TWO men came into the cabin, Don Diego Colon, left in charge of
Hispaniola, and with him a tall, powerful, high-featured man, gray of
eye and black and silver of hair and short beard. As he stood beside
the bed, one saw that he must be kinsman to the man who lay upon it. “O
Bartholomew! And is this the end?” cried Don Diego, and I knew that the
stranger was that brother, Bartholomew, for whom the Admiral longed.
These three brothers! One lay like a figure upon a tomb save for the
breathing that stirred his silver hair. One, Don Diego, tall, too, and
strong, but all of a gentle, quiet mien sank on his knees and seemed to
pray. One, Don Bartholomew, stood like rock or pine, but he slowly made
the sign of the cross, and I saw his gray eyes fill. It seemed to me
that the Admiral’s eyelids flickered. “Speak to him again,” I said.
“Take his hand.”
Bartholomew Columbus, kneeling in the _Cordera’s_ cabin, put his arm
about his great brother. That is what he called him,--“Christopher, my
great brother, it is Bartholomew! Don’t you know me? Don’t you remember?
I must go to England, you said, to see King Henry. To tell him what you
could do--what you have done, my great brother! Don’t you remember? I
went, but I was poor like you who are now Viceroy of the Indies--and I
was shipwrecked besides and lost the little that we had scraped--do you
remember?--and must live like you by making maps and charts, and it was
long before I saw King Henry!--Christopher, my great brother! He lies
like death!”
I said, “He is returning, but he is yet a long way off. Keep speaking.”
“But King Henry said at last, ‘Go bring us that brother of yours, and
we think it may be done!’ And he gave me gold. So I would come back
to Spain for you, and I reached Paris, and it was the summer of 1493.
Christopher, my great brother, don’t you hear me? For it was at Paris
that I heard, and it came like a flood of glory, fallen in one moment
from Heaven! I heard, ‘Christopherus Columbus! He has found the Indies
for King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella!’--Don’t you hear, Christopher?
All the world admiring--all the world saying, ‘Nothing will ever go just
the same way again!’ You have done the greatest thing, my great brother!
Doctor, is he dying?”
“He will not die,” I said. “You are cordial to him, though he hears you
yet from leagues and leagues away. Go on!”
“Christopher, from Paris I got slowly, slowly, so slowly I thought
it!--to Seville. But I was not poor. They gave me gold, the French King
gave it, their nobles, their bishops. I walked in that glory; it flooded
me from you! All your people, Christopher, your sons and your brothers
and our old father. You build us again, you are our castle and great
ship and Admiral! When I came to Barcelona, how they praised you! When
I came to Toledo, how they praised you! When I came to Seville, how they
praised you! But at Seville I learned that I was too late, and you were
gone upon your second voyage. Then I went to Valladolid and the Queen
and the King were there, and they said, ‘He has just sailed, Don
Bartholomew, from Cadiz with sixteen ships--your great brother who
hath crossed Ocean-Sea and bound to us Asia!’--But, sweet Jesu, what
entertainment they gave me, all because I had lain in our old wooden
cradle at Genoa a couple of years or so after you!--Genoa!--They say
Genoa _aches_ because she did not send you. Christopher, do you remember
the old rock by the sea--and you begged colors from Messer Ludovico and
painted upon it a ship and we called it the Great Doge--”
The Admiral’s eyes opened slowly like a gray dawn; he moved ever so
slightly in the bed, and his lips parted. “Brother,” he whispered.
We got him from the _Cordera_ to Hispaniola shore, and so in a litter to
his own house in Isabella. All our town was gathered to see him carried
there. He began to improve. The second day he said to Don Bartholomew,
“You shall be my lieutenant and deputy. Adelantado--I name you
Adelantado.”
Don Bartholomew said bluntly, “Is not that hard upon Diego?”
“No, no, Bartholomew!” answered Don Diego, who was present. “If it were
question of a prior of Franciscans, now! But Christopher knows and I
know that I took this stormy world but for lack of any other in blood to
serve him. Our Lady knows that I never held myself to be the man for the
place! Be Adelantado and never think of me!”
