The rebels protested that the Admiral resorted to calling them horrible names, “wicked and quarrelsome, pimps, thieves, rapists, kidnappers, outlaws, men deprived of any value or good sense, brainless perjurers, liars either with previous criminal records or escapees fearing being sentenced by judges for crimes.” (The accusations stung because they contained considerable truth.) They had heard that Columbus had characterized them as men “originally brought to dig and provide services,” yet “did not even walk out of the house.” Instead, “they have the poor natives carry them throughout the whole island, like high-ranking magistrates.” Columbus related how the rebels, “so as not to lose their blood-shedding habit and test their strength draw swords and compete with each other in cutting off the heads of those innocent people”—the Indians—“with one blow; the man who more swiftly decapitated an unfortunate native in a single blow was declared the strongest and more worthy of honor among them.” Even the rebels realized that such appalling behavior would destroy their reputation, if not in Hispaniola, then in Spain.
As the controversy swept Hispaniola, several ships belonging to Columbus’s fleet appeared off the coast of Xaraguá, but they were not the ones that Roldán had been expecting.
The three supply ships had made a speedy passage since leaving the Canary Islands in June, too speedy, in fact. When the squadron arrived in the Caribbean, the pilots, said Ferdinand, “were carried so far westward that they arrived on the coast of Xaraguá, where the rebels were.” If they had reached their intended destination, Santo Domingo, they would have enjoyed Bartholomew’s protection. Instead, the ships were overrun with Roldán’s rebels, who falsely claimed that the Adelantado had ordered them to “secure provisions and pacify the countryside.” One captain, Alonso Sánchez de Carvajal, saw through the ruse and attempted to persuade Roldán to end his revolt and declare his loyalty to Bartholomew, but sentiment among the crew, already influenced by Roldán’s men, and their alluring promises, favored the rebels over the loyalists.
Frustrated, Sánchez de Carvajal joined forces with the two other captains to send a small party of salaried workers to the mines near Santo Domingo. The unfavorable weather and currents that had brought the ships to Xaraguá still held sway; it might take months for the ships to reach Santo Domingo, so the workers, forty in all, planned to set out on foot, under the command of Juan Antonio Colombo. Pedro de Arana would take charge of the three ships, and Sánchez de Carvajal resumed negotiating with Roldán’s representatives.
The situation darkened when most of the workers deserted to join Roldán, and Colombo was left with only six or seven men. Furious, Colombo confronted Roldán, insisting that the laborers had come to the Indies to work, not to spend their days drinking Indian wine and their nights with the Indian women. If Roldán refused to cooperate, it would be obvious to all that he had affronted the Admiral and the Sovereigns. Skillful as ever at devising excuses, Roldán pleaded helplessness and ignorance. He could not tell the unruly men how to behave. “His monastery,” he explained, “was governed by rules that denied the habit to no man.”
Juan Antonio Colombo realized he had been defeated, so he and his handful of loyalists returned to the ships to sail back to Santo Domingo. Battling adverse wind and weather, his food supply rotting in the heat, Sánchez de Carvajal ran onto a shoal, which tore away the rudder and ruptured the keel, admitting so much seawater that the afflicted ship barely reached her mooring. After completing the difficult passage from the rebel outpost of Xaraguá, the three captains were gratified to see the Admiral himself, having completed his northerly passage from Trinidad.
More mariner than warrior, Columbus studied the list of grievances against the rebels, as compiled by his brother, and realized that eventually he would have to punish the malefactors, but first he assembled a new catalogue of accusations. Ferdinand recalled that his father initially “resolved to be as moderate as he could in this affair, that the rebels might more easily be reduced to obedience.” To rid the enterprise of troublemakers, he promised, on September 22, free passage to Spain, and food, to anyone who wanted it.
A long voyage westward across an uncharted sea no longer held the terrors that it once did, thanks to Columbus’s mastery of winds, currents, reefs, and harbors. The risk of disaster, while never absent, diminished with every crossing until transatlantic travel from Spain to Santo Domingo had become almost routine.
