Fecha en el Bonao, hoy martes, a 16 de octubre. Miguel Ballester. El Almirante. Estas son palabras del Almirante. Lloro ninguno ni sentimiento hacen por los que se mueren. Con esta medicina y modo de curar muchos escapan y sanan. Trujo consigo por alcalde mayor un caballero de Salamanca y licenciado, llamado Alonso Maldonado, persona muy honrada, prudente y amigo de hacer justicia y humano. El grano que dije de que dieron nueva, fue cosa monstruosa en naturaleza, porque nunca otra joya tal que la naturaleza sola formase vieron los vivos.
Metieron en esta nao capitana cien mil castellanos del rey, con el grano que dijimos, grande de tres mil y seiscientos pesos o castellanos, y otros cien mil de los pasajeros que iban en la dicha nao. Y que hiciese que fuesen bien tratados, y los que dellos fuesen cristianos, mejor que los otros.
Verum cum die noctuque in labore perseverent, multi ex nimio labore moriuntur: cum nulla eis ab opere detur requies aut laboris intermissio, sed verberibus ad continuum opus coacti, raro diutius vivunt. Robustiori quidam corpore et animi vigore, plurimum temporis in ea versantur calamitate, quibus tamen ab miseriae magnitudinem mors est vita optabilior, etc.
Sed qui fortiori pectore constabant, sub spe recuperandae libertatis vivere malebant. Ex his plerique non inertiores, forte si fugae locus dabatur, partes Hispaniolae petebant septentrionales, unde ab eorum patria venti flabant, et prospectare arcton licebat: ibi protentis lacertis et ore aperto halitus patrios anhelando absorbere velle videbantur, et plerique spiritu deficiente languidi prae inedia corruebant exanimes, etc. Estas fueron sus palabras. Ex illis sex et quadrigentas ab annis viginti amplius, quibus Hispaniolae Cubaeque habitatores Hispani eas pertractarunt, percurrisse inquiunt, et quadraginta utriusque sexus milia in servitutem ad inexhausti auri famem explendam adduxerunt: has una denominatione Iucayas appellant, et incolas iucayos, etc.
Piget haec refere, sed oportet esse veridicum, sui tamen exitii vindictam aliquando sumpsere iucay, raptoribus interfectis: cupiditate igitur habendi iucayos, more venatorurn, per nemora montana perque palustria loca feras in sectatur, etc. Tiene algunos puertos no buenos, si no es el que llaman Puerto Rico, donde la ciudad y cabeza del obispado tiene su asiento. Finalmente, trabajaron enviar frailes contra frailes, por meter el juego, como dicen, a barato.
Dijo el rey: «No, por Dios, ni tal mande en mi vida». Las ordenanzas del Almirante segundo, D. Todo esto es verdad. Si culpa, de injur. De origine iuris , I. De todo lo dicho yo soy testigo, que lo vide y estuve presente, y dejo de decir muchas otras particularidades por abreviar.
Dona iniquorum non probat Altissimus, nec respicit in oblationes iniquorum. Qui aufert in sudore panem quasi qui occidit proximum suum. Qui effundit sanguinem et qui fraudem facit mercennario, fratres sunt». Estas son sus palabras formales. Estas son palabras de Oviedo. Legnani the orders of events. Why weave such a tangled web?
In this anecdote about a very pregnant rabbit, conquistadors of all nationalities were involved; no naturales were hurt, for Porto Santo in the Madeira archipelago was a deserted island; yet this is the island where Columbus would prove his mettle, where he would father his first-born son, where the landscape would first be destroyed by an invasive species the hare and almost immediately thereafter by capitalism in the form of logging and manufacturing ship build- ing , a cash-crop economy sugarcane , and a stepping stone in the increased commodification of human beings for their labor and for their souls.
Moreover, the rabbit as sign offers its own warnings on univalent narratives. In the context of an expanding empire through overseas empre- sas enterprises in the wider sense , the symbolic and material economies of the natural and belonging s rely on classifications and definitions that seem both transparent and contradictory.
