Stepping Stones to the World
Columbus’s stop in La Gomera, in the Canary Islands, on his first voyage was no accident. By the time his fleet had set off, this archipelago off the coast of North Africa was already a well-known colony of Castile. Indeed, as early as the first century, Pliny the Elder had mentioned the Atlantic islands in his writings, calling them ‘Canaria’. How much was known about the islands then is difficult to ascertain, but in the new age of exploration it was only a matter of time before these seven islands, sixty miles off the coast of North Africa and hundreds of miles from the Iberian peninsula, were rediscovered. Some accounts put the re-entry of Europeans into the Canaries sometime around 1312 when a Genoese sailor, Lanzarotto Malocello, was said to have arrived on one of them, though little is known about what transpired.1 Other expeditions followed, including one claimed to be commissioned by Portugal’s Afonso IV in 1341. Details are scarce, but the islands began to appear on maps.
After an initial flurry of exploratory activity from the Genoese, Castilians,and Portuguese, the islands lay quiet for a while. By the time two Normans, Jean de Béthencourt and Gadifer de la Salle, met in La Rochelle in 1402, interest in the islands had waned. Béthencourt was a noble who was possibly in search of a fortune to pay off debts. He had tried to convince the French crown to back his plans, to no avail, which is why he ended up turning to Castile.2 He may have been on the hunt for gold, but he might also have been looking to enslave some of the native Guanche people to sell. There were also trees on the islands whose resin had been sold to be transformed into a valuable dye known as ‘dragon’s blood’. Of course, Béthencourt also had to claim they wanted to introduce Christianity to the unbelievers. Salle, a knight, told Béthencourthe was looking to find his fortune. Soon 1 May 1402 they, along with a crew, embarked for the ‘lands of Canary, to see and explore all the country, with the view of conquering the islands, and bringing the people to the Christian faith’, according to an account written by a friar and a priest who participated in the voyage.3
Soon they met a ‘foul wind’ and were forced to stop in Galicia for a few days, and then headed south, stopping in the Andalus port of Cádiz. Béthencourt got into trouble there, as he had made no friends in Galicia and ‘Genoese, Placentian, and English merchants . . . brought accusations against him . . . that he and his crew were robbers’. While Béthencourt was trying to straighten out this misunderstanding, a rumour spread that his ships did not have enough supplies for the journey, and twenty-seven men left the expedition. Finally, the situation was resolved and eight days later they arrived on a tiny island they named Graciosa, which is near the larger island of Lanzarote, the easternmost of the chain. These volcanic islands were formed thousands of years ago,and their climate is mostly arid; the desert-like desolation is augmented by sand blown in by Saharan winds for part of the year, though there are pockets of tropical lustre, such as on the northern part of Tenerife.4
The men crossed over to Lanzarote, but did not get off to the most auspicious of starts, as the friar and the priest reported. Realizing they were not alone, their early attempts to greet the natives were summarized as ‘great efforts to capture some of the people of Canary, but without success’. Eventually, some of the native Guanche people came down from the mountains. With a fragile friendliness established, Béthencourt ordered a fort built once he had received their leader’s permission. He left Bertin de Berneval in charge and he and Salle went to the next island, Fuerteventura, which lies to the south. Again, they made ‘great efforts to find their enemies, and were much vexed that they could not fall in with them’.5 Béthencourt and Salle stayed eight days, after which Béthencourt returned to Lanzarote and then to Spain to resupply and meet with the king. While Béthencourt was awaiting his audience with Henry III of Castile, Berneval captured Lanzarote’s ruler, and also stranded Salle on the small island of Los Lobos, off the coast of Fuerteventura, after which Berneval wrested control of a ship to take him back to Spain.
Once Béthencourt returned, he was ready to conquer – Henry III had named him lord of the islands, and granted him the right to collect one-fifth of the colony’s profits in exchange for claiming them for Castile. Béthencourt and Salle soon began a more aggressive attempt to colonize. They got off to a straightforward start when the ruler of Lanzarote, ‘who had so often been taken and escaped again’, decided to give in and ‘yield obeisance to M de Bethencourt’, meaning that he would accept Christian baptism. When the occasion at last arose, the king ‘shewed every appearance of sincerity . . . and received . . . the name of Louis’.
But the Norman pair met resistance elsewhere,and soon the financial and material support Béthencourt had collected in Spain dwindled. A frustrated Salle left for Seville, as did Béthencourt, and there their paths diverged. Béthencourt returned to the islands, this time with more settlers, and Salle did not. Upon Béthencourt’s return, he persisted in his attempts to subdue the people of Gran Canaria, but the island’s people stood firm. After this, Béthencourt decided to leave, and put his nephew, Maciot de Béthencourt, in charge of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. Béthencourt went to Spain, Rome, and then France in 1406. He sent more men to settle the islands, but he never returned, and died in Normandy in 1425.6
Well before Béthencourt’s death, Henry the Navigator had heard what had been taking place in the Canaries. Like Afonso IV, Henry, too, wanted Portugal to control these islands. In 1424, he organized an expedition of 2,500 men – although he did not join it – ordering them to capture Gran Canaria. But unlike the Ceuta campaign a decade earlier, it was a disaster. The Guanche were prepared, and they fought off the soldiers. Undeterred by Castilian claims to the island and native resistance alike, Henry continued attacking intermittently for decades to try to take the islands, failing every time.
Lanzarote and Fuerteventura had not been as heavily populated as the islands to the west, and Europeans were able to to live there. By 1455 there were reports of ‘Christians’ living on both as well as on the smaller La Gomera and El Hierro, while Gran Canaria, Tenerife, and La Palma were still inhabited only by ‘pagans’.7 Castile, too, would later struggle to subdue the Guanches, and Gran Canaria, La Palma, and Tenerife would not become part of Castile until the last decade of the fifteenth century.
Like the indigenous people of the New World nearly a century later, the existence of the islands’ native inhabitants opened up questions in the minds of Europeans, people whose world view was still narrowly constrained by the precepts of Christianity. The priest and the friar who wrote about Béthencourt’s exploits pointed out on the first page of their account that the islands ‘are inhabited by unbelievers of various habits and languages’. Such men were accustomed to the ‘unbelievers’ in Islamic lands, but the people on the islands were puzzling because they were not part of the Muslim world.
