by David Boyle
Undeterred, Ojeda moved on to found his colony at San Sebastian. He sailed back to Hispaniola in search of new supplies, leaving Pizarro in charge, and was shipwrecked on the way. Only after a terrible struggle did he finally make his way back to Hispaniola, to find that a new generation under the leadership of Columbus’s eldest son was now in charge there and had no time for him. He died in poverty, taking the vows of a Franciscan shortly before his death in 1515.
The settlers on Hispaniola were excited about the arrival of the first Dominican friars, who had a reputation as brilliant speakers. Entertainment was in short supply for them, and the prospect of some thrilling sermons was enough to provide a frisson of excitement. The Franciscans were less keen on the arrival of their rivals, who were known for their reforming zeal, but the Dominicans kept to themselves when they arrived in 1510, and it was not until December 4, 1511, that the first of their preachers opened his mouth.
Antonio de Montesinos was asked if he would deliver a sermon in the large thatched church at the center of Santo Domingo, which was being used as a temporary cathedral. It was packed for the occasion, but what the settlers heard froze them in their seats. “This voice says that you are in mortal sin, that you are living and may die in it, because of the cruelty and tyranny which you use in dealing with these innocent people,” thundered Montesinos from the pulpit. He had watched the treatment of the Tainos with mounting horror for over twelve months. “Are these not men? Have they not rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves?”
At the end of his sermon, he walked straight out of the church. A group of prominent settlers went to see Diego Colón, who complained to the senior Dominican and asked him to tell Montesinos to withdraw his remarks. He was told that Montesinos would preach again the following Sunday, and the crowds packed the church again to hear his apology. But the second sermon was more condemnatory than the first. At the end of it, he said he would hear no more confessions of settlers until this injustice was brought to an end.
The settlers pulled what political strings they could to demand Montesinos’s recall, and his colleagues sent him home to argue on his own behalf. Ferdinand was appalled at what he heard and convened a group of theologians to meet in the Casa del Cordón in Burgos, where he had received Columbus in 1496. It was a high-level committee, including the fearsome Fonseca, and it met twenty times to debate and hammer out a solution. One professor of law dismissed the Indians as “animals who talk.” The Franciscans accepted that the Tainos were free people, but said it was their duty to help them overcome their tendency to laziness. The debate rumbled on and resulted in the so-called Laws of Burgos, not quite what the Dominicans had intended and in many ways disastrous for what remained of Taino culture. There should be new villages built for them, the committee decided. The old ones would be burned. They must not dance or sing, paint their bodies, or get drunk. And in return they would be taught. Talavera, now bishop of Granada, and once the chair of the commission that dismissed the idea of the Indies enterprise, was invited to write a small book of instruction for Indian children. The Dominicans argued for some relaxation and that the labor they must give to landowners was limited to nine months a year. They must be allowed three months a year to work on their own farms.
But all these laws were subject to a major qualification: Indians must accept the Church of Rome and their new Castilian rulers or they would be made slaves. This outline of what was required of them, the so-called Requerimiento, was read in the villages, usually in a language the residents could not understand. It was often used in a symbolic way, read in Spanish to empty fields by the newly arrived conquerors. It was read to a deserted village on Darien by the conquistador Pedrarias, to the laughter of his military guard in June 1514. If the natives took no action, it would mean they could reasonably be enslaved or attacked.
After only four years as pilot major, Vespucci’s health was also deteriorating. His attacks of malaria were more pronounced and more frequent, though he had no conception of what the disease was. His reputation had also been damaged by the revelation that he had been selling versions of secret maps and was forced to swear an oath never to do it again. Through the early months of 1512, while Michelangelo’s Creation of Man was taking shape in the Sistine Chapel, Vespucci was growing increasingly sick. One of his last recorded acts was to verify the signature of Columbus on a map. He did so knowing it would deeply displease his masters.
