Book: Christopher Columbus, Volume 7

F >> Filson Young >> Christopher Columbus, Volume 7




"I should know how to remedy all this, and the rest of what has been
said and has taken place since I have been in the Indies, if my
disposition would allow me to seek my own advantage, and if it
seemed honourable to me to do so, but the maintenance of justice and
the extension of the dominion of her Highness has hitherto kept me
down. Now that so much gold is found, a dispute arises as to which
brings more profit, whether to go about robbing or to go to the
mines. A hundred castellanos are as easily obtained for a woman as
for a farm, and it is very general, and there are plenty of dealers
who go about looking for girls: those from nine to ten are now in
demand, and for all ages a good price must be paid.

"I assert that the violence of the calumny of turbulent persons has
injured me more than my services have profited me; which is a bad
example for the present and for the future. I take my oath that a
number of men have gone to the Indies who did not deserve water in
the sight of God and of the world; and now they are returning
thither, and leave is granted them.

"I assert that when I declared that the Commander could not grant
immunities, I did what he desired, although I told him that it was
to cause delay until their Highnesses should, receive information
from the country, and should command anew what might be for their
service.

"He excited their enmity against me, and he seems, from what took
place and from his behaviour, to have come as my enemy and as a very
vehement one; or else the report is true that he has spent much to
obtain this employment. I do not know more about it than what I
hear. I never heard of an inquisitor gathering rebels together and
accepting them, and others devoid of credit and unworthy of it, as
witnesses against their Governor.

"If their Highnesses were to make a general inquisition there, I
assure you that they would look upon it as a great wonder that the
island does not founder.

"I think your Ladyship will remember that when, after losing my
sails, I was driven into Lisbon by a tempest, I was falsely accused
of having gone there to the King in order to give him the Indies.
Their Highnesses afterwards learned the contrary, and that it was
entirely malicious.

"Although I may know but little, I do not think any one considers me
so stupid as not to know that even if the Indies were mine I could
not uphold myself without the help of some Prince.

"If this be so, where could I find better support and security than
in the King and Queen, our Lords, who have raised me from nothing to
such great honour, and are the most exalted Princes of the world on
sea and on land, and who consider that I have rendered them service,
and who preserve to me my privileges and rewards: and if any one
infringes them, their Highnesses increase them still more, as was
seen in the case of John Aguado; and they order great honour to be
conferred upon me, and, as I have already said, their Highnesses
have received service from me, and keep my sons in their household;
all which could by no means happen with another prince, for where
there is no affection, everything else fails.

"I have now spoken thus in reply to a malicious slander, but against
my will, as it is a thing which should not recur to memory even in
dreams; for the Commander Bobadilla maliciously seeks in this way to
set his own conduct and actions in a brighter light; but I shall
easily show him that his small knowledge and great cowardice,
together with his inordinate cupidity, have caused him to fail
therein.

"I have already said that I wrote to him and to the friars, and
immediately set out, as I told him, almost alone, because all the
people were with the Adelantado, and likewise in order to prevent
suspicion on his part. When he heard this, he seized Don Diego and
sent him on board a caravel loaded with irons, and did the same to
me upon my arrival, and afterwards to the Adelantado when he came;
nor did I speak to him any more, nor to this day has he allowed any
one to speak to me; and I take my oath that I cannot understand why
I am made a prisoner.

"He made it his first business to seize the gold, which he did
without measuring or weighing it and in my absence; he said that he
wanted it to pay the people, and according to what I hear he
assigned the chief part to himself and sent fresh exchangers for the
exchanges. Of this gold I had put aside certain specimens, very big
lumps, like the eggs of geese, hens, and pullets, and of many other
shapes, which some persons had collected in a short space of time,
in order that their Highnesses might be gladdened, and might
comprehend the business upon seeing a quantity of large stones full
of gold. This collection was the first to be given away, with
malicious intent, so that their Highnesses should not hold the
matter in any account until he has feathered his nest, which he is
in great haste to do. Gold which is for melting diminishes at the
fire: some chains which would weigh about twenty marks have never
been seen again.

