The Canary Islands after the conquest: the making of a colonial society in the early sixteenth century 9780198218883

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
List of Maps (page xii)
List of Abbreviations (page xiii)
Introduction: the Setting and Background (page 1)
I The Settlers: Portugese and Italians (page 13)
II The Settlers: Castilians and Others (page 33)
III The Division of the Soil (page 48)
IV The Agronomy (page 69)
V Irrigation (page 93)
VI The Emergence of a Framework of Government (page 114)
VII Administrative and Judicial Problems (page 133)
VIII Trade (page 151)
IX Morale and Devotion (page 177)
Conclusion (page 200)
APPENDIX OF DOCUMENTS (page 211)
MAPS (page 221)
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY (page 225)
INDEX (page 233)

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OXFORD HISTORICAL MONOGRAPHS Editors

M. G. BROCK BARBARA HARVEY H. M. MAYR-HARTING H. G. PITT

K. V. THOMAS A. F. THOMPSON

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THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST The Making of a Colonial Society in the Early Sixteenth Century FELIPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO |

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Nos manet Oceanus circumvagus; arva beata Petamus arva, divites et insulas. — Horace, Epod., XVI, 41-2

PREFACE

This attempt to portray the life, work, and institutions of an early Atlantic colonial society in its first generation of settlement has been constructed from four principal archive sources: (1) Castilian documents of royal origin preserved at Simancas in the Registro general del Sello; (ii) the archives of the Canarian Inquisition now kept at El Museo Canario in Las Palmas; (iii) the miscellaneous collection of manuscript Canariana formed

in the same museum in the last century by Don Agustin Mullares Torres, the Canarian antiquary; and (iv) finally, and most important of all for this study, the oldest surviving public

notarial ledgers of Tenerife and Gran Canaria, kept in the provincial archives respectively of Santa Cruz and Las Palmas.

Extensive use has also been made of two published collec-

tions of documents: (i) the relevant volumes (listed in the bibliography) in the series Fontes rerum canariarum (La Laguna,

1933 — in progress), published by the Instituto de Estudios Canarios, especially the two volumes of notarial ledgers from Tenerife and the collections of acts of Tenerife’s island council;' and (11) three books of early land-grants in Tenerife, preserved

in the municipal archive of La Laguna and published in abstract by E. Serra Rafols in Revista de historia canaria, xxv (1959)—xxxiv (1970).

The social and economic history of Castilian overseas expansion has usually been approached through the study of laws and ordinances and the monarchs’ correspondence with royal representatives in the colonies. Most of the material thus employed has come from the Archivo General de Indias in Seville and the published collections of documents drawn chiefly from there.” 'E. Gonzalez Yanes and M. Marrero Rodriguez, eds., Extractos de los protocolos del escribano Hernan Guerra de San Cristobal de La Laguna, 1508-10 (La Laguna, 1958) and M. Marrero Rodriguez, ed., /xtractos del protocolo del escribano Juan Ruiz de Berlanga 1507-8

(La Laguna, 1974); i. Serra Rafols, ed., Acuerdos del cabildo de Tenerife, i (La Laguna, 1949), ii(1952), iii (1965). *Coleccién de documentos inéditos del Archivo de Indias (Madrid, 1864-84); Collecci6n de documentos inéditos de ultramar (Madrid, 1885-1900; E. Schaefer, /ndice de la coleccién de documentos inéditos de Indias, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1946).

PREFACE vil Konetzke’s famous collection is representative of the type of material hitherto relied on.*? In consequence, the theory has grown up and has become a historians’ commonplace, that the characteristics of Spanish activity in America were largely determined by the ‘action of the state’ (la accién del estado) ,* whereas an examination of the Canarian records seems to me to suggest that the reality of life in distant parts of the monarchy was often far removed from the royal conception. Royal and gubernatorial ordinances, in short, give one at best an idealized picture of colonial society as it took shape, not in the settlers’ environment, but in the minds of the monarchs and their advisers. In using the crown’s archives, I have therefore looked less at the monarchs’ attempts to regulate life in the Canaries than at examples of litigation that were referred from the courts of the archipelago to those of the crown. The protocolos — ledgers or, as I shall call them, protocols —

of Spanish public scribes or notaries have always been singularly detailed documents, imparting an invaluable abundance of minutiae about everyday transactions at every social level. At intervals during the last half century they have been published and deployed in secondary works in the Hispanic world*® and

especially in the Canaries, where one monograph and numer- ous articles, based on the perusal of such sources, have already

| appeared.® The present work, however, represents the first attempt comprehensively to depict the society of a Spanish | overseas colony in the sixteenth century, using the great mass of detailed information imparted by notarial archives. Of course, *R. Konetzke, Collecctén de documentos inéditos para la historia de la formacién social de Hispanoamérica, 5 vols. (Madrid, 1953). “Especially, among many works in a single tradition, see S. Zavala, La encomienda indiana (Madrid, 1935); J. Ots Capdequi, El estado espaiiol en las Indias (Mexico, 1942); M. Géngora, El estado en el derecho indiano (Santiago, 1961).

*Pionecred in the field of Castilian overseas expansion by J. Ots Capdequi, ed., Catalogo de fondos americanos del Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla, 5 vols. (Havana, 1930-2); A.

Millares Carl6 — himself a Canary Islander — and J. Mantecon, Indice y extractos del Archwwo de Notarios de México, 2 vols. (Havana, 1947-50). J. Miranda and M. Gongora, in

particular, have begun to use notarial evidence in secondary works.

°The substance of the protocols of the notary Hernan Guerra, 1508-10, was published by M. Marrero and E. Gonzalez Yanes in 1958 (Protocolos del escribano Hernan

Guerra), which inspired articles abroad by C. Verlinden, ‘Gl italiani alle Canarie all’inizio della colonizzazione spagnola’, Economia e storia, vii (1960), and J. Gentil da Silva, ‘Echange et troc: l’exemple des Iles Canaries’, Annales, économies, sociétés, civilisations, xvi (1961).

Vill PREFACE individual case-histories minutely examined must tire readers who are interested only in the main lines of argument, not its detailed exemplification. But the subject does have, I believe, many points of broad interest which justify this treatment. ‘Via

lata gradior, more iuventutis’: I can only beg the reader’s indulgence if the way seems paved with many small stones, all demanding particular scrutiny.

Spanish technical terms are explained in the text as they occur. Readers who are simply ‘dipping’ into the book or who

wish to be reminded of the meaning of such terms at their second or subsequent appearance, may therefore use the index to find these explanations. I am grateful to Professor Peter Russell, who supervised the inception of my research, and Dr J. R. L. Highfield, who had a more awkward and uncongenial task in supervising its completion. Lord Dacre of Glanton has been generous with his time

and unerring in his counsel. When in the Canaries, I was assisted by Dr L. de la Rosa Olivera, who criticized my views from his vast knowledge of Canarian history, presented me with publications of the Cabildo Insular de Tenerife and allowed me to see work in progress on his projected edition of Canarian materials from the Registro del Sello. Professor M. A. Ladero Quesada (now of the University of Madrid) allowed me the use of his unpublished bibliography of Canariana; Dra M. Marrero

Rodriguez permitted me to see the proofs of her edition of E-xtractos del protocolo del escribano Juan Ruiz de Berlanga (Fontes

rerum canariarum, xviii, La Laguna, 1974) in advance of publication, I also benefited from conversations in La Laguna with Dr

A. Cioranescu and Dr A. Pérez Voituriez and in Oxford with Mr A. R. D. Pagden and Dr A. C. de C. M. Saunders. Dra E. Gonzalez Yanes of the Archivo Histoérico Provincial de Santa

Cruz de Tenerife was a veritable Ariadne in that labyrinth. With characteristic generosity, Professor Charles Verlinden read the thesis on which this book is based,’ and criticized it with

characteristic acumen. I could have done little without financial support from my colleges, Magdalen and St. John’s, a grant from the ‘Trustees of the Arnold Historical Essay Fund in 1972, "PL EOR. Fernandez-Armesto, ‘The Society and Government of the Canary Islands, ¢.1497~e.1525°, Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1977.

~ PREFACE ix or the hospitality of Marlborough College in 1974. I owe a great

debt to the former Headmaster of Charterhouse, Mr Brian Rees, and to my colleagues there for helping me to see this work

through the press in the rare and brief interludes of a master’s life.

39 April 1981 Felipe Fernandez Armesto

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CONTENTS

List of Maps XU List of Abbreviations x1 Introduction: the Setting and Background l I The Settlers: Portuguese and Italians } 13 IT The Settlers: Castilians and Others 33

II] The Division of the Soil 48

IV The Agronomy 69

V Irrigation 93 VI The Emergence of a Framework of Government 114

VIII ‘Trade 151 IX Morale and Devotion 177 Conclusion 200 APPENDIX OF DOCUMENTS 211

VII Administrative and Judicial Problems 133

MAPS 221

INDEX 233

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 225

MAPS

THE CANARY ISLANDS 221

GRAN CANARIA 222

TENERIFE 223 LA PALMA 224

ABBREVIATIONS

AGL. Archivo General de Indias (Seville)

A.G.S. Archivo General de Simancas (refers always to Registro general del Sello unless otherwise stated)

AEA Anuario de estudios atlanticos

Arch. La Lag. Archivo Municipal de La Laguna

Arch. Prov. Las Palmas Archivo Historico Provincial de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Arch. Prov. ‘Tenerife Archivo Hist6rico Provincial de Santa Cruz de Tenerife

Cat. XU Registro general del Sello (A.G.S. Catalogo XIII) (Valladolid, 1950)

cuad. cuaderno Datas Tenerife E. Serra Rafols, ed., ‘Las Datas de Tenerife’, RHC, xxv (1959)—xxxiv (1970). Note that documents are referred to by number, not page.

El Mus, Can. El Museo Canario (periodical)

FRC Fontes rerum canariarum (La Laguna, 1933)

Inquisition MSS Colecci6n Inquisici6n de Canarias (in El

leg. legajo mrs. maravedis, maravedies, maravedises Museo Canario, Las Palmas)

Millares MSS Coleccién A. Millares Torres (in El Museo Canario, Las Palmas)

RHC Revista de historia canaria (until 1957 entitled ' Revista de historia)

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INTRODUCTION:

THE SETTING AND BACKGROUND The concept of continuity, or in other words the absence of a gap, between the Middle Ages and modern times can be applied to colonial history in the strict sense.' Podemos ver prefigurada la historia americana de ayer y de hoy en la historia medieval espanola, el hombre nuevo del Nuevo Mundo, en el nuevo hombre de la Espana renovada por la reconquista y repoblacién.?

The intensive colonization of the Canary Islands from c.1496 to ¢.1525 followed the Portuguese settlement of Madeira and the Azores and overlapped in time with two comparable processes: Castilian colonization in Granada and the beginnings of European settlement in the New World. The peoples chiefly involved

in the early exploitation of the Canaries — the Castilian, the Portuguese, and the Italian — had an earlier history of colonial experience in the Iberian Peninsula and (in the Italian case) in the Mediterranean. The colonization of the Canaries can therefore be seen as an episode in a long history of expansion. In . order for us to know exactly where it fits in that history, in terms of reciprocal influences and of continuity or discontinuity, a comparative study of European colonization in the late Middle

Ages and early modern period would be necessary. | The present work, which may be regarded as a contribution _ towards such a study, attempts to describe one early Atlantic colonial society in all its aspects. The provenance of the settlers,

their distribution, economic activities (agronomy, irrigation, and trade), political institutions, ‘cultural contacts’ with the indigenous people, and moral and devotional life are described in turn. Like travellers to the Land of Oz, specialists in every ~'1C, Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1970), p. xvi. ?C.. Sanchez-Albornoz, Espana: un enigma histérico, i (Buenos Aires, 1956), 15.

2 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

theme of the history of the period are likely to approach the book seeking different counsel. For instance, historians of the Spanish monarchy will want to know how, ifat all, the Castilian

experience in the Canaries contributed to the transmission of ways of life and methods of government from the Iberian Peninsula across the Atlantic to the New World. Exponents of comparative colonial history will wish to identify any original features in the settlement of the Canaries, or elements of continuity with earlier colonization, especially in the Mediterranean. Students of ‘frontier’ societies will see the Canaries as an example in their own chosen field. Other readers will be chiefly interested in the motives that animated the ‘age of expansion’

and what light the case of the Canary Islands can cast on that problem. Historians of commerce will wish to know whether any modifications should be made to our received picture of

Atlantic trade in the sixteenth century. Others will see the Canaries as the first terrain of encounter, conflict, and coexistence between a relatively ‘advanced’ civilization of European

colonists and a relatively ‘backward’ culture of indigenous primitives. Historians, finally, of the Canary Islands — a small but gallant band — will be most concerned with the influence of this formative period on subsequent Canarian history. All these specialists, as well as those readers who may come to this study for its own sake, will judge for themselves the extent to which it satisfies them. But first, the setting and background of the subject — the archipelago and its indigenous inhabitants —— must be very briefly described. Like stepping-stones into the

Atlantic, the Canary Islands lie on or about the twenty-eighth parallel North, between ninety and three hundred miles off the southernmost extension of the Moroccan coast, almost in the path of the north-east trade winds. The most westerly deepwater harbour of the archipelago is only thirteen days’ normal sail out from Cadiz in the season; some further thirty days’ sail to westward in good conditions, the first isles of the Antilles

announce the New World.? Central, therefore, in position, among areas of European expansion overseas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Canary Islands were also first in time: from early in the fourteenth century, their convenient *P. and H. Chaunu, Séville et ’Atlantique, vi, part I (Paris, 1956), 320.

INTRODUCTION 3 position for exploration of the sources of the African gold trade and their attractions in their own right as a compendium of all the other objectives of the age of discovery — lands to conquer and settle, trade to ply, fish to catch, slaves to master, and souls to save — aroused cupidity, curiosity, and missionary zeal all

over western Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe. But the paucity of available resources in the Old World, the check to European expansion that followed the Black Death, and the tenacious resistance of the native Canarians delayed the start of the conquest until 1402 and its completion until 1496.4 The era of intensive settlement, which is the subject of the present work, began at the close of the conquest and lasted for about a generation’s span. To a traveller who visits them in turn from west to east, the islands present a successively more arid aspect and less varied relief. By their westerly positions and mountainous interiors, Hierro, Gomera, La Palma, and Tenerife are assured of the best share of the region’s rainfall, which in the first years of settlement was still undiminished by the effects of deforestation. Yet

even then the south and east of Tenerife were too dry and infertile to attract many colonists. Gran Canaria, the central island, similarly but more dramatically combines a fertile zone on the northerly slopes and foothills of its rugged hinterland with a southern coastal plain of a parchedness so perfect that the landscape is utterly unrelieved, save by dunes and mirages. This overseas extension of the great Sahara is separated from the fertile area by mountains in the west, and on the east coast

by a short plain of apparently modest agricultural potential nowadays (when it 1s dedicated to the cultivation of tomatoes)

but of evidently richer utility in the early sixteenth century, 4For accounts of the events of the 14th and 15th centuries in the islands, see E. Serra Rafols, ‘El redescubrimiento de las Islas Canarias en el s. XIV’, xxvii (1961), and the alternative view of C. Verlinden, ‘Lanzarote Malocello et la découverte portugaise des Canaries’, Revue belge de philologte et d’histotre, xxxvi (1958), ‘Les Génois dans la marine

portugaise avant 1385’, Actas do congresso de Portugal medievo, iii (1966), and ‘La. découverte des archipels de la ‘“‘Méditerranée Atlantique”’ et la navigation astronomique primitive’, Revista Portuguesa de Histéria, xvi (1978); A. Cioranescu’s introductory vol. to Le Canarien ( FRC, viii); J. Alvarez Delgado, ‘Primera conquista y colonizacién de la Gomera’, AEA, vi (1960); J. de Viera y Clavijo, Noticias de la historia general de las Islas Canarias, V¥-1X, in the edition by E. Serra Rafols and others (3 vols, Santa Cruz, 1950-2), which is normally cited in the present work except where an earlier edition is specified, or A. Cioranescu (2 vols, Santa Cruz, 1967-71).

4 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

when sugar and horticultural products were grown there. Climatic heterogeneity characterizes all the westerly islands, where marked variations in the distribution of rain and sun, in temperature, and in the incidence of wind can often be observed

from side to side of a single mountain or valley, and where mountains and valleys are the most frequent topographical features. Further east, the large islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, with their scant rainfall, low reliefs, and sandy, stony soil, could only sustain in this period a life that was at best

precarious and poor. Volcanic activity has since transformed the nature of Lanzarote’s soil, and hence the local methods of cultivation. But modern Fuerteventura — the ‘thirsting rock’ so startlingly evoked in Unamuno’s sonnet® — still presents the semi-desolate aspect that was formerly common to both islands. Of the remaining islets, Alegranza, Santa Clara, Roque, Lobos,

and Graciosa, though a few households cling tenuously to the rock surface of the last-named, none was large enough to support life at the time considered in this study.°® Islands draw their wealth and importance not only from their own soil and geologi-

cal composition, topography, and climate, but also from communications with the outside world and prospects of trade. The historically significant islands of the Canary archipelago are those that possess natural fertility combined with good deepwater harbours — that is Tenerife, Gran Canaria, La Palma, and Gomera: I mean (and hope to show) that they have been particularly significant in the history of the Spanish monarchy and of European overseas expansion and colonization. But it

will be as well to remember that the archipelago has a dual nature: Lanzarote and Fuerteventura have always had a local or regional importance in the history of the stretch of ‘Barbary’ coast that lies opposite them across the Mar Pequena.’ And the °M.de Unamuno, De Fuerteventura a Paris (Paris, 1925), p. 26. °On climate and weather, see I. Font Tullot, él tempo atmosférico en las Islas Canarias (Madrid, 1956) and ‘Factores que gobiernan el clima de las Islas Canarias’. Estudios geograficos, xvi (1955); A. Huetz des Lemps, Le climat des Iles Canaries (Paris, 1969). See A. Rumeu de Armas, Espana en el Africa atldntica, i (Madrid, 1956), ‘La torre africana de Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequena’, AZA, i (1955), ‘La expedicién canaria al Senegal en 1556’, RHC, xii (1946), 141; J. Caro Baroja, “Las actas de 1499 y las tierras

del Nun y del Draa’, Africa (1957); R. Ricard, ‘Recherches sur les relations des Iles Canaries et de la Berbérie au XVIéme siécle’ and “Les relations des Canaries avec les O56) portugaises du Maroc au XVIéme siécle’, Etudes hispano-africaines (Tetuan,

INTRODUCTION » hypothetical traveller, as he crosses the chain of islands will notice, in addition to the geographical variations we have

mentioned, a contrast of cultural affinities. Tenerife, for in- , Stance, 1s almost unexceptionably orientated towards the Hispanic world: the rural economy, the composition of the population, the traditional dress, the local idiosyncrasies of spoken Spanish, and the domestic architectural style all betray

similarities with the cultures of maritime Iberia or with the other Hispanic archipelagos of the northern Atlantic or, indeed, with Latin America; but they owe little or nothing to influences

from the African mainland. On Lanzarote and Fuerteventura and even in parts of Gran Canaria, by contrast, one hears a Spanish more affected by Arabisms and Berberisms,* spoken in

a world of flat-roofed dwellings and traction by camel. These islands stand midway, in cultural terms, between the mother

country and the mainland coastal settlements of Western

Sahara. As well as influences from Europe, Africa and the New World, there is, or has been, a fourth source of influence on the composition and life of Canarian society since the colonization. The islands’ aboriginal inhabitants, who have left a trace of bones in the land, have also left a very few vestiges of their presence in popular culture. By the conclusion of the conquest, the native population was so depleted and debilitated that it played a surprisingly small role in the history of the colonial era. When it met the developing and expanding civilization of late

medieval Castile, the culture of the indigenous Canarians was as primitive and introspective as any known to history or science. It was ill equipped to survive an unequal clash. At that

time, the islands were already inhabited by a partly miscegenated plurality of peoples. A very ancient Cro-Magnoid type, comprising elements from Stone-Age North Africa and Europe’ was present in the islands perhaps from 2,500 BC”® or

at any rate in the first millenium before the Christian era. A 8M. Alvar, El espanol hablado en Las Palmas (Las Palmas, 1972); J. Pérez Vidal, ‘Arabismos y guanchismos en el espanol de Canarias’. Revista espahola de dialectologia, xx ¢

To This view is supported by all authorities except E. A. Hooton, The Ancient Inhabttants of the Canary Islands (Cambridge, Mass., 1925). See AEA, xv (1969), passim, especially H. V. Vallois, ‘Les hommes de Cro-Magnon et les guanches’, pp. 100-18. '°L,. Diego Cuscoy, Los guanches (Santa Cruz, 1968), p. 17.

6 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

type usually called ‘Mediterranean’ with a longer, narrower head and face was also of considerable antiquity". These mingled with subsequent immigrants or chance arrivals from the nearby mainland in varying proportions from place to place within the archipelago. Little is known of them. Even their physical appearance is hard to reconstruct with conviction. The only surviving authentic drawings from the sixteenth century,

done by an Italian engineer on a tour of inspection of the islands’ fortifications from 1587 to c.1593"", are not easily recon-

ciled with early written descriptions, which contradict each other perplexingly. ‘The Canarians’ pigmentation, for instance,

is variously described by writers from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries as light, dark, and in Columbus’s opinion ‘neither light nor dark’.’’ The deficiencies of the early literature cannot be supplied from later experience: no aboriginal Cana-

rians are known to have survived beyond the late seventeenth century,'* and the efforts of physical anthropologists, working from prolific sepulchral evidence, have left the problems of their

appearance and, in particular, their pigmentation unre-

solved.!> Records of sales of slaves from the end of the fifteenth century refer to both ‘white’ and ‘dark’ Canarians.'° The ambiguity of the evidence therefore lends some support to the claims of sixteenth-century writers that there was more than one race in the archipelago — or even within the single island of Tenerife — at the time of the conquest."’

197-8. |

'T, Schwidetzky, La poblaci6n pre-hispanica de las Islas Canarias (Santa Cruz, 1963), pp. '?]. Torriani, ‘Descrittione et historia del regno de Il’ Isole Ganarite’, in Die Kanarischen

Inseln und thre Urbewohner, ed. D. J. Wolfel (Leipzig, 1940); Descripcion de las Islas Canarias,

ed. A. Cioranescu (Santa Cruz, 1969). 3A Cioranescu, Colény Canarias (La Laguna, 1959), p. 19. '*The engraving which depicts hide-clad aboriginal Canarians acting as guides to gentlemen in eighteenth-century dress (A. F. Prévost d’Exiles, Histoire générale des voyages [Paris, 1746], plate XV, facing p. 260) is meant to illustrate an incident which in fact occurred in 1652. R. Verneau’s belief that he had found pure-blooded descendants of the Guanches (as the natives of Tenerife were called) in the village of San Juan de la Rambla in the Giiimar district in the 1870s was fancifully inspired. Cing années de séjour aux Iles Canaries (Paris, 1891), p. 287. 'SSchwidetzky, La poblacion pre-hispanica, pp. 53, 123-8, 140, 149, 199.

'eV. Cortés. ‘La conquista de Canarias a través de las ventas de esclavos en Valencia’, AFA, 1 (1955), 498. '7A, de Espinosa, Origen y milagros de Nuestra Senora de la Candelaria (Santa Cruz, 1848), p. 10 (1. 6); J. de Abreu de Galindo, Historia de la conquista de las stete islas de Canarta, ed. A.

Cioranescu (La Laguna, 1955), p. 291 (III, 10); R. Verneau, ‘De la pluralité des races

INTRODUCTION 7 Archaeological evidence of the Canarians’ neolithic material culture confirms the impression of diversity.'* Lack of cultural correspondence between the islands may owe something to the

fact that the natives were ignorant of the art of navigation — extraordinary though this may appear in the case of island peoples who dwelt within sight of neighbouring islands. This ignorance of navigation makes the already obscure problem of their origins all the more intriguing; but, hard as it is to explain, it is at least consistent with their modest technical and material achievements 1n most other respects. ‘They did not know the use

of metals; they preferred the shelter of caves to constructed dwellings; they dressed only in hides; their diet was of meat and dairy produce, supplemented in most islands by powdered and toasted grain, cultivated in the interstices of a chiefly nomadic, pastoral existence; they were ignorant of the baking of bread.’ As for their languages, all the early accounts agree in describing a confusion of tongues nicely corresponding with the confusions of culture generally. Modern research has rationalized

the problem by demonstrating the existence, within a framework of great diversity, of a common Berber contribution to all the languages spoken in the islands at the time of the conquest.*° But the materials for this subject are all too few and too heavily corrupted by the fifteenth and sixteenth-century transliterations on which modern scholarship must rely. Canarian religions were of a type commonly associated with

‘primitive’ societies — animistic and preoccupied with questions of fertility. On a large scale on Tenerife and Gran Canaria,

and to a lesser degree in some other islands, the inhabitants embalmed their dead, or in some cases, preserved the cadavers by exposure to the sun, collecting the corpses in caves by the anciennes de l’archipel canarien’, Bulletin de la Société de’Anthropologie, 2nd ser., xi (1876),

408-17.

"EL, Diego Cuscoy, Paletnologia de las Islas Canarias (Santa Cruz, 1963), pp. 52-3, El Museo Canario: breve resena historica_y descriptiva (Las Palmas, 1967), p. 59.

‘The detail in which an early catechism describes ships and the accidents of the Blessed Sacrament is curious: FRC, xi (1965), 87-95. On diet see additionally J. Alvarez Delgado, ‘Sobre la alimentacién indigena en Canarias’, Actas y memorias de la Sociedad Espanola de Antropologia, xxi (1964).

7°Materials united in D. J. W6lfel, Monumenta Linguae Canariae (Graz, 1965). On , Berber links see Wolfel, ‘Probléme des relations entre les langues guanche et berbére’, Hespéris, x1 (1953), 525-7,

8 THE GANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST hundreds. Some of these gruesome hecatombs were still tended in the south-east of Tenerife in the seventeenth and early eight-

eenth centuries. Today, no ethnographical museum of the islands is complete without its mummified specimens, ghoulish witnesses to the Canarians’ remarkable proficiency in the art. Fetishes and images survive in considerable numbers; though their significance 1s unclear it is worthy of record that most are of female types whose interest is grossly gynaecological. The researches of Professor Wolfel have identified some items of pre-conquest religious vocabulary, which confirm our impression of emphasis on animism, funerary mysteries, and fertility, and appear to extend to dog-worship: this may also be a preIslamic Berber feature. W6lfel’s vocabulary could also be construed to show traces of Muslim influence, but we have Ibn Khaldun’s word for it that the islanders were untouched by Islam.*! Their rituals were not well observed by contemporary writers, except the suicides which they performed by leaping from precipices — and of these, European observers omitted to note any specifically religious significance.

It is impossible to classify the pre-conquest social systems. Early European observers recognized the existence of family and tribal units, but beyond that no common features can be elicited. We find evidence of marriage of cousins,” selective incest prohibitions,*? polyandry in one island, polygamy in another,”* and matrilineal descent systems varying in detail from island to island.** The Canarians’ political institutions

were determined partly by tribal affiliations, partly by the exigencies of their largely pastoral economy. The islands were

divided into entities which the Spaniards called ‘kingdoms’ (retnos), each occupied by a tribe, almost all combining uplands

with coastal plain to ensure seasonal grazing. They were marked off from each other by topographical features or, excep-

tionally, it seems, on Fuerteventura, by a dyke of native construction. On no island were there fewer than two such units: **Wolfel, Monumenta, p. 427; The Mugadimmah, trans. F. Rosenthal, i (London, 1958),

: 2 Monuenta Henricina, xiv (1973), 235. ?? Abreu de Galindo, Historia de la conquista, pp. 89, 294 (1. 18, HI, 11). 4F RC, xi. 141; O manuscrito ‘Valentim Fernandes’, ed. A. Baiao (Lisbon, 1940), p. 102. *5See J. Alvarez Delgado, ‘El episodio de Iballa’, AEA, v (1959), 66—72.

INTRODUCTION 9 there were nine on Tenerife (called menceyatos in the Spanish

rendering) and on La Palma, albeit a much smaller island, twelve. What was the relationship between the various rulers on whom — even in some cases within a single ‘kingdom’ —

ultimate authority reposed, and what was the nature of that authority, are questions which the surviving sources are not adequate to answer.”° But the native polities were sufficiently endowed with monarchical and hierarchical elements to impress

Castilian onlookers with their complexity; the the organizational capabilities of the Ganarians were such that they defended their independence staunchly against the much superior Spanish technology. Though literally armed with only sticks and stones, they won repeated victories by stratagems.”’ It was the sort of paradox that enlivened every aspect of their culture. ‘These Canarians obviously resembled some of the primitive Amerindian peoples, especially the Arawaks of the Antilles.”* Contemporaries were sensible of the similarities: the Ganarians

generated the same kind of controversy as the American Indians over whether they were fully human, fully rational beings or, rather, semi-bestial creatures of instinct, and whether they could with propriety be attacked or enslaved.”? But their great

point of distinction from their American counterparts — and what helped to set the development of early colonial society in the Canaries somewhat apart from that of the New World — ?6Indigenous political institutions have not been studied in detail except by Diego Cuscoy, Los guanches, pp. 89-98, for Tenerife, and Alvarez Delgado, ‘Episodio de Iballa’, pp. 53-60. 7Cf. F. del Pulgar, Cronica de los Reyes Catélicos, ed. J. de Mata Carriazo (Madrid, 1943), ii, 60. 28F F. R. Fernandez-Armesto, Ferdinand and Isabella (London, 1975), pp. 155-63. 29A. Rumeu de Armas, La politica indigentsta de Isabel la Catélica (Valladolid, 1969); L. Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians (London, 1959), pp. 2, 123. It is instructive to

compare remarks of contemporaries on the Indians, selected, for example, by J. H. Elliott, “The Discovery of America and the Discovery of Man’, Proceedings of the British Academy, \viii (1972), with 15th and 16th-century observations of the Canary Islanders in, for example, A. Rumeu de Armas, “Cristébal Colén y Dona Beatriz de Bobadilla’, £/

Mus. Can., xx (1960), part II, 265; H. Miinzer, ‘Itinerarium Hispanicum’, ed. L. Pfandl, Revue hispanique, xlviii (1920), 23; FRC, ix, 12, and xi, 15, 65; G. Eannes de Azurara (sic for Zurara), Chronique de Guinée (Dakar, 1960), p. 233; C. M. de Witte, ‘Les Bulles pontificales et Pexpansion portugaise’, Revue d’histotre eccléstastique, xlviti (1953), 715, 718; A. Bernaldez, Memortas del retnado de los Reyes Catélicos, ed. J. de Mata Carriazo (Madrid, 1962), p. 137; B. de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, ed. A. Millares Carl6é and L. Hanke (Mexico, 1951), i. 116—18 (1, 21); Espinosa, Origen y milagros, pp. 8, 9 (I, 5), 59

(III, 5).

