Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 (44 page)

By the time Bartholomew Columbus, “the Advancer,” returned from his pacification mission in Xaraguá, Roldán’s followers had concocted a scheme to stab him and string him up with a rope. Acting on hints of a conspiracy, Bartholomew hastily jailed one of the rebels, Barahona, and condemned him to death, but later changed his mind. “If God had not inspired the Adelantado not to carry out Barahona’s death sentence,” Ferdinand maintained, “they doubtless would have killed him then and there.” Instead, Bartholomew uncovered the full extent of Roldán’s plot, in which the rebels would convert a fort named Concepción into a bastion from which they could launch attacks at will across Hispaniola.

Roldán was already familiar with this fort, having once been assigned there by Diego Columbus to pacify surrounding Indians, and while in attendance, he pretended to follow orders. However, the fort’s commander, Miguel Ballester, was not taken in by the deception and warned the Adelantado of the mutiny-in-the-making. Bartholomew then sequestered himself in the fortress, thinking his presence would repel Roldán. But the unpredictable rebel went straight to the fort and, as if he had every right to do so, insisted on readying the caravel to carry him and his men away to the relative safety of a voyage to Spain. Although Roldán was better off in his kingdom in exile, he pursued his conflicting strategies at the same time, much to the confusion of his superiors.

Impossible, Bartholomew said on hearing the demand. Roldán was not capable of sailing the caravel to Spain, nor were his followers. They might be able to launch her, but they did not know the sea, and they would perish. Bartholomew spoke as an experienced navigator, “but they were landlubbers who knew nothing,” said Ferdinand.

Bartholomew ordered Roldán to resign his office as the mayor; predictably, Roldán refused to comply until King Ferdinand himself so commanded. He declared that he could “expect no justice from the Adelantado,” that is, Bartholomew, who would only find some way to kill or harm him. Enraged, Roldán insisted he was a “reasonable man,” and to prove it, he would postpone sailing off in the beached caravel and instead coexist peacefully on the island at a place of Bartholomew’s choosing, but Roldán expected concessions in exchange for the offer. When he learned the Adelantado wanted to install an Indian who had converted to Christianity and was loyal to Columbus, Roldán rejected the idea, claiming the settlement lacked sufficient supplies. Instead, they would live somewhere else, of Roldán’s choosing.

The contest of wills between the two adversaries ended only when the rebel leader stomped off.

 

D
espite his angry demands for a safe haven on Hispaniola, Roldán still yearned for the caravel and the promise of escape to Spain. He returned to La Isabela to take possession of the vessel, but even with sixty-five men at the ready—more than enough to operate the ship—Roldán could not launch it. Instead, they looted the crown’s arsenal, equipping themselves with weapons, and the storehouse, commandeering food, clothing, and anything else they desired. While they raided the storehouse, Bartholomew looked on, powerless to stop them. Fearing for his life, he went into seclusion within the fortress, taking a few servants as bodyguards, but not before Roldán tried to lure him to his side to take a stand against the Admiral himself. That, of course, Bartholomew would not do.

Learning that Bartholomew had dispatched armed men to protect Diego from further abuse, Roldán summoned his rebel force, and left La Isabela, and for the time being, the plan to return to Spain. They moved steadily through the thick tropical undergrowth, slaughtering cattle for food as they went, and taking other beasts as needed for the long trek to Xaraguá, the province that Bartholomew had recently pacified. They had their reasons for selecting this remote location as their destination. “It was the pleasantest and most fertile part of the island,” Ferdinand explained, “with the most civilized natives and especially the best-looking and best-natured women in the country: This last was their strongest motive for going there.” With these seductive promises Roldán, the Lucifer of the Enterprise of the Indies, offered the men everything Columbus withheld: wealth, women, a life of ease, and a sense of control over their own destiny. Roldán’s way offered no promise of redemption, no official recognition, and no titles, only a pleasurable limbo.

 

O
n their way to Xaraguá, Roldán’s men planned one last, murderous scheme. They would overrun the little hamlet of Concepción, and, if they found Bartholomew, the Adelantado, they would kill him. If he was absent, they would lay waste to the town. When word of the plot reached Bartholomew, he countered with a strategy of his own, promising his men “two slaves apiece,” said Ferdinand, in exchange for their support. It was a desperate maneuver, but he realized that even those who nominally supported him were tempted by Roldán’s offer. Bartholomew summoned his willpower and kept his followers’ loyalty. If he could not maintain his rule by the power of logic, he was prepared to fight.