This accomplishment gave rise to a more baffling challenge: how to manage a far-flung empire and its many constituencies: Spanish, Indian, and the brothers Columbus, to name only the major segments. Then there were the hidalgos, or gentlemen; the hired workers; and the fierce Caribs. The Sovereigns’ monolithic approach—convert or exploit, or, on occasion, convert and exploit—proved tragically ill suited to the varied people of both the “Indies” and Spain, and inadequate to the task of maintaining an empire.
Two days later, on September 24, Miguel Ballester reported that Roldán and another rebel, Adrián de Mújica (or Moxica), were to meet, presenting an opportunity for the Admiral’s men to seize the leaders, if Columbus chose to act. As before, he remained idle.
Roldán and his forces, in the meantime, marched to Santo Domingo. Columbus placed the commander, Ballester, in charge of nearby Concepción. Ballester was to deliver a carefully worded message of reconciliation from the Admiral, saying that he “deplored” all that Roldán had suffered, and wished to “bury the past in oblivion, granting a general pardon to all,” in Ferdinand’s depiction. Roldán should feel that he could meet with Columbus “without fear of reprisal” so that they could jointly determine how best to carry out the Sovereigns’ intentions. Columbus would even provide Roldán with safe conduct “in the form he desired.”
Whether Columbus made this offer in good faith is not certain. Ballester reported that he had conveyed the Admiral’s conciliatory message to Roldán and Adrián de Mújica, “but found them very stubborn and brazenly defiant,” with Roldán loudly insisting that he had no interest in negotiations or finding a path to peace. He had the Admiral “in the hollow of his hand,” as he expressed it, and could either “help him or destroy him as he pleased.” He would not consider negotiations of any kind until Columbus and his brothers released the Indians taken prisoner in the pacification of Concepción: a deeply cynical demand in light of the abuse that his men routinely inflicted on the Indians.
Roldán complicated matters by insisting that he would hold discussions only with Alonso Sánchez de Carvajal, whom he believed to be sensible. The assertion immediately aroused Columbus’s suspicions. According to Ferdinand, the Admiral doubted that Sánchez de Carvajal was an out-and-out traitor; after all, he was a person of standing, a hidalgo, and a thoughtful one at that. More likely he sought to be a diligent conciliator, not a double agent. Columbus polled his aides about the best course of action: Columbus would send Sánchez de Carvajal together with Ballester to negotiate with the slippery Roldán.
Roldán refused to meet with the two, citing Columbus’s failure to release the Indians he held. Sánchez de Carvajal took up the cause and eventually convinced Roldán, accompanied by several of his men, to speak directly with Columbus. But the rebel leader’s own men interfered with the mission, to the point of surrounding him. They did not want their leader making secret arrangements with Columbus; they preferred to convey their “conditions for peace in writing,” said Ferdinand, who characterized the terms as “immoderate and insolent,” and no doubt they appeared that way to Columbus. Even the combined forces of Ballester and Sánchez de Carvajal failed to convince the rebels to negotiate. Running out of strategies for compromise, the loyalist delegation abruptly conceded to the rebels. Ballester in particular justified the capitulation on the basis of the dwindling morale among Columbus’s men, who teetered on the verge of joining the bold and determined rebels. Although Columbus trusted his servants and aides, even they seemed susceptible to Lucifer’s blandishments.
Day by day, the number of rebels increased,
and loyalists diminished. Preparing to do battle against the renegades, Columbus had only seventy men at his side, and after eliminating those who feigned illness or injury to avoid service, only forty men, or even less, could be considered entirely loyal.
In this vulnerable condition, he dispatched Sánchez de Carvajal with a surprising message for Roldán: Columbus expressed confidence in his worthy antagonist and promised that he would give a “favorable account” of his actions to Ferdinand and Isabella. None of this was put in writing, Columbus explained, to protect Roldán from “the common people” who might be inspired to harm him. Rather, he should talk directly with Columbus’s representative, Ballester, “as if he were the Admiral himself,” in the words of Columbus’s son.
At about the same time, October 17, 1498, Roldán and his outlaw allies sent an oddly conciliatory letter to the Admiral claiming they had “quit the Adelantado because he had plotted to slay them.” They implored Columbus to consider their actions “a service to him” and buttressed this strange logic by reminding him that they had protected him and his possessions when they could have resorted to violence. They wished only to act “honorably” and to enjoy their idea of “freedom of action.”
