Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean

The Greater Antilles, 1493–1550

Ida Altman

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780807176191
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

The half century of European activity in the Caribbean that followed Columbus's first voyages brought enormous demographic, economic, and social change to the region as Europeans, Indigenous people, and Africans whom Spaniards imported to provide skilled and unskilled labor came into extended contact for the first time. In Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean, Ida Altman examines the interactions of these diverse groups and individuals and the transformation of the islands of the Greater Antilles (Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica). She addresses the impact of disease and ongoing conflict; the Spanish monarchy's efforts to establish a functioning political system and an Iberian church; evangelization of Indians and Blacks; the islands' economic development; the international character of the Caribbean, which attracted Portuguese, Italian, and German merchants and settlers; and the formation of a highly unequal and coercive but dynamic society. As Altman demonstrates, in the first half of the sixteenth century the Caribbean became the first full-fledged iteration of the Atlantic world in all its complexity.

1

Creating a Spanish Caribbean

When Europeans arrived in the Caribbean in October 1492, they found themselves moving around and through an archipelago of islands that formed a crescent some two thousand miles long, stretching almost from the tip of Florida to just off the northern coast of South America. The islands varied greatly in size, topography, climate, demography, ethnicity, and resources. Populations were substantial in the large islands of the northern Caribbean (Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico), known today as the Greater Antilles, the principal focus of this study. The residents of these islands had complex forms of sociopolitical organization and practiced intensive agriculture. They took full advantage of the seas in which they fished and moved around with ease.

Accustomed to the arrival of migrants, raiders, and traders on their shores, the people who lived in the islands might not have found the appearance of Columbus’s three ships as surprising as is often assumed. Judging by the first interactions that took place between Europeans and Indigenous islanders, the islanders were intrigued by the odd newcomers with their strange ships but not apparently alarmed. It must be emphasized, of course, that we know almost nothing about these encounters beyond the descriptions provided by Columbus.

Archaeological work has demonstrated that at the time of contact, the Caribbean was home to several groups speaking languages that probably were related but not always mutually intelligible. Starting around six thousand years ago, people began to arrive in the islands in waves. That movement continued for several thousand years, with the earliest migrants originating in Central America and later ones coming from the South American mainland.1 Although Europeans quickly began to distinguish between the friendly people they encountered in the Greater Antilles and the more mobile groups of the smaller islands, whom they labeled “Caribs” and associated with cannibalism, the ethnolinguistic situation in the region was much more complicated than the simple distinction between friends or enemies would suggest, as probably at least some Europeans understood. Our understanding of the human map of the Caribbean at the time of Europeans’ arrival and during the preceding centuries derives almost entirely from archaeological evidence, since European categories, as suggested, were more self-serving than accurate.2

The early emergence of this dichotomy in Europeans’ categorization of the Native peoples of the region proved to be politically and ideologically useful, even if inaccurate, and contributed to how the newcomers constructed the region geopolitically as they worked to bring it under Spanish control. They sought to settle in the large islands, which had substantial Indigenous populations and indications of gold, but for some time they viewed other areas mainly as sources of captive labor. They considered the Bahamas, for example, to be “useless islands” (islas inútiles) because they lacked gold, and so they virtually emptied them of their inhabitants; many of the Lucayans, as the people of the Bahamas were known, ended up laboring for Spaniards in Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, or Cuba. Columbus very early began exporting Indigenous captives to be sold in Spain, and Europeans organized raids and entradas (expeditions) to the mainland, capturing large numbers of people to be used as auxiliaries or sold as slaves.3

The Spanish crown soon repudiated Columbus’s decision to send Indigenous captives taken in early campaigns on Hispaniola to be sold as slaves in Spain, many for his own profit. Queen Isabel insisted that, as her vassals, the people of Hispaniola could not be enslaved. That decision, however, did not preclude the imposition of other forms of labor exploitation on the Indians of the Greater Antilles, and Spaniards found ways to justify taking captives who resisted Spanish domination and Christianization.

