Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [149]
The situation darkened when most of the workers deserted to join Roldán, and Colombo was left with only six or seven men. Furious, Colombo confronted Roldán, insisting that the laborers had come to the Indies to work, not to spend their days drinking Indian wine and their nights with the Indian women. If Roldán refused to cooperate, it would be obvious to all that he had affronted the Admiral and the Sovereigns. Skillful as ever at devising excuses, Roldán pleaded helplessness and ignorance. He could not tell the unruly men how to behave. “His monastery,” he explained, “was governed by rules that denied the habit to no man.”
Juan Antonio Colombo realized he had been defeated, so he and his handful of loyalists returned to the ships to sail back to Santo Domingo. Battling adverse wind and weather, his food supply rotting in the heat, Sánchez de Carvajal ran onto a shoal, which tore away the rudder and ruptured the keel, admitting so much seawater that the afflicted ship barely reached her mooring. After completing the difficult passage from the rebel outpost of Xaraguá, the three captains were gratified to see the Admiral himself, having completed his northerly passage from Trinidad.
More mariner than warrior, Columbus studied the list of grievances against the rebels, as compiled by his brother, and realized that eventually he would have to punish the malefactors, but first he assembled a new catalogue of accusations. Ferdinand recalled that his father initially “resolved to be as moderate as he could in this affair, that the rebels might more easily be reduced to obedience.” To rid the enterprise of troublemakers, he promised, on September 22, free passage to Spain, and food, to anyone who wanted it.
A long voyage westward across an uncharted sea no longer held the terrors that it once did, thanks to Columbus’s mastery of winds, currents, reefs, and harbors. The risk of disaster, while never absent, diminished with every crossing until transatlantic travel from Spain to Santo Domingo had become almost routine.
This accomplishment gave rise to a more baffling challenge: how to manage a far-flung empire and its many constituencies: Spanish, Indian, and the brothers Columbus, to name only the major segments. Then there were the hidalgos, or gentlemen; the hired workers; and the fierce Caribs. The Sovereigns’ monolithic approach—convert or exploit, or, on occasion, convert and exploit—proved tragically ill suited to the varied people of both the “Indies” and Spain, and inadequate to the task of maintaining an empire.
Two days later, on September 24, Miguel Ballester reported that Roldán and another rebel, Adrián de Mújica (or Moxica), were to meet, presenting an opportunity for the Admiral’s men to seize the leaders, if Columbus chose to act. As before, he remained idle.
Roldán and his forces, in the meantime, marched to Santo Domingo. Columbus placed the commander, Ballester, in charge of nearby Concepción. Ballester was to deliver a carefully worded message of reconciliation from the Admiral, saying that he “deplored” all that Roldán had suffered, and wished to “bury the past in oblivion, granting a general pardon to all,” in Ferdinand’s depiction. Roldán should feel that he could meet with Columbus “without fear of reprisal” so that they could jointly determine how best to carry out the Sovereigns’ intentions. Columbus would even provide Roldán with safe conduct “in the form he desired.”
Whether Columbus made this offer in good faith is not certain. Ballester reported that he had conveyed the Admiral’s conciliatory message to Roldán and Adrián de Mújica, “but found them very stubborn and brazenly defiant,” with Roldán loudly insisting that he had no interest in negotiations or finding a path to peace. He had the Admiral “in the hollow of his hand,” as he expressed it, and could either “help him or destroy him as he pleased.” He would not consider negotiations of any kind until Columbus and his brothers