SEVENTEEN
In the centuries since 1492, generations of scholars have heatedly debated who actually were the first non-Americans to step on the shores of the New World. Some say the credit should go to Norsemen, or Welsh, or Africans, or Polynesians, or, most recently, Chinese. Some or all of these people may in fact have gotten a glimpse or more of the Americas before Columbus did. They looked, they left. But one thing is certain: only one person in history immediately recognized the importance of the discovery, claimed it for herself, and turned the venture promptly into a keenly pursued enterprise that resulted in one of the most dramatic population shifts in history. And that person was Queen Isabella.
She alone of all the rulers of those various lands appreciated from the start the significance of what had been found and took effective steps to institutionalize future expeditions and colonize the Americas. The En-glish and French lagged behind by a century, finally claiming the leftover lands in North America that the Spaniards had found unappealing. The Portuguese at first focused their efforts on mercantile exchange, creating only a network of trading posts that supported their trade routes. The Spanish, however, resettled themselves in great numbers almost immediately, intermingling the blood of Castilians and native Americans to forge a new people.
Soon after Columbus’s return in 1493, Queen Isabella came to the conclusion that what he had found was too momentous for any one man, even her friend, to have sole right to exploit. As soon as she secured the pope’s blessing, she began to throw resources and effort into forming new expeditions, with proper financial controls, that would primarily benefit her subjects, the Castilians. Within months she sent Columbus back with more men and ships, but she sponsored other explorers as well. Soon ship after ship, with different Castilian captains and crews, was heading west from Seville on her mission.
Columbus was dispatched on three further voyages with varying degrees of success. But in the next decade she sent out at least six other expedition parties as well. Alonso de Hojeda led a group accompanied by the pilot from the first trip: Juan de la Cosa went with Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine who wheedled his way on board, and after whom the Americas were accidently (and unaccountably) named. Other expeditions were led by Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, the youngest of the three Pinzón brothers; Diego de Lepe, a capable seaman who was a cousin to the Pinzón family; Pedro Alonso Niño, from the Niño maritime family; and Rodrigo de Bastidas, a wealthy merchant from Seville, who was joined by a young man named Vasco Núñez de Balboa.
With her express permission, within the next ten years these expeditions reached and charted thousands of miles of coastline in the Americas. Columbus visited most of the major islands of the Caribbean as well as the coast of Central America. Alonso de Hojeda reached what are now Colombia and Venezuela. Juan de la Cosa explored a cluster of islands off the coasts of Colombia and Panama. Vicente Yáñez Pinzón visited Brazil and was the first European to see the Amazon River. Bastidas, accompanied by Balboa, was the discoverer of mainland Panama. The expedition to Panama was particularly significant because the narrowness of the isthmus at the point soon made it possible to traverse from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. Balboa was the first European to spot the Pacific Ocean from American shores.
Each expedition spawned others, in a cascading effect that continued for decades. Hernán Cortés, who arrived in the Caribbean in 1504, became the conqueror of Mexico and later explored Baja California. Juan Ponce de León, who first went to the New World in 1493, charted the coasts of Florida, in what would become the future United States of America. Francisco Pizarro traveled to the Americas with Alonso de Hojeda in 1509 and conquered Peru in 1533. And the explorations were multigenerational. Pedro de Vera Mendoza helped conquer the island of Gran Canaria in the 1480s; his grandson Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca set out for the coast of Florida, got marooned and enslaved there, and ended up walking for nine years across the south of Texas and the American Southwest before making his way to safety in Mexico.1
Isabella’s decision to allow others to go exploring was painful to Columbus, who believed he had negotiated the exclusive right to exploration and mercantile exchange in the lands he had discovered. But his original supposition that he had landed in India was soon proved inaccurate, and although Columbus showed himself to be an excellent mariner, he was also exposed as a terrible administrator and a man of poor judgment, something that would soon become obvious to almost everyone.
At first, however, Isabella placed complete confidence in the Italian seafarer. Within a month of Columbus’s arrival in Barcelona, she had prepared sixteen royal orders making preparations for his next departure. Using the customary royal boilerplate heading that joined her name with Ferdinand’s, Isabella gave him specific instructions for the trip. The first and most important point—and the one that she most fully elaborated—called for the religious instruction of the Indians, whom she said Columbus should “by all ways and means… strive and endeavor to win over,” to convert them to “our Holy Catholic faith,” teaching them Spanish so that they would understand the religious instruction they would receive. To that end, she sent a contingent of twelve priests to begin the missionary work.