Although theories of “just war” long predated Iberian expansion to the Americas, in 1513 the Spanish crown adopted a formal proclamation called the Requerimiento (Requirement), which set out the terms by which Native Americans were “required” to recognize the legitimacy of the Roman Catholic church and the sovereignty of the Spanish crown as the protector of the church. Spaniards were to read this statement when they confronted potentially hostile Indigenous people. If their audience failed to comply, the Requirement gave Spaniards the legal basis to wage war on, and enslave, recalcitrant Natives.4 By the time the Requerimiento was issued, Spaniards already had occupied all four of the big islands of the northern Caribbean, so it provided a legal ritual that justified what Spaniards had been doing almost from the outset.

Given that Europeans established themselves first in Hispaniola and from there moved on to the neighboring islands and nearby mainland, their initial contacts mainly were with Taíno peoples. Archaeologist William Keegan suggests that the term Taíno should not be understood as designating a single homogeneous group; rather, it incorporated a range of historical, socioeconomic, political, cultural, and linguistic patterns while also reflecting some shared practices.5 These included sociopolitical organization in chiefdoms, or cacicazgos, some quite large and possibly incorporating a number of lesser chiefdoms; hierarchical organization within communities as well as among cacicazgos; the construction and grouping of houses according to social hierarchies and family and kinship ties; an emphasis on matrilineal descent and matrilocal residence; the practice of settled, varied, and in some places intensive forms of agriculture (irrigation, terracing, mounding), which included cultivation of yucca (both sweet and bitter, also known as cassava or manioc), maize, aje (a kind of sweet potato), fruit, and cotton; dependence on marine and riverine species for most of their animal protein; the construction and use of ball courts and plazas, some predating the Taíno; and sophisticated carving in wood and stone.

Notwithstanding such similarities, the islands of the Greater Antilles were differentiated from one another by geographic location in relation to other islands and the mainland; by the presence of distinctive groups; and by varying population numbers, topography, and mineral resources. For Europeans, these differences meant that, as they occupied the islands, they would confront—and perhaps create—on each a specific set of conditions that resulted in unique challenges or, possibly, advantages.6 The proximity of Puerto Rico to the Leeward Islands, for example, made it something of a borderland between Taíno and Carib cultures, the result being that Caribs figured far more significantly in the early history of Spanish Puerto Rico than was the case in the other islands. The lack of gold in Jamaica meant that it would attract smaller numbers of potential settlers, while Hispaniola’s large Indigenous population, numerous chiefdoms and communities, and substantial gold deposits ensured its institutional and economic primacy under Spanish rule. Indeed, Hispaniola remained the sole focus of Spanish colonizing activity for somewhat more than a decade and a half, which certainly contributed to its preeminence as well. On the other hand, the four islands had in common mountainous interiors that attracted Indians and Africans seeking to escape the Europeans and their demands, and abundant harbors that facilitated trade and movement throughout the region.

Columbus (Colón in Spanish) failed to encounter the wealthy trading societies he hoped to find by sailing west from Europe and reaching Asia. Instead, he and the people who went to the islands with and after him had to adjust their ambitions and expectations to the realities of the Caribbean milieu. They became accustomed, if not enthusiastically, to eating the caçabi (cassava) bread that local people produced by grating bitter yucca, squeezing out the poisonous juices, and drying it into flour, and they began to produce it commercially for export to other islands or to the mainland. They depended on large Indigenous-built dugout canoes to move around, and they used native materials and Native building styles (not to mention labor) to fashion houses for themselves and their slaves and servants. They learned about the therapeutic properties of local plants and trees and exported some brazilwood in the early years. Above all, they used the sea as a highway to connect the islands not only to one another and to the nearby mainland but also to the islands of the Atlantic—the Canaries, the Azores, and, later, São Tomé and Cabo Verde—and to the ports of Spain and Portugal.

