Last weekend, I was lucky enough to see the (few remaining) ruins of the earliest European settlement in the Western Hemisphere. While not much remains of them, so I don't have many pictures to show you, our program director gave us a fascinating tour that included a more detailed history of Columbus's first two voyages than I'd ever heard before...as well as many juicy details that are left out of most history books. I will do my best to pass the most interesting parts of both onto you.
To give you a bit of background, when Columbus and his crew happened upon the New World, they first docked the Niña and the Santa María in what is now Haiti (the Pinta had somehow wandered off, and Columbus wouldn't rejoin it until he was back in Europe). In that port, they met a friendly group of Tainos who welcomed them hospitably. They spent a few days with them, feasting and trading, until one night Columbus's men got carried away partying. The man who was supposed to be on watch that night on the Santa María was too drunk to stay awake, so he delegated the task to the next man, who delegated it to the next man, and so on until, finally, the 12-year-old cabin boy was left in charge of the entire ship. Unfortunately, as the 12-year-old cabin boy had no idea what he was doing, that night the boat drifted out too far into the bay and crashed against the coral reefs below. While the men got out okay, the ship sank.
The next morning, the Tainos saw what had happened and immediately began to help. They piled into their canoes and rowed out into the bay, diving down under the water and pulling everything valuable out of the wreck and back to shore. Columbus's men were touched by their help - in his journal, Columbus wrote something along the lines of "What wonderful people! They didn't stop fishing our things out of the water until they'd recovered every last nail." (You can even see one of the nails in the museum.)
Even so, the ship was beyond repair. When Columbus was ready to head back to Europe, seeing as he couldn't fit all of his crew into the Niña, he left 39 of them behind with the promise that he'd be back within a year. While Columbus did indeed make it back almost exactly a year later...the men he'd left behind didn't last that long. In Taino culture, there were no limits on coupling up until marriage, but once a person was married, adultery was a serious offense. Columbus's men, however, didn't catch on to that distinction fast enough. They seduced one too many married women and, infuriated, the chief ordered that they be killed and left their bodies to rot on the beach as a warning. When Columbus made it back, he saw the 37 decomposing bodies, realized what they meant, turned around, and started looking for another place to dock his fleet.
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| Picture borrowed from ericlp at Google Maps |
About a hundred miles to the east, he came upon a beautiful bay, sheltered enough to protect ships from big waves and with easy access to the mountains where he believed abundant gold was be found. The men landed, unloaded their ships, and began building. (The picture on the right gives you an idea, but it doesn't quite do the area justice - the mountains in the background look much more impressive in person, and the colors of everything are much more vivid.)
La Isabela, however, didn't turn out to be a great spot to live. There was very little fresh water or good land for growing food. Because of that, Columbus's men soon ate up more than their fair share of the neighboring Taino's stockpiles and still didn't have enough. Men were getting dysentary rapidly and, without water to rehydrate themselves, often died. At the same time, the groups of men who set out to explore the island quickly discovered many places with far more gold and far better access to land and food. Within four years, the settlement was abandoned.
What followed was an archeological tragedy. For centuries, the ruins were more or less left alone. They began to crumble, and neighboring farmers sometimes came to use the rocks in their own houses, but the foundations and bottom parts of the walls of most of the buildings remained intact. Then, in the 1950s, a group of German researchers sent the dictator, Trujillo, a telegram asking if they could come and excavate the site if they paid all of the costs and trained Dominicans to help them. Trujillo sent them a note back, giving them permission, then turned to one of his generals and said, "Go clean it up."
The general, not daring to ask questions or displease Trujillo, took off. He got to the site, looked around, saw a bunch of crumbling buildings....and cleaned them up by bulldozing them into the sea. When the German researchers got there, there was almost nothing left.
A few decades later, another group came through and was able to recover some things, including the bottom of Columbus's house. Here's what's there now...
The Warehouse
None of the little walls here are original, but the outer ones outline where the original walls were and those squares on the inside were built to protect the surviving parts of the foundations of the columns that once held up the roof. This warehouse is mainly important for being the site of numerous revolts over the very few years it was used.
Columbus's crew on his second voyage was made up almost entirely of young noblemen who were middle or youngest children hoping to make their fortunes in the New World. In Spain, the oldest son of every family received the entire family fortune, so in order to maintain the level of luxury they'd been brought up in, younger sons of nobles had to find their own way to get rich. When Columbus came back to Europe, telling tales of the bountiful gold he'd found in the New World, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for them to have an adventure and come back to Europe wealthy.
