. He immediately began his residencia of the judges of the audiencia, but they succeeded in escaping denunciation, thanks to their experienced defense counsel, Cristóbal Lebrón.
At much the same time, fourteen Franciscans of mixed origins from the reformed division of Picardy also arrived in Santo Domingo, headed by the venerable French brother Fray Remigio de Faulx, a welcome addition to the monasteries of Santo Domingo and Concepción de la Vega. Las Casas thought they all looked like Roman senators. They came from several Franciscan groups: one of them, Ricardo Gani de Manupresa, was English, Guillermo Herbert was a Norman, while the provincial Tomás Infante was reported to be an illegitimate brother of Marie de Lorraine, Queen of Scotland.30
The priors were coming to an interesting conclusion. They may have been influenced by Las Casas, but there is no direct evidence of it. They wrote to Cisneros that having been in La Española six months and having observed the shortage of labor and the problems that resulted when the Indians were asked to work harder, they had no doubt that black slaves from Africa were needed—bozales, that is, slaves who had been bought in Africa, rather than bred in Europe: “because by experience one can see the great benefit of them.” They suggested that the Crown should concede a license recognizing that “from this island, it would be easy to go direct to the Cape Verde Islands or the land of Guinea, and they could arrange with a third person to export the slaves from there.”31
But this request contradicted the expectations of the Flemish courtiers of Charles V: they knew that the slave trade could be beneficial to middlemen. Furthermore, it ran against the understandings in several treaties that trade with Guinea was a monopoly of the Portuguese. All the same, the request is of great interest. Since King Fernando had given his permission to introduce two hundred slaves into the Americas in 1510, a few black slaves had been sent every year. They had taken part in numerous expeditions. Diego Velázquez had had some African slaves with him in his conquest of Cuba. As we have seen, Vasco Núñez de Balboa is alleged to have had a black slave (Nuño de Olano) when he first saw the Pacific, and African slaves working for him in 1517 were building boats on that ocean.32 Pedrarias had African slaves with him when he discovered a group of their fellows who had escaped from a shipwreck nearby a few years earlier.33
So it was scarcely surprising that in Spain a license was given in May 1517 to Jorge de Portugal, son of Álvaro de Portugal, that exiled Portuguese prince who had been a member of the Council of the Realm in the days of the late Queen Isabel. The new license was to take four hundred black slaves, presumably bought in Lisbon or Seville, directly to the Indies. No taxes were to be paid.34 The number was later reduced to two hundred.35 But Jorge de Portugal did little about the matter. He does not seem to have sent more than a handful. He was commander of the Inquisition’s castle of Triana in Seville and appears to have been submerged in local politics there.36
The priors were so slow in doing anything else practical that Las Casas began to complain again. His letters were intercepted, and, obsessed, he became convinced that the priors were looking for an excuse to imprison him. He told the priors that he was going home but took refuge in the Dominican monastery. Fray Luis de Figueroa responded, “Don’t go, because you are a candle that will burn up everything we are trying to do.” Judge Zuazo told Fray Luis that he had to let Las Casas go home if he wanted to. Las Casas himself airily said that he had to return home to carry out some undertakings of his own.37 On June 3, 1517, he did set off again back to Spain. He had with him letters—not only a long one from Judge Zuazo, but two others, one of May 27 from Fray Alonso de Santo Domingo, written in Latin and signed by the reformed Dominicans in the colony, as well as by the new Franciscan monks, and one of May 28, written by Fray Pedro de Córdoba. This last talked of the way that the Indian population was in headlong decline because of the brutalities of the conquerors, and said that the only way to resolve the problem was to allow the people to live freely.
On June 15, 1517, Zuazo, in the documents attached to his residencia of the judges, revealed the details of the slave-raiding fleets and demonstrated the active participation of the judges, above all of Vázquez de Ayllón.38 The priors were perplexed as to what to do. In the event, Fray Bernardino de Manzanedo went home with Las Casas to tell Cisneros that he and his colleagues felt incapable of carrying out their mandate. They were beginning to see themselves as too unworldly to go
vern tropical settlers. After seeing Cisneros and delivering his letter to Conchillos, Manzanedo retired with relief to his monastery of Santa Marta, near Zamora. His letter was pessimistic. He thought that the Indians did not have the capacity to conduct themselves as if they were Castilians, but that to let them live in their old way would soon cause them to revive their ancient religions and ceremonies. To keep them in encomiendas, however, would lead to their extinction. It might be possible to delay disaster by avoiding the constant moves from master to master. Those recent grants of land might with advantage be considered permanent arrangements rather than be confined to a single generation and, if so, they should not cover more than eighty Indians per person. The indigenous population of La Española would be extinguished, and that could only be compensated for by introducing black slaves from Africa.
Las Casas saw Cisneros in Aranda del Duero, in July 1517. It was obvious that the great Cardinal had lost heart. He was ill. Las Casas decided that to talk more to him would yield little benefit and prudently thought that he would wait until King Charles came to Spain. If Charles did not come, he determined to go himself to Flanders. Reginaldo de Montesinos, a brother of the eloquent Fray Antonio, offered to accompany him if he went.39 (In fact, Charles was at last planning his first visit to Spain.)40
