The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America

by Hugh Thomas

  These new decrees did not pass without challenge. The Cuban settlers, for example, thought that Indians might be made to wash for gold in rivers but not in mines. Even that led to complaints: Rodrigo Durán, a settler of Santiago de Cuba, said that, if the royal order even as modified were carried out, many colonists would leave the island. The settlers in Cuba described mining as easy work and insisted that “their” Indians preferred it to clearing land. Also, the Spaniards argued, workers were well fed at the mines on cassava bread and pork every day, whereas Indians in encomiendas had meat or fish only once a week. Ruin would surely follow any attempt to put these laws into effect.28

  Rome continued to play a decisive part in the administrative history of the Indies. Thus in October 1523, the Flemish Erasmian Bishop Juan de Ubite, a Dominican in Cuba, was permitted to move his cathedral from the eastern extremity of Baracoa to “the most powerful place on the island—namely, Santiago.”29 (The King gave half his share of tithes in Santiago toward the completion of the cathedral.) Then in 1524, the new Pope Clement created a new patriarchate of the West Indies: the first to fill that role would be Antonio de Rojas Manrique, bishop of Palencia, then one of the richest Spanish dioceses (Valladolid was part of it).30 This was a time when the Rojas family seemed to be filling every empty benefice, secular or ecclesiastical, in Spain. Bishop Antonio, after all, had been president of the Council of Castile for several years.31

  Diego Colón, son of the immortal Christopher, had meantime returned to his governorship in Santo Domingo in 1520. He found the intrigues in that colony even worse than those in Seville. The chief intriguer remained the royal treasurer, the converso from Aragón, Miguel de Pasamonte, who had dominated the colony since his arrival there in 1508.32 Despite Pasamonte’s evident disposition to conspire, Díaz del Castillo wrote well of him: “personally worthy, of great good sense (cordura), honest to a fault, chaste all his life.”33

  After three years of revived proconsular life in Santo Domingo, Diego Colón and his wife, María Toledo y Rojas, niece of the Duke of Alba—they had all the pretensions of royalty—returned to Spain in October 1523, and two months later Charles, or rather the Council of the Indies, finally brought to an end the regime of the Columbus family in the New World. The title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea was suspended. All that the Columbuses retained was their dukedom of Veragua, a territory allegedly close to Panama. But though the regime of the Columbuses was at an end, María Toledo y Rojas retained her financial interests in the Caribbean. Having been a prominent dealer in Indian slaves, she became so in Africans. For the moment, she also retained her husband’s income from the New World. Why the commerce in Africans was permitted and that in Indians discouraged is one of the mysteries of those days.

  These events required a new governor of Santo Domingo. The government was for a time in the hands of a president of the court, and the choice of the Council of the Indies fell on Dr. Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal, a reliable public servant from a tiny village south of Cuenca, Villaescusa de Haro, who had been a judge in the Alpujarra Mountains during the Muslim rebellion there in 1500. Then he became an inquisitor in Seville.34 Despite that role, which must have tried him, Ramírez de Fuenleal showed himself a humane proconsul. At that time, many liberal churchmen still sought to enter the Holy Office in order to humanize it. “There is no doubt,” Ramírez once declared, “that the natives have sufficient capacity to receive the faith and that they greatly love it.” He also thought that “they had sufficient capacity to carry on all mechanical and industrial arts.”35

  But Ramírez took a long time to reach Santo Domingo. Indeed, he only arrived in December 1528. In the meantime, Pasamonte had enjoyed, as he had so often before, de facto authority. He used this interregnum to allow many of his friends to trade in Indian slaves.

  The leaders of these entrepreneurs were by now Juan (Martínez) de Ampiés and Jacome de Castellón. The former was an Aragonese friend of Pasamonte who had been the factor of Santo Domingo in 1511. Ampiés had given evidence of a rather harsh character to the legal enquiry mounted by the Jeronymites in 1517, agreeing that Indians were “lazy, luxurious, gluttonous and with a disinclination to have any affections if left in liberty.”36 Despite that, in 1524, he sent an armada to bring eight hundred Indian slaves to Santo Domingo from islands off Venezuela, and in 1525 he sent another expedition to the same region.