The day after this ambiguous negotiation with Roldán, Columbus dispatched five ships to Spain. Those aboard recalled it as a dangerous crossing, filled with “great trials” endured by the six hundred Indians in the convoy. Accompanying them were two emotional letters from Columbus to Ferdinand and Isabella about Roldán’s rebels, “of the damage they had done and were continuing to do on the island, plundering and acting violently, killing whomever they pleased for no reason at all, taking other men’s wives and daughters and perpetrating many other evil deeds.” Las Casas was convinced that matters on Hispaniola had degenerated into a state of anarchy in which Spaniards “traveled from village to village and from place to place, eating at their discretion, taking the Indian men that they wanted for their service and the Indian women who looked good to them.” Rather than walking, they commanded Indian men to carry them in hammocks. “They had hunters who hunted for them, fishermen who fished for them, and as many Indians as they wanted as pack animals to carry their loads for them.” All the while, the Indians revered and worshipped the Spaniards who exploited them.
Columbus beseeched the Sovereigns to send “devout religious men,” in his words, to replace these sinners. As he denounced the wicked behavior of the Spaniards, the Admiral praised the land and its possibilities, “abundant in all things,” he wrote, with a biblical cadence, “especially in bread and meat.” No one need go hungry, not with the copious pigs and hens and wild animals resembling rabbits so easy to catch that “an Indian boy with a dog brings in fifteen or twenty daily to his master.” All that was needed was wine and clothing, items easily transported from Spain. The only problem was that the land of plenty attracted “the greatest loafers in the world.”
The lack of dedication among the Spaniards dismayed Columbus. “When I came here I brought many people for the conquest of these lands,” he reminded the idealized Sovereigns of his thoughts. “All of these people importuned me, saying that they would serve very well and better than anybody.” But in reality, “it was the reverse, because they only came believing that the gold and spices that were said to be found could be gathered with shovels, and that the spices already came tied in bundles on the seashore, so that there was nothing more to do than throw them in the ships. Thus, they were blinded by greed.” (As was Columbus, though he refused to acknowledge his own shortcoming.) “I preached all of this to them in Seville. Because so many wished to come, and I realized why, I had to tell them this and all the trials that those who settle in far lands often suffer.” Few believed his warnings, at first. “When they arrived here and saw that I had spoken the truth to them, and that their avarice would not be satisfied, they wished to return right away without seeing whether it were possible to conquer and dominate this land. And because I did not consent to it, they began to hate me. And they had no reason.” They also hated him because he would not allow them to enter the island’s beguiling interior “because the Indians had killed many who had traveled spread out like that, and they would have killed more if I had not prevented it.”
As if disruptive settlers did not pose enough of a problem, he had to contend with stowaways; Columbus estimated that a quarter of his men consisted of such polizones. And there was one other difficulty: the women of Hispaniola “are so beautiful that it is a marvel,” he observed, “even though it should not be said.” But everyone did remark on the island’s women, with their tawny skin and sweet scent, fertile beauties who displayed a taste for sensual abandon surpassing the settlers’ fantasies. To many Europeans, these women, more than any other aspect of Hispaniola, represented the allure of the Indies.
Columbus, as always, tried to calculate the cost, and to make the case to the Sovereigns that his discoveries had given them a historic bargain. “What man of wisdom will say that it was a waste of money?” That was one point of view. Las Casas, in contrast, ruefully observed that Columbus “would have done great things and produced inestimable benefit in this land if he had realized that these people did not owe anything to him or to any other person in the world just because they had been discovered.” Instead, Columbus had fostered a system under which the Indians did all the work for the Spaniards, corrupting them in the process. Month after month, he had assigned property to settlers, many of them Indian farms, and given them plants and vines to cultivate, as many as ten thousand to a single person, complete with certificates indicating the quantity and recipient of the items. He initiated cooperative agricultural enterprises among the Spanish settlers, with the unfortunate result that the settlers forced the Indians occupying the land to leave and search for gold to give to their new masters.
