Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (36 page)

Recounting this policy, Las Casas howled with indignation. “Some complied,” he noted, “and for others it was impossible, and so, falling into the most wretched way of living, some took refuge in the mountains whilst others, since the violence and provocation and injuries on the part of the Christians never ceased, killed some Christians for special damages and tortures that they suffered.” The Christians responded by murdering and torturing their antagonists, “not respecting the human and divine justice and natural law under whose authority they did it.” There is no denying the force of Las Casas’s outrage, but Indians were not the innocents of his imagination; they had been slaveholders long before the Europeans arrived. Fernández de Oviedo noted that in war, contesting Indian tribes “take captives whom they brand and keep as slaves. Each master has his own brand and some masters pull out one front tooth of their slaves as a mark of ownership.”

Demoralized by the Spanish tribute system, and unnerved by their own prophecies, many Indians took steps to escape in the only way left to them. Columbus became aware of the dimensions of the tragedy decimating the Indians when “it was pointed out to him that the natives had been vexed by a famine so widespread that more than 50,000 men had died, and every day they fell everywhere like sickened flocks,” in the words of Peter Martyr.

The reality was even more terrible than famine; it was self-inflicted. The Indians destroyed their stores of bread so that neither they nor the invaders would be able to eat it. They plunged off cliffs, they poisoned themselves with roots, and they starved themselves to death. Oppressed by the impossible requirement to deliver tributes of gold, the Indians were no longer able to tend their fields, or care for their sick, children, and elderly. They had given up and committed mass suicide to avoid being killed or captured by Christians, and to avoid sharing their land with them, their fields, groves, beaches, forests, and women: the future of their people. It was an extraordinary act of despair and self-destruction, so overwhelming that the Spanish could not comprehend it.

All of them, fifty thousand Indians, dead by their own hand.

T
he Spanish refused to shoulder the blame. The mass suicide resulted from the Indians’ “own stubbornness,” said Peter Martyr. “The Indians purposely destroyed all their bread [cassava] fields,” Columbus told his Sovereigns in October 1495. “To prevent my searching for gold the Indians put up as many obstacles as they could.” At the same time, he acknowledged that “nothing else makes them so sad and upset as the fact that we are coming into their territory.” But in reality, the Indians had little interest in gold, especially in comparison to Columbus. In his version, the Indians, after realizing that they would not be able to divert him from his hunt for gold, belatedly “resumed planting and seeding the land because they were starving, but heaven did not help them out with rain this time and they were ruined and died and are dying at an incredible rate.” He ascribed their deaths to “starvation.”

The dwindling number of survivors found themselves trapped in a survivalist endgame. Some took refuge in the mountains, where Spanish dogs set upon them. Those who avoided the dogs succumbed to starvation and illness. Although estimates of the population are inexact, the trend is plain. Of the approximately 300,000 Indians in Hispaniola at the time of Columbus’s first voyage in 1492, 100,000 or so died between 1494 and 1496, half of them during the mass suicide. Las Casas estimated that the Indian population in 1496 was only one-third of what it had been in 1494. (“What a splendid harvest and how quickly they reaped it!” he wrote acidly.) Twelve years later, in 1508, a census counted 60,000 Indians, or one-fifth of the original population, and by 1548 Fernández de Oviedo found only five hundred Indians, the survivors of the hundreds of thousands who had populated the island when Columbus arrived, and who had seen him as the fulfillment of a longstanding prophecy. It was only now that the meaning of that prophecy became clear: his presence meant their extinction.

In time the Taínos made peace with their adversaries. A tribe combining both Caribs and Taíno emerged, and seemed to point the way to coexistence. The arrival of Columbus’s fleets, one after the other, disturbed the spontaneous compromise, and added a new level of stress and conflict to this volatile society. The leading figure was Columbus’s adversary, Caonabó, the Carib cacique who married a Taíno wife, Behechio’s sister, Anacaona. Not long before Columbus’s arrival, other Taínos had married Caribs who renounced cannibalism; in this, Caonabó and Anacaona were not alone. A third tribe, the Ciguayo, appeared to be a hybrid of the two former adversaries. Las Casas reported that they had forgotten their native tongue and instead “spoke a strange language, almost barbaric” that might have combined their idiom with the Taínos’ speech. Like the Caribs, they grew their hair long, and used liberal applications of red and black war paint, but unlike them, the Ciguayo did not poison their arrows. It was the Ciguayo who fired off arrows at Columbus when he first arrived at the Dominican Republic, and to memorialize the attack, he named the scene of the battle the Gulf of Arrows.

At the time Columbus arrived on the scene, all three tribes—Taíno, Carib, and Ciguayo—were trying to preserve peace and prevent mutual destruction with intertribal marriages, a strategy akin to the many liaisons between the royal families of Spain and Portugal. But the Spanish presence brought the Indian alliances to a halt, and pitched the Indian nations into turmoil.

 

C
olumbus’s sins—at least, those against the Spanish—eventually returned to haunt him. On August 5, 1495, a fleet of four caravels sailed from Spain under the leadership of Juan de Aguado, a martinet who had been among those who sailed with Columbus at the outset of the second voyage, and who had returned to Spain along with other sick and disaffected would-be conquerors under Torres’s command. Thanks to the efforts of Father Buil, sentiment in Spain had turned decisively against the Admiral, and Aguado and his aides returned to Hispaniola with orders to investigate Columbus. At the same time, they carried supplies and—because gold remained paramount—a metallurgist.