  All these slaving expeditions derived from the use of captives in war or from kidnapping. There was none of the negotiation that by then characterized the purchase or exchange of African slaves. Ampiés spent eight months making friends with people in Curaçao and Aruba. He soon convinced himself that only he could establish good relations with the South American Indians. He had a plan to take some of the chiefs of Indians in what became Venezuela to Santo Domingo, educate and convert them, and then send them back to their old homes as Spanish agents. Ampiés would put up some of these doomed leaders in his own house in Santo Domingo. In order to protect his own interest on the South American coast, he also built a fortress on the island of Cubagua and named it, optimistically, Nueva Cádiz, which soon became a center of the pearl trade.

  Cubagua, a small barren island off Santa Margarita, had been identified as a possible pearl fishery as early as 1502 by Rodrigo de Bastidas, the converso businessman who made a fortune in Santo Domingo. Within a few years, several Spanish adventurers had established pearl beds around the island, which was already mercilessly overfished. Spaniards did not know then that pearl fishing should be confined to the months of February, March, and April. They did realize, though, that the pearls were of good quality, if inferior to those of the East. The Blanca Rosada dominated.37 Las Casas recalls what hard work fishing for pearls was. It meant diving deep in cold water, a task that even the strongest Indians performed under duress.

  The other entrepreneur of importance was Jacome de Castellón, the natural son of a merchant of Genoa, Bernardo Castiglione, and a Spanish girl in Seville, Inés Suárez. At the time of his birth, the commerce of Seville and southwest Andalusia had been dominated by Genoese, and the early activities of trade in the West Indies were similarly marked. Jacome’s elder brother, Tomás, had, to begin with, represented the family in La Española, but he had then gone to Puerto Rico, where he built the first sugar mill on the island and exploited the salt beds at San Juan. A cousin, Marcos Castellón, had an olive farm near Seville.

  Jacome went out to the Indies for the first time in 1510, being then eighteen. He became a partner of another Hispano-Genoese, Jerónimo Grimaldi, with Diego Caballero. They together kidnapped Indian slaves from the Bahamas or from the mainland. By 1522, he was captain of a flotilla of his own, which went regularly to Cumána on the mainland just beyond Cubagua, where, like Ampiés, he built a fortress and where he became chief magistrate (alcalde mayor) and received a salary in consequence. All the same, he continued to live in Santo Domingo. When he received a coat of arms in 1527, it depicted a fortress with four Indian heads bordering it.38 By the 1530s, Jacome de Castellón, like his brother Tomás in Puerto Rico, would have a sugar mill, “La Española,” near Azua de Compostela.39

  The seizing, branding, and carriage of Indians as slaves from the Bahamas and northern South America seemed the major activity for Spanish entrepreneurs in the 1520s. But Ampiés and Castellón were unable to carry on after 1526, since the Crown allocated the geographer Fernández de Enciso most of the zone and then began to favor the German Welsers, to whom the emperor Charles owed money.

  Diego Caballero, however, received a contract in 1525 for the discovery, development, and settlement of the coast of Maracaibo, from Cabo de la Vela to Cabo de San Roman. It was thought that Lake Maracaibo might indeed lead to, or even constitute, the great strait to the Pacific, or Southern Sea, of which so much had been said. That was one reason for the interest of the Welsers from Augsburg.

  10

  Pedrarias, Panama, and Peru;

  Guzmán in New Spain

  The good soil discovered
is the most abundant and possible to populate with Christians that you have ever seen … it has very fine gold.

  FRANCISCO PIZARRO, ON GALLO ISLAND, TO PEDRO DE LOS RÍOS, GOVERNOR OF PANAMA, JUNE 2, 1527

  Pedrarias Dávila (Pedro Arias Ávila) was still the controlling genius in Spain’s dominions in Panama and Nicaragua, though he was now well over seventy years of age. He had survived every challenge to his authority. He had outlived his benefactors, including King Fernando, as well as his enemies, such as Núñez de Balboa. It was said that he had made a pact with the devil to enable him to live so long. The judge of his residencia, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, persuaded the aged governor to agree that he had discovered the Southern Sea at his own cost and founded there the city of Panama and so gained the credit for it.1 No friend of Núñez de Balboa would have agreed with such a claim, but Balboa had now been forgotten: Indeed, in the many questions of Pedrarias’s residencia questionnaire, the name of Balboa did not figure. Perhaps because Pedrarias had arranged a new distribution of ten thousand Indians to the Spaniards there, he was judged favorably: eighty-three encomenderos benefited.