10 THE CANARY [ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

was a quantitative difference so great as to amount to a differ-

ence of quality: the Canarians were few in number and so contributed on a relatively small scale, compared with the Indians of America, to the composition of the post-conquest population and the working of the colonial economy.

Of their total numbers little may be said with certainty, either for the years of the conquest or the early colonial era. Chroniclers of the conquest made characteristically exaggerated estimates of native armies. The figure of 10,000 for the population of Gran Canaria in the 1470s is too obviously conventional to be convincing,” while that of 60,000 alleged by the chronicler Alonso de Palencia in a generally fanciful account of

Tenerife seems altogether implausible. The estimates of the Venetian traveller, Ca da Mosto, and the French chronicle, Le Canarien, for the mid and early fifteenth century respectively, seem to represent more dispassionate attempts to arrive at a

true estimate; the former suggests 7,000-8,000 for Gran Canaria and 14,000—15,000 for Tenerife; the latter, while silent about Tenerife, cites 6,000 as a number commonly ascribed to

Gran Canaria but adds that the conquerors never saw native armies larger than 800 strong.*' In the absence of archaeological evidence, it is tempting to follow the advice of one recent writer*’ and leave the reader to make his own guess.

Tenerife and Gran Canaria were certainly by far the most populous islands. No useful information exists for Gomera. Of La Palma, Ca da Mosto says only that its population was small

compared with ‘Tenerife and Gran Canaria, while the well

informed chronicler, Bernaldez, seems to suggest they numbered 1,200 at the time of the conquest.*? For the other islands, where we have the plausibly modest estimates of the early fifteenth-century Le Canarien, it is clear that their populations were indeed minimal, to be numbered in hundreds rather than thousands, partly because the islands were too Though E. Serra Rafols (‘La repoblaci6n de las Islas Canarias’, Anuano de estudios medievales, v (1968), 416) accepts it.

1A. de Palencia, Cuarta década, ed. J. L6pez de Toro, i (Madrid, 1970), 24; Ca da Mosto, Le navigazioni atlantiche del veneziano Alvise da Mosto, ed. T. Gasparrini Leporace

(Rome, 1966), p. 19; FRC, xi. 121, 131. Diego Cuscoy, Los guanches, pp. 82-7. 33Ca da Mosto, op. cit., p. 19; Bernaldez, Memorias, p. 338.

INTRODUCTION L] small or infertile to support large numbers, and partly because

slavers had already depopulated them. The conquest, moreover, took a heavy toll, throughout the archipelago, in deaths, deportations, enslavements, and ‘cultural shock’, and may have

caused a demographic cataclysm similar to that which befell the conquered peoples of the New World. The conquest of Tenerife, for instance, was assisted by an outbreak of plague which decimated and enfeebled the defenders. Columbus ob-

served the poor resistance to disease shown by native Canarians.** Even after the conquest, outbreaks of plague afflicted the natives of Gran Canaria in 1514 and 1522-32. Recurrent, obscure sicknesses called ‘modorras’ afflicted Tenerife from time to time in the same period.

The number of native survivors in colonial society is not, therefore, likely to have been large.** The island council of Tenerife numbered the natives in its jurisdiction at some 600 in 1513.°° Though the councillors had no sure means of reckoning, the low assessment 1s striking. While the natives of Tenerife were supplemented in the early sixteenth century by redistributions of population from other islands, there is no question that

there was a net loss of indigenous inhabitants throughout the archipelago. And the proportion of natives — small from the first —- can only have declined as European settlers arrived. Recourse to serological studies is of little use in arguing to the contrary, since the blood-groups of present-day islanders have been affected both by the phenomenon of isolation (which has affected blood-group distribution in many peripheral parts of Europe) and by a highly complex pattern of immigration after

the conquest, when in the first generation of settlement newcomers came not only from Spain but from many other parts of Mediterranean and northern Europe, and in large numbers from North Africa. It is therefore imprudent to suppose merely from differences between the present populations of the Canaries and peninsular Spain that these differences are

4Cioranescu, Colén_y Canarias, p. 20. | **1 have been unable to verify the assertions to the contrary of D. J. Wélfel, ‘Sind die

Ureinwohner der Kanarischen Inseln ausgestorben?’, Zeitschrift fir Ethnologie, \xii (1930), 282~—302, and ‘Los indigenas canarios’, La medecina canaria, xi (1932), 6.

FRC, v. 281.

12 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

to be ascribed to pre-conquest survivals.’ Similarities with the Berbers, for instance, in serological terms, could be explained by post-conquest migration from North Africa. ‘Those which have been detected with north-western Europe could also be the product of isolation or co-incidence.

Similar limitations apply to the usefulness of cranial evidence. Attempts have been made to contrive a case from it for

the survival of large numbers of natives into the colonial ~ period** but the only proven fact is that throughout the long era of some two thousand years spanned by the data, the ‘Mediterranean’ type of cranium has gradually or fitfully displaced the ‘Cro-Magnoid’ type. Since the European settlers generally conformed to the ‘Mediterranean’ type, this fact is consistent with the view that the colonial population greatly outweighed what remained of the indigenous at the conclusion of the conquest. This paucity of indigenous Canarians is important because of its effects on post-conquest society in the archipelago. Because the natives were so few, the labour force available to the conquistadores and earliest settlers was insufficient. After the depletions of the conquest, the need for repopulation was acute. In consequence, as I hope to show in the course of the rest of this

work and especially in the next two chapters, Canarian colonialism differed fundamently from that of the New World, but rather resembled the repopulated Castile of the medieval Reconquest. The archipelago was rapidly colonized at humble social levels. The colonists did not merely displace the natives

but engulfed them. Along with the traditional classes of medieval Mediterranean colonialism — merchants, artisans, and the holders of large estates — came peasants and workers in

considerable numbers.

37s in the unfortunate offering by D. F. Roberts, M. Evans, E. W. Ikin, and A. E. Mourant, ‘Blood groups and the Affinities of the Canary Islanders’, Man, NS, i (1966), 312-25, and even the serious contribution by I. Schwidetzky, ‘Groupes sanguins ect histoire des populations aux Iles Canaries’, Homenaje a E. Serra Rafols, iii (1970), 335-7.

38Notably E. Fischer, ‘Sind die alten Kanarier ausgestorben?’, Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, xii (1930), 258-81; M. Fusté Ara, ‘Contribution a l’anthropologie de la Grande Canarie’, L’Anthropologie, xiii (1959), 296—306.

I

THE SETTLERS: PORTUGUESE AND ITALIANS Les Canaries constituent, en fait, une sorte de condominium hispano-portugais latent.’ (GPitaliani] si sono dimostrati elemento economico piu dinamico e competente della vita isolana.?

Settlers are the most effective vectors of cultural change; therefore, to understand the formation of early colonial societies, we

have to isolate their parts and trace the provenance of the individuals who composed them. Hispanic civilization, as it took shape in the growing empire of the sixteenth century, was modified not only by the native cultures on which it was 1mposed but also by the non-Castilian colonists who made contributions to it. It was predominantly a Castilian empire. But Portuguese, Italians, Catalans, Basques, Jews, Negroes, and, to a lesser extent, Moriscos, Moors, and northern Europeans also took part. In the Canary Islands, no less than in other parts of the monarchy, the Italians and the Portuguese stand out, both as the most prolific groups of foreigners and as peoples with their own medieval colonizing traditions. In the early sixteenth century the encouragement of foreign settlers in the Canaries appears to have been the personal policy of Alonso Fernandez de Lugo, the conqueror and first governor

of the islands of Tenerife and La Palma, who, at successive judicial enquiries into his conduct as Governor, was accused of favouring Genoese and Portuguese above native Castilians in his appointment of land and water.* He aimed not at mere ‘peopling’ (poblactén) but also at ennoblement (enoblescumiento) of

the islands. This ‘ennoblement’ was effected, or at least '‘Chaunu, Séville, viii, 1, 378, n. 2. *Verlinden, ‘Gl italiani alle Canarie’, p. 170. 3ERC, vi. 1,9, 31-58.

14 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

signified, by material achievements: the foundation of industries, the creation and increase of sources of wealth, the

initiation of public works, and the erection of settlements. Alonso de Lugo was therefore anxious to stimulate an influx of

capital as well as labour into his islands, and it is a striking feature of the history of the settlement of the Canaries that of those resources the capital was supplied chiefly by the Italians,

and labour, particularly in certain specialized fields, by the Portuguese. In particular, the fortunes of the islands’ most important industry — that of sugar production — were dependent on the contributions made by Italian and Portuguese settlers. Lugo seems to have been the first man to realize the islands’

potential for sugar production. He erected the earliest mill at Agaete in Gran Canaria (1484) and extended the cultivation of

the crop to all the islands that came under his sway where conditions were suitable — first to La Palma and Tenerife by conquest, then to Gomera, which came to him by marriage. But sugar-growing required a large initial outlay of capital, both for planting and refining. It cost the Genoese entrepreneur, Batista or Bautista de Riberol, halfa million maravedis to set his canes in the soil and build a mill at Galdar in Gran Canaria in about 1501,* and the expense incurred by his countryman, Mateo Vina, in turning the wastes of Garachico on Tenerife over to sugar became almost proverbial.° In most cases the investment for these enterprises came from Genoa or the Genoese communities in Castile. Whether this is

to be explained by capital deficiency in Castilian hands or Castilian unfamiliarity with the sugar industry can be a matter for speculation only. An external factor may also have been involved — the restrictions applied, at about the same time, against alien merchants in the Portuguese monarchy and the aliens’ particular unpopularity in Madeira, whence they may

have been tempted to transfer some of their interests to the Canaries.°® It is remarkable that although there were foreigners *A.G.S. 26 February 1502, Seville. On the values of coins and monies of account, see

below, pp. 152-3. SERC, iii. 77. °V. Rau and J. de Macedo, O agucar da Madeira nos fins do século XV (Funchal, 1962), p.

26; D. Giofré, ‘Le relazioni fra Genoa e Madera nel I decenio del s. XVI’, Studi colombiani, iii (1952), 442~3.

THE SETTLERS: PORTUGUESE AND ITALIANS 15

among the great sugar proprietors of Madeira, the documents suggest that, contrary to much contemporary propaganda, they formed a far smaller proportion than their counterparts in the

Canaries,’ where foreign sugar-planters encountered little native Castilian competition, and where opportunities for aliens to settle productively as well as (or rather than) engage in

trade may also have been greater. What is certain is that the only Castilians to make substantial investments 1n sugar in the Canary Islands were Alonso de Lugo and his particular friends, and that bourgeois gentilhomme, the Duke of Medina Sidonia.

In turn, the personnel required for the technical skills of the sugar industry and irrigation to water the canes was supplied overwhelmingly from among the Portuguese colonists, and the

sugar industry of Tenerife depended, in its early years, on

Lusitanian expertise.® |

The Portuguese formed the largest of the alien communities

in the Canaries. It was the opinion, based on observation, of Leonardo Torriani, who visited the islands towards the end of the sixteenth century, that Tenerife had been colonized ‘chiefly

by Portuguese’.’? In Icod and Daute in the north-west of the island, the Portuguese formed perhaps as much as eighty per cent of the settler population.'® Lusitanian penetration of the Castilian overseas possessions, which was to be so marked a feature of the history of Hispaniola and New Spain after the union of the two crowns in 1580,'!' had actually begun in the Canaries nearly a hundred years earlier. From the limited evidence of the protocols of one early notary, Professor Charles Verlinden has suggested that the role of the Portuguese in the Canaries was largely that of agricultural labourers.'* Perusal of the remaining sources suggests that his findings require a little 7For Madeira see Rau and Macedo, op. cit., pp. 23-4, 34—5. 8M. L. Fabrellas, ‘La produccién de aztcar en Tenerife’, RHC, xviii (1952), 17. *Torriani, ‘Descrittione’ in Wolfel, ed., Die Kanarischen Inseln, p. 158. '°L. de la Rosa Olivera, ‘El poblamiento de los reinos de [cod y Daute’, Estudios canartos, xiv-xv (1970), 35—43. 'tOn New Spain see J. Israel, Race, Class and Politics in Colonial Mexico (Oxford, 1975), 119, 127—8; on Hispaniola see M. Bataillon, ‘Santo Domingo era Portugal’, B. Garcia Martinez et al., eds., Historia» sociedad en el mundo de habla espaiiola: homenaje a J. Miranda

out this work. .

(Mexico, 1970), pp. 113-20, I am grateful to M. Alain Milhou of Rouen for pointing

'2“Le R6éle des portugais dans l'économie des Iles Canaries an début du XVI e siécle’, Homenaje a E. Serra Rafols, iii (1970), 411-20.

lo THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

modification. Of the identifiable Portuguese settlers whose designations are given in the notarial archives of Tenerife and Las Palmas (where their names are always disguised by Castilian orthography), three were clearly mere labourers. Of these, Juan Martin, who was employed from October 1505 by his countryman, Axenxio Gémez (a somewhat more substantial farmer), was willing to receive his yearly wages of 8,000 mrs. in ‘cash or young bulls’ (‘dineros o novillos’), which shows that he was at

least interested in building up his capital assets.'? The case about which most information survives is that of Francisco Diaz of Gran Canaria, who appeared before the Inquisition in 1524, suspected of Jewish practices. He could not read and ‘knew no office save that of labourer’; he had worked as a blacksmith fora year and previously found employment on various sugar-mills; he had been born in ‘Pontesvila’ (stc— for Ponte de Lima?) and

gone with his parents to Madeira at about four years of age, migrating anew to Gran Canaria two years later. We do not know the outcome of his case.'* The third mere labourer is one Alonso Yanes, described in a notarial entry simply as ‘Portuguese workman’.'°

Other Portuguese supplied the manual labour for farming partnerships with the owners of land.'® Yet others pursued the

hi ith th ors of | ley h d th

hardy occupations of stone quarrier, logger, or pitch-maker.'’ A

substantial number lived in towns and _ pursued artisans’ trades.'® At least nine on Tenerife and Gran Canaria are recorded as exercising technical skills in the sugar industry.!® Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 3, f. 11". ‘Inquisition MS XXIV-—-3, ff 795-9. 'SArch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 178, f 201. ‘Juan Lorenzo, Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 2316, f. 9; Gonzalo Vaez, Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 180, f. 171. '7Tuan Yanes, ibid., leg. 178, f. 190; Diego Rodriguez, Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 733, f. 129; Vasco Gémez, Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 178, {. 246, and leg. 180, f. 265, where he is described as aserrador (log-cutter); Rodrigo Yanis, ibid., leg. 3, f. 401; Pedro Vaez, ibid., f. 429; and Pedrianis, who was in partnership with the Genoese merchant, Esteban Menton (see below, p. 34), and was fined for making pitch in an area where deforestation was prohibited in February 1512 (ibid., leg. 6, f. 992). '8F Serra Rafols and L. de la Rosa Olivera, eds., Vecindario de La Laguna en el Siglo XVI

(La Laguna, 1949). |

Pero Afonso, Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 178, f. 230°; Blas Afon., ibid., f. 158;

‘Anthon portugues’, Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 2316, f. 84°; Blas Fernandez, ibid., f.

91‘; Miguel Moros, ibid., f. 152°; Diego Fernandez, ibid., leg. 733, f. 65°; Alonso Gonzalez, Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 185, f. 318; Juan and Alvar Rodriguez, E. Serra Rafols, ‘Las Datas en Tenerife’. RHC, ix (1943), 101.

THE SETTLERS: PORTUGUESE AND ITALIANS 17

Four were priests: Fernan Garcia, the first priest on ‘Tenerife after the conquest; Ruy Blas, the parish priest of Daute and Icod in the west of Tenerife, who arrived in the island in 1499; Juan Yanes, popularly called ‘el Abad’, the first incumbent of the parish of Santa Maria de la Concepcion in La Laguna; and a certain Alonso Anton, who ts recorded as conferring power of attorney “para los reinos de Portugal y Castilla’ on his brother in 1506.7° A stray document in Seville shows that an incumbent of La Laguna — not at Santa Maria, but its rival, Nuestra Senora

de los Remedios — in the next generation was also the son of Portuguese parents. According to the statement of antecedents,

made to the Inquisition by the Bachelor Antonio de

Montesdoca in 1548, his father, Blas Fernandez Toro, and his mother, Ana Sanchez de Montesdoca, had come to Tenerife about forty years previously and thereafter lived ‘serving the king in increasing and settling the said island for it was new and underpopulated.””’ By far the greater number of Portuguese, however, were quite

substantial farmers in their own right. Their estates could not, for the most part, compare with the great sugar lands owned by the leading conquistadores and Genoese financiers, but many of them dry-farmed for a significant yield of wheat or wine, and not a few exploited irrigable smallholdings and small sugar plots. Into the first category, for instance, fell Luis Alvarez, who

in November 1505 discharged his debts in part with twentyfour fanegadas (about thirty-seven acres) of dry cornlands in ‘Tacoronte, and the substantial Alonso Bello, who built a flourmill in El Sauzal in the same area of north-eastern Tenerife, and to whose example we shall return. Owners of commerical smallholdings included Asparicio Gomez whose allotment lay in the very darranco (the local name for a steep-banked, seasonal waterway or gully) of Las Palmas, and Gonzalo Vaez, who from 1508 introduced peaches, quinces, and lemons on his plot near

La Laguna.”* Of Portuguese sugar cultivators in their own right, Alonso Martinez of Daute, Diego Sardina (who owned Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 178, f. 253; Verlinden, ‘Le R6le des portugais’, p. 417; A. Cioranescu, La Laguna (La Laguna, 1959), p. 3.

71A. G. I. Indiferente general, leg. 3094: IV; probably the same Antonio de Montesdoca who testified on Thomas Nichols’s behalf to the Inquisition in 1557. Cf. below, p. 168. 22Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 733, f. 81°; Arch. Prov. Tencrife, leg. 184, f. 150.

18 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

several mills), and the island councillor, Gonzalo Yanes of Daute, were sufficiently rich to excite widespread jealousy.?9 One Hector Luis must have been important, too, for in October

1506 he sought to purchase lands planted with canes in Guimar, offering to mortgage sugar which had formerly been the property of Alonso de Lugo in Icod, at the other end of the

island.24 Gémez Gonzalez, who in 1510 was able to make generous bequests of irrigable land to his favourite charity, the hospital of Nuestra Senora de la Antigua on Tenerife, must also _ have had appreciable resources.** On Gran Canaria, the Portuguese Lorenzo Fernandez had been a major cultivator of sugar

since 1492, helping to establish the industry and teach the techniques; his remained a conspicuous fortune in the new century.”° But in general the documentary evidence of the occupations of Portuguese settlers bears out the testimony of witnesses at the inquiry of 1506 into the distribution of land grants in Tenerife, that they were ‘good workers’ and that their property holdings were numerous but not generally large.’ ‘The most interesting revelation (or perhaps corroboration of what one might expect) in the documents concerning the Portuguese 1s that many of them came not directly from peninsular Portugal but from or through Madeira. The epithet ‘portugues’ is normally the only indication of provenance betrayed by the notaries,*® since Portuguese names are always Castilianized,

but three sources help to fill out the picture: testamentary dispositions, indicating property or family left in Madeira by the testator; statements of debts or litigation abandoned on that island;*® and statements of ancestry or other records of the lives of those settlers who appeared before the Canarian Inquisition. FRC, vi. 30-58. **Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 3, f. 492. *SIbid., f. 407; cf. below, p. 194.

See below, p. 212. 27FRC, vi. 38.

*8Except, apart from Verlinden’s examples, for these instances: Juan Fernandez, ‘portugues, natural de la isla de Madera’ (Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 733, f. 201 — the name of his street, ‘calle de los portugueses’, is suggestive); Diego de Trujillo, ‘vecino de la ysla de Madera’ (ibid., f. 203); Pedro Yanes, ‘vecino de la Madera’ (Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 178, f. 335); Bartolomé Lopez, ‘portugues, vecino de la Madera’ (ibid., leg. 5, cuad. XVII, f. 751). e.g. Juan Fernandez, 13 July 1512, ibid., leg. 187, f. 167°; Juan Garcia, 2 August 1512, ibid., f. 183,

THE SETTLERS: PORTUGUESE AND ITALIANS 19

Among conspicuous instances, Juan Yanes ‘el Abad’ (rector of the Church of the Conception in La Laguna), already referred to, was known to have Madeiran connections;*® and it was in Madeira that the pitch-maker, Pedro Vaez, learned his trade:*' this is a significant example and leads to the presumption that other practitioners of the craft also came to the Canaries from Madeira. Restrictions on the pitch industry in Tenerife showed the anxiety of the island council that the experience of deforestation that afflicted southern Madeira should not be repeated there.*? One also suspects that many of the Portuguese personnel of the Canarian sugar industry must have gained their skill

in Madeira, where sugar had been grown since the midfifteenth century and intensively developed since the 1470s.*° It 1s now more than twenty years since Professor Verlinden sug-

gested that sugar cultivation in the Atlantic islands had its effective precedents in Genoese practice in Sicily and the eastern Mediterranean,** whence it spread through the Algarve to the Atlantic; more recently, Maria Luisa Fabrellas has drawn special attention to the Portuguese influence in the industry on Tenerife.** Although there is no explicit evidence for attributing that influence more specifically to Madeira, if an argument ex stlentio may be admitted, it is hard to see where else (save in the

Algarve itself) the Portuguese technicians could have developed their expertise.

On the other hand, it is interesting in this connection to examine the career of Alonso Bello, the corn-farmer already mentioned. His involvement with that relatively modest crop in Tenerife is confirmed by the fact that he rented out 60 fanegadas

of dry land suitable for corn in Tacoronte to Fernando Yanis and Juan Rodriguez in July 1510, and by the record of another similar but smaller holding in Acentejo.** In the protocols of the

notary Hernan Guerra, Bello appears in the further guise of *°Verlinden, Le Réle des portugais’, p. 417. *4Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 3, cuad. XI, f. 429 (10 July 1515). FRC, iv. 33-4; E. Gonzalez Yanes, ‘Importacién y exportacién en Tenerife durante los primeros anos de la conquista’, RHC, xix (1953), 78-80. *>Rau and Macedo, O agicar da Madeira, pp. 24-52. Cf. the case of Francisco Diaz, above, p. 16. °*Précédents médiévaux de la colonie en Amérique (Mexico, 1954), pp. 55-9. On the Genoese contribution in Madeira, see Rau and Macedo, op. cit., pp. 25-32. **Fabrellas, ‘Azucar en Tenerife’, p. 410; Verlinden, ‘Le Réle des portugais’, p. 420. Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 3, f. 296"; FRC, vii. 234.

20 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

viticulturist, owning a vineyard rateable at 10,000 mrs. a year in

El Sauzal (which he rented out rather than farm himself).>’

Now according to evidence from a Madeiran resident in Tenerife, Grigorio Ramos, recorded in July 1512, Bello had been in Funchal at some earlier date and bought a slave there

for 10,000 mrs.:3% this hint of a Madeiran connection is extended and confirmed by his own will, which reveals that he had once possessed a house on that island, in Machico (which he had first rented to his son-in-law and then sold to his brotherin-law), and left five separate debts there. But the most curious feature is that no less than three of those debts were due to be paid in sugar:°? the conclusion seems irresistible that Bello’s

preparation on Madeira had been in the sugar industry, which he apparently abandoned in favour of dry-farming on migrating to Tenerife. Nevertheless, it would perhaps not be too reckless to suppose that Bello was exceptional at least in his change of

trade and that, whilst many of his fellow-Madeirans in the Canaries must have shared his background in sugar production, many must also have remained in that type of work in their new milieu. In some ways, the relationship of Madeira to the Canaries in this period seemed like that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza: initially, the influence was all one way. But whereas in the first

years of sugar cultivation in the Canaries the sugar-masters were Portuguese (and, I suppose, Madeirans) by the early sixteenth century at the latest, we find evidence of indigenous Canarians, no doubt slaves, working as ‘mestres d’acucar’ in Madeira.*° The paradox is heightened by the fact that, in their own islands, the native Canarians never played much part in the sugar industry, but continued in their traditional pastoral occupations. The first Canarian slaves in Madeira seem to have been employed as shepherds;*’ but evidently some must have | been used for heavy work in the sugar-mills alongside the black 7Ibid., p. 231.

38Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 188, f. 713.

I bid., leg. 4; cuad. XXII, f. 669" (dated 1 May 1511); see below, pp. 216-19. °C. M. Miguel, ‘A escravatura na Madeira’, Das artes e da historia da Madeira (Funchal, 1952). “'F, J. Pereira, ‘Indices dos documentos do sec. XV no Toumbo Primeiro do Registro Geral da Camara do Funchal’, Arquivo Histérico da Madeira (1958), p. 118. am grateful to Dr Alastair Saunders for pointing out these sources.

THE SETTLERS: PORTUGUESE AND ITPALIANS 2 |

slaves imported for that purpose, where they no doubt gradually learned the trade and rose to be masters of their craft. It 1s curious to record that this two-way traffic in personnel between

the two archipelagoes applied, with comparable irony, to goods: by the early sixteenth century there was a lively export trade in pitch from the Canaries to Madeira.** Evidently, in sum, the favour in which Alonso de Lugo held

the Portuguese laid the foundation for a wise policy. ‘Good workers’ were just what Spanish colonies required: the experience of the Antilles in the early sixteenth century, where the

native labour supply was unproductive, inadequate, and rapidly diminishing, but where efforts to introduce Castilian labourers or even to induce settlers to make a permanent home and pursue an earnest occupation, were disappointing in their outcome, was an eloquent proof of that. In the Canaries, although the native labour supply was small and little-used in the exploitation of the staple sugar crop, the presence of large numbers of Portuguese labourers, sugar-masters, and small farmers was a vital constituent of the islands’ economy. The Portuguese influence in the period of settlement has left its mark today on the customs of the islanders, their speech, and many of

their surnames.”

Second to the Portuguese in numbers, but equal or greater in

economic importance, were the Italian merchants. Many of those who infest the documents appear only as estantes, temporary residents, making brief purchases of sugar or dyestuffs, or sales of cloth; but others settled permanently in the islands to

participate in sugar production. Again, for Italian names, we are obliged to rely on the orthography of Castilian scribes. On *Gonzalez Yanes, ‘Importacién y exportacién’ pp. 78-80. There were only two immigrants in the Canaries whom I have been able to connect conclusively with the Azores: Alonso Yanes, ‘natural de Santarem, vecino de La Palma’, who had a daughter in Texeira, named Maria, to whom he gave power of attorney in 1501 (Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 181, f. 69), and Antonio Diaz, estante, who rented lands to Juan Afonso, vecino, in July 1510. FRC, vii. 372.

See J. Pérez Vidal, ‘Influencias portuguesas en la cultura tradicional canaria’, Actas do I Congresso de Etnografia e Folklore, i (Braga, 1956), 321-8, ‘Esbozo de un estudio de la

, influencia portuguesa en la cultura tradicional canaria’, Homenaje a E. Serra Rafols,i (La Laguna, 1970), 369-90, ‘Fenémenos de analogia en los portuguesismos de Canarias’, Revista de dialectologia y tradiciones, xxiii (1967), 55~7, “Clasificaci6én de los portuguesi-

smos del espanol hablado en Canarias’, V Coloquio Internacional de Estudios LusoBrasilenos, iii (Rio de Janeiro, 1966), 367—72; N. de la Torre, Notas para una historia del traje tipico cananio (Las Palmas, 1943). _

22 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

Gran Canaria the most conspicuous were Batista or Bautista and Cosme de Riberol, whose brother, Francisco, head of that house of merchants in Seville, achieved fame as a financier of Columbus and for many years farmed the monopoly of Canarian dyestuffs first from the courtier and royal adviser, Gutierre de Cardenas, and then from his widow, Teresa Enriquez, ‘la Loca del Sacramento’. The family strength on the islands was increased by Francisco’s acquisition of an interest in the original sugar-mill of Agaete and its administration by his partner,

Francisco Palomar, and Palomar’s heir, Ant6n Cerezo, who married a niece of Riberol’s.** Cerezo, in his turn, appears in partnership with one Roque de Riberol in a development in El Palmital in northern Gran Canaria in 1509.45 On the same island at least three other men, Cosme de Espindola, Jacome de Cervantis, and Francisco Lerca, augmented the community of Genoese residents, farming or dealing in sugar.*° Four of the Genoese of Tenerife achieved political as well as economic power by serving on the island council as members (regidores). In every case, it was in the sugar industry that their basis of wealth was built up. Among them, the man known to

Castilian scribes as Mateo Vina had been an indispensable source of finance for the conquest, and ‘without me’ — he could declare — ‘this island would not be so well peopled as it is’, for

he had estates and mills in Garachico and the Orotava valley and engaged in trade.*’ Tomas Justiniano’s interests extended from sugar to orchil and fish; an indication of his wealth is, perhaps, the fact that in 1506 it was in his house in La Laguna that the Inquisitors on their visit to the capital chose to lodge. His partner in his fishing interests, Cristobal Daponte, first “*A, Rumeu de Armas, Alonso de Lugo en la corte de los Reyes Catélicos (Madrid, n.d. [1954], pp. 106—7; R. Pike. Enterprise and Adventure (New York, 1966), p. 129; L. de la Rosa, ‘Francisco de Riberol y la colonia ginovesa en Canarias’, AFA, xix (1972), 72—96,

w SAreh. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 2316, f. 6°.

4*Espindola ‘genoves, vecino de Gran Canaria’ and his brother, Juan Bautista Santiago, had a sugar-mill in Tenoya and acquired a second in Moya (Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 733, ff. 40, 71); Cervantis ‘mercader ginoves’ had a mill in Telde rented to one Diego de Cabrera (A. G. 8., 10 September 1499, Granada). On Lerca, see I. M. Gomez Galtier, ‘E] genovés Francisco de Lerca’, RHC, xxix (1963-4). “7 FRC, vi. 30; M. Marrero Rodriguez, ‘Los genoveses en la colonizacién de Tenerife’, RHC, xiv. (1950), 59. “Arch. Prov. Tenerife, legs. 178, ff. 3,319; 180, ff. 216, 259; 181, f. 243.

