Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  With Fonseca’s oversight, Columbus’s fleet was generously equipped for a six-month voyage, with plentiful food, equipment, tools, domesticated animals, seeds to plant, and a substantial quantity of arms. It was a unique and costly enterprise. “No European nation had ever undertaken an overseas colonizing expedition on anything approaching this scale,” writes the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison.3

  It was just the first of many follow-up voyages. Soon the crown would establish a semiregular shuttle service of ships between Europe and the New World, carrying mail, food, and supplies to the explorers and colonists, and in return hauling back whatever riches could be gleaned from the territories the crown now claimed as its own.

  Columbus and his massive fleet set out from Spain to the Canary Islands, as they had done before. But this time the Italian explorer was an important celebrity, and he was feted and squired about the island by none other than King Ferdinand’s former paramour, Beatriz de Boba-dilla, the still-young niece of Isabella’s best friend, whose reputation and behavior had not improved in the intervening years. Amid festivities, island promenades, and blazing cannon salvos, Columbus engaged in an intense amorous fling with Beatriz that lasted three long days, leaving more than a thousand soldiers dawdling, rolling their eyes, and laughing behind Columbus’s back at his romantic hijinks.4 It was not an auspicious beginning for the trip, and word of the dalliance with Ferdinand’s former flame almost certainly made its way to the queen.

  Once Columbus left the Canary Islands on October 13, however, he made good time. Despite some stormy weather, they arrived in the Indies after a three-week voyage. The first sight of land was a joyous experience, as it had been on the initial trip. “At sunrise on Sunday, November 3, they could see land from all the ships and were as happy as if Heaven had suddenly opened up before them,” Las Casas wrote. “… They sang the Salve Regina as sailors do at sunrise and marveled at the scent of flowers blowing from the coast; they saw green parrots flying together like thrushes and screeching all the while.”5

  But then things started to go downhill. Soon after their arrival at a string of islands to the east of present-day Puerto Rico, the Castilians encountered a fierce tribe of Indians known as the Caribe, who ran away into the mountains when they saw them. Meanwhile some of the Spaniards were so eager to start searching for treasure that they took off on their own, according to Cuneo. A band of about a dozen set off into the wilderness “for purposes of robbery” and to search for gold.6 They promptly got lost, forcing Columbus to assign several hundred men in four squadrons to go looking for them.

  The Caribe Indians whom the Spaniards had encountered, it turned out, were cannibals, and the horrified Castilians who entered their encampment discovered them cooking up what looked to the Castilians like a dinner of human flesh. They “found salted human legs, hanging from beams as we are accustomed to do with pigs, and the head of a young man recently killed, still wet with blood, and parts of his body mixed in with goose and boiled parrot meat, ready to be in pots, as well as other parts near the fire ready to be roasted on the spits,” wrote Peter Martyr to a friend in Italy, having heard the account firsthand from a survivor of the expedition. They also found some captives held by the Caribes, including very plump young women and young men who had been castrated, presumably to make their meat more tender.7

  Versions of this story were told in all the surviving accounts. Interpretations of their meaning have varied. Some scholars now describe these activities as ceremonial rituals honoring brave enemies or deceased family members. But the explorers’ accounts called it cannibalism, and they were united in their belief that the Caribes were using human meat as a source of protein.

  This sight, of course, terrified the expeditioners, who concluded that their lost shipmates were probably on the menu elsewhere on the island. But in fact the Spanish brigands had made it to a mountaintop and lit a fire that allowed them to be located. The main party found them and brought them back to the ships with the assistance of a helpful old Indian woman, who showed them the way. The Spaniards left the island, taking with them thirty Indians who had been captured by the Caribes and held under conditions suggesting that they were being enslaved and cannibalized. These now-freed native Americans were eager, at least at first, to leave with the Spaniards.