Little is known about the Guanches, except what was recorded by Europeans, who no doubt had little understanding of their languages or customs. The Guanches – itself a broad term used to describe people across all the islands – were probably connected to North African Berber tribes. The estimates of the population across the islands vary, ranging from 6,000 to more than 60,000. They did not survive into the seventeenth century, and because the only written records were European, the recorded descriptions have a familiar ring. For instance, the priests describe the people of Gran Canaria as going ‘quite naked, save for a girdle of palm leaves . . . [and] print devices on their bodies . . . their hair tied behind . . . They are a handsome and well-formed people.’ But whatever Europeans thought about them, they had been able to keep those Europeans at bay until Béthencourt’s time, and even then he had not managed to take all the islands – there was an active and sustained resistance.8
However, this came to an end over time as all the islands were put under Spanish control, and larger-scale settlement began. The merchants and artisans arrived, as did large estate-holders with their peasants. Portuguese, Genoese, Catalans, Jews, Moors, and moriscos displaced the Guanches.9 By the mid-1500s, even the English had arrived, and traders on the islands were exchanging cloth for sugar and dyes extracted from wood.10
None of these settlers, however, found any sign of the mystical river of gold, despite the proximity of the African coast. But instead of exploring further, they looked to the ground and planted something that was almost as valuable – sugar. The climate on some of the islands was suitable for raising the crop and there was a growing market for it. Before long the remaining natives were enslaved and working in the fields, and Africans brought from the Portuguese posts in Guinea were not long in joining them. The Genoese, with their interest in capital investments, were heavy backers in this enterprise, and they made handsome profits. From the beginning, the exploration of the Atlantic and the development of the sugar trade could scarcely be called ‘Spanish’ at all – Castilian, Portuguese, Genoese, even Norman. Much of western Europe was involved in the enterprise, even though the islands were under the Castilian crown.
But despite Henry’s failure to take any one, much less all, of the Canary Islands, Portugal still managed to find some Atlantic islands of its own – and with no fighting at all.
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In 1420, navigators João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira were blown off course in a storm, and they took refuge on the small island of Porto Santo.11 They would have disembarked into silence, with only the waves lapping against the flat shore and the sound of birds. No signs of life were present. There were no Moors to vanquish, no Africans to enslave, no Canarians to suppress. There was no one. The only thing nearby was the looming volcanic island of Madeira, and they soon sailed over and began to explore it. It must have come as a surprise, for Madeira is green and mild, and it would have felt like a spring day to the men. The fertile landscape was imposing, with near-vertical volcanic slopes. The mariners were quick to spot the island’s potential. They could see it was rich in wood and had a climate that supported flora and fauna, a stark contrast to the arid Canary Islands. While many other sailors might have been dissuaded from going inland or would have been unable to see the value of the craggy hillsides, these experienced navigators could. Of equal importance was that Gonçalves and Vaz were not so off course as to be unable to return home, that great occupational hazard of this period. Madeira lies about 965km (600 miles) from Lisbon and some 482km (300 miles) north of La Palma, in the Canaries. It is volcanic, and its peak had been spotted by other sailors before Gonçalves and Vaz’s expedition. Yet the Portuguese crown had little inclination to find out more until reports arrived in 1417 that Castilian ships had been seen sailing nearby, though nothing came of it. Although an empty island would seem to have more obvious attractions because there were no native people to contend with, the opposite was the case: no money could be made there capturing slaves. However, Portugal’s King John I decided not long after Gonçalves and Vaz’s expedition to send around a hundred people to settle the colony and ward off future incursion from Castilians or anyone else. The group was led by Gonçalves and Vaz, and they were joined by Bartolomeo Perestrello, whose family came from the Italian peninsula. Perestrello was given control of Porto Santo, the smaller, flatter island to the north-east of Madeira. By 1425 a stream of settlers began making their way to the fertile islands. Madeira and Porto Santo prospered, and at one point, around 1478 or 1479, Columbus arrived and lived there for a while. He married Perestrello’s daughter, giving him ties to a prominent Portuguese family, even if they, like Columbus, had their roots in Italy. The seas might have been infinite, but the world of the sailor was much smaller. And so Columbus’s colonial education continued.12
On the main island logging began because, as in the Canaries, there were trees whose resin could be used for dye. The few trees of Porto Santo suffered a different fate as they were cleared to make way for livestock and other grazing animals. Some of Madeira was also cleared for growing crops, especially much-needed wheat, but also sugar. Sugar thrived there because there was enough rain. When it was grown in Sicily or the Algarve, farmers had to construct irrigation systems to give the plant sufficient water. The climate on Madeira enriched the canes with a higher natural sugar content, making it easier to grow and refine. But the island’s steep slopes made it difficult to grow the crop in large plantations. As in the Canaries, it was the Genoese who brought the capital to spend on sugar mills, and the Portuguese who brought the labour. However, the settlers were soon using Africans brought up from the Gulf of Guinea and Guanches captured on the Canaries to produce the crop as well. Despite the success of sugar, little of the profit went to the settlers; most went to the Genoese investors.
Madeira was also producing around 12,000 bushels of grain a year by the middle of the fifteenth century.13 In addition, the island was well suited to growing grapes, and islanders began to produce the fortified wine that bears its name to this day. It was not long before the Genoese became even more involved in the control of trade and development of the island, though other merchants, such as the Flemish, began to arrive as well. With a steady supply of sugar now guaranteed for Portugal, the market opened up.
