Passing an island, Columbus decided to name it after his companion Michele de Cuneo of Savona, who explained, “out of love for me, the Lord Admiral called it La Bella Saonese. He made a gift of it, and I took possession . . . by virtue of a document signed by a notary public.” By such contrivances ancient lands passed into contemporary hands. Cuneo surveyed his new realm, where he “uprooted grass and cut trees and planted the cross and also the gallows.” Cuneo was pleased; it was beautiful, he decided, counting thirty-seven villages “with at least 30,000 souls.”
On the night of September 14, Columbus “observed an eclipse of the moon and was able to determine a difference in time of about five hours and twenty-three minutes between that place and Cadiz,” said Ferdinand.
This statement has inspired centuries of questions about Columbus’s precise whereabouts at this time (uncertain), his facility with celestial navigation (limited), and even his honesty in reporting his findings (open to question). But the deceptions and lapses reveal the limits of his abilities as a navigator and his instinctive desire to obscure his location when it seemed to place him beyond the limits of “India.” In “India,” he reigned supreme, thanks to the proclamations of Ferdinand and Isabella, and was entitled to great wealth and prestige. If he had inadvertently strayed into some uncharted part of the world, his findings and claims would be open to challenge and probably worthless. Better to hope that all would come right in the end than to try to understand his actual location in a global context. One of the great paradoxes of this explorer’s mental habits was his reluctance to contemplate alternative answers to unresolved questions about navigation. He did not wish to “discover” the “unknown.” For Columbus, who believed that all had been foretold and guided by the will of God, there was no such thing.
For those who shared Columbus’s mysticism, a lunar eclipse was freighted with significance. It occurs when the moon passes behind the earth so that the earth prevents the sun’s rays from striking the moon. The sun, the earth, and the moon are aligned, with the earth in the middle. The previous lunar eclipse, May 22, 1453, coincided with the fall of Constantinople, and now it was happening again, imbuing his voyage with cosmic significance.
Columbus was planning to return to La Isabela, when the character of the voyage abruptly changed, and disturbing gaps in the account appear. After five days riding out a gale, the fleet had become separated once more; eventually the two missing caravels reappeared, and on September 24, the restored fleet made for the eastern end of Hispaniola to another island, this one called Amona by the Indians. Instead of returning to what had become his home port in the Indies, Columbus “repaired his ships with the clear purpose of ravaging again the islands of the cannibals and burning all their canoes, so that these rapacious wolves would not injure sheep any longer.” But the campaign against the cannibals failed to materialize.
“From that point on the Admiral ceased to record in his journal the day’s sailing,” his son reported, “nor does he tell how he returned to Isabela.” Overwork and nervous strain had broken his health. “He sometimes went eight days with less than three hours’ sleep,” his son explained. “This would seem impossible did he not himself tell it in his writings.” The recent ordeal at La Isabela had taken its toll; as a result of “his great exertions, weakness, and scanty diet” Columbus “fell ill in crossing from Amona to San Juan.”
In fact, he was comatose: “He had a high fever and drowsiness, so that he lost his sight, memory, and all his other senses.” He was fighting for his life, “more dead than alive,” said Peter Martyr. “I attribute my malady to the excessive fatigues and dangers of this voyage: over 27 consecutive years at sea have taken their toll,” he later wrote to the Sovereigns. “My own concern was that even the most courageous person could die, and besides, I was preoccupied with bringing the ships and crews back safely.” Over the course of the last thirty days, “I slept no more than five hours, in the last eight only an hour and a half, becoming half blind, completely so at certain times of day.” He ended his lament with a prayer: “May Our Lord in His mercy restore my health.”
The men serving under him realized there was no second-in-command to take his place. Frightened and disoriented, the leaderless crew decided to make for La Isabela, arriving at the beleaguered fort on September 29, 1494. The fleet dropped anchor, and Santa Clara welcomed another Columbus, the wandering Bartholomew, who had lived in his brother’s shadow. Now he had his chance to step into the light.
For years, Bartholomew Columbus had tried to emulate his brother’s exploits at sea. In England, he had unsuccessfully petitioned Henry VII to sponsor a voyage to the Indies, and in France, he approached Charles VIII with the same plan, and met with the same dispiriting result. His skills as a mapmaker stood him in good stead, and he conducted himself as a competent and reliable mariner, but he lacked Columbus’s charisma and consuming mysticism. Said Las Casas, “My impression, from talking to him on a number of occasions, was that the commander was a dry and harsh man, with little of the sweetness of character and gentleness of disposition that characterized the Admiral.” On the other hand, he had a “pleasing countenance, albeit a little forbidding, with good physical strength and strong character,” in the chronicler’s estimation, and he was “well-read, prudent, and circumspect” and experienced “in the world of business.” During the years of exile in Spain, he had been a “great support to the Admiral, who turned to him for advice whenever he proposed to do something.”