On his arrival in October 1495, Aguado made a grand entrance, accompanied by trumpets, and assumed command of the little outpost in the wilderness. Bartholomew, present at La Isabela during the humiliating spectacle, sent a letter of caution to Columbus, who had gone inland to the mines of the Cibao. Returning to the fort, the Admiral surprised everyone by listening respectfully to the new orders Aguado brought from the Sovereigns.

Columbus was to reduce the number of men on the royal payroll to five hundred, and to make sure that everyone received his just share of provisions. Complaints that Columbus had played favorites reverberated from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Worse, everyone else at La Isabela subsisted on short rations, despite the land’s incredible fertility. “The soil is very black and good,” observed Cuneo. “We brought with us from Spain all sorts of seeds, and tried those that would do well and those that could not.” The successes included radishes, squash, onions, lettuce, parsley, melon, and cucumber. Chickpeas and beans shot up in a matter of days, “then all at once they wilt and die.” No one knew why. The Spaniards eventually lost interest in growing their own food, “the reason being that nobody wants to live permanently in these countries.” Infected with gold lust, they preferred to rely on supplies of foodstuffs from Spain and cassava bread.

Listening to the outpouring of complaints about Columbus, Aguado noticed that the healthiest Europeans engaged in rogue pursuits: petty thievery, searching for gold for themselves, and trapping slaves. He painted a sorry portrait of the Spanish colony’s inability to feed itself in the midst of plenty.

Absorbing this harsh testimony and surveying the degradation into which La Isabela had fallen, Columbus realized he had little choice but to suspend his exploration of Hispaniola and return to Spain to defend himself. The doors of royal favor and patronage were creaking shut slowly but unmistakably, and he dreaded being cast out. Other mariners stood ready to take his place. All they needed was the Sovereigns’ blessing, and Columbus’s monopoly on discovery in the name of Spain would end, and with it, the prestige and riches he had been promised.

 

W
hile he pondered his fate, Columbus, a lifelong autodidact, applied himself to studying the Taínos with the thoroughness he brought to his other endeavors, especially their spirituality, which, he learned, was far more intricate and nuanced than their simple way of life—their small fields, primitive huts, and long canoes—had led him to expect. He noted that their numerous chieftains maintained private shrines in a “house apart from the town in which there is nothing except some carved wooden images.” When they saw Europeans coming, Columbus said, they hid them “in the woods for fear that they will be taken from them; what is even more laughable, they have the custom of stealing each other’s
cemís.
” There was more; the statues were the focus of a private, mysterious, and transformative rite. The images, he added, were accompanied by “a well-made table, round like a wooden dish, in which there is kept a powder that they place on the head of the
cemí
with a certain ceremony. Then, through a cane having two branches that they insert in the nose, they sniff up this powder. The words that they spoke none of our men could understand. This powder makes them lose their senses and rave like drunken men.”

The Taínos used the little
cemís
to commune with the spirit world, and as Columbus observed to his dismay and amusement, to manipulate members of their tribe who had not been initiated into the idol’s mysteries. He told of a
cemí
that “gave a loud cry and spoke in their language.” On closer examination, he discovered that the “statue was artfully constructed,” the base connected by a tube or “blowgun” to a “dark side of the house, covered by branches and leaves, where was hidden a person who said whatever the cacique wanted him to say (as well as one can speak through a blowgun).”

To expose the sleight of hand, several Spaniards toppled the talking
cemí
, and the cacique, deeply embarrassed, pleaded with them to say nothing to his tribesmen “because it was by means of that deception that he kept them in obedience to him. . . . Only the cacique knows of and abets this fraud, by means of which he gets all the tribute he wants from his people.” (Surely that cynical combination of superstition and deception to control the faithful occurred nowhere in Spain, or anywhere else in Europe.)

Caonabó elucidated other Taíno burial rites for caciques, as Columbus took notes. (“They open the cacique and dry him before a fire that he may keep whole. In the case of others they preserve only the head.”) This sojourn through the Taínos’ underworld prompted the Admiral, already prone to a morbid turn of mind, to ponder questions of mortality. “I have taken pains to learn what they believe,” he wrote, “and know as to where the dead go, especially from Canaobó,” who told the explorer that they went “to a valley to join their forefathers.”

 

T
his was as far as Columbus dared to venture into the twilight of the Taínos’ spiritual beliefs and practices. He assigned Ramon Pané, one of the six priests on the expedition, to go further still, “to set down all their rites.” This Father Pané did, and compiled a report based on his four years of living in close quarters with the Taínos. His revelations about their religious practices, and the Spanish interference in these rites, contained so many unpleasant truths that Columbus dismissed them as fiction, and considered that “the only sure thing to be learned from it is that the Indians have a certain natural reverence for the after-life and believe in the immortality of their soul.” Yet he included the controversial document in his chronicle, which his son reproduced more or less in full, realizing, perhaps, that it offered the best explanation of the deterioration of relations between the Spanish and the Indians.