The Rest Is History - 308: Columbus: Death in the Caribbean

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

Columbus returns to the remnants of his first voyage to the "Indies", having convinced Isabella and Ferdinand to fund a larger second trip. Desperate to make his mission financially fruitful, his search for wealth and capital unleashes horror on the land that he has “discovered”. Columbus makes enemies, causes destruction and starts to lose his grip on reality, whilst he attempts to cling to his newly-found power and status. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Back from the Western Antipodes, there has returned one Christopher Columbus, a man from Liguria, who barely obtained three ships from my sovereigns for the voyage, for they had regarded the claims he had been making as utterly fantastical. That was Peter Martyr, an Italian humanist who was chaplain at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, the king of Aragon, the queen of Castile, respectively, who had commissioned this Ligurian, a man from Genoa, Christopher Columbus, to sail, well, Dominic,

to the Indies, to China, to Asia. And Columbus comes back from his first voyage across the Atlantic thinking that he's got to Asia, or at least he has to say that he thinks he's got to Asia because that's the entire basis of the contract and the commission, isn't it? That's right. And that's where we left it in the previous episode. Yes. So in our first two episodes, we talked about the background, didn't we, to Columbus's voyages. And then the second episode, we talked about voyage number one. And you're absolutely right, Tom. Does Columbus genuinely believe he's found Asia? I think he

does, but there's obviously some slight element of convincing himself, isn't there? He needs to persuade Ferdinand and Isabella. He needs to persuade all these people who've invested, as we talked about last time, Genoese sort of bigigs in in the court of the the catholic monarchs as they're called they put up the money for this and everybody is expecting they have not done this for the thrill of discovery they have done this because they want spices and gold uh from cafe from chipangu as they call it and from india and columbus has come back with this formula of the indies which is nice and vague it sort of hints at islands that are probably off the coast of China. But the interesting thing I would say is that almost everybody, I mean, he was turned down

so many times by the Portuguese and Spanish because they said, it can't be done. We don't believe that you can just sail so quickly to Asia from Europe. We just don't believe it's possible. And they have been kind of proved right because he hasn't gone to Asia. And when he comes back, they think, well, we're still right. He clearly has not been to Asia. I'm reluctant. Well, I'm not reluctant. I'm keen to do some cod-psychologizing. Only someone as driven and self-confident as Columbus could possibly have done what he did. So do you think that to an extent, he can't possibly carry on being the great explorer unless he cleaves to this conviction that he was right and everyone

else was wrong? It's the foundation stone of the entire sense he has of himself. We talked before, didn't we, about how he probably isn't university educated, how he's an autodidact who has this tremendous sense of himself as the man of destiny who is tilted against the kind of mainstream media, the establishment. And psychologically, I think it's impossible for him to back down. I don't think he's equipped to say, my goodness, I have come back and I've discovered something absolutely extraordinary. There is a whole new continent out there. I mean, you mentioned Peter Martyr, the great humanist. He is one of the first people to use the phrase, a new world. think is it nova

orbis or something like that yeah lots of people sense and that's an amazing thing and yet the great irony is that columbus as you said psychologically cannot bring himself to face the reality that there is another continent because he has staked everything on this sort of lunatic idea that you can sail across the Atlantic in a matter of a couple of weeks and basically get to the coast of China. And the whole way through, there's this weird double thing, not just on the part of Columbus, but on the part of the Spanish monarchs as well, that on the one hand, they're perfectly happy to kind of cull to the idea that they've discovered Asia. But at the same time, they're kind of

operating also on the assumption that these are new lands that they can grab Asia. But at the same time, they're kind of operating also on the assumption that these are new lands that they can grab. The fact that at the back of the minds of both Ferdinand and Isabella is the possibility that they have discovered, as they see it, virgin territory, because they start to set diplomatic wheels in motion, don't they? Particularly with the papacy. They do, exactly. So as early as the 3rd and 4th of May, 1493, so Columbus has been back basically a matter of weeks. They get the Pope Alexander Borgia to issue an encyclical, a top pope, top pope, very famous pope.

So he's a Valencian, isn't he? So he is close to them. He issues a papal bull that basically says there is a line down the earth from the, I mean, I'm quoting, from the Arctic pole, which is in the north to the Antarctic pole, which is in the south, the line lying at a distance from what we vulgarly call the Azores and Cape Verde, 100 leagues away. He says basically everything to the west of that line is fair game for Spain and everything, The implication is that everything to the east of that line. So that's Africa and the eastern route to India.

That's for Portugal. But as you said, the implication is this is virgin territory. These are lands that can be claimed. People can be converted to Christians. In other words, it's not ruled by the emperor of China. Yeah. They don't want a war with China. I mean, I would thought even the Pope wouldn't feel that he can give away China.

