Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (21 page)

 

For now, Columbus savored his achievement. The new lands that he had discovered were closer to Spain and, to hear Columbus tell it, more benign than Marco Polo’s version. The soil was fertile, the people nothing like the monsters he had expected to find. Only the fate of the men stationed at the fortress in Hispaniola remained unknown.

He planned to proceed to Barcelona “by sea, in which city he had news that Their Highnesses were, and thus to give them the story of his entire voyage that Our Lord had permitted him to perform.” He reminisced briefly about the opposition he had faced when planning his voyage, and the “opinion of so many high personages . . . who were all against me, alleging this undertaking to be folly.” Perhaps his critics, like the king of Portugal and his advisers, would see how mistaken they had been.

He had been shrewd, he had been tough, and he had been wily, but most of all, he had been spectacularly lucky. He had been wrong at least as often as he had been right, most blatantly about his destination, but he had also been nimble, capable of reversing himself when it served his purpose. His words, as recorded in his diary, were emphatic, but his strategy was flexible and opportunistic.

“Since I know that you will be pleased at the great success with which the Lord has crowned my voyage,” said Columbus in the famous letter to his Sovereigns at the conclusion of his first voyage, “I write to inform you how in thirty-three days I crossed from the Canary Islands to the Indies”—in reality, an island in the Caribbean—“with the fleet which our most illustrious Sovereigns gave to me. I found very many islands with large populations and took possession of them all for Your Highnesses; this I did by proclamation and unfurled the royal standard.”

His initial contacts with the inhabitants of the New World were tentative and respectful, even heartening, he claimed. “I hoped to win them to the love and service of Your Highnesses and of the whole Spanish nation,” he wrote. “They have no religion, and are not idolaters; but all believe that power and goodness dwell in the sky and they are firmly convinced that I have come from the sky with these ships and people. . . . This is not because they are stupid—far from it, they are men of great intelligence, for they give a marvelously good account of everything—but because they have never before seen men clothed or ships like these.”

Still convinced he had reached India, Columbus tailored his understanding of another major discovery, the island of Cuba, to suit his purposes. At first, he accurately labeled it as an island in his journal; later, when he realized he was bound to demonstrate to Ferdinand and Isabella that he had reached the East, he recast it as “the mainland,” that is, China, and its inhabitants as subjects of the Grand Khan. Ferdinand and Isabella appointed Columbus as viceroy of these lands without realizing they were creating a monarch potentially more powerful than any in Europe.

To Columbus, one question took precedence on his return: the fate of the thirty-nine men left behind at La Navidad. He had placed their lives, and Spain’s honor, at risk. And he would have to return to “India” to rescue them, or to discover what befell these hostages to his ambition.

His first voyage had been a qualified success. That he returned with his fleet and its men alive, reasonably healthy, and intact was itself miraculous. He contended that his accomplishment was divinely inspired. Exactly what he had discovered or explored was subject to human interpretation and so less certain. He claimed the dozens of islands he had visited comprised a western extension of India, or China; that the figure of the Grand Khan and the trading possibilities that he offered lurked somewhere to the north and west of the turquoise waters over which his tiny fleet had sailed. He offered his journal as evidence, bolstered by the testimony of the others who had accompanied him, in the hope of claiming the riches and titles and glory to which he believed he was entitled, even divinely ordained, to have. Carefully embellished and edited to meet Ferdinand and Isabella’s expectations and his contractual obligations to them, that journal purported to demonstrate that he had accomplished and even exceeded his mission to the point of establishing a Spanish outpost in the islands he had discovered on his way to India. But the lives of thirty-nine Spaniards stationed there hung in the balance. He had created a situation in which he would play the champion, or, if matters went awry, the scapegoat.

The little fort served as the kernel of a vision of empire on which Columbus had been meditating ever since his first voyage, and by now the plan had become firmly established in his mind. He envisioned two thousand colonists settling Hispaniola. They would build “three or four towns”; collect gold, which would be closely guarded; and establish churches with “abbots or friars to administer the sacraments, perform divine worship, and to convert the Indians.” He explained his plans to regulate shipping, handle cargo, and protect valuable exports, especially gold, in grinding detail to satisfy Spanish bureaucrats who administered the kingdom’s day-to-day operations. He displayed an impressive familiarity with the minutiae of his administrative agenda, which belied the difficulty of carrying it out. Concerning navigation, of which he possessed a singular mastery, he had almost nothing to say.