THE SETTLERS: PORTUGUESE AND ITALIANS 23

appears in the documents as a sugar-mill owner though he had

traded in orchil before the conquest, and had been awarded land-grants on Tenerife in 1497. He went on to serve on the island council, marry Alonso de Lugo’s niece, and live in old age

to cheat the Inquisition of his person.” Bautista de Escano or Ascanio, formerly of Cadiz, grew sugar on lands granted by Alonso de Lugo and served as an island councillor of ‘Tenerife from 1501.°°

Of lesser figures among the Genoese who took part in the production or marketing of sugar, one Esteban Menton (or Mentone) is conspicuous. He had come to the islands by 1506, when he bought a house in La Laguna in May, and was in partnership with the French woodcutter, ‘Juan Bardon’ (sic for Prudhomme?), whose case will be considered later.*! Other

Italians included the Lombard partners, Juan Jacome Carminatis and Bartolomé de Milan, and their associate, Jacome Catano (the scribe’s rendering of the familiar Genoese name, Cattaneo), with whom they exported sugar to Milan;>?

the Florentines, Juanoto Berardi and Bernaldo Escarlaty;°° Juan Alberto Geraldin or Gerardini, who had an agreement with Alonso de. Lugo to exploit land in Gtimar for sugar in _ 1512;5* and the brothers, Blasino and Juan Felipe Romano or Inglasco, who came from Piombino to make sugar in Giiimar.**

It was chiefly against the Genoese that a fascinating but little-known** movement for the dispossession of foreigners in “Espinosa, Origen y milagros, p. 78 (III, 11); Marrero, ‘Los genoveses’, p. 61; summoned to the Inquisitors in 1527, ‘no podia trasladarse por sus muchos anos y achaques’ (‘he was unable to cross over because of his many years and infirmities’), Inquisition MS CLXITI-6. 5°H. Sancho de Sopranis, ‘Los genoveses en la regi6n gaditano-xericense de 1460 a 1500’, Hispania, viii (1948), 396; Marrero, ‘Los genoveses’, p. 60. 51Arch. Prov. Tenerife, legs. 178, f. 260°; 181, f. 182; cf. below, p. 34. Jacomé de Cervantis appears as sugar-merchant and owner and lessee of sugar-mills on ‘Tenerife in A.G.S. 10 September 1499, Granada.

*“Ibid., legs. 180, ff. 77, 114°; 181, f. 24, September, 1507. On Carminatis see Verlinden, Beginnings of Modern Colonisation, pp. 136-46.

On Escarlati, see below, p. 167: Berardi may have been the son or other close relation of the Juanoto Berardi who helped finance Alonso de Lugo and Columbus but who was dead by 1497. Escarlati was among the executors. 54M. Marrero, ‘Los italianos en la fundacion del Tenerife hispanico’, Studi in onore di A. Fanfani, v (1962), 336. 55F, Morales Padrén, ‘Canarias en el Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla’, AEA, vii (1961), 85; viii (1962), 111. 5°Noted by Rumeu, Alonso de Lugo en la corte, p. 31 n. 2; Marrero, ‘Los italianos’, p. 333; de la Rosa, ‘Francisco de Riberol’, pp.80—4.

24 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

the Canaries was directed at the end of the fifteenth century and early in the sixteenth. This episode must be considered against

a background of changing relations between Genoa and the

Catholic Monarchs: Ferdinand and Isabella used threats against the Genoese communities in Spain as a means of exert-

ing influence on the republic, but the actual treatment meted out to their Genoese subjects seems to have been affected less by

the changing course of relations with Genoa than by strict considerations of the prosperity of their realms, the demands of

their Castilian subjects, and in the 1480s, no doubt, the exigencies of the Granadine War. Indeed, throughout the period of hostility with Genoa in the

1480s, the favour which Ferdinand and Isabella showed towards Genoese subjects resident in their realms had not been greatly disturbed by the fluctuations of their understanding with the republic. But by the late 1490s (when formal relations with Genoa were actually much improved) the monarchs seem to have given way to the pressing xenophobia of some of their advisers and in particular to have entertained changed feelings towards the Genoese. Columbus, for instance, felt that he was ‘blamed as a poor foreigner’, and one of the charges levelled

against him in 1499, according to the chronicler, Bernaldez, was that he had ‘plotted to give the island of Hispaniola to Genoese’. The same year saw what was perhaps another manifestation of nationalism in the form of a hardening of royal policy against the Moors. But whether or not in the context of an accentuation of the monarchs’ impatience with alien elements in their realms, Ferdinand and Isabella seem to have grown increasingly responsive during the 1490s to the complaints emanating from the Canary Islands against the wealth and power of foreign settlers. A similar resentment had been displayed against foreign capitalists in Madeira by the Portuguese settlers there at intervals from 1467 to 1498;°” such feelings were perhaps endemic where the differences of wealth and commercial opportunities between the national and alien communities was so conspicuous and so disadvantageous to the former. In the Canaries, overlapping differences of nationality and wealth continued to provide a focus for local discontents *’Giotré, “Le relazioni’ pp. 442-43; Rau and Macedo, O agicar da Madeira, pp. 22-32.

THE SETTLERS: PORTUGUESE AND I[TALIANS 29

- throughout our period, and though the crown broadly favoured the policy of concentrating wealth in relatively few hands as a means of promoting the profitable exploitation of the islands, there were moments in 1499— 1502, 1504—6, and 1512—13 when

the monarchs answered local importunities by bringing pressure to bear on aliens in the archipelago. A closer scrutiny of these phases of policy may help to reveal the general factors which link them.

The earliest occasion on which a restriction on foreign property-holding in the Canaries was proclaimed occurred prior to October 1499, when in a letter to the Governor of Gran _ Canaria the monarchs recalled complaints from the concejo (the body, that 1s, of all the fixed residents of the island) that over half the land suitable for sugar planting was in Genoese hands;

they had accordingly declared that no foreigner should be allowed to purchase more than 200,000 mrs.’ worth of property on the island, and now commanded the Governor to enforce that measure.*® By 1501 there is some evidence that this policy was beginning to take effect. In March of that year Francisco de

Riberol petitioned the monarchs for a suspension for four months of the threatened confiscations (in his own case at least)

‘because’, to quote the monarchs’ reply, ‘in Seville you pay taxes and serve like a Castilian (pechays e servis por natural)’. Moreover — his case went on — Lope Sanchez de Valenzuela, Governor of Gran Canaria, had not informed him of the contents of the royal letter of 1499; and finally he objected, not without justice, that ‘they | presumably the concejo and justices of ; the island] will want to apply the said letter not only to purchases made after the proclamation of the said ordinance, but to all the other [property] as well’.°°? Although Riberol’s request was granted, by the following June orders were renewed to Lope Sanchez to enforce the terms of the monarchs’ letter.®° In

July a riposte arrived in the names of Francisco de Riberol, Francisco Palomar, Cosme de Riberol, and other unspecified foreign residents. They claimed that they had not been given 8AG.S. 31 October 1499, Granada. 59A.G.S. 14 March 1501, Granada. I have been unable to trace the prematyca alluded

to in the letter of 1499. Dr de la Rosa states that a similar ordinance had been proclaimed in Gran Canaria in June 1498 (‘Francisco de Riberol’, p. 20). °A.G.8. 12 June 1501, Granada.

26 THE CANARY [ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

due notice’of the royal commands, ‘nor do they apply in their cases, for they are not foreigners in these realms’.°! This supplication brought the petitioners a year’s renewed grace.

At about this time a list was actually drawn up on Gran Canaria of some of the properties in excess of the permitted 200,000 mrs. in Genoese hands, evidently with a view to their forfeit. Although there is no evidence that the threat behind this ‘list was ever implemented, it shows how far the matter could be taken and how precarious was the tenure of the Genoese. ‘The general heading of the document declares that the properties of which it treats ‘belong to their Highnesses’, their owners ‘having been disloyal and disobedient to their royal commands’.

Most of the estates listed belonged to the Riberol family; of these, two were Francisco de Riberol’s, one in Galdar and one known as ‘el Sirago’, valued at 300,000 mrs. each: both properties included sugar-mills. Batista de Riberol was listed as having a fountain and a piece of what was alleged to be common

pasture-land in Galdar, which must have been a formidable morsel, since it was valued at 187,500 mrs. It was alleged against him that he held this land in infringement of common rights; but, further or alternative to that charge, since he had ‘houses and gardens and other fat properties (fazzendas gruesas)’ ,

the implication was that his total holdings exceeded the limit of 200,000 mrs. It well accords with the impression one derives from the whole history of the controversy over foreigners’ hold-

ings of a conflict between the poor settlers who formed the majority of the concejo and the opulent sugar-farmers, so many of

whom were aliens, that the Riberols’ encroachments on supposedly communal grazing should figure specifically in this list of prospective forfeitures. The fact that Batista’s sugar lands are unmentioned helps date the document: he only began that part of his operations in 1501.

Apart from the Riberols’ holdings, to Geronimo de Oredio are attributed a sugar-mill worth 300,00 mrs., which he erected, no doubt again to the great umbrage of the lesser farmers in the concejo, ‘on common land without licence or order from their

Highnesses’ and, more vaguely, ‘houses and shops and other properties of great value’. The famous mill — the first to be S'TA.G.S. 12 July 1501, Granada. *Tbid., Diversos de Castilla I. 735 (9-24), transcribed below, p. 211.

THE SETTLERS: PORTUGUESE AND I'PALTANS 2/

erected in the islands — which Francisco Palomar owned by purchase in Agaete is listed at a value of over 2,000 ducats (750,000 mrs.), not only because it exceeded the permitted limit

but also ‘because it was built by royal grant obtained by false declarations’, though it is unclear to what this refers. Palomar figures a second time for a mill of 450,000 mrs. in value in the town of Las Palmas. Finally, one Pedro de Cairrasco held lands and a mill worth 375,000 mrs. in Galdar. The list makes no

claim to be exhaustive, but concludes a little desperately: ‘Other Genoese hold many other properties of great value. Thus at the least the value of profitable properties held by Genoese which rightfully belong to their Highnesses 1s six million and six hundred thousand mrs.’. Meanwhile the scope of these restrictions on the permitted extent of foreigners’ property-holdings had spread beyond the

Genoese. In February 1502 the case of a Portuguese colonist who, although clearly a leading figure in the sugar industry of Gran Canaria, can be traced only in a single document and has remained unknown to historians, came before the monarchs. ‘Their reply to his plea reveals that Lorenzo Fernandez was one of the first cultivators of sugar in the islands and was influential in the promotion of the crop: ‘to many residents of the said island you have shown how sugar is made.’ In view of the important service he had rendered in that respect since his arrival in 1492, the monarchs granted him immunity from the penalties he had incurred under the ordinance limiting foreign

estates.°? 3

Thereafter the question of dispossessing foreigners made no

further appearance in royal documents until after Queen [sabella’s death. Perhaps the men involved had successfully purchased naturalization or postponed the dies trae with timely disbursements; perhaps the monarchs had realized the danger of disturbing the concentrations of wealth on which the insular economy and the growth of the sugar industry depended. But the queen’s demise and the accession to power of a new royal couple, anxious to exploit their opportunities for patronage, ended the period of tranquillity and precipitated a series of efforts to dislodge foreign landowners from their properties to the advantage not of members of the island concejos but of royal 6A.G.S. 2 February 1502, Seville, transcribed below, p. 212.

28 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

officials. On 14 January 1505 Queen Juana declared forfeit Mateo Vina’s lands in Garachico.™ The gift of these to Luis de Zapata was followed by that of the Giimar property of Blasino

Romano to another household administrator, Francisco de Vargas. Romano offered another holding of irrigable land capable of yielding 4,000 arrobas of sugar (situate in Taoro) in its

place; Vargas accepted, but before making the transfer, Romano renounced all his rights in the substitute property, so that his would-be dispossessor got nothing — or, as the royal expostulation put it, “The said licenciate, Francisco de Vargas had been cheated.’® Juana insisted on Francisco’s rights to the Taoro plot, and during the judicial redistribution of land the following year, the narrowness of the Romanos’ escape was remembered in the popular designation of their estate as the property which the queen gave to the Licenciate Vargas.°° At that time (1506) complaints against grants to foreigners were mentioned in the brief of the reformador (the royal official

appointed to revise land-grants made by the governors), the Licenciate Ortiz de Zarate, and recurred 1n depositions made to him. But he did not specifically apply the restriction to 200,000

mrs. value and generally allowed foreigners who possessed letters of naturalization or their equivalents, who could prove long residence or who had wives and children in the islands, to remain unmolested. His adjustments ignored the inequalities of which the concejo complained and continued to favour wealthy settlers. Most of his new grants were bestowed on royal officials. The change of mood during 1505 is further instanced by the

fact that on 20 November Francisco and Cosme de Riberol received cartas de vecindad — certificates of the rights of residents

— from the island council of Gran Canaria.®’ But it is signifi-

cant that evidence of a mollified attitude to the foreigners should come from the royal representative, Ortiz de Zarate, and from the island council (cabildo), composed of the wealthiest settlers, while it was from the popular organ, the concejo, that the complaints against aliens had emanated.

It is hard to resist the impression that popular resentment °9A.G.S Toro. 65A.G.S. 2] November 1505, Salamanca, f 3. SOF RC, vi. 56.

87A.G.S. 4 May 1513, Valladolid.

THE SETTLERS: PORTUGUESE AND ITALIANS 29

against foreigners was one aspect of a phenomenon one sees again and again: the hostility between rich and poor, sugarplanters and cereal-raisers, holders of irrigation resources and dry-farmers, cabildo and concejo: in many cases the divisions between foreigners — especially Genoese — and Castilian subjects overlapped with these categories. Generally, it was not the aliens’ dominance in or conduct of commerce that aroused unrest, as it had been so often in Castilian and Portuguese towns in the Middle Ages, but their productive settlement in the islands and the concentration of property in their hands. In the comparable and almost contemporary controversies in Madeira, which have already been mentioned, although there the foreigners (especially the Genoese) were, as in the Canaries, settlers and sugar-farmers as well as traders, the particular casus

bellt was at least in part their practice of undercutting their Portuguese commercial rivals and their alleged export of specie from the realm. - By contrast, in the Canaries the foreigners’ commercial com-

portment gave little offence; on the contrary, as we shall see when we turn to the study of the islands’ trade, the Genoese at least were generally innocent of such practices as the substitution of barter for cash in transactions to the consumers’ disadvantage in favour of the merchant, or the export of grain to the Moors, of which the monarchs’ own subjects, Castilians and Catalans, would stand accused. And in only one case were foreigners arraigned for the export of currency: and even then it

| was only to Valencia, technically foreign soil as part of the Crown of Aragon, albeit still within the monarchs’ realms, that they were alleged to have removed specie.™ Rather, it was the frankly enviable extent of their properties, their disproportionate share of the wealth, their encroachments on the commons — facts connected not with trade but with productive settlement —- that made them enemies in the islands. The attitude of the crown — though fluctuating and affected at various times by the importunities of the concejos — was in the long run determined by the dependence of the island economy on foreign skill and capital. Ferdinand and Isabella did almost

nothing positive to break up the foreign holdings, contenting %A.G.S. 5, 15 December 1503, Segovia, and 24 December 1503, Medina del Campo.

30 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

themselves with the mere threat. Only briefly at the beginning of Philip and Juana’s reign were there any actual confiscations — and even in those cases the old owners were back in control

within a year or two, either by re-purchase or in partnership with the university-trained officials who replaced them. The fact was that men like Lorenzo Fernandez, who had ‘taught many settlers to make sugar’, or Mateo Vina, without whom — albeit admittedly in his own words — ‘this island would not be so well peopled as it is’, could not be lightly dismissed.

It appears that after the redistribution of land by Zarate periodic revivals of the threat to dispossess foreigners became a | mere fiscal device. In an age when no monarch had the means of making accurate assessments of the taxability of his realms or exploiting systematically the fiscal potential of his subjects, the

sale of privileges and exemptions — and the enactment of legislation for the purpose — could be an important source of revenue. In the case of the Canaries, the proposed confiscation of wealth in excess of 200,000 mrs. became a means of testing

the financial buoyancy of the merchants and the degree to which their fortunes could be creamed off by the crown. It was in 1513, following the conquest of Navarre, when Ferdinand was faced with the prospect of a French war and all the expense that involved, that the old sore of restrictions on alien propertyholdings next grew ugly. In May, the vecindad of Francisco and Cosme de Riberol in Gran Canaria was confirmed, doubtless at a substantial price and despite the fact that Francisco, at least, seems to have retained his permanent residence in Seville. At the same time the confiscation (in favour of the royal secretary, _ Lope de Conchillos) of their property, under the orders respecting aliens, was revoked.® Within a month, however, new moves against the family were afoot, on the implied grounds that they allegedly maintained households in Genoa; the concejo complained that they enjoyed the protection of the then Governor of Gran Canaria, Lope de Sosa, and between them had bought up half the best properties on the island.” Lope de Conchillos had obtained the crown’s rights before April 1511, presumably in the period after 1507 when he was

building up a fabulous fortune from royal concessions in the °A.G.S. 4 May 1513, Valladolid. A.G.S. 3 June 1513, Valladolid.

THE SETTLERS: PORTUGUESE AND [PALIANS 31

New World. Not until 1513 did he introduce an agent, Graviel or Gabriel Mas, a Valencian,’”' to collect what was due to him. Mas’s power of attorney, dated in Seville on 30 April 1511, and shared with the Bachelor Pedro de Gongora (later prosecutor and devil’s advocate of the Holy Office), records the terms of

Conchillos’s grant in a transcription made by the notary, Sebastian Paez of Tenerife. The document was obscurely rendered by the scribe. But its meaning is clear: Lope de Conchillos was to have all the surplus property absolutely.’ Nevertheless, the royal secretary was moderate in the exaction

of his nghts and sought not his bond but cash commutations from his victims. In February 1513 for instance, Mas collected 32 doblas on his behalf from the rich Genoese, Cristdébal Daponte,’* and in November, 1,000 mrs. (2 dodblas by the reckoning of Tenerife) from a certain Alonso de Pedraza, whose origins I have been unable to establish. It is not possible to assess the total number of Italian settlers in the Canaries; the records are too incomplete. But by comparison with the Portuguese and Castilian colonists, the Italians’ numerical significance was slight. Nor did they bring with

them, as fas as I am aware, any political institutions or tradi- . tions from the Italian medieval colonial experience. Their influ-

ence was enormous, but it appears to have been felt in the Canaries strictly in the spheres of economic and agricultural techniques; it was an influence wielded not as a result of large-

scale migration, but by means of the Italians’ wealth and industrial and commercial savotr-faire.

Despite these qualifications, the experience of Italians and especially of Genoese in the Canaries appears consistent with their involvement in the development of Iberian states in the

late Middle Ages and in the colonization of Atlantic archipelagos generally. The Genoese operated in the Atlantic from a solid base in the [berian peninsula, whither the decline of opportunities in the eastern Mediterranean had driven them,

and where the proximity of the Maghrib and the ocean attracted them. There they led tenuous and frugal lives in almost every important coastal city. Records surviving from “Associate of Rafael Font (see below, pp. 35—6), Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 186, f.

wArch, Prov. Tenerife, leg. 188, f, 579. BT bid., f. 597,

32 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

Cadiz, for instance, show how they ploughed all their profit back into their enterprises and for most of the fifteenth century possessed little beside their bare homes, unornamented by more than the essentials in furniture, until by the end of the period their thriftiness had made them rich and enabled them to invest in easily movable wealth, like jewels and carpets, and indulge in luxuries. ‘Their range of economic activities was wide

— wider even than in the Canaries. From these communities came the Riberol brothers and Batista de Ascanio and, no doubt, many of the other Genoese of the islands. Men of similar ilk helped to discover and exploit the New World, often acquir-

ing Canarian interests on the way — Francisco de Riberol himself, the Cattaneo family, Riberol’s associate Francisco Pinelo (who had helped to finance the conquest of the Canaries)

and, of course, Columbus himself, are only representative examples. As financiers of and participants in voyages of exploration and conquest, as entrepreneurs and organizers of economic

activity, as settlers and promoters of sugar production, such men were or became familiar in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries from the Cape Verde Islands to the Antilles

as well as in the peninsular bases of the emerging empires.” There is no clearer instance of how the early exploitation of the Atlantic was a ‘Mediterranean’ enterprise which not only opened up a new economic system, but also extended an old one. If Italian activity in the Canaries differed from Genoese behaviour in, say, Madeira, or the Antilles — or, indeed, in their older colonies in the eastern or central Mediterranean — it

was only in degree. Here it is arguable that they put down firmer roots than elsewhere, established more examples of an enduring presence, entered wholeheartedly into the business of

) production, and tended to eschew mere commerce or mere finance. Not enough is known of the Azores or the Cape Verde | Islands to fit them into the comparison, but it is clear that the Italian contribution to the expansion of Mediterranean civilization overseas offers a pattern of continuous development. The prominence and permanence of their role in the Canaries was assured by the success with which they overcame the realtively feeble local constraints on foreign settlement. See Verlinden, Beginnings of Modern Colonization, pp. 98-180; Pike, Enterprise and Adventure; H. Sancho de Sopranis, Los genoveses en Cadiz antes del ano 1600 (Jeréz, 1939).

II

THE SETTLERS: , CASTILIANS AND OTHERS Toda la historia castellana se resume y cristaliza en una no interrumpida gigantesca empresa de colonizacién.'

Foreigners in other groups were neither so numerous nor so

important economically as the Italians and Portuguese. Frenchmen had been among the first settlers to make their homes in the Canaries in the first decade of the fifteenth century, when Jean de Béthencourt, joint conqueror of Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, and Hierro, brought an uncertain number

of colonists to the minor islands, including at least 160

Normans, 120 of whom were established in Hierro.’

Béthencourt effected no great changes in the insular economy, which continued to rely on cereals and goats (to which, how-

ever, he did add cattle and pigs) and the export of hides, dyestuffs, foodstuffs, and slaves.* But he introduced a truly colonial population of socially humble settlers — peasants for the most part, with the skilled artisans such as masons and carpenters who were necessary for the maintenance of civilized life — a population that would exploit the soil directly, replacing the indigenous people without relying on imported slaves. This was a pattern which the subsequent conquests and settlements would develop and modify. Béthencourt had also introduced a French element into Canarian history which the passage of time did not utterly extinguish: Norman surnames remain common in the islands to this day — not least that of Béthencourt itself in

various renderings, derived from the progeny of Mathieu de

Béthencourt, the conqueror’s supposed nephew, or from 'C, Sanchez-Albornoz, Espaia: un enigma histérico, ii (1957), 506.

2M. Mollat, ‘La place de la conquéte normande des Iles Canaries dans l’histoire coloniale francaise’, AEA, iv (1958), 544. 3A. Garcia de Santa Maria, El capitulo de Canarias en la ‘Cronica de Juan II’, ed. J. de

Mata Carriazo (La Laguna, 1946), p. 11; FRC, ix. 135.

34 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

natives who took the name at baptism. But already in the conqueror’s own day, or very soon there after, the Castilian element in the population seems to have outweighed the French. In the earliest records we possess, from the midfifteenth century, the language of the conquered islands was Castilian, as was the character of their institutions.* There was a tiny number of French settlers in Tenerife in the

early sixteenth century, whose foreign provenance caused difficulties in 1513. One of them, called Juan Bardon, or Berd6én

or Perdomo (possibly a Castilianization of the name ‘Prudhomme’), who has already been mentioned, occurs fre-

quently in notarial records, served on the island council in 1506-7, and had been the commercial partner of the Genoese Esteban Menton.’ Our first intimation of their afflictions in 1513 comes from a January entry in a notarial ledger of Tenerife, in which ‘Juan and Ximon frances’ give power of attorney to Francisco Dalbornoz, a professional lawyer resident on the island ‘to appear before the Queen and the gentlemen of

her Council in the matter of an embargo and sequestation of their property, which has been done on the grounds that they are Frenchmen and natives of France, and to obtain for them

letters of disembargo and naturalization as appropriate.” Clearly, it was not by virtue of the familiar pragmatic proclaiming a limit of 200,000 mrs. on the value of alien proerty that these Frenchmen were deprived, but because of the French war. By a happy chance, the record survives of their petition to the crown, in two documents which passed under the royal seal in April and October 1513: in the first, the colleagues are said to

have lived in Castile for fifteen years as woodcutters and the Catholic Monarchs to have protected them against maltreatment and confiscations during earlier French wars; they had been denounced and dispossessed as Frenchmen in Tenerife in spite of fulfilling the qualifications for vecondad — the rights and

status of residents — and having families about them.’ The *L. de la Rosa Olivera, Evolucién del régimen local en las Islas Canarias (Madrid, 1946),

pp. 19-26.

>In 1506, Arch. Prov. ‘Tenerife, leg. 178, £. 260.

ST bid., leg. 6, f. 902°.

7A.G.S. 7 April 1513, Valladolid. We also know that Juan Bard6én supplied the materials for the erection of the Church of Holy Spirit in La Laguna by the Augustinians in 1507 (Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 180, f. 142). Fire has only recently destroyed the last traces of his handiwork.

THE SETTLERS: CASTILIANS AND OTHERS 35

October document is the order of release they had requested, and adds the information that their full names were ‘Juan Bandon [sic.] y Simon Seyete [for Siéyés?]’ and that their residence in peninsular Spain had been at Ronda.° At roughly the same time a French resident on Gran Canaria, one Juan de Alemania — presumably ‘d’ Allemagne’ — had been experiencing similar difficulties. In June 1513 a royal letter to Governor Lope

de Sosa ordered the restitution of his sequestered property on the grounds that he had lived on the islands for many years with a house, a wife, and a certificate of residence.? The resolution of these cases in the foreigners’ favour seems

to mark the end of royal flirtation with the xenophobia of the Castilian colonists in the Canaries. The favour which Alonso de Lugo showed to the Genoese and Portuguese, and which Lope de Sosa was said to have evinced towards the Riberol family,

was the norm of gubernatorial policy and represented in the long run the best interests of the crown. That same year, 1513, saw the introduction by the monarchs of the powerful Welzer interest in La Palma. With them the German banking family brought their concentrations of capital and their foreign employees.'° Like so many features of the Spanish overseas empire,

the participation of the Welzers began in the Canary Islands. After 1513 there were no more ejections of foreigners; the monarchs and governors continued to follow the biblical principle of good husbandry by giving to them that had. Catalans constituted a group among the settlers similar in character to the Genoese, but smaller and more properly a community, since most of them were connected with the notori-

ously rich Rafael Font, former denizen of Barcelona, whose house in La Laguna cost 15,000 mrs. to build and whom Lugo described in the same breath with Francisco de Riberol — ‘men

so rich and powerful that they can well wait awhile without prejudice to their estate’ for reimbursement of the 7,000 ducats

he owed them in 1513.'' Font’s interests were chiefly in the 8A.G.S. 12 October 1513, Valladolid. °A.G.S, 19 June 1513, Valladolid. ‘See below, p. 209; cf. K. Haebler, Die dberseeischen Unternehmungen der Welzer (Leipzig, 1903), p. 32.

"A.G.S. 9 July 1513, Valladolid; the house-building account in Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 180, f. 31°.

36 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST : export of sugar and import of cloth. We know that of the other Catalans in the islands, not only Graviel Mas, already referred to, but also Francisco Florentin as agent, Diego Fernandez as debtor, and Jaime Joven and Gerénimo de Montserrat, both as legal proxies on ‘Tenerife and Gran Canaria respectively, were all associated with Font.’* It is impossible to say in all these

cases whether the individuals should be classed as visiting 7 merchants or genuine settlers; the lure of sugar and the market for cloth were attractions that sometimes caused merchants to make protracted stays in the islands, taking over sugar estates or refineries.

The enslavement of captives on the Barbary coast, supplemented by spontaneous emigration from North Africa and the [berian Peninsula, added Moors, Moriscos, and Negroes to the non-Castilian population of the islands. We know that by

the end of the sixteenth century Lanzarote was largely inhabited by Moriscos.'? Already in the 1530s it seemed to the Inquisitors in Las Palmas that ‘the greater part of the crew members on ships from the islands were Moriscos’.'* The emi-

gration of North African Berbers is vividly illustrated by the case of one Hernando, ‘former leader of certain Moors of Barbary’, and twenty-four of his followers, who had embraced Christianity voluntarily and gone to live in Gran Canaria in or before 1498, seeking royal protection against the molestations of

Spanish slavers.'° By 1501 Moorish immigration had reached such proportions that the monarchs ordered Governor Lope

Sanchez de Valenzuela to admit no more Moors to Gran

Canaria, save as captives, without royal licence.'® Naturally, some of these incoming Moors and Moriscos appear later in the

records of the Inquisition. For example, on Lanzarote one witness swore that he saw the wife of Juan Agudo, Morisco, eat

meat on Holy Thursday, 1510; another had seen ‘Catalina 'Tbid., legs. 181, ff. 300, 329; 3, cuad. VI, f. 112; 1, f 311; Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 733, {. 254. Other Catalans were Francisco Miré, who owned irrigable land in Guimar in 1505 (Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 181, £5), Juan de Agramonte (ibid., leg. 180, f. 55), Gerénimo Pascua, a sugar-merchant (Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 734, f. 179°), and perhaps the conquistador Alonso Jeréz Castil de Vit, who was granted lands in Tenoya (Gran Canaria) in 1489 (Millares MS, I, f. 24°). 'SReport of Padrones de Moriscos of 1594. Millares MS II, f. 41. '*Inquisition MS CVI-2. 'SA.G.S. 31 August 1505, f. 98, Segovia, transcribed below, p. 213. '°A.G.S. 31 August 1501, Granada.

THE SETTLERS: CASTILIANS AND OTHERS 37 Bealgaca, mora conversa crestiana’, commit the same offence, and had heard from a son of one Fernando de Acona that ‘my father wanted to turn us into Moors’. In the same list of depositions we find one of August 1510 which curiously linked Islam with a magical practice — the use of a charm to inspire love — by the wife of the Morisco Alonso Peguillos.'? In a case which greatly illuminates the plight of Moriscos whose conversion was

feigned, one Pedro Salema, ‘cristiano nuevo de moro’, was alleged to have said that if he was a Christian it was ‘by force and not of free will’. Finally, the petty jealousies and rivalries channelled through the inquiries of the Inquisition are instanced among these depositions by those against a Moorish woman named Luzia, who slept with a slave of the concejo named Salmon, a Moor from Le6én, and one Elvira ‘who sleeps

with a Moor from Ortega named Samente’. It is noteworthy that these were Moors or Moriscos expressly from Spain. The following year the flight of Alonso de Fatima, ‘morisco converso’, from the Inquisitors’ prison, where he awaited trial for heresy and apostasy, ended with his suicide, while in 1521, Juan de Lugo, ‘morisco converso’, whom Alonso de Lugo had first

brought to Tenerife as a captive from Barbary and who had risen to be the governor’s judicial deputy in the port of Santa Cruz, was freed for lack of evidence —- an unusual instance of inquisitorial jurisprudence and a revealing example of a Moor (though called ‘morisco’ in one document) who had served the colony in municipal office." The use of coloured slaves, especially in the sugar refineries, !®

introduced another element into the population of the Canaries. But it was never a group as numerous or influential as | the Moriscos. The only coloured vecinos of whom record remains were Vicente Eannes (‘Bezentianes’ or ‘Vicente Yanes’), described as ‘de color prieto’ and ‘prieto portugues’, who received lands from Alonso de Lugo in Tenerife and was appointed an ‘Inquisition MS LXXI]I-12 (all these depositions occur at ff. 2‘-3°). '8A. Rodriguez, ‘Catalogo y extractos de la Inquisicién de Canarias’, El Mus. Can. XXVil-xxx (1966 —9[1971]), 131-3. This was probably the same ‘Juan de Lugo natural de Berberia’, who gave power of attorney to ‘Alilazey, moro rehem,’ in La Laguna in 1506 (Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 178, f. 209).