The Admiral upon his bed spoke. “We have always worked together, we
Colombos. When it is done for the whole there is no jealousy among the
parts. I love Diego, and I think he did well, constraining his nature to
it, here among the selfish, the dangerous and factious! And others know
that he did well. I love him and praise him. But Bartholomew, thou art
the man for this!”
Accordingly, the next noontide, trumpets, and a proclamation made
before the great cross in the middle of our town. The Viceroy’s new-come
brother had every lieutenant power.
I do not know if he ever disappointed or abused it. He became great
helper to his great brother.
These three! They were a lesson in what brothers might be, one to the
other, making as it were a threefold being. Power was in this family,
power of frame and constitution, with vital spirit in abundance; power
of will, power of mind, and a good power of heart. Their will was good
toward mankind.
They had floods to surmount and many a howling tempest to out-endure.
By and large they did well with life,--very well. There was alloy, base
metal of course, even in the greatest of the three. They were still
men. But they were such men as Nature might put forward among her goodly
fruit.
The Viceroy lay still in his bed, for each time he would rise came
faintness and old fatigue. The Adelantado acted.
There was storm in Hispaniola, storm of human passions. I found Luis
Torres, and he put me within leg-stride of the present.
Margarite! It seemed to begin with Don Pedro Margarite.
He and his men had early made choice between the rich, the fruitful,
easy Vega and the mountains they were to pierce for gold and hunt over
for a fierce mountain chief. In the Vega they established themselves.
The Indians brought them “tribute”, and they exacted over-tribute, and
reviled and slew when it pleased them, and they took the Indian women,
and if it pleased them they burned a village. “Sorry tale,” said Luis.
“Old, sorry tale!”
Indians came to Isabella and with fierce gesture and eyes that cast
lances talked to Don Diego. Don Diego sent a stern letter to Don Pedro
Margarite. Don Pedro answered that he was doing soldier’s duty, as the
Sovereigns would understand when it came before them. Don Diego sent
again, summoning him upon his allegiance to Isabella. He chose for a
month no answer to that at all, and the breezes still brought from
the Vega cries of anger, wails of sorrow. Then he appeared suddenly in
Isabella.
Don Diego would have arrested him and laid him in prison to await the
Admiral’s return. But with suddenness, that was of truth no suddenness,
Margarite had with him three out of four of our hidalgos, and more than
that, our Apostolic Vicar of the Indies! Don Diego must bend aside,
speak him fair, remonstrate, not command. The Viceroy of the Indies
and Admiral of Ocean-Sea? Dead probably!--and what were these Colombos?
Italian wool-combers! But here stood hidalgos of Spain!--“Old
story,” said Luis Torres. “Many times, many places, man being one in
imperfection.”
A choppy sea had followed Margarite’s return. Up and down, to and fro,
and one day it might seem Margarite was in control, and the next, Don
Diego, but with Margarite’s wave racing up behind. Then appeared three
ships with men and supplies and Don Bartholomew! Margarite saw Don Diego
strengthened. He was bold enough, Margarite! on a dark night, at eve,
there were so many ships before Isabella but when morn broke they
were fewer by two. Margarite and the Apostolic Vicar and a hundred
disaffected were departed the Indies! “Have they gotten to Spain? And
what do they say? God, He knoweth!--There have been great men and they
have been stung to death.”
“Ay, ay, the old story!” I said, and would learn about the pacification
of the Indians.
“Why, they are not pacified,” answered Luis. “Worse follows worse. Pedro
Margarite left two bands in the Vega, and from all I hear they turned
devils. It looked like peace itself, didn’t it, this great, fair, new
land, when first we stepped upon it, and raised the banner and then the
cross? It’s that no longer. They’re up, the Indians, Caonabo and three
main caciques, and all the lesser ones under these. In short, we are
at war,” ended Luis. “Alonso de Ojeda at the moment is the Cid. He
maneuvers now in the Vega.”
I looked around. We were sitting under palm trees, by the mud wall of
our town. Beyond the forest waved in the wind, and soft white clouds
sailed over it in a sky of essential sapphire. “There’s an aspect here
of peace!”
“That is because Guacanagari, from his new town, holds his people still.
