Hispaniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus

4. The Adelantado's Visit to Xaragu

4 ****** The Adelantado's Visit to Xaragua The ethnohistorical accounts of the visit of Colon's brother Bartolome -the Adelantado, or governor, by title-to the province of Xaragua are remarkable for their sensitive portrayal of a contact situation. More, they offer insights into the operations of historical processes which are critical for understanding Taino social structure and political organization. At issue are the ways in which the Taino elite acted within the context of their own political boundaries, how they related with other cacicazgos, and how these social relations may have been significant in producing cultural change. The events discussed here occurred in late 1496 and early 1497. The Adelantado's initial visit to the province probably occurred in January 1497, and he returned to Xaragua for a short stay in April of that year. Bartolome had arrived on Hispaniola in June 1494, and so had been on the island for two years and seven months. Of the people with him, no Europeans had been on the island for more than three years, and most had arrived aftereither in October 1494, October 1495, or July 1496. The events discussed in this chapter depict the sociopolitical structure of the Taino as dynamic and mutable, subject to transformation through the competition of elites and of polities. The ethnohistorical data suggest that elite interaction (in many forms) across the boundaries of political units was a significant factor in the restructuring and reorganization of the Caribbean chiefdoms from generation to generation. At the level of ethnohistorical detail provided in the accounts of the Adelantado's trip, we can see several very suggestive pat111 112 * Hispaniola terns. It appears that the structure of a cacique's polygynous marriages was a powerful tool in concentrating social and political status in his lineage. It also seems probable that when no acceptable mates were available for the highest-ranking women within their own polity, that marriage to a high-ranking man in a neighboring cacicazgo was possible. Coupled with documentary evidence for Taino succession and inheritance patterns, it is suggested that the structure and principles of the Taino sociopolitical organization were conducive to the consolidation of political units. In fact, the Spaniards may have been witnesses to such an event. The engimatic details concerning the woman Anacaona are central to all of these questions. The Spanish Dilemma Through the first decade of the occupation of Hispaniola, the Spaniards were continually faced with the problem of provisioning more than a few men in anyone place for more than a very short period. Colon's dream of establishing port cities had failed twice by the summer of 1496, first with the catastrophe of Navidad, which was completely destroyed upon his return on the second voyage, and then with the town of Isabela, also on the north coast. Large settlements were found to be traps of disease and starvation. The Spaniards, primarily minor nobility and soldiers, were unable to feed themselves with their attempted transplant of a European economy, and Colon's plan of temporarily provisioning the colonies with a supply line from Spain was doomed. The Taino economy was based on a range of wild and cultivated starches which were harvested as they were needed, and on fish, eels, iguanas, and the small rodent hutia, none of which were stored for long periods (Sturtevant 1961).1 With very little stored food to commandeer, there remained the option of increasing production on the local level manyfold in order to feed the foreigners. Even in the cases where the local Indians were inclined or compelled to attempt it, however, the production of manioc could not quickly be increased; while both planting and harvesting went 'Some foods were preserved and stored for at least short periods. Martyr reports an encounter with fishermen who were "sent to fish by their cacique, who was preparing a festival for the reception of another chief. . . . When asked why they cooked the fish they were to carry to their cacique, they replied that they did so to preserve it from corruption" (Martyr 1970:95). The Adelantado's Visit to Karagua * 113 on in all seasons, each plant could take more than a year to mature . Other food sources, such as wild foods, garden horticultural products, and possibly maize could be produced more quickly, but each avenue for increasing the food supply involved increasing the amount of effort put into food production on the short run...