‘Household slaves were usually Canarians. The municipal ordinances of Las Palmas of 1529 ~ 31 actually prohibit the use of imported slaves in the home (Millares MS II, f. 10).

38 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

- attorney 1n 1513; ‘Baltasar de color loro’, who appears in Gran Canaria in a document of 1514; and ‘Juan Sanchez, negro’, who figured in a witness list on Tenerife in 1506.7° The fact that a slave woman’s daughter by her master could rise in the social scale and inherit the master’s property is illustrated poignantly by the testamentary declaration of one Diego Afonso, ‘portugues estante’ (a resident, that is, of less than five years’ standing or without rights of vecindad) on Gran Canaria in 1514. He left no legitimate heirs of his own blood, but divided his property equally between his wife’s daughter and his own by a black slave woman.’' Because of its unique character, this document has suggestive but not probative value about the social position of blacks: in particular, it is unclear whether the daughter was a vecina — perhaps not, since her father is described as unquali-

fied for the rights of a permanent resident. However, black vecinas did exist, or one at least did so: ‘Mari Gonzalez, la negra, madre de Lorita, vecina’, is mentioned casually in a deed of sale of a house in La Laguna in 1507, because she owned the house

next door.”

The conquest was accompanied by a considerable redistribu-

tion of the indigenous population of the islands.?* The conquered natives of one island might become conquistadores of the next: Don Fernando Guanarteme, a displaced native chief-

tain, headed the large numbers of Canarians from Gran Canaria who fought with Alonso de Lugo in La Palma and Tenerife. There were considerable numbers of Gomerans in Tenerife in the years of settlement, where the capital had a street called ‘calle de los gomeros’, and where the island council repeatedly denounced them as a lawless and intractable section

of the community.** Hernan Peraza, it will be remembered, took eighty Gomerans to the conquest of Gran Canaria, and it may be that some of these settled there. No doubt because it was

the last conquest, Tenerife attracted the most native settlers °See below, p. 57; Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 77, f. 112; Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 6, f. 1274, and leg. 178, f. 268. #14Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 733, f. 116°. 22 FRC, xviii. 35.

- 3Serra Rafols, ‘La repoblaci6n de Jas Islas Canarias’, pp. 410, 421. 4FRC, iv. 76, 78-9. The street-name may be owed to a fire in which some Gomerans perished — cf. Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 181, f. 94, where ‘the house of the Gomerans who were burned’ is mentioned (‘las casas de los gomeros que se quemaron’).

THE SETTLERS: CASTILIANS AND OTHERS 39 from other islands, but there was some traffic from Tenerife to Gran Canaria: Don Sebastian de Anaga, son of the last mencey or

native chieftain of that district, made the move by royal command, and was followed by at least one member of his tribe.** In 1500 Alonso de Lugo had to intervene with sanctions to prevent

some Canarian settlers in Tenerife from returning to Gran Canaria. Even for the Canarian conquistadores, who got land-grants for their pains, the rewards of the conquest were small. Most of them were to receive land suitable only for their traditional

pastoral occupations; the benefits of the economically remunerative pursuits introduced by the conquerors passed them by. Only Hernan Leon, who farmed irrigated soil in Tegueste in 1506, and Alonso de Bonilla, who formed a partnership with a Portuguese named Alvaro Yanes de Béjar and frequented the house of Gonzalo Rodriguez de Daute, appear to have engaged directly in the new forms of exploitation associated with sugar.”° Even as slaves, Canarians were not normally employed in the sugar lands or mills, despite their specialization in jobs con-

nected with the sugar industry in Madeira. Numerous other natives managed to occupy an apparently well-to-do position and employed their surplus resources in purchasing the liberty

of enslaved compatriots or hiring lawyers to petition the monarchs on behalf of unjustly enthralled natives.?” About half *5‘native of Tenerife, resident in Gran Canaria’ (‘natural de Tenerife, estante en Gran Canaria’) employed ‘to keep all the livestock’ (Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 733, £. 38°). 6Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 178, ff. 16°, 178, 264, 189. Cf. below, pp. 55—66. 27M. Marrero Rodriguez, ‘Los procuradores de los naturales canarios’, Homenaje a E. Serra Rafols, 11, 352—66. A useful list of the chief philanthropists occurs in Arch, Prov.

Tenerife, leg. 187, f. 715°. Don Pedro, Pedro Guantejina, Diego de I[baute, Diego Guanimence, Don Alonso, Juan Delgado, Alonso de Benilla, Gaspar, Ximon de Guimad, Juan de Osorio, Hernando de Ibaute, Francisco de Vacoronte, Juan .\lonso, Pedro de Llerena, Bastian, Alonso Guillén, Ant6n Hernandez, Juan de ‘Tacoronte, Bastian de Imobar, Juan de Giiimad, Juan Texera, Francisco y Pedro Constantyn, Pedro Atario, Diego Guamacas, Anton Garcia, Rodrigo Guillén, Juan Dadex, Juan Navarro, Andrés Fernandez, Diego de Giimar, and Fernando ‘Tallado, ‘veginos y naturales’ granted power of attorney to Anton Azate, ‘vecino y natural’, who was prominent in pleas on behalf of enslaved natives and served as an interpreter in court (see below, p. 185). Note the selective use of ‘Don’ and the retention of some preconquest surnames. Other native advocates who appeared at court, including the extraordinary woman, Francisca Gazmira, who evangelized her native La Palma and defended its people, are given by Marrero, pp. 354— 6.

40 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

the references to specifically indigenous slaves in the notarial , archives of Tenerife for the years 1507—11 seem to relate to such transactions. The wealth that made them possible must have

come from traditional pursuits: herding and gathering of. dyestuffs; indeed, more from herding,”* since the royal grants of dyestuffs monopolies deprived many natives ofa livelihood. ‘The only new occupation for which large numbers of natives exchanged their former way of life was that of slave — though for some, the change of juridical status left them in a traditional pastoral role, like the herdsmen employed to shepherd Alonso

de Lugo’s inordinately large flocks.” The redistribution of natives among the islands was a small phenomenon compared with their mass deportation to exile in‘Spain or export to the slave-markets of the Mediterranean or to servitude in Madeira. Within the archipelago, native slavery was more important asa

social than as an economic institution, for although every household had its compliment of Canarian domestic slaves, little use was made of their labour in producing the islands’ wealth. Most slaves outside the home were blacks — especially

those in productive employment in the sugar industry. Of slaves mentioned in documents notarized by the scribe, Hernan Guerra, for instance, in 1508—10, only eleven were specifically natives of ‘Tenerife, while fifty were black or coloured.*° The enslavement of Canarians was mainly for export, while slaves for the home market came from abroad. There is no indissoluble paradox here. Most cases of the export of slaves dated from the

years of the conquest, or very soon thereafter, before the development of the islands’ economy generated much demand for labour. By the early years of the sixteenth century, there were

few Canarian natives left to enslave, and the crown, the Church, and the native élite were all alert to the need to protect

them. It was therefore by immigrant European, especially Portuguese, labour, and by slaves from the nearby African mainland or the Portuguese offshore emporiums that the needs of the Canarian economy were met, rather than by exploitation of indigenous labour. The contrast with the New World, where Cif, Diego Cuscoy, Los guanches, p. 190. 9 FRC, vii. 159,

ERC, vin. 422,

THE SETTLERS: CASTILIANS AND OTHERS 4] the native population constituted a vast labour pool in the early _ years of colonization, is very apparent.*! It remains to consider the largest body of immigrants: those

from Castile itself. “The conquest had ushered in a period of royal and gubernatorial zeal for promoting the peopling of the islands. The principle that one established title to a res nullius by

occupying it was familiar in Castilian law.** It may therefore have been partly to enhance the legal propriety of their claims (which remained unresolved in respect of Portuguese rivalry until as late as 1482)°° as well as to extend their effective power,

introduce their subjects into their new lordships, and expedite

economic exploitation of the islands, that Ferdinand and Isabella quickly proceeded to order the settlement of emigrants in the Canaries. Just as in 1497 the colonists whom Columbus took to Hispaniola were accompanied by such cogent inducements as fiscal exemptions and the promise of land, so already

those same devices had been employed to lure settlers to the Canary Islands.** In October 1481 Ferdinand and Isabella abrogated (with certain qualifications) all restrictions on the movement of persons and the sale or transfer of goods throughout the lands of the Castilian crown: the date of this measure was sufficiently early for it to have been at least as important for the colonization of Gran Canaria as of the kingdom of Granada;

in 1496 it was confirmed and explicitly applied to would-be emigrants to Tenerife, in terms which suggest that some of them

had been frustrated or opposed in their endeavours by their peninsular municipal authorities or lords.** Nor, even in the 1480s, was there any question of discouraging foreign settle3!) iterature on the enslavement of the Canarians and on the royal and ecclesiastical efforts to limit it is extensive. See Rumeu, Politica indigenista; D. J. Wolfel, ‘La curia romana y la corona de Espana en defensa a los aborigenes de Canarias’, Anthropos, xxv (1930); M. Marrero Rodriguez, La esclavitud en Tenerife a raiz de la conquista (La Laguna,

1966); V. Cortes, ‘La conquista de Canarias’, ‘Los cautivos canarios’, Homenaje a E. Serra Rafols, 11 (1970); L.. Siemens Hernandez and L. Barreto de Siemens, ‘Los esclavos aborigenes canarios en la Isla de Madera (1455— 1505), AEA, xx (1974); A. de la Torre y del Cerro, ‘Los gomeros vendidos en 1489’, Anuarto de estudios americanos, vii (1958). 32 Codigos espanoles, 1i (Madrid, 1848), 344-5. 33]. M. Cordeiro Sousa, ‘La boda de Isabel de Castilla’, Revista de archivos, babliotecas y museos, Ix (1954). 34Qibro rojo de Gran Canaria, ed. P, Cullén del Castillo (Las Palmas, 1947), p. 1; Arch. La Lag. RI. 1 (containing the royal grant of fiscal exemption for settlers of Tenerife). 38G. Chil y Naranjo, Estudios histéricos, climatolégicos_y patologicos de las Islas Canarias;

parte I; Historia, iti (Las Palmas, 1891 [99]), 427 n2.

42 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

ment, which subsequently became so prolific. Indeed through-

out the period, the only area from which a displacement of population to the conquered islands was restricted was the seigneury of the four lesser isles ‘in order to prevent depopulation’ (‘para evitar su despoblacion’):** this effort to dissuade

must have lacked either cogency or persistence, for in 1496 Dona Inés Peraza, mistress of the seigneurial isles, continued to complain of the drift of her vassals to the newer conquests.*’ Westward movement of this kind may have occurred between Gran Canaria and Tenerife too, for in 1499 Alonso de Lugo had to be restrained from harbouring the criminals (‘malefechores’) of the former island in the latter.**

The monarchs further assisted the peopling of the islands from the Peninsula by making land-grants and other rights of vecindad contingent upon married residence in a household. This was a general condition of the rights of residence or citizenship elsewhere in the monarchy, but seems especially appropriate in the ‘frontier’ environment of the Canaries, where adventurers might be attracted for short periods, or residents of

the Peninsula might accumulate property to the discouragement of potential colonists. Plainly, the royal intention in the Canaries was to create a settled community, in which the colonists would be fixed residents who would farm the land in person. This is not the place in which to enter the controversy over the character of the proposed settlement of the Indies in the earliest years, but it is striking that, whereas Columbus’s own intention in 1492 was perhaps to establish merely or primarily a trading factory, like those he knew in Chios or Sao Jorge da Mina, the monarchs’ instructions for the colonization of the New World, at least from 1497, envisage a permanent settlement of the sort familiar in the Canaries; and their instructions of 1503 to Nicolas de Ovando, Governor de Hispaniola, %©A.G.S. 5 January 1484, Vitoria, f. 6; Cat. XII, iii, no. 2, 173.

"Four of her dependants had emigrated to ‘Tenerife and Gran Canaria without paying the dues they owed her. A. G.S. 14 November 1496, Burgos. 38A.G.S. 6 November 1499, Granada; cf. A. G. S. 2 March 1508, Burgos. According to Pedro Fernandez, regidor of Gran Canaria, local law forbade exit from the island save by special licence. Merchants, he added, exploited this law to tie labourers to their work ‘and hold them like slaves’ (‘los mercaderes sabiendo que ninguno se pucde salir de la dicha ysla e dan fiancas e apregonan osar fiar a personas pobre [sic] que no tyenen salvo

lo que ganan a trabajar diez e veynte mill mrs e despues por la misma debda los prenden ...e por cllo diz que los tyenen como esclavos’).

THE SETTLERS: CASTILIANS AND OTHERS 43 make explicit the same requirements of married residence and the establishment of a household as has been observed in the case of the Canary Islands. It seems that some of the arrivals in the early years of colonization must have been disappointed of their hopes in the lands

and privileges promised by royal ordinances: in 1502 the monarchs complained to Antonio de Torres (who, having served on Columbus’s second voyage, was at that time Governor of Gran Canaria) that because of his slackness in granting residence rights to incoming settlers, many of them were leaving

the island — bound, one might suspect, for Tenerife.*’ In general, the royal injunctions that insular malcontents to be forbidden from crossing to the new islands strongly evoke the

magnetic power that Gran Canaria and her sister-conquests . held for prospective colonists. A conspicuous minority among the Castilian settlers was formed by Jews and new Christians, many of whom are identifiable from the records of the Inquisition. L. B. Wolf has pointed out the cases contained in published documents.” From the records unknown to Wolf, it is apparent that there was a cell of Judaizers in Las Palmas in 1505, when a deposition

stated that Martin and Juan Aleman, with four others including one designated only as ‘el Bachiller de la gramatica’ met for suspicious periods in a house never frequented by Christians of unimpeachable ancestry.*' Perhaps this was the same Martin

Aleman who was denounced twenty-two years later on the grounds, inter alia, that ‘he has made his fortune from bad, usurious contracts’.*? It is interesting that this could be regarded as evidence of Judaizing. Of the five other case histories preserved from about the same time, that of Gonzalo de Burgos, the first public scribe on Gran Canaria, is described below (p. 186). Of the others, that of Juan de Lorca, silversmith, resident of ‘Tenerife, is the most interest-

ing. He admitted his Jewish parentage, and said that he had fought in the conquest of Tenerife and then moved to Madeira %A.G.S, 24 February 1502, Seville. *°L. B. Wolf, ed., Jews in the Canary Islands (London, 1926). Wolfs source was W. de G. Birch, ed., Catalogue of a Collection of Original Manuscripts formerly belonging to the Holy Office of the Inquisition in the Canary [slands (London, 1903).

“Inquisition MS CXXVI-8, f. 1. *Tbid., f. 20.

44 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

to set up permanent residence — but perhaps the correct order of events got inverted in his confusion.** The remaining cases involved Juan Fernandez, dyer, vecino of Gran Canaria, who had come to that island a year previously from La Palma, where he had lived for eleven years; Pedro Dorador, ‘merchant and tailor’; and Luis Nunez, native of Seville, who had allegedly

circumcized a black slave. |

Evidently there was some correspondence between the Jewish origins of certain colonists and the occupations they followed — merchants, smaller tradesmen, or literate callings like scribe and grammar-master. At least one, Diego Riquel,

native of Jeréz and resident of Gran Canaria, was a selfeducated lawyer;** he claimed to devote part of his practice to

the assistance of others handicapped by poor education or poverty. Many were evidently Andalusian and may have been

refugees from the Inquisition or even Jews expelled in the 1480s. The expulsion of Jews from Andalusia occurred precisely

in the first days of the colonization of Gran Canaria. The expulsion from the rest of Spain caused some Jews to seek refuge in the Atlantic islands: one suspects that this was the motive for

Juan Lorca’s flight, and Luis Hernandez, a native of Rioseco, was explicitly said to be ‘a new Christian from the Jews expelled by the Catholic Kings’.*°

Another identifiable group of immigrants from Castile was formed by Basques, who are often mentioned as such in notarial

records, no doubt because the scribes did not regard them as genuinely Castilian and because of their peculiar status and privileges among the subjects of the crown.*’ Many native Canarians used ‘Vizcaino’ as a surname — an indication that they had Basque godparents.** It was characteristic of Basque settlers in other parts of the monarchy to live in communities of their own, court one another’s company, and preserve a sense of their origins.*° But of the great majority of colonists, it 1s impos“Ibid. CLVITI-25, fi 2. “Ibid. CX XXI-1, ff 6, 31"; LXX-12; CXXI-4. Ibid. CXXI-31, ff. 7, 40", 73; CLI-1 (June, 1525). 4°A. Rodriguez, “Catalogo y extractos’, no. 10. “Eg. FRC, vii. 101, xviii, 129. **L. de la Rosa Olivera, ‘Las senales de los antiguos canarios’, RHC. xii (1946), 395. “°P. Boyd-Bowman, ‘La emigracion peninsular a América’, Historia mexicana, xii (1963), 168.

THE SETTLERS: CASTILIANS AND OTHERS 45

sible to say anything with certainty about their exact provenance. We know that many conquistadores had fought in the conquest of Granada and that many were recruited in Andalusia (especially Seville), Galicia, and the Basque country; it

may be assumed that these maritime provinces would continue | to supply settlers after the completion of the conquest. This impression is confirmed in the case of Andalusia by the Inquisition records, though that may indicate no more than the extent of Andalusian provenance among the converso population. Of the declarations of ancestry by the inquisitors themselves, only

that of the Bachiller de la Coba survives, showing that he too was an Andalusian, from Moguer.*° Despite overlaps of personnel from whom the conquistadores were recruited, and areas from which the colonists were drawn, the settlement of the Canaries betrays marked differences from that of Granada. The islands’ settlers came from the whole of

maritime Spain and further afield, not merely Andalusia and the adjacent provinces. Settlement was confined to a much lower social level: it attracted no magnates, and the Military Orders were not corporately involved. Compared with the New World, the islands were settled at an early date by a cosmopolitan population. Although the New World trade was in practice virtually unrestricted to foreigners, settlement was

clearly a different matter, at least in the first years of the sixteenth century.*! It may be more than mere coincidence that the rise of the sugar industry in the Antilles from the end of the second decade of the century occurred at a time of relaxation of

restrictions on alien settlement there. It is an equally conspicuous fact that the prohibition of foreign settlement in the Indies coincides with the period of restricted alien propertyholdings in the Canaries. Furthermore, the allure of gold and spices, combined with Columbus’s early plans for a trading — factory rather than a settled colony on Hispaniola, invested the first colonization of the Indies with an opalescent and mutable character: Spaniards arrived expecting a quick profit and early departure homewards. Although royal instructions to ColumInquisition MS CLII-1, f. 46. *"Colecctén de documentos inéditos del Archivo de Indias, xxx. 13; C. Haring, Trade and Navigation between Spain and the Indies (Cambridge, Mass., 1918), p. 97; Pike, Enterprise and Adventure, p. 71.

46 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

bus envisaged a colony in the Indies remarkably evocative of that which already existed in the Canaries, with its sugar-mills and distributions of land among the settlers, in fact, instead of the immediate introduction into the New World of an agronomy based on sugar, the indigenous framework survived for a generation or more, while the colonists lived by exploiting the Indians and exhausting the extant resources. Instead of allot-

ments of land, as in the Canaries, one finds distributions of native labour services (encomiendas). It may not be too fanciful to

see the non-fulfilment of the royal instructions of 1497, and the

3 failure of the Hispaniola colony to mirror that of the Canaries,

| as the results of restricted foreign immigration in the New World in the early years. In this particular period one can see more continuity of personnel and of the character of settlement generally, between Madeira and the Canaries than between the Canaries and America. It was probably the attractiveness of the New World that drew prospective settlers away from the Canaries as the six-

teenth century advanced. If few Canarians migrated to America,*” that was because America pre-empted the emigrant

trafic. “Truly’, lamented the anonymous chronicler of the Canaries towards the middle of the century, if the Indies had not been discovered, where all go who determine to migrate in search of fame and out of greed for gold and silver, then would [Gran]

Canaria be a second Cyprus (‘otra isla de Chipra’) and if it were fully cultivated and settled, truly it would become a major kingdom in its own right, as all seven isles together are today through shortage of population.”

After the 1520s immigration into the archipelago almost ceased

until the eighteenth century: new names disappear from the documents; the growth rate of population seems to slacken. ‘The

evidence of place-names and personal names, ethnographical hints culled from costume and folklore, the amount and antiquity of foreign linguistic influence, and the limited range of present-day islanders’ physiognomy and physical type all suggest what the documents confirm: that after an intense period of °C, Pérez Bustamante, ‘Regiones espafolas y la poblacién de América’, Revista de Indias, (no. 6) (1941), 82, 98, 118; there was much illegal emigration, not reflected in the records, but most of this must be ascribed to a later period. See J. Pérez Vidal, ‘Aportacion de Canarias a la poblacién de América’, AFA, 1 (1955), 99-114. S3ERC, i. 26.

THE SETTLERS: CASTILIANS AND OTHERS 47

settlement of varied character and origins in the early sixteenth century, the Canaries were deprived of new sources of population, and the existing society became miscegenated, endogamous, and conservative of its culture. In spite of the continuous flow of shipping through the main ports, it was only with a new and limited inflow of immigrants in the eighteenth century that this mood of introspection was disturbed, and only

in the present generation, which has witnessed an influx of Germans and Scandinavians, has the diverse character of settlement in the archipelago, established in the generation after the conquest, been renewed.

Ill THE DIVISION OF THE SOIL La tierra otras veces vista Anime vustros aceros Que della seréis senores Y como conquistadores La repartiréis ganada, Por los filos de la espada ‘Lantas veces vencedores.'

A late version of Le Canarien, the chronicle of Béthencourt’s

exploits, attributable to a descendant of his and generally untrustworthy wherever the character or reputation of the con-

queror is in question, may perhaps be relied on it its nonpartisan account of how the Norman adventurer divided the soil of his conquests among his followers: ‘And to each he gave part and portion of lands, manors, and encampments (logis) as seemed good and as suited his rank.’ The chronicle then passes from facts to judgements when it adds unconvincingly, ‘And he

did so much that therewith was none discontented (‘Et fit tant que il n’y eut nul qu'il ne fut content’).* Béthencourt’s practice is unlikely to have influenced methods of land-sharing in the

islands conquered by Castilians. Rather, it is in the whole course of previous Castilian colonization during the Reconquest of the Peninsula that the origins of their repartimientos — that is, the sharing under royal licence of the land of the islands among the conquistadores and early settlers — must be sought. That conquest was only rendered effective by occupation was

one of the first lessons of the wars against the Moors; it later ‘Lope de Vega, ‘Los Guanches de Tenerife’ (Obras, xi [1900], 303). 7FPRC, ix. 321. M. Mollat, ‘La place de la conquéte normande des [les Canaries dans Phistoire coloniale frangaise’, AA, iv (1958), 548, calls this ‘un véritable repartimiento’. His judgement on Béthencourt’s exploitation of the soil could be applied to the whole

course of the colonization of the islands: ‘Les modalités de Poccupation de sol présentent des traits originaux ow la tradition médiévale se prolonge, ot s’annoncent aussi les procédés de la colonisation moderne’, p. 547.

THE DIVISION OF THE SOIL 49 became embodied in the law of the great thirteenth-century code, the ‘Siete Partidas’, that one established title to land by occupying it. Early in the Reconquest, systematic division of the soil by those in authority under the crown had already taken

place, for example, at Alba de Tormes, Benavente, Mansilla, and Frias, while more haphazard resettlement went on elsewhere. But with the great expansion of Castile at Moorish expense in the thirteenth century, repartumiento achieved an institutional monopoly as a means of colonizing conquered lands.? The apportionment of the lands of Granada and the Canaries

under the Catholic Monarchs were acts of the same type, employing much the same means, as the thirteenth-century distributions. In the first flush of victory the conquistadores had to be disbanded and rewarded. A new basis of economic life for the conquered territory had then to be foreseen and enshrined in further distributions of land. Committees of local men were appointed — called divisores in Coérdoba, partidores in Seville, repartidores in the Canaries — to measure the land, fix the limits of allotments, and attend to the administrative problems.* They

acted by royal authority. But if the principle of distributing plots of land and the means by which it was enacted were in all cases the same, there were real differences which separated the thirteenth-century experience from that of the fifteenth and the Andalusian from the Canarian. It is not enough to say merely

that the division of the soil of the Canaries was on a much

smaller scale: it was also conducted amid more modest efforts and expectations, at a humbler social level. ‘The conquest of

Andalusia was the result of a single-minded mobilization of Castilian resources; the new land was famous as the richest and therefore most coveted part of Spain. The Church, the Military

Orders, and the magnates all expected and received an abundant return on their investments in the conquest. In the Canaries, by contrast, the conquest was a largely Andalusian enterprise, with support from Castile’s other maritime provinces; the land was attractive, but not renowned. The Military Orders neither took part in the expeditions nor acquired any interest in the land — surprisingly, perhaps, in view of their 3J. Gonzalez, El repartimiento de Sevilla, i (Madrid, 1949), 20—1. *Tbid., 235, 239.

50) THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

reputed ‘great desire’, recorded by a contemporary whose knowledge of the Canaries was profound, ‘to acquire riches by sea and land’. ‘The Church was relatively little endowed in the

distributions; and the only magnate who participated or

obtained much land was the Duke of Medina Sidonia. Thence arose a further difference. Because of the role of the privileged orders, Andalusia was colonized — so to speak — at second hand. In places where the incumbent population was displaced, the King distributed the land to the nobles and the Church (and in some cases to the municipalities), who settled them with colonists. Now in Granada, perhaps about half the land was not colonized in this fashion, but rather by way of large

numbers of small grants to individual settlers.° And the Canaries knew only a few great domains — though these were enough to excite the jealousy of lesser proprietors — while most

of the colonized soil was divided into small lots. As for the Canarian municipalities, they were left notoriously short of property in the early years of the colonization. Similarly, the

islands knew only two senorios (grants of jurisidiction as well as _

land): the lordship of the lesser islands, granted in the wake of the Béthencourtian conquest, and the episcopal fief of Aguimes in eastern Gran Canaria, whereas in Andalusia jurisdiction had generally been meted out along with the land. Again, Granada was a half-way house; grants of the right to dispense justice were

not unknown, but were usually confined to areas where the native population was not ejected.’ Not only was the repartimiento of the Canaries linked by ele-

ments of continuity and development to those of peninsular Spain, but it also created a precedent for subsequent attempts

to colonize parts of the New World by the same means.

Ferdinand and Isabella ordered Columbus in 1497 to share out the land of Hispaniola among the settlers, according to their degree, under the same advantages of fiscal privilege and conditions of residence, for the same principal purpose (the cultiva-

tion of sugar), as had been pre-figured in the Canaries.’ But >Diego de Valera, ‘Espejo de verdadera nobleza’, Prosistas castellanos del siglo xv, ed.

M. Penna (Madrid, 1959), p. 107. °M. A. Ladero Quesada, ‘La repoblacién de Granada antes de 1500’, Hispania, xxviii (1968), 490. Ibid., 501, 508, 515, 519, 523, 538, 559. *Raccolta Colombiana, ii, part 1] (Rome, 1893), 58-9.

THE DIVISION OF THE SOIL o| compared with the Canary Islands, the Indies generally continued to have a large indigenous and small colonial population. Among the settlers of the New World it was more convenient to distribute the indigenous labour force than land; and the term repartumiento came to mean not so much a division of the

soil as the award of Indian labour services or tribute. In the Canaries, no record survives of Béthencourt’s division,

beyond the generalities preserved in Le Cananen. For Gran Canaria, a few early land-grants cited in later litigation have survived, together with an official account of the public enquiry into and reform of the repartimiento conducted by the Licenciate

Ortiz de Zarate in 1507: this is preserved in closely similar versions in El Museo Canario and the notarial archive of Seville.? The most extensive documentation relates to Tenerife, for which we have not only the record of Zarate’s proceedings’® but also five ledgers of early grants, made in almost every case by the first Governor, Alonso de Lugo.'! These contain a few grants of land on La Palma, which was also in Lugo’s jurisdiction. There is no complete record for any island, but for Tenerife

we have at least a selection large enough, it is hoped, to be representative. In some grants vital information is omitted or illegible through deterioration — the location or amount of land

concerned, the grantees’ provenance or designations, sometimes even their names. In others the places mentioned can no longer be identified. Once grants of building-plots and watersources have also been eliminated, fewer than half the available documents are found to be statistically useful for the study of the division of the soil. But by analysing those grants which are

complete and unambiguous, one can hope to approach the problems of the density and distribution of settlement in Tenerife, and glean an idea of whether and how the different national or ethnic groups which contributed to the settlement were differently treated when it came to dividing the land. In particular I hope to be able to throw more light on the relations ’Millares MS, I; Morales Padron, ‘Canaries en al Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla’ (1962), pp. 424-42. FRC, vi (1953). "Serra Rafols, Datas Tenerife, has published the gist of the first three ledgers. All are kept in Arch. La Lag. Lugo left other grants to be fulfilled after his death, the so-called ‘Datas de Testimonio’, but it is doubtful whether these were ever effective; the same may be said ofa few grants issued by his heirs after 1525.

92 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

between the immigrant and indigenous communities, or at least on their relative wealth and standing. One further limitation of the evidence should be made clear

at the outset: in all the figures given in this chapter, irrigable land is probably under-represented, though there was certainly much less of it than of dry farmland or forest. Various grants of irrigable soil (rego) cannot be included in the tables because the

grant assigns no specified amount, either naming boundaries which can no longer be located, or vaguely assigning a source of water to the grantee ‘with the land that may be irrigated by it’.

By contrast, the amounts of dry land (seqguero) apportioned in | the land-grants are usually well defined.

It will be convenient to take in turn each of the nine

‘menceyates’ (menceyatos, also known as bandos or reinos) or dis-

tricts into which the island was divided and tabulate an analysis of the surviving grants. I shall depart from the strict canons of

scientific statistics by arranging the material in different categories from area to area; the reason for this — as always, when the information of which an author seeks to dispose is drawn up in other times by other hands, without regard to the

type of question posed or methods used by a modern investigator — is that from place to place the nature of the evidence changes with its amount. Where it is plentiful — as in some parts of northern Tenerife — the evidence of the landgrants can be classified according to the affiliations of the recipients: one can test, for instance, the charges levelled

against Lugo by his enemies that he unfairly favoured foreigners and his own dependants.'* In a zone, however, like the menceyate of Anaga, where the Spaniards made their first landings on the island, but where outside the port of Santa Cruz their subsequent settlement was thin, the grants of which we can make use are relatively few and the information they impart

more restricted. ‘The amounts are expressed in terms of the Janegada — an approximate measure of the land required to yleld a fanega, that is a bushel or bushel and a half of wheat (only much later was the fanega fixed at 1.58 bushels and the fanegada

at 6460 square yards). Among the recipients of these grants thirteen are described as ERC, vi. 65-7.

