Thus ended Columbus's second trip westward across the Atlantic. What a landing! Blackened ruins, dead bodies, the enmity of the natives, and— no gold; all this where he had hoped to be greeted by happy, prosperous men. Here were the first fruits of his great discovery; here the first sample of Spanish ability at colonizing; here the first specimen of what the white man could do in a new and peaceful land; and our great Admiral, thinking of the mixed band he had brought out from Spain to colonize, dropped his head and covered his face with his hands.
All were anxious to leave the scene of this tragedy; but before they left, the native king, Guacanagari, who appeared as friendly as ever, expressed a desire to visit Columbus's ship. While on it he managed to talk with the Caribbean Indians who were aboard. That night the captives, including a woman whom the Spaniards had named Catalina, made their escape and were picked up in waiting canoes. Next day when Columbus sent to Guacanagari to demand their return, the king and his whole village had disappeared. It would appear that this simple savage had grown into a far shrewder person than his European host since that Christmas night when the Santa Maria ran aground.
La Navidad having disappeared, the next concern was to found another settlement. A point some distance east was chosen, where a beautiful green vega, or plain, stretched far back from the shore. The city was to be called Isabella, in honor of the queen who had made possible the discovery of the new lands. Streets were laid out, a fine church and a storehouse were planned to be built of stone, and many private houses, to be built of wood or adobe or any convenient material, were to be constructed. All this was very fine in plan; but when the men were called upon to do the hard manual labor that is required for building a town and planting gardens and fields in an utter wilderness, many of them murmured. They had not come to do hard work, they had come to pick up nuggets of gold. Besides, many were ill after the long diet of salted food and musty bread; even Columbus himself fell ill upon landing, and could not rise from his bed for weeks; and although all this time he continued to direct the work of town building, it progressed but slowly.
So there lay the great Christopher Columbus, bedridden and empty-handed, at the moment when he hoped to be sending back to Spain the gold and other precious substances collected by the men of his first settlement. What should he write to the sovereigns waiting for news? He could not bear to write the sad truth and tell them how all his hopes, and theirs, had come to naught. If only he could have known, or surmised, that his islands fringed a magnificent new continent that had never even been dreamed of by civilized man, his worry might have ceased; for surely a man who had found a new world for Spain need not have found gold besides; but he knew nothing of the continent as yet; and remembering the extravagant promises made in Barcelona, he decided to postpone writing the letter home to Spain until he should make another attempt to find gold.
Accordingly, he sent two expeditions to different parts of the island to find the mines which, according to his understanding of the natives' sign language, must exist. Alonzo de Ojeda and the other captain he sent out returned each with a little gold; and this slight find was sufficient to set Columbus's fervid imagination at work again. He sent a rosy account of the island to the monarchs, and repeated his former promise to soon send home shiploads of gold and other treasures. And no wonder that he and so many others wished for gold; for it is written in his journal, "Gold is the most precious of all substances; gold constitutes treasure; he who possesses it has all the needs of this world as well as the price for rescuing souls from Purgatory and introducing them into Paradise." If gold could do all that, who would not try to possess it?
But so far as his letter to the monarchs went, Columbus knew, even while writing it, that real gold and the promise of gold were two very different things. His promises could never fill up the empty hold of the ship that was going back to Spain; and so, failing the rich cargo which the men of La Navidad were to have gathered, Columbus bethought himself of some other way in which his discoveries might bring money to the Spanish Crown. The plan he hit upon was the plan of a sick, disappointed, desperate man, as will be seen from a portion of his letter. The letter, intended for the sovereigns, was addressed, as was the custom, to their secretary.
"Considering what need we have for cattle and beasts of burden … their Highnesses might authorize a suitable number of caravels to come here every year to bring over said cattle and provisions. These cattle might be paid for with slaves taken from among the Caribbeans, who are a wild people fit for any work, well built and very intelligent; and who, when they have got rid of the cruel habits to which they have been accustomed, will be better than any other kind of slaves."
Horrible, all this, we say, but it was the fifteenth century. Slavery had existed for ages, and many still believed in it, for men like the good Las Casas were few. Moreover, Columbus was tormented by a feeling of not having "made good." He had promised his sovereigns all sorts of wealth, and instead he had been able to collect only an insignificant amount of gold trinkets on Haiti. Desperate for some other source of wealth, in an evil moment he advised slave-catching.
Besides considering himself to have fallen short in the royal eyes, he was hounded by the complaints and taunts of the men who had accompanied him. They hated work, so he tried to appease them by giving them authority to enslave the natives; and, as our good Las Casas wisely remarks, "Since men never fall into a single error … without a greater one by and by following," so it fell out that the Spaniards were cruel masters and the natives revolted; to subdue them harsher and harsher measures were used; not till most of them had been killed did the remaining ones yield submissively.