The Conquistadors (4 page)

Columbus sighted the Bahamas on October 12, visited Cuba and Haiti, where he landed men to establish the first Spanish colony in the New World. His flagship wrecked, he returned in the
Niña,
reaching Palos on March 15, 1493, after anchoring briefly in the Tagus. To the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, he brought the evidence of his discoveries – crudely made gold ornaments, specimens of plant, animal and bird life, also six of the native islanders. It was an exotic cavalcade, the first of all that wealth that was to pass out of the Indies for the support of Spanish arms and pretensions. It also symbolized the vindication of the theories that Columbus had held in the face of years of incredulity, misrepresentation and rebuff.

So great were the hopes set upon these discoveries that Juan de Fonseca, Archdeacon of Seville and a shrewd man of business, was put in charge of an office in Seville for the administration of Indian affairs, and a special customs house was allocated at Cadiz. Application was made to the Court of Rome, and the Pope issued three bulls confirming Spain in the possession of all lands discovered west of a line drawn between the two poles at a distance of one hundred leagues
from the Canary and Cape Verde islands. Discoveries east of that line belonged to Portugal. But Portugal objected and by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 she gained a dividing line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verdes; it was this new line which gave her a legal foothold in Brazil.

Meanwhile, on September 25, 1493, Columbus had sailed again, this time from the small creek harbour of Puerto de Santa Maria, which faces Cadiz across the bay. The fleet was much larger – three carracks and seventeen caravels – and he had with him fifteen hundred men. After a forty-day crossing, he found his settlement on Haiti abandoned. Haiti, now called Hispaniola, was re-colonised; but in a short time all the dissensions and conflicts of interest that were to follow each successive conquest in the New World became apparent. Though the expedition was remarkably well equipped for the times, it nevertheless carried with it the seeds of trouble. Apart from the sailors and artisans – among them, incidentally, a large number of miners, which gives a clue to the main hopes of the expedition's backers – the bulk of the adventurers were soldiers of fortune, men whose interests were personal glory and profit. There were also a dozen ecclesiastics and some of the Indians brought back on the first voyage, now converts and intended as missionaries.

Columbus, a queer mixture of mountebank, opportunist and navigational fanatic, was hardly the best man to govern effectively such high-mettled and unruly settlers. Moreover, though Spaniards might refer to him as Cristobal Colon, he was still a foreigner. However, the main cause of the trouble was that adventurers do not make for good husbandry. It was crops, not gold, that the new colony had to offer. The Indians, outraged by the behaviour of men accustomed through war to devastating the lands they conquered and seizing whatever took their fancy, rose in rebellion. As a result, one-third of the population was killed, whilst the failure to plant crops caused a food shortage. Columbus was forced to ration supplies and issue orders for every man, whatever his rank, to work in the fields. The effect of such an order was inevitable. When Columbus returned to Spain in 1496, income from the colony had been slight, the complaints numerous. He was still well received at court, but Bishop Fonseca was less accommodating, and it was not until early in 1498 that the third expedition of six ships was ready.

Sailing from Sanlúcar de Barrameda on May 30, Columbus took a more southerly route, discovered the island of Trinidad and landed on the coast of South America itself. Arriving finally at Hispaniola, he was faced with a rebellion of the colonists themselves. This was only settled by grants of land and the allocation of Indians to work it. Thus the vicious
repartimiento
system was established. Meanwhile, complaints and accusations of his conduct came into Spain with every returning ship, and as a result, a commissioner was sent out to investigate. This over-zealous and pretentious knight, Don Francisco de Bobadilla, ordered Columbus to appear before him to answer the charges, threw him into prison and finally sent him and his brother back to Spain in irons. Columbus was released, of course, but a new
governor was appointed in his place. This was Don Nicolas de Ovando of the Order of Alcántara. He sailed in February 1502 with a fleet of thirty-two ships and a complement of 2,500, among whom, as an adventurer, was the future defender of the Indians, Las Casas. The size of this expedition gives an indication of the importance Hispaniola had now assumed in the eyes of the Spanish crown.