"I have been more distressed about this matter of the gold than even
about the pearls, because I have not brought it to her Highness.

"The Commander at once set to work upon anything which he thought
would injure me. I have already said that with six hundred thousand
I could pay every one without defrauding anybody, and that I had
more than four millions of tenths and constabulary [dues] without
touching the gold. He made some free gifts which are ridiculous,
though I believe that he began by assigning the chief part to
himself. Their Highnesses will find it out when they order an
account to be obtained from him, especially if I should be present
thereat. He does nothing but reiterate that a large sum is owing,
and it is what I have said, and even less. I have been much
distressed that there should be sent concerning me an inquisitor who
is aware that if the inquisition which he returns is very grave he
will remain in possession of the government.

"Would that it had pleased our Lord that their Highnesses had sent
him or some one else two years ago, for I know that I should now be
free from scandal and infamy, and that my honour would not be taken
from me, nor should I lose it. God is just, and will make known the
why and the wherefore.

"They judge me over there as they would a governor who had gone to
Sicily, or to a city or town placed under regular government, and
where the laws can be observed in their entirety without fear of
ruining everything; and I am greatly injured thereby.

"I ought to be judged as a captain who went from Spain to the Indies
to conquer a numerous and warlike people, whose customs and religion
are very contrary to ours; who live in rocks and mountains, without
fixed settlements, and not like ourselves: and where, by the Divine
Will, I have placed under the dominion of the King and Queen, our
Sovereigns, a second world, through which Spain, which was reckoned
a poor country, has become the richest.

"I ought to be judged as a captain who for such a long time up to
this day has borne arms without laying them aside for an hour, and
by gentlemen adventurers and by custom, and not by letters, unless
they were from Greeks or Romans or others of modern times of whom
there are so many and such noble examples in Spain; or otherwise I
receive great injury, because in the Indies there is neither town
nor settlement.

"The gate to the gold and pearls is now open, and plenty of
everything--precious stones, spices and a thousand other things--may
be surely expected, and never could a worse misfortune befall me:
for by the name of our Lord the first voyage would yield them just
as much as would the traffic of Arabia Felix as far as Mecca, as I
wrote to their Highnesses by Antonio de Tomes in my reply respecting
the repartition of the sea and land with the Portuguese; and
afterwards it would equal that of Calicut, as I told them and put in
writing at the monastery of the Mejorada.

"The news of the gold that I said I would give is, that on the day
of the Nativity, while I was much tormented, being harassed by
wicked Christians and by Indians, and when I was on the point of
giving up everything, and if possible escaping from life, our Lord
miraculously comforted me and said, 'Fear not violence, I will
provide for all things: the seven years of the term of the gold have
not elapsed, and in that and in everything else I will afford thee a
remedy.'

"On that day I learned that there were eighty leagues of land with
mines at every point thereof. The opinion now is that it is all
one. Some have collected a hundred and twenty castellanos in one
day, and others ninety, and even the number of two hundred and fifty
has been reached. From fifty to seventy, and in many more cases
from fifteen to fifty, is considered a good day's work, and many
carry it on. The usual quantity is from six to twelve, and any one
obtaining less than this is not satisfied. It seems to me that these
mines are like others, and do not yield equally every day. The
mines are new, and so are the workers: it is the opinion of
everybody that even if all Castile were to go there, every
individual, however inexpert he might be, would not obtain less than
one or two castellanos daily, and now it is only commencing. It is
true that they keep Indians, but the business is in the hands of the
Christians. Behold what discernment Bobadilla had, when he gave up
everything for nothing, and four millions of tenths, without any
reason or even being requested, and without first notifying it to
their Highnesses. And this is not the only loss.