Between the lines of his communiqué, Columbus urged Ferdinand and Isabella to act quickly, before the Portuguese or another rival outfoxed Spain. Rather than standing as an unprecedented feat of navigation, the voyage would become the first of many to assemble the greatest, the wealthiest, and the largest commercial empire in the world. Or so Columbus hoped. To make his case, the document simplified the complex reality of the “Indies.” He omitted references to the menace posed by the Caribs, the difficulty of replicating his feat of navigation, the vagaries of weather, and, of course, the stupendous misunderstanding of the location of his discoveries. He was selective to the point of being deceptive, but there was no mistaking his meaning. Spain would acquire a new empire and he would administer it, becoming wealthy in the process by founding a dynasty. The scheme had the virtue of familiarity; it echoed the Spanish—and for that matter, the Portuguese—approach to exploring and colonizing the African coast and the exotic islands to the south and west of the Iberian Peninsula, Madeira and Gomera and Cape Verde—not quite substantial enough for an empire, but a sphere of influence that might grow into one. Implementing Columbus’s plan meant pushing the boundaries of empire thousands of miles to the west.

 

Pope Alexander VI closely followed Columbus’s discoveries, recognizing that they could mightily increase the reach of the Church of Rome and his personal power. But it was crucial that he divide the spoils among the competing states that would administer and exploit their resources. Acting as a mediator, Alexander issued four bulls—formal proclamations—dividing the newly discovered lands and their riches between the leading contenders, Spain and Portugal, who were allies in matters of faith but rivals in matters of politics and trade. (Italy, which supplied much of the manpower for exploration, ranked a distant third behind them.) The bulls were based on the assumption that Christian nations could, by divine right, claim title to newly discovered non-Christian lands and their peoples.

In each bull, he gave to Spain the newly discovered “Indies” (the pope, like all of Europe, was mistaken about the location of Columbus’s tantalizing finds), and it was assumed that his Spanish origins influenced his decision. But his effort at clarification led to confusion in April 1493 when he established a line of demarcation that extended from the North Pole to the South “one hundred leagues toward the west and south from any of the islands commonly known as the Azores and Cape Verdes.” Anything west of the line—that is, everything that mattered—was Spain’s, and if Columbus was able to complete another voyage, partly his as well.

Columbus’s son Ferdinand later explained, “As the Catholic Sovereigns knew that the Admiral had been the prime cause of the favors and grants made to them by the pope, and that the Admiral’s voyage and discovery had given them title and possession of all the lands, they resolved to reward him well.”

On May 20, 1493, they appointed him captain general of a second voyage of discovery, and eight days after that, in an elaborate, finely honed document issued in Barcelona, they conferred rights and privileges on him, and gave him the title “Viceroy and Admiral of the Ocean Sea and the Indies,” or “Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” as he became known. By then, Columbus was inundated with formal orders for his second voyage with an urgency that seems all the more remarkable given the years of delay and evasion that preceded his first voyage.

Although the document conferred extraordinary powers on Columbus, it reflected the regal self-aggrandizement of Ferdinand and Isabella, determined to shape the stubborn mariner into an instrument of their empire and their will. They treated him as both their Admiral and their vassal, revealing themselves as traditional medieval sovereigns despite the changes swirling about them. The document was studded with entitlements for the newly created Admiral of the Ocean Sea, who was formally empowered to call himself “Don Christopher Columbus,” as would his sons and successors, and he was now admiral, viceroy, and governor of the island and mainlands “which you may discover and acquire,” as would his sons and successors. That hereditary status meant he could “hear and determine all the suits and causes, civil and criminal,” that he could “punish and chastise delinquents,” and that he could “levy fees and salaries.” It was a long way from being a merchant seaman from Genoa.

On May 29, 1493, the Catholic Sovereigns heaped more honors and obligations on the shoulders of “Don Christopher Columbus,” now fully authorized to claim and acquire lands for Ferdinand and Isabella, who charged and directed their admiral, viceroy, and governor to “strive and endeavor to win over the inhabitants” of the islands and mainland he claimed for Spain, which meant they would “be converted to our Holy Catholic Faith.” To assist Columbus in his primary mission, and to make certain it was done properly, the Sovereigns assigned a priest, Fray Buil (sometimes referred to as Father Boyle), and several assistants to the voyage “to see that they be carefully taught the principles of our Holy Faith.” The identity of this controversial cleric has been in doubt ever since, partly because of confusion surrounding his name. He was likely a Catalan who joined the Benedictine order. Although Columbus was profoundly religious, there was little love lost between the two.

For the record, the Sovereigns insisted that “the Admiral shall, after the safe arrival of his fleet there, force and compel all those who sail therein . . . to treat the Indians very well and lovingly and abstain from doing them any injury.” Not only that, but Columbus “shall graciously present them with things from the merchandise of Their Highnesses which he is carrying for barter, and honor them much.” In fact, if members of the fleet mistreated the Indians “in any manner whatsoever,” Columbus was ordered to “punish them severely.” The order, unequivocal in writing, proved anything but in action.