Caribbean (20 page)

Ocampo gasped, but the most serious revelation was still to come: “It is believed that the big chest they keep locked, there in the room where you were, is filled with silver belonging to the king. Three different men have seen Señora Pimentel place money they’ve given her for the right to do business on the island in that chest. It must contain a fortune, and we think you ought to report this to the king.”

Ocampo was furious: “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“We wanted to be sure.”

“Well, are you?”

“Yes! We’ve written it here!”

Ocampo accepted their papers, studied one, and pushed them back: “Burn them.” And when they had lit a fire on the tile floor and destroyed the accusations, he said: “I’m a soldier. I have but one commission from the king. To inquire into Colón. You and I have done that properly, and now it’s time for us to take our report and sail home.”

“Leaving the Pimentels free to continue their abuses?”

“If they don’t do the stealing, someone else will,” and he stomped from the room, going for the first time out into the streets alone, while his honor guard remained behind.

He walked toward the sea, and the first building he saw was the fine stone house of the Pimentels, and he laughed at himself: I saw the chest of silver but neglected to investigate what was inside.

Ocampo walked for several hours, reflecting on the confused data he had uncovered, and his straightforward judgment was: Colón, Bobadilla, Pimentel. All honorable men, as Spanish gentlemen are required to be, but also rascals and thieves, as Spanish gentlemen are prone to be. Colón earned his honors, no man on earth more honorably than he, and the king must let his heirs have their rewards, within reason. Bobadilla, if he is really alive, does little harm in pretending to be a knight. And Pimentel, with his silver, will become a marquis or better.

He had a sense of frustration that a simple soldier would feel whose tests of honesty had always been on the battlefield, where a man either did his duty with courage or shirked it in cowardice, and he felt repelled by the complexities and nuances of political life. As he stared out at the sea he cried: “That town behind me. Everything in it is for sale or prey to thieves … or already stolen. I would like to be with King Ferdinand on a ship out there, sailing to Sicily for an honest battle. Friend here, foe over there.” But then he wondered: Ferdinand could trust
me
, but could I trust
him
?

Stepping toward the water, he ventured a short distance, even though his Cordoba shoes might be damaged, and he looked westward to the island of Jamaica: In all this testimony the only man I would feel I could trust was one I never saw. That fellow Diego Méndez who sailed his canoe across the sea to rescue Colón and his men. Shaking his head in sorrow, he cried with regret: “Spain! Spain! I wish you could create a thousand such men.”

When Ocampo had calmed down he felt ready to return to his quarters, but as he began walking back he could not resist turning around one more time to gaze out upon this beautiful sea, which would one day be called the Caribbean, and he had a powerful intimation of what the coming centuries portended: I see the men of Spain who come to these islands repeating in perpetuity the behavior of Colón and Pimentel—steal, abuse the natives, place relatives on the king’s payroll, think always of self and family, never of the general weal. It’s a bad precedent we’ve established here in Española.

^*1
Historically known to the world as Hispaniola. Later the western one-third became Haiti, the eastern two-thirds, the Dominican Republic.

^*2
About $70 U.S. at today’s rate, but enough to mean luxury for a sailor of that time.

^*3
Taino was the name used in several large western Caribbean islands for those peaceful Arawaks who had sought refuge in these islands after the arrival in the small eastern islands of the cannibalistic Caribs in or about the early 1300s.

^*4
Father Gaspar’s estimate was too generous. An exhaustive census in 1548 could turn up only 490 Arawaks, and in certain other of the western islands the total extinction was complete long before that.

^*5
In Central America, really, especially parts of the future Nicaragua and Honduras.

^*6
The Caribbean coast of the modern nation of Panamá.

^*7
About one-third of a penny.

^*8
Numerous translations of this long and famous document known as
Léttera Rarissima
exist in English. Madariago offered a fine one in 1936. Morrison gives a sparkling vernacular version done especially for him in 1963 by Dr. Milton Anastos. One of the best occurs in the Penguin
Four Voyages of Columbus
by J. M. Cohen in 1969. Wishing to preserve a more archaic mode, this account uses with certain clarifications the fine translation done in 1849 by R. H. Major.

I
N THE LATTER YEARS OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
, 1567–1597, two fabled mariners, one Spanish, one English, waged an incessant duel throughout the Caribbean. The two men fought at the extreme western end at Nombre de Dios, and beyond the northern limits at Vera Cruz in Mexico. They fought on the isthmus, the approaches to Panamá, at little ports on the coast of South America and at the huge harbor of San Juan in Puerto Rico. But most often they faced each other at Cartagena, the walled city that became in the early 1500s the capital of Spain’s empire in the Caribbean. In heritage, training, religion, manner and personal appearance, these men differed conspicuously, but in personal heroism and eagerness to defend their honor they were identical.