Queen Isabella was explicit about how Columbus and his men should interact with the native Americans. She ordered them to “treat the said Indians very well and lovingly and abstain from doing them any injury, arranging that both peoples should hold much conversation and intimacy, each serving the other to the best of their ability.” The queen said that if any person were to “maltreat” the Indians “in any manner,” Columbus should “punish them severely,” under the authority she had granted him as admiral, viceroy, and governor.
She wanted to make sure that the expedition’s finances were solidly managed, both as to its initial expenses and as to the income she expected to eventually derive. For better oversight, she put the acquisition of the ships and supplies under the joint control of Columbus and Don Juan de Fonseca, a bureaucrat from an aristocratic family based in Coca, not far from Isabella’s family headquarters in Segovia, and whose family had long been faithful servants to the crown. Fonseca was not a mariner, but he was an expert logistician whom Isabella had employed on other complicated tasks. He shared responsibility with Columbus for hiring and expenditures.
New rules and regulations were imposed that determined how the lands would be colonized. Everyone who went on the new explorations was required to register and take an oath of loyalty to the crown of Castile. A customshouse was established in Seville so that the kingdom could track the arrival of shipments from the New World. The right to barter for goods was restricted to the Castilian crown.
On September 25, 1493, just six months after his triumphant return from the Indies, Columbus set sail on his second voyage. This time he led a much larger enterprise. His effusive description of the wonders of the lands he had found—a paradise where gold was available to be plucked from the ground like the luscious fruits hanging in the trees, free for the taking—had inspired a groundswell of enthusiasm, and people clamored to join the voyagers. This time seventeen ships set out, with some fifteen hundred men participating. There is no complete list of the voyagers, but a number of well-connected courtiers took part this time, including many who would go on to play important roles in future trips of exploration, such as Juan Ponce de León and Alonso de Hojeda, both of whom had already made names for themselves by serving bravely during the war with Granada. A few Aragonese noblemen also joined up, including a man named Mosén Pedro Margarit, who had close and long-standing ties to King Ferdinand.
There was a larger contingent directly linked to the queen and her household, including Diego Álvarez Chanca, the queen’s physician; Antonio de Torres, the brother of the crown prince’s governess; Melchior Maldonado, a former envoy to the Vatican; and Francisco de Penalos, a courtier of the queen, and his brother, Bartolomé de Las Casas. These last two men told their stories firsthand to Bartolomé’s son, who shared his father’s name and became one of the first historians of the Indies. Columbus was permitted to take along a few Italian friends, including his brother Diego and a Genoese named Michele de Cuneo.
We have many more sources of information for this second expedition than for the first one. Columbus kept a journal on this trip, and although his account has not survived, it was accessible to the first generation of historians of the New World. At least three other participants—the younger Bartolomé de Las Casas, Diego Álvarez Chanca, and Michele de Cuneo—all wrote letters or books about the second voyage based on what they saw or heard on good authority. In addition, contemporary accounts were circulated by historians Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés and Peter Martyr, who also had inside knowledge of the events.
Columbus had been given everything he asked. He was granted the fine title of “Viceroy and Admiral of the Ocean Sea and the Indies,” which would be inherited by his children. He had been instructed by the sovereigns to “treat the Indians well and lovingly” but was also given the specific right to judge civil and criminal cases and punish wrongdoers. He was authorized to claim new lands for Castile.
Not surprisingly, tension arose between Columbus and Fonseca very early in the preparations. Columbus saw himself as the unquestioned commander of the expedition, but Don Juan de Fonseca saw his role as ensuring that the sovereigns’ interests were protected and advanced. The conflict erupted over a number of small matters: the size of the guard that would defend Columbus, and the quality of the horses chosen for the trip. Fonseca was not a sailor or a discoverer, which irritated Columbus, but he was nevertheless a master of planning and managing elaborate enterprises. His function was essentially to serve as the crown’s “chief minister for colonial affairs,”2 and his role would grow increasingly powerful over the next few years.
