Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [118]
Ojeda rode on, pausing only to tighten the restraints of his prisionero, until they reached La Isabela, where Caonabó, now a captive, spent his time, in the words of Peter Martyr, “fretting and grating his teeth as if he had been a lion of Libya.”
Pressing on with his pacification of the Cibao, Ojeda rounded up other recalcitrant chieftains, although at least one, Caonabó’s brother-in-law, Behechio, escaped. When the action was over, Columbus staged a victory march through the subjugated countryside.
That was the Spanish side of the story, recorded for posterity by the chroniclers Ferdinand Columbus, Peter Martyr, and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. But there was another, more troubling perspective, that of the Indians, which emphasized the European rape and kidnapping of the naive Taínos. Even Columbus’s sympathies were divided at times between the men he led and those he sought to conquer, but once he had purged himself of compassion, his attention returned to his obsession with gold, glory, and conquest.
Illuminating the moral stakes in the conflict, Las Casas declared, “Such an execrable victory certainly did not redound to the glory of God.” To try to make up for these sins in some small way, he would bear witness to their suffering, and serve as their advocate for posterity.
Columbus intended to dispatch Caonabó and his brother to Spain, “for he was unwilling to put to death so great a personage without the knowledge of the Catholic Sovereigns,” according to Ferdinand. He judged it sufficient to punish many other Indians. It was a curious decision for such a vindictive man, and stemmed from the fact that Columbus and Caonabó had developed a rapport, from one leader to another, across their vast political and linguistic gulf. They shared an interest in the eternal mysteries of life and death, as Columbus attempted to conquer the Indians’ sturdy spiritual realm with the same vigor he had brought to their fragile temporal existence, and with equally baffling results.
“I have taken pains to learn what they believe and know where the dead go, especially from Caonabó,” Columbus wrote in a remarkable reappraisal of his former antagonist. “He is a man of mature age, very knowledgeable and sharp-witted,” and he gave Columbus his first convincing idea of what the life of an Indian cacique was like: privileged, indulgent, and Edenic. “They eat, have wives, enjoy pleasures and comforts,” Columbus marveled. In and around the outbreaks of hostilities, the Spanish had learned more about the lives and resources of their hosts, as Ferdinand noted, their mines of “copper, sapphires, and amber; brazilwood, ebony, incense, cedars, many fine gums, and different kinds of wild spices,” including cinnamon (“though bitter to the taste”), ginger, pepper, everything except the gold Columbus ardently sought. There were even “mulberry trees for producing silk that bear leaves all year round, and many other useful plants and trees of which nothing is known in our countries.”
What sounds like an idyll, at least in Columbus’s words, was anything but. With his two brothers, he established three more fortresses, which he used to enforce a system of tribute that ruined the island’s previously resilient economy.
Henceforth, every Indian over the age of fourteen had to give the equivalent of a hawk’s bell filled with gold. Caciques were required to give even more to the Spanish occupiers. Indians who lived in regions where gold was scarce could substitute cotton—spun or woven, not raw—if they wished, but everyone had to give his tribute, on pain of death. Those who complied received a stamped copper or brass token to wear around their necks in what became a symbol of intolerable shame. (Of this system, Las Casas charged: “Even the cruelest of the Turks or Moors, or the Huns and Vandals who laid waste our kingdoms and lands and destroyed our lives, would have found such a demand impossibly