By 1455, Madeira was in profit. By around 1500 it had 211 sugar producers, with many of the estates being owned by the Genoese and Florentines. More Africans were sent to the island, along with enslaved Canarians, to help increase output, which reached around 1,360 tons, by the early 1500s, though by the 1520s – when New World sugar was beginning – this would drop significantly and the island would never again reach its previous peaks.14
For a while, however, Portugal’s sugar island was the envy of other nations. With Madeira and Porto Santo established, sailors began to press further into the Atlantic, where they soon came across another uninhabited group of islands, known as the Azores, which lie to the north-west of Madeira. Ilhas dos Açores means Islands of the Goshawks, a reminder of how an understanding of the natural world was part of early navigation.15 Portugal began to settle these islands in 1439. Although the Azores were too far north for sugar production, they prospered with wine and grain. Both they and Madeira were soon incorporated into the expanding Portuguese world.
Further south, sailors were refining the volta da Mina,which was the name used to describe the return trips between Africa and Portugal that were facilitated by the growing understanding of winds and currents. Mina was also the name of the first Portuguese settlement, today’s Elmina, in Ghana. Once contact with Africans had been established, traders were quick to set up feitorias, around the 1440s. These ‘factories’ were basic trading posts. The first was at Mina, but they were soon dotted all along the coast. The Portuguese brought textiles, beads, horses, and brass goods, as well as guns and other weapons, and in exchange loaded their ships with gold, spices, ivory, and slaves to take back to Europe. From the middle of the fifteenth century until around 1530, estimates put the number of enslaved Africans at around 156,000.16
The Portuguese were able to add another link in their Atlantic chain near these African forts. About 650km (400 miles) from mainland West Africa is an archipelago of ten islands. The Portuguese called them the Cape Verde Islands, though ironically, as the verde (green) refers to the verdant land of coastal Africa around Guinea and Senegal, not the islands themselves. Like the Canaries to the north, these islands are mostly arid deserts, though some, such as Santiago, the largest, are more mountainous and tropical. While undertaking the volta da Mina, sailors had begun to stop off on these islands and by the 1460s there was an official settlement on Santiago. As on Madeira, the sailors found no other human beings. Unlike the mainland territories, where the Portuguese would have encountered the Jolof, for instance, the sailors to Santiago were met, as far as is known, with silence. If there were humans, all traces of them had been swept away by the island’s ever-present winds. But the archipelago was soon repeopled. Like Madeira and the Azores, Cape Verde too saw a mix of people come to its shores – sailors and merchants – although before long it was overwhelmingly Africans, as the islands – especially Santiago – became ever more bound up in the slave trade.
Soon Santiago bore the hallmarks of a European colony, a process hammered out in the Atlantic and replicated in the Caribbean. First there needed to be a well-situated harbour, in this case Ribeira Grande, which has a sandy beach encircled by steep, vegetation-lined hills, and a river offering a supply of fresh water. Then a few streets of houses sprang up along with a church. Convents further up the hillside soon followed, and at the top, a fortress, with vistas stretching for miles.17 Such settlements could be established quickly. And of course there were variations. Sometimes the fort came first, then the monastery, and then the settlers. The elements were often the same, even if the order differed. Settlements were not usually secured inland, but on the sea fronts. Ships could call in, and goods be loaded and exchanged.
The arid and windy climate – the islands receive uncertain and often scarce amounts of rainfall and winds off the Sahara – meant they were not suitable for sugar. Some of the archipelago could, however, produce salt, as the name of one of the islands, Sal, attests. But the main purpose of the development of these islands was as a stopping point for the burgeoning maritime traffic and slave trade.
The papacy had been taking note of these Atlantic developments with growing interest. On 8 January 1455 Pope Nicholas V promulgated his Romanus Pontifex, praising the Afonso V for his role in overseeing the colonization of Madeira and the Azores, as well as the crown’s foray into Africa and the attempts to convert the natives. He also granted permission to enslave the non-believers. The Catholic Church still held and exercised an enormous amount of power in Europe during this time, and the direction of expansion was in no small part due to papal policies and the Church’s support. The colonization of the Atlantic and later the Caribbean was a project not only of the evolving marketplace or Genoese merchants (though of course they were crucial to its development), but of Church and state. Claiming of territories and enslaving ‘unbelievers’ required the support of the crowns of Portugal, Castile, and Aragon, as well as the permission of the Vatican.
The Reconquista roots to this are traceable. For instance, the papal bull Dum Diversas of 18 June 1452 gave the king of Portugal permission to attack and conquer unbelievers and take their lands, which was considered especially important as parts of the Iberian peninsula were still under the control of the Islamic caliphate. Even though Portugal had driven Islamic rule out of the Algarve in the south in 1249, attacks on non-Christians were still permitted. Indeed, one of the longest-running preoccupations of Christian Europe was the threat of the infidel, a tradition that dates nearly to the beginning of Islam. That this spills over into the early years of discovery should come as little surprise. Although concepts about conquest and colonization would undergo numerous transformations (especially when the Protestants arrived), the starting point is here, in the rocky terrain of the Iberian peninsula. It was not the case that one thing led to another – that the fight against Islam led to overseas expansion. Rather, it was the case that there was an institutional framework in place, via the Catholic Church, that legitimized what was happening. The Portuguese, Castilians, Aragonese, and Genoese were pushing into new worlds, and encountering people who were so vastly different that they grappled to find a vocabulary to explain it, and so they turned to what they had.
However,the continued relay race of discovery and conquest was straining the already fragile relations between the Castilian crown and Portugal, both of whom wanted to claim these new territories – and the right to find more – as their own. It would take the power of the papacy to put it to rest, and a series of treaties were issued to stop the claims and counter-claims between these two kingdoms. The 1479 Treaty of Alcáçovas that brought the Castilian War of Succession to an end also stipulated that Portugal would recognize Castile and Aragon’s right to the Canary Islands, and in exchange receive recognition for its claims on Madeira, the Azores, and Cape Verde. This would set a precedent for what followed in Inter Caetera, a papal bull issued in 1493 by Alexander VI – who was from the notorious Valencian Borja (or Borgia) family – after Columbus’s voyage, and the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, which established the line of demarcation of Portuguese territory at 370 leagues (around 1,185 nautical miles) to the west of Cape Verde, with the area beyond that going to Castile. This invisible line would have very concrete ramifications.
