Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  To Castilian eyes, these items underscored the mortal peril to the souls of the people living in the islands and made new evangelization efforts more urgent.

  By now, however, some of the novelty of the discovery was wearing off, and criticism of Columbus and his administration of Hispaniola was fully setting in. “There were great rumblings against him, that he had not found gold,” Bernáldez wrote, and people heard stories that the earlier colonists were starving to death: “There were reports that the people there were in great want of necessities.”18

  Isabella continued to view Columbus with friendliness, but now she and others harbored growing doubts about the Genoese explorer’s administrative talents and aptitude. From this time on, his power declined, and Isabella began to shift responsibility for Castile’s overseas expansion into other hands. Columbus’s star had risen and fallen.

  But she still appreciated the bravery he had demonstrated, and she remained his most important patron. Now he stayed around the court, making himself useful. In early 1497, for example, the queen was living in Burgos, awaiting a fleet from Flanders that was bringing her son’s bride to Spain, but bad weather had delayed the ships’ arrival. While waiting, she was scheduled to make a side trip to the town of Soria and made ready to go, but the night before her departure, Columbus wrote her a note to let her know that the winds were changing, and that the fleet would soon arrive in northern Castile. The next day the first of the ships came into port, and Isabella was there to greet the full convoy soon after it arrived.

  She was grateful for Columbus’s expertise and was reminded once again of his maritime knowledge, writing him later:

  It is very good [to have] a learned man who has much experience of the matters of the sea. I am grateful to you and hold it a special obligation and service, both for your timeliness in sending it (as your warning and advice was most useful to us), as for having tendered it with the true goodwill and affection which have always been known in you; and so believe that all is received as coming from a special and faithful servant of mine.19

  In February 1498, she drew Columbus’s family even closer to hers by appointing his two sons as pages in her personal service, a mark of particular favor.20

  But Columbus had become very unpopular elsewhere at court, and it was getting more difficult for others to stand up for him. He compounded his own problems by denying what was patently obvious. He had promised the sovereigns that he would find a path to the Orient. He had stumbled on something large and important, but it was not the Indies. China and India had sophisticated and well-developed cultures, and their rulers lived in palaces in large cities. So far, the Indians Columbus had encountered lived on little islands in grass huts. His refusal to accept this reality—that they were not in China or in India, no matter how much he wished otherwise—made him seem disingenuous at best, a liar at worst.

  Some people blamed all the woes they found in the New World on Columbus. His great promises now seemed false. Many—perhaps as many as half—of the people who had traveled with him to the Americas had died, and large numbers had been financially ruined. Others had come back ill, suffering from syphilis, a painful and sometimes fatal disease they had contracted there. The disease came in stages, and in a far more virulent form in these first years of European exposure when people had much less resistance to it. Within two to four weeks of sexual contact with an infected person, a sore or lesion, or a “bubo,” would appear on the body, although the sufferer might otherwise remain in good health at first. Grotesque ulcers would erupt on their lower limbs. A second stage would strike in about three months, when the patient began to suffer malaise, weakness, nausea, fever, and body pains. Then those symptoms might disappear. The final stages included blindness, sterility, and death. It was therefore possible for men to have become infected in December but to suffer no serious symptoms until they arrived back home in March, contaminated with an infectious disease they then spread to others.

  Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Ferdinand Columbus, and Bartolomé de Las Casas were all emphatic that syphilis had migrated from the Americas to Europe, and several other contemporary medical treatises from these years echo this opinion. “Some Christians who accompanied Columbus on the voyage of discovery and some who were on the second voyage brought this plague to Spain,” Oviedo wrote. “From them other people were contaminated.”21

  Las Casas had the same opinion. “It is abundantly verified that all the incontinent Spaniards who in this Island did not hold to the virtue of chastity, were contaminated by it, and out of a hundred hardly one escaped, except when the other party had never had it,” he wrote. “The Indians, men or women, who had it were very little affected by it, scarcely more than if they had smallpox; but for the Spaniards, the pains thereof were a great and continual torture, especially so long as the buboes did not appear.”22