No, exactly. To Spain. So there is a kind of strange double thing there. And so the fact that there is this ambivalence, this ambiguity, clearly in a kind of deep sense of uncertainty as to what exactly it is that Columbus has found means inevitably that there has to be a second voyage almost straight away. The Catholic monarchs, as they're called, Ferdinand and Isabella, they pay him a pension. They confirm his titles. So he's a don. Yes, exactly. That's what he's always wanted. I mean, that's why he's done this, because he wants status and respectability. But they also say, right, you should start taking colonists now. So what's interesting with this is they're clearly rushing because they are worried about the Portuguese. The Portuguese are the sort of premier league explorers and colonizers. The Spanish are a bit of a rung below. So they have to hurry. And Columbus, when he came back, he'd

been taken to Lisbon, hadn't he? He had. So the Portuguese know about it. So there's a slight anxiety about that. In fact, for all they know, the Portuguese may be sending ships even now. And there are lots of rumors that are reaching the Spanish that Portuguese may be about to send expeditions of their own. They're not, of course, because the Portuguese are much more interested in the more lucrative route around Africa. But the Spanish king and queen agree that they will pay colonists basically to go to this new territory. So they organize about 1,500 people, almost all of them men. Queen Isabella doesn't want women to go. She says that women who go by definition would be prostitutes. So she doesn't like the idea of women going.

They are told that they're going to settle. They're going to look for gold. Columbus has come back talking about gold. So they're going to establish gold mines. Now this is different from what the Portuguese are doing right away. So when the Portuguese go around Africa and when they do their own expeditions, they're really going purely to trade. They establish ports, they buy slaves, they buy ivory, they buy gold, but they don't really want to set up little towns of their own, the Portuguese. That's why when you tell the story of Portuguese colonization in Africa and India, there's no sort of big lumps of Portuguese territory. They're all just ribbons and on the coast. The Spanish straight away are thinking, well, maybe we'll build towns and we'll do what we did on the Canary Islands. We could even have plantations and things. And what they did in Spain itself, in Iberia itself with the Reconquista. Yeah. So they've got experience of doing this because when they

drove back the Moors, as they would have called them, they established towns. They also converted people. So Isabella in particular is really keen on the idea of conversion. There's that tension, which this episode really brings out between when we get there, the local people, are we going to make them our workforce, basically just force them to become our slaves effectively? Or should we actually be making Spaniards of them? She gives explicit instructions to Columbus that he is to treat the Indians, as they're calling them, very well and lovingly. That word lovingly, amorosamente, that was a word they had used when they had conquered Granada. So that was how they had said, we will treat the population of

Granada lovingly. So again, there's that sort of continuity between the Reconquista, because at this very moment that Columbus is coming back and having these conversations with them, they are busy converting the forced conversion of Muslims and Jews to Christianity within Spain. And so this is a year after the conquest of Granada, a year after the expulsion of Jews who refused to convert. And so in a sense, that is the approach that the Spanish kings are bringing to their Muslim and Jewish minorities is also evident in Columbus's expedition, because he is taking lots of very, very battle-hardened Castilian warriors. But he is also, for the first time, he's taking a priest. So he is taking a

Catalan friar called Bernardo Bruil. Yeah, who ends up hating Columbus. Yes, they all go badly off-piste. But you also have a man who'll become very famous, Juan Ponce de Leon, who in due course will discover Florida. Then go off and the story is that he's trying to find the fountain of youth. That's right. I think is apparently rather sadly, perhaps not entirely true. Bernardo Brayil, this friar, and this guy who's going to end up searching for the fountain of youth. All of Spanish engagement in the New World is there going off with Columbus. I mean, one of the other guys who goes on this second voyage, Diego Velazquez, he is the governor who sends Enan Cortes to Mexico and then falls out massively with Cortes.

And the Velazquez-Cortes feud kind of runs right through the story of the fall of the Aztec empire. So there's a lot of Spanish feuding going on, isn't there? There is right from the beginning. We had that analogy that some listeners may have considered ridiculous, but I think actually does stand up. We talked about Columbus trying to raise money and being a sort of tech entrepreneur. And it's a bit like that story of the people who, you know, created Facebook or something. Yes. They all fall out really quickly because there's a lot of money involved. There's a lot of professional pride. These are people, in the Spanish case, who are very jealous of their own privileges and their own status.

But they also, it is mixed up with religiosity, isn't it? Because when they are talking about, do the Indians have souls? The Indians, they call them. Do they have souls? Can they become Spanish? Can they become Christians? Or are they just servile? These are not dry academic debates. They really believe this stuff. And obviously it has real world consequences for people's lives, for their own wealth,

all of these kinds of things. And also Columbus has come back and said that the Indians are peaceable. And that is the basis on which the plans are being made to found colonies. And of course they're peaceable when he's handing beads to them and saying, let's trade some fish or whatever. But obviously, they're less peaceable when he says, I'm now going to enslave you. Of course. Or make you dig gold from mines. Or make you dig gold. And that's the point at which he says, oh, my gosh, these people are cannibals.

