The Comendador added to his forces by assembling everyone on the Sovereigns’ payroll to inform them that henceforth they served him, and their first objective was to rescue several convicts who were about to be hanged. When he produced the document ordering their release, the warden, Miguel Díaz, looking down from the battlements, recognized the signatures of Ferdinand and Isabella affixed to it. Bobadilla persisted: the prisoners were to be released. The warden stalled, asking to examine the fine print. The Comendador shot back that there was no time to produce a copy for him. A delay might lead to the hanging of the convicts. If the warden did not comply immediately, the Comendador would do whatever was necessary to free them, and if injury and death resulted, the warden would bear the burden of responsibility. Cornered, Miguel Díaz insisted that he had to consult with the Admiral himself.
Realizing that the officious warden would not do his bidding, Bobadilla, with his newly assembled forces, advanced on the fortress and ordered him to open the gates and admit them. The warden stood his ground. Sword drawn, standing atop the battlements, he shouted that he had already given his reply. “Since the fortress had more sauce than meat,” said Las Casas, “because it had been built to withstand unfortunate people who were naked and without weapons, the Comendador and the people came up and with the great blow they gave to the main entrance, they broke the lock and plate.” Just as Bobadilla’s men raised ladders and prepared to swarm into the fortress through the windows, the main door swung open. Bobadilla and his forces charged past soldiers offering no resistance to his onslaught and found their way to the chamber holding the prisoners, their feet in painful shackles. Bobadilla delivered them, still bound, to the constable.
All the while, Columbus remained in the interior, preoccupied with ending the uprising. Bobadilla took the Admiral’s absence to mean that he had abdicated his role as governor of Hispaniola. And so, Ferdinand said, he “promptly took up residence in the Admiral’s palace and took over all that he found there as if it were his by lawful succession and inheritance.”
Of this insult, Columbus snarled, “All that he found there, he appropriated for himself; all well and good, perhaps he had need of it; a pirate never treated a merchant so.” His personal papers had been confiscated, and those that would have helped him defend himself in Spain, “he has most carefully concealed.” While this madman pilfered Columbus’s personal effects, the Admiral himself was exposing himself to danger in the interior and at Xaraguá, pacifying rebellions. Even if he overstated his heroism, the Admiral had a point: Bobadilla had usurped the Admiral just as he was bringing a semblance of order to Hispaniola.
To win over the handful of Spaniards still loyal to Columbus, Bobadilla announced that “he had come to pay everyone, even those who had not served properly up to that day.” The Admiral looked on in amazement as this bureaucrat usurped his authority and reduced him to a nonperson. “He announced he was to send me back in chains, and my brothers also; and that I was never to return,” Columbus recalled. “All this happened the very day after he arrived,” with Columbus in the interior.
Bristling with officialdom, Bobadilla had brought letters signed by the Sovereigns that enabled him to do whatever he wished in their names. “To me he sent neither letter nor messenger, nor has he done so to this day,” Columbus lamented. A situation so awful “I could not recall even in my dreams,” he said. After all he had done for the Sovereigns over the course of three voyages, to be treated this way was beyond imagination and reason. Maybe Ojeda was behind it, maybe he had formed a pact with Bobadilla to dishonor Columbus. Meanwhile, the Sovereigns who owed him so much remained mute.
He unburdened himself in a letter to Doña Juana de la Torre, who enjoyed a close friendship with the queen, and served as conduit as well as confidante. “Consider, Your Grace, what one who held my position was to think!” the Admiral exclaimed to her. “Honors and favors for those who sought to usurp Their Majesties’ authority and who have done so much harm and damage; humiliation for one who has sustained it through many perils.” He admitted to mistakes in the founding of the Enterprise of the Indies, yet “my errors have not been committed with intention to do ill, and I believe Their Highnesses will credit me when I say so.” He had, he pleaded, “fallen into error innocently and under compulsion,” unlike the evil Bobadilla, who had plotted to defraud Columbus and the Sovereigns. “Maintaining justice and extending the realm of Their Highnesses to this day has brought me to the depths.” But then, inadvertently damning his administrations, he reported that Spaniards bought and sold Indian women for outrageously high prices, enough to buy a farm at home, “and this is very common, and there are now many merchants who go seeking for girls; nine or ten are now for sale; for women of all ages, there is a good price to be had.” The situation had become so dire that “if Their Highnesses would command a general inquiry to be made there, I declare to you that they would find it a great marvel that the island has not been swallowed up.”
As Columbus retreated into paranoia, Bobadilla established his regime. To begin, he suspended the demoralizing tribute system for a period of twenty years and summoned Columbus to appear before him immediately, as ordered by the Sovereigns. Bobadilla established the legitimacy of this command by conveying a stale royal order to Columbus from the Sovereigns.
Don Christopher Columbus, our Admiral of the Ocean Sea.
We have sent the Knight Francisco de Bobadilla, the bearer of this letter, to inform you of certain things on our behalf. We ask that you give him full faith, trust, and obedience. Given in Madrid on May 26, 1499.