  The Indians were familiar with syphilis and called it by different names in different languages, depending on the tribe, according to Friar Ramón Pane, a missionary who went with Columbus on his second voyage and who collected folklore of the Taino tribe. A Taino legend described a mythological hero who had traveled to a distant land and contracted the disease from a foreign woman. It’s possible the disease originated elsewhere, perhaps in a different form, from another part of the planet, maybe from Europe, or Asia, or Africa, and mutated in various ways over time. Indeed, the concept that the disease came from a foreign land, from outsiders, resonated throughout Europe too, where the Spanish called it the French disease, and the French called it the Neapolitan disease. The papal court’s Spanish physician, Caspare Torrella, wrote: “This malignant pestilence began, it is reported, in the year 1493 in France, and thus by way of contagion it reached Spain, the Islands and Italy, and finally spread till it covered the whole of Europe.”23

  A Spanish surgeon named Ruy Díaz de Isla, however, said the disease was first observed in Spain in “1493, in the city of Barcelona, which city was infected and in consequence all Europe and the universe,”24 adding that it came specifically from Hispaniola. Columbus and his men had certainly been given a warm welcome in Barcelona when they came back to Spain.

  Who were among the first to contract it? According to Ruy Díaz de Isla, the mariner Martín Alonso Pinzón, who had died so quickly upon arriving back in Spain from the first voyage, was one of the earliest; another was Mosén Pedro Margarit, described by Oviedo as “in such suffering and complaining so much that I also think he had the agonies which those who are afflicted with this painful disorder usually have.”25 Cesare Borgia soon contracted it as well, according to his physician Caspare Torrella. Several of the women in the Neapolitan ruling family were also infected at an early point, according to recent archaeological evidence.26 Christopher Columbus himself may have contracted it, for he fell ill for five months at about the same time that half of the group under the command of Mosén Pedro Margarit were known to have been sick with syphilis.

  Soon the disease had spread throughout Europe, according to Oviedo:

  In the above mentioned year 1496, these pains began to be felt by some courtiers, but in the beginning it was the disease of the humble people and those of low quality, and so it is believed that they picked it up in the company of public women and by this evil and lecherous behavior, but afterwards it caught on among better and more important people.… Great was the wonder that it caused in all who saw it, both because the pestilence was so contagious and frightful and because many died of this infirmity. And since the disease was something new, the physicians did not understand it and did not know how to cure it, nor could others give counsel from experience.

  But in Hispaniola, he wrote, it is a “very common thing and they know how to cure it.”27

  This was yet another unfortunate turn of events for Columbus’s sons, who were verbally abused by the families of the people who were sick or had died. When Ferdinand and Diego went out in Granada, crowds of angry people would hound them, despite their close associatio
n with the queen, shouting, “There go the sons of the Admiral of the Mosquitos, of him who discovered lands of vanity and illusion, the grave and ruin of Castilian gentlemen!”28

  Columbus’s reputation suffered, and now Isabella showed reluctance to give him another chance. But he pleaded with her, and after more than two years, she finally relented and authorized a third expedition.

  On May 30, 1498, Columbus departed with a fleet of six ships, a significant reduction from the large fleet of the second voyage. This time Don Juan de Fonseca managed the planning for the trip with an iron hand. Again the queen sent Columbus with specific instructions. At the top of the list was a requirement that he handle the Indians calmly and gracefully, leading them to “peace and quiet,” and that they be converted to the Catholic faith.29

  But Columbus confronted bad news upon his arrival in Santo Domingo, finding “the island in great tumult and sedition, because a great part of the people whom he had left there were already dead, and of the others more than 160 were ill with syphilis.”30

  Despite the chaos he encountered on his arrival, Columbus soon sailed away, always more interested in finding new lands than in governing those he had already discovered. He followed this pattern again now, making new discoveries off the coast of South America. When he got back to Hispaniola, however, things were completely out of hand. His men had often been on the verge of mutiny before; now on the third trip they went over the edge. Columbus went to extreme lengths to reestablish control. Word of this flew back to the Castilian court, and people there solidly turned against Columbus. They had come to view the Italian mariner and his brothers, Peter Martyr wrote, as “unjust men, cruel enemies and shedders of Spanish blood,” who “took pleasure” in killing people who opposed them.31

  Columbus was on the way to getting replaced. Back in Castile, three new expeditions were being planned, backed by the queen and organized by Fonseca. None would be commanded by Columbus.