He lay in his sickbed at home, listening to the hammering from the shipyards across the street, a constant reminder of oceans and coastlines still to be explored, and the smell of the tropical forest reaching far out to sea. He died at home on February 22 with Maria and his nephew Giovanni at his bedside.
Vespucci was only fifty-eight and was not a wealthy man. His will set out the extent of his failed investments in Columbus: Berardi’s estate still owed him 144,000 maravedis, but Maria was to get a pension of 10,000 maravedis, which was inherited twelve years later by her sister Catalina, who had lived with them in the same house. The pilot major left his books and maps to his nephew Giovanni, later a Florentine spy in the service of the Medici pope Leo X. Vespucci also asked that a ruby and a pearl, left in his brother’s custody when he departed from Florence in 1491, be sold to pay for a requiem mass and thirty-three masses for his soul in the church of Ognissanti in Florence, where his portrait as a youth remains on the walls.
He was buried, like so many of his other navigator contemporaries, in the robes of a Franciscan, probably in the church of San Miguel in Seville, which burned down in the early twentieth century. He was succeeded as pilot major by Juan de Solís, just back from the Plate River.*
If western exploration had faltered in England and Portugal, the Castilian voyages and settlements were now in full swing. Columbus, Vespucci, and Juan de la Cosa were dead; Ojeda was ruined. But there were plenty more in Castile willing to take their places, and the generation who would bravely and brutally found the Spanish empire in Latin America was now on its way to the place officials still referred to as the Indies.
Jamaica had been invaded in 1509. Cuba had been conquered by Ovando’s protégé Cortés two years later: the Cuban leader was offered a Christian death, including eternal life, and is supposed to have said that if that meant eternity in the company of Spaniards he would prefer not and was burned as a pagan. Juan Ponce de Leon had scourged Puerto Rico with the utmost bloodshed, nearly wiping out the native population. His large red dog played such a vital role in the routing of the local Indians that it was given the salary of a crossbowman, before master and dog sailed in 1513 for Florida in search of a rumored fountain of everlasting youth. And so on toward the great and terrible exploits of the conquistadors in Peru from 1530 and Mexico from 1535.
It was Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, a stowaway fleeing from creditors, who finally solved the central problem set by Columbus. Balboa emerged as the effective leader of a new attempt to settle in the region of Darien, who sent an unwisely enthusiastic letter home to Ferdinand, accompanied by a consignment of pineapples, where he used the overblown phrase “rivers of gold.” Faced with this temptation, the royal court roused themselves to finance their first expedition since 1493, under a seventy-year-old soldier named Pedro Arias Ávila, known as Pedrarias. As soon as Balboa heard the news that there was an expedition planned, he realized it would make sense to go inland immediately and find these rivers of gold himself.
Collecting as many armed men on the colony as he could, Balboa marched inland in September 1513. It was an exhausting journey through swamps and jungles. He managed to make peace with some of the tribes he encountered. Where this was impossible, he had their representatives torn apart by dogs on the peculiar grounds that they were transvestites. Heading up the first mountain peak, he reached the summit on September 25, 1513, and saw finally the sight that had eluded Columbus, Vespucci, and Cabot before him, and for which in their different ways they had given their lives. Far off, stretching into an impossible dis
tance, was the blue of another ocean to match the Atlantic.
Balboa raised his hands and saluted the ocean that would one day be known as the Pacific, then he made his way down the other side of the mountain, fought a short engagement with the local chief, and marched to the edge of the ocean. There he waded into the water wearing his armor until he was breast deep, raised his sword, and arrogantly took possession of it in the names of Ferdinand and Juana.
The problem that had obsessed Columbus was now solved. The new continent was two vast landmasses, connected by a narrow strip, with an ocean on either side. The question of whether this was a large ocean or a small strip of sea before China, was as yet unanswered, but the sea that had eluded Columbus for so long had now been seen by Europeans.
The admiral’s heir Diego Colón was as effective an administrator as his father had been a useless one. He was tall, good-looking, charming, and dignified. He spent his first years as governor building a base of personal support in the Indies and did so by quietly failing to report when the landholdings, the encomiendas, fell vacant—as he was required by the crown in Castile to do—then appointing his own supporters to fill them.