THE DIVISION OF THE SOIL 53 Table |: Anaga — grants of agricultural and pastoral land, 1497-1525 Amount

Amount of Number Number of irrigable

of of dry land land TOTAL

Location grants grantees (sequero)* (riego) _fanegadas

Barranco Aboture ] | 6 — 6 Barranco Arruacite l | ]16| — —-516 Barranco Baradero 5 Barranco Bufadero l N.I. N.I. 24

Figueras 9 310116 13312 2 | 128 154 Jagua dD P. del Hidalgo 2 2 128 —— 128

Punta de Naga 2 2 54 — 54 S. Cruz 2 2 12 3Y2 Inn Los Sauces l l 656—176 6 Taganana 7 7 120 Tehyay l l 30 — 30 Location unspecified 4 4 85 4 89 TOTALS 37 36 831 ¥2 Source: Datas Tenerife. : N.I. denotes ‘no information’. *in this and subsequent tables sequero includes unspecified lands.

‘conquistadores’ but the rest give us no information according to which they might be classified. That our figures for Anaga

are incomplete is demonstrated by the fact that no data (the Canary Island term for a record of a land-grant) survives for

Diego de Sardina, who was the biggest land-owner in ‘Taganana and had a sugar-mill there; and among the grants not used in the table, for want of sufficient information, is one of an unspecified amount of land to Grigorio Tabordo and others,

immigrants from Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, in which thirteen beneficiaries are named," only one of whom can be linked

with any of the grants I have been able to use.'* Nevertheless, : even allowing for substantial omissions, the small extent and number of the colonists’ landholdings in Anaga is surprising. It 'S Datas Tenerife, 390; cf. E. Serra Rafols, ‘Otra vez los origenes de ‘l'aganana’, RHC, xi

(1945), 474-5. '"6 fanegadas riego and 60 of sequero to ‘Constancga Mexia’ et al.; sugar was to replace

the vines grown there and a mill worked by horses be built. [bid., 450; Goncalo Mexia received unspecified amounts of irrigable land in Figueras on 10 July 1503, Ibid., 198.

54 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

was a large district, which included the island’s chief port at Santa Cruz, bordered the populous region of Tegueste, and enjoyed a climate conducive to colonization. One suspects that the reason for this under-exploitation of the menceyate was that the native population was little displaced. Anaga was the foremost of the bandos de pazes, whose inhabitants could not lawfully be enslaved. ‘Though Alonso de Lugo was a slaver whose rapacity respected few legal limits,’? Anaga was the best-protected of the native tribal areas, for its inhabitants had been the allies of the Spaniards and had enjoyed royal favour since before the conquest.'® Its people and their property appear, from the paucity of land-grants in the area, to have been spared to an unusual degree. It should be remembered that although slaves from bandos de pazes did find their way illicitly to

market, and Lugo was loudly denounced for the traffic, he himself maintained his innocence and can be shown from the acts of the island council of Tenerife to have condemned the trade, at least officially.’ In his own submission, it was only exceptional circumstances of rebellion or severe unrest among the natives that caused him to overstep the strict limits sanc-

tioned by law and custom and seize natives in protected categories.'* Though Lugo’s reputation deserves only a very slight adjustment in this respect, and it is not my purpose to reassess his character, or contribute new modifications to the ‘Black Legend’ of Spanish colonial brutality, it is yet a pleasure

to record a point in favour of a man who has incurred such widespread odium.

Westward from Anaga along the northern seaboard of

Tenerife there are areas where settlement was more dense. In Tegueste, the next menceyate, one can tabulate first the grants in the immediate environs of La Laguna, where the greatest numbers were concentrated. Here the grants admit of more revealing classification: the large numbers of Portuguese, the

substantial holdings enjoyed by Lugo’s dependants and Italians, the relative poverty of native islanders — all are key revelations, which the figures for other areas will partially modify but generally confirm.

'SEFRC, vi, 94-6. 'See below, p. 127.

MERC, iv. 21. 'BFRC, iii. 42.

THE DIVISION OF THE SOIL oy) Table 2: La Laguna (excluding the pago de vinas — see below) grants of agricultural and pastoral land, 1497-1525

of of TOTAL

Number Number

grants grantees Cereals Vines Seqguero Riego fanegadas Lugo’s

dependants139 13 7 200 6 426 69 638 Portuguese 90 10 400 309 Canarians and Gomerans 434324 — 54 — 78 Lanzarotenos — — 89 — 89 Italians 3 3 36 — 344 — 380

French | | — — 3 3 6

Conquistadores not in other

categories 9 7 186 9 225 — 420) Unspecified 16 Id 80 30 391 «AS 476

TOTALS 94 93 616 D9 1892. 33 2596 Source: Datas Tenerife.

Lugo also established a district expressly for vines (pago de

vinas) in ‘Tegueste, between La Laguna and San Lazaro, in 1501, destined for the cultivation of vines in relatively small lots by the citizens of La Laguna. Most of the 146 surviving grants date from 1501, 1511, and 1513, and deal with lots of from three

to ten or exceptionally up to fifteen fanegadas; the whole spectrum of colonists is represented here, and no doubt if a complete record survived, virtually all the vecinos of La Laguna would figure in it. Table 3: Heneto (Tegueste) — grants of agricultural and pastoral land, 1497—1525

, Number Number of of

TOTAL

grants grantees Sequero Riego __fanegadas

D. Pedrode Lugo l4I 6150 — 150 Native islanders 99 — 99 Conquistadores 2 2 24 41187 28 Unspecified 22 23 1187 — TOTALS 29 32 1460 4 1464

Source: Datas Tenerife. ,

56 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

In the rest of Tegueste, where most of the grants are of lands

in Tegina (in the north of the district), the surviving datas are numerous but unhelpful. No interesting information is forthcoming about the provenance of the settlers, except for notices

of six Gomerans or native Canarians of Gran Canaria, one of whom, Rodrigo el Coxo or Cojo, was a conquistador and two others, Martin Cosme and Diego Delgado, servants of Alonso de Lugo: these half dozen received thirty-three fanegadas between them, including only half a_fanegada of irrigable land.'” Fernando de Tacoronte, one of the natives of Tenerife most prominent in efforts to liberate slaves by purchase or by process

of law, obtained a relatively small holding of twenty-four fanegadas in October 1503 on the grounds that he had farmed the land for three years.*° The impression that native islanders

found Lugo less than generous in distributing the spoils is somewhat mitigated by the record of the reversion to one Francisco Serrano, of unspecified provenance, of a hundred fanegadas in ‘Tegueste in 1506, formerly the property of ‘Diego

Lopez, gomero’, deceased.’ Still, the average holding of an indigenous islander, whether of Tenerife or an immigrant or ~* conquistador, seems to have been much below that figure. Moreover, the small amount of irrigable land enjoyed by Canarian grantees in Tegueste was typical of what seems to have been a general policy on Lugo’s part of concentrating irrigable land in the hands of wealthy immigrants, who could make the capital investment necessary to exploit it, thereby effectively excluding the natives. But water was scarce in the Tejina area anyway, where irrigable land expressly accounted for only twenty-seven fanegadas of the total recorded in surviving grants.

The distribution of land in the next district, Tacoronte, presents some curious features, not least because of the absence of irrigable soil in the area. The largest concentration of grants was in Acentejo, in the west of the menceyate, where two great battles of the conquest had been fought; here was the best land bordering the rich menceyate of Taoro. The rest of the grants were scattered in the eastern part of the district. The figures for the Portuguese in eastern Tacoronte include two grants to Vicente Eannes, the Negro of Portuguese prove'9Datas Tenerife, 694, 710, 1115, 1185. 20T bid., 969. *"Tbid., 765.

THE DIVISION OF THE SOIL 97 Table 4: Eastern Tacoronte — grants of agricultural and pastoral land, 1497-1525

Number Number

of of Amount grants grantees fanegadas

Lugo’s dependants 4 4610 407 Portuguese 10 8" Native islanders 2 9” , 360 Conquistadores not

in other categories 16 5546 1] 994° Unspecified 51 58 TOTALS 83 83 7917" Source: Datas Tenerife. 4includes Bezentianes who is variously called ‘Portuguese’ and ‘coloured’ — ‘onbre prieto’ (Datas Tenerife, 121), ‘preto [sic.] portuguese’ (ibid., 618). 1 from Gran Canaria, | from Tenerife. “with an additional plot of 120 paces square.

Table 5: Acentejo — grants of agricultural and pastoral land, 1497-1525

Number Number

of of Amount

) grants grantees fanegadas

Portuguese 3 736166 Native islanders 242 in other categories 7 7929 853 Unspecified 2| 23% TOTALS 38 39 2190 Conquistadores not

Source: Datas Tenerife.

*includes friary of Santo Espiritu (La Laguna).

nance (p. 37 above). The only traces of grants to Italians are

two records of holdings by Mateo Vina, neither of which appears in the tables because the amount of land is unspecified.”* It may well be that relatively little land in this area

was in Italian hands; lack of water allowed little scope for sugar-planting, the activity with which Italians were chiefly associated. But it is a fact that even in the parts of the island 22 Datas Tenerife, 428, 1286, both dated 18 July 1497.

58 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

further west, where in Icod, Garachico, and Orotava, Vina and his compatriot Cristobal Daponte owned big concentrations of

land, or on the east coast at Guimar, where the brothers Romano were endowed with extensive sugar lands, their possessions are largely unrecorded in the surviving datas. Indeed, the same 1s true of other notorious fortunes in land, such as

those of the Portuguese Diego Sardina in Taganana, his countryman Alonso Martinez in Icod, the Duke of Medina Sidonia in Taoro, and the Governor himself in Realejo and Icod.*7 Some other major concentrations are revealed by perusal of the datas, but the incompleteness of the sources on which we are compelled to rely is again apparent, and cannot be stressed too much. ‘And in the menceyate of Taoro which is called El] Araotava,

is place for a good settlement as well because a great many residents have estates there as there are pastures and woodland

at hand.’ Fernando de Trujillo’s testimony” to the inquiry of 1506 1s borne out by the fact, reflected in the large number of surviving land-grants from the area, that Taoro was the most densely settled place in Tenerife in the period. Not only is the number of grants highest, but the quantities of irrigable land distributed to the colonists far exceed those of other districts.

In Table 6 the number of grants to Italians is certainly unrepresentatively small; the fact that the Italans are not shown to have been awarded any irrigable land suggests this, as water was essential to the sugar production at which they were adept; in Icod and Daute there is similarly no record of grants of

riego to Italians, but it is evident from the separate grants of water-sources apart from land that their holdings were well

supplied with the necessary element. The Portuguese appear to constitute a much smaller group here than elsewhere: this may be another trick of the evidence, but it is surely curious

that, while the Italians seem to be consistently under-

represented in all districts, it is only here that the Portuguese contingent looks small. A possible construction of the data is that the Portuguese land-owners were concentrated in Icod and La Laguna and that the Portuguese of ‘Taoro were employees 3W'e have some of Lugo’s grants to himselfin #RC, vi. 101—3. On the notoriety of the large holdings, see ibid., 58-62. 4IFRC, vi. 26.

THE DIVISION OF THE SOIL 99 Table 6: Taoro — grants of agricultural and pastoral land, 1497-1525

of of TOTAL

Number Number

grants grantees Sequero Riego _fanegadas

Lugo’s dependants 13 12 483 59¥2 54242 Native islanders 24 15 301% 16° 317Y2

Portuguese 3 3 1] 3 14

Italians 2 2 150° — 150 Basques 2 2 206 — 206 in other categories 23112 16 687 75 762 Churches 2 2 6 118 Unspecified 97 90 2186 228 2414 Conquistadores not

TOTALS 166 142 413642 387% 4524 Source: Datas de Tenerife.

“includes 4 fans, as dowry for the daughter of a Canarian conquistador to marry a Spaniard and 6 fans. to a slave of Lugo’s, who is listed here rather than among Lugo’s dependants.

Cristobal Daponte also received 3 fans. of woodland ‘para madera para vucstro engenio’ (‘for wood for your mill’). A record of the datas in Taoro up to 1506 is also in FRC, vi. 132-3, 142-3.

Table 7: [cod and Daute — grants of agricultural and pastoral land, 1497—1525

of of TOTAL

Number Number

grants grantees Sequero Riego fanegadas

Lugo’s dependants 2 2 68 — 68 Portuguese 47 29 2176 70 2246 Native islanders 24 21 678Y2 8* 6861/2

Italians 5 3 470 —- 470

Conquistadores not

in other categories 7 6 322 43 365 Unspecified 2095146 25 |3020 TOTALS 13530 96 35 5909% 685512 Source: Datas Tenerife. *includes 3 fans. to Diego de Leén (10 August, 1503) (Datas Tenerife, 403) and

1/2 fans. to Rodrigo el Coxo (before August 1508) (ibid., 322). Sugar cultivation being expressly forbidden in both (‘que no sean para canas’), it seems likely that these were irrigable plots.

60 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

on the large sugar estates rather than proprietors in their own night.

The menceyates of Icod and Daute must be treated jointly: the location of the boundary is unclear and several sites might have been in either zone. The under-representation of the Italians again calls for comment. Though, as we might have come to expect from previous tables, they appear well endowed with dry land man for man, the seeming dearth of irrigable land among their holdings is to be explained at least in part by the independent grants of water they received. On 30 October 1503, for instance, Mateo Vina and Cristébal Daponte, the two largest Genoese proprietors in the area, were awarded half shares in the water of the mountains behind Garachico.** Daponte held ‘lands and water’ of unspecified extent in Daute from 14977° which bordered the seashore; and in March 1505 Lugo confirmed to him ‘the lands and water which you hold peacefully in Garachico and Icod.... You have ennobled the Island; you have built a sugar-mill and every day you make and build anew’.”’ The number of grants to Portuguese is another conspicuous feature in this area. But it should be noted that the forty-seven grants are shared among only twenty-nine colonists. No fewer than fifteen grants, amounting to 846 fanegadas of land, went

to Gonzalo Yanes (or Eannes) of Daute (often called

‘Goncalianes’ in the document), his eight sons, son-in-law, and brother-in-law. He had a special claim on Lugo, for whom he

managed the governor’s Icod estate. No other really big domains are reflected in the table, though Fernando de Castro, who was a Portuguese proprietor of some fame and substance, is

mentioned in three grants. The Portuguese parish priest of Icod, Ruy Blas, accounts for as many as six grants, but together they total a relatively modest 167 fanegadas. His right to a grant

was justified in lavish terms by Lugo in a data of 14 January 1507:7* You are a clerk and a mass-priest and have been resident in and live in the said island of Tenerife for eight years and in the said period have administered the

sacraments of the Church... wherefore and whence... various people settled the areas of Icod and Daute wherein you have done His Highness service.

25 Datas Tenerife, 395. ®Ibid., 1230.

27Ibid., 1217. *8Tbid., 938.

THE DIVISION OF THE SOIL 6] The existence of large holdings unrecorded in the surviving datas must not be overlooked. According to one witness at Zarate’s enquiry, the lands owned in Daute by Lugo, Vina, Medina Sidonia, Daponte, Gonzalo Yanes, and Martinez could have ‘sustained a hundred citizens or more’ if broken up into smaller units.”? The general lines of his evidence were confirmed by other witnesses, who referred to the properties of all those he named in comparable terms.*° Yet Gonzalo Yanes is the only one of these proprietors whose wealth 1s justly reflected in the books of land grants; and if it were not for the transcript of

Zarate’s proceedings, of Martinez we should know nothing at all.

The figures for irrigable land held by native Canarians may also be significant: not only because they are by any assessment

paltry, for that 1s what we should expect from the similar evidence in other areas, but also because of the express prohibition of sugar cultivation on two plots which together account for more than half the recorded total. This raises the presumption that it may have been a matter of policy to exclude natives from

the sugar industry on other than economic grounds. The promotion of the crop was no doubt assisted by concentrating irrigable land in European hands; but it can hardly have been served by forbidding its growth on the few watered plots that natives were fortunate enough to obtain. I have so far dealt with the northern coast of Tenerife; only

the southerly menceyates of Adeje, Abona, and Gutimar remain. All were bandos de pazes, all relatively infertile. But while

Guimar became populous and important in the era of colonization, Adeje and Abona remained backwaters, little exploited and scantily populated. The reasons for this are not far to seek.

Guimar was close to the main centres of population in the north-east and north-centre of the island. It possessed a port convenient for the export of sugar. It housed the image of Our Lady of Gandlemas, patroness of the island, and received the pilgrims who flocked to her shrine. Finally, it had the benefit of

the large investments made by the brothers Romano or Inglasco, Blasino, and Juan Felipe, who devoted their wealth and ingenuity to the cultivation and milling of sugar. It was the 9FRC. vi. 19. TI bid., 26—7, 31, 35, 38-9, 48-9.

62 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

opinion of Mateo Vina, whose money had turned the wastes of Garachico into a thriving sugar-estate, that Adeje and Abona could also be transformed by an infusion of enterprise. In those districts, he told the Licenciate Zarate in 1507, “There is scope,

after the expenditure of much money and effort, to create settlements as good as or better than those in other parts of the islands.’*' But whatever the merits of that statement as a speculation, it proved false as a prediction. ‘The investment was never forthcoming. It can be shown, however, that Alonso de Lugo was not indifferent to the requirements of these areas. He made grants of land and water, for instance, in Adeje in 1504 to his nephew, Bartolomé Benitez, and the judicial official Pedro de

Vergara, on condition that they build a sugar-mill; and the following year the sons of Juan de Siberio received a similar grant under the same conditions.** But the country remained overwhelmingly pastoral, unaffected by his good intentions; real conditions are more accurately reflected by the grant of 500 fanegadas in Abona which he made to the Licenciate Cristébal de Valcarcel, the official sent by the monarchs to assist Lugo in the government of the island, ‘for your livestock of goats [and] sheep, and pens for livestock, and cheeses’.*? Before drawing any conclusions, it is worth reviewing the surviving evidence from Gran Canaria, although it is too slight to be statistically significant and, while not without interest,

provides scant scope for reliable inferences. In El Mureo Canario (Las Palmas) the island houses records of some grants

made in the first year of the repartimiento. Like all the early distributions of land in Gran Canaria, those of 1485 appear to have been concentrated in the north of the island, specifically —

in the surviving examples — in the north-east at Las Palmas, Arucas, and, still in the east but further south, in Agtimes. The earliest are dated in June of that year, when Juan de Siberio, conquistador, received an allotment adjoining the capital, and land and water in Arucas; in 1502 he exchanged the site of a sugar-mill in the Tenoya valley for his urban holdings** and thereafter his sugar-estates continued to grow: the influence

wielded by his heirs in insular affairs was later to become notorious. Also in the first repartimiento, Antonio de Arévalo, 3'Tbid., 30. 32 Datas Tenerife, 179, 1304. I bid., 1291. _ 34Millares MS, [. 23.

THE DIVISION OF THE SOIL — 663 Table 8: Adeje — grants of agricultural and pastoral land, 1497-1525

of of TOTAL

Number Number

grants grantees Sequero Rtego _fanegadas

Lugo’sislanders dependants | l 3030° —180 30 Native 3 2 150° Conquistadores not in other categories 4 3 348 — 348

Unspecified 10 888 360 90 60 978 420 TOTALS 17916

Source: Datas Tenerife. “includes 100 fans. sequero and 30 fans. riego to the former mencey of Adeje, ‘Don Diego de Adex, rey que erades’ (Datas Tenerife, 845, 856).

Sancho de Vargas received a separate grant of water in May 1505 in addition to his 84 fans. of land. (Ibid., 179).

Table 9: Giimar — grants of agricultural and pastoral land, 1497-1525

of of TOTAL

Number Number

grants grantees Sequero Riego fanegadas

Lugo’s dependants 47 Portuguese 3 37 6618102916

Italians 2 2 I 6 7

Native islanders 15 18* 636 3 639 Conquistadores not

in other categories 4 4 137 — 137 Unspecified 798 761720 874 TOTALS 97 26 59 26 1596 124 Source: Datas Tenerife.

*includes Michel de Guimar (60 fans. 7 January 1514, 24 fans. 19 February 1512 — Datas Tenerife, 40, 1086). The remaining |7 were natives of Gran Canaria.

familiar to students of the conquest of the Canaries in his capacity as official receiver of royal dues,** received a caballeria

(usually 60 fanegadas) in the Tenoya valley near the Siberio estate, as did Hernando de Prado, conquistador and island councillor, and the notorious, crypto-Jewish public scribe, See M. A. Ladero Quesada, ed., ‘Las cuentas de la conquista de Gran Canaria’, AEA, xii (1966), 61 ff.

64 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST Table 10: Abona — grants of agricultural and pastoral land, 1497-1525 Amount

of of land Native islanders 4 5 580* Others 8128131310 TOTALS 1890 Number Number of

grants grantees (fanegadas de sequero)

Source: Datas Tenerife.

*includes a dowry of 400 fans. for Elvira Hernandez, Lugo’s godchild (ahijada), 10 October 1505 (Datas Tenerife, 1326).

Gonzalo de Burgos. Smaller lots — peonias, reckoned at half the value of the caballerias — went to the conquistadores Ybone or

Ibone Darmas, who later served in the conquest of Tenerife, ‘next to the lot of Gonzalo de Burgos, as far as a very tall, thin palm tree’,*° and the island councillor Juan de Mayorga, whose plot was next in line along the Tenoya valley. At the same time,

land was set aside for commons and for the construction of a road to Las Palmas. This information survives because much of the Tenoya valley

passed into the hand of St. Martin’s hospital (in Las Palmas) which presented the documents in evidence during litigation at the Real Audiencia of the Canaries in 1591; they were copied from the court archives by a notary, whose transcript in turn was copied by a local antiquary in 1783, whence they passed to

the collection of A. Miullares Torres and so to El Museo

Canario.*’ The same accident enables us to continue to trace the history of the distribution of land in the Tenoya valley up to the time of Ortiz de Zarate’s inquiry. In August 1485 ‘Diego de Jerez’ and ‘Diego Perez de Badajoz’ — which might conceivably be renderings of the same name — joined the proprietors of 36Millares MS, I. 23-4. 37Millares MS, VI. 21-6: ‘Noticias en razén del establecimiento y formaci6én de los Heredamientos’ by D. Francisco de Leén y Matos, who was President of the recently formed Real Sociedad Econémica de Amigos del Pais. His notes say that Ortiz’s

confirmation of the Hospital’s property was included in a protocol of the notary Antonio Miguel del Castillo, but the date given — 2 August | 790 — is an obvious slip of

the pen: that notary was not in office at that time. I have searched Castillo’s ledgers without success. Nor could I find the original in the Audiencia archives.

THE DIVISION OF THE SOIL 65 the valley. In September a further apportionment took place to Alonso de Albaida and ‘Bartolomé trompeta’, who no doubt

had blown his trumpet during the conquest and who was to leave his property to St. Martin’s Hospital on his death a few months later.** In 1486 ‘Pablo Perez, portugues’ obtained a peonia, while part of the deceased trumpeter’s land was reallotted to Juan de Avila and then (when he died after only two months’ tenure) to Francisco Yanes. In 1488 Diego de Aday, whose name indicates a provenance in the seigneurial islands of

Lanzarote or Fuerteventura, received another portion of the land of the departed Bartolomé.*? In 1489, Hernando de Prado increased his holdings and one Alonso Castil de Vit (a Catalan, perhaps?) was added to the valley’s proprietors.” By the time Zarate arrived in 1507, the number of holdings had swollen to

twenty-four, all of which, with minor adjustments, he

confirmed.*!

Some conclusions can be drawn even from the sparse evidence united in these pages; but like the evidence they must be largely confined to Tenerife. The figures show that there was a great deal of justice in some settlers’ complaints that foreigners were unfairly favoured in the distribution of land, together with Alonso de Lugo’s servants and kin. Records of grants to Italians

show a relatively large amount of land concentrated in a few hands. In the case of the Portuguese, however, the grants are numerous but in most cases moderate: only a few Lusitanians got real fortunes from the division of spoils. It also seems that Portuguese properties were concentrated in Tegueste and Icod/ Daute, and were much less numerous outside those areas. In the tables, the large amounts of land granted to Lugo’s dependants are sufficiently eloquent; moreover, some large land-

owners in other categories — like the Genoese Cristébal Daponte and the conquistador and judicial official Pedro de Vergara — were related to Lugo by marriage. The datas for La

Palma show the same characteristic, where Lugo’s son, Don Pedro, described in one grant as ‘conquistador de las islas y °®Millares MS, VI. 25; VII. 10. The following month Bartolomé received a further grant of irrigable land in Telde. *Tbid., VIL. 10-11. 40Ibid., 1. 24”, “Ibid., VI. 21%; VIL. 15—22, 26.

66 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

poblador de la isla de La Palma’,* and Ysabel, the governor’s niece, together with such collateral relations and relations by marriage as Geroénimo de Valdés, Andrés Suarez Gallinato,

and Cristobal de Valcarcel, all had substantial property.*? | The next point to emerge is that native islanders generally were less well treated than immigrant Europeans in the division of the land. In particular, natives were relatively deprived of irrigable land. ‘The individuals who constitute exceptions are evidently uncharacteristic: Elvira Hernandez, for instance, was Lugo’s adopted daughter; Don Diego de Adeje was the former mencey of the area in which he received his grant and had therefore an unusual claim on the conquerors’ generosity. In some cases, Canarian recipients of irrigable soil were forbidden to use it for sugar cultivation. The distribution of population as a whole — to judge from the incidence of the surviving land-grants — follows a pattern unchanged in its broad outlines to this day. The settlement of Tenerife was confined to coastal areas. Most colonization took place in the north and was densest in Tegueste, where La Laguna is situated, and Taoro. But if the datas are helpful about

the distribution of population, they tell us nothing about its size. Indeed, one can say nothing more for certain about the population of the archipelago in the period save that it was growing. In June 1502 Governor Antonio de Torres expressed the need for more housing in Las Palmas ‘and, great thanks to God this island grows every day, especially this town’;** though

the rate of increase slackened under pressure of competition from the New World, it was only in the mid-1520s that immigration fell off altogether. Baptismal registers survive in Las Palmas cathedral from as early as 1498, but are too incomplete and erratic to serve as reliable sources of demographic informa-

tion. Some sort of pattern can be construed by grouping the figures in decades: whereas thirty baptisms were celebrated in the cathedral in 1501 (the first year for which all the monthly records survive) and that medial figure was roughly sustained, allowing for annual fluctuations, over the next ten years, the figures for the subsequent decade, 1511~20, represented an average relative increase of over 50 per cent on the preceding 42 Datas de Tenerife, 1205. I bid., 825, 1245—46; cf. below p. 107. 44Millares MS, I. 23°.

THE DIVISION OF THE SOIL 67 ten-year period. After ‘peak’ years in 1513 and 1514 (with 90 and 140 baptisms respectively), numbers diminished, to return

for the first years of the 1530s to pre-1520 levels, and only recovered after 1536; there were 103 baptisms in 1537, 73 in 1538, and 50, 81, 94, and 115 in each of the following years respectively. Of course, baptismal records tell us nothing about

absolute population, and in this case they do not even reveal any useful information about the rise or decline of the birth rate, since it 1s not clear how representative of the island as a whole — or even of the city of Las Palmas — the cathedral’s register might be. The marked fluctuation of numbers from year to year might equally well indicate either that the number of recorded baptisms was subject to more variables than the total number of births, or that the over-all population was too small to produce

consistent figures — that is, a consistent mean annual birth rate.* Witnesses made estimates of the numbers of vecinos in Tenerife (that is, fixed resident householders, normally of five years’ standing, with the civic obligations and privileges of residence) at Ortiz de Zarate’s inquiry, but their figures vary so

wildly as to inspire no reliance. For La Laguna, we have the vecindario of 1514, which lists 325 residents of that capital, but is

almost certainly incomplete, while Alonso de Lugo’s claim three years later that La Laguna had over 600 residents and Orotava 150 is perhaps exaggerated.*® Even if we had a reliable estimate of numbers of vecinos, it would be hard to decide what

multiplier to use to estimate total population. For various reasons, it would have to be a figure exceeding the four or five commonly used in European demography. In the first place, the vecinos included only those who had served in the conquest,

purchased or compounded for their status, or lived in the islands with their families for at least five years; in a situation like that of the Canaries in this period, with an increasing tally of newcomers, such a sample is bound at any time to exclude a The figures are tabulated in E. Sanchez Falcén, ‘Evoluci6n demografica de Las Palmas’, AEA, x (1964), 98-9. *°K. Serra Rafols in FRC, xiii. p.v. (also p. 256). As these figures represent the numbers of resident heads of families in 1509 and 1512 respectively, one might reckon tentatively on a growth rate in that category of 91.3% p.a. over that period (maximum). But one must doubt the trustworthiness of such calculations. The vecindario is printed in Serra Rafols and de la Rosa, Vecindario de La Laguna.

68 THE GANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

significant number. Secondly, this was a slave-owning society,

in which many of the natives became household slaves and many more were imported from Africa to serve in a domestic Capacity or work in the sugar-mills. Thirdly, the natives who remained in the countryside, though probably reduced to no more than a few hundreds on any one island by the depredations of conquest, enslavement, deportation, and disease, are an entirely unknown quantity. Finally, to the vecinos, immigrants, natives, and slaves one would have to add the landless labour-

ers, and as Mateo Vina was said to have told the Licenciate Zarate, the labourers outnumbered those who enjoyed vecino status (“cree que ay muchos trabajadores mas que vecinos’).*”

The ingenious suggestion by Professor Ladero Quesada that the population of Tenerife may be computed at 9,000— 12,000 from the estimated cereal requirement of 30,000 fanegas in 1522

gives us what is perhaps the most useful available estimate, albeit by no means a definitive one.* Yet, if we must leave the problem of the size of the population

unresolved, the study of the distribution of land has been iJuminating in other respects. It helps to classify the elements of

Canarian colonial society with some precision and to grasp some implications of the divisions, for instance, between Euro-

peans and natives, Castilians and foreigners, governors and governed. And it provides another example of an institution of colonization that developed, without loss of continuity, from the

peninsular Reconquest to the islands and thence to the New World.