Once a wellborn Spaniard established himself as the lord of an estancia (“I think in Seville they call this a country home or a farm or a property,” Las Casas noted), he treated the local cacique and the Indians as serfs. If they failed to obey him quickly enough to suit his taste, said Las Casas, he whipped them, cut off their ears, or killed them. At the same time, he took the wives and daughters of the caciques as concubines. Indians bold enough to attempt to flee, or, as the Spaniards put it, rise up, were hunted down and killed. Others were sold as slaves, or loaded into ships bound for Spain and further degradation in a distant land.
“What right did the Admiral have to give them lands, farms, or properties of the unfortunate Indians?” Las Casas asked. By divine right and by order of the Sovereigns, Columbus would have replied.
Among the recipients of Columbus’s scandalous bounty was Francisco Roldán, who demanded a settlement known as Ababruco, claiming it already belonged to him. As before, Columbus yielded to Roldán, and soon the estate, the ancestral land of Indians, belonged to the Spanish master, who put the Indians to work for him while he lived a life of indolence. The Indian name was discarded, and the settlement given the name Esperanza (“Hope”), although Robo (“Theft”) would have been more appropriate. “He also gave him two cows, two young bulls, two mares, and twenty sows, all from the king’s stock, so that he could begin raising them, because Roldán asked it of him,” said Las Casas of Columbus. “He did not dare deny him anything.”
Columbus’s lack of decisiveness damaged his credibility and encouraged the Spaniards’ basest instincts. “The Spaniards learned—even the laborers and those who came on salary to dig and work the land and extract the gold from the mines—to loaf and walk proudly, eating from the sweat of the Indians and seizing each by force, three, four, and ten to serve them, because of the gentleness of the Indians, who neither could nor knew how to resist,” Las Casas noted of the arrangement, known as the repartimiento or encomienda system. To Las Casas, Columbus, Roldán, and the other rebels degraded innocent Indians, and in doing so, made “a sacrilege and unpardonable mockery of the Christian religion itself.” Fuming, Las Casas declared those Spaniards
to blame “deserved to be quartered not just once but fourteen times.”
Of the five ships sailing that day in October 1498, two conveyed Roldán’s supporters back to Spain. Three others were reserved for Bartholomew to return to the Paria Peninsula and its precious pearls. Roldán remained in Hispaniola, meditating on his next move.
Columbus, meanwhile, reached the lowest point of his career as an explorer. Returning to Hispaniola, he had, once again, been undone by the wily and relentless Roldán. It seemed Columbus had discovered his “other world” only to lose it to a charlatan and thief whose chief aim was the humiliation of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Las Casas imagined that “the pain he suffered because of the anger that would come upon the king and queen tormented him most!” Because of his reverses, Columbus’s adversaries at court would conspire to make him an outcast, not because of his harsh treatment of the Indians, but because the Spanish rebels had outmaneuvered him.
On October 26, Roldán received a safe-conduct pass from Columbus, and the adversaries convened. After repeating his demands, the rebel leader returned to his supporters without an agreement. Still hoping to reconcile, Columbus sent one of his aides, Diego de Salamanca, to accompany Roldán and negotiate an end to the conflict. On November 6, Roldán finally sent his terms for Columbus’s signature, claiming they were “the best he could get from his men,” Ferdinand recorded. “If His Illustrious Lordship approved of it, he should send his acceptance to Concepción.”
Roldán demanded a swift reply from Columbus. In his son’s words, “Having seen this letter and the articles, with their insolent demands, the Admiral would on no account sign them lest he bring justice into contempt and dishonor both himself and his brothers.” Overcoming his frustration, the Admiral nailed an announcement to the fort’s door on November 11, offering amnesty to Roldán’s men. The rebels could safely return to Spain and “the service of the Catholic Sovereigns as if nothing had happened.” Passage was free, and wages would be paid in full. The offer would be valid for thirty days. If the rebels failed to accept, Columbus vowed to “proceed against them as the law required.” Once more, the rebels ridiculed Columbus and boasted that within a short time he would be seeking a reprieve from them.
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