56 CHAPTER 3 THE CONQUEST OF AMERICA
the south Atlantic and the promising route around
Africa to the East. Yielding to Portuguese pressure,
Ferdinand and Isabella signed in 1494 the Treaty
of Tordesillas, which established a boundary 270
leagues farther west. Portugal obtained exclusive
rights of discovery and conquest east of this line;
Castile gained the same rights to the west.
Columbus returned to Hispaniola at the end
of 1493 with a fl eet of seventeen ships carrying
twelve hundred people, most of them artisans and
peasants, with a sprinkling of “caballeros, hidal-
gos, and other men of worth, drawn by the fame
of gold and the other wonders of that land.” The
settlers soon gave themselves up to gold hunting
and preying on indigenous peoples. A foreigner of
obscure origins, Columbus lacked the powers and
personal qualities needed to control this turbulent
mass of fortune hunters.
After founding the town of Isabella on the
north coast of Hispaniola, Columbus sailed again
in quest of Cathay. He coasted down the south-
ern shore of Cuba almost to its western end. The
great length of the island convinced him that he
had reached the Asiatic mainland. To extinguish
all doubts, he made his offi cers and crews take a
solemn oath, “on pain of a hundred lashes and
having the tongue slit if they ever gainsaid the
same,” that Cuba was the mainland of Asia. In
1496 he returned to Spain to report his discoveries
and answer charges sent by disgruntled settlers to
the court. He left behind his brother Bartholomew,
who removed the settlement from Isabella to a
healthier site on the south shore and named the
new town Santo Domingo.
The fi rst two voyages had not paid their way,
but the Sovereigns still had faith in Columbus and
outfi tted a third fl eet in 1498. On this voyage he
landed at Trinidad and the mouths of the Orinoco.
The mighty current of sweet water discharged by
the great river made Columbus conclude that he
was on the shores of a continent, but his crotchety
mysticism also suggested that the Orinoco was one
of the four rivers of Paradise and had its source in
the Garden of Eden.
Columbus arrived in Hispaniola to fi nd chaos.
The intolerable demands of the greedy Castilian
adventurers had provoked the peaceable Taino
natives to the point of war. The Spaniards, disap-
pointed in their hopes of quick wealth, blamed
the Columbus brothers for their misfortunes and
rose in revolt under a leader named Roldán. To
appease the rebels, Columbus issued pardons and
granted land and native slaves. Meanwhile, act-
ing on a stream of complaints against Columbus,
the Sovereigns had sent out an agent, Francisco de
Bobadilla, to supersede Columbus and investigate
the charges against him. Arriving at the island, the
irascible Bobadilla seized Columbus and his brother
and sent them to Spain in chains. Although Isa-
bella immediately disavowed Bobadilla’s arbitrary
actions, Columbus never again exercised the func-
tions of viceroy and governor in the New World.
Still gripped by his great illusion, Columbus
continued to dream of fi nding a western way to the
land of spices. He was allowed to make one more
voyage, the most diffi cult and disastrous of all. He
was now convinced that between the mainland
on which he had recently landed and the Malay
Peninsula shown on ancient maps, there existed
a strait that would lead into the Indian Ocean. In
1502 he sailed in search of this strait and a route
to southern Asia. From Hispaniola, where he was
not permitted to land, he crossed the Caribbean to
the coast of Central America and followed it south
to the Isthmus of Panama. At this point he believed
he was ten days’ journey from the Ganges River.
In Panama he found some gold, but the hoped-for
strait continued to elude him. He fi nally departed
for Hispaniola with his two remaining ships but
was forced to beach the worm-riddled craft on Ja-
maica, where he and his men were marooned for a
year awaiting the arrival of a relief ship. In Novem-
ber 1504, Columbus returned to Europe. Broken in
health, convinced of the ingratitude of princes, he
died in 1506 a rich but embittered man.THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA IN
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
The fi ve-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s
1492 voyage to America produced an outpour-
ing of writings seeking to throw new light on that
momentous event. Debate still rages over the pro-
digious consequences of Columbus’s discoveries
and whether they should be cause for jubilation or
regret. The Spanish chronicler Francisco López de