After 1492, as the Iberian nations pushed out the non-Catholics who refused to convert, many soon spilled into this expanding Atlantic world. Jewish people played a large part, especially when, in 1497, Portugal decided to follow Spain in forcing the Jews to convert. Thousands were killed, and thousands more were deported to the colonies, especially São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea. Some of them converted to save their lives but then left the country, and these ‘new Christians’, or cristãos novos, would make their way to Cape Verde and onward from there.
When Columbus set off, he not only had his Mediterranean experience, but had also played an active part in the early years of European colonization in the Atlantic. Before he arrived in Porto Santo, he had already been to Chios, as well as Tunis and Marseille before that, and even Iceland and Ireland. He may have also done the volta da Mina in the 1480s, and he knew about the Canaries and Cape Verde. He was aware of Africans and Guanches, and he realized that sugar was a money-maker. Columbus had been no dreamy-eyed map reader, but an active player in this new Atlantic colonization.
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When the admiral sailed into the West Indies on his first voyage and saw unbelievers, he reverted to what he knew from the example of the Canary Islands and the Mediterranean. Here were slaves to capture, and people to convert. His initial encounter on these islands may not have matched his grandiose vision; it would have seemed familiar, rather than exotic. In his journal, Columbus noted that the ‘Indians’ he met were ‘very handsome and not small; and none of them are black, but the colour of Canary Islanders’. Yet Columbus and hundreds of people after him could not – or did not want to – find a way to explain this new world and its people on their own terms. Instead, they created new words.
The diary of Dr Diego Álvarez Chanca, a physician on Columbus’s second voyage (September 1493 to June 1496), could perhaps be considered the starting point fort he vocabulary devised to describe the people they met in this new world: the so-called Taino and Caribs. Although the words Taino and Carib (and Arawak, at times) are used today to describe the indigenous people of the Caribbean, there is a great deal of uncertainty about their meaning. Almost from their inception they gave a sharp contrast: the Taino was a peaceful islander, happy to aid and work for the Spaniards, while the Carib was a warrior who killed Tainos and often ate them, and fought the newcomers. Chanca’s account of what happened when the expedition stopped on the island later named Guadeloupe offers a vivid commentary on the differences between the two peoples. The doctor observed that ‘the captain went to the shore in the boat and made his way to the houses . . . he brought away four or five bones of the arms and legs of men. As soon as we saw this, we suspected that those islands were the Carib islands which are inhabited by people who eat human flesh.’18 Indeed, Columbus himself wrote, regarding his first voyage, that this New World was said to have people who ‘feed on human flesh’.19
Later, Chanca observed ‘many men and women [who] walked along the shore near the water wondering at the fleet . . . and when a boat came to land to speak with them, saying to them tayno, tayno, which means“good”, they waited as long as our men did not leave the water, remaining near it, in such a way that then they wished they could escape’.20 Columbus used this terminology, and Chanca recorded it, and so the dichotomy was established and enshrined. The people of the Greater Antilles – Hispaniola, Cuba, and Puerto Rico – were considered to be peaceful Tainos, while those of the smaller islands were deemed violent Caribs.
However, in the past thirty or so years scholars across a range of disciplines have challenged the notion that the Amerindian past divided so sharply. They have also questioned whether these people were made ‘extinct’, as generations of writers have repeated in their histories of the islands. Studies have found not only biological persistence (through DNA) but cultural practices and even archival evidence that have survived.21 What is beyond dispute, however, is that life as all parties knew it was altered to the limits of recognition because of the encounter. People from different backgrounds who had never seen each other before – American, African, or European – converged and diverged. Diseases were unleashed on everyone, as was violence. Similar investigations have been conducted into the differences among the indigenous people of the Caribbean, whose identity was defined for centuries by historical sketches or first-hand accounts by Europeans such as Chanca, who understood neither their culture nor their language.
That there was inter-island warfare and hostility is no surprise. Like other nations and peoples, alliances changed and wars began and ended. One group describing another as good or bad did little to help these newly arrived foreigners make sense of what they were encountering. Instead, the Europeans often based their judgements on which groups offered help and which groups preferred to shoot arrows at them. Generally speaking, Taino came to mean helpful, and Carib hostile. There was plenty of resistance from the indigenous people in the Greater Antilles, but the myth of cooperation there persisted. Caribbean Indians became symbolic of the encounter of old and new worlds. Even as the Indians died by the thousands, these dichotomies lived on: they were cannibals, they were peaceful; they were barbaric; or sometimes, they were both. How they were viewed reflected the success or failure of attempts to settle in these new lands. This was not helped by the proliferation of writings, such as Peter Martyr’s De Orbe Novo, published around 1516, from Europeans who had yet to set foot on the islands. They were basing their accounts on reports of men who were there primarily to find gold and convert heathens, not on a mission of cultural understanding. Martyr’s work was a misleading compilation of reports and letters from explorers, and it was soon translated and disseminated throughout Europe to an eager readership.
Although it is fruitless to judge that world against our own – disciplines such as anthropology or archaeology did not exist until the nineteenth century at the earliest – it bears noting that the idea and use of Taino and Carib continue today. It is ironic that, at the same time, the people doing the naming were perhaps not very clear about their own identity. Hispania had been a Roman invention. Spain in its present guise was not quite fully formed, and the Genoese were independent of what would become Italy in 1861. It was religion in this period that served as a way of dividing and categorizing people.