  The first was led by Alonso de Hojeda, who had served in the war with Granada and traveled with Columbus on his second voyage. He was given permission to go adventuring to the south. He departed in May 1499 and soon reached the shores of South America, discovering a place he called Little Venice, or Venezuela.

  The pilot Alonso Niño set sail a bit later in 1499, also exploring South America, and came back loaded with treasure. In the autumn of that year, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón reached the coast of Brazil. Another explorer, Diego de Lepe, went still farther south along the Brazilian coast later that year.

  An even bigger step, one that would have significant future consequences for Spain and the world, came in 1500, when an affluent notary from Seville, Rodrigo de Bastidas, explored the coast of Panama, returning to Spain in 1502, not knowing that he was only a few dozen miles away from the vast Pacific Ocean. That discovery remained in the future for Bastidas’s shipmate, Vasco Núñez de Balboa.

  Of course, all these trips came and went without the consent of Columbus, in direct contradiction to the legal promises the explorer had obtained from the crown when he had undertaken his risky mission in 1492. Seeing his franchise being eroded, he increasingly viewed himself as an underappreciated martyr, identifying himself with others who had been made to suffer from malevolent interlopers. His religiosity grew more intense, and so did his paranoia.

  But sometimes even a paranoid is actually correct. Isabella was indeed in the process of replacing Columbus, not just as an explorer but also as an administrator. In spring 1499, responding to reports of problems in the Indies, she sent Francisco de Bobadilla, a man of good reputation and connections, to investigate, giving him the power to arrest rebels and take over the forts from Columbus. He was also a relative, and perhaps the brother, of Isabella’s friend Beatriz de Bobadilla, which would have placed him within Isabella’s inner circle. When Bobadilla arrived in Hispaniola in August 1500, he was greeted by the grim sight of seven Spanish corpses hanging from the gallows as he entered the port, and he was told that five more were to be hanged the next day. Columbus and his brothers, who were helping him manage the enterprise, were carrying out increasingly harsh punishments against those they thought were undermining their efforts.

  Columbus was away adventuring once again when Bobadilla arrived, so he was not there to state his case during the investigation undertaken by Bobadilla. But a Pandora’s box of cruelties erupted into view as a result of the inquiry. Columbus had ordered one woman’s tongue cut out because she had defamed him and his brothers. He had ordered a man’s throat cut for engaging in homosexual behavior. He had ordered people who stole bread when they were hungry to be hanged. He had ordered harsh and potentially fatal lashings for other such crimes.

  Hearing these hair-raising stories, Bobadilla promptly seized control of the city, moved into Columbus’s house, and impounded his possessions. Columbus’s administration of lands in the New World was over.

  When Columbus arrived back in Hispaniola, Bobadilla’s contempt for him was so great that he would not even give him the opportunity to defend himself. He clapped him in irons and sent him home. After they cleared the port, the captain offered to remove Columbus’s chains, but the mariner proudly refused. He said he would wear them until the queen ordered them removed.

  But Queen Isabella was not terribly eager to see him when he returned. At this point he had repeatedly defied her specific instructions. He languished in jail in Spain for six long weeks before she summoned him to an audience in the Alhambra in Granada. She spoke to him kindly, in words he found heartening, but for him, the die was cast.