“FRC, vi. 30. :

*®M. A. Ladero Quesada, ‘La economia de las Islas Canarias a comienzos del siglo XVI’, Anuario de estudios américanos, xxxi (1974), 735.

IV

THE AGRONOMY Alonso: La tierra es bella y podria Tener en si mas provecho Del que por barbaros cria: Ya hemos venido, esto es hecho.

Esto es honor vuestra y mia.

Before the coming of the Spaniards, indigenous varieties of crops, livestock, and methods of cultivation were circumscribed by the natives’ limited horizons, implements, and experience.

Partly sedentary and partly nomadic, they cultivated cereals and herded goats; the hides and cheeses yielded by their flocks constituted useful items of truck but generally the only articles they produced for trade were dyestuffs and shells? gathered on their shores. ‘The European settlers continued to exploit all the existing products of the soil — not‘only those cultivated by the natives, but also the wood of the forested areas which they used

for fuel and pitch — and they added the goods which everywhere accompanied Spanish settlement and later wrought a great change in the agronomies of the New World. The local diet was expanded by the addition of cattle and pigs to the existing livestock, the extension of land under cultivation to increase the yield of fodder and wheat, and the introduction of wholly new varieties — the garden crops long characteristic of Andalusia, with vines and, above all, sugar. In partial consequence, the economy continued to be dominated by a single ‘Lope de Vega, ‘Los Guanches de Tenerile’ (Obras, xi (1900), 306). *The importance of shells was increased rather than diminished by the conquest, which ushered in a period of commerce with mainland Africa; on that coast, especially

in the vicinity of Sao Jorge da Mina, shells could be employed, by virtue of their supposed talismanic and ornamental properties, in a way analogous to currency (V. Magalhaes Godinho, L’Economie de Uempire portugais (Paris, 1969), p. 380). The Catholic

Monarchs declared the shell trade a royal monopoly in May 1478 (A.G.S., n.d., f. 61

[Cat. XIH, ii, no. 625]) and made provision for the re-export of shells from Gran Canaria to Portugal in January 1498 (A.G.S. 22 January 1498, Alcala).

70 THE CANARY [SLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

commodity. The dyestuffs period of pre-conquest days was

succeeded, in the islands colonized early in the fifteenth century, by wheat. From 1484 the preponderance of wheat rapidly succumbed to that of sugar. Later in the new century, when competition from the New World destroyed the Canarian sugar industry, as it eclipsed so many aspects of the life of the

islands, Canary wines came into their own. The wines, in turn,were to be ousted at the end of the eighteenth century by the rise of those of Jeréz: on the islands, the grape gave way to

the banana.° |

The period of this study is that of the predominance of sugar. But it was also a time in which dyestuffs played what might be

called a strong supporting role — like the relationship of logwood to sugar in colonial Brazil and (to some extent) Jamaica:* a time, too, in which vines were introduced on a large

scale, in which wheat and other cereals were important, in which localized and small-scale garden cultivation contributed a goodly total of varied produce, and in which there were also some survivals from the pre-conquest economy.

Most important of the products in this last category was orchil. The principal source of the islands’ famous dyestuffs, it occurred only in the wild, forming like moss? on the surfaces of rocks, and perhaps was not susceptible of cultivation. Among the natives before the conquest, it was presumably employed in connection with the mysterious pottery stamps, which are be3The banana was cultivated in the Canaries, whence it was taken to America (as

Oviedo informs us) in 1516 (J. Menéndez Rodriguez, ‘Algunas notas sobre la introducci6n y desarrollo del platano’, Homenaje a E. Serra Rafols, ii (La Laguna, 1970),

428). It was cultivated in the Canaries by the mid-sixteenth century, when Thomas Nichols, an English sugar-merchant imprisoned by the Inquisition, sampled it there — presumably the first recorded Englishman to do so (A Pleasant Description of the Fortunate

Tlandes . . . by the Poore Pilgrime (London, 1583), f. 9). Nichols recommends that it be eaten black. This may indicate an idiosyncrasy of taste on his part, or perhaps suggests that the fruit was a variety of the sour or wild banana (musa x paradisiaca L, — ‘Dwart Cavendish’) which, Dr David Mabberley informs me, was formerly a staple food and is still important in East Africa. 4F. Morales Padron, La Jamaica espaiola (Seville, 1952), pp. 281, 287-9; F. Mauro, Le Portugal et l’Atlantique (Paris, 1960), p. 121; J. H. Parry, “Ihe Indies richly Planted’, Terrae Incognitae, i (1969), 11-22. SBotanically speaking, orchil is a form of lichen. See Ency. Brit. (1974) under ‘lichens’, Livingstone, however, describes orchil growing parasitically from trees in the central African interior, Travels, xv. 266. The Canarian variety is Roccella capitata (Ach.) Nyl. (R. tinctoria DC), U.K. Duncan, Introduction to Britesh Lichens (1970) p. 213. Tam grateful to Dr David Mabberley for this reference.

THE AGRONOMY 71 lieved to have been used to imprint the skin with decorative patterns,° although the dyes obtained from modern varieties of lichens have a greater affinity with fibrous materials. The dyestuff may also have been used for trade with Europeans who called at the islands; certainly it was so used by the colonists in the years which followed Béthencourt’s conquests.’ The lords of the seigneurial islands sought to monopolise this trade, eliciting by the mid-fifteenth century indignant appeals fron their vas-

sals to the crown,® in terms which show that in these lesser islands the settlers gathered the orchil themselves. Generally, however, the wild nature of the plant meant that it could be plucked only by a solitary, roving gatherer, making the occupation more suited to the indigenous than to the immigrant habits and temper; in Tenerife the records are overwhelmingly of native orchil-gatherers. But these were the humble and local beginnings of a trade that must have reached much of Europe: the suspicions of impermanence that dogged orchil’s reputation as a dye in the England of Richard III in an eloquent testimony to that.? When

the conquest of the major islands was being prepared, it was supposed that their prospective orchil trade was rightfully a prerogative of the crown; Ferdinand and Isabella at once conceded the monopoly of the commerce for ten years to Bishop Juan de Frias in recognition of his services in the conquest.'® The trade remained in the royal gift and the monarchs’ rights were extended to include the orchil of the African mainland, which from 1497 could not be exported save by royal licence."! Although we may guess, from two known instances, in 1479 and 1494,'* at further encroachments by unauthorized interlopers, Sl Museo Canarto: breve resena, pp. 45—50. 7Rumeu, Espana en el Africa atlantica, i. 176. 8Chil, Estudios historicos, 1. 623-30.

°OED, ‘orchil’: “The Colours made with the which Orchell . . . faden away’ | Richard ITI, c. 8 Preamble). OM. Fernandez de Navarrete, Obras, i (Madrid, 1954), 537.

“de la tierra de Africa que es de nuestra conquista’ (A.G.S. 25 August 1497, Medina del Campo, f. 22). The monopoly was later conceded to the Licenciate Zapata of ‘toda la orchilla de todas las partes que ay desde el cabo de Mega hasta el Rio de Oro y la Mar Pequena por mar y tierra’, ibid., f. 150.

'7The first was that of Manuel Fernandez de Trotin, merchant of Seville and frequent commercial traveller to the islands since the 1450s (R. ‘Torres Campos, Caracter de la conquista_» colonizacién de las Islas Canarias (Madrid, 1901), p. 176), who provisioned the beleaguered Las Palmas in 1479 in exchange for orchil. Viera, Noticias, ii (1951), 50.

72 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

the orchil trade of the royal islands continued to be concentrated in a single pair of hands. These changed at the monarchs’ whim but from 1494, at the latest, till 1513 were those of Gutierre de Cardenas, faithful servant of King Ferdinand since before the latter’s accession, and his widow, Teresa Enriquez, the daughter of the Admiral of Castile. It is from the second of the two records of interloping that we first learn of this. In March 1494 the monarchs dealt with a complaint against intrusions in the orchil trade from Gutierre de Cardenas.'* The fact that copies were also sent to officials of Seville, Cadiz, Puerto de Santa Maria, Rota, and Sanlucar de Barrameda, expressely and to other unspecified ports (“commo de todas las cibdades e logares de la Mar’), indicates the range of the trade in these early years: the places mentioned are the

Andalusian ports which traditionally handled the Canarian navigations. Some idea of the value of the Cardenas’ concessions may be got from a letter of 1510 in which the monarchs informed the island councils that Teresa Enriquez, as her husband’s heiress, had 600,000 mrs.’ worth of bonds tied up (setuadas) in orchil and forbade them to impose their usual duty of four mrs. per quintal.'* This may mean that the value of the

orchil represented the interest on that amount of bonds or that Cardenas had paid or forgone 600,000 mrs. in bonds in order to obtain the monopoly. Although it is impossible to be precise about the amount or value of orchil production from the records of Cardenas’s supplications at court, it 1s evident from the fact of

the original concession to the courtier that a set of lucrative rights, which during the conquest had been used to reward conquistadores, became after the pacification of the islands the perquisite of royal servants and bureaucrats. The monopolists did not handle all the trade themselves, but farmed it out to merchants: here, as in so many areas of Cana-

rian entrepreneurism, the Genoese excelled. It was Tomas Justiniano who made the earliest recorded purchase of orchil on ‘Tenerife in 1505;'° but the house of Riberol were the leaders in

the field, no doubt because they were willing to pay cash for dyestuffs in that specie-starved economy.'® Francisco de '3A,.G.S. 4 March 1494, Medina del Campo, {. 24b (Cat. XII, xi, no. 592). '44.G.S. 24 September, Madrid. 'SArch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 181, f 243. 'SERC, iv. 14.

THE AGRONOMY 73 Riberol had an agreement with Teresa Enriquez which was a source of much litigation. The records of this reveal that their bargain had been first struck in 1501 at — interestingly enough — the fair of Medina del Campo. Since then, Riberol had paid the widow a total of 1,595,200 mrs. in proceeds from the sale of the product; of his outstanding debt of 1,477,406 mrs. he was

pardoned 130,000 mrs. on account of 200 undelivered quintals.'’ The date was then 1510; therefore this particular partnership, which was probably among the most productive of orchil, appears to have exported something approaching 5,000

quintals in nine years. The apparent figure of 650 mrs. per quintal evidently represents the value to Riberol — that is, the price in the Peninsula; on Tenerife in 1510, orchil fetched only 250 mrs. per quintal.'®

Riberol had a further agreement with Inés Peraza for 800 quintals of orchil yearly:'® this probably represented a near monopoly of the orchil of the seigneurial islands, since in November 1499 Alonso de Lugo denounced the agreement to the monarchs in his capacity as guardian of Dofia Inés’s grandchildren, asking that the orchil of Gomera be excluded from its

terms or at least that Riberol be obliged to pay the market price.*® By June 1505, however, we find that Lugo had made a new agreement of his own with Riberol, relating to the orchil of Hierro, though a dispute had brought this case, too, before the royal court.”! An example of how the relationship of monopolists with their farmers worked is provided by a record of 1510 of debts owed for orchil to Juan de Betancor (14,824 mrs.) and Juan de Plazencia

(8,000 mrs.): Gonzalo del Castillo, manager for Dona Teresa '7A,G.S. 28 March 1510, Madrid. 'SArch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 3, cuad. VIII, f. 55° (15 August). MA.G.S. | February 1500, Seville; 31 December 1499, Seville: complaint of Inés Peraza that she had sold Francisco de Riberol 4,000 quintals of orchil at 800 quintals a year plus a further 700 quintals, but their agreement had broken down (‘La dicha Ynes Peraza diz que non ha cumplido con el...e... porque se teme que los vendera, que los mandasemos secrestar’). 2°A.G.S. 9 November 1499, Granada. Lugo’s obligation to sell to Riberol derived legally from Inés Peraza’s grant of 1486 of the seigneury of Gomera to Hernan Peraza. At that time she reserved the orchil rights to herself. Lugo was stepfather to Hernan Peraza’s children by virtue of his marriage to their mother, Beatriz de Bobadilla. 71A.G.5. 12 June 1505, Segovia: complaint of Francisco de Riberol that Lugo had not fulfilled his agreement to sell the orchil of Hierro.

74 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

Enriquez, is named as debtor: it seems that the two creditors were contracted to him for wages and were perhaps ‘middle men’ who collected the orchil from the gatherers. Castillo had sold the yield to Cosme de Riberol, who agreed to take over the debt.”?

The Genoese were not the only large-scale investors in the dyestuffs. It appears that Francisco de Maldonado indulged in various speculations in orchil during his governorship of the islands, though his entrepreneurism was perhaps of a distant kind: in the first place, he imposed an illegal tax of 70 mrs. per quintal, the proceeds of which were sequestered during the judicial investigation of his conduct in office;”? he also took part

in the trade directly, to judge from the complaints of [bone Darmas, who had handled some orchil for him in 1493 and was not paid his share.”* Wood was a commodity analogous to orchil in that it occurred naturally, but was very under-exploited until the coming of

the Spaniards — and with them the French and Portuguese woodcutters. Though today the ancient forests of the islands have disappeared, except on La Palma, they must then have covered the mountainous interiors. The sugar refineries, however, greedy for wood for construction and fuel, soon conjured up the fear of over-exploitation. The island council of Tenerife, thinking perhaps of the example of Madeira, devoted as much time to the discussion of the dangers of deforestation as to any single problem of the colony between 1499 and 1517. Until 1502 the pitch-makers appear as the principal enemy of the forests; thereafter the constructors of mills, indicating perhaps an increase in the latter activity rather than a fall in the former. At first the council contented itself with prohibiting the export of wood — though some did go out, ironically, to Madeira.”” But from 1507 zones were apportioned around the nuclei of population where logging was forbidden under pain ofa large fine for the propios or public chest.”° 22 Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 3, cuad. XI, f 303 (dated 18 July), transcribed below,

pp. 214-15. 234.G.S. 3 December 1493, Zaragoza, f. 115 (Cat. X/T/, x, no. 3098). 4Ibid., 24 January 1494, Valladolid, f. 81 (Cat. XI//, xi, no. 45). *5Gonzalez Yanes, ‘Importacion y exportaci6n’, pp. 78—80.

FRC, iv. 158. On Gran Canaria we know that woodcutting was forbidden in Galdar.

THE AGRONOMY 79 The protection of the council’s regulations had also to come

into force for the conservation of cereals, especially wheat. Although cereals had traditionally been cultivated by thenatives as fodder for their goats and as a subsistence food'which they served powdered, toasted, and mixed with milk or water,”’ the enormously increased scale of cultivation after the conquest

made wheat an outstanding element of the new agronomy introduced by the settlers. Magalhaes Godinho and Serrao Serrano have shown that it was to cultivate wheat that the Portuguese first colonized Madeira and the Azores.”® It seems highly probable, though evidence is lacking, that cereal-raising was the main occupation of the earliest settlers of the Canaries, that is, the colonists who came with Béthencourt or were settled by his successors, chiefly in Fuerteventura and Lanzarote. Certainly, by the 1480s the seigneurs of those islands were able to

supply the conquerors of the royal islands with bread and, in particular, to relieve the famine of the conquistadores of Gran Canaria in 1482.79 Because of their aridity, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura were unsuitable for sugar: wheat therefore held its own there early in the period. The characteristic agricultural method of present-day Lanzarote — irrigating by dew formations in moulded soil of volcanic ash — was practised at about the same time, but in its present extent dates from the great volcanic eruption of the eighteenth century. Gomera, though not much colonized till very late in the fifteenth century, and more famous for the cheeses with which Columbus victualled there and which were still supplying trans-atlantic shipping with provender in the mid-sixteenth century,°*’ must also have produced wheat. Before 1499 a certain Gutierre de Ocana had migrated there from Gran Canaria 27). Alvarez Delgado, ‘La alimentacién indigena en Canarias’, Sociedad Espaiiola de Antropologia, Etnografia y Prohistoria: Actas_y memorias, xxxi (Madrid, 1964). This dish,

known as gofio, is still eaten in the islands, as well as Cuba, Venezuela, and Argentina.

Tis makes it perhaps the only cultural legacy of the aboriginal Canarians to a wider 28 Serrao Serrano, ‘Le blé des iles atlantiques’, Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, ix (1954), 337-41. 9A.G.S. 8 June 1490, Seville, f. 36: ‘Juan Fernandez Crespo y Maria Fernandez, su

muger’, wished to export wheat from Fuerteventura to Gran Canaria eight years previously because of famine (‘que avia muy gran fambre’). °F, Morales Padron, El comercio canario-americano (Seville, 1955), pp. 319—26.

/6 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

and built a flour mill.** But the westerly climate of Gomera made it suitable for sugar, which Alonso de Lugo introduced in 1498; we can suppose that the familiar cycle of displacement by

sugar diminished wheat production there as elsewhere in the Atlantic. A royal letter of 1506 to Alonso de Lugo refers to his administration of the sugar and orchil interests of Gomera and Hierro without mentioning other products (though this may indicate only the limits of the seigneurial rights of Lugo’s stepchildren).** In the same year we read of two sugar-mills on

the island, rented from Lugo by Pedro Rodriguez, resident of Gran Canaria, for 1,100 arrobas (the arroba being equivalent to about twenty-five pounds’ weight) of sugar yearly.*? In 1509 a record occurs of the export of 150 _fanegas of fodder to Gomera

from ‘Tenerife, shipped by the Flemish merchant, Jacques Casteleyn,** but it would be too rash to suppose that by then cereal production had so far declined on the island that Gomera was no longer generally self-supporting.

The higher rainfall and more varied topography of Gran Canaria, with its consequent profusion of seasonal waterways, made it, too, more suitable for sugar and less so for wheat than

the easternmost islands; and although there were cereals planted in Puerto de las Galgas, Guia, and Galdar, and a flour-mill in the last-named place early in the sixteenth century,**? Gran Canaria continued to suffer from an endemic

shortage of bread. In 1503, there was actually an illicit shipment from Sanlicar de Barrameda at a time of scarcity in Spain.*° Twice in 1502 the island council received royal permis-

sion to import wheat from the other islands, notwithstanding shortages there;*’ the following year the monarchs ordered, at the request of the people of Gran Canaria, that foreign sugarStA.G.S. 3] October 1499, Granada. 21 bid., 30 July 1506, Valladolid. 31 bid., 12 September 1509, Burgos.

FRC, vii, 114. Arch, Prov. Las Palmas, legs. 733, ff. 163 (D. Andrés Martinez, canon, Archdeacon of Tenerife, acting for Juan Lopez, vecino, lets 10 fans. to Andrés de Castellanos,

P. de las Galgas, December 1515), 194 (the same, 18 fans. to Alonso de Varea, November 1516); 2316, ff. 118° (Alonso Lopez, vecino ‘se obliga a guardar panes’, January 1514), 9 (Fernando Jaimez, vecino, and Juan Lorenzo, portugues, ‘sementera de trigo y cebada a partido’, December 1509). 36A..G.S. 15 November 1505, Salamanca, f. 393. "I bid., 2 April 1502, Alcala; 23 December, Alcala.

THE AGRONOMY 77 mill-owners should import as much corn as was consumed by their employees.*® These quantities could be formidable: in 1506 Crist6bal Daponte thought it prudent to obtain special permission from the island council of Tenerife to purchase 200 fanegas of corn and 250 of fodder for the provision of his workforce, giving assurances that none of this was to be exported.*” Evidently it was emphasis on sugar that excluded wheat from a major role in the economy of Gran Canaria. What the concejo of that island told the monarchs in 1513 remained true throughout

the period: ‘in the island of Gran Canaria, very little wheat is harvested, compared with what is needed for the provision and maintenance of the residents and settlers (vegznos e moradores) on

account of the fact that most of the land is under sugar cultivation and because of the many rabbits on the said island’.*° The petition went on to request leave to import corn from Tenerife

and La Palma at controlled prices. But the very fact that regulations which it was necessary to circumvent existed on the other islands is an indication that their own grain supplies were limited. Wheat was widely grown on Tenerife, especially in Tegueste and ‘Tacoronte, and to a lesser extent around Orotava and La Laguna, but high prices caused sporadic attempts at control by

the island council. In 1499, for instance, the price of baked bread was fixed at two mrs. for ten ounces; merchants were forbidden to buy bread except for their own consumption in an effort to cut out middle men from the trade, but it appears that they could still accept larger quantities of grain in settlement from their debtors.*' It is perhaps surprising, in the light of these controls, that there is no evidence in the Canaries of the

system of public warehousing of grain which Ibarra y Rodriguez has described for Andalusia at that time.* In 1502, when shortage was general and immigration into Tenerife was increasing, wheat exports from the island were banned,* al**Ibid., 6 April 1503, Alcala.

ERC, iv. 120. *°A.G.S. 29 May 1513, Valladolid. The interesting reference to rabbits is corroborated by G. Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdés, Historia general y natural de las Indias, ed.

J. Pérez de Tudela (Madrid, 1959), ii. 38 (XII, 9), and in Bernaldez, Memorias, p. 145. “1 FRC, iv. 47, 58. “*E. Ibarra y Rodriguez, El problema cerealista en Espana (Seville, 1944). 43FRC, iv. 48.

78 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

though Alonso de Lugo guiltily shipped 300 fanegas to his wife,

Dona Beatriz de Bobadilla, in Gomera. Perhaps not daring to address Lugo directly, the regidores or island councillors of Tenerife protested to La Bobadilla that ‘as she well knew’ there

was ‘great scarcity of bread and much hunger both for the

residents of the said island of Tenerife and for the newcomers and outsiders that are arriving and the hunger worsens daily’ .**

In 1506, the prohibition of wheat exports was renewed not because bread was scarce on the island but because the councillors feared the consequences of the famine that afflicted Spain that year; yet they fixed the price at 200 mrs. per fanega ‘as well for this island as for export’ (‘agora sea para esta ysla como para sacar’),*° perhaps looking forward to a time when the prohibition could be lifted. In fact, Alonso de Lugo again ignored the

regulations and sent 650 fanegas to Castile in September; a majority of the island council refused to intervene ‘because the lord Adelantado [Alonso de Lugo] ordered it in his capacity as

chief representative of the crown’ (‘como Justicia Mayor’). The fact that wheat was even scarcer on the Barbary coast made the practice of illegal exports of grain for sale to the African Moors a regular source of lucre for the smugglers and of

protests from the people. This was part of a wider and more dangerous contraband trade: as the monarchs commented in 1511 in instructions to Lope de Sosa, ‘Many persons have removed bread, wheat, fodder, livestock, weapons and other supplies to take to Moorish country or to Portugal.’*” It is consistent with what we know of the characters of Alonso and Pedro de Lugo that they should have been the principal offenders. ‘Tenerife, therefore, in most years appears to have had a precarious and jealously guarded surplus of grain. It is interest-

ing that by this time the encroachments of sugar had reduced

Madeira to a state of permanent shortage of wheat:** in February 1508 we find the record in Tenerife of a ship’s master who trafficked between Santa Cruz and Madeira in corn, fodder,

and empty pipes.* | “*Tbid., 53. ‘ST bid., 95, 105, 107.

**Ibid., 116. 7A.G.S. 7 December 1511. “*Serrao Serrano, ‘Le blé des iles atlantiques’, p. 340.

“Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 181, f. 259°. One wonders whether the pipes were to be

THE AGRONOMY 19 Wheat provided not only the staple foodstuff of the colonies, but also employment for much of the population, especially the independent farmers of middling means, the holders of land but

not of substantial amounts of water for irrigation. Yet, as already shown, despite exports to Castile in times of famine there, or the small, underhand trade with Barbary, after the conquest

of the royal islands the grain of the Canaries was almost all consumed within the archipelago. In short, it fed the great sugar industries of Gran Canaria, Tenerife, and, to a lesser extent, La Palma and Gomera. For even when grain was scarce,

sugar was always a more profitable business — high capital outlays notwithstanding. By the late fifteenth century, it was already true, as Fernandez de Oviedo later put it, that sugar farming was a most profitable business (‘aquesto del azicar es uno [sic.] de las mas ricas grangerias que en alguna provincia 0 reino del mundo puede haber’).*° Batista de Riberol thought it worth halfa million maravedis to set his canes in the soil of Gran Canaria in 1501.°' Alonso de Lugo was able to pledge 120,000

mrs. a year from three of his sugar estates in Tenerife and La Palma to the church he proposed to dedicate to St. Michael,

who had (as he professed to believe) fought the Guanches (natives) at his side.*?

The growing demand for sugar in fifteenth-century Europe

is shown by its increased cultivation in the Levant, the Mediterranean islands, and the Algarve, and instanced by the record of conspicuous consumption of sugar in, to take a perti-

nent example, the household accounts of Isabella the :

Catholic.*? Madeira, where the crop was introduced in the mid-century and seen by Ca da Mosto, rapidly became the

unloaded at their destination or filled with a Madeiran export. A document appended to G. Camacho y Pérez-Galdos, ‘Cultivo de cereales, vina y huerta en Gran Canaria, 1510-27’, AEA, xii (1966), 278, shows that Madeiran wines were imported into Gran Canaria in 1522. °F storia general y natural de las Indias, i, 106 (1V, 8); cf. Mauro’s figures (Le Portugal et

l’Atlantique, pp. 217-19) suggesting only a 2% profit margin in the Brazilian industry at the end of the 16th century. Yet in Bacon’s Of Riches the Canarian sugar industry is selected as the exemplar of ‘a wonderful overgrowth in riches’. 9IA.G.S. 24 February 1502, Seville. **Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 181, f. 561: ‘frente a las casas de su morada’, the church can still be seen in La Laguna, duly opposite the convent which occupies the site of Lugo’s house; but it is today a humble and ill-kept oratory. *3 Cuentas de Gonzalo de Baeza, ed. A. and E. A. de la Torre (Madrid, 1955).

80 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

principal producer,” followed later by Sao Thomé and Brazil.» But in the last years of the fifteenth century and throughout the

remainder of the period, the Canaries were a considerable source of supply. If the statement of the anonymous Canarian chronicle is to be trusted, the crop was introduced during the conquest by Pedro

de Vera from Madeira.*® But its successful exploitation depended on the erection of refineries. The industry began to grow in earnest in 1484 when Alonso de Lugo erected the first sugar-

mill in the islands at Agaete in western Gran Canaria.*’ His colleague, Lope Fernandez, soon emulated him at Guia: both

mills were sold in 1494 to raise money for the conquest of Tenerife. By 1497 sugar cultivation had reached such proportions that Bernaldez could call the island ‘a land of many canes’.°* Lugo was also responsible for introducing sugar to his

conquests of La Palma and Tenerife, and when Gomera came

| to him by marriage, he sowed sugar and built a mill there too. On Tenerife he had two refineries at El Realejo, a third at Daute, and a fourth at Icod. On La Palma he built another at Rio de los Sauces, which he later mortgaged to the English sugar-merchant [Thomas Malliard, and the Genoese Francesco Spinola.°? It was on land opposite this that the Welzer mill was erected after 1513, and the water to drive it shared between > Lugo and the Welzers. Generally Lugo was indefatigable in the promotion of the crop and the industry, making the land-grants in his gift conditional in many cases on the grantees’ planting canes or erecting a mill, where the grant was substantial or well-watered.® In 1502 he tried to exclude rival activities from the area of Taoro, which he designated for sugar production exclusively.®! And by dint of his land-grants the Orotava valley

and the coast adjoining it, north-west Tenerife (Icod, Daute, **Rau and Macedo, O agucar da Madeira. pp. 12-16. 55Mauro, Le Portugal et (Atlantique, pp. 183-201. S°FRC, i. 40.

°”T he prior claims of Pedro de Vera and Alonso Jaimez de Sotomayor, conquistadores of Gran Canaria, rest on tradition unsupported by evidence. Sce A. Rumeu de Armas, Puiraterias y ataques navales contra las Islas Canarias, i (Madrid, 1947), 276; E. Serra Rafols, Alonso Fernandez de Lugo (Santa Cruz, 1973), p. 14.

Bernaldez, Memorias, p. 136. °A.G.S. 31 March 1513, Medina del Campo.

Serra Rafols, ‘Las Datas en Tenerife’, p. 100.

“FRC, iv. 33.

THE AGRONOMY 8] Garachico), and Guimar in the east were effectively turned to the predominant cultivation and milling of sugar. The earliest surviving record of sugar exports from Tenerife

dates from 1506 — though by then the trade was probably

several years old — when, in September, the Lombard merchant Juan Jacome Carminatis, obtained the services of Pedro de Ortega, vecino of Seville, master of his ship San Cristobal, to take sixty cases of sugar from Giiimar, no doubt from the great estate of the brothers Romano, to Cadiz. The freight charge was 180 mrs. per case. It is impossible to estimate accurately the amount of sugar produced or exported in this period, owing to the incompleteness of the records, or even to say how many mills there were, but from the surviving evidence, at least fifteen mills can be counted on Tenerife down

to 1515 and as many on Gran Canaria, where records are sparser, to 1524. Camacho ingeniously calculates a production of 4,320 arrobas for a mill at Moya in Gran Canaria in 1514, basing his reckoning on the amount of transport required to carry the yield, but the figure is little better than a speculation.© Another, and equally uncertain method, would be to work from the fact that rentals for refineries are often expressed in terms of sugar, ranging from 500 to 1,000 arrobas yearly: this must have

represented well under half the total production for the mill, since the whole rent would be met from the lessee’s usual share of 50 per cent, the remaining half going to the production workers (see below, p. 85). One must then add a further allowance for costs. Bearing in mind the minimum number of mills at work in the Canaries, we may judge that total production in the islands cannot have lagged far behind — and may have surpas-

sed (indeed, greatly surpassed, if Camacho’s figure is representative) — that of Madeira, which can be reckoned to have produced 70,000 arrobas in 1508.% Among other indications of the scale of production, one might point to Alonso de Lugo’s pledge of the harvests of his properties in 1508 against a loan from Rafael Font of 2,265,360 mrs.® At that time, sugar was *Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 180, f. 114". °5G. Gamacho y Pérez-Galdés, ‘El cultivo de la cafa de azicar en Gran Canaria, 1510-25’, AEA, vii (1961), 35. “Mauro, Le Portugal et l’Atlantique, p. 184.

Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 181, f. 361.

82 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

worth 300 mrs. per arroba on Tenerife. Of course, Lugo’s total production may have exceeded the implied 7,550-odd arrobas, but the figure is in any case of doubtful usefulness, since it may be that more than one year’s crop was involved in the transaction with Font. In August 1508, in what must have been a quite separate deal, Lugo ordered the harvests from his Icod estate to be handed over in toto to Font until October 1510, but in this case, infuriatingly, where the time-factor is certain, we are given no inkling of the amount or value of sugar which was expected

to change hands in that term. The total of lesser debts and payments made or promised in sugar — many of them to Rafael | Font — in the surviving records of 1508 for Tenerife was

4,521,961 mrs. |

Table 10: Rafael Font’s loans to sugar producers (Tenerife 1508)

Debtor , Amount (mrs.) Gonzalo Rodriguez, jurado 113,737

Alonso de Lugo 1 841,422 1,409,578

Hernando del Hoyo 1,027,224 Diego de San Martin 18,000 112,000 Lope Fernandez

TOTAL 4,521,961 Source: Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 181, ff. 380, 475, 485, 487, 491, 493.

