Caribbean (22 page)

“The gulf at Cumaná looks the same, but is different. It’s shallow, and every summer when the sun is high the water evaporates, leaving an enormous deposit of salt. There’s so much salt there, you can scrape it up with shovels.”

“But don’t we station soldiers to protect the flats?”

“Because it is so hot, no one can stay around Cumaná for long. The heat beating back from the white salt is incredible, not like any other known, and the saline air corrodes nostrils and makes breathing difficult. Men work with huge flat-bottomed shoes tied to their feet so as not to break up the salt deposits on which they walk, and a merciless glare shines back from the intensely white surface. A season in Cumaná is a season in hell. But the Dutch sea captains who creep onto the flats enjoy an unusual advantage. Judges in Holland tell
criminals: ‘Death or work in Cumaná,’ so the salt is collected by men who have to work there, the ships are loaded, and salted herring is made available to large parts of Europe.

“What I must do,” Ledesma told his wife, “is take a fleet out there before the king orders me to do so.”

“Can’t you send one of your captains?” she asked, and he replied honestly: “I suppose I could, but would it not look better …” He hesitated, because as the father of three unmarried daughters and the uncle of two nephews with limited futures, he faced what could be called “The Spanish Problem”: “How can I protect and extend the interests of my family?”

In the Spanish society a man like Don Diego acknowledged tremendous obligations to four entities: God, God’s church, the king, his own family, though in reverse order if he was a prudent Spaniard. One could argue as to whose claims were greater, God’s, the church’s or the king’s, but any sensible man would have to admit that first came his family’s. And Don Diego had a most demanding one. His three daughters needed husbands of wealth and importance and his wife’s two able nephews deserved jobs. Then there were his three brothers, who had no titles but did have ravenous appetites for good things, and Doña Leonora’s inexhaustible array of cousins. If he played his cards cleverly and retained his governorship for another fifteen or twenty years, he would have a reasonable chance of placing all his relatives in profitable positions, and no man could discharge his family obligations more honorably than that.

So it was advisable that he conduct in person this campaign against the Dutch interlopers, for in doing so he might be able to connive two promotions for his wife’s nephews and at the same time ingratiate himself with a young captain of troops, a man of excellent family in Saragossa whom Doña Leonora had settled upon as a proper husband for their eldest, Juana. If, during action, Don Diego could find an opportunity to promote the young man, and then commend him in his report to the king, a marriage might very well be attainable. Getting the nephews started young in the naval service could mean that he might later be justified in placing them in command of one of the treasure galleons that sailed each spring from Cartagena for Havana and Sevilla. In fact, the more Don Diego thought of this expedition to the salt flats, the more attractive it became. A man could kill a chain of doves with one arrow well shot.

It was for these personal reasons, plus a desire to knock the insufferable
Dutch renegades in the head, that Governor Ledesma assembled in late February 1568 a fleet of seven ships, well armed and manned, and set sail for distant Cumaná, a town most governors would never see but to which they would send troops on occasion to monitor the valuable salt flats. As self-appointed admiral of the fleet, he rode in the largest vessel, one with the biggest guns, and after the ships had sailed for some days on a northeast heading so as to clear the jutting peninsula protecting Maracaibo, he turned them due east for the long run to Cumaná. And he placed his nephews in charge of the port and starboard wings of the fleet.

These assignments were shocking, for as one of the captains who had to surrender his post grumbled: “Those whelps aren’t past the age of twenty-five and know nothing of the sea.” But the answer from another old sea dog touched reality: “True, but you must remember they’re his wife’s nephews, and that does count.”

Satisfied that he had made two judicious moves, Don Diego now attended to the young nobleman who had been courting Juana Ledesma, and for him he created a wholly new position, vice-regent to the admiral; no one knew what it entailed, but it did evoke in the young man a feeling of great warmth toward Don Diego and his entire family. When one of the old-line captains asked: “What are the vice-regent’s duties?” Don Diego replied without hesitation: “He relays my orders to my vice-admirals.” When he went to sleep that night, with three more members of his family taken care of, he felt not even a wisp of shame at having abused his position so blatantly. If the truth were known, the long-dead bearers of the distinguished names he bore had probably gained their high places in history by similar attention to the promotions of their sons, nephews and cousins, for that was the Spanish way.