Columbus made one last great voyage, Sailing in March 1502 with orders to avoid the colony of Hispaniola. The state of his ships, however, forced him to shelter there, together with a fleet of eighteen vessels about to leave for Spain. Columbus warned the governor that a hurricane was imminent. This was the great navigator speaking from his vast experience, not the ex-governor. Foolishly Ovando ignored the warning, dispatched his ships and ordered Columbus to leave the harbour of Santo Domingo. Columbus rode out the gale in the lee of the island, but of the eighteen ships bound for Spain, only three survived. Columbus went on to explore the Caribbean sea from Honduras to Darién, searching through two long years for the passage to Asia. He died at Vallodolid in 1506, two years after his return to Spain, having been almost within sight of his goal.

In the story of Columbus we see many of the problems and trials Spain brought with her to the New World. Her interests, divided between greed and a sense of religious mission, were irreconcilable. The men who went out there as colonists were adventurers rather than settlers, and since their leaders were drawn from the lesser nobility, with a background of inter-family strife, the New World, far removed from the interference and control of the state, gave full rein to their martial and feuding instincts. With sailors grown accustomed to the long haul across the Atlantic, they were well equipped for discovery and conquest, but for little else, as the wretched Indians were to discover.

With the death of Columbus, the torch of discovery passes to Spanish nationals, to the conquistadors – in particular to Cortés and Pizarro. There is little reliable information about the latter's early life. He is supposed to have been deserted by both his parents, to have been a foundling discovered abandoned on the steps of the church of Santa Maria in Trujillo; there is even a story that he was suckled by a sow. There seems little doubt that, as a youth, he was occupied in herding pigs and had no education except that of a hard life. One account suggests that he served with his father in the Italian wars, even that he sailed with Columbus. But all we know for certain is that the blood of his father answered to the call of the New World, and in 1509, when he was almost forty, he took part in an expedition led by Alonso de Hojeda, was left in charge of the settlement at Urabá on the mainland, and escaped after deliberately allowing the colony to waste away until the survivors were few enough to be safely embarked in the two small vessels available.

He helped Balboa establish his colony on the Darién isthmus, was employed on several expeditions by Pedrarias after his appointment as governor, and in 1515 crossed the isthmus to trade with the natives of the Pacific. He accompanied
Pedrarias when he moved the seat of his government to Panama, but by the age of fifty he had little to show for his efforts, except for a tract of poor land near the capital, a
repartimiento
of Indians and his position as one of the governor's senior captains. This at a time when the much younger Cortés was marching on the Mexican capital. Yet, despite his age and his lack of resources, Pizarro was then on the threshold of three great voyages of discovery and of the extraordinary and barely credible adventures that were to make him lord of Peru and of the whole Inca empire.

Whereas Pizarro's early life is a matter for conjecture, that of Cortés is fully covered by his secretary, Francisco Lopez de Gomara, and others. Like a number of great men, Cortés was a sickly child, ‘so frail that many times he was on the point of dying'. The religious attitudes of the period inevitably attribute his recovery to heavenly intervention, in this case St Peter, picked at random by his wet nurse, according to Gómara. At the age of fourteen he was sent to study at the University of Salamanca. Accounts differ, some saying he was a Latin scholar, others that he studied law, others still that he was learning grammar and through
illness, boredom and lack of money returned home after two years. The nature of the man we shall see in action later suggests that he did study law and government, as well as Latin, that he was an adept student who absorbed a great deal in a short time, and that his ambitious and active nature, thwarted by lack of funds in a student world full of the sons of men much richer than his father, induced him to use the natural excuse of illness to explain his return home.

Gómara says Cortés was ‘restless, haughty, mischievous and given to quarrelling', which is a fair description of an ambitious adolescent, conscious of his latent powers and frustrated by the provincial life of a small town. At the same time he was being subjected to exaggerated stories of Spanish feats of arms in the Italian wars and of the enormous potentialities of the New World. For a high-spirited youth, who had abandoned learning for a life of action, the choice was either Italy or the Indies.