"I know that my errors have not been committed with the intention of
doing evil, and I believe that their Highnesses regard the matter
just as I state it: and I know and see that they deal mercifully
even with those who maliciously act to their disservice. I believe
and consider it very certain that their clemency will be both
greater and more abundant towards me, for I fell therein through
ignorance and the force of circumstances, as they will know fully
hereafter; and I indeed am their creature, and they will look upon
my services, and will acknowledge day by day that they are much
profited. They will place everything in the balance, even as Holy
Scripture tells us good and evil will be at the day of judgment.

"If, however, they command that another person do judge me, which I
cannot believe, and that it be by inquisition in the Indies, I very
humbly beseech them to send thither two conscientious and honourable
persons at my expense, who I believe will easily, now that gold is
discovered, find five marks in four hours. In either case it is
needful for them to provide for this matter.

"The Commander on his arrival at San Domingo took up his abode in my
house, and just as he found it so he appropriated everything to
himself. Well and good; perhaps he was in want of it. A pirate
never acted thus towards a merchant. About my papers I have a
greater grievance, for he has so completely deprived me of them that
I have never been able to obtain a single one from him; and those
that would have been most useful in my exculpation are precisely
those which he has kept most concealed. Behold the just and honest
inquisitor! Whatever he may have done, they tell me that there has
been an end to justice, except in an arbitrary form. God, our Lord,
is present with His strength and wisdom, as of old, and always
punishes in the end, especially ingratitude and injuries."

We must keep in mind the circumstances in which this letter was written
if we are to judge it and the writer wisely. It is a sad example of
querulous complaint, in which everything but the writer's personal point
of view is ignored. No one indeed is more terrible in this world than
the Man with a Grievance. How rarely will human nature in such
circumstances retire into the stronghold of silence! Columbus is asking
for pity; but as we read his letter we incline to pity him on grounds
quite different from those which he represented. He complains that the
people he was sent to govern have waged war against him as against a
Moor; he complains of Ojeda and of Vincenti Yanez Pinzon; of Adrian de
Moxeca, and of every other person whom it was his business to govern and
hold in restraint. He complains of the colonists--the very people, some
of them, whom he himself took and impressed from the gaols and purlieus
of Cadiz; and then he mingles pious talk about Saint Peter and Daniel in
the den of lions with notes on the current price of little girls and big
lumps of gold like the eggs of geese, hens, and pullets. He complains
that he is judged as a man would be judged who had been sent out to
govern a ready-made colony, and represents instead that he went out to
conquer a numerous and warlike people "whose custom and religion are very
contrary to ours, and who lived in rocks and mountains"; forgetting that
when it suited him for different purposes he described the natives as so
peaceable and unwarlike that a thousand of them would not stand against
one Christian, and that in any case he was sent out to create a
constitution and not merely to administer one. Very sore indeed is
Christopher as he reveals himself in this letter, appealing now to his
correspondent, now to the King and Queen, now to that God who is always
on the side of the complainant. "God our Lord is present with His
strength and wisdom, as of old, and always punishes in the end,
especially ingratitude and injuries." Not boastfulness and weakness, let
us hope, or our poor Admiral will come off badly.




CHAPTER II

CRISIS IN THE ADMIRAL'S LIFE

Columbus was not far wrong in his estimate of the effect likely to be
produced by his manacles, and when the ships of Villegio arrived at Cadiz
in October, the spectacle of an Admiral in chains produced a degree of
commiseration which must have exceeded his highest hopes. He was now in
his fiftieth year and of an extremely venerable appearance, his kindling
eye looking forth from under brows of white, his hair and beard
snow-white, his face lined and spiritualised with suffering and sorrow.
It must be remembered that before the Spanish people he had always
appeared in more or less state. They had not that intimacy with him, an
intimacy which perhaps brought contempt, which the people in Espanola
enjoyed; and in Spain, therefore, the contrast between his former
grandeur and this condition of shame and degradation was the more
striking. It was a fact that the people of Spain could not neglect. It
touched their sense of the dramatic and picturesque, touched their
hearts also perhaps--hearts quick to burn, quick to forget. They had
forgotten him before, now they burned with indignation at the picture of
this venerable and much-suffering man arriving in disgrace.