In matters of scholarship, Las Casas judged Bartholomew his brother’s equal, or better: “He was a notable sailor, and to judge from the books and the navigational charts belonging either to the admiral or to him and covered in marginal notes and annotations in his own hand, he was, in my opinion, so learned in matters of the sea there can have been little his brother could have taught him.” In fact, Bartholomew “had a clear hand, better than the Admiral’s, for I have many writings by both in my possession.”
In limbo, Bartholomew had occasion to study his brother’s handwriting. Fresh from the triumphant first voyage, Columbus wrote to Bartholomew, imploring him to come to Spain. If he arrived in Seville in time, the reunited Columbus brothers could have sailed together as brothers in arms, but the fleet had formed so quickly that Christopher led the second voyage from Cadiz long before Bartholomew arrived.
Marooned in Seville, Bartholomew received a communication from Columbus that promised to give him the standing he needed. Bartholomew was to escort Columbus’s two children, Diego and Ferdinand, to the court in Valladolid to serve as pages to the sole male child of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the sixteen-year-old infante, Don Juan. At the start of 1494, Bartholomew presented his nephews to the Sovereigns, who in turn elevated him to the status of Don Bartolomé, and gave him a coveted appointment to command a fleet consisting of three ships bound for La Isabela, where supplies were desperately needed. Despite settling in a land of astonishing fertility, the outpost remained dependent on Spain for survival.
By the spring of 1494, Bartholomew, now known as El Adelantado, a Spanish military title meaning “the Advancer,” was guiding a fleet bound for La Isabela, where he arrived in late June to join forces with the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Try as he might, he never inspired the confidence or fear associated with his brother. “Since Genoa was Genoa there has never been a man so courageous and astute in the act of navigation as the lord admiral, for when sailing, by simply observing a cloud or a star at night, he judged what was to come, if there was to be bad weather. He himself commanded and stood at the helm. When the storm had passed, he raised the sails while others slept,” marveled his friend Michele de Cuneo, who, unlike Las Casas, doubted the Adelantado’s ability to lead a small fleet, let alone a Spanish colony. But nepotism was nepotism, and there was nothing that Cuneo or anyone else on the voyage could do about it.
In an effort to bring a measure of order to their ragtag outpost of empire, Ferdinand and Isabella dispatched another supply fleet, fou
r ships in all, with instructions to Columbus dated August 16, 1494. Although appreciative in tone, the communiqué revealed widening cracks in the royal façade of confidence. They desired their almirante to be more forthcoming about his actual discoveries. “We have now read everything you say, and although you go into considerable detail, and reading what you write is a source of great happiness and joy to us, we should like to know still more about, for example, how many islands have been discovered to date and named,” they chided, adding that they also desired to know “how far these islands are one from the next, and everything you have discovered on each of them.” Furthermore, “You must already have harvested what you sowed, and so we should like to know more about the seasons over there, and what the weather is like in each month of the year, for it seems from what you say they are very different from here.” They asked, “If you love us, please write at length.”
All reasonable requests, with a common theme: Tell us about our new empire.
Displaying more than perfunctory sensitivity to Columbus’s preoccupation with La Isabela, they acknowledged the responsibility was his: “As to the settlement you are building, there is no way anyone can from here advise you or recommend any changes to your plans, and we leave it entirely up to you; even were we on the spot, we should listen to your opinion and take your advice.”
To Columbus’s dismay, they threatened politely to switch him to a new assignment. Instead of settling the Indies, where the situation was rapidly deteriorating, he could return to Spain to help settle matters with the rival Portuguese concerning trade routes and the Treaty of Tordesillas, whose application was still hotly debated. “If it would be difficult for you to come,” Isabella wrote, would he please send his brother “or some other person there who knows” about the issue, “promptly by the first caravels that come home.” Given the overriding importance to the shape of the fledgling empire, whose boundaries were being tested every day, she needed to hear all his thoughts “so that we can get back to the question of exactly where the demarcation line is to be drawn within the time laid down in the agreement with the king of Portugal.”
Oblivious to these royal requests, Columbus remained at La Isabela, trying to fulfill his grandiose vision of his mission, but his goals were slow to be met. “As each day passed,” Las Casas explained, “the Admiral became more and more conscious that the whole of the land was up in arms—albeit the arms involved were a joke—and that the hatred of the Christians was growing.” Conversions to Christianity among the Indians proved difficult to accomplish, and often temporary. “As for our holy faith,” Columbus wrote of his halting efforts to persuade Indians, “I believe that if the caciques and peoples of this island were called for baptism today all would come running, but I do not believe they would understand or comprehend anything associated with this holy mystery.” Often the Indians consented to be baptized—and rebaptized—simply to obtain the gifts they received for complying.
The limited value of the cotton and spices to harvest and ship to Castile hardly justified the expense and danger of maintaining a distant outpost. Most important of all, the gold that had seemed to glisten in every riverbed and hillside in the Cibao had run out. Columbus and his men had picked the mines and waterways clean. He thought there would be an endless supply of gold on Hispaniola, but in fact he had rapidly depleted the island’s modest store. To justify his continued presence and his rich entitlements, he turned to the resource of last resort: slaves.