Given the Caribbean’s openness to anyone willing and able to cross the Atlantic, it is no surprise that Spaniards never maintained an exclusive presence in the region. Indeed, although Columbus sailed across the Atlantic on behalf of the Spanish crown, with crews drawn mostly from Andalucía in southern Spain, he was by origin Genoese. He had accrued mercantile experience in the eastern Mediterranean and Madeira and lived among the Italian community in Lisbon, eventually sailing to Guinea. He married a woman from an Italian family that had settled in Portugal in the late fourteenth century and thereby entered into the Portuguese nobility.7 The commercial model that the Portuguese had developed along the coast of West Africa, and later in Asia, of establishing trade factories (feitorias) at defensible coastal locations, possibly influenced Columbus in some measure, although in Hispaniola he did not hesitate to order the construction of several inland forts to secure gold mining areas.

From the outset, then, postcontact Caribbean society would be notably international. Italian merchants and Portuguese ships and settlers joined Spaniards in pursuing new economic opportunities in the islands, as did a small number of Englishmen.8 The Caribbean became even more diverse as captive Africans were brought to the islands. German merchants became involved in the slave trade and obtained a concession from Charles V to settle Venezuela. They participated in the commerce of the large islands as well.9

Beginnings

Columbus and his party reached the Bahamas in October 1492. They sailed along some other islands but focused their attention on Hispaniola, where the cacique Guacanagarí welcomed them. On Christmas Eve, the Santa María, the largest of the three ships, ran aground near the present-day site of En Bas Saline (Haiti), on the island’s northern coast.10 Guacanagarí and his people helped the Europeans to salvage what they could from the ship and provided them with hospitality and shelter. Columbus had a fort built, which he named La Navidad, in part using timber salvaged from the ship and probably with the assistance of Guacanagarí’s people. When he returned to Spain he left behind thirty-nine men under the leadership of a man named Rodrigo de Arana and a surgeon, Maestre Juan.11

Whether due to the men’s bad behavior, a lack of food, or contention among the island’s caciques over Guacanagarí’s apparent alliance with the newcomers—probably all those factors played a part in the men’s fate—none of the thirty-nine who stayed behind in Hispaniola survived to greet the approximately 1,200 people who participated in Columbus’s second voyage, in 1493. The ships did not sail directly to Hispaniola but instead stopped at Guadaloupe and then Monserrat before reaching the site of the fort of La Navidad, where the Europeans discovered that the settlement had been destroyed. The ships then worked their way slowly along the north coast until Columbus chose the site that would become La Isabela, which archaeologist Kathleen Deagan has called the first medieval town in the Americas, at the mouth of the Río Bahabonico.

The ships’ crews and passengers were exhausted from the extended voyage and soon began to sicken.12 Supplies were scarce and arrived irregularly from Spain, so hunger afflicted nearly everyone from the start. Nonetheless, Columbus imposed a harsh work regimen on the men, most of whom were on salary, and refused to excuse them because of illness or starvation, pressing them not only to build the town but also to construct and man forts in the interior.13 Hunger drove men to “rebel” by escaping into the interior, or to commit theft. Columbus responded to these acts with brutal punishments, which witnesses described in the inquiry (pesquisa) conducted by comendador Francisco de Bobadilla in 1500.14

Extensive archaeological work at La Isabela has shown that the town included a fortified tower, a storehouse, a church, a stone house for the admiral, a large open plaza, and earthen walls. Although the early abandonment of the site has fostered the notion that it was not viable, it did have some advantages, including proximity to go...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• TIMELINE OF THE EARLY SPANISH CARIBBEAN
• MAPS
• Introduction
• 1. Creating a Spanish Caribbean
• 2. Death and Danger in the Islands
• 3. Government, Politics, and the Law
• 4. Church and Clergy
• 5. Transitions
• 6. Women and Family
• Conclusion: Caribbean Connections
• GLOSSARY
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX