ABSENT-MINDED COLUMBUS FORGETS HIS FRIENDS IN THE INDIES

HAD A LOT ON HIS MIND

March 15, 1493

Palos, Spain

 

Fast-talking salesman and part-time sailor Christopher Columbus returned today from his hugely hyped “journey of discovery” to the East Indies, but in all the excitement he forgot to bring back his entire crew.

That’s right: he left thirty-nine of his men stranded in the place he’s calling “The New World.”

When pressed to answer how such a meticulous planner could be guilty of such an oversight, he came up with a cover story: he purposely left them there to build a town. He calls this alleged town “La Navidad” in a naked attempt to sway the pious Queen Isabella to forgive his logistical lapse that cost her thirty-nine of her subjects.

When asked what would become of the lost men, he presented another of his impossible scenarios. He said,

“I’ll just have to go back and get them.”

As if Isabella and Ferdinand would trust this absent-minded Genoan with another Spanish ship.

 

But seriously…

 

September 30^th, 2022

 

Christopher Columbus was a very ambitious man.

He spent years planning and selling his trip to the Indies, but he wanted to do a lot more than just sail to a new land.

He wanted to set up his own empire.

When he first presented his plan to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain, they turned him down flat. As had King João of Portugal. One sticking point surely was his demand that he be made “Admiral in all islands and mainlands that shall be discovered by his effort … for the duration of his life, and after his death, his heirs and successors in perpetuity,” as well as “viceroy and governor-general of all lands he should discover.”

He would refer to himself as “Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” Ocean Sea being the contemporary term for the Atlantic Ocean. That’s right: he appropriated an ocean. That’s ambition.

Columbus wanted it all. He wanted gold, fame, land, and titles. And in the midst of all this, he hoped to convert the new people he encountered to Christianity.

His dream of a personal empire was not to be.

As relentless as he was at convincing a sovereign to back his venture, as expert as he was as a mariner, as far sighted and courageous as an explorer, Columbus was thwarted by external forces, and by his own inherent weaknesses.

 

La Navidad

Columbus made four voyages to the new world, a place he believed to his dying day was the Indies. His first voyage secured the titles he craved, and cemented his name as the discoverer of the New World. It also represented his first attempt to establish a permanent presence in this far-off land.

On Christmas Day his flagship, Santa María, went aground and was wrecked. There wasn’t space for his entire crew on the two remaining ships, so thirty-nine (or forty, according on one source) men would have to be left behind.

They included a doctor, known as “Maestre Juan,” and Luis de Torre, a converso (a Jew who had converted to Christianity) who served as interpreter. He knew Hebrew, Chaldean, and a little Arabic. Presumably these languages were of as much use in the Caribbean as they would have been in the Indies.

Columbus saw the shipwreck as the hand of God, a divinely sent opportunity to build a fort:

“God plainly wanted a garrison there.”

The planks of the wrecked flagship would be used to construct a fortified tower and moat.

The Santa María was also known as the Maria Galante, and La Gallega, because it was built in Galicia. In its new form it would be called La Navidad (Christmas), and it would mark the birth of the first town, or proto-town, the Spanish would found in the Americas.

The men left behind were ordered to obtain gold, find its source, and trade peaceably with the Indians.

The Admiral of the Ocean Sea could not have been more satisfied. The men who were chosen to be the first European inhabitants in the New World may not have been so keen.

Columbus returned in triumph to Palos, Spain on March 15, 1493, then traveled in a highly organized procession from Seville to Barcelona, to report to the Spanish sovereigns.

Columbus wowed the Queen with his story of a people called the Taino, who were sweet and peaceful, ripe for conversion to Christianity. They smoked a thing called tobacco, and used words that would become part of the Spanish, then English, languages: hammock, canoe, hurricane, savannah, barbecue, cacique, and, ominously, cannibal.

He had found a strange, enchanting land where they used long curved vomiting sticks made of Manatee bones; they told of their own legendary sailor who had set out across the sea to find a cure for syphilis.

