Columbus

by Laurence Bergreen

  At the time Columbus arrived on the scene, all three tribes—Taíno, Carib, and Ciguayo—were trying to preserve peace and prevent mutual destruction with intertribal marriages, a strategy akin to the many liaisons between the royal families of Spain and Portugal. But the Spanish presence brought the Indian alliances to a halt, and pitched the Indian nations into turmoil.

  Columbus’s sins—at least, those against the Spanish—eventually returned to haunt him. On August 5, 1495, a fleet of four caravels sailed from Spain under the leadership of Juan de Aguado, a martinet who had been among those who sailed with Columbus at the outset of the second voyage, and who had returned to Spain along with other sick and disaffected would-be conquerors under Torres’s command. Thanks to the efforts of Father Buil, sentiment in Spain had turned decisively against the Admiral, and Aguado and his aides returned to Hispaniola with orders to investigate Columbus. At the same time, they carried supplies and—because gold remained paramount—a metallurgist.

  On his arrival in October 1495, Aguado made a grand entrance, accompanied by trumpets, and assumed command of the little outpost in the wilderness. Bartholomew, present at La Isabela during the humiliating spectacle, sent a letter of caution to Columbus, who had gone inland to the mines of the Cibao. Returning to the fort, the Admiral surprised everyone by listening respectfully to the new orders Aguado brought from the Sovereigns.

  Columbus was to reduce the number of men on the royal payroll to five hundred, and to make sure that everyone received his just share of provisions. Complaints that Columbus had played favorites reverberated from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Worse, everyone else at La Isabela subsisted on short rations, despite the land’s incredible fertility. “The soil is very black and good,” observed Cuneo. “We brought with us from Spain all sorts of seeds, and tried those that would do well and those that could not.” The successes included radishes, squash, onions, lettuce, parsley, melon, and cucumber. Chickpeas and beans shot up in a matter of days, “then all at once they wilt and die.” No one knew why. The Spaniards eventually lost interest in growing their own food, “the reason being that nobody wants to live permanently in these countries.” Infected with gold lust, they preferred to rely on supplies of foodstuffs from Spain and cassava bread.

  Listening to the outpouring of complaints about Columbus, Aguado noticed that the healthiest Europeans engaged in rogue pursuits: petty thievery, searching for gold for themselves, and trapping slaves. He painted a sorry portrait of the Spanish colony’s inability to feed itself in the midst of plenty.

  All of the people that have been in this island are incredibly discontented, especially those that were at La Isabela, and all the more for the force, the hunger and the illnesses that they endured, and they did not swear an “as God would take me to Castile”; they had nothing to eat other than the rations given to them from the storehouse of the King, which was one escudilla [about a cup] of wheat that they had to grind in a hand mill (and many ate it cooked), and one chunk of rancid bacon or of rotten cheese, and I don’t know how many garbanzo beans; of wine, it was as though there was none in the world, and this was the allowance of the Crown. And the Admiral for his part ordered them to work hungry, weak, and some sick (in building the fort, the Admiral’s house and other buildings) in such a manner that they were all anguished and afflicted and desperate, for which reasons they complained to Juan Aguado and used the occasion to speak about the Admiral and threaten him to the [Sovereigns].

  Absorbing this harsh testimony and surveying the degradation into which La Isabela had fallen, Columbus realized he had little choice but to suspend his exploration of Hispaniola and return to Spain to defend himself. The doors of royal favor and patronage were creaking shut slowly but unmistakably, and he dreaded being cast out. Other mariners stood ready to take his place. All they needed was the Sovereigns’ blessing, and Columbus’s monopoly on discovery in the name of Spain would end, and with it, the prestige and riches he had been promised.

  While he pondered his fate, Columbus, a lifelong autodidact, applied himself to studying the Taínos with the thoroughness he brought to his other endeavors, especially their spirituality, which, he learned, was far more intricate and nuanced than their simple way of life—their small fields, primitive huts, and long canoes—had led him to expect. He noted that their numerous chieftains maintained private shrines in a “house apart from the town in which there is nothing except some carved wooden images.” When they saw Europeans coming, Columbus said, they hid them “in the woods for fear that they will be taken from them; what is even more laughable, they have the custom of stealing each other’s cemís.” There was more; the statues were the focus of a private, mysterious, and transformative rite. The images, he added, were accompanied by “a well-made table, round like a wooden dish, in which there is kept a powder that they place on the head of the cemí with a certain ceremony. Then, through a cane having two branches that they insert in the nose, they sniff up this powder. The words that they spoke none of our men could understand. This powder makes them lose their senses and rave like drunken men.”

  The Taínos used the little cemís to commune with the spirit world, and as Columbus observed to his dismay and amusement, to manipulate members of their tribe who had not been initiated into the idol’s mysteries. He told of a cemí that “gave a loud cry and spoke in their language.” On closer examination, he discovered that the “statue was artfully constructed,” the base connected by a tube or “blowgun” to a “dark side of the house, covered by branches and leaves, where was hidden a person who said whatever the cacique wanted him to say (as well as one can speak through a blowgun).”