The Spaniard was a tall, thin, beardless aristocrat with the hollow-cheeked austerity that El Greco liked to depict in his scowling portraits of Spanish noblemen and church authorities; he usually wore a Toledo blade with an elegant, filigreed hilt, a deadly instrument he was ever ready to wield in defense of King Philip and his Catholic church.

The Englishman was a short, muscular fellow of undistinguished parentage, the owner-master of a small trading ship which he sailed to ports in France and the embattled Netherlands, always keen to
protect the interests of Queen Elizabeth and her new Protestant religion. Men under his command said of him: “He’s all gristle and nerves.”

The Spaniard carried the insolent and resonant name of Don Diego Ledesma Paredes y Guzman Orvantes. If he had been a proper Englishman, his name would have been a simple James Ledesma and let it go at that, but the Spanish style had a grace that gave it added attraction. The various names evoked memories for any Spaniard hearing them; for example, on the father’s side the Ledesmas had always been notable defenders of the king and to have Ledesma in one’s name signified honor. The male branch also sprang from the Paredes family of northern Spain, and its contribution to the last defeat of the Moors in 1492 had been heroic; this was a name worth preserving.

The letter
y
indicated that whatever names followed belonged to the maternal side of the family, and here the Guzmans were as distinguished as either of the paternal ancestors, while the Orvantes men were considered, at least in the little region from which they came, the most outstanding of the four because of their bravery in helping expel the Moors from Spain. To make things more complex, at his birth adoring and important members of his family had to be honored, so that his full name became Juan Tomas Diego Sebastian Leandro Ledesma Paredes y Guzman Orvantes. But this occasioned no trouble, for everyone called him just Don Diego, omitting the other eight names, laden with honor though they were.

Don Diego was inordinately proud of his family’s ancient fame and saw in his three unmarried daughters—Juana, María and Isabella—an opportunity to enhance it if he could find acceptable young men to marry them, but he never lost sight of his primary obligation: augmenting his family’s present power. As a young naval officer of unusual daring, he had won an enviable reputation for defending against pirates the Spanish armadas which carried Peruvian gold and Panamanian silver across the Caribbean on its way to Sevilla in southern Spain. His bold successes enabled him to rise swiftly to the rank of captain, and in 1556, at the age of only twenty-four, he had been appointed governor at Cartagena. During his first day on the job he issued the order which would characterize his long tenure: “The Caribbean is a Spanish lake, from which all intruders will be expelled.” The first step he took to enforce this boast was to make his home city of Cartagena so impregnable that no enemy would dare attack it.

Nature assisted him in this effort, for it had made the city easy to defend: Cartagena stood in the middle of a strange island. Stretching some seven and a half miles along the coast of South America, with one shore beautiful, straight and smooth, and the other resembling an octopus with many arm- and leg-like peninsulas, with vast impenetrable swamps and unscalable cliffs, this island was designed by nature gone mad. To invade its one settlement, Cartagena, was almost impossible. Of course, when an adversary came at Cartagena from the Caribbean he found an approach that appeared both easy and promising, for at the southern tip of the octopus island waited a broad, beautiful entrance into the harbor leading to the city; Boca Grande it was called, Big Mouth. But its allure was deceptive, for it was extremely shallow; and what was worse, to keep out any enemy, Don Diego had commanded that ships be scuttled in the middle of the passage, which meant that not even an alien rowboat could penetrate.

And if the arriving enemy continued some easy miles to the south, he came upon Boca Chica, Little Mouth, a deep entrance but treacherous because of its extreme narrowness and certain intruding islands. Should a determined ship captain work his way through, he would find himself lost in the first of four distinct bays: big Southern leading into smaller Middle, which led into small Northern, which debouched into tiny Harbor atop which rose the battlements of the city. Cartagena was well-nigh impregnable.

In the late summer of 1566, King Philip of Spain dispatched to Cartagena the kind of investigating ambassador who had tormented Cristóbal Colón at Española eighty years earlier. But unlike Bobadilla, this man, after the most inquisitive probing, uncovered no malfeasance, though his shrewd report anticipated weaknesses that might cause trouble in future years:

Yet even as King Philip read this reassuring statement, there was on the cold east coast of England a tough seafarer, twenty-three years old, with his one small ship, who was swearing in blind fury: “I shall fight the King of Spain until I die. And I shall exact full recompense for every slave the Dons stole from me. When I’m through, Cartagena will lie in ruins.”