Yes. So he leaps very quickly from one extreme to the other. Anyway, we should tell the story of his voyage, shouldn't we? They set off on the 25th of September. They've got 17 ships now. So three last time, 17 this time. Obviously a much, much bigger operation. And Columbus is still on the Nina.

Yes, they've still got the Nina. So the others are dead ducks, but he's still got the Nina. Because the Santa Maria was wrecked, wasn't it, on a reef during Voyage 1. Yes, and made into the Fort of Navidad. Exactly. So what's happened to that? That's part of the jeopardy. Yes, it is part of the jeopardy because he's left those 39 guys last time saying,

don't worry, we'll be back soon. What's going to happen to them? Back they go. The voyage is a little bit more straightforward this time because obviously they've done it before. They pitch up first at Dominica. They're in the Caribbean islands. On Dominica, there is a bad moment, I think, from the point of view of posterity. So straight away, they start kidnapping indigenous people as slaves. They're going to send them back to Spain. They go next to Guadalupe, and there they say they've come across evidence of cannibalism.

So there are all these sort of, we talked a little bit about the Caribs last time, didn't we? They have a doctor with them called Alvarez Chanca, and he says they've found houses full of bones. There's all this stuff about castrating boys and fattening them, all of this sort of stuff. And there's no doubt, I think, that the Spanish believe this. I mean, it's impossible for us to know how true or not it is. But I think the Spanish undoubtedly believe that they have found evidence.

Well, they say that in their pots were geese mixed with human flesh while other parts of human bodies were fixed on spits ready for roasting. In another house, the Spaniards found bones which the cannibals carefully preserved for points of their arrows for they have no iron. The Spaniards discovered the recently decapitated head of a young man still wet with blood. I mean, what's the thinking of scholars today on that? Are they just making that up? I don't think they necessarily are making it up. I mean, it's perfectly possible that there was an element of cannibalism. We know that in much more sophisticated Niso-American societies, so the Aztecs are the most obvious. There's human sacrifice

and there's very limited sort of ritualistic cannibalism almost. So it's not impossible that it's cannibalism, but we just, it's very hard to be sure. Because the argument is that this is kind of Eurocentric. Yes, exactly. But you could argue that

to condemn the Spaniards for thinking that cannibalism is you know that they're cannibals is itself eurocentric because you're not buying into the idea that cannibalism might be absolutely fine i suppose so yes i suppose if you were taking a very very very avant-garde position you might say uh you're condemning the cannibal community yeah what's his name the guy who who was intoning the cannibal community. Yeah. What's his name? The guy who was into being a cannibal, who got cancelled? The actor. Armie Hammer.

Armie Hammer. The actor. Would he have views on this? I mean, he's recently resurfaced, Tom. I think there's a slight sense now that he may have been hard done by. Because he wasn't actually a cannibal, was he? No, he wasn't. These may have been text fantasies.

We've gone massively off-piste. Massively off-piste, yeah. So well listen we've gone massively so so it's unproven i think it's unproven i think it absolutely depends on the political perspective of the historian actually yeah so if you're a historian based in madrid who's very close to the conservative party in spain you say this place was actually teeming with cannibals heads everywhere oh yeah heads everywhere disgraceful and i think if you're at a particularly progressive american university you say this is everywhere disgraceful and i think if you're at a particularly progressive american university you say this is absolutely disgraceful you're a central projection one thing that is really interesting is that on guadalupe now i found this fascinating so i was reading about this in different accounts on guadalupe there's a notorious incident where

columbus they're taking slaves and columbus takes a girl and he gives her to a guy called miguel cuneo and cuneo writes an account of this and he gives her to a guy called Miguel Cuneo. And Cuneo writes an account of this and he says, it was pretty poor at first. I had to beat her to get her to yield to my advances. But in the end, we came to an agreement and she appeared to have learned her arts in the school of whores. And in his book, Rivers of Gold, which is part of his mighty trilogy about the foundation of the Spanish Empire, the historian Hugh Thomas, Lord Thomas, has the extraordinary phrase, this was the first account of lovemaking in the new world. I mean, he read that in 2003, only 20 years ago. But now nobody would write that sentence. Everybody would say, this is rape.

