Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  The witnesses in this investigation included many experienced sailors, shipbuilders, and merchants, including Captain Francisco Dorta, of Moguer (who had by then been crisscrossing the Atlantic for more than ten years); Antón García (who as long ago as 1501 had accompanied Hojeda to Trinidad); the ineffable Juan Bono de Quejo, of Trinidad fame (who now insisted that all Caribs were, conveniently, sodomites); and Francisco de Vallejo (the most experienced man on the Pearl Coast). Most were encomenderos, if on a small scale. The Dominicans Fray Pedro de Cordóba and Fray Pedro Mexía also testified. But the restless character of the indigenous peoples was causing both of these high-minded men to doubt the possibility of serious missionary work. The latter commented: “I see some merit in Fathers being there, but it is a very small merit.” A modern historian thought grimly that “the friars already did not seem to be unconditional enemies of the seizure of indigenous people.”11

  The demographic diversity of northern South America was revealed in this inquiry for the first time: on the Venezuelan coast, for example, there turned out to be eight different major tribes, four definable as Arawak, four “Carib.” The “Carib” territories were afterwards named as the four “provinces of the Gulf of Paria, and all the uncolonized islands of the Caribbean, except for the Lucays, the Barbados, the Gigantes, Trinidad, and Margarita.” The capture of Caribs was to be allowed, but only if there was proper licensing.

  The inquiry revealed, too, the precarious nature of the assignments on the Pearl Coast. The Franciscan mission there had closed, and a new Dominican one threatened to do the same when there came to be too few Spaniards to hear Mass. By October 1519, there was again only one Dominican on the coast along with a few lay brothers.

  Figueroa also embarked on the residencia of Judge Zuazo, and in this connection, he examined numerous settlers, such as the ex-treasurer Cristóbal de Santa Clara. The chief accusation was that Zuazo had conceded licenses to capture slaves without telling the Jeronymites, and favoring friends.12 He was also accused of having seduced an Indian girl, whom he had subsequently sold to Judge Cristóbal Lebrón, the judge of the residencia in respect of Marcos de Aguilar, the late chief magistrate. Zuazo replied with counteraccusations against the witnesses, for example that Cristóbal de Santa Clara had become a drunk who wanted to conceal the murder of Juan Pizarro (a brother of Francisco), whom Pasamonte had had killed; that the bachelor Juan Roldán was living with a witch; that Hernando Caballero was a converso and the son of a reconciliado, and so should not be in the Indies at all, while he accused Hernando de las Mallas of being a wizard. Zuazo insisted that all his licenses for slaves were for “Caribs,” who could be legally enslaved.13

  Figueroa’s main anxiety was becoming much the same as that of the priors: if he treated the Indians well, the encomiendas would have to be abandoned. But if he abandoned them, most of the Castilians would leave for home. None of the four thousand African slaves planned under Gorrevod’s famous grant seem yet to have materialized. As for the thirty Indian towns that the priors had planned, only four now existed.14 Figueroa himself founded a few more places.15 But he felt the shortage of labor was such that he would soon have to accept the arguments of the encomenderos and permit indiscriminate slaving in the Bahamas and on the Pearl Coast.

  He soon had a report on the provenance of 108 Indians who had reached Santo Domingo in a boat belonging to Jacome de Castellón, one of the many hispanized Genoese who made such a major contribution to the first years of Spanish control of the Indies.16 This showed that only twenty-eight were men, the rest women, some with babies still at their breasts. Their ages ranged from seven to thirty, though three women were over seventy. Two men were even older. Figueroa asked Bono de Quejo, Captain Dorta, and Antón García to examine these Indians. A cacique of Cumaná was the interpreter. Seventy-eight Indians were consulted. Those who could prove definitely that they were not Caribs were declared naborías and left as such with the factor Ampiés. Bono de Queijo announced that all were Caribs. The three examiners confirmed that estimate but, all the same, the Governor doubted it. He caused the magistrate Francisco de Vallejo and Antonio de Ojeda, who knew the areas concerned, to make a new inquiry. Spanish officials were thus becoming used to such investigations.