  The Castilians had a series of clashes with Caribes soon afterward, in which a few people on each side were killed. Oviedo, who arrived a few years later and wrote his own history of the first contact between Europeans and Indians, said that the warlike Indians, called bravos or braves, were armed with arrows tipped with a toxic substance that attacked the nervous system. There was no available medical treatment—people shot by the arrows “died raving… and biting their own hands and flesh, regardless of the great pain they were feeling.”8 Some Spaniards who had received poisoned arrow wounds survived, although it wasn’t clear why—perhaps good diet or better treatment. Others died, and no one knew what to do for them because different tribes used different kinds of poison. The randomness of it was unnerving and made the others all the more anxious about the unknown dangers they were facing.

  By now Columbus was growing increasingly worried about the fate of the thirty-nine colonists he had been forced to leave behind when the Santa María was wrecked on the first voyage. He had entrusted them to the care of a seemingly friendly cacique, but now he had reason to feel concerned. The Spanish fleet made its way through the islands toward the place where the colonists had been left, stopping to establish a settlement they called La Isabela, after the queen. It was located on the island variously known as Hispaniola or Santo Domingo, which now comprises Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This island became Castile’s primary base of operations and staging area for subsequent expeditions.

  Columbus’s fellow travelers quickly discovered that he had oversold the pleasures of this new place. The foliage was lush and exotic and the weather was warm and balmy, all true, but insects multiplied quickly in the tropical humidity, leaving the men crazed with mosquito bites. Painful boils erupted on their legs, causing them to sprout infections that sapped their strength; many got sick and died. The provisions from home ran short, and the food available locally was hard to find and difficult for them to digest. “Everyone [was] demoralized by the number of sick, dying and hungry, which, to the healthy among them, was a sad and tearful spectacle,” Las Casas wrote.

  The Christians’ misery grew stronger every day as the possibilities of relieving it diminished.… And what made it worse was the idea that they were going to die of starvation so far away, without any of the usual consolations afforded a dying man, not even someone to give them a glass of water.… So, then, many noblemen raised in comfort who had never known a day of hardship in their lives found their misery intolerable and some died in a state of great turmoil; even, it is feared, of utter despair.9

  To survive, the Spaniards were forced to eat dogs and reptiles, but for many even this was not enough. About half the Spaniards were dying of hunger, but the number of Indians who were dying was even greater. They fell ill from exposure to infectious diseases from Europe—smallpox, measles, cholera, typhoid, and bubonic plague among them—that were being introduced to the Americas for the first time. Corpses were everywhere. “The stench grew very great and pestiferous,” Oviedo was told.10

  Riches, meanwhile, were not as easily found as Columbus had said. They could be obtained only through grueling work—mining ore from the ground or in riverbeds, or planting crops, all under a blazing sun.

  Worse news soon followed. When Columbus finally reached La Navidad, the place on Hispaniola where he had left the thirty-nine settlers, he found that they had all been killed, probably within the previous month. About a dozen corpses had been left to rot in the sun. Michele de Cuneo said their eyes had been removed; he believed that the Indians had gouged them out to eat them.11 The village had been burned to the ground.

  The cacique, or chief, who Columbus had thought was a friendly ally
was vague about what had happened and tried to avoid their questions by pretending to have suffered a leg injury. The Spaniards easily saw through this deception and bickered among themselves about how the cacique should be punished for his role in the deaths. Columbus argued that they could not punish the man without knowing all the facts, and that punishing him could expose them to further attacks by even less friendly natives.

  The full story gradually came to light under questioning, as the Indians and the Spaniards became increasingly able to understand each other. The thirty-nine settlers had provoked ill will by stealing food and women from the Indians living nearby. Columbus’s son Ferdinand said that the members of the marooned colony had begun fighting among themselves almost as soon as their shipmates departed. The men had claimed “four or five wives apiece”—women they took from Indian men—and they also went in search of gold, quarreling over it. An Indian tribe attacked and killed some of them; others died of sickness.