This is sexual violence. violence and i think that whenever you read any indictment of columbus particularly in the united states this incident always looms very large and people say this is the beginning and the truth of the matter is it is the beginning of what's going to follow because the spanish you know there is a lot of sexual violence well and part of it is because isabella has said i mean i'm not excusing it but i'm saying isabella has said take. Right. So you basically have all these blokes roaming across the islands with swords and unclothed native born women who they're just sort of seizing and making off with. So again, there is a tension there in the Spanish attitudes is absolutely evident. The feeling that they have the right to use the native women as they want yeah which i guess is you know an ancient ancient story men who who are engaged in war rape is a constant kind of background yeah to that activity at the same time the reason they haven't taken women to serve their sexual needs is because of Isabella's very Christian

sense of sexual morality. And that also is something that is exported to the new world. The sense that chastity is a positive. I don't know enough about Tainos sexual morality to know whether they would have had that concept, but I would doubt it. We don't know. We know so little about them because they're basically, in the long run, I mean, a big spoiler, they all die one way or another. So we know so little about them other than from the accounts that the Spanish themselves wrote, which again, we don't know how much projection there is. So in other words, we condemn the rape of this woman for reasons that ultimately descend

from Christian notions of sexual morality. Right. Yeah. You're saying it's kind of the condemnation itself is a form of Eurocentrism. That tension that exists in Spanish attitudes back in the late 15th century, in the modern West, we remain the heirs of that. That tension remains within our discourse. That's true. But I don't think the local people, the Tainos, I don't think they think this is fine because we know that they don't because they resist it so bitterly. So I think they are really shocked by the Spanish behaviour. But there is descriptions of, you know, among the cannibalism, those accounts of people carrying off women and using them as slaves. Yes, it's true. It would not surprise me if that is something more than just, again, European projection.

The idea that women can be abducted and essentially raped, used as slaves, would seem to have been part of the culture of the native peoples on those islands. Well, if you're being very bleak, you would say part of all human history, wouldn't you? Yeah, but there is a very precise Catholic understanding of sexual morality that would condemn that. One of the interesting things about Columbus and his reputation is that the arguments pretty much start straight away, don't they? Exactly. So these are not new.

This isn't the kind of product of 21st century woke attitudes to gender. These are debates that are being had and that are bred of Spanish culture, Spanish morality, right from the beginning. As you say, we don't know enough about Tainos to know what their attitudes were. But it would seem from what the Spanish write about what they're doing, that they are fighting one another and that they are enslaving and abducting each other's people. Yeah, I think that's true. They're behaving very badly, but they're arguing all the time about their own bad behavior and whether it is as bad as some of them are condemning it. And that is absolutely a product of the intellectual world of sort of late medieval Spanish Christendom.

So in other words, the black legend, as it comes to be refined by the Protestant powers, derives from what the Spanish themselves are reporting. Well, the great exponent of it, who you've written about in your book Dominion, I think, Bartolomeo Lescazas, the great priest who condemns the mistreatment of the Indians. And who writes a lot about Columbus. Yes. He is the progenitor in some ways of the black legend, the idea that the Spanish have disgraced themselves. Anyway, so they've been faffing around on the Antilles.

They discover lots of islands. Montserrat, it's named after the monastery in Catalonia. Antigua, that's named after the Santa Maria de Antigua, the Virgin in the Cathedral in Seville. The Virgin Islands, they're named after St. Ursula, so on and so forth. They finally get back to Hispaniola. And how is La Navidad doing? The town that Columbus had left, it's been completely destroyed and everybody's dead. I mean, that's basically the result. And what seems to have happened is that the 39 men have been massacred by the locals, the people who Columbus had said, oh, they're very peaceable and they're lovely. They'll make

fine subjects. And the reason they've been massacred is almost certainly, well, like all Spanish expeditions, they've fallen out among themselves, but also they have been disgracing themselves by going out around the countryside looking for gold and stealing women. Yeah. Actually, once again. So gold and rape again. Yes. That's a huge theme of this episode and indeed of the Spanish colonization of the New World generally. Columbus decides he's not really in a position to punish the locals for this.

So he sort of shakes hands with the local chief and says, you know, we'll let bygones be bygones. Then he goes off to found a new town, which he calls La Isabella. You know, Columbus is a very good mariner and a good navigator. Well, I mean, he's not a very good cartographer, but he's a good navigator and all this stuff. He's a terrible town planner and administrator. All his towns are always in the wrong place. One historian says, Isabella had a bad harbor and the site had been chosen foolishly. And I think the site had been chosen foolishly as might as well be Columbus's epitaph.

Felipe Fernandez Armesto, who wrote a great biography of Columbus, describes it as the first and worst fated township in the new world. And has this brilliant thing that there were ghostly wailings by night and of shadowy processions of headless men. Wow. That's not a good sign, is it? No, no. That's very ominous. You found a town and you have shadowy processions of headless men.