With Fonseca’s oversight, Columbus’s fleet was generously equipped for a six-month voyage, with plentiful food, equipment, tools, domesticated animals, seeds to plant, and a substantial quantity of arms. It was a unique and costly enterprise. “No European nation had ever undertaken an overseas colonizing expedition on anything approaching this scale,” writes the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison.3
It was just the first of many follow-up voyages. Soon the crown would establish a semiregular shuttle service of ships between Europe and the New World, carrying mail, food, and supplies to the explorers and colonists, and in return hauling back whatever riches could be gleaned from the territories the crown now claimed as its own.
Columbus and his massive fleet set out from Spain to the Canary Islands, as they had done before. But this time the Italian explorer was an important celebrity, and he was feted and squired about the island by none other than King Ferdinand’s former paramour, Beatriz de Boba-dilla, the still-young niece of Isabella’s best friend, whose reputation and behavior had not improved in the intervening years. Amid festivities, island promenades, and blazing cannon salvos, Columbus engaged in an intense amorous fling with Beatriz that lasted three long days, leaving more than a thousand soldiers dawdling, rolling their eyes, and laughing behind Columbus’s back at his romantic hijinks.4 It was not an auspicious beginning for the trip, and word of the dalliance with Ferdinand’s former flame almost certainly made its way to the queen.
Once Columbus left the Canary Islands on October 13, however, he made good time. Despite some stormy weather, they arrived in the Indies after a three-week voyage. The first sight of land was a joyous experience, as it had been on the initial trip. “At sunrise on Sunday, November 3, they could see land from all the ships and were as happy as if Heaven had suddenly opened up before them,” Las Casas wrote. “… They sang the Salve Regina as sailors do at sunrise and marveled at the scent of flowers blowing from the coast; they saw green parrots flying together like thrushes and screeching all the while.”5
But then things started to go downhill. Soon after their arrival at a string of islands to the east of present-day Puerto Rico, the Castilians encountered a fierce tribe of Indians known as the Caribe, who ran away into the mountains when they saw them. Meanwhile some of the Spaniards were so eager to start searching for treasure that they took off on their own, according to Cuneo. A band of about a dozen set off into the wilderness “for purposes of robbery” and to search for gold.6 They promptly got lost, forcing Columbus to assign several hundred men in four squadrons to go looking for them.
The Caribe Indians whom the Spaniards had encountered, it turned out, were cannibals, and the horrified Castilians who entered their encampment discovered them cooking up what looked to the Castilians like a dinner of human flesh. They “found salted human legs, hanging from beams as we are accustomed to do with pigs, and the head of a young man recently killed, still wet with blood, and parts of his body mixed in with goose and boiled parrot meat, ready to be in pots, as well as other parts near the fire ready to be roasted on the spits,” wrote Peter Martyr to a friend in Italy, having heard the account firsthand from a survivor of the expedition. They also found some captives held by the Caribes, including very plump young women and young men who had been castrated, presumably to make their meat more tender.7
Versions of this story were told in all the surviving accounts. Interpretations of their meaning have varied. Some scholars now describe these activities as ceremonial rituals honoring brave enemies or deceased family members. But the explorers’ accounts called it cannibalism, and they were united in their belief that the Caribes were using human meat as a source of protein.
This sight, of course, terrified the expeditioners, who concluded that their lost shipmates were probably on the menu elsewhere on the island. But in fact the Spanish brigands had made it to a mountaintop and lit a fire that allowed them to be located. The main party found them and brought them back to the ships with the assistance of a helpful old Indian woman, who showed them the way. The Spaniards left the island, taking with them thirty Indians who had been captured by the Caribes and held under conditions suggesting that they were being enslaved and cannibalized. These now-freed native Americans were eager, at least at first, to leave with the Spaniards.
The Castilians had a series of clashes with Caribes soon afterward, in which a few people on each side were killed. Oviedo, who arrived a few years later and wrote his own history of the first contact between Europeans and Indians, said that the warlike Indians, called bravos or braves, were armed with arrows tipped with a toxic substance that attacked the nervous system. There was no available medical treatment—people shot by the arrows “died raving… and biting their own hands and flesh, regardless of the great pain they were feeling.”8 Some Spaniards who had received poisoned arrow wounds survived, although it wasn’t clear why—perhaps good diet or better treatment. Others died, and no one knew what to do for them because different tribes used different kinds of poison. The randomness of it was unnerving and made the others all the more anxious about the unknown dangers they were facing.
