The World полностью

There, he only ruled over Panama, Cuba, Jamaica and Hispaniola, inhabited by 5,000 Spaniards, the benighted Taíno peoples and a few enslaved Africans – and encompassing limited gold. Charles supported Bartolemeu de las Casas, the friar horrified by the killings of Taínos, as Protector of the Indians. Yet the friar devised an atrocious solution: save the Taínos by importing African slaves. In August 1518, Charles licensed a Flemish courtier to export 4,000 slaves from Africa to protect the Taínos: many of these first American slaves were Muslim Wolofs from Senegambia.

In 1520, Charles reappointed Diego Columbus as viceroy. Columbus, duke of Veragua (Panama) and marquess of Jamaica, and now married into the aristocracy, arrived in Santo Domingo in style, holding court at a new palace, Alcázar de Colón (still partly standing). Columbus pioneered the sugar industry in Jamaica – which he owned entirely – but treated his Wolof slaves so appallingly that in December 1522 they launched the first slave rebellion, some escaping to form a community of enslaved rebels, known as Maroons from the Spanish for wild cattle, cimarrón.^*

Yet the Portuguese were far ahead of the Spanish, with their distant outposts in Goa, Cochin (both in India), Hormuz (Iran), Malacca (Malaysia), Sri Lanka and Africa, where they found that Kongo was ideal for sourcing slaves. The demand was rising; they had realized they now possessed a vast, scarcely settled coastline with unknown lands to the interior, Brazil, which became the most important market for slaves. These were overwhelmingly taken from Kongo, where the Portuguese now used African mercenaries and allies from the neighbouring kingdom of Ngola to seize the slaves, and their own mixed-race enforcers to deliver them.^* Their ally Manikongo Afonso acquired thousands of slaves during his military campaigns. The manikongo swiftly lost control, unable to restrict the slave trade to his war captives. ‘Each day the traders are kidnapping our people,’ he wrote to João III, the successor of Manuel, in 1521, ‘children of this country, sons of our nobles, even people of our own family,’ adding in another letter that ‘Many of our own subjects eagerly covet Portuguese merchandise,’ for which ‘they seize many of our black free subjects’. Priests were now shameless slave traders too, inflamed with ‘the lusts of the world and lure of wealth just as the Jews crucified the Son of God because of covetousness’. Ten of his own nephews, dispatched to Portugal to be educated, were enslaved and sold to Brazil: ‘We don’t know so far if they are alive or dead.’ But João III needed the trade. ‘The Portuguese there on the contrary tell me how vast Kongo is,’ he replied, ‘and how it’s so thickly populated it seems as if no slave has ever left.’ The Pious King brought da Gama out of retirement for one last voyage.^*

In 1518, Charles received the thirty-nine-year-old Magellan, veteran of Albuquerque’s wars whose misconceived plans had been turned down by João. In proposing to sail westwards to reach the Spice Islands, on the assumption that America was close to China and the Moluccas, Magellan did not plan to circumnavigate the world. But when he hinted that the Portuguese did not know of this route, Charles backed him.

Soon after Magellan had sailed with five ships and 260 sailors (including Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Africans, an Englishman and his Malay manservant known as Henrique, possibly the first person to circumnavigate the globe), the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez, asked permission to send an expedition to Yucatán in central America. Charles agreed. Velázquez fitted out an expedition under his secretary, Hernán Cortés, part of the first wave of adventurous Spaniards who followed Columbus. Founding a new town on the Gulf coast, Cortés learned of a gold-infested kingdom inland and immediately planned to defy Velázquez’s control.

In June 1519, Cortés sent Charles a letter promising ‘as much gold as Solomon accumulated for the Temple’ along with a golden moon six feet wide and six Caribbean slaves, and requesting ‘the offices of conquistador, captain-general and chief justice’ of his town. Simultaneously Velázquez requested the execution of Cortés for insubordination. The glint of gold convinced Charles.

Cortés set off into the interior of the Mexica empire, accompanied by 500 Spaniards, Juan Garrido (Handsome John), born in Kongo, captured by the Portuguese and later manumitted, a woman named María de Estrada (who fought in all the battles and was the sister of one of the conquistadors), several Jewish conversos, and an unknown number of Taíno and African slaves.

CORTéS, MALINCHE AND MOTECUHZOMA