Toward the end of March, the fleet approached Cumaná from the west, and found at the mouth of the salt lagoon a group of three big renegade Dutch traders, each protected by heavy guns. Without the least hint of indecision Don Diego attacked, and in forty minutes the Battle of Cumaná, as the Spanish scribes would name it in their enthusiastic reports, was over, with one enemy ship sunk, one smoldering on a reef, and the middle one a captured prize.

Aware, even in the heat of battle, that he was a Spanish gentleman bound by the rules of honor, Don Diego directed his interpreter to shout in Dutch to the survivors: “You may keep that ship you have and seek what port you can. But we’ll chop down your masts so you
can’t chase after us in the night.” But as his own men watched the defeated Dutchmen begin to climb aboard the surviving ship, a stout one, they protested: “Why give them that fine ship, while we must do with this poor one of ours?” and he called to his men who were about to destroy the masts: “Stop! Don’t touch that mast!” And without a moment’s reflection he directed his men to cut down the mast of one of his own ships and turn it over to the Dutchmen.

When his crew climbed aboard their prize and all the Dutchmen had been crammed into the leaky old craft, Don Diego called down: “What’s the name of this ship?” and they pointed to the stern where the words had been neatly carved in oak:
STADHOUDER MAURITZ
. While the Dutchmen argued about which way to head, a horde of bright yellow butterflies seeking land saw the captured ship and alighted upon her rigging, clothing it in gold.

“An omen!” Don Diego cried, and before nightfall carpenters had fashioned a new board with the lovely new name
MARIPOSA
. When it was in place, each member of the crew was issued a bottle of captured Dutch beer with which he toasted the admiral when he poured his bottle over the new name and shouted: “We christen thee
Mariposa
!”

That night, flushed with victory, Don Diego directed his scribe to compose a letter informing King Philip of the capture of the Dutch ship, adding in his own handwriting: “Without the exceptional bravery and shrewd military judgment of the vice-regent and the two vice-admirals, this victory over three huge Dutch ships would not have been possible. They did their fighting on the decks of the enemy and deserve both commendation and promotion.”

During a spell of fine weather on the homeward voyage, when the Caribbean rolled in those long, graceful swells which made it famous, Don Diego told his future son-in-law: “Notice what a fine ship we got for ourselves. When she rolls to port or starboard, doesn’t matter which, she always returns to the upright position and holds it for a long moment. Doesn’t wallow continuously from side to side like a drunken Frenchman.” He pointed out another feature of even greater significance: “Look at the structure. Clinker-built with her strakes overlapping for strength. Not like so many Spanish ships, carvel-built with the boards abutting against each other and liable to split apart in a storm.” But the feature he seemed to like best was one rarely seen
in Spanish ships: “Her hull is double-planked.” Clicking his tongue, he said with great warmth: “When you and I captured this one, we got ourselves a real ship.”

Suffused with this euphoria, Ledesma completed his long run westward, then headed south for home, and as he coasted down the western edge of Cartagena’s island and saw on the cliffs above him the safe, solid town which he commanded, he was inspired to discharge seven salvos to inform the citizens of his victory.

But as he was luxuriating in his defeat of the Dutch and the capture of their fine ship, his future son-in-law, the vice-regent, showed what a perceptive young man he was by asking permission to address the admiral, and when Don Diego gave assent, the young man said: “You know, Excellency, that my great-uncle was once governor of Peru?”

“Of course! That’s one reason why Doña Leonora and I have been so proud to think of you as a possible member of our family. Don Pedro, one of the finest.”

“Then you also know what happened to him?”