Palos was not a natural first choice. But Columbus made do, for in early August , the other, larger harbors were teeming with people and ships headed south and east. After centuries, the Jews of Sefarad—known as Spain to the Christians—were be- ing forced from their native Spain into exile. So much can change in a year. This we know all too well today. In the early days of that January in , Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon had defeated the last Muslim-held kingdom in Europe, that of Granada.
This content downloaded from And it is all too easy for us to turn our gaze with him, in the wake of those three ships. It bears repeating, but three days at sea and the Pinta was both leaking and rudderless, yet Columbus and his men would find a safe harbor in Lanzarote and Tenerife on the Canary Islands.
It was a safe harbor in that it was a colonized harbor. Conquered in by the forces of Isabel and Ferdinand, after two cen- turies of disputing claims among European trading companies and monarchs, the Canary Islands offered a stepping stone to the lands and peoples that lay to the southwest. Columbus wrote but one diary entry for that entire month when he could have been at sea but was, instead, twiddling his thumbs, as it were, on the is- land of Gomera.
Beyond recalling the arrival of a man from the Madeira islands to Portugal some eight years earlier, Columbus does not say much beyond re- porting that this man had requested a ship from the king of Portugal, John II r. Per Columbus, the man of Madeira was not the only one to make This content downloaded from Similarly, the new residents on the Azores islands were known to declare that on a clear day, lands could be discerned on the western horizon.
Similar to those Portuguese transplants to the Azores islands, Columbus was himself another man of Madeira through his marriage into the Perestrello fam- ily, who were a Genovese seafaring family based out of Lisbon.
While his own origins remain obscure, we know this much about Columbus: were it not for his time on Madeira, Columbus most likely would not have set sail from southern Spain in August Were it not for the exile of the Jews from Spain, Columbus would not have set sail from the lesser port town of Palos. Now, Las Casas tells the story or the history of the Indies in an insular, episodic, dare I say periphrastic fashion.
His narrative wanders, but in his wandering, he makes discoveries along the way. Las Casas will begin at the beginning, he tells his readers over and over again in the Historia de las Indias, which took him more than three decades to write — The wife of Perestrello remains unnamed, but she was the one who shared with her son-in-law the instruments, narratives, and maps relevant to the conquest of the west coast of Africa, which was known as Guinea at the time. After all, they are of Madeira, but not native to it.
This realization begets another narrative incursion, further back in the past, and it involves, of all things, a pregnant rabbit. Legnani After the mother-in-law anecdote, Las Casas offers a guidepost to his read- ers, noting that the history of the discovery of Madeira will be told starting in chapter Returning to his biography of Columbus, Las Casas then notes how from the stepping stone of Porto Santo in Madeira the future admi- ral of Spain joined other Portuguese expeditions to Mina, where he learned the slave trade.
As a stepping stone, Porto Santo is both fertile ground for empire and, as Las Casas tells it, a wasteland. It became a launching site for expeditions east and west of the islands of Madeira, first exploited for their wood—hence the metonymy if their name—and, This content downloaded from With the promise to his readers that he will return to the west coast of Guinea and the mid-Atlantic islands in later chapters, Las Casas closes his first digression on Madeira.
It opens with a detailed description of the financial schemes employed by various empresarios—French, Castilian, Ara- gonese, and Portuguese—and how various European crowns did or did not back the colonial aspirations of their respective subjects. As Las Casas demonstrates, the original charters for the conquests of these islands in the early fifteenth century did not delineate precisely between private ownership of enterprises in conquest, the nationalities of the entrepreneurs, and the crowns who had chartered them.
This was the case of Maciot Betancourt, a French- man, who had inherited the island of Gomera from his uncle, Jean Betancourt, whose expedition had been made up of Frenchmen and Castilians under a charter from King John II of Castile r. Soon thereafter, Prince Henry of Portugal sent an armada to back up his capital investment.
Las Casas reproduces the ensuing confusion generated by these private en- terprises in imperial violence by juxtaposing the letters exchanged between John II of Castile and Alfonso V of Portugal r. Though it would become commonplace for Portuguese navigators, for example, to lead ventures for Span- ish monarchs think, for example, of Ferdinand Magellan in the Pacific Ocean or for these ventures to be multinational beyond the Iberian Peninsula in their makeup, including Greeks, Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians, the common un- derstanding by the sixteenth century was that the chartering monarchy laid claim to the conquered or to-be-conquered territories, not the monarch of the sub- ject doing the conquering.