Property prices are not going to be helped by that. It's not highly rated on Zoopla, Tom. No. It's about this point that you can really see Columbus's mood, I would say. He's come with such sort of high hopes. High hopes is maybe the wrong expression because that implies a sort of jaunty idealism, which I don't think is ever Columbus's. He's quite a gloomy bloke, isn't he, don't you think?

Yeah. He's always expecting to be stabbed in the back or betrayed, because he always is being. Well, and he's had a big bust-up, hasn't he, with the friar? Because the friar, who you'd think would be very turn-the-other-cheek, is all for having a crack at the natives and punishing them for wiping out the settlers of Navidad. He's a sort of warrior, from the warrior-mon monk end of the friar spectrum, isn't he?

Yes. And so Columbus, to do him credit, is not buying into that, but they have a bust up. They also have a bust up about the tree. Weirdly, the friar is completely inconsistent because it's about this point when they built that Isabella, the gold is nowhere to be found. They're all a bit sort of miserable.

And Columbus is clearly saying, well, he needs to show a return on his investment. He has not been sent for the good of his health or as charitable. I mean, the conversion is a part of it. But Ferdinand and Isabella are expecting him to send gold or something valuable back. And he starts to think that could be human beings. And so to compare, again, your startup analogy, he's received lots of investment. They're all with their space hoppers and their open plan things where they're all having a lovely time burning up money,

but they're not showing any profits at all. Exactly. And he needs to show that this is financially remunerative. Exactly. He's Elon Musk trying to monetize Twitter, isn't he? He's about to start charging people for their blue ticks or whatever. Yes. So clearly he is thinking about slavery.

And why slavery? Well, he would say, why not? He's come from a world, we talked in the previous episode, there are 100,000 slaves already in Spain, Berbers, Eastern Europeans, Black Africans, people of every sort of possible description. And they were using slaves on the Canary Islands. So from his point of view, slavery probably just seems completely natural. But why not? There is a Catholic tradition of

the idea that every human being has God-given rights, descended from 12th century legal thought. And this is very, very representative in Spanish universities and particularly among the friars. So that notion that slavery is a moral evil is present in Spain and something that Columbus will have to wrestle with. So again, the debate over slavery, it's not anachronistic to say that there are reasons for condemning slavery as an institution in Columbus's Spain. Well, is it not right to say though, Tom, you'll know more about this than me, that the general thinking at the time is that slavery is fine if the people you're dealing with are kind of dyed in the wool, inveterate infidels who cannot be saved. It's debated. It's debated. It's debated.

And then it's more reason, whereas if it's people who had the possibility of becoming Christians, this is certainly what Queen Isabella thinks. She's back in Spain. And one of the big themes of this episode and the next episode is she keeps getting reports of Columbus and Co. enslaving people, or he is sending back ships with slaves on. And she says, what are you doing? These are my subjects. She dreams of a world in which they are all brought into the bosom of Christ and is horrified.

I mean, to look ahead, Las Casas, who we've mentioned, he's appalled at the idea of enslaving Indians for precisely the reason you say, that these are people with rights who can be brought to Christ. Yeah. And therefore he suggests enslaving Africans. Yes, extraordinary. That's very much a kind of a black mark against him. But in due course, he comes to recognize that that is evil as well. And he's kind of groping his way towards the idea that slavery as an institution itself is evil. So the potential

is there for this whole idea that slavery is acceptable to be condemned. It's not enough just to say the Spanish were brutal, full stop. They also have this notion, and that also is part of the package of ideas and tensions and complexities that they are exporting to the new world. Yeah, that's absolutely right. I think we talked about it before, or we talked about it in one of our bonus episodes for our club members, the book Conquistadores by Fernando Cervantes, who's a Mexican historian based in Britain. And he takes the Spanish religiosity really, really seriously. He's written lots about Spanish friars and things and about their theological thinking. And he says exactly that. interested in money, you're missing a really important part of what they thought about and what they talked about every day, which is they took this stuff about bringing people to God

and about what God wants. They took it incredibly seriously. And these debates were not just fig leaves for their own entrepreneurial ambitions. I mean, this was a huge part of the mentality. Well, it was the mentality they took to the new world. And I think that that is evident because we are the heirs of that tradition. The reason that we condemn slavery in part is because we are the inheritors of these ideas of why slavery is wrong. All right, Tom, we're in danger of turning the story of Columbus into an advert for your book.