Just after midnight on January 23, 1516, King Ferdinand died in an unfurnished house in the tiny village of Madrigalejo, having recalled Diego for consultation. Diego remained in Castile as the young Charles V inherited the joint throne, and Castile and Aragon finally merged as the nation of Spain, under an imperial ruler who, through his mother, also ruled Burgundy and the Netherlands, the most powerful monarch in Europe, and the beginning of the mighty Hapsburg dynasty. Diego charmed the young emperor, and he was reappointed as governor in 1518. He was there for another five years before failing revenues and conflict with campaigners like Bartholomé de las Casas led to his final return home in 1523. But he never abandoned his father’s claims. It was just that from his intricate knowledge of the Castilian court, he had a more subtle way of going about pursuing them. While accepting the position of governor, he also quietly pursued a series of long-running lawsuits to enforce what he believed had been promised his family.
The first legal decision, in 1511, had confirmed Diego’s rights over the land discovered by his father, though this was limited to the places actually found by him, and these rights were circumscribed in various ways. Both sides took exception to the decision, and Diego appealed. The next phase concentrated on whether the family had the right to vice-regal power over the areas that were the focus of settlement activity, Veragua, Urabá, and Darien, all on the coasts of mainland Latin America. It meant that a string of witnesses were called to question whether Columbus had actually set foot on any of them. Under questioning, his brother Bartholomew claimed that because Christopher was ill, he had gone ashore and claimed them for Castile.
By 1515 Diego was sure he was winning the case, when the government solicitor managed to complicate it further with a legal masterstroke. He collected thirteen friends of the Pinzón family, who claimed that it was actually Martin Alonso Pinzón who had made the journey possible in 1492 and had discovered the Indies. By now the money the Colón family was claiming amounted to a massive 55 percent of all royal revenues from the Indies and the government simply could not afford to let him win.
Throughout this period Diego’s brother, Ferdinand, acted as his legal agent. It was a task that took his whole life, but he had time for the occasional journey between hearings to visit Genoa and to accompany the emperor Charles V on long journeys across Europe, especially the two-year trip he made beginning in 1520, from Brussels to Worms, taking in London and Switzerland. Everywhere he went he bought paintings and books. Ferdinand’s share of the Columbus fortune was invested in a library that ran to as many as fifteen thousand volumes.* It was he who was largely responsible for the next favorable decision, but Diego was still not satisfied and appealed again. The strain of the lawsuit, and his period in Hispaniola, had exhausted Diego, and he died in 1526 at the age of only forty-six. The case was carried on by his wife. Even then, the so-called Judgment of Deuñas in 1534 left some questions unanswered.
Diego’s son, Luis, the third admiral, continued the case. But he was perpetually in debt and settled out of court in 1537, giving up his rights to administrative office in the Americas in return for an annuity and the hereditary title Duke of Veragua. Not long after that, he was convicted of bigamy and sentenced to a heavy fine and ten year’s military service in North Africa, where he married for a third time, much to the rage of his previous wives. He died at fifty and was buried alongside his forebears in Santo Domingo Cathedral.
But even that was not the end. The legal actions, known collectively as the Pleitos, continued in some form or another well into the eighteenth century. Luis had no legitimate sons, and his nephew Diego inherited his pension, laying the foundations for a long-running dynastic dispute. Luis’s grandson Cristóbal died without an heir in 1601, having lived on handouts from other members of the family, and the titles were passed on through cousins to other families. The legal battle over which family line should inherit the titles began in 1650 and lasted until a final court decision in 1790, nearly three centuries after Columbus made his first discovery. The pension that Luis had accepted in his out-of-court settlement was still paid into the 1830s, and the dukes of Veragua continue to this day.