He assembled his men, and set off with determined swagger to face the forces of Francisco Roldán, who, intimidated by this convincing show of force, retreated to Xaraguá, dispensing anti-Columbus propaganda as he went. With some justification, Roldán claimed that Bartholomew was cruel and greedy in his treatment of both Indians and Christians; he demanded impossible tributes and broke the spirit and drained the resources of everyone with whom he came into contact. Even if the Indians complied with the onerous tributes, the vicious Adelantado would only demand more, despite the Sovereigns’ objections—an unlikely scenario. Roldán, in contrast, proclaimed himself the Indians’ champion; if they were unable or unwilling to stand up for their rights, he and his supporters would take up their cause. His unjustified promises persuaded the Indians to defy the tribute system. In reality, Bartholomew received nothing from distant villages, and he was afraid to demand it from those nearby and so push the Indians even deeper into Roldán’s camp.

Roldán found a potent ally in the chieftain Guarionex, who formed clandestine alliances with the other caciques and pledged to kill the Spanish invaders. The Indians felt confident that they could exterminate the outsiders who had come from the ships in a series of coordinated surprise uprisings. “Their only way of reckoning time or anything else being their fingers,” Ferdinand explained, “the Indians agreed to launch the attack on the first day of the next full moon.”

All was ready, until one of the chieftains decided to attack prematurely, either to portray himself as a hero to his people, or, less likely, because he was “too poor an astronomer to know for sure the first day of the full moon.” The attack failed miserably. Seeking safety, the disgraced chieftain skulked back to Guarionex, who had him executed for carelessness.

The reversal of fortune reached all the way to Roldán, whose men had expected the Indians to do the slaughtering. Scuttling the pact with Guarionex, they retreated once again to Xaraguá, where they maintained the pretense that they, the Spanish rebels, protected the Indians from the predatory colonial policies of Columbus. “Actually, they were naught but plain thieves,” observed Ferdinand, although much the same thing could be said of many of the men who served under Christopher Columbus, men who had exploited and underestimated the Indians for nearly eight years, and counting.

Roldán’s misstep occurred when he renewed his promise to protect the Indians from Bartholomew’s demands for a tribute, and then seized an even greater tribute for himself. He insisted that the chieftain Manicaotex offer “a calabash filled with gold dust worth three marks every three months,” in Ferdinand’s words. To ensure that Manicaotex obeyed, even though the supply of gold dust was nearly depleted by this time, Roldán took the chieftain’s son and nephew hostage. With characteristic duplicity, he maintained that his gesture demonstrated friendship.

Faced with an impossible situation, Bartholomew and his allies stood by helplessly as their support from their Indian and Spanish allies wilted in the tropical heat. It appeared increasingly likely that either the Spanish rebels or disenchanted Indians, or perhaps an unholy alliance between the two, would wipe out Bartholomew and the loyalists, and claim the island of Hispaniola, bringing a violent end to the Columbian experiment.

 

A
mid the gathering despair, the men at Santo Domingo spotted two Spanish ships on the horizon. They constituted the supply fleet from Spain, carrying food, men, weapons, and provisions needed for survival in the Indies. Roldán and his men intended to plunder the new arrivals as soon as they reached Santo Domingo, but Bartholomew had the advantage of superior intelligence, and he happened to be closer to the port. He placed sentries along the paths leading to the little town to deter Roldán’s men so that he, not the rebels, would welcome the supply ships to the troubled realm. And so he did.

Even then, Bartholomew tried to improvise a fragile, temporary peace with the rebels to present a unified front to the newcomers. He dispatched one of the captains, Pedro Fernández Coronel, reputed to be “a man of worth and honor,” according to Ferdinand. From the moment he confirmed that Christopher Columbus had safely arrived in Spain, where he received an enthusiastic reception from the Sovereigns, he had won Bartholomew’s trust. The Adelantado sent Coronel to convey the situation to Roldán’s rebels, but the newly arrived
capitán
found himself staring at the tips of crossbows and arrows. His prepared speech went undelivered. Instead, he spoke privately with a few of the insurrectionists, who made no promises and hastened back to their stronghold at Xaraguá to await the Admiral’s return to Hispaniola.