Heaven for Fed. So let's get to things aren't going well. And he decides to basically go off to cuba doesn't he so he sent expeditions into the interior looking for gold looking for slaves all of this stuff they were arguing they've fallen out a little bit with the locals because they're slaving and in april 1494 so they've been gone almost a year cumbers says things are not going well running out of food the natives aren't trading with us and stuff i'll tell you what i'm going to do i'll go to cuba the rest of you stay here and see how things work out which is i think is a very good sign of of why columbus is heartily despised by a lot of the people

that he's taken he's just such a poor leader and a poor manager of men i think so off he goes to cuba twitter's not working i'm going to go to mars yes pretty much so off he goes to Cuba. Twitter's not working. I'm going to go to Mars. Yes, pretty much. So off he goes to Cuba and I think we should take a break and we'll find out what happens next after the break. All right. See you then. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes,

and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest is History. We are sailing off with Columbus to Cuba, where Dominic, rather magnificently, he claims to have seen the footprints of griffins. Yes. Well, don't forget, he also thinks Cuba is China. Well, right, because China's full of griffins. Full of griffins. Absolutely. Yeah, backed with them.

Columbus has left these guys on Hispaniola, where everything's going wrong. They've sent back some ships to Spain. The Spanish monarchs have been busy doing a deal with the Portuguese called the Treaty of Tordesillas, which is going to definitively divide up the world between them. But they say, fine, we'll send some help back to the Caribbean to bail out these guys on Hispaniola. And as you say, meanwhile, Columbus has gone to Cuba because he thinks Cuba is part of the Asian mainland and he wants to investigate it. He finds the footprints of something that he thinks is a griffin. I mean, you know, we talked about that, didn't we,

in episode one of this series about the world of the chivalric romances, Amazons, people with no ears, all these wacky ideas that people had about what was out there. And also the idea that there might be Prestor John, a great Christian king, waiting to come to the assistance of the Christians of Europe. And one of his crewmen sees a man dressed all in white. And so Columbus leaps to the obvious conclusion that it must be Prestor John. So he's clearly absolutely entered a world of chivalric romance, as you say, and wonders. Columbus, throughout all of this story, is a man under tremendous strain and pressure,

strain from his financial backers, from the king and queen of Spain. But also, he's a Genoese surrounded by Spaniards who all hate him. Also, sailing across the Atlantic is not a barrel of laughs. And he doesn't really know where he is. And everything is defying all his expectations. Yeah. The great Khan of China is nowhere to be seen. Yeah. These people are clearly not Chinese or Japanese.

I think there's an argument that he hasn't lost his wits completely, but he's definitely getting a bit scrambled. Slight breakdown. Yeah. He makes all his men sign a statement that they have seen the beginning of kind of the Asian continent. And that if they'd gone further, they would have got to mainland China and met the Chinese emperor and stuff. And they sign this sort of contract that if they ever rescind that or contradict it, they will be fined 10,000 maravedis and they'll have their tongues, he'll cut their tongues

out. Yeah,ust sanctions. And the weird thing is that all the locals are saying, this is definitely not the mainland of Asia. We know that we live on an island and Columbus just will not have it. He says, well, they don't know what they're talking about. Mainstream media conspiracy kind of stuff. They're part of the mainstream media. They've been brainwashed by the press moguls. He then goes back to Hispaniola again after faffing around on Cuba. He's got dysentery, I think, by now. So he's ill for five months.

In the history books, there were sort of offhand remarks like, you know, Columbus is bedridden for five months or something. That's a pretty long time. He gets there. Every time Columbus leaves a small group of people on an island, he returns to find that most of them are dead. And in this case, about half of them are dead of syphilis because they've been molesting the locals again. And they've caught syphilis from the local population because syphilis is reasonably widespread in the Caribbean, but unknown in Europe. And this is more bad news that adds to Columbus's kind of discombobulation. And it's all very kind of heart of darkness, isn't it? Oh, yeah. It's apocalypse now.

It's white men going mad in tropical jungles. Yeah, that's a good comparison. All that kind of stuff. Because the more, the worse that things go, the worse they behave, I think it's fair to say, don't you? Yes. And I wonder also if for Columbus, there's the shadow of a kind of theological anxiety, because the fact that the Indians, as he calls them, when he sees them are naked and that this is an Edenic

paradise, he lives in a fallen world and paradise no longer exists. I wonder if he's shadowed by a kind of dread that perhaps he is the serpent. He has brought evil into paradise. I don't know. But the sense that things aren't going well, his whole take that the Indians are peaceable, that they are Edenic, that they kind of embody a prelapsarian state. And now everyone is catching syphilis and raping and there are cannibals everywhere. And he's had the shits for five months.

He's living out the whole doctrine of original sin. And compounded by the fact that he knows that in Spain, the pressure is building, that he has to show results. Right, because some of his enemies, including the friar, has gone back, haven't they? Well, they go back and they say to the king and queen of Spain, Columbus is an absolute waste of space. He's a terrible manager.