  The most recent distribution of Indians, it is true, particularly favored Pedrarias himself, since he would have the services of five hundred of them. Among the less well favored were resourceful men such as Diego de Almagro, probably from the town of that name in New Castile, who received a new allocation of twenty Indians, just off Panama, in addition to the eighty that he already had on Susy; and the priest Hernando de Luque, a Sevillano from Morón de la Frontera, in the sierra near Seville, who received seventy Indians; and the illiterate giant Francisco Pizarro, from Trujillo in Extremadura, who also gained 150 Indians, on the island of Taboga, some fifteen miles off Panama. Of these last dependants of Pedrarias we shall soon hear more.2

  The new allocation caused intense resentment, and a new lieutenant-governor of Panama, Licenciado Hernando de Celaya, who had already been named by the Council of the Indies in succession to Pedrarias as governor, reduced the old adventurer’s share of Indians to 378. The sudden death of Celaya followed. His friends were not slow to draw a malign conclusion about Pedrarias’s responsibility.

  Soon Gil González Dávila, the royal accountant in Santo Domingo, came to Panama. Like so many officials in the Indies in the early days, he came to royal notice first through having been employed in the household of the much regretted Infante Juan. He then became a contino (courtier) of the royal household, a favorite of the courtly, corrupt, but competent bishop Rodríguez de Fonseca, and he had gone to La Española in 1509 with Diego Colón. He was one of those who, with Pasamonte, promoted the idea of taking Indians as slaves from the Bahamas. Elder brother to Alonso de Ávila, that successful captain of Cortés, he went first to Darien with Pedrarias. After several journeys back and forth to Spain, he reached Panama in 1522 to propose a journey to the West to explore the land, a companion being Peralonso Niño, a shipowner of the Columbine family of seamen of Moguer. The two went to Spain and gained a license to explore three thousand miles of the coast of the Southern Sea. That permit ordered Pedrarias to give them the ships that Balboa had had built near Panama. Pedrarias was reluctant to comply, royal decree or no, until he was offered a good financial share in the expedition.3

  At much the same time, the governor gave permission to a companion of his, Pascual de Andagoya, to make a journey to the south. Andagoya was a Basque from a town of that name in Álava, the son of a hidalgo, Joan Ibáñez de Arza.4 He went to the Indies in 1514 as a criado of Pedrarias, who indeed, in the will that he made before leaving Spain, left him a horse and 6,000 maravedís. Andagoya eventually established himself happily in Panama, becoming in 1521 a town councillor, and married a señorita Tovar, who had been in the train of Isabel de Bobadilla, the famous wife of Pedrarias. He once wrote: “Being already rich, I requested permission of the Governor Pedrarias to explore the coast beyond the bay of Saint Miguel”—that is, toward Peru, then known as Birú, of which he had heard rumors of wealth. It seemed that there might be another rich empire there, even comparable to that of New Spain.

  Andagoya therefore set off and, after clashing with the Chocama, encountered a subordinate of the ruler, the Inca, from Birú. When an accident upset the canoe in which he was traveling, he swallowed a lot of water and narrowly escaped drowning. He returned to Panama to recover. It was three years before he could ride again. It is not clear what had happened to him, but obviously he was struck by a serious setback that removed him from the list of those who might first exploit Peru. He naturally told Pedrarias what he had seen. That governor in reply thought that he should himself act immediately to prevent anyone else becoming interested. He asked another friend, Juan Basurto, to prepare an expedition, but Basurto died. The field was again opened up to others.

  Some indication of who these others might be was already evident in 1524. For, in May of that year, Pedrarias himself joined with three successful and rich encomenderos of Panama to explore Birú: Francisco Pizarro, Diego de Almagro, and Fray Hernando de Luque.