By extension, the writing practices of conquistadors would similarly follow the norms laid out by the laws in the country of charter, yet these laws arose out of the process of trial and error in which the Iberian monarchs had engaged in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By exposing in minute detail the genealogy of commonly held practices of conquest, Las Casas in effect disentangles the habitus of the sixteenth century, so imbricated with that of conquest, but also, let us recall, expulsion.
And so, it is in chapter 21 that Las Casas explores the livelihood of the native Canary Islanders, an alternative habitus to the life and times of conquest. In the next and final chapter of this section, Las Casas returns to the Perestrello-Columbus connection as promised in his first book of the Historia de las Indias and, thus, to Madeira.
He chooses to close off his narrative incursion into the islands off the western coast of Africa with an anecdote about a plague of rabbits, an invasive species brought by Perestrello on his ship in She gave birth at sea, from whose birth all the Portuguese rejoiced, taking it as a good sign that all the things they carried would multiply, because even en route they had begun to see their fruits. Over two years, this multiplication was so great and excessive that, concluding it to be a pestilential and irremediable plague as it was , they all began to ab- hor their life there.
Yet what had been interpreted as a sign of good fortune becomes a plague on the island, so much so that life there be- comes unbearable. Thus, money multiplying i. In this passage, both things cosas and rabbits multiply first on a boat and later on an island. In this way, in a few lines, the anecdote destabilizes the seemingly transparent op- position between natura and contra natura, and yet it questions, at the same time, the way in which this form of colonizing capitalism blurs the distinction between things and beings.
Las Casas literally adds color to the passage by underscoring that the doe rabbit is black negra ; Barros gives no color for the doe rabbit in the original. As an al- legory for chattel slavery, it almost seems too transparent.
And their growth was such during the two years of their stay, and they were so annoyed by this plague, that their life and labor there became abhorrent to them; so that Bartholomew Perestrello decided to return to the kingdom [of Portugal], or for another reason that he had at the time.
But all of humanity? In part? Can anyone or anything remain without the logic of primitive accumulation? The Madeira of the Indies These lessons about the relations between humans, nature, capital, and the state learned by Columbus with the Portuguese and the Genovese on Madeira and This content downloaded from In the Diario entry for Sunday, November 25, , Columbus foreshadows the figure of the manu- facturer who claims ownership of a waterfall, explored by Karl Marx in his third volume of Capital.
He classifies the landscape both in terms of its potential to generate a cluster of economic activity such as gold panning, wood logging, ship building and anticipates violence against the natives. Such a measurement only makes sense within a logic of capitalist violence that foresees the need to defend the enclosure of this land from its native inhabitants.
Para llevar a los reyes. Miro por la sierra y vidolos tan grandes y tan maravillosos que no le [? Llego a la boca del rio y entro en una cala al pie de aquel cabo de la parte del sueste muy honda y grande en que cabrian cient naos sin alguna amarra ni anclas. Y el puerto tal que los ojos otro tal nunca vieron. Lo mismo en los puertos y en las aguas. He went to the river and saw shining in it some stones with gold-colored spots on them, and he remembered that in the Tagus River, in its lower part, near the sea, gold is found, and it seemed certain to him that this one should have gold.
And he ordered certain of those stones collected to take to the sovereigns. He looked up toward the mountains and saw them, so large and admirable that he could not praise [sufficiently] their height and straight- ness, like spindles, thick and thin, where he recognized that ships could be made, and vast quantities of planking and masts for the greatest ships of Spain. He saw oaks and arbutus and a good river and material to make water-powered sawmills.
He saw along the beach many other stones the color of iron and others that some said were from silver mines, all of which the river brought. He reached for the mouth of the river and went into an opening at the foot of the cape, toward the southeast, which was very deep and large, and in which there would be room for a hundred ships without any cables or anchors.
And the harbor was such that eyes never saw another like it. And he indicates that he had received from seeing it, and even more so from the pine trees, inestimable joy and pleasure; because as many ships as might be wanted could be made there, bringing out their equipment except for wood and pitch, of which a great plenty would be made there.