He's chosen the worst town sites imaginable. But also he is behaving very badly with your Indians. You see, the Ferdinand and Isabella, the thought that these people are their subjects, they take this very seriously. They are very sort of jealous of their own power and status. They absolutely do not want Columbus to carve out an independent realm of his own on the other side of the ocean it's theirs and these are their people and for him to be killing them raping them enslaving them isabella in particular is is furious about this and columbus doesn't get this at all he keeps making this mistake so the beginning of 1495 he's been away now for more

than 18 months or 18 months or so. He still hasn't got any decent amount of gold. He and his brother and a guy called Alonso de Ojeda, they go out across the island of Hispaniola and they're kidnapping Indians in larger and larger numbers. Sorry, I say Indians. They're obviously not Indians. They're Tainos. They're kidnapping these people in ever larger numbers and saying, well, they're all cannibals, godless cannibals, so it's fine. So, for example, in February, by that point, he seized about 1,600 locals, and he sends 550 of them home to Castile thinking, this is great.

This is my monetization of my project, and I will be rewarded for this. About 200 of them die on the voyage. I mean, these are awful, awful stories. You know, they've been suffering massive culture shock, disease. They die of cold. They don't have clothes. It's just awful. By the time the rest of them get to Cadiz, about half of them are ill,

probably terminally ill. Isabella is outraged that he's doing this. I mean, she doesn't greet these people with delight at all. The horror of it reverberates down the generations because Las Casas, writing a generation later, says that Columbus destroyed two-thirds of the population in this kind of razzia. Yeah, that's right. Hispaniola. Well, this is again a thing where it depends on the political persuasions of the historian, because the issue about whether that's true is really hotly debated. My sense is that most historians think that's a massive exaggeration. They say there weren't enough Spaniards to cause that much damage, and that obviously the Tainos do end up dying out. But I think probably most historians would say this is actually because of later disease, smallpox and so on, maybe in the 1500s and 1510s after Columbus is dead. However, there's no doubt that Columbus causes a lot of damage.

But again, I mean, it's as with the rapes. The idea that Columbus is pursuing a near-genocidal policy isn't kind of woke manufacturing in the 21st century. It is deriving from what Spanish writers are saying, who are almost contemporary with Columbus. Although one thing I will say is that Columbus is clearly, none of the Spanish are genocidal in the sort of strict meaning of the term. They absolutely do not want to kill the locals because they want them to live as labor rather like the caribs who capture people and keep them you know fatten them up then to eat they're not going to eat them but they're going to work them no but but but they they keep them

you know and they keep the women don't they this is the this is the story that they keep the women and breed them to raise children like livestock the caribs do or the spanish the caribs do so again you know this is there's a sense i mean one, one wonders, is this a kind of, I don't know, I don't want to go all Freudian, but operating in the subconscious of the Spaniards that they're projecting anxieties about what they are doing onto the Caribs. Oh, that's interesting. I hadn't thought of it that way. Maybe.

I mean, what's definitely true is that Columbus now really just thinks of the locals. All that stuff about, oh, they're lovely people, very nice, friendly. That's all gone. That is all gone. He thinks about them now purely as labor units. So he develops a new system of tribute. And this is the ancestor of the encomienda system that the Spanish later instituted in the Caribbean, which is basically all adult Tainos must provide tribute to the Spanish crown largely by work.

So basically they'll either hand over gold or they'll hand over cotton or they'll work for you. And when they've paid off, they will be given a disc to wear around their necks as a sign they've paid off their tribute. And if they don't have this disc, they can be worked to death basically. I mean, this is a wholly alien way of understanding how labor should be organized. I mean, who, God knows what they think about this. We don't have any sources at all, really, to tell us what they think. But one could assume that they don't like it. Yeah, definitely. Their whole world has been turned upside down. The Spaniards are also,

of course, bringing over animals. So the Columbian Exchange. The Columbian Exchange. Yeah. So they're taking back chili peppers and squashes and things. Pineapples. But they brought over animals like horses, sheep. Rats.

They're trampling across the agricultural ecosystem the Tainos have built. They're making it impossible for them to continue the sort of horticultural or the hunting, fishing lifestyle that they had previously practiced. So that's actually destroying their world. The Spanish don't do that. Again, they don't do that from genocidal intent. They were always going to bring their own animals over.

I mean, there's no alternative universe in which they don't. But the unanticipated consequence of that is it completely destroys the world on which the locals rely. So all this is going on. What is happening in Spain? In Spain, the Catholic monarchs are getting really hot onto the collar about all this. They realise basically they have to sort it all out by about 1495.