By now Columbus was growing increasingly worried about the fate of the thirty-nine colonists he had been forced to leave behind when the Santa María was wrecked on the first voyage. He had entrusted them to the care of a seemingly friendly cacique, but now he had reason to feel concerned. The Spanish fleet made its way through the islands toward the place where the colonists had been left, stopping to establish a settlement they called La Isabela, after the queen. It was located on the island variously known asHispaniola or Santo Domingo, which now comprises Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This island became Castile’s primary base of operations and staging area for subsequent expeditions.
Columbus’s fellow travelers quickly discovered that he had oversold the pleasures of this new place. The foliage was lush and exotic and the weather was warm and balmy, all true, but insects multiplied quickly in the tropical humidity, leaving the men crazed with mosquito bites. Painful boils erupted on their legs, causing them to sprout infections that sapped their strength; many got sick and died. The provisions from home ran short, and the food available locally was hard to find and difficult for them to digest. “Everyone [was] demoralized by the number of sick, dying and hungry, which, to the healthy among them, was a sad and tearful spectacle,” Las Casas wrote.
The Christians’ misery grew stronger every day as the possibilities of relieving it diminished.… And what made it worse was the idea that they were going to die of starvation so far away, without any of the usual consolations afforded a dying man, not even someone to give them a glass of water.… So, then, many noblemen raised in comfort who had never known a day of hardship in their lives found their misery intolerable and some died in a state of great turmoil; even, it is feared, of utter despair.9
To survive, the Spaniards were forced to eat dogs and reptiles, but for many even this was not enough. About half the Spaniards were dying of hunger, but the number of Indians who were dying was even greater. They fell ill from exposure to infectious diseases from Europe—smallpox, measles, cholera, typhoid, and bubonic plague among them—that were being introduced to the Americas for the first time. Corpses were everywhere. “The stench grew very great and pestiferous,” Oviedo was told.10
Riches, meanwhile, were not as easily found as Columbus had said. They could be obtained only through grueling work—mining ore from the ground or in riverbeds, or planting crops, all under a blazing sun.
Worse news soon followed. When Columbus finally reached La Navidad, the place on Hispaniola where he had left the thirty-nine settlers, he found that they had all been killed, probably within the previous month. About a dozen corpses had been left to rot in the sun. Michele de Cuneo said their eyes had been removed; he believed that the Indians had gouged them out to eat them.11 The village had been burned to the ground.
The cacique, or chief, who Columbus had thought was a friendly ally was vague about what had happened and tried to avoid their questions by pretending to have suffered a leg injury. The Spaniards easily saw through this deception and bickered among themselves about how the cacique should be punished for his role in the deaths. Columbus argued that they could not punish the man without knowing all the facts, and that punishing him could expose them to further attacks by even less friendly natives.
The full story gradually came to light under questioning, as the Indians and the Spaniards became increasingly able to understand each other. The thirty-nine settlers had provoked ill will by stealing food and women from the Indians living nearby. Columbus’s son Ferdinand said that the members of the marooned colony had begun fighting among themselves almost as soon as their shipmates departed. The men had claimed “four or five wives apiece”—women they took from Indian men—and they also went in search of gold, quarreling over it. An Indian tribe attacked and killed some of them; others died of sickness.
Without question, however, a large number had been murdered. Some members of the second expedition concluded that Columbus was allowing natives to murder Spaniards with impunity, which they saw as proof of the mariner’s weakness or disloyalty to his crewmen. Even some of the missionaries wanted Columbus to take a hard line against the Indians and execute possible perpetrators. Columbus saw that he could be criticized for leniency as well as for harshness.
On both sides of the Atlantic, Columbus was blamed for the deaths of the men who had been left behind. Spaniards back home had no recognition or understanding of the environment in which the newcomers were trying to operate. No words could describe the extreme culture shock that Spaniards experienced in the New World. People living in this alien environment developed strange fancies and fears. The town of La Isabela, which was soon abandoned, became known as a haunted place where the ghosts of the dead noblemen walked the streets at night, howling and crying.
The reports of the murders, the deaths, and the signs of cannibalism were disturbing to the Spaniards, and some came to view Indians as not fully human. And this, of course, allowed generations of explorers to justify all kinds of barbarities.