  The conclusion of all these investigations was that the Crown allowed officials to participate in procuring slaves on condition that they did it alone, without business associations. The illegality of the sale of naborías was again proclaimed.17

  But, benign though Figueroa might have been at heart, he himself sought to benefit from whatever commerce was available, to the exclusion of all the old shipbuilders. For example, he formed a society with Alonso Gutiérrez de Aguilón, of Azúa, an experienced planter, to build a new sugar mill, and sent his own nephew, Alonso de Aguilar, to do the same in the north of the island; and in 1519 and 1520, about thirty-four little fleets set off in the usual directions, north and south, in search of both pearls and slaves, bringing back about 1,500 of the latter. About twenty flotillas from San Juan to the Pearl Coast conveyed over five hundred marcos of pearls. Antonio Serrano, the procurador, returning from Spain, meanwhile busied himself with a scheme to make available slaves from the new Portuguese settlements in Brazil to La Española, to be carried in Castilian ships.18 To a visitor from Mars, the search for Indian slaves on the mainland of South America might have seemed, in 1519, the prime concern of the new Spanish Empire.

  Figueroa antagonized many of the older shipbuilders of Santo Domingo, who had powerful friends at home. Though lowly born, or perhaps because of it, he was haughty and declared, “There is no merchant here who has either a conscience or any sense of truthfulness,”19 which, even if correct, was a remark scarcely calculated to please. The shipbuilders had the support of the three judges of the audiencia—Matienzo, Villalobos, and Vázquez de Ayllón—as well as friends at court. But then everyone had some friends at court; indeed, Las Casas, who was then dictating policy (if not activity) in the Indies, was permanently at court—wherever the court might be.

  In October 1519, the court was still at Molins de Rey, outside Barcelona. Las Casas met Bishop Juan de Quevedo, the onetime peasant boy from the mountains of Santander who had gone out as bishop of Darien with Pedrarias, and who had been asked to dine by the royal almoner, Bishop Ruiz de la Mota. Juan de Samano, a notary and a protégé of Conchillos’s who had survived the eclipse of his patron, and who would soon be named by Cobos as his deputy in respect to matters relating to the Indies, was also present. Las Casas went up to Quevedo and said, “Sir, because of my concern with the Indies, I am obliged to kiss your hands.”20 Quevedo asked Samano, who had some sinecures in Cuba, “Who is this priest?” “It’s Señor de Las Casas.” Quevedo asked: “Oh, Señor de Las Casas, and what sermon have you brought to preach to us?”21 Las Casas said: “Certainly for days I have longed to preach to your lordship, but I assure you that I have a couple of sermons which, if you would only listen and consider them, would be more valuable than all the money that you bring back from the Indies.”22 Quevedo, furious, said: “You are lost, you are lost.…” Samano intervened to tell Quevedo that the Council of the Realm was pleased with Las Casas’s ideas. Quevedo commented: “With good intentions, one can often do something dishonest and so commit a mortal sin.”23

  Las Casas was about to make an appropriate reply when Bishop Ruiz de la Mota came out of the royal bedchamber and carried off Quevedo to dine with him, and also Diego Colón and Juan de Zúñiga, a onetime courtier of the late King Philip and the future tutor of King Philip II.24 After dinner, Las Casas approached Ruiz de la Mota, who was by then playing cards. They were all watching the game when someone who had been in La Española said that it was possible to grow wheat there. Quevedo denied it. Las Casas then took from his pocket some seeds that he said had come from an orange tree in an orchard in Santo Domingo. Quevedo asked him offensively: “What do you really know about anything? What is this business that you carry on? Do you know what you are talking about?�
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  Las Casas asked in reply, “Are my undertakings good or evil?” Quevedo demanded: “Are you so informed in arts and sciences that you dare to negotiate these undertakings?” Las Casas returned:

  Do you know, my lord bishop, how little I know of the affairs that I am dealing with? That the learning which I think I have is less than you suppose? But I see my ideas as conclusions, and the first of them is that you have sinned a thousand times, actually a thousand times more than that, for not having put your soul at the disposal of your sheep, in order to free them from the hands of those tyrants who destroy them. And my second conclusion is that you eat the flesh and drink the blood of your own sheep. My third is that, unless you restore everything that you stole from the Indies, up to the last farthing, you cannot save anyone else except perhaps for Judas.