People keep coming back from the Caribbean and saying it's an absolute shambles. Columbus is mad. He's treating everybody very badly. We need to do something about it. First of all, they break his monopoly. So they had given him a monopoly. And then in April 1495, they issue a new decree that basically says anybody now can go. As long as they promise to follow the rules, you can fit out your own private ventures. To use our sort of venture capital to tech pioneer analogy that's opening up the

technology to everybody you know you can if you can raise a ship you can raise a crew if you will do as you're told you can set up your own search engine yes exactly exactly they send an official called juan aguado off to um hispaniola at the end of 1495. And he is told, you know, find out what's going on. Tell Columbus we're very concerned or this. I mean, do they think that he's gone the full Marlon Brando by this point? Some of the people around them, definitely. They're confessors and chaplains and bishops and things. Maybe people who've always distrusted Columbus are saying to them,

I mean, it's also such an important thing. I think he's Genoese. So, you. So he's a hired gun from a foreign country, and he's got no one really at court to plead for him. He's got no network of relatives at court, patrons and all that who are pleading his case. But he's very good at pleading his own case, isn't he? He is. So he's always able to turn it back when he gets back himself. Kind of end up kind of bending them to his will but that's what he decides he has to do so he ends up thinking i've got to go back he does he says he says to himself i have to go back and then he does something very very strange which i think is part of that slightly nervous breakdown element and

even historians themselves you know who know far more about this than we do, clearly find it baffling. He decides to go back, but he does so, he's grown a beard and he's dressing as a Franciscan friar. You see, I don't think that's weird at all. Well, I mean, I can't remember which historian it is. Maybe Cervantes says a bizarre decision. I don't think it's bizarre. I think he's making a statement about himself as, we talked about the symbolic weight of his names,

that he's the Christ bearer and he's the dove, the embodiment of the spirit. And that the idea that the world is entering the age of the spirit is particularly associated with the Franciscans. Yes. So in that sense, maybe he's casting himself as the vehicle of the Holy Spirit. Well, I think it's definitely PR. I think he's definitely going back, slightly Uriah Heapish, bringing his hands and saying i'm incredibly humble i'm the servant of the lord yeah so he pitches up in there in his robes in his in his franciscan outfits they kind of raise their eyebrows but as you say he's very persuasive

i mean it's like kind of very predatory capitalist companies who kind of woke wash he's christian washing him it's fly washing i mean you could always tell the most predatory companies because they're always the ones that are most pious, have the most pious advertising. Ben and Jerry's. Yeah, exactly. So that kind of thing. He's the Ben and Jerry's of 15th century exploration.

Right. There's a whole massive metaphor here with fish food. That's my favourite Ben and Jerry's ice cream, but we won't go in for that. He gets back. He works his magic to some extent. So he actually gets permission from them, sort of tentative theoretical permission to go back again,

a third voyage, taking more settlers. And they say to him, you have to convert the locals. That's really important. Stop doing all this. But by this point, he's actually slightly struggling to recruit people because word has spread in the ports of Spain. He's a bit mad. He's very annoying. Everything goes wrong. So actually, for a time, he's becalmed. And in that time, he's writing increasingly weird things about how it's definitely Asia, how evil words have been spread about him.

He's starting to make these strange comparisons. He's digging out things from the Bible and saying there have been prophecies about a place called Tarshish. Do you know what Tarshish is? Yeah, Tarshish is a place in Spain that is associated with gold and silver. Well, he's sort of digging up all stuff about this and he's saying this is foretold. He's very interested in solomon so he sometimes says that the caribbean these are probably places that traded with solomon yeah and then other times he says i'm actually king david and ferdinand is solomon that's the analogy i'm i'm laying the foundations i mean when you're comparing yourself with david i mean jesus obviously did that and got away with it. Well, he didn't, did he? No, he didn't, actually. He didn't get away with it.

Jesus tried that and didn't get away with it. And Columbus, well... He wasn't crucified. No, he wasn't crucified. So actually, it's a plus for Columbus. So we should leave Columbus there. He's in Spain. He wants to do another voyage. He's slightly bonkers. Everything has gone wrong. And we should do a fourth episode shouldn't we tom where we talk about his third and fourth voyages which is some ways less consequential but a matter stranger things happen full of brilliant details yes including an extraordinary metaphor for the shape of the globe that columbus comes up with after he's been a long time at sea

yeah a slightly not safe for work metaphor i think it's fair to say plus there's some heroic canoeing which is always good in a podcast and we shall be debating when we where columbus stands in history and what we make of him yes a hero or villain well would we ever be so simplistic tom who knows find out now long-term listeners to the rest is history will know exactly what i'm going to say now. If you are a member of the rest is history club, the crew, as I like to think of them, you can listen to that right now. And if you're not, well, you can subscribe right now. Just go to Apple podcasts, the rest is history feed, do the free trial or visit restishistorypod.com.

Sign up for our voyage. We're not mad. Is that the right analogy to comparing ourselves with Columbus? Yeah. We're not mad. No, please join us. Right. And on that bombshell, we'll see you next time for episode four.

Goodbye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.