Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [148]
Bartholomew’s men learned that Roldán and others planned to tarnish Columbus’s name in Spain by means of poison-pen letters. Peter Martyr, from his vantage point in Italy, later wrote that “the rebels, complaining seriously about both [Columbus] brothers, called them unjust, impious, enemies of the Spanish blood”—code for their Genoese origins—“and squanderers, because they took delight in torturing over trifles, hanging, slaughtering, and killing in all kinds of ways.” The rebels, he continued, “depicted them as ambitious, arrogant, envious, unbearable tyrants: so they deserted them, being just wild animals thirsty for blood and enemies of the Sovereigns.” Roldán’s men claimed that they had seen Columbus and his two brothers plotting obsessively to take over the islands, and they claimed that the Columbus brothers “would allow no one but their own men to reach the gold mines or gather it.” From the Sovereigns’ perspective, that was precisely what Columbus should have been doing.
The rebels protested that the Admiral resorted to calling them horrible names, “wicked and quarrelsome, pimps, thieves, rapists, kidnappers, outlaws, men deprived of any value or good sense, brainless perjurers, liars either with previous criminal records or escapees fearing being sentenced by judges for crimes.” (The accusations stung because they contained considerable truth.) They had heard that Columbus had characterized them as men “originally brought to dig and provide services,” yet “did not even walk out of the house.” Instead, “they have the poor natives carry them throughout the whole island, like high-ranking magistrates.” Columbus related how the rebels, “so as not to lose their blood-shedding habit and test their strength draw swords and compete with each other in cutting off the heads of those innocent people”—the Indians—“with one blow; the man who more swiftly decapitated an unfortunate native in a single blow was declared the strongest and more worthy of honor among them.” Even the rebels realized that such appalling behavior would destroy their reputation, if not in Hispaniola, then in Spain.
As the controversy swept Hispaniola, several ships belonging to Columbus’s fleet appeared off the coast of Xaraguá, but they were not the ones that Roldán had been expecting.
The three supply ships had made a speedy passage since leaving the Canary Islands in June, too speedy, in fact. When the squadron arrived in the Caribbean, the pilots, said Ferdinand, “were carried so far westward that they arrived on the coast of Xaraguá, where the rebels were.” If they had reached their intended destination, Santo Domingo, they would have enjoyed Bartholomew’s protection. Instead, the ships were overrun with Roldán’s rebels, who falsely claimed that the Adelantado had ordered them to “secure provisions and pacify the countryside.” One captain, Alonso Sánchez de Carvajal, saw through the ruse and attempted to persuade Roldán to end his revolt and declare his loyalty to Bartholomew, but sentiment among the crew, already influenced by Roldán’s men, and their alluring promises, favored the rebels over the loyalists.
Frustrated, Sánchez de Carvajal joined forces with the two other captains to send a small party of salaried workers to the mines near Santo Domingo. The unfavorable weather and currents that had brought the ships to Xaraguá still held sway; it might take months for the ships to reach Santo Domingo, so the workers, forty in all, planned to set out on foot, under the command of Juan Antonio Colombo. Pedro de Arana