His letter to Dofia Juana, hastily despatched by him, probably through
the office of some friendly soul on board, immediately on his arrival at
Cadiz, was the first news from the ship received by the King and Queen,
and naturally it caused them a shock of surprise. It was followed by the
despatches from Bobadilla and by a letter from the Alcalde of Cadiz
announcing that Columbus and his brothers were in his custody awaiting
the royal orders. Perhaps Ferdinand and Isabella had already repented
their drastic action and had entertained some misgivings as to its
results; but it is more probable that they had put it out of their heads
altogether, and that their hasty action now was prompted as much by the
shock of being recalled to a consciousness of the troubled state of
affairs in the New World as by any real regret for what they had done.
Moreover they had sent out Bobadilla to quiet things down; and the first
result of it was that Spain was ringing with the scandal of the Admiral's
treatment. In that Spanish world, unsteadfast and unstable, when one end
of the see-saw was up the other must be down; and it was Columbus who now
found himself high up in the heavens of favour, and Bobadilla who was
seated in the dust. Equipoise any kind was apparently a thing
impossible; if one man was right the other man must be wrong; no excuses
for Bobadilla; every excuse for the Admiral.

The first official act, therefore, was an order for the immediate release
of the Admiral and his brothers, followed by an invitation for him to
proceed without delay to the Court at Granada, and an order for the
immediate payment to him of the sum of 2000 ducats [perhaps $250,000 in
the year 2000 D.W.] this last no ungenerous gift to a Viceroy whose
pearl accounts were in something less than order. Perhaps Columbus had
cherished the idea of appearing dramatically before the very Court in his
rags and chains; but the cordiality of their letter as well as the gift
of money made this impossible. Instead, not being a man to do things by
halves, he equipped himself in his richest and most splendid garments,
got together the requisite number of squires and pages, and duly
presented himself at Granada in his full dignity. The meeting was an
affecting one, touched with a humanity which has survived the intervening
centuries, as a touch of true humanity will when details of mere parade
and etiquette have long perished. Perhaps the Admiral, inspired with a
deep sense of his wrongs, meant to preserve a very stiff and cold
demeanour at the beginning of this interview; but when he looked into the
kind eyes of Isabella and saw them suffused with tears at the thought of
his sorrows all his dignity broke down; the tears came to his own eyes,
and he wept there naturally like a child. Ferdinand looking on kind but
uncomfortable; Isabella unaffectedly touched and weeping; the Admiral, in
spite of his scarlet cloak and golden collar and jewelled sword, in spite
of equerries, squires, pages and attendants, sobbing on his knees like a
child or an old man-these were the scenes and kindly emotions of this
historic moment.


The tears were staunched by kindly royal words and handkerchiefs supplied
by attendant pages; sobbings breaking out again, but on the whole soon
quieted; King and Queen raising the gouty Christopher from his knees,
filling the air with kind words of sympathy, praise, and encouragement;
the lonely worn heart, somewhat arid of late, and parched from want of
human sympathy, much refreshed by this dew of kindness. The Admiral was
soon himself again, and he would not have been himself if upon recovering
he had not launched out into what some historians call a "lofty and
dignified vindication of his loyalty and zeal." No one, indeed, is
better than the Admiral at such lofty and dignified vindications. He
goes into the whole matter and sets forth an account of affairs at
Espanola from his own point of view; and can even (so high is the
thermometer of favour) safely indulge in a little judicious
self-depreciation, saying that if he has erred it has not been from want
of zeal but from want of experience in dealing with the kind of material
he has been set to govern. All this is very human, natural, and
understandable; product of that warm emotional atmosphere, bedewed with
tears, in which the Admiral finds himself; and it is not long before the
King and Queen, also moved to it by the emotional temperature, are
expressing their unbroken and unbounded confidence in him and
repudiating the acts of Bobadilla, which they declare to have been
contrary to their instructions; undertaking also that he shall be
immediately dismissed from his post. Poor Bobadilla is not here in the
warm emotional atmosphere; he had his turn of it six months ago, when no
powers were too high or too delicate to be entrusted to him; he is out
in the cold at the other end of the see-saw, which has let him down to
the ground with a somewhat sudden thump.