  To expose the sleight of hand, several Spaniards toppled the talking cemí, and the cacique, deeply embarrassed, pleaded with them to say nothing to his tribesmen “because it was by means of that deception that he kept them in obedience to him. . . . Only the cacique knows of and abets this fraud, by means of which he gets all the tribute he wants from his people.” (Surely that cynical combination of superstition and deception to control the faithful occurred nowhere in Spain, or anywhere else in Europe.)

  Caonabó elucidated other Taíno burial rites for caciques, as Columbus took notes. (“They open the cacique and dry him before a fire that he may keep whole. In the case of others they preserve only the head.”) This sojourn through the Taínos’ underworld prompted the Admiral, already prone to a morbid turn of mind, to ponder questions of mortality. “I have taken pains to learn what they believe,” he wrote, “and know as to where the dead go, especially from Canaobó,” who told the explorer that they went “to a valley to join their forefathers.”

  This was as far as Columbus dared to venture into the twilight of the Taínos’ spiritual beliefs and practices. He assigned Ramon Pané, one of the six priests on the expedition, to go further still, “to set down all their rites.” This Father Pané did, and compiled a report based on his four years of living in close quarters with the Taínos. His revelations about their religious practices, and the Spanish interference in these rites, contained so many unpleasant truths that Columbus dismissed them as fiction, and considered that “the only sure thing to be learned from it is that the Indians have a certain natural reverence for the after-life and believe in the immortality of their soul.” Yet he included the controversial document in his chronicle, which his son reproduced more or less in full, realizing, perhaps, that it offered the best explanation of the deterioration of relations between the Spanish and the Indians.

  According to Father Pané, a Catalan who characterized himself as a “poor anchorite”—or scholarly hermit—“of the order of St. Jerome,” the trouble went to the heart of their opposing spiritual beliefs. His unsparing reflections are sometimes considered the first anthropological study of the Indians, or, for that matter, of any people. Of all the accounts Columbus’s voyages generated, it is certainly the strangest and most penetrating.

  “They believe that there is an immortal being in the
sky whom none can see and who has a mother but no beginning,” he wrote, recording their basic myths in a manner that he hoped would make them comprehensible to Christians like him. Father Pané said that he “wrote in haste and had not enough paper” to record myths passed down the generations: how the sea was created (a giant calabash emptied its contents, water and fish), the origins of the sun and moon (they emerged from a cave populated with two stone cemís that appeared to perspire), and the afterlives of the dead (secluded by day, they emerge by night for recreation and to eat a special fruit the size of a peach). Among Father Pané’s observations, the Indians had a method for identifying the dead: “They touch the belly of a person with the hand, and if they do not find a navel, they say that person is ‘operito,’ which means dead.” And if an amorous man carelessly lies with a woman without first checking to see that she does, indeed, possess a navel, “she suddenly disappears and his arms are empty.”

  Suffusing all these beliefs was cohoba, the hallucinogenic snuff the Indians snorted through their special pipes with two stems. Father Pané’s subjects spent much of their time in an altered state of consciousness, the effect of inhaling powerful cohoba dust. “The cohoba is their means of praying to the idol and also of asking it for riches,” he wrote. The chief initiated the ceremony by playing an instrument. “After he has finished his prayer he remains for some time with bowed head, looks up to the sky, and speaks. All respond to him in a loud voice, and having spoken, they all give thanks; and he relates the vision he had while stupefied with the cohoba he stuffed up his nose and that went to his head.” During the séance, he spoke of his communing with the cemís, of their enemies fleeing, and of the victory to come. Or he might warn of famine, or massacres, “whatever comes into his addled head.” Horrified and faintly amused, Father Pané mentions that “they say the house appears to him upside down, and the people to be walking with their feet in the air.” He was talking about astral projection, or out-ofbody experiences triggered by cohoba.

  Father Pané believed that conversion to Christianity could break these ancient patterns, and he embraced those Indians who made the leap from their sinful lives to the church. Yet his detailed report demonstrated to Columbus how difficult it would be to conquer and administer this part of the world, trying to bring European ideas of order to people who lived in other spiritual realms and obeyed other voices.

  Father Pané heard from Columbus himself about an Indian community with its own language, distinct from the others. It would be his assignment to live with these people and their cacique, Guarionex. Dismayed, the priest questioned Columbus about the wisdom of the order. “Sir, how can Your Lordship ask me to stay with Guarionex, when the only language I know is that of Macorix?” Father Pané beseeched Columbus to provide an Indian companion.

  “He granted my wish,” Father Pané was pleased to report as he joined forces with a bilingual Indian named Guaicavanú, who later converted to Christianity and took the name of Juan. “Truly, I looked upon him as my own good son and brother.” The priest and the sympathetic Indian named Juan took up their new post, where they stayed with Guarionex for nearly two years, “during which time we instructed him in our holy faith and the customs of the Christians.” But it was not easy: “At first he appeared well disposed toward us, causing us to believe that he would do all we wished and wanted to become a Christian, for he asked us to teach him the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, the Credo, and all the other prayers and things that are proper for a Christian to know.” Later, “he grew angry with us and backslid from his good purposes on account of the principal men of that country, who scolded him for obeying the Christian law.” So they abandoned Guarionex for another cacique, “who seemed well-disposed to us and said he wanted to be a Christian.” His name was Maviatué.