Ovando was then fitting out his fleet of thirty-two ships at Cadiz and at the same time studying at Cáceres in Estremadura. This brought him into contact with the Cortés family, who arranged that he should take their son with him when he sailed as the newly-appointed governor of Hispaniola. St Peter, however, decreed otherwise. The young Cortés was already deploying his energies in another direction, and whilst escaping from the house of a married woman, a wall collapsed, and but for the intervention of the mother Cortés would have been killed by her irate son-in-law. Injured by the fall and confined to bed by a quartan fever, Cortés lost the chance of going to the Indies with Ovando; instead he set off for Italy. But he never got there, Gómara saying that he wandered idly about for nearly a year. Since he returned to Medellín with his mind set firmly on the Indies, it is probably safe to assume that he had spent that year in the heady atmosphere of Spain's southern ports.

The year was 1503, the Italian wars coming to an end and the Indies beckoning. Already Amerigo Vespucci had completed three of his four widely publicized voyages. In the two ‘letters', or descriptions, which resulted in his name being given to a continent (the first of these appeared in
Mundus Novus,
the second in
Cosmographiae introductio
), he claimed to have been south of the River Plate, almost as far as the Straits of Magellan. This was the third voyage made in 1501–02. In the second, made in 1499–1500, he is supposed to have discovered Brazil, sailing the coast from 5°S to the Gulf of Maracaibo in company with Hojeda. With him on that voyage was Juan de la Cosa, who produced the first map of the New World. One of the Niños of Palos, Pero Alonso, had reached the north coast of Colombia. Pinzón had reached the mouth of the Amazon, Lepe had also sailed the coasts of Brazil, and a lawyer, Bastidas, had explored the north coast of South America right to the Darién coast. Most of these ships came into the Atlantic ports of Spain's southern coast, into that curving bight that is called the Gulf of Cadiz.

Sanlúcar de Barrameda, just inside the estuary of the Guadalquivir, was the point of entry for Seville. The river is broad here and easy to enter, the low-cliffed
headland to the south giving some protection from southerly winds, and once inside the bar, which still straddles the river, there is good shelter, with a sand shore that makes for easy landing. But it was Seville itself that would have been the chief attraction to the young Cértes, the puerto centred around the Torre del Oro, a squat circular tower that is almost all that remains to mark the nearest approach to the river of the old city walls. Here, on the dark sand beach below the walls, the boats from the Indies were hauled ashore on greased timbers. There were builders' yards smelling of wood shavings and tar, and the quays were crowded with sailors, merchants, adventurers and monks, piled with stores going out to the ships anchored off, and, much more exciting, the products of incoming vessels; the exotic scent of a new world.

Cadiz, too, was bustling with new life, not only below the fortress end of the great north-curling spit of land that protects this large natural bay, but in the creek harbour of Puerto de Santa María from which Columbus once sailed. Sanlúcar, Cadiz and Puerto de Santa María, these were all within a few miles of each other, in a group about 60 miles south of Seville; and about the same distance west of Seville, over the flat land leading into undulating hills, were the mud creeks of Moguer, Palos and La Rábida on the Tinto river. These, too, were alive with the first fantastic fruits of an empire just at the point of birth. Discovery and conquest, dreams of untold wealth, tales of shipwreck, storm and reef, of gold and Indians and strange, unknown lands – it was more than enough to excite the imagination of an ambitious youth of eighteen determined to carve out a niche for himself.

Cortés sailed the following year in a convoy of five merchant ships bound for Santo Domingo, the capital of Hispaniola. It was the year of Queen Isabella's death, and at that time a pilot's knowledge of the Indies was still very sketchy. This is hardly surprising, for the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico are littered with a complex pattern of islands, reefs and coral cays. Swift currents sweep down along the embayed coasts of Central America and from the beginning of September to mid-October there is danger of hurricanes. At that time even the big island of Cuba was still regarded as part of the mainland.

On his arrival at Santo Domingo, Cortés lodged with Medina, a friend who was one of the governor's secretaries. He advised him to register as a citizen, which would entitle him to a
caballeria,
a building plot and land for cultivation – a slow and pedestrian way to the accumulation of wealth compared with the lure of gold and the high hopes of the voyage. No doubt the governor, Ovando, offered him the same advice, for he gave him a
repartimiento
of Indians and made him notary to the town council of Azúa. During the next five or six years Cortés seems to have been content to trade and establish a position in the colony. He must have met Pizarro, for it was a tight little community and he very nearly went on the ill-fated Nicuesa-Hojeda expedition.