The larger sugar-mills could be extraordinarily sophisticated places, with accommodation provided for farmers who came to mill their canes or merchants who came to buy.®* Warehousing, of course, was also required. The actual refinery housed three

processes. The millstones beneath which the juices were extracted from the canes were, in a large majority of cases, worked

by water, though the horse-driven mill (trapiche) was by no °°The corresponding figure on Gran Canaria was 500 mrs.; yet when first introduced in 1497, the 300 mrs. figure in Tenerife seemed, if anything, too high for the market. Merchants were able to buy futures partly for cash and partly for cloth, reckoning the cloth at above market value (A.G.S. 2 November 1499, Granada). 67Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 181, f. 664".

, 620) to the testimony of Martin Aleman in 1527 (Inquisition MS CXXVI-

THE AGRONOMY 83 means unknown in the Canaries, especially in Gran Canaria. Then the extracted liquid was collected in vats to be ‘purged’ of impurities by straining and boiling before being allowed to crystallize. Among surviving contracts for this type of work are

two from the mill of Fernando de Santa Gadea on Gran Canaria. In December 1513 two workers promised their services during the harvest season of the coming year, producing nine vats full of molasses daily, for 1,800 mrs. per month and their keep.®? For the corresponding period of the year 1517,

‘Miguel Moros portugues’ undertook to do the same work and more ‘provided he is given two Negroes to do the boiling and one to carry the liquid’.” Finally, the dross of espumas which rose to the surface during boiling could be further refined to make inferior syrup known as remieles.”* In November 1513, for

instance, a certain ‘Anthon portugues’ obtained a job at Fernando de Santa Gadea’s mill on Gran Canaria processing this dross (‘para que tiemple todas las espumas que se produzcan en el ingenio durante un ano’) ‘as is done at the mill of Cosme de Riberol’.’* He would have bread, meat, fish, a jug of wine, and an arroba of sugar daily for his trouble. A full complement of staff for all the processes would include a master (maestro

de azucar), miller (moledor), refiner (purgador), assistants (almocreves), a second refiner (despurgador), and slaves, such as

were listed at the refinery of the brothers Romano at Giimar.” In 1535 Crist6bal Garcia del Castillo, at his mill in Galdar, the biggest on Gran Canaria, had twenty-three slaves, twenty of them black.’* Corresponding to each of the three processes, Alonso de Lugo’s mills at El Realejo included casas de prensas, casas de purgar, and casas de mieles, as well as the lodgings neces-

sary for the accommodation of commercial callers.” These structures required large amounts of capital to build and run. Although the cost of labour in erecting a mill might be 6 Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 2316, f. 106°.

Tbid., f. 152", ™’The most nearly contemporary descriptions of the refining process are those of Thomas Nichols for Tenerife in the 1550s (A Pleasant Description of the Fortunate Ilandes)

and Constantine’s history for fifteenth-century Madeira, quoted by D. Giofré, ‘Le relazioni’, 457. ?Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 2316, f. 84". Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 2, f. 10. ™Millares MS, I. 1; Camacho, ‘EI cultivo de la cana’, p. |. *G. Camacho y Pérez-Galdés, La hacienda de los principes (La Laguna, 1943), p. 39.

84 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

restricted to 30,500 mrs.,’° materials could add up to a consider-

able sum. Fifty dozen planks for repairs to his mill cost Fernando de Santa Gadea eight and a half reales per dozen and two doblas de oro in January 1514.”’ When the refinery was built,

further expenditure was needed to stoke the fires of the purging

rooms. A contract of 1508 survives in which Diego Sardina ordered 4,000 loads of wood for a mill in Tasautejo at four mrs.

per load. The Bachiller de la Coba was at pains to ensure his firewood supplies for 1515, placing separate orders for the cutting and carrying of at least 500 loads, amounting to his full

requirements.” |

The fields of sugar required considerable labour resources too, although their demands were small compared with those of the mills. In preparation for the harvest of 1506 in the Guimar property, Juan Felipe Romano hired twenty workmen (‘veinte peones al tiempo de la cosecha’) under the foremanship of one

‘Alvarianes portugues’, who was to receive 11,000 mrs., perhaps for the workmen’s pay. Their sustenance was to be on

the same scale as that of other sugar-workers (‘los otros canavereros’) — suggesting that they were not the whole of the specially recruited force — and included wheat and oil as well as 8 per cent of the sugar harvested (‘ocho cahizes de trigo con mas ocho arrobas de azeyte y de cada cient arrobas de azucar ocho arrobas’).’? Some details of the kind of work entailed are to be found ina contract from Las Palmas of March 1512, whereby Pedro de Jaén employed one Cristébal de Alcala to plant with sugar his irrigated land in el Airaza (not far from the supposed

site of the tower defended by the legendary Diego de Silva, Portuguese would-be conqueror of the island of some fifty years before). Alcala undertook to ‘irrigate, weed, dig, clear, exterminate the rats... and do all the other menial tasks needful (faenas necesarias) for the said job’. His employer was to provide all the water and tools, and the husbandman was to receive 9 per cent

of the yield, 2,000 mrs. for expenses, and ‘una suerte de lo 764 Diaz Castro, ‘El trabajo libre y asalariado en Tenerife’, RHC, xix (1953), 121. 77Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 2316, f. 114. For values of monies of account, see below, p. 153. 78Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 733, ff. 97, 99. 79Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 1, f. 473. An arroba of oil was reckoned at about | ,000 cubic inches, a cahiz of corn at about a hundredweight.

THE AGRONOMY 85 curado’ for himself.8° The rate for this temporary labour compares favourably with that earned by the canavereros who did the planting and tended the canes on a regular basis: 1t was normal

for the proprietor to admit them to a partido, that is, a share of the yield rather than wages, normally of 50 per cent to be shared among the workers and the remaining half for the owner, out of

which the expenses would be met. An estate large enough to have a mill of its own might employ fifteen to twenty canavereros.®! This method of farming is evidently very remote from the plantation economy which later became characteristic of so

many European colonies overseas, with their large forces of slave labour. ‘he Canarian system evokes far more the methods of the Old World, and the equal sharing of the produce between

owner and workers is most akin to the farming a mezzadria, which developed in late medieval northern Italy and in some parts 1s still practised today. After the work of planting and tending remained the problem of transporting the harvested canes to the mill. Four contracts have survived for this kind of work, dating from 1513 and 1514,

showing that it was a costly business for the proprietors — though, as usual, Cosme de Riberol obtained the best deal, paying for his carters’ services in wheat, while his fellow Genoese, Agustin de Chavega and Fernando de Santa Gadea, had to pay cash.*?

| In view of all these charges on the proprietors, it 1s not surprising that milling charges at refineries could be swingeing. In the early years of the industry, mill-owners appear to have levied a charge of 50 per cent on the produce brought to them

for processing. According to a petition of the people of Gran Canaria addressed to the monarchs before February 1497, at the time of the introduction of sugar, it was ‘agreed and drawn *Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 23167, f. 47; cf. Gamacho, ‘E] cultivo de la cana, pp. 61—4 for another contract (1522) in similar terms. S1Cf. the Relacién of Dr Beltran on points of good government in the Antilles, attributed to the year 1512 in Coleccion de documentos inéditos del Archivo de Indias, xxxiv

(1880), 145: ‘ . . . [que] los labradores thengan las canas e partan con el Senor del Ynxenio el azicar por medio, como se face en Canarias, e desta manera cada ynxenio therna quince o veinte christianos labradores por lo menos’. *Riberol (30 November 1513, El Palmital), Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 23167, f. 91°.; Santa Gadea (20 November 1513), ibid., f. 86°; Chavega (July 1514), ibid., leg. 733, ff. 110, 115 (also El Palmital).

86 THE CANARY [ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

up with the community of that said island’ that the mill-owners

for “carting, carrying, milling and purifying the said sugar’ should take half the product for themselves; ‘and now recently

the merchants and owners of mills do not want to process the | said canes if they are not given all they demand’.® It is, at first sight, curious that apiculture should have thrived

alongside such an extensive sugar industry: yet bees were valued, more no doubt for wax than honey; in the sixteenth century, to materialize candles for her own use was among the

favourite miracles of the Virgin of Candelaria, the islands’ patroness.** Beehives are mentioned as early as October 1485, | in the will of Bishop Juan de Frias, as being among his effects. In

December 1506 we find a partnership between Juan Méndez and Juan Alberca, ‘trabajador’, for beekeeping in the malpais or

wasteland of Icod, and in October of that year Gonzalo Rodriguez de Salamanca is recorded as keeping bees on the mountain behind El Realejo.** In January 1509, ‘Rodrigo colmenero’ sold a formidable beekeeping establishment 1n a similar location ‘on the mountain of Guimar’ for 5,000 mrs. It included seventy-seven stocked hives plus a further number into which bees had not yet been introduced, and a dwelling on the site.*® Thereafter the mentions of bees in records are prolific

throughout the period, but these early examples indicate the reason for the popularity of apiculture: it was an activity which was possible in bad and mountainous country, of which the Canaries had a great deal to offer or inflict on the settlers. It is not clear whether bees existed wild in the islands before the arrival of Europeans or were brought by them — in other words, whether the bees were cause or effect of the colonists’ apicultural interests. By 1513 the council of Tenerife was charg-

ing dues on the profits of wild bees — or rather, had the monopoly of them which it farmed out for cash; but these might have reverted to savagery after the introduction of the species.*’

It appears that wax and honey, like sugar, could be used to 83A.G.S. 20 February 1497, Burgos, f. 208. **Espinosa, Origen_y milagros, pp. 34-7 (II, 10). 85Arch. Prov. Tenerife, legs. 180, f. 233; 2, f. 289". 8 FRC, vii. 115-16.

87Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 606, cuad. XXIII, f. 1004 (3 February). Wax was recorded on the islands as early as 1393. B. Bonnet, ‘Las expediciones a Canarias en el s. XIV’, Revista de Indias, v (1945), 386.

THE AGRONOMY 8/7 ' make payments, barter,or discharge debts: in November 1506, for instance, Bartolomé Alonso and Diego Martin elected so to pay a debt of 10,000 mrs. It is not easy to assess the economic importance of beekeeping: it probably remained a literally marginal activity, relegated to the infertile hinterlands of the settled areas. It was not thus with horticulture, which was practised on varying scales by

almost all property-owners among the settlers, and was especially intensive in and around the inchoate urban centres of La Laguna and Orotava in Tenerife and Las Palmas, Guia and Galdar in Gran Canaria. The commercial garden or huerta

was — and remains — as important an institution of life in Andalusia as the garden in England, ever since the Arabs introduced it in the eighth century. But unlike its English counterpart its object was production, not recreation; the cultivation of a wide variety of remunerative crops, chiefly fruit, condiments, and vegetables. It 1s not surprising that the Auerta should have been transplanted to the Ganaries at an early stage of the colonization in view of the Andalusian provenance of so many settlers. A few examples should suffice to illustrate the character of Canarian horticulture in the period. ‘The question

is inseparable from that of the origins of viticulture in the islands, since some of the earliest examples of the cultivation of grapes occur in records of gardens, in which the grapes formed one of a number of crops. It therefore appears that the vine was introduced by way of the Auerta and then became transferred to

vineyards once it had proved successful on a small scale. In October 1508, for instance, Pedro de Vergara, alguacil mayor (one of the governor’s judicial deputies) of Tenerife, rented out three plots of vines (‘tres pedacos de vina y parral’) in Sauzalejo

(T'acoronte) for three years; the rent was to be partlyincash— 8,000 mrs. yearly — and partly in produce: 100 large melons and six boxes of grapes.*? The lessee, Francisco de Mérida, was

obliged to plant 100 fig and quince trees, saffron, chives, and ‘malvasia’, showing that this name was already given to the grape of Tenerife. An Auerta of La Laguna, which changed hands between two Portuguese residents that same month, was five fanegadas in extent and had its own water-supply: this was 88Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 181, f. 434. *°Ibid., leg. 181, f. 11.

88 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

sufficient for the cultivation of 200 apricot, quince, and lemon trees (‘para labrar y hacer una huerta de CC arboles’).”° Pedro

de Lugo had a garden and small vineyard in La Laguna, adjoining his house, for which in March 1510 he ordered the planting of muscatels, pears, and 200 quince trees; he also directed that figs should replace his sugar canes. It was not unusual for the less well-to-do settlers to supplement their income by growing a patch of canes in their huertas, but evidently the younger Lugo felt no need to do so.”! Some huertas included vegetables. An instance occurs in October 1510 of

‘legumbres’ in association with fruit-trees and vines in a watered plot in the valley of ‘Agare’ (a locality I have been unable to identify) in the old menceyate of Anaga, owned by Diego Maldonado, member (contino) of the royal household.”

Despite the relative paucity of surviving evidence on Gran Canaria, examples of the combination of huerta with vines can be multiplied from there. In 1509, for instance, such a combination could be rented in Galdar, adjoining the town on one

side and the seasonal waterway (barranco) on the other, for thirty-eight arrobas of wine annually.”* An interesting example

dates from December 1513, when a certain Gonzalo Gallego took a nine years’ lease at 1,000 mrs. per year on the ‘huerta y parral’ of the church of Santa Maria de Guia (‘de la iglesia junto

a ella’). The lease was at the disposal of the treasurer of the municipality of Guia — which may mean that the church garden was a municipal enterprise.” To the variety of produce identifiable from the examples looked at so far, one suspects that palm-trees and their products should be added: the toponymy of the Canaries features palms in profusion — La Palma, Las Palmas, El Palmar (Daute), El

Palmital (northern Gran Canaria) — and it would be odd if they were altogether unexploited commercially. Curiously enough, they appear to go unmentioned in the notarial archives of the period, but we can be certain of their economic value from a royal command of 1503 to Alonso de Escudero, who at that *Ibid., leg. 184, f. 150°. 11bid., leg. 186, f. 587. *21Ibid., leg. 3, cuad. VI, f. 413°. Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 2316, f. 16°. "*Ibid., f. 91",

THE AGRONOMY 89 time governed Gran Canaria, to hold an investigation of the exploitation of palm-trees on that island and in particular to inquire into why one particular tree had been burnt, provoking, no doubt, a complaint to the monarchs.?> Presumably the contribution of palm-trees to the economy was too small for them to intrude to a greater extent upon the records.

Although the early Auertas included vines, it was not long before the vines encroached on the space allotted to other crops,

or were planted on a large scale in their own right. Like the sugar industry, though to a smaller extent, that of wine enjoyed the patronage of Alonso de Lugo, who no doubt realized that such an essential commodity ought to be locally produced. In his distributions of land on Tenerife, he enjoined many grantees to devote their lands to the cultivation of vines. The small-scale,

urban character of the early viticulture, analogous to the characteristics of the Auertas and representing the first phase of

development of the wine industry, can be discerned in many examples: the terminology frequently used to describe holdings in vines —~ “‘majuelos con cepas’, small, new units with newly-

planted vines that were not yielding as yet — captures the inchoate nature of this sector of the agronomy. Alonso de Lugo himself planted with vines one side of the square he began to lay out to be the centre of La Laguna, alongside the oratory of St. Michael, which he had endowed from the profits of his sugar estates. And in August 1512 the island councillor Hernando de

Llerena bought a house and small adjoining vineyard on the edge of La Laguna, by the common grazing land, for 26,000 mrs.’° By that time, however, wine was already an important product, and grapes were cultivated in much larger units. The vineyard of a total 11,000 vines which Baltasar Vaez contracted to plant for Bartolomé de Jaén in April 1510, ‘en esta laguna’, beside the latter’s substantial huerta, was a more representative indication of the future development of the crop.*” The technical problems of planting and tending the vines, the

work involved, the labour requirements, costs, and means by which they could be met, are well illustrated from a contract of 1509 for the husbandry of one of Alonso Bello’s vineyards — °A.G.S. 4 July 1503, Alcala, f. 13. °°From one Alonso Pérez (Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 187, f. 26). °TFRC, vii. 354.

90 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

whose fortune in wine and corn on Tenerife has already been mentioned. Before the notary Hernan Guerra in La Laguna on 20 September 1509, Bello leased to Anton Rodriguez and Juan Martinez his tended vines in El Sauzal (Tacoronte), together

with some unplanted land, the whole being fenced in. The property stretched from the stream to the sea and adjoined lands owned by Alonso de Lugo. Possession would be transferred on | October, and the lease would last for two years. Bello was to provide all that was needed for good husbandry: a mule or similar beast of burden (‘bestia asnal’) throughout the dura-

tion of the lease and a second such towards harvest time

(‘cuando empiecen a madurar las uvas y otras frutas 0 simientes que hubiere sembrado’), oxen and carts at the conclusion of the harvest in order to bring wood from the mountains to shore up the vines, spades, pruning-knives, a mattock and picks, a dwel-

ling on the site, and the water permitted by local irrigation arrangements (‘el agua que corresponde a esta tierra por sus dulas para regar’). The lessees promised to turn the soil, prune,

hoe, ‘and perform all necessary tasks’ and to plant two new plots with vines. Towards harvest, Bello would build a path to give them access to the public highway. The rent was 30,000 mrs. annually, payable in cash instalments as the crop was sold, or in the wine which it was anticipated would be made from the grapes.’* The last clause, perhaps was uncharacteristic; it was

more usual for the owner to admit the workers who were the nominal lessees to a partido, amounting to a half share of the proceeds of the crop, which the proprietor would make and market himself — the same arrangement as we have already seen at work in the context of the sugar industry. There is no evidence of large-scale viticulture on Gran Canaria; indeed, that island remained backward in wine production compared with ‘Tenerife, and its wines never acquired the reputation that Tenerife’s Malvasia enjoyed internationally in the sixteenth century.”? Icod, in western Tenerife, the wine-growing district par excellence of the islands in the next two centuries was already

called ‘de los vinos’ — an agnomen it still bears — as early as 1533.1°° The instances we have reviewed suggest that already in *8Ibid., p. 229. *°See A. de Lorenzo-Caceres, Malvasia y Falstaff (La Laguna, 1951). ' Datas Tenerife, 1344.

THE AGRONOMY 9] the first decade of settlement, Tenerife had a sound basis for the future prodigious development of its wines, which, following the

ereat expansion of the Brazilian sugar industry in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, replaced sugar as the mainstay

of the insular economy and held their dominant position thenceforth for 200 years.'°!

But in the period of immediate concern to this study, evidence is found time and again of the tensions in society caused by the predominance of sugar in the early colonial economy of the Canaries. The high capital outlay required to implant the sugar industry gave the Canaries from the earliest days a social group — the sugar-owners — distinguished not only by their wealth but also by the favour of the crown and its representatives and the control of the islands’ prosperity. The resentment

of ordinary people against the early governors’ land-grants (which tended to concentrate the best land in the hands of those wealthy enough to invest in sugar), against foreigners (a group

which overlapped in so many cases with that of sugar magnates), against the members of the island council (mostly wealthy settlers and usually the owners of sugar refineries), and against the owners of irrigation resources (see Chapter V), is intelligible only against this background. It is remarkable that as early as 1503 the popular institution of Gran Canaria conceived the plan of setting up a sugar-mill of its own, a communal sugar-mill of the petit peuple, to compete with those of the great

proprietors.’ But, once established, it remained a small and modest affair: the ordinary settlers did not generally have sufficient water or suitable land to grow the crop in large quantities, and so there was no escape from their secondary role. And the communal mill at Las Palmas was probably supplied from the canes grown a few at a time in gardens or from

sugar watered by the joint resources of the municipal community (the next chapter will examine the evidence of the existence of irrigation communities in the islands at this period), A further inescapable conclusion is that the example and "IV, Morales Lezcano, Sintesis de la historia econdmica de Canarias (Santa Cruz, 1966).

'A.G.S. 2 May 1503, Alcala (the Catholic Monarchs to Alonso de Escudero at the petition of the concejo of Gran Canaria to allot a site ‘para haser un yngenio de moler acucares que fuere para los propios de la dicha ysla’).

92 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

direct influence of Madeira had an important formative effect on the Canarian economy. Canarian sugar and wine had their immediate origins in Madeira. The structure of the economy — the cycle of wheat, sugar, and wine — in the Canaries was so similar to Madeira’s that it might have been copied from it. The

evidence already seen of the contribution of settlers from Madeira to the colonization of the Canaries suggests that the similarity was indeed the consequence of influence, and not merely the product of climatic and environmental similarities.

V

IRRIGATION | It has become a commonplace, especially in anthropological literature, that irrigation necessitates co-operative action. But the fabric of relations inherent in any system of water distribution must also have an implicit potential for disruption. !

The islands seem to have been better watered in the sixteenth century than they are today. Espinosa referred in the 1590s to ‘a large number’ of springs, streams and waterfalls in northern Tenerife; and the anonymous chronicler of the mid-century

said that there were more permanent waterways on Gran Canaria than all the other islands combined.” The deforestation that produced the pitch and stoked the sugar-mills, diminished

the rainfall of the western islands, so that today a stream that does not run dry in summer 3s a rare find anywhere in the archipelago. But water was never abundant. Lanzarote and Fuerteventura and the southern parts of Tenerife and Gran Canaria were always arid. The references in Tenerife’s Acuerdos

del Cabildo (Acts of the Island Council) and the documents of the Registro del Sello relating to Gran Canaria show how prob-

lems of irrigation and disputes over rights in and the use of water resources were a constant cause of preoccupation and contention in the period. Lack of rainfall was the only natural factor which limited the

growth of the colonies or the fruition of their crops; enough settlers had experience in irrigation for the needs of all of them

to be supplied; but precisely because water was scarce, its exploitation brought problems of its own. In some cases, where the right to use local water was in private hands, it divided the

jealous colonists like the distributaries of a stream, while in others, where its use was communal, it brought them together in tense but narrow co-operation. 'T. Glick, Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), p. 5. *Espinosa, Origen _y Milagros, p. 3. (1,2); FRC, ii. 26.

94 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

It 1s instructive to see how far setthements and waterways shared the same catchment areas. The settlers evidently chose places where precipitation was moderate, but the darrancos or seasonal streams were relatively broad and well supplied with

water. [hese part-time waterways seem to have been more reliable then than now, since some preserved the name of rios (which in the Castilian of the time always implied continuously flowing water) and one royal document makes particular mention of barrancos which were periodically dry’: this implies that some, at least, always contained water. On Tenerife, the settlers

drew above all on those streams that flowed north from the Sierra de Orotava and the adjoining ranges; on Gran Canaria from a semi-circle of darrancos in the north and north-east, two of

which, Los Tilos and Guia, still bear water almost continuously. On La Palma, the ‘rivers’ of Tazacorte and Los Sauces were the most important sources. As well as the barrancos, the

colonist exploited springs — underground or largely underground waterways — which are particularly plentiful in La Palma; there the great central depression — mysterious in Canarian geomorphology — of La Caldera presented ideal conditions for the complementary use of both kinds of source, for springs are abundant and the Barranco de las Angustias frequently flowing. Little or no use seems to have been made of wells, though two documents survive on Tenerife which refer to a device which is either a pump or something like an Archimedes’

screw, powered by a horse — a chestnut horse as the conveyance tells us — and employing ropes and wheels.* Lastly, there were occasionally serviceable ponds (/agunetas)? and the more substantial concentration in the level ground around La Laguna which gave that city its name, but which is now dry and covered with villas.

Water was required not only for irrigation but also for domestic consumption and power to drive the sugar-mills. Not surprisingly, the three uses became rivals and cases of conflict arose. The most extraordinary instance occurred early in 19513, 3A.G.S8. 13 April 1513, Mojados: merced to Lope de Sosa of the royal share (two thirds) of ‘el manantial el Juncal en el heredamiento de Arucas’ (N.E. Gran Canaria), which was ‘dry at times’ and unexploited. *FRC, vii. 233-4, 363-4. >Datas Tenerife, 442, 1261.

IRRIGATION 95 when the notorious Luis de Armas, whose personal history will be discussed later, proposed to divert the drinking-water of Las

Palmas.® It was frequent, however, from 1504 onwards for bestowals of water to be made conditional on the maintenance or establishment of a use-right for consumption. No doubt this is another reflection of the increased rate of immigration discernible in Tenerife after about 1502; the owners of springs and streams were often required to allow livestock access to their water, and sometimes to provide cattle-troughs and, indeed, access-roads.’ Even settlers as highly favoured in the land-distribution as Bartolomé Benitez, Alonso de Lugo’s nephew, and don Fernando Guanarteme were so encumbered. Occasionally the needs of human consumption were expressly provided for. In 1505 one of Alonso de Lugo’s grants specified

that the spring of Erjos (in north-western Tenerife) was bestowed upon the recipient on condition that it remain available to settlers — ‘con tal que dexeis libre entrada para la dicha fuente, por donde se puedan servir los otros vecinos que alli

fueren a poblar’;* a stream which contributed to the watersupply of La Laguna was given in 1507 to one Hernando Lorenzo, provided he made no attempt to dam it above the point at which it ceased to serve the city, where apparently its course went underground.’ On at least one occasion, water earmarked for consumption was designated ‘realenga’ — that is, under the direct lordship of the crown — even when it was in some sense granted to an individual.’® This is a problem which will come up again in connection with the juridical status of the sources of water. Cases of conflict were frequent between owners of mills which stood on a watercourse and tirrigators whose lands bordered it. In 1509, for instance, the owners of the great property of Firgas

in north-eastern Gran Canaria complained to the royal court that they were losing 30,000 arrobas of sugar a year because °A.G.S. 13 April 1513, Valladolid. Luis de Armas had contracted to provide winter

irrigation for wheatlands in Tafira and failed to do so; further, he had proposed diversion of water from Las Palmas to Tasautejo; Lope de Sosa was allegedly partial in

his investigation: complaint of the concejo of Gran Canaria. "Datas Tenerife, 264, 275, 317, 332, L111.

*Ibid., 61. *Ibid., 1274.

Tbid., 332.

96 THE GCANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

Tomas de Palenzuela had broken and diverted an open irrigation canal (‘una agequia muy antigua e muy buena’) on which they

had formerly depended in order to make a will ‘por hazer un ingenio’.'! ‘The positions of mill-owner and irrigator, as they appeared in Firgas, were reversed in a litigation of 1502 between two of the most powerful men on Tenerife, Francisco de Riberol, one of the financiers of Columbus, and Lope Sanchez de Valenzuela, Governor of Gran Canaria, who, in Riberol’s submission, had appropriated for irrigation ‘a water which, he says, belongs to himself and his partners .. . and with it he drives a sugar-mill which would be lost if the said water were taken from him’.'* Clearly, the same water could serve the needs of mill and fields alike, provided the mill concerned was located directly on the watercourse, so that no diversion of the stream was necessary, and was sited above the level at which the flow was syphoned off for irrigation. This, indeed, was the arrangement adopted by Alonso de Lugo from 1501 for his sugar lands and mills at El Realejo in northern Tenerife; his

irrigable land where the sugar was grown, occupied the Cercado Bajo, above which a sugar-mill stood on each of the barrancos that flowed through his land. Further up, on the ridges known as the Cercados Medio, Alto, and De Santa Lucia, were

lands adapted to dry farming, because the water could not be used for irrigation until it had passed through and powered the mills.'° Catalina Guerra, on the productive estate she inherited from her husband, Juan de Siberio, in Firgas in northern Gran Canaria, followed a similar plan, and it may be for this reason that she decided to move her sugar-mill in 1514, though the reason she expressed publicly was shortage of wood near the original site.'* The history of the same estate provides an instance of how water could sometimes be used for irrigation even when it ran above a sugar-mill: the original grant to ‘Bartolome trompeta’ of ‘un pedaco de tierra’ above Siberio’s projected mill

in 1485 stipulated that it could be irrigated when the mill was not In use (‘se ha de regar con el agua cuando no moliere el dicho Engenio’).’* Catalina Guerra subsequently managed to acquire most of the lands along the darranco before resiting the mill. NALG.S., 14 November 1509, Valladolid. = '?A.G.S. 15 February 1502, Seville.

'SCiamacho, La Hacienda, p. 28. 4ALG.S. 7 April 1514, Madrid. 'SMillares MS, vii. 10’.

IRRIGATION 97 Only a little can be said of the techniques by which the sparse

and often recondite waters were exploited for these purposes; but from the few surviving documents which illuminate this problem, it seems that the influence of Madeiran irrigation, both in techniques and personnel, predominated over that of the Spanish mainland. An exception was the custom or general rule of siting mills directly on natural waterways, whereas in Madeira it was not unusual to carry water to the sugar-mills by

narrow canal.'® In the Canaries the use of open channels (acequias) was chiefly to convey water from the barrancos to irrigable land. On Gran Canaria the only mill powered by canal was that of Tomas de Palenzuela, already referred to. The term canales was reserved for open channels within or apart from acequias and differing from them in being reinforced against _ seepage by pinewood walls and floors; or else it was applied to wholly enclosed tunnels bearing water from springs or passing beneath or over topographical obstacles. Contracts have survived both for the construction and repair of acequias, In that which Lope Fernandez, a stone-quarrier perhaps of Portuguese

birth, made for Pedro de Villeras in Tegueste, northern |

‘Tenerife, in 1508, all the water of two valleys was to be collected and conveyed to Villeras’s fields. ‘The channel was to carry up

to four spades’ depths of water and be two feet broad. Lope Fernandez would supply the necessary labour and tools and receive 4,000 maravedis in cash and goods for the job.'’ The repair of another acequia on Gran Canaria was undertaken in 1518 for Esteban de Riberol, of the powerful family of Genoese

settlers, by Juan Yanez, described in the contract as ‘gallego’ but possibly, to judge from his name, belonging to the Portuguese frontier zone; he contracted to line, clear, and widen the

duct that bore water to property at Tasautejo.'* The work would take a little over a month and cost twenty-four dodlas; lime

would be required, which Riberol was to provide. It seems that the object of this reform was to make a larger channel of greater capacity than previously; perhaps therefore the wooden canales '°Some mills were sited directly on streams towards the end of the 16th century as recorded by G. Frutuoso, As Saudades da Terra, ed. A. Rodrigues de Azevedo (Funchal, 1873), pp. 83, 91. MERC, vii. 214. '8Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 734, f.14".

98 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

were removed because it would be too expensive to extend them as required. Alternatively, the lime would be used to replace the canales with hard surfacing for the acequia. It seems to have been

the general rule that channels were lined either with lime compound (when available) or wood if no lime was to hand, as in the case of one of the new acequias ordered by the Licentiate Ortiz de Zarate for the Orotava Valley in 1506." ‘The uses of canales can be illustrated from other documents.