  “The day after we left the village and dwelling of Guarionex for the land and people of Maviatué, the people of Guarionex built a hut next to the chapel, where we have left some images before which the neophytes could kneel and pray and find comfort.” The chapel and its objects immediately became a source of irritation for the lapsed Christians. Two days after Father Pané’s departure, “by orders of Guarionex six men came to the chapel and told the seven neophytes . . . in charge to take the sacred images that I had left in their care and destroy them because Fray Ramón [Pané] and his companions had gone away and would not know who had done it.” The six followers of Guarionex pushed the guards aside, “forced their way in, took the sacred images, and carried them away.”

  As if that were not bad enough, the Indian raiders hurled the images to the ground, buried them, and urinated on the mounds, saying, “Now will you yield good and abundant fruit?”

  When he heard about the incident, Bartholomew Columbus felt impelled to demonstrate that he could be as decisive in his dealings with the Indians as his illustrious brother had been hesitant. “He brought those wicked men to trial, and their crime having been established, he caused them to be publicly burned at the stake.” If Bartholomew believed this punishment would chastise the Indians once and for all, he was quickly forced to realize his error. “Guarionex and his people persisted in their evil design of killing all the Christians on the day assigned for them to pay their tribute of gold.” The Spanish discovered the plot just before it was carried out, and imprisoned the Indian conspirators, “yet some persisted in their design, killing four men and Juan Matthew, the chief clerk, and his brother Antonio, who had been baptized.”

  The rampage grew in intensity, and, it seemed to Christian eyes, yielded a miracle amid the mayhem. “Those rebels ran to the place where they had hidden the images and broken them to pieces. Several days later the owner of the field went to dig up some yams (which are roots that look like turnips or radishes), and in the place where the images had been buried two or three yams had grown together in the shape of a cross.” Incredibly, “This cross was found by the mother of Guarionex—the worst woman I ever knew in those parts,” yet “she found it a miracle, saying to the governor of the fort of Concepción, ‘God caused this wonder to appear in the place where the images were found, for reasons known only to Himself.’” At least it was comforting to imagine that she did.

  Father Pané offered sobering advice to Columbus: “This island has great need of men who will punish those Indian lords who will not let their people receive instruction in the Holy Catholic Faith, for those people cannot stand up to their lords.” Toughened and wearied by experience, the priest set aside his humility to insist, “I speak with authority, for I have worn myself out in seeking to learn the truth about this matter.”

  But for the moment, Columbus appeared to have succeeded in his mission against all odds, if his mission consisted only of conquest. Ferdinand claimed that his father “reduced the Indians to such obedience and tranquility that they all promised to pay tribute to the Catholic Sovereigns every three months, as follows: In the Cibao, where the gold mines were, every person fourteen years of age or upward was to pay a large hawk’s bell of gold dust; all others were to pay twenty-five pounds of cotton.”

  Such were the terms of the Pax Columbiana.

  Still adhering to their hunger strike, the Indians were starving to death. “If they survive this famine,” Columbus euphemistically noted in October 1495, “I hope in Our Lord I can maintain this agreement with them and earn not a little profit.” He ordered his men to conduct a census “cacique by cacique,” and complained, “no more than a quarter of them could be found because everyone had scattered to the mountains, into unpopulated areas in search of roots to feed the people.” Each surviving Indian who delivered a tribute to the Spanish authorities received a “brass or copper token, which he must wear about his neck as proof that he made his payment; any Indian found without such a token was to be punished.”

  All the while, the Spaniards seethed with resentment. Some had already returned to Spain with Antonio de Torres to spread tales about the callous Admiral of the Ocean Sea. His two brothers, rushing to his side,
had only managed to make things worse with their brutal approach to Indian relations. He feared that the longer he was away from the court, the more his rivals would poison the minds of his Sovereigns against him. On his first voyage he had departed in relative obscurity and returned as a hero; on this, his second voyage, he had departed as a hero, but had every reason to believe that he would return in disgrace unless he pleaded his case before the Sovereigns.

  Conditions at La Isabela were so chaotic that it took a long time—nearly six months—to ready a ship to bear the Admiral of the Ocean Sea to Castile. She was named, fittingly, India, a caravel made of three ships destroyed by a violent Caribbean hurricane, said by Peter Martyr to have occurred in June 1495, and for which the Indians blamed the presence of the Spaniards, who had upset the elements. The only other ship in the little convoy was Santa Clara, in which Columbus owned a half share.

  The two caravels were designed to carry about twenty-five people each; now they collectively held 235 Europeans and 30 Indians, including the dangerous Caonabó, still a prisoner, along with his brother and nephew. Columbus commended these former enemies to his royal patrons with cheerful optimism: “I am sending Your Highnesses Caonabó and his brother. He is the most important cacique on the island and the most courageous and intelligent. If he starts to talk he will tell everything about this land better than anyone else, because there is no subject he does not know about.” The safe arrival of Caonabó in Seville, and his appearance before the Sovereigns, promised to be a major event.