I the King. I the Queen.
Columbus had no choice but to return to Spain immediately to face his impatient Sovereigns and envious rivals. His exploring, his quest for wealth for the glory of Spain, his awe at the discovery of lands and creatures for which he had no words, the whole magnificent panoply of realms no European before him had visited, had come to a sudden end. Columbus’s behavior suggests that he realized that retribution for the excesses he had permitted was coming, but he never imagined it would be so swift and severe.
It was now early October 1500, nearly eight years after Columbus first spied the glittering white shores of the Indies and claimed them in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella. He hastened to Santo Domingo with his brother Diego to confront Francisco Bobadilla, who placed the two in chains and kept them under guard aboard ship. To reinforce the seriousness of the proceedings, Bobadilla insisted on secrecy from everyone with knowledge of the arrest.
And then he confiscated Columbus’s gold, a deed certain to torment its target. “Of this gold I had put aside certain specimens, grains as large as a goose’s egg, and a hen’s egg, and pullet’s egg, and of many shapes.” Now it all belonged to Bobadilla, who melted down much of it. A large gold chain disappeared. As the days passed, the Comendador raided Columbus’s house for silver, jewels, and decorations, appropriating everything for himself. Livestock, books and writings, and personal effects all wound up in his grip. In sum, said Columbus, Bobadilla “showed energy always in everything that he thought would injure me.” It seemed incredible, laughable that this man had been sent to “inquire into my conduct,” knowing that if he sent back a “very damaging report” he would “remain in charge of the government.” If only Bobadilla had appeared two years earlier, “I should have been free from scandalous abuse and infamy.”
His influence undermined by rebellions, Columbus felt powerless to resist Bobadilla. The standard by which he was judged was unjust, he insisted. He was being treated as an administrator of “a city or two under settled government, without fear of all being lost.” But Hispaniola posed entirely different and greater challenges. “I ought to be judged as a captain who went from Spain to the Indies to conquer a people, warlike and numerous, with customs and beliefs very different from ours, a people living in highlands and mountains, having no settled dwellings, and apart from us.” Because of his efforts, “I have brought under the dominion of the king and queen, ou
r Sovereigns, another world, whereby Spain, which was called poor, is now most rich.” That was his claim, backed by three perilous voyages of exploration.
Heedless of Columbus’s elaborate self-justifying arguments, Bobadilla ordered a “farcical inquest,” or so it appeared to Ferdinand Columbus, “taking testimony from their open enemies, the rebels, and even showing public favor.” Even a blind man, he said, would recognize that the depositions were “dictated by prejudice rather than truth.”
Much later, when passions cooled, the Sovereigns came to agree with this assessment, and “ultimately cleared the Admiral of these charges,” and even “regretted having charged such a man”—Bobadilla—“with that mission.” But for now, Ferdinand Columbus noted, the Comendador preferred “hobnobbing with the richest and most powerful men on the island,” and awarded himself a share of the pay earned by the Indians he assigned to work for the Europeans. And he angrily reported that Bobadilla auctioned off the possessions he had seized, “while making sure some of his cronies acquired ownership of the properties for one third of their value.”
Columbus was not quite the innocent victim he proclaimed himself to be. He maintained that he silently endured the investigator’s challenge to the point of submitting to shackles and even jail, but witnesses testified that the Admiral had actually assembled a militia composed of Spanish settlers and Indians to resist Bobadilla. If true, Columbus enlisted Indians—heathens—to battle Christians: a serious offense against Spain.
Meanwhile, Bobadilla’s inquiry got under way. A priest testified that Columbus ordered Roldán not to baptize Indians without express permission. And another priest, who identified himself as Mateo Valenciano, beseeched the Admiral for permission to baptize a “female servant,” only to be denied. Instead, Columbus permitted the Spaniards to take the Indians as slaves to be bought and sold rather than baptized. Stories circulated that Columbus sold attractive Indian boys and girls as slaves rather than converting them to Christianity.
Rodrigo Manzorro, another witness, stated that he heard priests complain that they were unable to convert Indians to Christianity unless Columbus specifically permitted them, insisting that all the Indians of the island belonged to him. This accusation was echoed by Columbus’s antagonist Ojeda, who was said to have presided over mass conversions, a practice that upset the Admiral, who insisted that he, and only he, would decide who would be converted and who would be sold into slavery. Capturing a cacique with three hundred followers, the story ran, Columbus decided to send the lot to Castile to offer them as slaves to be bought and sold at auction, even though they were under Roldán’s protection. The Admiral’s conviction that all slaves belonged to him drove him to inform the island’s settlers that they must assign every other servant to him. No longer were they souls to be saved, they were human commodities whose value would be decided by Columbus.
Another witness, Francisco de Sezé, testified that in the previous six and a half years, the Admiral had ordered a dozen or more Spaniards to be whipped in public, tied by the neck, and bound together by the feet because they had traded gold for “a bit of pork and for some wine and bread” when starving. Columbus subjected them to this extreme punishment “because they bartered and gave gold without the Admiral’s permission.”