  The Bishop saw that he could not make any headway with the intemperate Las Casas, so he began to laugh. Las Casas exclaimed: “You laugh, my lord bishop. Start to cry because of your unhappiness and that of your sheep.… Ah, if only I had tears in my pocket!”25

  Bishop Ruiz de la Mota had continued playing his game while this unusual conversation was going on. Diego Colón and Zúñiga said something in favor of Las Casas, and Ruiz de la Mota then went to the King, whom he told of what had passed between Las Casas and Bishop Quevedo, suggesting that the King might like to listen himself to what “Micer Bartolomé” was saying about the Indies. The King agreed and suggested that the Bishop and Las Casas should both come to see him in three days’ time.

  The three days passed. The Bishop came upon Las Casas in the chamber that Charles used as a throne room and exclaimed: “Father, you here? Is it a good idea that friars wander fecklessly about the palace? Surely it is better for priests to be in their cells than in a palace?” Las Casas said: “In truth, it would be better if all of us who are friars were in our cells!” (Quevedo was a Franciscan while Las Casas for the moment was just a priest.) Bishop Quevedo suggested that Las Casas should leave so that the King should not find him there. Las Casas replied, “Silence, my lord bishop. Let the King come, and you will see what happens.”26

  The King soon entered and sat on his improvised throne, attended by Chièvres, Gattinara, Ruiz de la Mota, and three or four others, among them the historian Oviedo and Agustín Aguirre. The last-named was seeking land, and he would obtain it at Santa Marta, Colombia, but not the authorization to go there for one hundred members of the Order of Santiago that he had also requested. Las Casas had mocked that scheme, though he was scarcely in a position to do so, with his own suggestions for a specially instituted new order of knights. Oviedo had only just returned from the territory of Pedrarias, as the Bishop had done earlier, and he was, of course, experienced at court. Agustín Aguirre, Vice-Chancellor of Aragon (despite his Basque name), had been with King Charles since 1517. King Fernando had once imprisoned him, either because he had opposed the grant of a subsidy by the Cortes of Calatayud or, as some said, because he had been too friendly with the young Queen Germaine de Foix—who, aged twenty-nine in 1518, seems now to have enjoyed a brief love affair with the young King, who was still only eighteen and who, it may be remembered, had been charged to look after her by his grandfather, the late King Fernando.27

  Gattinara said to the Bishop: “Reverend Bishop, His Majesty says that you are to speak now if you have anything to say about the Indies.”28 Thanks to Gattinara, the King was now addressed in Spain as “Majesty” rather than “Highness.” Cobos had written to all Spanish noblemen and officials assuring them that that change did not mean the King intended to reduce the prestige of his Spanish realms. But letters to the monarch were no longer to be directed to the “very noble and powerful lord”; they were to be sent to “SCCR Majestad”—“sacra, cesaréa, católica, real Majestad.” Gattinara had also wanted Charles to abandon the traditional Spanish royal signature “yo, el rey” for just “Carlos,” but Charles, perhaps thinking of letters from King Fernando, refused.29

  Quevedo then paid a compliment to the King in Latin, saying that his face, like that of Priam in the Iliad, alone made him worthy of an empire. Everyone present liked that, especially the King (they had forgotten what had happened to the King of Troy). Then Quevedo said that he had indeed many important things to say about the Indies, and asked that those who were not of the Council of the Realm be told to leave.

  Gattinara spoke in the King’s ear and afterwards repeated: “Reverend Bishop, His Majesty commands that you speak now if you have anything to say.” The Bishop repeated that what he had to say was secret. Gattinara again consulted the King and then said, “Reverend Bishop, His Majesty commands that you speak now if you have anything to say.”