  In 1501 the queen recalled Bobadilla to Spain but did not invite Columbus to return to his old post as governor of Hispaniola. Instead, she assigned another bureaucrat, this time Friar Nicolás de Ovando, to administer justice in the New World. Ovando was another Castilian, from Extremadura, with long family ties to Isabella. His mother had been a lady-in-waiting to Isabella’s mother, and Ovando himself had served in the household of Prince Juan, Isabella’s son. He was named governor on September 3, 1501. Both Bobadilla and Ovando proved to be competent administrators. Their colonists continued to die at the same alarming rate as they had under Columbus, but by now this had become a standard and expected part of the colonization process, and they were not blamed for it as Columbus had been.

  On his departure for the New World, Ovando was given some specific new rules to enforce. Only Castilians would be permitted to stay in the Americas; he was expected to send back to Spain people of any other nationality that he found there. No expedition could be permitted without express permission from the Castilian crown. And, again, he was to treat the Indians kindly and to convert them “with much love and without using force.”32

  To add insult to injury, from Columbus’s perspective, the queen sent Ovando with a fleet of twenty-seven well-provisioned ships—“far the largest fleet that had yet set out for the New World”—with some 2,500 settlers, including men and women, farmers and artisans.33 This was the expedition in which the young Bartolomé de Las Casas made his first arrival.

  But this was not yet the end for Columbus. Isabella sent him on one final trip of discovery, his fourth, in 1502, with a fleet of four ships. He had been told to stay away from Hispaniola, but he decided to go there first just the same. Bobadilla’s fleet of almost two dozen ships was preparing to return home, and Ovando was just assuming command. Columbus tried to warn Ovando that a big storm was brewing at sea and that Bobadilla’s fleet should delay in port a bit longer before starting. But Columbus had so little credibility that Ovando insulted him and ridiculed his warning. Bobadilla’s fleet set out, loaded down with 200,000 pesos of gold that the Spaniards had extracted from the Caribbean islands. The hurricane that Columbus had predicted struck with all its fury; Bobadilla and almost his entire fleet were lost at sea. Only three ships crept back to Santo Domingo. Columbus’s ships, meanwhile, had stayed close to shore and remained undamaged.

  And so began Columbus’s most treacherous but also most successful
trip, for on this fourth voyage to the New World he sailed along the Caribbean mainland of Latin America, reaching Panama and a harbor so lovely he called it Portobelo, with a sheltered, narrow mouth surrounded by hills, protected from heavy wind, and lined with thick jungle foliage, with birds chattering in the trees.

  It could be an ideal place of embarkation for goods to be shipped to and from the New World, Columbus thought. Perhaps it would be a good location for a customshouse. In time, just such a building was constructed there.

  In Panama, Columbus heard, there was much gold buried underground—it was a funerary custom for the Indians to bury treasure with the corpses of their loved ones. He predicted that one day many precious objects would be dug from the earth there. And that too came to pass.

  In Panama he also learned that there was a large body of water not far away. In fact, the Pacific Ocean was a mere fifty miles distant, across an isthmus that contained a large river, the Chagres, suitable for navigation partway to the other side. This would become, in time, the famous Path Between the Seas, the Panama Canal, the waterway that would link Europe to Asia. That revelation would come to Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who within a few years would cross the isthmus of Panama and catch the first European glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, which provided the second half of the water route to India and China, bypassing the Ottoman Turk chokehold. The route had been there all along.

  By now reports were circulating that the gold Columbus had promised did indeed exist, though it was located on the mainland of the Americas, not on the islands. It would soon be made available for transport back home to Castile, huge ships full of riches that Castile could use for its own purposes. The Casa de Contración, the central national customshouse, was established in Seville, and no one could travel to the Indies without permission of the Castilian officials who ran it. Its sister institution would be established in Portobelo, and from there huge shipments of gold and silver would pass from the New World to the Old. Portobelo became the most important port on the Isthmus of Panama, and site of a large annual market, where huge Spanish galleons could gather in safety to transport the wealth of the Americas to Spain. Sugar, tobacco, quinine, glass, and wine passed through this port. And in exchange, about one-third of the gold in existence in the world was said to have passed through Portobelo on its way to the royal treasury, providing a steady flow of funds for Isabella’s children and grandchildren to use in their continuing defense of Europe and the Catholic faith.