If the people were not Carib or Taino, what were they? Recent archaeological scholarship reveals a far more specific history.22 In a wide sense, these peoples were mostly from the Orinoco and other river basins in South America. There is a growing consensus that some of these first peoples had learned how to harness the currents of the rivers and sea to travel northward, thousands of years before the Genoese sailor set off on his mission. They too were looking for something – not gold, but food, plants, perhaps new places to settle. They too were sailors, but of canoes (a word which derives from the Arawak). They are thought to have arrived around 6,000 years ago, which, in terms of human history, makes them quite recent immigrants, the Caribbean being – to the best of current knowledge–one of the later places of human settlement.23 By around 4,000 many of the islands had sizeable communities, and different waves of migration from the Orinoco valley and other parts of South America continued. Included in this was the later and significant arrival of the Saladoid people, who travelled from South America and inhabited the islands between approximately 500 and 600, with settlements scattered from Trinidad to Puerto Rico. Others may have gone to Hispaniola and Cuba directly from coastal South America.24
As the archaeologist Samuel Wilson has pointed out, these early colonists, like the later Europeans, ‘refashioned the island environments, unintentionally and intentionally, to suit their purposes’.25 They brought their own plants, insects, and germs as well, and settled these islands. They too needed to grow plants and chop down trees, and fish in the waters. By the time Columbus arrived there were areas of dense settlement, and ‘villages’ that contained thousands of people. Although Taino became the catch-all term for the peoples in the Greater Antilles, there were actually other groups, such as the Lucayans of the Bahamian islands who traded with the Tainos. There was variation in the Arawak language spoken throughout the region, though the Arawaks lived in northern South America and have been often conflated with Tainos and Lucayans.26 Indeed, there is evidence that most islanders thought themselves culturally distinct from those on neighbouring islands, or even a different part of the same island.27
The people Columbus called Tainos, then, had their roots in the archaic pottery-making Casimiroids and Ostionoids, while many on the smaller islands were the descendants of the Saladoids.28 But after Columbus, the incarnation of the Carib took a variety of turns: Kalinago described the people of Dominica and Grenada, and the people of St Lucia and St Vincent were later called ‘black Caribs’ because there was intermixing between runaway slaves and indigenous people – and they were known for their fierce resistance. Because a variety of the Arawak language was spoken, people in the smaller islands were called Arawaks at times. Despite the stories, there is no evidence that anyone on any island was a cannibal: that remains in the realm of folklore. Yet the idea of the Carib remains, extending even to the sea surrounding the islands.
From this Taino/Carib misunderstanding has sprung a long debate about the origins and ethnic demarcations of the native peoples of the Caribbean, but the idea of the cannibalistic ‘Carib’ is perhaps the most persistent. By the time Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, most of the native peoples in the New World would have been long dead, yet the Europeanized idea of them was clearly quite alive.
After the narrator, Crusoe, survives shipwreck and sets up on the desert island, he frets, ‘I had heard that the people of the Caribbean coast were cannibals or man-eaters, and I knew by the latitude that I could not be far from that shore.’ Later on, he spots five canoes on the island and proceeds to spy on the people who had come ashore. What he saw confirmed his suspicious, as ‘two miserable wretches dragged from the boats . . . were now brought out for the slaughter’. He grew alarmed as one victim made an escape but was not followed very far. But he was soon cheered up, as he recalled that ‘it came very warmly upon my thoughts . . . that now was the time to get me a servant . . . and that I was plainly called by Providence to save this poor creature’s life’.
Crusoe helped this man kill some of his captors,and took him under his protection. This was, of course, Friday. A while later they revisited the scene of Friday’s near-death and found it ‘covered with human bones . . . and great pieces of flesh left here and there, half-eaten, mangled, and scorched . . .’ While this revolted Crusoe, he noted that ‘I found Friday had still a hankering stomach after some of the flesh, and was still a cannibal in his nature’ but made it clear that ‘I would kill him if he offered it’.29
In a few pages, the native person of the Caribbean was enshrined in literature not only as a perfect candidate for servitude, but also as a cannibal by his very nature. Other writers perpetuated the myth of the native cannibal, though some put it down to a vicious type of revenge, rather than something innate. Père Labat, a French missionary who travelled to the Caribbean in 1693 and wrote extensively on the islands, said of the people of Dominica, ‘I also know, and it is quite true, that when the English and the French first settled in the Islands many men of both nations were killed, boucanned,and eaten by the Caribs. But this was due to the inability of the Indians to take revenge on the Europeans for their injustice and cruelty, and it was done with impotent rage, not custom.’30
On the eve of Columbus’s arrival, the peoples of Hispaniola were living in organized settlements, some as large as 5,000 people. The men hunted and fished, and the women worked the land, raised children, and performed other duties, and the communities were in general quite hierarchical.31 The depiction of Amerindians as sensual or lazy is, of course, a European fantasy, or at least a false impression. In Hispaniola there was intensive agriculture and fishing. Estimates of the pre-Columbian population of the West Indies range widely, from hundreds of thousands to millions across the islands. What is certain is that most of them died early as a result of the encounter with Europeans, be it through disease, labour, or murder.