  Then, despite the, to him, offensive presence of Las Casas, the Bishop did speak. He spoke reverentially of the King’s grandfather, the Catholic King, who of course had first sent a fleet to the New World. He said that he himself had lived in Darien for five years and that because the expedition had taken inadequate supplies, many of his friends had died of hunger. The first Governor of Darien, Núñez de Balboa, had, of course, been bad, but the second, Pedrarias, was worse—so “I determined to come home and give evidence to His Majesty about what I had seen.” As for the Indians, “Those people are slaves by nature”—as the philosopher Aristotle had put it.

  Then Las Casas was asked to speak. He said that he was one of the most senior of those who had gone to the Indies, having been there first in 1502, and he had “seen the greatest cruelty and inhumanity practiced on the gentle and peace-loving indigenous people, without any reason except for insatiable greed, thirst, and hunger for gold by the conquistadors—my father [Gabriel de Peñalosa] among them.” These crimes, he said, had been committed in two ways: by unjust wars in which there had been no limit to the number of people, towns, and even nations that had been destroyed; and by subjecting Indians to unbelievably hard work to enable the extraction of gold. “I was moved to act not because I was a better Christian than others but by a natural compassion.” He described how he had gone to tell King Fernando about these things and how he had approached Cisneros and, after him, Jean Le Sauvage. He repeated that “these Indians … are capable of Christian faith and, by nature, are free and have their kings and natural lords … and even if it were as the reverend Bishop says, we should recall that the Philosopher [whom he quoted, namely Aristotle] was a nonbeliever and is now, presumably, burning in Hell.”30 That remark had a considerable effect. No one talked critically, as a rule, of Aristotle. Las Casas added that the Christian religion concerned itself with equal treatment of all and that there were no people who are “slaves by nature.” One should recall that Jesus Christ died also for those people.

  This speech took three-quarters of an hour. Las Casas had a beguiling way of talking, and he completely held his distinguished audience. When he had finished, a Franciscan, Cristóbal del Río, who had just returned from Santo Domingo, was brought in to speak briefly, if with fervor, of the vexed subject of the decline of the Indian population. Diego Colón also was constrained to add some remarks about the damage that the Indians had suffered.

  When the Admiral ceased, Bishop Quevedo rose and asked to reply. But Gattinara, again after consulting the King, said, “Reverend Bishop, if you have something more to say, you should write it down.” The King then returned to his rooms and nothing more was said.

  What an extraordinary conversation this was! We know of it only from Las Casas, and we should beware of trusting all that he says. Yet certainly the eloquence of Las Casas convinced not only the worldly Gattinara but also the inexperienced young King that a serious problem existed in the New World.

  Quevedo did put his recommendations on paper. To everyone’s amazement, they were quite close to the ideas of Las Casas’s. First, he described the massacres that he had seen in Darien; and, second, he made suggestions for ending these evils. That was to bring an end to the entradas that had continued though they were formally prohibited.

  Just before Chri
stmas 1519, Gattinara summoned Las Casas, took him to his room, and, giving him one of the large candles that he had on a table, told him to read the memorandum of the Bishop. Afterwards, Las Casas said to Gattinara that he would like to sign the documents himself: “What greater cruelties have I described than these?”

  In the event, then, Charles and Gattinara gave support to Las Casas’s schemes. What a great opportunity now unfolded before the priest from Seville! The trouble was that although he had won the battle of ideas, his own schemes remained fanciful. He wrote in his History: “If it were not for the haste that the King, having been elected emperor, had to go to be crowned and confirmed as emperor, the future of the Indies would have been promising.”31 That was a self-deception. Las Casas was still, after all, pressing his scheme for the introduction of his Knights of the Golden Spur. These, he now thought, should number fifty. They were each to put up 75,000 maravedís, and with that money the colony would be founded. They would wear a robe of white on which would be a red cross, similar to that of the Order of Calatrava. They would control the one thousand leagues between Santa Marta and Paria.