  Pizarro, from Trujillo in Extremadura, was a distant cousin of Hernán Cortés, whose grandmother Leonor had been a Pizarro.5 Almagro was probably from the town in New Castile that bore his own name, Almagro, while Luque was a Sevillano who may have been a converso. These three had a half share of the planned expedition between them in three ships, the other half being in the hands of Pedrarias. Pizarro had a reputation for leadership, endurance in difficult circumstances, and physical strength; he was also easy and popular with his men. The fact that he was illiterate seemed less important. It was suggested that he had in his youth looked after swine, which, considering the importance of those animals in the economy of Extremadura, would not have been improbable.6 Almagro was also illiterate. But Luque could read and write, and indeed preach. He was one of the eleven churchmen who had accompanied Fray Juan de Quevedo, the first bishop of Darien (Betica Aurea), to the New World. The Peruvian historian Busto considered that Luque had an unusual gift for business.7

  These men prepared their expedition carefully in 1524, and in November Pizarro set off in two small ships with less than two hundred men, from Panama down the Pacific coast, leaving Almagro to find reinforcements. It did not seem a very promising enterprise; they had with them only four horses, one fighting dog, no muzzle-loaded firearms nor crossbows, and no artillery.8

  Actually, Spain had already made a mark on Peru. Even though no Spaniard had yet been there, in 1524 smallpox had been carried there from Castile.

  In the meantime, in January 1523, Gil González Dávila and Andrés Niño, convinced that wealth lay to the north, not the south, had set off north toward Guatemala from the Isle of Pearls off Panama with four small vessels. Like all early explorers in this region, they hoped to light upon a strait to the Pacific. They sailed north and, in the next eighteen months, discovered several new Indian kingdoms. But no strait appeared. At the end of this time, their ships were so damaged by worms that they had to continue by land.

  They thereupon went into the interior about three hundred miles farther up the Central American coast with a hundred men, and Gil González Dávila received presents worth over 100,000 pesos. This was land adjacent to Alvarado’s Guatemala, with the same customs, gods, costumes, and language. More than thirty-two thousand natives received baptism voluntarily, wrote Peter Martyr, as usual exaggerating. Gil González reported that, in this part of Central America, all the carpenters’ tools were made of gold, but he, too, must have been mistaken, confusing gold for copper. They passed through land where the rivers were alluvial, and wound up their journey at a place they named San Vicente at the foot of the Volcán de Chichontepec in the valley of the Joboa. A little farther on, Gil González came upon a local Mayan lord named Nicoiano (Nicoya), whom he persuaded to accept baptism and who, in consequence, gave him six gold figures of gods each over a foot high. Nicoiano spoke of another lord named Nicaragua who lived about 150 miles to the west, and Gil González continued there, persuadin
g him to become a Christian, along with nine thousand of his people. Nicaragua gave the Spaniards 15,000 pesos in the form of gold necklaces. Gil González presented him in return with a silk jacket, a linen shirt, and a red hat.

  A long conversation followed during which Nicaragua said that the total destruction of the human race would soon come, brought on by man’s many crimes and unnatural lusts. This lord asked all kinds of interesting questions of Gil González Dávila, which that conquistador must have found surprising: What was the cause of heat and of cold? Were dancing and drinking acceptable? Did men have souls? Gil González delivered a good sermon describing the benefits of Christianity and the evils of human sacrifice. He was made aware that these Indians were terrified of the Spaniards’ beards.

  Gil González and his comrades were also astounded at the high level of culture of these Indians. They were in particular impressed by their large palaces, and considered that their ceremonial centers with “an urban disposition” would have given them little to envy in the world of Spain.9 Still, every so often, to recall their essential “barbarism,” they would sacrifice girls to the nearby volcanoes.

  Gil González moved on to Lake Nicaragua, which was supposed to be the site of the entrance to the strait so long sought. They named it the Sweet Lake (El Mar Dulce). Niño, meantime, was still exploring the coast by sea. He reached the Gulf of Choluteca in what is now Honduras, to whose sea outlet he politely gave the name of Fonseca after the bishop of Burgos, which it retains.10