The reality, however, was disappointing. The men had been expecting huge piles of gold on the beach and natives bedecked in solid gold. While there was gold on the island, there was not nearly as much of it as Columbus had promised and most of it was buried away in mines. The Tainos did have gold jewelry, but they made it by stretching the tiny pieces of gold they found on the surface very thinly over other materials - they'd never done the kind of metalworking or mining that the Europeans were familiar with.
Also, since so many noblemen had wanted to go with Columbus that there had been no room for servants, the nobles found themselves being forced to do hard labor for the first time in their lives. They were not at all happy about it, especially as they were in, you know, the Caribbean, where it is too hot and humid to even walk ten minutes to class comfortably. To add insult to injury, Columbus - the one ordering them around - wasn't even a noble himself and, back in Spain, would have had no right to treat them that way.
Moreover, as I mentioned before, la Isabela is not a good site for finding water and food, so there were often shortages of those very basic necessities. And, while most of the deadly cross-continental exchange of diseases didn't happen until later, there was a massive outbreak of dysentery among the crew (which was, of course, made even worse by the fact that there was very little food and water). It was so bad that, within the first four months, one-third of the crew had died.
All in all, good conditions for a revolt. Or five.
The Admiral's House
This was, for four years, Columbus's home. Because it's farther away from the main section of buildings, it was also one of the few things to survive the bulldozing, and those low walls are actually originals. (The roof, however, is just there to protect it from the elements - back in the day, it was a solid stone building.)
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| Here's a picture of me and some of our group instead. |
Columbus had a wonderful view, and I'm really sorry I couldn't find of a picture of it. The house was near the edge of a small cliff that dropped sharply about four feet onto a little strip of sandy beach. While standing on the few feet of grass and shrubs between his house and the drop, Columbus could look straight to see the calm bay and the vast dark blue ocean beyond it...to his right to see lush green palm trees stretching for miles and fading into the distance...and to his left to see the hazy outlines of the mountains that he believed held the immense goldmines that would make him rich and, more importantly, make his family's name known and respected across all of Europe. Standing there centuries later, you still imagine the sense of wonder and promise he must have felt...and then some, because you (unlike him) know how significant of a moment that was in the history of the world.
The Graveyard
As the bodies in the graveyard were, obviously, below ground, they avoided getting bulldozed into the sea. In the 1990s, however, they were exhumed and taken to museums to be studied. (Most of them are now, in fact, sitting in storage in Santo Domingo.) But, as the researchers exhumed them, they took careful note of where they found them, and afterward, they put up these crosses and stone rings to mark where each one came from.
This graveyard has a creepy historical ghost story attached to it...About twenty years after la Isabela was abandoned, most of the Spainards were living down by Santo Domingo where they had found more gold, water, and food. Different groups of men were still exploring the country, however, and one group was sent back to la Isabela to see what the site looked like, if there was anything useful still in it, that sort of thing. This story comes from the diary of their leader, a lieutenant.
The group, knowing the site had been abandoned years ago, expected it to be empty. As they approached, however, they were surprised to see two lines of about ten soldiers standing on either side of the road leading up to the settlement. They were at attention and dressed formally, although their uniforms looked strangely out-of-date. The lieutenant called out to the men and asked them who they were. They saluted, but said nothing. The group got a little closer, and the lieutenant called out again. This time, he noticed that the men's mouths were moving, but he still couldn't hear what they were saying. He looked at his men, agreed with them that this was strange, and decided that as their leader, he should be the one to investigate. So he got off his horse and walked on foot towards the men.
"Hello!" he greeted them. "Who are you, and what are you doing here?"
Their mouths kept moving, but he still couldn't make out what they were saying.
"Speak up!" he demanded. "Who are you?"
He began to hear whispers, but they were so quiet he couldn't understand them, so he asked again, "Speak up!"
Then, very gradually, the whispers grew louder...and louder...and louder, until finally the soldiers were shouting: "I am hungry! I am hungry! I am hungry!" They chanted those same words at him over and over, getting louder each time.
Finally, the lieutenant yelled back, "I can hear you! You are hungry!"
The men stopped. They saluted him. And they vanished into thin air.
So, believing he had happened upon the ghosts of Columbus's crew who died of starvation and dysentery, the lieutenant ran back to his group and, I believe, left the site without even stopping to investigate it.
And, on that creepy note, I wish you all a nice weekend!
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