Since February, Columbus had planned to inaugurate a regular slave trade between the Indies and Spain. It would focus on the menacing Caribs, thereby allowing the more peaceful Taínos to remain in place, and it would last until the gold mines functioned. With gold in short supply, the slave trade gradually took on greater urgency. If Columbus had misgivings about his decision, he kept them to himself. Portugal and Genoa had their slave trade; why not Spain? The Sovereigns, no strangers to cruelty, kept their distance from the idea, which was certain to offend the church, political rivals, and even their own sense of morality. “This subject has been postponed for the present until another voyage has come thence, and let the Admiral write what he thinks about it.” Ignoring the sentiment expressed in this response, Columbus set about establishing a slave trade including both Caribs and Taínos. Despite his intermittent regard for the more peaceful of the two tribes, he would send them all to the busy and profitable slave market in Seville.
According to Michele de Cuneo, Columbus ordered the seizure of fifteen hundred men and women on Hispaniola. Of these, five hundred deemed the most desirable for the slave trade were confined to one of four caravels bound for Spain. He invited his men to select from those left ashore; about six hundred Indians disappeared into captivity this way. The remaining four hundred Indians managed to escape with their lives, among them women who were nursing. Describing the appalling spectacle, Cuneo wrote, “They, in order to better escape us, since they were afraid we would turn to catch them again, left their infants anywhere on the ground and started to flee like desperate people; and some fled so far that they were removed from our settlement of La Isabela seven or eight days beyond mountains and across huge rivers.”
In retribution, the Spanish captured Guatiguaná, a cacique believed to have killed Spanish intruders, along with two of his chiefs, and bound them all, but before the Indians could be shot for their misdeeds, the captives chewed through their restraints and fled.
On February 24, 1495, their less fortunate brethren sailed with the fleet, along with Michele de Cuneo, who had finally seen enough of the New World, and Columbus’s brother Diego, who had been given the task of defending the Admiral against the charges being prepared in Spain by Columbushaters led by Father Buil and Pedro Margarit. At that moment, Columbus was ruminating bitterly on the trumped-up charges and outright “falsehoods reported to Your Highnesses by some wretches who came here, and those whom they spoke to.” He raged against his accusers, an untrustworthy, ignorant, depraved lot who had no business participating in this noble enterprise: “At dice and other pernicious, infamous vices they lost their inheritances, and since they could no longer find any land that could sustain them they came on this voyage through lies and deception, thinking to get rich quick on the seashore without any work or effort so they could return to their former way of life. This happened no less among the religious [orders] than among the laity; they were so blinded by wicked cupidity that they would not believe me in Castile when I predicted that they would have to work for everything. They were so greedy they thought I was lying.”
No matter how low their character and malicious their tales, Columbus’s behavior on the voyage was at times even more shameful, but it went unrecognized and unchallenged in Spain.
Antonio de Torres, by now making a specialty of leading these intermediate transatlantic crossings, proved less adept than Columbus at bringing the fleet swiftly home. The Admiral had neglected to advise him of the optimal route, which involved sailing on a northerly course to a latitude approximately that of Bermuda before heading east to the Canaries or Cape St. Vincent on the Portuguese coast. With his tragic burden of captives, Torres drifted around the Lesser Antilles for several weeks before working his way far enough north to catch the trades; after that, he reached the island of Madeira in little more than three weeks.
It was a hellish crossing. “About two hundred of these Indians died, I believe because of the unaccustomed air, colder than theirs,” Michele de Cuneo wrote. “We cast them into the sea.” Half the surviving Indians were seriously ill by the time they disembarked at Cadiz. “For your information,” he informed the authorities, “they are not working people and very much fear cold, nor have they long life.”
Desperate to demonstrate the value of the vulnerable human cargo he sent to Spain, Columbus, at a safe distance, put aside his reservations about the Indians to extol their qualities to Ferdinand and Isabella. “I believe they are without equal in the world among blacks or anywhere else,” he declared. �
��They are very ingenious, especially when young,” he noted. “Please consider whether it might be worth it to take six or eight boys, set them apart, and teach them to write and study, because I believe they will excel in a short time; in Spain they will learn perfectly.” The educational program never came about. Instead, the fleet’s overall manager, Juan de Fonseca, sent the survivors to Seville to be auctioned off. Columbus’s confidant Bernáldez witnessed the Indians’ final degradation at the hands of the Spanish. They were “naked as the day they were born, with no more embarrassment than wild beasts.” As if reaching for an even more callous observation, he complained, “They are not very profitable since almost all died, for the country did not agree with them.”
As Columbus’s plan to establish a slave trade with Spain self-destructed, the Indians of Hispaniola battled Spanish forces, especially in the vicinity of La Isabela. The fugitive Guatiguaná, who had chewed his way out of Spanish bondage, rallied his warriors, and began to kill off the Spanish invaders or force them back onto their ships. The Indians had the advantage of overwhelming numbers and familiarity with their homeland, but Guatiguaná was unable to unite the disparate tribes in this quest. Some leaders wished to remain safely apart, and others, especially Guacanagarí, retained their loyalty to the forces of Spain.
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