He presented a bevy of exotic gifts to Her Majesty: chili peppers, sweet potatoes, hutia (small rodents), monkeys, and parrots.

He also gave her six Taino (he had brought back ten, but four died on the way to the Queen), whom he called “Indians.” They wore gold earrings and nostril rings. Isabella was suitably impressed. (No word on how the Taino felt about the arrangement.)

Of course he would follow-up his success with another journey, bigger and better. And the men left behind would no doubt have great things to report.

 

Bad News

On his second voyage, Columbus did return to La Navidad. He arrived on November 4, 1493.

The fort was gone; his men were all dead.

Chief Guacanagarí, the cacique, or chief, in whose district they had lived, claimed that some of the men had died of disease and some in fights with one another over gold and women. Others had left to explore the interior and died there, while the rest had been killed in an attack by Caonabó, a rival Taino chief.

The cacique had tried to defend them, he claimed, receiving a wound to his leg, which he refused to allow Columbus’s doctor to treat. Columbus believed his friend the chief; evidence in his favor was the fact that after the incident he was hated by fellow caciques Behechio and Caonabó. It seems the first European casualties in the Americas lost their lives because of a combination of factors, one of which was simple greed.

 

La Isabella

On this second voyage, Columbus set up a town, which he called La Isabella, on the coast of Hispaniola. He was determined that La Isabella would succeed where La Navidad had failed.

Delegations hand-picked by Columbus- always accompanied by his accountant- bartered Spanish beads, metal items, and ceramics for Taino gold and food. The Taino particularly liked Hawk’s Bells.

For a time the Europeans seemed to be living in a paradise of fertile land, exotic birds, docile natives, and, they hoped, mountains of gold.

 

The Canaries

La Isabella was built on a well-known pattern of trading ports or houses called feitorías or factorías, whose purpose was to facilitate long-distance trade. They had been in use in the Canary Islands for years.

Columbus was familiar with this pattern, having spent time in the Canaries, in the service of Portuguese traders, from 1476 to 1484. Factorías had been in place in Flanders since the mid-fourteenth century and were probably based on the even earlier Catalonian and Italian ones in the Mediterranean.

The Treaty of Alcáçovas gave the Canaries to Castile. With the blessing of the Castilian crown, entrepreneurs, backed by military muscle, would invade one of the islands and conquer the Canarians (who apparently never signed off on the treaty, and still thought the land was theirs).

The Canaries were, in this way, carved up into essentially feudal fiefdoms, with European families “owning” certain islands while swearing fealty to the crown.

In addition to the trading posts, local businesses were set up, particularly sugar plantations.

The conquest of the Canary Islands involved future explorers Pánfilo de Narváez, Hernan Cortes, Francisco Pizarro, and Diego de Almagro, and no wonder: the men who claimed the Canaries were adventurers, working within a military/business model.

One of these adventurers was Alonso Fernández de Lugo. He founded the first sugar mill, Agaete, on the island of Gran Canaria, then sold it to finance his conquest of another island, Tenerife. He took 1,200 men and twenty thousand goats and sheep to conquer Tenerife, with its magical volcano, El Teide.

Columbus’s fellow Genoese also had a hand in the Canary venture, including the banker Piñelo Francesco, who would help finance Columbus’s voyages.

The Canary Islands also bequeathed to the Americas their distinctive architectural look- what might be termed Maritime Spanish.

In a sense, the European development of the New World began in the Canary Islands.

 

Food and Gold

La Isabella failed. What happened?

For one thing, they ran out of food.

They didn’t bother sowing, because no one wanted to live there permanently. It was easier to demand tribute from the Taino, in the form of food. The Tainos grew their crops yearly and did not accumulate large surpluses, so the constant demand for food put a strain on their resources. This engendered animosity towards the Spaniards.