Columbus and his men, and the sailors who soon followed, had technology and germs on their side. The native people had poor resistance to European diseases; and the Europeans had firepower for which spears were usually no match. By Columbus’s time, there had been great changes in guns and other arms, especially in the development of the musket.32 By the middle of the fifteenth century, sailing ships were carrying increasing amounts of armaments. The evolution of such weapons gave Europeans tactical advantages against Africans, Canarians, and native peoples in the Americas. Weapons were also later used as a means of barter, as guns were sold for slaves in West Africa.33
Despite the diseases, the horses, the ships, and the weapons, the native peoples did not necessarily give themselves up easily. There are numerous accounts of hostility. For instance, a Spaniard, Pedro Arias de Ávila, arrived in 1514 with nineteen ships to take the island of Dominica, but he and his 1,500 men were greeted with a hail of poisoned arrows. They anchored in a bay on the north-west shore, later called Prince Rupert Bay. Over time, the Spanish were able to convert a tiny bit of the island to a small resupply station for ships, but they remained under continual attack. Further to the south, on the island of St Vincent and the scattered Grenadines, Caribs(and later black Caribs) put up a fight against European settlement until 1796, when they were shipped out of the islands.34 The Central American coastline, too, faced similar incursions, and in places such as Nicaragua and Honduras the Miskito people gave the Spanish constant problems. Europeans also encroached around the littoral of South America. Further south, along the Guyana territory (which later would be British Guiana, Suriname, and French Guiana) the indigenous peoples of the Amazon interior would remain largely untouched in the dense and virtually impenetrable jungle while settlements were established along the fertile coast. The problems began when the imported African slaves ran away into the forest, where they could regroup and plan attacks.35
But there was also more commonplace resistance, as the historian Matthew Restall has pointed out. This took place in numerous ways, from working slowly to sabotaging equipment to simply picking up and leaving for more isolated places to live, out of the reach of Europeans. Attacks and revolts were often local, and usually straightforward to put down, and so less likely to be enshrined in the pages of the histories of these islands being written in Europe.36
On the other hand, collaboration between the Spaniards and the people they enslaved and killed played a significant part in the settlement of the Caribbean. Indeed, according to Restall, such cooperation began on the ships. Those armour-plated ‘conquistadors’, so often depicted as white Spaniards, could actually be a more diverse crew. Africans were part of the early colonization process. They had been brought enslaved to Spain and Portugal and were many times put to use in high-status servant roles. They frequently accompanied their masters on voyages, and became involved in the settlement of the islands. Men like Juan Garrido, a West African taken to Lisbon who was later involved in expeditions to Puerto Rico and Cuba, were part of the development of this world. Garrido arrived in Hispaniola in 1502 or 1503, making him one of the first Africans to go to the New World. He was later freed and lived in Mexico City after joining the expedition to Mexico around 1519.37
In the same vein, many indigenous people in Hispaniola, and later elsewhere in the Americas, considered it in their interest to aid these new people. From the outset, Columbus and his men needed at the very least interpreters. Sometimes alliances were for strategic political reasons, other times for more personal ones. Sex was also part of the encounter, and shiploads of Spanish men came without women. Some women were willing concubines, others were the bargaining chip of powerful fathers, and still others victims of brutal rape. The result was known as mestizaje: the merging and blending of the indigenous and Spanish. Through this, the indigenous past of Hispaniola and other islands was kept alive, even if the number of Amerindians continued to decline. The lines between the two groups were not rigid, and in fact were quite easily crossed.
Modern historians and social scientists only know fragments of the pre-Columbian world of the Caribbean. There are very few written sources revealing what any of these native people felt or thought when they saw Columbus and his ships, or in the turbulent time thereafter. There are records of what Europeans thought the indigenous people said, and there are accounts of the Caribs not cooperating. Over time, cultural artefacts were ruined and practices interrupted and transformed though the encounter, so working with what remains means examining what indigenous people did, rather than what they were reported to have said. The myth of the compliant Indian is one that permeates the entire American continent, from Canada to Argentina. The idea of the first Thanksgiving, when the native peoples saved the English settlers from starvation, is one of the foundation myths of the United States. The docile Taino, and his Janus twin the Carib likewise have left an indelible imprint on the history of the Caribbean.
*
In 1493, Columbus was eager to return to Hispaniola and see how La Navidad was faring. This second expedition was a much larger one, with seventeen ships. He had plans to turn his outpost into a commercial centre, a feitoria, like that of Mina, but he would be trading in gold.38 He had varied the route, and he and his entourage sailed further to the south, which brought the ships in between Guadeloupe and Dominica. On this voyage he gave names to the islands he passed: Santa María de Guadalupe (Guadeloupe), Santa María de Montserrat (Montserrat), Santa María de la Antigua (Antigua), San Cristóbal (St Kitts), Santa Cruz (St Croix), and San Juan Bautista (Puerto Rico). He did not arrive on Hispaniola until November, which gave his dreams time to develop, but they would have died a quick death when they reached the settlement. There was nothing. No signs of life, no people. Just silence and stillness. Dr Chanca described the scene: ‘We went to the place where the town had been, and we saw that it was entirely burned and the clothes of the Christians were found in some grass.’39
Where many others might have been deterred from attempting another settlement, Columbus was not. He had brought farm animals, sugar cane, grapes, and wheat for planting. He had a vision, and it did not include eerie silences and failed settlements. His men were quick to find a new location, also along the north coast, and this time named it after the queen of Spain, La Isabela. In many senses, Columbus’s determination at this juncture marked the true beginning of the colonial enterprise in the Americas. Undaunted by the possibility of death, not fearful of the native peoples, Columbus and his men pressed forward, like the conquistadors who would follow him, straight into a rugged physical terrain, and an even more terrifying spiritual one. La Isabela had a shaky start; there was not enough food or water. Soon the colonists were heading inland to find the riches they had been promised, either taking from the native people or trying to make them work. The native anger, already stoked during the collapse of La Navidad, only increased. Columbus made two brutal campaigns in 1494 and 1495 against the Amerindians on Hispaniola, killing and conquering, and he took some 1,600 people into slavery, sending around 550 of them to Spain.40 In this sense, Columbus continued to reflect the moral codes of the Old World. He knew the Portuguese had been enslaving Africans, with papal approval – indeed, a 1436 bull by Pope Eugene IV called Africans ‘enemies of God’.41 Closer to home, the Guanches in the Canary Islands had been forced into slavery. In 1495, the Spanish crown authorized the sale of captured people from the Caribbean. Those Columbus did not sell or force to scrabble for gold, he left to raise cassava and other crops.
There were other problems. The feitoria idea did not sit well with some of the settlers. Many of the men were minor nobles and felt the hard work of settlement was beneath them, especially when there were native peoples who could do the labour. The blueprint of the Reconquista was set in their minds. They believed they had come under the repartimiento system, which had been used to resettle land taken from Muslims, and later in the Canary Islands as well. It is, in essence, an agreement that the settler would be granted land if he promised to work it for a set number of years. But such a system was a square peg for the round hole of the island’s problems.
In March 1494 Columbus left again, this time to explore further, still believing he was in the East. He left Bartolomé,his brother, in charge. During that voyage, Columbus sailed around more of Cuba, and the island of Jamaica (St Jago). His brother, meanwhile, was contending with a full-on rebellion. It did not start immediately. Indeed, by that August, a decent vein of gold had been discovered in the south of the island, and Bartolomé had moved the capital to a new settlement nearby, calling it Santo Domingo. It was a strategic location as well, as it had a good harbour. But that was about the only happy decision he had made. By this point he had so enraged the settlers that there had been a revolt, led by Francisco Roldán. This breakaway faction had moved to the west of the island, taken over native lands and forced people to work outside the auspices of the sanctioned leader. Columbus, in the meantime, had returned to Castile, having left in March 1496. Unfortunately for him, news of the colony’s failure had reached the crown, too. But Bartolomé did not have time to worry about that, as tensions with the Amerindians had rekindled.
