Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [69]
The little fort served as the kernel of a vision of empire on which Columbus had been meditating ever since his first voyage, and by now the plan had become firmly established in his mind. He envisioned two thousand colonists settling Hispaniola. They would build “three or four towns”; collect gold, which would be closely guarded; and establish churches with “abbots or friars to administer the sacraments, perform divine worship, and to convert the Indians.” He explained his plans to regulate shipping, handle cargo, and protect valuable exports, especially gold, in grinding detail to satisfy Spanish bureaucrats who administered the kingdom’s day-to-day operations. He displayed an impressive familiarity with the minutiae of his administrative agenda, which belied the difficulty of carrying it out. Concerning navigation, of which he possessed a singular mastery, he had almost nothing to say.
Between the lines of his communiqué, Columbus urged Ferdinand and Isabella to act quickly, before the Portuguese or another rival outfoxed Spain. Rather than standing as an unprecedented feat of navigation, the voyage would become the first of many to assemble the greatest, the wealthiest, and the largest commercial empire in the world. Or so Columbus hoped. To make his case, the document simplified the complex reality of the “Indies.” He omitted references to the menace posed by the Caribs, the difficulty of replicating his feat of navigation, the vagaries of weather, and, of course, the stupendous misunderstanding of the location of his discoveries. He was selective to the point of being deceptive, but there was no mistaking his meaning. Spain would acquire a new empire and he would administer it, becoming wealthy in the process by founding a dynasty. The scheme had the virtue of familiarity; it echoed the Spanish—and for that matter, the Portuguese—approach to exploring and colonizing the African coast and the exotic islands to the south and west of the Iberian Peninsula, Madeira and Gomera and Cape Verde—not quite substantial enough for an empire, but a sphere of influence that might grow into one. Implementing Columbus’s plan meant pushing the boundaries of empire thousands of miles to the west.
Pope Alexander VI closely followed Columbus’s discoveries, recognizing that they could mightily increase the reach of the Church of Rome and his personal power. But it was crucial that he divide the spoils among the competing states that would administer and exploit their resources. Acting as a mediator, Alexander issued four bulls—formal proclamations—dividing the newly discovered lands and their riches between the leading contenders, Spain and Portugal, who were allies in matters of faith but rivals in matters of politics and trade. (Italy, which supplied much of the manpower for exploration, ranked a distant third behind them.) The bulls were based on the assumption that Christian nations could, by divine right, claim title to newly discovered non-Christian lands and their peoples.
In each bull, he gave to Spain the newly discovered “Indies” (the pope, like all of Europe, was mistaken about the location of Columbus’s tantalizing finds), and it was assumed that his Spanish origins influenced his decision. But his effort at clarification led to confusion in April 1493 when he established a line of demarcation that extended from the North Pole to the South “one hundred leagues toward the west and south from any of the islands commonly known as the Azores and Cape Verdes.” Anything west of the line—that is, everything that mattered—was Spain’s, and if Columbus was able to complete another voyage, partly his as well.
Columbus’s son Ferdinand later explained, “As the Catholic Sovereigns knew that the Admiral had been the prime cause of the favors and grants made to them by the pope, and that the Admiral’s voyage and discovery had given them title and