Columbus himself permitted many cruelties to occur. In one skirmish the Castilians had captured a Caribe woman, and Columbus’s friend Michele de Cuneo asked for her to be given to him. Cuneo took the woman into his cabin on the ship and “conceived desire to take pleasure” from her.12 She fought him, screaming loudly for help. He whipped her harshly with a rope. Nobody on the ship came to her aid, and finally she submitted. This was the first recorded rape of an Indian woman among many that would occur in the Americas. Columbus did nothing to stop it or interfere, raising the question of what else he might have allowed to happen or done himself.
It was on this second voyage that the massacres of the Indians began as well. Bartolomé de Las Casas described the first serious incident as a violent overreaction by Columbus and the Castilians to a minor provocation. Five Indians who had been instructed to help three colonists ford a river had instead left them stranded and taken some bundles of clothing the Spaniards owned. The cacique of that tribe was believed to have taken the clothing for himself. One of Columbus’s attendants, Alonso de Hojeda, was outraged at the theft and imprisoned some of the Indians who had been involved and ordered that one of them should have his ears cut off, a common European penalty for theft at the time. Columbus, however, ordered that three other Indians should be executed for their involvement in the crime. He later relented, but then word came that the cacique’s men had attacked some other Christians, as revenge for the threatened executions. The Spanish response to a simple theft of goods had been prompt and brutal, and it established a terrible cycle of action and revenge on both sides. “This was the first injustice committed against the Indians,” wrote Las Casas, “ . . . and the beginning of the flow of blood which was to flow so copiously from then on all over the island.”13
Las Casas thought Columbus’s ferocity in dealing with the Indians was a direct contradiction of his orders from Queen Isabella about how to interact with them. The sovereigns had given specific instructions that the Spaniards treat the Indians respectfully, sending messengers to arrange parlays, bringing gifts when they did so. Instead, the writer said, Columbus had trespassed on their lands and had not acted in the spirit of “Christian benignity, gentleness and peace.”14
Columbus also quickly proved himself to be a poor administrator who had difficulty getting the men to follow his orders. He faced an almost constant sequence of mutinies among his crews. This was not entirely his fault. It was proving difficult to get people to accept the chain of command, given the unprecedented problems that were emerging thousands of miles from established authority figures. Fear, disorientation, and resentment created a combustible mix.
Columbus was also viewed with a measure of contempt. Many of the Castilians in the crews were proud of their nationality and looked down upon him because he was a foreigner. His lack of an authentic aristocratic pedigree also devalued him in their eyes, living as they did in a culture that gave prime importance to blood lineage and descent. Many of the people who had joined the expedition, like the Aragonese Mosén Pedro Margarit, were of noble blood, which gave them a sense of entitlement that was hard to overcome. Many did not want to work at all and thought it inappropriate that they were being asked to do so, especially by someone they perceived as belonging to a lower caste.
King Ferdinand’s friend Margarit eventually decided he had had enough. Gathering up some other dissidents, he seized three ships and sailed to Spain, rushing to court to tell the king and queen that the expedition was a disaster and that Columbus was committing abuses there. The handful of Aragonese who came along on the trip found that complaints about Columbus could be taken to Ferdinand, who gave them a ready ear.
Without question, Columbus was using a heavy-handed approach in managing his men. “The admiral had to use violence, threats, and constraint to have the work done at all,” Las Casas wrote. “As might be expected, the outcome was hatred for the admiral, and this is the source of his reputation in Spain as a cruel man hateful to all Spaniards, a man unfit to rule.”15
The Spaniards, including Columbus, had grown strangely inured to the pain and suffering of others, particularly the Indians. To them it seemed simply odd that Indian women were willing to jump from the Spanish ships and swim miles to shore through choppy waves to escape and return home. By the time Columbus and some of his men returned to Spain in February 1495, leaving a large contingent behind as colonists, the Indians were deservedly mistrustful of Europeans. On this second trip, the Castilians had captured sixteen hundred native Americans. They couldn’t fit them all aboard the ships, so they chose the best of the lot to transport, and some four hundred were released.