If Columbus was short on understanding of the Taino, he also showed a lack of understanding of his own men. He took their horses, claiming they belonged to the Crown; he also forced Hidalgos and courtiers to labor with the commoners. These were proud men, who, according to Bartolomé de Las Casas, were “people for whom having to work with their hands was equivalent to death, especially on an empty stomach.”

The next problem surfaced when Columbus decided to venture inland in search of gold.

By April of 1494, Spanish incursions into the interior of the island had become regular, setting off uprisings, attacks, and counterattacks. In response to a threatened attack from Caonabó, Columbus ordered Pedro de Margarite, with 350 men, to invade the heavily populated central plain of the Cibao, the Vega Real, “and spread terror among the Indians in order to show them how strong and powerful the Christians were.”

On April 9, 1494, Columbus gave instructions on how to treat the Taino, which seem, in their contradictions, to sum up his schizophrenic approach to these indigenous people:

“The main thing you are to do is to take great care that no harm or injury is done to the Indians, and that nothing is forcibly taken from them; but rather that they are treated with respect and protected, so that they do not rebel.”

But later in the same instructions:

“If you discover that any of them steal, you shall punish them by cutting off their ears and noses, as these are the parts of the body they cannot hide.”

Gold had a powerful pull on Columbus. From the moment he claimed Hispaniola for Spain, and was assured the claim was good because “nobody objected,” he was preoccupied with the yellow metal. (The Tainos didn’t share his fascination; they valued copper more highly because of its lower melting point.)

From the beginning there was a tension between the competing objectives of commerce, conquest, colonization, and conversion.

The first voyage was concerned with finding a sea route to the Indies, for the purpose of trade. But Columbus had appealed to Isabella’s devotion to the Catholic church, by promising her that “all the gain of this Enterprise should be spent in the conquest of Jerusalem.”

The savvy queen wasn’t going to be sold by sweet promises again. The charter for the second voyage spelled out clearly that this trip would be about conversion.

But the gold kept calling him.

The failure of La Navidad would play out again- this time before Columbus’s eyes- at La Isabella. These failures were forerunners of the problems of the disastrous third voyage, which auspiciously featured Columbus getting into fistfight with a bureaucrat named Jimeno Breviesca, and ended with him being marched off the ship returning to Spain, in chains.

 

Short-sighted Visionary

Christopher Columbus has been idolized and demonized. For years he was a cardboard saint, the hero who “sailed the ocean blue.” In recent years he has become the personification of evil. The truth of the man is much more interesting than either of these.

He was a man of seething ambition and unabating confidence.

He was pious and greedy, humble and autocratic, a showman and a fast-talking salesman as well as a man of introspection who for a time lived in a Franciscan monastery.

He was a man of great courage, an outstanding mariner, and a meticulous planner who failed to foresee the consequences that his plan set in motion.

He was a short-sighted visionary.

He saw the native people of the Americas as children to be protected, capital to be exploited, curiosity pieces, potential religious converts, subjects, friends, and yes, slaves.

The slave-trading impetus started early; his native Genoa was a prominent slave market. He apparently never saw a contradiction between being a pious Christian, and selling other humans.

He was a great man, bearing nonetheless all of the flaws, weaknesses, and contradictions of his time and place, as well as compelling eccentricities which were all his own. His success, born of audacity, deserves to be celebrated; his failures, which were many, should be a cautionary tale on the dangers of that audacity.

 

Human Sacrifices

One extraordinary man’s relentless devotion to a dream propelled Europe into a new era. But it came at a cost. He was willing to sacrifice others to make his dream a reality.

The men left at La Navidad were the first thirty-nine sacrifices to Columbus’s world-changing vision. The next four were the nameless Tainos who were taken aboard ship, bound for a strange land called Spain, who never made it to that audience with a far-off all-powerful queen.

 

Sources

Columbus, The Four Voyages, Laurence Bergreen

Columbus’s Outpost Among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela 1493-1498, Kathleen Deagan and José María Cruxent

Rivers of Gold, The Rise of the Spanish Empire from Columbus to Magellan, Hugh Thomas