The Other Slavery (7 page)

Like any other rush, the gold rush of Española was chaotic and destructive. “Take the most advantage, because you do not know how long it will last” was a saying that circulated among the early miners. This bit of wisdom applied not only to the amount of gold one could extract but
also to the number of Indians one could command. Columbus’s initial proposals for enslavement fit perfectly with the labor needs. The first slaves working in the mines were islanders who had rebelled during the 1490s and whom the Spaniards had defeated and captured. The end of these rebellions, coupled with Queen Isabella’s insistence that the Indians were free, threw a monkey wrench into his plans and brought to the fore the problem of keeping the mines supplied with workers.
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The man who had to address the vexing problem of forcing Indians to work in the mines without enslaving them outright was Nicolás de Ovando, the highest political authority in Española during the gold rush years. At the time of his appointment, Ovando was already fifty years old, an advanced age in the sixteenth century for someone who had to travel to the New World to impose his will on strong-minded conquistadors and indomitable Indians. Yet Ovando more than compensated for his age with tremendous energy, loyalty to the crown, and experience. His native Extremadura was a frontier area where Ovando had participated in the civil wars of the 1470s and 1480s and witnessed the final stages of the Reconquista.
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The Catholic monarchs dispatched the aging Ovando to the Caribbean to restore order to a colonial experiment that had fallen into complete disarray. Columbus had attempted to monopolize the wealth of Española, igniting a rebellion by Spanish soldiers who had long mistrusted their commander and now found themselves shut out of the gold mines. Sending Ovando to the island in April 1502, with almost absolute power and at the head of 30 ships and 2,500 colonists, by far the largest expedition up to that time, was the crown’s boldest attempt to restore stability. As King Ferdinand reminded Diego Columbus, the Admiral’s son, “We sent him [Ovando] to that island because of the bad mistakes committed by your father while discharging the office that you currently have; the island was all up in arms, lost, and yielding no benefit whatsoever.”
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Ovando’s view of the Indians—quite similar to his perception of Muslims—was that they had to be treated firmly but not necessarily as enemies or animals. The deeply religious governor may have been a hardened frontiersman, but he was not a heartless slaver. For instance, after
visiting the war-torn town of Alcántara, Spain, in 1496, his initial efforts were directed toward building a new convent and church as a way to revive communal life. In addition to his faith, weighing heavily on his plans for the Natives of America was Ovando’s close relationship with Queen Isabella, who at that time remained a most determined and powerful defender of Indian rights. Ovando, on the basis of past experience and religious conviction, intended to grant the beleaguered islanders a measure of relief in the face of the headlong gold rush and scramble for Indian laborers. Yet his governorship illustrates the most salient feature of the crown’s early dealings with the Indians: good intentions gone terribly wrong.
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Ovando’s most important initiative was to distribute the Natives of the island to various
encomenderos,
or grantees. In effect, each Spanish grantee was “given” or “entrusted with” a cacique and his people, making sure in return that they were introduced to the mysteries of Christianity. The contract drawn up at the start of each distribution of Indians read: “You are hereby entrusted with the cacique
fulano
[so and so] and one hundred Indians, so you can make use of them in your ranches and mines and teach them the things of our holy Catholic faith.”
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Known indistinctly by the two relevant Spanish words
repartimiento
(from the verb
repartir,
to distribute) and
encomienda
(from
encomendar,
to entrust), this institution amounted to an extraordinary bridge between two vastly different historical realities. In feudal Spain, lords had wielded great power over the peasants who lived on their lands. They had the right to receive tribute from the peasants in exchange for protection. To be sure, there were significant differences between the feudal world of medieval Europe and the encomienda system proposed for Española. But at least to some degree, Spanish conquistadors could style themselves as lords of the New World. Interestingly, the encomienda was not entirely alien to the islanders. The Taíno people of the Caribbean were organized in stratified societies, with paramount caciques exercising control over lesser caciques and ordinary Indians
.
These caciques regularly extracted tribute in products and labor from their dependents. It was not a tremendous stretch, therefore, for the islanders to
understand the encomienda as an extension of their own system, except that now the ultimate beneficiaries were no longer the caciques but the encomenderos
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Ovando did not intend the encomiendas to become a disguise for slavery. He carefully regulated these arrangements, spelling out mutual rights and obligations. To prevent sexual predation, for example, Ovando insisted that prospective encomenderos had to be married, preferably with their wives present on the island. Before receiving an encomienda, each grantee had to understand the limits of his authority. He did not
own
the Indians in any sense of the word and therefore could not sell them or rent them out. In fact, the Indians would continue to live in their own villages under their caciques and by their own rules. The encomendero did have a right to require labor from the Indians given to him, and he was naturally eager to send them to the mines. But he had to pay each Indian 1 gold peso per year—an absurdly low wage that distinguished encomienda Indians from slaves. The Indians would work in the mines only for a limited period, known as the
demora,
which was initially set at six months a year. If the encomendero failed to abide by these terms, Governor Ovando could take away his encomienda and award it to someone else, a powerful lever in a cutthroat world in which only some Europeans had encomiendas and all others clamored for them.