By this point, the Catholic monarchs had become concerned about the state of this colony. It was obvious to all that while Columbus had found something, it bore little resemblance to what he had claimed he would find. Although the crown continued to have serious misgivings, Columbus’s campaign for a third voyage was a success, and he set off once again from Spain on 30 May 1498, albeit with a much smaller fleet of six ships. His journey took him via the Cape Verde islands, where he hit a becalmed section of water – the infamous doldrums. When he eventually spotted land on 31 July, he had arrived much further south, between Trinidad and the South American continent. He returned to Hispaniola a month later, where the situation was so grave that Columbus began to grant encomiendas to the angry settlers.
This system functioned by making use of some existing structures: the distribution of labour on the island was such that native peoples often already worked under their chief, or cacique. Indeed, this was not unlike the labour system on the Iberian peninsula, which, like much of Early Modern Europe, used vassalage. But under the Spanish in Hispaniola, these caciques then paid tribute to the Spanish land-holding encomenderos. In exchange, the caciques and labourers received some pay, conversion to Christianity, and, as vassals of the Spanish crown, protection – in theory – from further abuses or attack. It was a system that could benefit powerful local rulers and the Spanish, though many of the workers who laboured in the mines and fields fared less well.
Queen Isabella’s displeasure increased when she heard that Columbus was issuing such grants, since in doing so he was acting well above his station. The exasperated monarchs sent Francisco de Bobadilla over to govern the colony in place of Columbus, who had disappointed them, and they also began to grant licences to other explorers. In addition, Isabella decided to issue a cédula (decree) in 1500 that freed the Amerindian slaves who had been brought to Spain by Columbus. For his part, Bobadilla’s solution to the ongoing unrest between Spaniards resulted in Columbus, Bartolomé, and another brother, Diego, being sent to Spain in chains the same year. Nicolás de Ovando was appointed governor soon after, and he arrived on the island in 1502. Accompanying him were 2,500 settlers, one of whom was an eager young man named Bartolomé de las Casas.42 Casas’s father, Pedro, had been a member of Columbus’s large second expedition, and he returned to Spain with a Taino slave in tow. Only a few years later, Bartolomé had joined his father on the Ovando expedition, ready to make his fortune. Bartolomé’s journey, however, would not be merely physical, but also spiritual.
When Ovando arrived, he was determined to make Hispaniola productive. He sent the troublesome Roldán back to Spain, and put more native people into the mines to pick at rocks in order to fill ships to Spain, delivering the promises of gold. These settlers were doing themselves no favours, laying a foundation for the leyenda negra, the black legend that casts these peninsular interlopers as cruel and heartless conquistadors. In 1503, seeing no other option, Ovando told the crown that the Indians had to be forced to work in the mines. He had also gone on slaving expeditions to neighbouring islands to replace the high number of people who were dying. He was partly able to do this by capitalizing on the conceptual gap that Columbus had opened between the cannibalistic ‘Caribs’ and the other indigenous people. Queen Isabella was convinced enough to allow, in 1503, the enslavement of people from other islands, ‘in order that if the said cannibals still resist and will not be taught of our holy Catholic faith and be in my service and under my obedience, you may capture them and shall capture them in order to bring them to whatever lands and islands you so deem’.43 A royal cédula of 20 December 1503 approved the system, but reports of mistreatment were relayed to Spain on a regular basis.
Ovando managed to squeeze profits from the colony, at the expense of the native people whose numbers were fast diminishing through overwork and disease – and at his own hand. In 1504 he massacred many of the chiefs. In 1509, the native population was thought to be 60,000; by 1518 a census recorded only 11,000. The small supply of gold, too, had been exhausted. Dreams of exporting expensive Asian silks, exotic spices, and valuable porcelain were dimming, replaced by the harsh tropical realities of Hispaniola.
Columbus set off on one last voyage on 11 May 1502, with four ships and under strict orders not to go to Hispaniola. He attempted to take shelter there from a brewing hurricane in June, but was denied permission to land. He weathered the storm, and after it passed he sailed on to Honduras, exploring the Bay Islands and the Central American coast. He set off once again for Hispaniola in April the following year, but ended up beached in Jamaica by the end of June. He and his men were stranded, and at one point some of the crew used a canoe to reach Hispaniola and ask for help. Ovando refused at first, though nearly a year later relented, and allowed ships from Santo Domingo to go and fetch them. Columbus was able to return to Spain in 1504, where he died, in Valladolid, in 1506. Although he had been stripped of the titles admiral and viceroy of the Indies, he ended his life a wealthy man thanks to the gold he had saved, but his quest for riches had been an uneven journey, and one that left him at the end of his life gripped by a strong religious fervour. And he never admitted that he had not found the East. The lands he encountered would never bear his name, but rather that of a later Florentine navigator, Amerigo Vespucci. Vespucci, who had sailed to the New World around the late 1490s and whose writings about his travels were widely read, differed from Columbus in that he felt that what he had seen was not the East but another world altogether. In 1507 a map attributed to the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller appeared to agree with this assessment, and a landmass across the Atlantic from Europe was labelled ‘America’.44 Although Columbus’s name does not directly survive in the nomenclature of the Americas, its presence lives on in the names given to the islands he sailed around: the West Indies and Caribbean.
Meanwhile, Bartolomé de las Casas had been enjoying the fruits of his encomienda, which was making him a wealthy man. He was also teaching religion to the native people, and helping suppress any rebellions among the Amerindians in Hispaniola. During this time, Ovando stepped down and Diego, Columbus’s son, was given command of the island in 1509. Other expeditions around this time were yielding the establishment of settlements on Puerto Rico (1508), Jamaica (1509), and Cuba (1511). Casas joined the settlers in Cuba in 1513. He went as a chaplain, having been ordained a few years earlier. And it was in Cuba that he would undergo his true conversion. There had been a growing awareness of the mistreatment of the native workers, and another cleric,Antonio de Montesinos, had given controversial sermons on the subject in Santo Domingo in 1511 which were quickly circulated, having upset the Spanish population on the island, and which deeply influenced Casas.