More examples of his viciousness surfaced. In one instance, he ordered a woman to be stripped and placed on the back of a donkey, “stark naked,” to be whipped because she falsely claimed to be pregnant. In another case, he ordered a woman’s tongue cut out because she had “spoken ill of the Admiral and his brothers.” She had said that his father had been a weaver—which was true—and that his brothers were “journeymen,” a vague insult, perhaps, but hardly a crime.
In La Isabela, a Spanish official arrested a woman named Teresa de Vaeça. With another Spaniard, Rodrigo Pérez, the Spanish official tortured her in secret because the governor had had an affair with a married woman allied with Teresa, who, it was claimed, “deserved the punishment for pimping.” Without trial, she received a hundred lashes “naked and on foot” and had her tongue cut out to chastise her for her transgressions, real or imagined, but in reality—from the context of the accusation—for daring to dishonor a Spanish official.
Columbus punished homosexuality with the same severity. He ordered Juan de Luxan’s throat cut for being a “traitor” and “sodomite.” The accused objected to the former accusation but not the latter.
Other testimony revealed that Columbus ordered Spaniards to be hanged for stealing bread when they were hungry. He even ordered the ears and nose cut off one miscreant, who was also whipped, shackled, and banished from the island. He ordered a cabin boy’s hand nailed in public to the spot where he had pulled a trap from a river and caught a fish.
Whippings for minor infractions occurred with alarming frequency. Columbus ordered one wrongdoer to receive a hundred lashes—which could be fatal—for stealing sheep, and another for lying about the incident. An unlucky fellow named Juan Moreno received a hundred lashes for failing to gather enough food for Columbus’s pantry. He received his lashings “on foot and naked” at the hands of an Indian, who was told to proclaim that Moreno was a “scoundrel.”
There were hangings, as Bobadilla had seen. And many others that he had not seen. Learning that two Spaniards had sold bread from the ships’ stores to hungry Christians, Columbus dispensed with an investigation and trial, and ordered them to be hanged. And so they were. Other hangings were carried out swiftly, without trial or time for the accused to confess.
Witnesses testified to Columbus’s bungling management of Hispaniola. Despite the remarkable abundance of fruit and other nourishment on the island, the generosity of the Indians in sharing it with the settlers, and the regular supplements provided by supply ships from Spain, fifty men had died at La Isabela from starvation as Columbus refused them provisions from the ships’ bountiful stores. Food that began to decompose was thrown into the sea, and anyone who tried to bargain with a food store’s guard was beaten for his trouble. The sick and convalescent discovered that their rations were reduced amid the fertile island’s plenty. The accounts, coming from so many witnesses, were abysmal, inexcusable, and served to justify the Comendador’s relieving Columbus of command.
After the inquiry, Bobadilla feared that Roldán, now realigned with the Admiral, might free Columbus from his fetters, but the raid failed to materialize. In captivity, both Columbus brothers “displayed much self-restraint,” Ferdinand reported. That way, “on arrival in Castile they could more easily secure Bobadilla’s punishment.” If they survived their ordeal.
Their situation was deteriorating by the hour. When Columbus was led to the ship, he believed he was about to be executed by having his throat cut.
“Where are you taking me?” he implored the hidalgo Alonso de Vallejo, who had been assigned the task of conveying Columbus from the fortress to La Gorda.
“Sir, your lordship goes to board the ship.”
Skeptical that he would be spared, he asked, “Vallejo, is it true?”
And the hidalgo replied, “By the life of Our Lady, it is true that you are going aboard.”
Columbus experienced overwhelming relief at the realization that he was being led not to his death but to the ship and to life.
The departure of the caravel La Gorda, bearing the Columbus brothers, provoked ugly scenes. The inhabitants of the island realm that the Admiral once ruled now insulted Columbus in the public squares and posted vicious notices on street corners. In the harbor, formerly loyal servants of the Spanish throne blew horns in derision.
Bobadilla feared that Columbus might find some way to escape, and ordered the shipmaster, Andrea Martín de la Gorda, to keep the prisoner shackled tightly throughout the voyage to Spain, until the moment they entered the presence of Bishop Fonseca, charged by the Sovereigns with overseeing the Enterprise of the Indies. Even Columbus’s enemies were appalled by this treatment. “A most absurd thing,” Las Casas charged, and launched
into a stirring defense of the explorer whom he vehemently denounced on other occasions. “At once disdainful, detestable, and wretched. He was, after all, viceroy and perpetual governor of this part of the world and, by most deserved renown, Admiral of the Ocean Sea. He had won those titles—chosen by the singular privilege of God—by enduring so many trials, dangers, and labor, and by revealing to the world this world that had been hidden for many centuries.” For that reason, Ferdinand and Isabella owed him “perpetual gratitude. It was unworthy of good reason and more than monstrous that a man in such a lofty position had been treated so inhumanely and shamefully.” With his adamantine nature and unflagging purpose, Columbus impressed even his critics, and never more than when he was shackled.
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