While Diego was fighting in the courts, there was a parallel argument about the Americas that would also continue through the generations, which began with Antonio de Montesinos’s brave sermon in 1511. The primary figure in the campaign to defend the Indians was Bartholomé de las Casas. He had been born in Seville, and when he was nine had witnessed Columbus’s triumphal return in 1493 and his procession with the first Taino captives. He went to the Indies himself with Ovando in 1502, when he was eighteen, to manage some land given to his father. He also witnessed the brutal subjugation of the west of Hispaniola by Ovando, and was there while Méndez desperately tried to get Columbus rescued from the Jamaica beach.
Las Casas had been at the church of Santo Domingo and heard and sympathized with Montesinos’s sermon. But it was not until he was appointed military chaplain to the 1513 expedition to conquer Cuba that he really experienced a revelation about the evil that was happening as the conquest extended. He renounced his own encomienda, contacted Montesinos, and sailed home with him to confront Ferdinand a second time, urging him to break up the encomienda system, which was destroying the Indians. He had noticed the decline in Tainos in Hispaniola and calculated that there were now only twelve thousand Tainos left on the island.
Together he and Montesinos worked out a series of ambitious plans, some of them utopian, of special new orders of chivalry, or a line of Spanish forts to protect the Indians in their old ways, as well as practical plans to compensate the encomienda owners and to organize new villages for the Indians. But time after time, these plans were undermined by the bitter opposition of the colonists and the inability of the court in Spain to enforce their will across the Atlantic.
Las Casas was an inspired campaigner, and Ferdinand and then Charles, for reasons of their own, were both sympathetic. But campaigning is always subject to the laws of unintended consequences, and the most powerful objective fact at their disposal was that the Tainos and other Indians were not used to heavy work in the mines or on the new cotton plantations. They tired easily, and if they were worked too hard they simply died. Administrators and settlers alike heard the message of Las Casas and Montesinos. They chose to look elsewhere for people to do their heavy work and found the source largely in Africa. It was one of those ironies of history that it was a powerful humanitarian campaign that drove the development of the slave trade.
African slavery was, at the start of this story, largely the preserve of Genoese businessmen, many of them, like Berardi and Marchionni, operating in Lisbon and Seville. But over a generation, slavery was becoming big business, disposing of all the Moorish captives after the fall of Granada or populating the plantations on the Canary Islands. A ce
ntury before, most right-thinking, God-fearing people condemned slavery as an ancient Godless evil; now they had embraced it as a business necessity. And at the very epicenter of this new trade was Berardi and Vespucci’s old colleague Jerónimo Grimaldi from Genoa, who built a large warehouse in Santo Domingo to house the slaves he had brought across the Atlantic. Those that survived the grueling journey were branded with letters on their faces and put to work.
This and other matters occupied the studies of Las Casas, locked away from the world in a convent on Hispaniola for ten long years, and when he finally emerged, he was completely radicalized. From now on, he could accept no compromise between Spanish and Indian interests. The material and spiritual interests of the locals came before Spanish interests every time, and any wars and conquests that claimed temporal power over the Indians were illegal, because he said these powers had not been given by the pope. In those circumstances, only one method could be used to persuade the Indians to convert to Christianity, and that was “love, gentleness and kindness.”
His history, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, was used as propaganda by Spain’s enemies for generations to come, as it detailed the cruelties suffered by the Indians in horrific detail. “I believe that because of these impious, criminal and ignominious acts, perpetrated unjustly, tyrannously, and barbarously upon them, God will visit in his wrath and his ire upon Spain for her share, great and small,” he wrote. The book was published shortly after his famous debate with the humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda about whether wars against the Indians could be justified. Sepúlveda won, in the sense that Charles V agreed with his position that Indians were “natural slaves” as defined by Aristotle, because of their wild and sinful sexuality—the influence of Vespucci was already felt here. But there was to be a peculiar twist. Horrified by the black slave trade he had done so much to begin, he worked away at Charles’s conscience, only to find he had overdone it. Instead of insisting on emancipation, Charles decided his own soul was in peril. He abdicated and went to live in a monastery in Extremadura.