For that Indian the scent of godship has not yet departed! He sees the
Admiral always as a silver-haired hero bringing warmth and light. He
is like a dog for fidelity!--But I saw three Indians from outside his
country curse him in the name of all the other tribes, with a kind
of magical ceremony. Is he right, or is he wrong, Juan Lepe? Or is he
neither the one nor the other, but Something moves him from above?”
“Have you never seen again the butio, Guarin?”
“No.”
We sat and looked at the rich forest, and at that strange, rude, small
town called Isabella, and at the blue harbor with the ships, and the
blue, blue sea beyond. Over us--what is over us? Something seemed to
come from it, stealing down the stair to us!
The fourth day after his return, Don Francisco de Las Casas, Don Juan
Ponce de Leon, and others told to the Viceroy, lying upon his bed in his
house, much what Luis Torres told Juan Lepe. “Sirs,” he said, when they
had done, “here is my brother, Don Bartholomew, who will take order.
He is as myself. For Christopherus Columbus, he is ill, and must be ill
awhile.”
The sixth day came Guacanagari, and sat in the room and talked
sorrowfully. Caonabo, Gwarionex, Behechio, Cotubanama, said, “Were these
or were these not gods, yet would they fight!”
The Admiral said, “The Future is the god. But there are burrs on his
skirt!”
Guacanagari at last would depart. He stood beside the bed and the
silver-haired great cacique from heaven. The Admiral put forth a lean,
knotted, powerful hand and laid it on the brown, slim, untoiled hand. “I
wish peace,” he said. “My brother Bartholomew and I will do what we can
do to gain it. Good peace, true peace!”
Without the room, I asked the cacique about Guarin. He was gone, he
said, to the mountains. He would not stay with Guacanagari, and he would
not go to Caonabo or Gwarionex. “All old things and ways are broken,”
said Guacanagari. “All our life is broken. I do not know what we have
done. The women sit and weep. And I, too, sometimes I weep!”
The seventh day came in Alonso de Ojeda from St. Thomas.
The Viceroy and the Adelantado and Ojeda talked alone together in
the Viceroy’s house. But next day was held a great council, all
our principal men attending. There it was determined to capture,
if possible, Caonabo, withdrawing him so from the confederacy. The
confederacy might then go to pieces. In the meantime use every effort
to detach from it Gwarionex who after Guacanagari was our nearest
great cacique. Send a well-guarded, placating embassy to him and to
Cotubanama. Try kindness, kindness everywhere, kind words and good
deeds!--And build another fort called Fort Concepcion.
Take Caonabo! That was a task for Alonso de Ojeda! He did it. Five days
after the council, the Viceroy being now recovered and bringing strength
to work that needed strength, the Adelantado vigorously helping,
Isabella in a good mood, the immediate forest all a gold and green
peacefulness, Don Alonso vanished, and with him fourteen picked men, all
mounted.
For six weeks it was as though he had dropped into the sea, or risen
into the blue sky above eyesight.
Then on a Sunday he and his fourteen rode into town. We had a great
church bell and it was ringing, loudly, sonorously. He rode in and at
once there arose a shout, “Don Alonso de Ojeda!” All his horsemen rode
with him, and rode also one who was not Castilian. On a gray steed a
bare, bronze figure--Caonabo!
The church bell swung, the church bell rang. Riding beneath the squat
tower, all our people pouring forth from our poor houses upon the
returned and his captive, the latter had eyes, it seemed to me, but
for that bell. A curious, sardonic look of recognition, appraisal,
relinquishment, sat in the Indian’s face. From wrist to wrist of Caonabo
went a bright, short chain. The sun glittered upon the bracelets and the
links. I do not know--there was for a moment--something in the sound of
the bell, something in the gleam of the manacles, that sent out faint
pity and horror and choking laughter.
All to the Viceroy’s house, and Don Alonso sitting with Christopherus
Columbus, and Caonabo brought to stand before them. Indians make much of
indifferent behavior, taunting calm, when taken. It is a point of honor,
meeting death so, even when, as often befalls, their death is a slow and
hard one. Among themselves, in their wars, it is either death or quick
adoption into the victor’s tribe. They have no gaols nor herds of
slaves. Caonabo expected death. He stood, a strong, contemptuous figure.
But the Viceroy meant to send him to Spain--trophy and show, and to be
made, if it could be, Christian.