The natives’ reaction to their own release showed that relations between the Castilians and native Americans had certainly soured. Those who were permitted to go were frantic to get away from the Spaniards, Cuneo noted with some bemusement. Many of the women among the captives had been nursing infants, and they simply abandoned the children in their desperate haste to get away: “They, in order to better escape us, since they were afraid we would turn to catch them again, left their infants on the ground and started to flee like desperate people” into the mountains, running for days to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the Castilians.16
Columbus had viewed these slaves as booty that could be sold to make money while the Spaniards figured out how to collect gold and other conventional riches. But Queen Isabella was furious when she learned that the explorer had returned home with ships heavy laden with hundreds of slaves. She had insisted that the Indians be treated kindly. Columbus had disregarded her express order. She ordered that all the slaves be returned to the New World as soon as possible, which was done for some, although by this point many of the Indians had died of cold or exposure to new diseases.
Young Bartolomé de Las Casas saw this firsthand, for his father and uncle had brought him a young male Indian as a slave, and Bartolomé and the boy became friends. When Isabella ordered all the surviving slaves returned to the New World, Bartolomé’s friend was sent back as well. That friendship, however, affected the Castilian deeply and began shaping his view toward the Indians, causing him to later become the period’s most vocal Indian rights advocate.
The capture of slaves had not been the only way Columbus defied the queen. When she was negotiating with the Portuguese in Tordesillas over the territorial rights to the new lands, she had asked him to return to Spain to help, but he had been preoccupied with his problems in the Caribbean and did not go. She had had to make the case for her rights without his participation, even though he knew more about the lands in question than anyone else.
When Columbus finally returned to Spain from this second voyage, he sought other methods to convince the queen of the importance of his discoveries. He began wearing the garb of a Franciscan priest, perhaps to display his piety to Queen Isabella. But in addition to bringing the slaves, he also came bearing gifts and amazing objects even more splendid than those from the first voyage.
These marvels included, according to people who saw the items, “a collar of gold… that weighed 600 castellanos,” wrote the chronicler Andrés Bernáldez, and also
crowns, masks, girdles, collars and many woven items made of cotton, and in all of them the devil appeared in the shape of a cat, or the face of an owl, or other worse shapes made of wood… he carried some crowns with wings, and they had golden eyes on their sides… and especially a crown that they said belonged to the cacique Caonabo, which was very big and tall, with wings on its eyes like a shield and golden eyes as large as silver cups weighing half a mark, each one placed there as if enameled in a very strange and ingenious manner, and the devil too was represented on that crown; and I believed that so he appeared to them, and that they were idolators and regarded the devil as their lord.17
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 association 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.
Whether ultimately positive or negative, Isabella’s influence on the New World cannot be underestimated. The discoveries and the colonization would make Spain the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world for the next two centuries, though at great cost to many. About half the colonists and explorers who went to the New World died young; the death toll for the indigenous population, mostly as a result of exposure to new diseases, was far higher. The entire native American population was decimated in the original islands Columbus discovered. The microbes that killed them cannot be blamed on European malice, nor can the microbes that migrated from the Americas to Europe, but millions of people were inevitably affected.
Most of the indigenous survivors in the New World were those who intermarried with the Spaniards and formed a new race. Under Queen Isabella, this new race was an Hispanic people. She established Spanish as the official language; its grammatical rules were regularized by a grammar published by a professor at the University of Salamanca and widely disseminated. Isabella had exported Castilian culture across the globe.
She also established Christianity as the formal religion. Human sacrifice and cannibalism would be prohibited, and by 1542, so too would slavery. The strengths of Catholicism would spread across the continent—with its support for family, respect for education, access to charity through church-affiliated organizations, and a tradition of self-reflection that can lead people of conscience, such as Bartolomé de Las Casas, to work in defense of the weak and powerless.
But if she imported the strengths of Castile to the New World, Isabella also imported its weaknesses, including the institution of the Inquisition. Wrong thinking would not be tolerated in the New World, either. Moreover, political and economic mistakes made in Castile would be replicated in Latin America as well.
All this happened because of the joint enterprise between a brave and bold explorer, Christopher Columbus, and his far-sighted sponsor, Queen Isabella. Because of her willingness to explore, because she recognized the possibility that the world was a bigger place than people had believed at her birth, she has been called the single most important person in Spanish history.
And no single person was more responsible for Spain’s expanded dominions than Columbus. “He planted the Christian faith in places so foreign and far,” Oviedo wrote, and because of him, “so many treasures of gold, and silver, and pearls and other riches and trade goods went to Spain. No other Spaniard ever brought such wealth to the kingdom.”34