Ovando’s intention to protect the Indians is also evident in the fact that he did not distribute all the Natives of Española. The governor allowed some caciques to continue to live on their own, free and apart from the Spanish colonial world. These were Natives who had shown the greatest loyalty to Spain and had made the greatest strides in becoming Hispanicized. One of these fortunate caciques was known to the Spaniards as “the doctor” because “he was the one who knew the most of them all.” Another one went by the name Diego Colón because the Admiral had raised him like his own son Diego, taking the boy back to Spain after his first voyage. Diego Colón spoke Spanish fluently and was well known to all the early colonists. Others included a cacique known as Alonso de Cáceres, who lived in Governor Ovando’s
household for some time; Francisco, who had been raised by Franciscan friars in a newly established monastery; and Masupa Otex, whose
cacicazgo
(chiefdom) incongruously lay in the heart of the gold region. By allowing these caciques and their people to live without Spanish interference, the governor wished to show that Indians were responsible neighbors and upstanding vassals of the empire, entirely capable of charting their own destiny.
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Unfortunately, reality overwhelmed Ovando’s careful plans. Dispersed in five or six hundred small villages, the islanders became easy prey for Spaniards determined to succeed at all costs. Some conquistadors simply enslaved the islanders illegally. Encomienda owners also found ways to get around the restrictions and safeguards. Instead of keeping the Indians in the mines for only six months, they compelled them to stay longer. In fact, being sent to the goldfields amounted to something close to a death sentence. According to one source, “Out of every hundred Indians who go only seventy come back, and in the worst cases out of three hundred only thirty return alive.” In their haste to obtain gold, the encomenderos pushed the Indians beyond the limits of survival. “The greed of men is insatiable,” commented Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. “Some owners gave excessive work to the Indians, and others provided them with too little food.” Contemporaries spoke of
quebrantamiento,
the breaking down of the body, turning laborers into walking cadavers stripped of the will to continue living. Such merciless exploitation was compounded by the constant shifts from one encomendero to another, “one more covetous than the previous one.” The encomiendas were granted at Ovando’s pleasure and lasted three years or less. Thus owners had an incentive to get the most out of their Indians, even if that meant passing on famished and exhausted workers to the next encomendero, who repeated the cycle of exploitation with renewed vigor.
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The misery also extended to the Indians who stayed behind in the villages: the elderly, children, pregnant women, and others who were somehow unsuitable for the arduous work in the mines. With all the able-bodied adults gone, they could not raise enough food for themselves, let alone for the scores of men and women returning from the goldfields. Widespread famines affected the island during Ovando’s years, and what little food existed was sent to the gold mines. Even the Indian villages given a pass by Governor Ovando failed. “They are improvident, especially about food,” one observer wrote about these communities. “If they have a lot of meat or fish, they eat them day and night without anticipating the future and realizing that tomorrow they will not have anything.” Prior to contact, these Indians had enjoyed a seemingly carefree lifestyle. But the harsh colonial demands rendered their traditional practices untenable and their survival impossible.
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Despite Ovando’s well-intentioned administration, the gold rush wiped out the island’s population. The mines destroyed the Taínos working there and in the process doomed those left behind in the villages. Caciques who had ruled over hundreds of individuals saw their dependents shrink to a handful of survivors after ten years of unrelenting work. Las Casas was one of the 2,500 colonists who had arrived in Española with Governor Ovando, and he had received an encomienda in the goldfields of Cibao, where he observed the cataclysmic decline of the Indians. He believed that three million Indians had died in just a few years. “Who of those born in future generations will believe this? I myself who am writing this and saw it and know most about it can hardly believe that such was possible.” Another knowledgeable contemporary writing a few years later, Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, expressed the same idea. “Let us be strictly truthful and add that the craze for gold was the cause of their destruction,” he wrote to the pope, “for these people who were accustomed as soon as they had sown their fields to play, dance, and sing, and chase rabbits, were set mercilessly to work.” By 1508–1509 the surviving islanders could no longer sustain the gold production of Cibao, let alone raise food, build towns for the Spaniards, and do all the other work required of them. Ovando himself, realizing the depth of the crisis and the failure of his policies, proposed a dramatic and far-reaching solution: bring Indian slaves from the surrounding islands to work in the gold mines and other endeavors of Española. A new chapter in the sad history of the early Caribbean had begun.
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Los Armadores

In the early years of the sixteenth century, Puerto Real and Puerto de Plata were two drab ports on the north shore of Española. Everything seemed modest and temporary: a couple of muddy streets, thatched huts with one or two stone houses, half-built churches that lacked even stone crosses. These communities were dangerously exposed to the tropical storms and hurricanes that sometimes roared through the Caribbean basin. Yet as the Indians of Española became scarce, Puerto Real and Puerto de Plata came alive. Local residents and wealthy colonists pooled their resources, chartered or bought dilapidated boats, hired disheveled crews, and launched their merchant vessels across the Caribbean Sea. They were known as
los armadores
(shipowners), an appellation that seems much too grand when compared with their counterparts in Seville, who were at the same time launching armadas across the Atlantic and around the world.
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The northern shore of Española opened up to the green-blue waters of the Caribbean and to dozens of islands that were large enough to sustain Native populations but small enough that the people could not hide from Spanish slavers. Even the Caribbean geography seemed ideal for the trafficking of Indians. Directly to the east were the Lesser Antilles, a cluster of islands in the shape of an arc, inhabited by Carib Indians and reaching all the way to South America. The Caribs refused to submit to the Spaniards or even negotiate. The Spaniards regarded them as fierce, physically strong, and very dangerous because they used arrowheads dipped in a poisonous substance made from shrubs and plants. One observer noted that “those who are wounded with this poison die in writhing pain, throwing up, biting their own hands, and beside themselves on account of the great pain.” But the practice of the Caribs that stood out most in the collective European mind was cannibalism. Columbus was the first to make invidious distinctions between the friendly Indians of the large islands and the cannibals of the Lesser Antilles, and indeed we owe the term “cannibal” to the Admiral’s conflation of the term “Caniba”—an appellation for the fierce peoples of the eastern
Caribbean—with their custom of eating human flesh. Eventually, the term was applied to all man-eating peoples.
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