Columbus, relying on the influence of these emotions, made bold to ask
that his property in the island should be restored to him, which was
immediately granted; and also to request that he should be reinstated in
his office of Viceroy and allowed to return at once in triumph to
Espanola. But emotions are unstable things; they present a yielding
surface which will give to any extent, but which, when it has hardened
again after the tears have evaporated, is often found to be in much the
same condition as before. At first promises were made that the whole
matter should be fully gone into; but when it came to cold fact,
Ferdinand was obliged to recognise that this whole business of discovery
and colonisation had become a very different thing to what it had been
when Columbus was the only discoverer; and he was obviously of opinion
that, as Columbus's office had once been conveniently withdrawn from him,
it would only be disastrous to reinstate him in it. Of course he did not
say so at once; but reasons were given for judicious delay in the
Admiral's reappointment. It was represented to him that the colony,
being in an extremely unsettled state, should be given a short period of
rest, and also that it would be as well for him to wait until the people
who had given him so much trouble in the island could be quietly and
gradually removed. Two years was the time mentioned as suitable for an
interregnum, and it is probable that it was the intention of Isabella,
although not of Ferdinand, to restore Columbus to his office at the end
of that time.


In the meantime it became necessary to appoint some one to supersede
Bobadilla; for the news that arrived periodically from Espanola during
the year showed that he had entirely failed in his task of reducing the
island to order. For the wholesome if unequal rigours of Columbus
Bobadilla had substituted laxness and indulgence, with the result that
the whole colony was rapidly reduced to a state of the wildest disorder.
Vice and cruelty were rampant; in fact the barbarities practised upon the
natives were so scandalous that even Spanish opinion, which was never
very sympathetic to heathen suffering, was thoroughly shocked and
alarmed. The Sovereigns therefore appointed Nicholas de Ovando to go out
and take over the command, with instructions to use very drastic means
for bringing the colony to order. How he did it we shall presently see;
in the meantime all that was known of him (the man not having been tried
yet) was that he was a poor knight of Calatrava, a man respected in royal
circles for the performance of minor official duties, but no very popular
favourite; honest according to his lights--lights turned rather low and
dim, as was often the case in those days. A narrow-minded man also,
without sympathy or imagination, capable of cruelty; a tough,
stiff-necked stock of a man, fit to deal with Bobadilla perhaps, but
hardly fit to deal with the colony. Spain in those days was not a
nursery of administration. Of all the people who were sent out
successively to govern Espanola and supersede one another, the only one
who really seems to have had the necessary natural ability, had he but
been given the power, was Bartholomew Columbus; but unfortunately things
were in such a state that the very name of Columbus was enough to bar a
man from acceptance as a governor of Espanola.

It was not for any lack of powers and equipment that this procession of
governors failed in their duties. We have seen with what authority
Bobadilia had been entrusted; and Ovando had even greater advantages.
The instructions he received showed that the needs of the new colonies
were understood by Ferdinand and Isabella, if by no one else. Ovando was
not merely appointed Governor of Espanola but of the whole of the new
territory discovered in the west, his seat of government being San
Domingo. He was given the necessary free hand in the matters of
punishment, confiscation, and allotment of lands. He was to revoke the
orders which had been made by Bobadilla reducing the proportion of gold
payable to the Crown, and was empowered to take over one-third of the.
gold that was stored on the island, and one-half of what might be found
in the future. The Crown was to have a monopoly of all trade, and
ordinary supplies were only to be procured through the Crown agent.
On the other hand, the natives were to be released from slavery, and
although forced to work in the mines, were to be paid for their labour
--a distinction which in the working out did not produce much difference.
A body of Franciscan monks accompanied Ovando for the purpose of tackling
the religious question with the necessary energy; and every regulation
that the kind heart of Isabella could think of was made for the happiness
and contentment of the Indians.

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