And that always, in what he had discovered up to this point, he had gone from good to better, as well in lands and groves and plants and fruits and flowers as in people, and always of different sorts, and likewise in one place as in another, and the same in harbors and waters. The panoramic view of the bay offered by Columbus soon pans upward to the forest, where it pauses at the sight of a waterfall and river.
Here, I see the monopoly of the em- presario as businessman over nature power in specific places and the monopoly over the legitimate use of violence by the empresario the standard bearer for the sovereign to constitute and defend the first monopoly over running, powerful water in the Indies.
Then the caravels went three for three on Christmas day. With these building materials stripped from the cara- vel, Columbus also leaves behind bread pan , wine vino , seeds simientes , a rowboat barca de la nao , a caulker calafate , a carpenter carpintero , a gunner lombardero , and a barrel maker tonelero. Thus, the material and symbolic conditions for the state of emer- gency become recycled and repurposed from island to island.
The wood of Madeira is but one example of scalability. When Columbus describes the great girth and height of the trees he found in the West Indies, he is making an oblique comparison to the lumber This content downloaded from It was the naturally larger scale of the planking from Madeira, which had allowed Portuguese and Spanish shipwrights to build both larger ships and larger fleets that could withstand ocean crossings.
How- ever, scalability functions by capital multiplying, but then disassociating from, the first enterprise in a contiguous form. Madeira First Telling the story correctly, from the beginning, may be one of the main concerns of the scholars and activists who advocate for the use of the term Capitalocene rather than Anthropocene, as the latter retains the binary of humanity vs.
The transatlantic space was the incubator of our current world ecology, as the logic of capitalism transformed its places and its peoples into metonyms for cheap nature. In yet another exploration of the counterfactual, Las Casas contended that had Columbus been blessed by the foresight to wit- ness the destructive effects of his discovery, he never would have set out for the Indies.
The counterfactual, however, posed to contemporary readers who are blessed with such hindsight, frames the question in a different light: What would you do and what do you do now with that knowledge? Chakrabarty, Habitations, Shell, Islandology. The chapter on the conquest of Venezuela similarly complicates the dichotomies es- tablished in the opening sections of the text. Rather than Spanish conquistadors, nominally Catholic per Las Casas, we have German conquistadors, possibly Lutheran bankers —17 ; his narrative of the martyrdom of the Dominican missionaries posits an aporia where the missionaries received an unjust martyrdom at the hands of indigenous insurgents who were, nonetheless, defending themselves justly against Spanish invaders — Columbus and Las Casas, Diario, Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.
Menocal, Shards, 5. Arendt, Origins, Columbus and Las Casas, Diario, 18— Columbus and Las Casas, Diario, 24— Las Casas, Historia, I: Both colonies were the last possessions of the declining Spanish empire in the Americas. The encounters among European, American, and Asian civilizations during the six- teenth century, as explored by Serge Gruzinski in The Eagle and the Dragon, follow the patterns of conquest—on the European side—that emerged out of the mid-Atlantic islands and West African laboratory for imperialism and which Las Casas analyzes in great detail in the Historia de las Indias.
Emphasis mine. Schumpeter, Theory of Economic Development. Emphases mine. Marx, Capital, 3: — Columbus and Las Casas, Diario, — He explains, By itself a sense of the marvelous cannot confer title; on the contrary, it is associated with longing, and you long precisely for what you do not have. But something hap- pens to the discourse of the marvelous when it is linked to the discourse of the law: the inadequacy of the legal ritual to confer title and the incapacity of the marvelous to confer possession cancel each other out, and both the claim and the emotion are intensified by the conjunction.
Neither discourse is freestanding and autonomous; on the contrary, each—like individual words themselves—takes its meaning from its conjunction with other motifs, tropes, and speech acts, and from the situation in which it is inserted.
And there is a further motive for the conjunction: under the actual circumstances of the first encounter, there was no discourse adequate for the occasion. In the unprecedented, volatile state of emergence and emergency in which Columbus finds himself, anything he says or does will be defective.
His response is to conjoin the most resonant legal ritual he can summon up with the most resonant emotion.
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