  Without question, however, a large number had been murdered. Some members of the second expedition concluded that Columbus was allowing natives to murder Spaniards with impunity, which they saw as proof of the mariner’s weakness or disloyalty to his crewmen. Even some of the missionaries wanted Columbus to take a hard line against the Indians and execute possible perpetrators. Columbus saw that he could be criticized for leniency as well as for harshness.

  On both sides of the Atlantic, Columbus was blamed for the deaths of the men who had been left behind. Spaniards back home had no recognition or understanding of the environment in which the newcomers were trying to operate. No words could describe the extreme culture shock that Spaniards experienced in the New World. People living in this alien environment developed strange fancies and fears. The town of La Isabela, which was soon abandoned, became known as a haunted place where the ghosts of the dead noblemen walked the streets at night, howling and crying.

  The reports of the murders, the deaths, and the signs of cannibalism were disturbing to the Spaniards, and some came to view Indians as not fully human. And this, of course, allowed generations of explorers to justify all kinds of barbarities.

  Columbus himself permitted many cruelties to occur. In one skirmish the Castilians had captured a Caribe woman, and Columbus’s friend Michele de Cuneo asked for her to be given to him. Cuneo took the woman into his cabin on the ship and “conceived desire to take pleasure” from her.12 She fought him, screaming loudly for help. He whipped her harshly with a rope. Nobody on the ship came to her aid, and finally she submitted. This was the first recorded rape of an Indian woman among many that would occur in the Americas. Columbus did nothing to stop it or interfere, raising the question of what else he might have allowed to happen or done himself.

  It was on this second voyage that the massacres of the Indians began as well. Bartolomé de Las Casas described the first serious incident as a violent overreaction by Columbus and the Castilians to a minor provocation. Five Indians who had been instructed to help three colonists ford a river had instead left them stranded and taken some bundles of clothing the Spaniards owned. The cacique of that tribe was believed to have taken the clothing for himself. One of Columbus’s attendants, Alonso de Hojeda, was outraged at the theft and imprisoned some of the Indians who had been involved and ordered that one of them should have his ears cut off, a common European penalty for theft at the time. Columbus, however, ordered that three other Indians should be executed for their involvement in the crime. He later relented, but then word came that the cacique’s men had attacked some other Christians, as revenge for the threatened executions. The Spanish response to a simple theft of goods had been prompt and brutal, and it established a terrible cycle of action and revenge on both sides. “This was the first injustice committed against the Indians,” wrote Las Casas, “ . . . and the beginning of the flow of blood which was to flow so copiously from then on all over the island.”13

  Las Casas thought Columbus’s ferocity in dealing with the Indians was a direct contradiction of his orders from Queen Isabella about how to interact with them. The sovereigns had given specific instructions that the Spaniards treat the Indians respectfully, sending messengers to arrange parlays, bringing gifts when they did so. Instead, the writer said, Columbus had trespassed on their lands and had not acted in the spirit of “Christian benignity, gentleness and peace.”14

  Columbus also quickly proved himself to be a poor administrator who had difficulty getting the men to follow his orders. He faced an almost constant sequence of mutinies among his crews. This was not entirely his fault. It was proving difficult to get people to accept the chain of command, given the unprecedented problems that were emerging thousands of miles from established authority figures. Fear, disorientation, and resentment created a combustible mix.

  Columbus was also viewed with a measure of contempt. Many of the Castilians in the crews were proud of their nationality and looked down upon him because he was a foreigner. His lack of an authentic aristocratic pedigree also devalued him in their eyes, living as they did in a culture that gave prime importance to blood lineage and descent. Many of the people who had joined the expedition, like the Aragonese Mosén Pedro Margarit, were of noble blood, which gave them a sense of entitlement that was hard to overcome. Many did not want to work at all and thought it inappropriate that they were being asked to do so, especially by someone they perceived as belonging to a lower caste.

