Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [151]
Columbus beseeched the Sovereigns to send “devout religious men,” in his words, to replace these sinners. As he denounced the wicked behavior of the Spaniards, the Admiral praised the land and its possibilities, “abundant in all things,” he wrote, with a biblical cadence, “especially in bread and meat.” No one need go hungry, not with the copious pigs and hens and wild animals resembling rabbits so easy to catch that “an Indian boy with a dog brings in fifteen or twenty daily to his master.” All that was needed was wine and clothing, items easily transported from Spain. The only problem was that the land of plenty attracted “the greatest loafers in the world.”
The lack of dedication among the Spaniards dismayed Columbus. “When I came here I brought many people for the conquest of these lands,” he reminded the idealized Sovereigns of his thoughts. “All of these people importuned me, saying that they would serve very well and better than anybody.” But in reality, “it was the reverse, because they only came believing that the gold and spices that were said to be found could be gathered with shovels, and that the spices already came tied in bundles on the seashore, so that there was nothing more to do than throw them in the ships. Thus, they were blinded by greed.” (As was Columbus, though he refused to acknowledge his own shortcoming.) “I preached all of this to them in Seville. Because so many wished to come, and I realized why, I had to tell them this and all the trials that those who settle in far lands often suffer.” Few believed his warnings, at first. “When they arrived here and saw that I had spoken the truth to them, and that their avarice would not be satisfied, they wished to return right away without seeing whether it were possible to conquer and dominate this land. And because I did not consent to it, they began to hate me. And they had no reason.” They also hated him because he would not allow them to enter the island’s beguiling interior “because the Indians had killed many who had traveled spread out like that, and they would have killed more if I had not prevented it.”
As if disruptive settlers did not pose enough of a problem, he had to contend with stowaways; Columbus estimated that a quarter of his men consisted of such polizones. And there was one other difficulty: the women of Hispaniola “are so beautiful that it is a marvel,” he observed, “even though it should not be said.” But everyone did remark on the island’s women, with their tawny skin and sweet scent, fertile beauties who displayed a taste for sensual abandon surpassing the settlers’ fantasies. To many Europeans, these women, more than any other aspect of Hispaniola, represented the allure of the Indies.
Columbus, as always, tried to calculate the cost, and to make the case to the Sovereigns that his discoveries had given them a historic bargain. “What man of wisdom will say that it was a waste of money?” That was one point of view. Las Casas, in contrast, ruefully observed that Columbus “would have done great things and produced inestimable benefit in this land if he had realized that these people did not owe anything to him or to any other person in the world just because they had been discovered.” Instead, Columbus had fostered a system under which the Indians did all the work for the Spaniards, corrupting them in the process. Month after month, he had assigned property to settlers, many of them Indian farms, and given them plants and vines to cultivate, as many as ten thousand to a single person, complete with certificates indicating the quantity and recipient of the items. He initiated cooperative agricultural enterprises among the Spanish settlers, with the unfortunate result that the settlers forced the Indians occupying the land to leave and search for gold to give to their