Casas began to realize that the Amerindians under Spanish control were being mistreated, and that the encomienda had to end. He gave it up and began his campaign. Orders issued in 1512, known as the Laws of Burgos, attempted to regulate the system and curb mistreatment with stipulations such as ‘we order that no person or persons shall dare to whip or abuse any Indian, or call him dog or any other form of address except his proper name’.45
It is difficult to know if the many edicts of the Laws of Burgos were actually fulfilled – one of the defining characteristics of the Spanish empire is the concept of obedezcoperonocumplo, meaning ‘I obey but I do not comply’. Although this might sound like a way of obfuscating official orders, the system that evolved gave men on the ground in these far-flung colonies a pragmatic way to apply royal policies as best they could, while also giving the Spanish imperial bureaucracy some flexibility to respond to problems as they arose. Like most systems of governance, however, it was also subject to abuse.
Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico followed a similar trajectory – gold (quickly depleted), some rearing of livestock, depopulation, and neglect.
However, the Amerindians who continued to work the mines provided the settlers with some sixty tons (US) of gold to export to Spain in the first half of the sixteenth century.46 It was not all the pursuit of metal, though. As in the Atlantic islands, land was cleared and planting began. The beginnings of a profound agricultural transformation were under way. The first sugar mill in Hispaniola was opened around 1513, and soon there were mills in Puerto Rico as well.
Casas began to make a case to the king, and indeed was given the title ‘Protector of the Indians’. But there was still a labour shortage, especially in running the new sugar operations. As early as 1502 Ovando had tried to bring some Africans over, but they had run off and taken refuge with the native people, so he banned the importation of any other slaves.47 But with the decline of the indigenous population, the island was losing its workforce. In 1517, Casas thought he had hit upon the solution – try again to use Africans. He would later rue the decision to promote this idea, as the scale of African slavery would well outstrip the use of Amerindians. In 1510 King Ferdinand had authorized a shipment of around 250 Africans to be taken to Hispaniola. But by the end of the 1500s around 100,000 people from Africa had been distributed throughout Spain’s New World colonies.48 Since the Africans came from the papal-designated Portuguese zone, it also meant that Spain could not buy the slaves at source, so the crown allowed traders to bring a fixed number of slaves to Spanish territories, while also forcing them to pay it for the privilege – an added bonus.49 Over time this arrangement for the importation of slaves formalized and became known as the asiento.
In the decades that followed, Casas continued his campaign throughout the conquered territories, trying to protect the indigenous people of Peru and Mexico. He also managed to bring the conquest of Nicaragua to a halt for a couple of years, after petitioning Charles V, of Spain, who issued a cédula calling for its cessation. All the while, he worked on his History of the Indies, which would not be published until after his death, although in 1540 he did give Charles V a shortened version of the book, later printed as ‘An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies’, pointing out to the king that ‘in these forty years [i.e. since 1502] there have been above twelve million souls – men, women, and children – killed, tyrannically and unjustly, on account of tyrannical actions and infernal works of Christians’.50 He reminded his reader of the brutality: ‘They would enter into the villages and spare not children, or old people, or pregnant women, or women with suckling babies, but would open the woman’s belly and hack the babe to pieces, as though they were butchering lambs shut up in their pen. They would lay wagers who might slice open the belly of a man with one stroke of their blade.’51
Over time, Africans supplanted the remaining Amerindians and an entirely new system of production began.52 Further to the south, the colonization project continued as well. The conquistadors managed to get a foothold in the deep and deadly jungles of Central America around 1510, near Darien, Panama, in the area known as Tierra Firme, land that stretched from Central America along the coast to Venezuela. Three years later, Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the isthmus to the Pacific, and the years that followed under his governorship were violent and bloody, wiping out more of the native population there. The town of Panama was established in 1519, moving the settlement from Darien. Around the same time, Cuba became a launching point for other expeditions to the mainland, not least of Hérnan Cortés to Mexico.
As the settlers moved around, pearls from the Venezuelan coast were added to the exports of gold and sugar. Spaniards set up rancherías off the coast of Margarita island, and smaller nearby islets called Cubagua and Coche, and by 1520 there were around a hundred. The pearls were gathered by native peoples (and later Africans), who were forced to dive into oyster beds.53
Reports of Spanish activity, delayed as they would have been, still reached eager ears in Europe. This was the height of the Renaissance, and, with the development of printing in the 1450s, the dissemination of ideas – and stories of adventure and exploration – was rapid. Ideas could and did move. Intrepid English, Dutch, and Frenchmen began to seek backing for such adventures of their own, and before long the passage between Europe and the Caribbean was becoming increasingly well travelled. As the sailors of Europe brought their ships to the shores of this new world, one thing was clear: the Caribbean was a place for fantasy, a place beyond rules, and social norms. It was also a land of riches, lust and power. Identities were challenged, and the social stratifications of Europe easily peeled off under the heat of a tropical sun. At the same time,it was brutal and violent, a certain death for many, and a rude awakening for people who believed the tales they heard back home. But by the end of the sixteenth century, the old and the new were soldered together. The pulse of medieval and Renaissance Europe still gave a faint beat, but by crossing the Atlantic, Columbus and those who followed him were – for better or worse – not just attempting to control the ‘New World’ but forging one of their own. Not everyone was eager to go to the West Indies, however. In 1497 the Venetian explorer Giovanni Caboto – John Cabot – with a commission from the English, worked out an Atlantic crossing further to the north, from Bristol to Newfoundland. And in 1498 the Portuguese Vascoda Gama stepped ashore having found at last a sea route to the true India. The age of exploration was under way.
As for the West Indies, another chapter was about to begin, as western Europeans arrived in earnest on its shores, intent on claiming their share of the riches they had heard so much about. But they would not come away with gold,and had to find their wealth in other ways.