  King Ferdinand’s friend Margarit eventually decided he had had enough. Gathering up some other dissidents, he seized three ships and sailed to Spain, rushing to court to tell the king and queen that the expedition was a disaster and that Columbus was committing abuses there. The handful of Aragonese who came along on the trip found that complaints about Columbus could be taken to Ferdinand, who gave them a ready ear.

  Without question, Columbus was using a heavy-handed approach in managing his men. “The admiral had to use violence, threats, and constraint to have the work done at all,” Las Casas wrote. “As might be expected, the outcome was hatred for the admiral, and this is the source of his reputation in Spain as a cruel man hateful to all Spaniards, a man unfit to rule.”15

  The Spaniards, including Columbus, had grown strangely inured to the pain and suffering of others, particularly the Indians. To them it seemed simply odd that Indian women were willing to jump from the Spanish ships and swim miles to shore through choppy waves to escape and return home. By the time Columbus and some of his men returned to Spain in February 1495, leaving a large contingent behind as colonists, the Indians were deservedly mistrustful of Europeans. On this second trip, the Castilians had captured sixteen hundred native Americans. They couldn’t fit them all aboard the ships, so they chose the best of the lot to transport, and some four hundred were released.

  The natives’ reaction to their own release showed that relations between the Castilians and native Americans had certainly soured. Those who were permitted to go were frantic to get away from the Spaniards, Cuneo noted with some bemusement. Many of the women among the captives had been nursing infants, and they simply abandoned the children in their desperate haste to get away: “They, in order to better escape us, since they were afraid we would turn to catch them again, left their infants on the ground and started to flee like desperate people” into the mountains, running for days to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the Castilians.16

  Columbus had viewed these slaves as booty that could be sold to make money while the Spaniards figured out how to collect gold and other conventional riches. But Queen Isabella was furious when she learned that the explorer had returned home with ships heavy laden with hundreds of slaves. She had insisted that the Indians be treated kindly. Columbus had disregarded her express order. She ordered that all the slaves be returned to the New World as soon as possible, which was done for some, although by this point many of the Indians had died of cold or exposure to new diseases.

  Young Bartolomé de Las Casas saw this firsthand, fo
r his father and uncle had brought him a young male Indian as a slave, and Bartolomé and the boy became friends. When Isabella ordered all the surviving slaves returned to the New World, Bartolomé’s friend was sent back as well. That friendship, however, affected the Castilian deeply and began shaping his view toward the Indians, causing him to later become the period’s most vocal Indian rights advocate.

  The capture of slaves had not been the only way Columbus defied the queen. When she was negotiating with the Portuguese in Tordesillas over the territorial rights to the new lands, she had asked him to return to Spain to help, but he had been preoccupied with his problems in the Caribbean and did not go. She had had to make the case for her rights without his participation, even though he knew more about the lands in question than anyone else.

  When Columbus finally returned to Spain from this second voyage, he sought other methods to convince the queen of the importance of his discoveries. He began wearing the garb of a Franciscan priest, perhaps to display his piety to Queen Isabella. But in addition to bringing the slaves, he also came bearing gifts and amazing objects even more splendid than those from the first voyage.

  These marvels included, according to people who saw the items, “a collar of gold… that weighed 600 castellanos,” wrote the chronicler Andrés Bernáldez, and also

  crowns, masks, girdles, collars and many woven items made of cotton, and in all of them the devil appeared in the shape of a cat, or the face of an owl, or other worse shapes made of wood… he carried some crowns with wings, and they had golden eyes on their sides… and especially a crown that they said belonged to the cacique Caonabo, which was very big and tall, with wings on its eyes like a shield and golden eyes as large as silver cups weighing half a mark, each one placed there as if enameled in a very strange and ingenious manner, and the devil too was represented on that crown; and I believed that so he appeared to them, and that they were idolators and regarded the devil as their lord.17