Bartholomew’s men learned that Roldán and others planned to tarnish Columbus’s name in Spain by means of poison-pen letters. Peter Martyr, from his vantage point in Italy, later wrote that “the rebels, complaining seriously about both [Columbus] brothers, called them unjust, impious, enemies of the Spanish blood”—code for their Genoese origins—“and squanderers, because they took delight in torturing over trifles, hanging, slaughtering, and killing in all kinds of ways.” The rebels, he continued, “depicted them as ambitious, arrogant, envious, unbearable tyrants: so they deserted them, being just wild animals thirsty for blood and enemies of the Sovereigns.” Roldán’s men claimed that they had seen Columbus and his two brothers plotting obsessively to take over the islands, and they claimed that the Columbus brothers “would allow no one but their own men to reach the gold mines or gather it.” From the Sovereigns’ perspective, that was precisely what Columbus should have been doing.

The rebels protested that the Admiral resorted to calling them horrible names, “wicked and quarrelsome, pimps, thieves, rapists, kidnappers, outlaws, men deprived of any value or good sense, brainless perjurers, liars either with previous criminal records or escapees fearing being sentenced by judges for crimes.” (The accusations stung because they contained considerable truth.) They had heard that Columbus had characterized them as men “originally brought to dig and provide services,” yet “did not even walk out of the house.” Instead, “they have the poor natives carry them throughout the whole island, like high-ranking magistrates.” Columbus related how the rebels, “so as not to lose their blood-shedding habit and test their strength draw swords and compete with each other in cutting off the heads of those innocent people”—the Indians—“with one blow; the man who more swiftly decapitated an unfortunate native in a single blow was declared the strongest and more worthy of honor among them.” Even the rebels realized that such appalling behavior would destroy their reputation, if not in Hispaniola, then in Spain.

 

A
s the controversy swept Hispaniola, several ships belonging to Columbus’s fleet appeared off the coast of Xaraguá, but they were not the ones that Roldán had been expecting.

The three supply ships had made a speedy passage since leaving the Canary Islands in June, too speedy, in fact. When the squadron arrived in the Caribbean, the pilots, said Ferdinand, “were carried so far westward that they arrived on the coast of Xaraguá, where the rebels were.” If they had reached their intended destination, Santo Domingo, they would have enjoyed Bartholomew’s protection. Instead, the ships were overrun with Roldán’s rebels, who falsely claimed that the Adelantado had ordered them to “secure provisions and pacify the countryside.” One captain, Alonso Sánchez de Carvajal, saw through the ruse and attempted to persuade Roldán to end his revolt and declare his loyalty to Bartholomew, but sentiment among the crew, already influenced by Roldán’s men, and their alluring promises, favored the rebels over the loyalists.

Frustrated, Sánchez de Carvajal joined forces with the two other captains to send a small party of salaried workers to the mines near Santo Domingo. The unfavorable weather and currents that had brought the ships to Xaraguá still held sway; it might take months for the ships to reach Santo Domingo, so the workers, forty in all, planned to set out on foot, under the command of Juan Antonio Colombo. Pedro de Arana would take charge of the three ships, and Sánchez de Carvajal resumed negotiating with Roldán’s representatives.

The situation darkened when most of the workers deserted to join Roldán, and Colombo was left with only six or seven men. Furious, Colombo confronted Roldán, insisting that the laborers had come to the Indies to work, not to spend their days drinking Indian wine and their nights with the Indian women. If Roldán refused to cooperate, it would be obvious to all that he had affronted the Admiral and the Sovereigns. Skillful as ever at devising excuses, Roldán pleaded helplessness and ignorance. He could not tell the unruly men how to behave. “His monastery,” he explained, “was governed by rules that denied the habit to no man.”

Juan Antonio Colombo realized he had been defeated, so he and his handful of loyalists returned to the ships to sail back to Santo Domingo. Battling adverse wind and weather, his food supply rotting in the heat, Sánchez de Carvajal ran onto a shoal, which tore away the rudder and ruptured the keel, admitting so much seawater that the afflicted ship barely reached her mooring. After completing the difficult passage from the rebel outpost of Xaraguá, the three captains were gratified to see the Admiral himself, having completed his northerly passage from Trinidad.