Don Diego’s easy smile turned into a frown: “Terribly unfair. Enemies brought all sorts of base charges against him. Reports to the king were biased …”

“And he was hanged.” There was silence in the cabin, after which Don Diego asked: “Why do you remind me of that sad affair?” and the young man said: “Because you must not boast about your victory at Cumaná. Neither in your report to Spain nor in your comments here in Cartagena.”

“What would be the peril … if I did … which I certainly won’t?”

“Envy. The envy that your enemies here and in Spain will feel.” In the silence that followed, the young man mustered his courage, then continued: “You have promoted me to high office. Same with your two nephews. And before we sailed you did likewise with two of your brothers. Tongues will wag. Spies, even aboard this ship, will begin framing their secret reports to the king.”

How well Don Diego knew and appreciated the truth of this warning. Any Spanish governor in charge of a territory far from home ran the constant risk of being summoned back to Spain to refute charges of the basest sort, and the nature of his commission made this inevitable, for he was assigned a position of enormous authority, in charge of riches beyond the imagination even of rapacious men, but given almost no remuneration. The kings of Spain were a
penurious lot, grasping for every gold or silver piece their colonies produced but unwilling to pay a decent wage to their overseers. The Spanish viceroys and governors were
expected
to steal, allowed ten or fifteen years to enrich themselves, and it was supposed that they would return to Spain with wealth great enough to last them and their voluminous families the rest of their lives.

But at the same time the suspicious kings encouraged a constant chain of spies to report on the misbehaviors of their viceroys and governors, with the result that after a man—like, say, Columbus—had been in one of those offices for a dozen years, he was almost certain to be visited by an official audiencia whose members might spend two years looking into his behavior and inviting his enemies to testify in secret against him, with the result that repeatedly an official who had enjoyed extraordinary powers in some far place like Mexico, Panamá or Peru finished his illustrious career by sailing home in chains, to languish in jail after he got there. The unlucky ones were hanged.

Don Diego felt driven to recall the mournful list of Spain’s great conquistadores who had met bitter ends, and as he recited their fates, his son-in-law nodded grimly: “Cristóbal Colón? Home in chains. Cortés in Mexico? Chains. Nuñez de Balboa? One of our finest. Beheaded. The great Pizarro of Peru? Slain by jealous underlings.”

These two good men, one a governor who kept his stealing within reason, the other the scion of a splendid family and himself destined to become a colonial governor, had identified the fundamental reasons why Spanish lands in the New World would fail, during the next four hundred years, to achieve any simple, responsible system of governance, democratic or not, in which good men could rule without stealing and alienating the riches of their countries.

A fatal tradition had already been codified during the rule of Diego Ledesma in Cartagena: provide reasonably good government for the time being, steal as much as decency and the envy of others will allow, and then, because your own position is tenuous, place every relative in the richest position possible so that he, too, can accumulate a fortune. This will mean that even if you are dragged home in disgrace, the members of your family will be left in positions of power, and after a few years they can ease their way back into Spain laden with wealth and titles, to become the new viceroys and governors or to marry into the families who do, and thus find new opportunities to steal new fortunes.

It was a system that provided swings of the pendulum so wide that men became dizzy, and a form of government that wasted the tremendous resources of the New World. With far fewer natural riches, both France and England would establish more lasting forms of good government than Spain with its superior holdings ever did. On that day in 1568 as Don Diego sailed home in triumph, Spain had already been in control of the New World since 1492, more than three-quarters of a century, whereas both France and England would not start their occupancy until the 1620s and 1630s, another half-century later. But the seeds of Spain’s deficiencies had already been sown.

However, neither of these reflective men perceived the lasting damage their philosophy was creating: First, if it was known and condoned that their governor was appropriating public funds, officials on the next tier down were justified in doing the same, although to a more restrained degree. Then those on the third tier were invited to try their luck, and on down to the lowest functionary. All had their hands out and all levels of government proceeded by theft and bribery. Second, and equally destructive, if thousands of men like Don Diego returned each year to Europe with their booty, they left the New World colonies increasingly impoverished.