In June 1507 in La Laguna two Portuguese engineers, Juan Gonzalez and Juan Rodriguez (as the scribe renders their names), contracted with the vicar Alonso de Samarinas to dig underground channels sufficiently deep to go undamaged by grazing livestock.”° As well as being needed underground, canales

were required to overleap fissures in the land above which water had to pass. Their constructors had to bridge as well as burrow: the land granted by repartimiento in ‘Tenoya in 1489 to

Hernando de Prado had to be irrigated with water from the valley ‘passando el agua por canales por encima del dicho arroyo ae Tenoya’.”! The fact that the men responsible for these techniques were often Portuguese helps to create a presumption that irrigation

in the Canaries depended on the experience gained in the colonization of Madeira; because the topography of the mountainous interiors was comparable, similar methods sufficed. And the continuity which has been observed between Madeira and the Canaries in the Portuguese contribution to the sugar industry”? may well apply to the Portuguese engaged in irriga-

tion work as well. Though one would not wish to press an argument ex silentio, it is hard to see where else these engineers might have acquired their expertise. Apart from those already mentioned, the origins of the Juan Gutiérrez who appears as an

irrigation expert (‘maestre de sacar aguas’) in the protocols of

the scribe Sebastian Paez on Tenerife in 15067? cannot be

determined, nor those of ‘Pedro Dazpetia’ and Martin Sanchez,

carpenters, purveyors of pine canales to one Fernandianes,

MERC, vi. 129, |

20 Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 181, f. 700°. *1Mfillares MS, I. 24°.

22M1. L. Fabrellas, ‘Azdcar en Tenerife’, p. 470, shows that these men were Portuguese; for their Madeiran provenance see above, pp. 18-20 3 Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 178, f. 128".

IRRIGATION 99 whose name plainly suggests a Portuguese provenance, in 1512

or 1513;24 the names of Blas Ruiz and Pedro Albertos, who undertook to construct an estanco or small reservoir in February

1512, are not incompatible with Portuguese origin.”* Gil Alfonso or Afonso, who was employed to make the canales through which the drinking-water of La Laguna was conveyed in 1515,?° and Pero Gil, ‘acequiero’ of La Orotava in 1506, may equally well have been Portuguese.”’

It remains to consider the juridical status of the waters and irrigated lands and the effects on society of the exigencies of irrigation. Writers on Canarian irrigation law have divided the usufruct of the waters into two types, heredamientos and comuntdades.** There are said to be four points of distinction between

them. In the first place, heredamientos consist always in aguas alumbradas — waters, that is, the existence of which is already common knowledge before their status is assigned them in law

— whereas the communities which dispose of waters of the second type (comunidades) were and are generally formed to discover sources yet unknown. That is true, at least, of most of the communities formed since the eighteenth century, but is inadequate to explain the changes of status from heredamiento to

comunidad which some Canarian waters underwent with par-

icular frequency fi -y in thein1880s.*° Groups of settlers: lated ticular the S. roups of settlers. associate 4Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 188, f. 572’. 51bid., leg. 5, £41. 26 ERC, xiii. 131, 137.

*"Tbid., vi. 126. It is possible that Valencian techniques and personnel exercised an influence on the Canaries via Madeira. Valencians certainly worked in the Madeiran sugar industry (J.M. da Silva Marques, ed., Descrobrimentos portugueses, iii (Lisbon, 1971), 178). ‘The peculiar sense attached to the word ‘dula’ in the Canaries, where it meant a specific, agreed share in a communally exploited water-source, has affinities with eastern peninsular and Navarrese usages (Diccionario histérico de la lengua castellana

(Madrid, 1966—), see under ‘adula’). The Portuguese form ‘adua’ seems to have been used in a similar sense (information of Professor P.E. Russell). But the term ‘tornos de

agua’ was used with equivalent meaning in Madeira (Silva Marques, op.cit., iii. 392—4),

**J. Benitez Inglott, ‘Los heredamientos de aguas’, La Provincia (daily newspaper of Las Palmas), 10-12 June 1953; J. Hernandez Ramos, Las heredades de aguas de Gran Canaria

(Madrid, 1954); N. Diaz Saavedra, ‘La heredad de aguas de riego’, Revista del Foro Canario, iv (1955), 29 ff; M. Guimera Peraza, ‘Heredamientos de aguas de Canarias’, Anuarto de derecho civil, x (1957), and Régimen juridico de las aguas en Canarias (La Laguna, 1960), pp. 1-38; J.L. Pascual, ‘Heredamientos de aguas en el archipiélago canario’, Revista critica del derecho inmobiltario, xxxviii (1962).

°Guimera, Régimen juridico, pp. 29-32.

lOO THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

for the discovery of unexploited sources of water would have a

promiment part to play in the spread of settlement and the growth of the colonies: unhappily, however, there is no record of

such communities in the early sixteenth century. The second distinction is said to be that the waters of heredamientos are directly the private property of their exploiters, while members of comunidades dispose of their water, which remains in some sense public property, by virtue of their possession of the land through which it runs or which it is employed to irrigate; water whose usufruct is not linked to the surrounding land, but is discovered by a society previously formed for that purpose, is said to form a subordinate type of comunidad. Thirdly, it is claimed that there is a chronological distinction: in the earliest years of the colonies, in the opinion of all previous writers all waters 1n use formed heredamientos, whereas the comunidades are of more recent origin; and finally, the title to waters of heredamtentos

consists in a grant or repartimiento by the monarchs or their representative, whereas in a comunidad the title is the pact or contract of association between the discoverers or exploiters of the water. Perusal of contemporary documents suggests that all these distinctions save the last convey a misleading impression of the status in law of the waters the early colonists used. ‘The heredamientos of our period display in varying degrees all the characteristics of the later comunidades; even the grants of waters sometimes had a contractual element.

From the documents, it seems that the water-sources of the . islands in our period can be divided into four main types: there were some that individuals owned or of which they owned at least the usufruct by virtue of a land-grant, because the water concerned ran throughout its course through one man’s land or was exclusively devoted to its irrigation; others were private property in the same sense yet granted independently of any land their owners might hold; there were cases of joint ownership where the exploitation of the waters was unregulated by any communal institutions established among the proprietors; but there were also numerous sources of water exploited by turns by members of communities who perhaps owned their

use-rights severally rather than jointly, but had a corporate status in law, derived from the institutions by which their

IRRIGATION 10] relations among themselves and the problems arising from the use of the waters were adjusted. It seems beyond doubt, if the surviving documents are representative, that most of the waters used in our period were of

this last type. The large number of grants or conveyances of land ‘con su agua’ or ‘con el agua que le pertenece’ cannot be supposed to imply individual ownership of the first type mentioned above, especially as there are large numbers of such documents which relate to areas where we know the water to have been shared. It is more likely that the water mentioned in this kind of document is a dula or ‘share’ (as Canarian usage has it) in a communally exploited source. On Gran Canaria all the known holdings in water for irrigation purposes, except those of Batista de Riberol, who, between 1485 and 1508, accumulated exclusive rights in various waters*® and those of Luis de Armas and associates (to whose case we shall return below), were the

subject of dulas. We know this to have been the case with the waters of the Tenoya valley, including the great heredamtento of Firgas and the sugar lands of Arucas from the chance survival of the inquest on the division of the land and water in that area by Ortiz de Zarate in 1508.7! The waters of the barranco of ‘Anzofe’ (which I have been unable to locate) must have been divided in the same way, for in January 1514, one Juan de San Martin sold

Pedro Sanchez three pieces of land there with rights to three days’ flow of water in each irrigation cycle (‘con tres dias y tres

noches de agua del Barranco de Anzofe por sus dulas’).** A most important waterway of the same type, it seems, was the Barranco de Guiniguada, which flows through Las Palmas and watered the market-gardens of the capital. ‘The Sale of a dula of _ halfan hour there was recorded before the notary Diego de San Clemente in January 1516.*° The darranco of the second largest

settlement, Galdar, was also of this type, for a garden was rented there by Juan Alvarez in 1510 with the right to a share in

the irrigation cycle (‘para que la riegue con el agua que le pertenece por sus dulas’).** A similar contract for a vineyard in 30°F Morales Padroén, ‘Canarias en el Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla’, AFA, vit (1962), 176-203. 31Millares MS, I. 24°, 26°. 32Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 2316, f. 112°. 31bid., leg. 733, f. 13. 4Tbid., leg. 2316, f. 16°.

102. THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

the plain of San Francisco outside the city in February 1516 refers to ‘a half-hour’s water’ (‘media ora de agua’).*°

This evidence perhaps suggests that the residents (for all concerned in these transactions are described as vecinos) in the main settlements of Gran Canaria, as well as the cultivators of some purely rural areas, formed communities for the purposes

of irrigation. What their shares amounted to and how the communities were regulated is to some extent explained by records on Tenerife. It seems that the shares of the irrigators were calculated according to the amount of land they had to irrigate and expressed in ‘hours’ (Horas) or ‘spades’ depths’ (azadas). Ortiz de Zarate’s inquest on Tenerife supplies the information that ‘una hora natural es de doze horas’ (presumably meaning that an hour’s flow of water was reckoned as a twelfth ofa day’s),*° which no doubt explains references in some documents to day’s shares (dias) of communal waters. It may be

that, where shares were expressed in hours or days, irrigation was by turns, and where a quantitative measure — the azada — was used, the members of the community were free to irrigate at

the time which suited them; but there is a grant of Alonso de Lugo’s in which an azada 1s said to represent two days and two nights’ flow of water (‘dos dias e dos noches de agua’):”’ naturally

this would vary according to the amount and pressure of water available from place to place; yet it suggests the azadas and horas or dias may have been measurements fundamentally of one and the same type. The length of what might be called the irrigation

cycle — the time, that is, which elapsed between a single adulado’s successive turns — varied considerably. It seems, for

instance, from the contract for lands in Anzofe referred to above, that water was available to members of the community only once a year at the season of planting, though this could be modified at need — ‘si el primero del ano no bastase le dara otro

dia’. On the other hand, the cycle was much shorter in the well-watered Orotava valley on Tenerife, where Alonso de SIbid., leg. 733, f. 44°. 38°F RC, vi. 129. There were similar arrangements for the communal exploitations of water in Madeira, though there the ‘tornos de agoa’ were not agreed by the users but imposed by authority. Silva Marques, Descobrimentos portugueses, 111, 392—4, 663-4; V. Magalhaes Godinho, ed., Documentos sébre a expansao portuguesa, iii (Lisbon, 1945),

347-60.

37 Datas Tenerife, 581.

IRRIGATION 103 Lugo made land-grants stipulating that the dula should occur every twenty days or every two months;** Ortiz de Zarate, however, fixed the cycle at a medial forty days.*? A normative cycle of twenty days was also established in the Tenoya valley by Ortiz de Zarate, who in 1508 told the interested parties: the land of the said valley 1s very dry and overworked . .. At most it has to be irrigated once every twenty days and for shorter periods at a time, if the terms on which the water is shared will permit, because at the height of the summer, when need of the said lands is greatest, there 1s insufficient water for more than the said twenty-four allotments,”

these twenty-four ‘lots’ being the holdings in which the valley is divided. The amount and frequency of the dula were naturally a cause

of diagreements in insular society, and methods of regulation were soon introduced. There seems to have been no communal organization (or, at least, no internal institutions possessed of jurisdiction within the groups of irrigators who shared the same water-supply) until Ortiz de Zarate conducted his investigation into the division of the land and water of the islands in 1506-8. He ordered a record to be made and kept of the permitted levels of irrigation for each property in every district.*1 No such book has survived, but the record of Zarate’s work in the Orotava

valley, where conflicts were particularly acerbic (‘avia gran desconcierto en el agua de riego’) shows how he executed this part of his commission.** He began by arbitrarily fixing the dulas

of the available waters, and then appointed the local judicial officer, Pedro de Medina, with two citizens of the place, Lope Gallego and Bartolomé de Villanueva, to construct three new irrigation channels and supervise the apportionment of the dulas. The jurisdiction of these three nominees seems, however, to have been confined to the new channels. For the waters which had previously been available, Zarate accepted popularly elected officials; the first of these, Pero Gil, was styled repartidor de aguas, which certainly means that he supervised the apportionment of a dula, but it is impossible to say whether this function of his was confined to one group or community among

many in La Orotava or extended to the whole valley. He was

I bid., no. 707. SERC, vi. 138,

*°Millares MS, 1. 26. ERC, vi. 6. “Ibid. 126-39.

104 = THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

given the particular job of seeing that the water diverted by Zarate’s command from milling to irrigation was not tampered with. His colleagues by popular election, Bartolomé de Villa-

nueva, Alonso Galan, and Pedro de Escalona (this last had worked as a surveyor with the commission responsible for the first division of the land of Gran Canaria), formed a team with Villanueva as agent and the others as supervisors to determine by experiment (‘ensayo’) the optimum time-cycle to which the dula should be adjusted; they found that forty days was not an excessive period of time. No doubt it was to ensure a supply adequate for the operation of such a cycle that Zarate ordered the construction of new channels. This first general settlement of differences between sharers of irrigation facilities (adulados) was thus imposed from outside by a royal officiai, who, in turn, appointed his own local nominees. The adulados were consulted but the settlement did not yet take

the form of a contract between them. From 1507, however, records begin in Tenerife of full articles of association between irrigators united in their dependence upon dulas from the same

sources of water. Thenceforth, there can be no doubt of the place of irrigation communities in Canarian society. The statutes of two such bodies survive from this period — the first the community of irrigators of Aguamansa in the Orotava valley, subscribed in May 1507 by the governor and the insular councillors, and the second formed to exploit the waters of Anavingo (in the same area) in July 1509.*° These ordinances fix the dula

and time-cycle, and more importantly still, establish judicial machinery within the community in the form of alcaldes de aguas elected by the adulados, or appointed by the island council with

the community’s approval, to settle any differences that may arise, as well as to inspect and maintain the irrigation channels; they could impose fines for damage to the irrigation canals and could order the repartidores de aguas, who apparently had no judicial function but were only responsible for supervising the sharing of the water, not making adjustments in the duda. It is hard to believe that these communities were not more widespread than the two chance documentary survivals which relate “1. Peraza de .\yala, Las antiguas ordenanzas de Tenerife (Lia Laguna, 1935), p. 44; M. de Ossuna y van den Heede, El regionalismo en Cananas, i (Santa Cruz, 1904), 156; Guimera, Régimen jurtdico, pp. 10—11; Arch. Prov. Santa Cruz, leg. 2, £ 406 (30 June 1509).

IRRIGATION 105 to them show. The evidence we have for the existence of the dula must necessarily be evidence, too, of the existence of irrigation

communities; otherwise, we should have either to suppose that

the operation of the dula was left entirely unregulated amid fierce competition for water and a rapidly expanding population, or else assume alternative methods of regulation for which there is no evidence. There is a mention in a land-grant in the Orotava valley in 1508 of the ‘repartidor del agua que os dé la que os pertenece por su dula’**: this reference is readily intelligible in the context of an irrigation community, but would be hard to interpret in any other sense. Not far outside the limits of the period, in 1529, the municipality of Las Palmas established the same system of distributors and adjudicators (repartidores and alcaldes) for the administration of its irrigation supplies as

the rural communities enjoyed:* this accords well with the suggestion that, considered from one point of view, the impor-

tant townships on Gran Canaria constituted irrigation com-

munities. The remaining waters in their private character must next be

considered, together with the extent to which that character was modified by communal or public rights. In this connection the problem of irrigation was exacerbated by a conflict which affected every aspect of life in the royal islands in this period. This was between the policies of the monarchs or governors on

the one hand and, on the other, the aspirations of ordinary settlers at a low or middling social level represented by the concejos. The promotion of sugar production, which, jointly with the creation ofa characteristically European agronomy, was the

monarchs’ and governors’ dearest economic aim, required that water be concentrated at the disposal of the growers and millowners, who were often the same people and constituted an envied minority. What was perhaps worse, the monarchs, in their anxiety to encourage irrigation, allowed dry farmland to

be appropriated by the governors to the holders of water; finally, powerful companies, of which Luis de Armas’s was the chief, were allowed to take the ‘lost’ waters — a category it cost

much ink and not a little blood to define — to themselves. A chain of events which began with these policies led through 44 Datas Tenerife, | 104,

“*Millares MS, I. 101 ff; Guimera, Régimen juridico, pp. 117-21.

106 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

recriminations on the part of the vecenos and litigation by indi-

viduals and popular institutions to violence and at last to

murder. The type of water most securely in private hands was that which ran throughout its course through the land of the man

who disposed of it. The bounds of Alonso de Lugo’s estate at El Realejo enclosed two entire streams, which with the generosity that characterized him he granted to himself.*° It was precisely to encourage sugar production in the unpromising and — to the colonists’ minds — southerly flatlands of Gtimar that in 1503 he granted the whole ‘river’ of that name with the surrounding

land to Lope Fernandez (the conquistador, that is, not the quarrier mentioned earlier in this chapter), who had been in the sugar business on Gran Canaria‘*’. This holding was conveyed to the wealthy Italian entrepreneurs, Juan Felipe and Blasino Romano, and became the hub of their activities. It seems that Lugo’s policy of granting away enormous estates in the earliest years of the colonization of Tenerife between 1497 and c.1505 was partly inspired by the need to group water-sources together in sufficient quantities to make sugar production worthwhile, though it proved equally productive of denunciations from the less wealthy settlers. Sometimes when a waterway traversed or bordered the lands of two or some small number of proprietors, they would make a private arrangement for its exploitation; on Tenerife, for instance, the barranco of Tauzo seems to have been divided between the three parties with an interest in its flow.** ‘The waters of the Rambla de los Caballos was shared from 1506 when Pedro de Lugo, Alonso’s nephew, acquired a half interest.” On La Palma, a full-blooded contract existed between Alonso

de Lugo and Pedro de Benavente (a Catalan merchant who nourished Lugo’s taste for war with money and supplies) for the

joint exploitation of the Rio de los Sauces, from its source to *°\.G:S. 9 March 1508, Burgos; this belongs to a long drawn-out litigation between Lugo and Hernando del Hoyo concerning the repartimiento of Los Realejos and Treslata-

dere. Pedro Fernandez, regidor of Gran Canaria, complained on Hoyo’s behalf that contrary to his obligations Lugo had taken the best land ‘con dos arroyos’ for himself and given away the rest. Accounts of the enmity between Lugo and Hoyo are given by Camacho, La hacienda, p. 27, and Rumcu, Alonso de Lugo en la corte, pp. 137, 146 ff. 47 Datas Tenerife, 109.

ERC, vii. 248. | Arch. Prov. Santa Cruz, leg. 1, £335". |

IRRIGATION 107 the sea, sharing its water by halves and co-operating to provide road communications, irrigation channels, and mills (‘yngenios’).°° The same island encompassed probably the largest estate-linked private holdings in water anywhere in the islands, made over by purchase and royal grant to the Welzers in 1509—13.5! These included all the waters of the Tazacorte valley and absorbed those not only of Lugo’s familiars, Juan de Lugo, Andrés Suarez Gallinato, and Gerénimo de Valdés, but

also of Juan de Cabrera, royal chamberlain, and the joint holding of the Lieutenant-Governor, Crist6bal de Valcarcel, with Vasco de Bahamonde.* In aslightly different category juridically, but just as likely to cause dissension among the settlers, were waters enjoyed privately and independently of any land-grants. Land was sometimes, so to say, appended to these grants so that the grantee could make good use of his water, but in these cases the ownership of the land depended on the usufruct of the water, rather than the other way round.** Ofall the grants, the most offensive to local feeling were those of so-called ‘lost’ waters (aguas perdidas), grants which emanated more often in the surviving instances

from the royal courts than from the governors, but in which both authorities co-operated closely. The granting of lost waters

was part of the royal policy of concentrating water in the few hands which could use it best. Popular feeling on this score was accurately expressed in 1502 by Bartolomé Ramirez Nieto, a citizen of Gran Canaria employed by his fellow-colonists to plead its cases at the royal court, when he said that land and water alike should be equally shared among all the citizens.** In January 1513 Governor Lope de Sosa of Gran Canaria was ordered to strip holders of irrigable properties of their land, compensating them with dry land elsewhere and turning their erstwhile possessions to wet farming; and in May of that year Gonzalo de Aguilar appeared at court from Gran Canaria to complain that de Sosa had dispossessed many dry-farmers, ostensibly in favour of the holders of water supplies (‘ha quitado a muchas personas sus heredamientos, diziendo que son tierras S94.G,S.17 June 1511, Seville. “4A.G.S. 10 January 1513, Valladolid. | 52 Datas Tenerife, 422, 825, 1248. Ibid., 96, 109, 209, 553. 34A.G.8. 6 April 1503, Alcala de Henares.

108 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

de sequero e que se han de dar a quien tiene agua’).*° Similar

reproaches were voiced on Tenerife at the time of Zarate’s inquest.°° In this context of popular dissatisfaction, the granting of lost waters was bound to be bitterly resented, especially as lost waters included not only those undiscovered or unexploited

but also those which seeped from existing irrigation works; moreover, the grantees of lost waters put increasingly bolder and more dangerous interpretations on their rights. From the first, the concejo of Gran Canaria displayed an interest in the exploitation of these waters, but the monarchs preferred to

| consign them to private entrepreneurs. We learn from a royal communication addressed to the concejo on 26 August 1501, that in the said island there were certain things which we could grant to the community... In particular, by bringing water from the mountains known as the Tejede range to a certain part of the island in order to use it for irrigation, some income could be created for the said community chest, and thence profit generally would accrue to all the residents of the said island; and to bring the

water to the place where it has to be exploited, 250,000 mrs. would be required; and these could not be paid save by a levy shared throughout the island by all the residents and recent settlers... Goncerning which we ordered the Licenciate Diego Fernandez de Valera to hold an enquiry. . . from which it also appears that certain persons say that they would undertake the job of bringing the said water at their own expense, provided they received half of it, with lands on which to use it.?’

No documents relating to Gran Canaria return to this theme for a number of years, but meanwhile, on Tenerife, Alonso de Lugo made a grant of lost waters to the wealthy Sancho de Vargas in 1506, specifying that discovered and undiscovered waters were

alike included; the justification was that the exploitation of these sources would create new mills ‘to the great ennoblement of this island’.*®

It must have been during this period of documentary silence on

Gran Canaria that Lope Sanchez de Valenzuela, the former Governor, began to form a company for the systematic exploitation of the lost waters. He had been involved in the diversion of water (already referred to) from one of the Riberol family’s mills in 1502; he seems to have extended his interests in irrigation as 3A .G.S, 23 January 1513, Valladolid; 25 May 1513, Valladolid. °° FRC, vi. 58-70. 7A.G.S. 26 August 1501, Granada. 538 Datas Tenerife, 551.

IRRIGATION 109 time went on. We find him troubling more waters in March 1507, when he appealed against a judgement of Lope de Sosa’s in which his claim to a share in the dula of the heredamiento of Firgas had been dismissed.**® The exact relationship between

these two cases and his dealings in lost waters, which began shortly afterwards, cannot be determined, but it is certain that at some time during these years he formed an association with a gifted but unscrupulous engineer named Luis de Armas, citizen of Gran Canaria and relative of the then Governor, Lope de Sosa. In or before 1511, Armas applied to the royal court for licence to exploit the lost waters of Gran Canaria; he said that he could join water from many unexploited sources and leakages from existing irrigation installations (‘asy manaderas como otras que se sumen 0 se pierden de las azequias e desaguaderos’) in a new and potentially fertile force. He requested permission

to use such waters, even where their use-rights were already technically vested in other settlers. His petition was granted, and he was given unequivocal rights of property — not in this case mere usufruct — to one-third of the water he made available. ‘The remaining two-thirds was reserved to the crown and used to irrigate lands bestowed on royal servants. Armas set to work to exact his rights to the utmost. Lope de Sosa and Lope Sanchez, the latter of whom now habitually resided on Tenerife, sank their usually inimical interests, together with some of their

capital, into his enterprises. Another of his associates was Nicolas Rodriguez, magistrate and councillor of Gran Canaria. -Armas thus had two of the most important permanent judicial officers on that island — Sosa and Rodriguez — as his partners.

That did not prevent Catalina Guerra (Juan de Siberio’s widow) from waging an unremitting campaign of litigation against his activities before the royal court and its temporary local representatives, beginning in February 1513, when she claimed that the Armas faction had misappropriated the waters of the Barranco de Arucas, which sustained the whole Tenoya valley.°° Beyond this continuous feud with the Siberio family, °°A.G.S. 16 March 1507, Plasencia. °A.G.S. February 1513, n.d., Valladolid, and 12 May, Valladolid: record of appeal by Catalina Guerra against Lope de Sosa’s judgement for Luis de Armas concerning the water of the ‘Montana Roja’. The cases continued at intervals; in 1515 the judge, Sebastian de Brizianos, was ordered to adjudicate finally between Dona Catalina and

the Riberol—Armas consortium in their disputes over water rights in Tenoya and Tasautejo (A.G.S. 15 March 1515, Medina del Gampo).

110 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

Armas naturally enough met with opprobrium and opposition from the common settlers. Early in 1513 the citizens of Gran Canaria protested at court that he had reneged on his promise to provide winter irrigation for the cornlands of ‘Tafira; it is

significant that corn was a product of dry farming, grown mainly by the settlers of middling fortune. He had also proposed to divert water from Las Palmas to ‘Tasautejo, which the Riberol family owned, while — as the appellants claimed, not without verisimilitude — Lope de Sosa had been partial in

his handling of the case.*' By 1515 Armas had brought the Riberols within the scope of his operations, for in March of that year ‘Cosme de Rebieron’ is mentioned as his co-defendant in an action brought by Catalina Guerra concerning the waters of

Tenoya and Tasautejo. Meanwhile, Armas was extending his work to Tenerife and La Palma. On 7 June 1513 Alonso de Lugo was ordered by royal writ to place the lost waters of those islands at Armas’s disposal.

on much the same terms as he enjoyed on Gran Canaria; there can be no doubt that Armas had now a brief from the monarchs

to intervene in existing irrigation installations and increase their output.’ But it was clear that he could not appropriate any water already in use or infringe existing rights — not at least in the intention of the Regent and Queen. Shortly, however, Luis de Armas was involved before the royal court in litigation referred from Tenerife too. In January 1514 some of the most important men on Tenerife joined forces to contest his rights in the water of the menceyate of Abona.® In March 1915 he appealed against a decision by the royal judge, Sebastian de Brizianos, about water from the Barranco de Ganoval that was

disputed between flour-mills and sugar lands.** Armas had grown so overweening in the protection of his powerful patrons and so generous in his interpretation of his own rights, that he

was actually alleging that the Queen had ordered him ‘to extract and put to use all those waters which persons having lands in the said island (Tenerife) hold in excess of their needs, $1A.G.S, 13 April 1513, Valladolid.

ERC, xii. 235. *3Ibid., 237: Bartolomé Benitez, Rafael Font, Andrés Suarez Gallinato, and Pedro de Lugo. They used the water in their Orotava holdings. 644 .G.S. 20 April 1515, Medina del Campo.

IRRIGATION 11] and other waters which hithero have not been exploited.’ The second part of this claim was certainly true, but the first was at best an egregious overstatement. Armas’s activities were an intolerable provocation to most of the settlers. Meanwhile, his relations with the Siberio family continued from bad to worse. In the spring of 1515 Juan de Siberio, the rash son of Catalina Guerra by her late husband, the homonymous conquistador and first settler of Gran Canaria, intervened decisively in Luis de Armas’s fate. The end of the story is told in a royal letter which authorized Armas’s heir, Juan de Armas, to bear weapons. Siberio had murdered Luis de Armas ‘because he had charge of exploiting lost waters’.®°

Most litigants over water were content with the ordinary procedures at law and stopped short of action as radical as Juan de Siberio’s: in that respect, the Armas affair was peculiar in its conclusion, if not 1n its course. But before attempting to make an over-all assesssment of the place of irrigation in the colonial

society of the islands, one other singularity pertaining to Armas’s activities must be noted. ‘The private dominion — the ownership in the strict sense — he enjoyed over lost waters was exceptional. ‘There can be no doubt of the public characters of lost waters generally — ‘the lost waters which belong to me’ (‘las aguas perdidas que me pertenesc¢en’), as the royal writ put it; and it seems that this character was shared by other waters too. Naturally, before a grant was made all waters, like all the land, were deemed to be at the disposal of the crown; nor could these

prior rights be extinguished by a grant to an individual:

Zarate’s reforms show that these could be revoked or amended at will after judicial investigation by monarchs or their representatives. On a practical level, water which was realenga, which

belonged to the crown or came within the monarchs’ direct lordship, was in terms of use-right in the possession of the whole community of citizens of the island; so the importance of the fact that this status continued after a grant had been made was that

the community had prior rights which the grant could not

waive. It is in this sense that we should understand Alonso de Lugo’s grant in 1504 to ‘Alfon Yanes’ of two springs, on condition that it remain in common use (‘con tal que el agua sea SA.G.S. 31 March 1515, Medina del Campo. 66A_G.S. 7 December 1515, Plasencia.

112. THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

realenga y seais obligado a hacer que entren bueyes y yeguas y

otro ganado’), or that of certain newly-discovered watersources to Sancho de Vargas, explicitly without prejudice to existing shares in the use-right ‘quedando a los vecinos la dula de agua’.®’ The water of the irrigation community of Las Palmas appears in the ordinances of 1529 as expressly realenga. In all the cases where I have shown or suggested that what was granted or conveyed in the documents under consideration was a use-right in water rather than strict ownerhsip, it would seem

that the property rights remained with the crown. And where the use-right was not explicitly granted away it was vested in the citizens collectively.

It is worth remarking, finally, that the difference in law between irrigated and unirrigated land was not as in the Peninsula, for the simple reason that there the distinction was a fiscal one® while the islands were exempted from all taxation save a port-toll. But sequero and riego were not treated as equivalent even in the Canaries — we have already seen how changes in status afflicted the holders of dry lands in the days of Lope de Sosa’s rule. The life of the Canary Islands continues to depend on irrigation today, but the factors which moulded early colonial society

were fewer and the influence of water correspondingly more important then than now. Rivalry over water divided men as the barrancos and acequias scored the face of the land, but on balance water or the lack of it was an unifying force which led the settlers to co-operate in the face of common problems. The documents examined suggest that irrigation communities were a widespread and effective form of social organization, so that the water which sculpted the soil was institutionally creative too. The divisions it caused corresponded to other conflicts that existed independently of problems of irrigation: in the lawsuits it provoked, the common settlers were set against the royal or gubernatorial authorities, the middlingly prosperous colonists against the few on whose wealth and enterprise the economic success of the colonies depended, and whom the authorities favoured for that very reason. By the end of the period — with fortunate consequences for the islands’ future — a balance in °’ Datas Tenerife, 645.

Glick, /rrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia, pp. 13-15.

IRRIGATION 113 the distribution of use-rights in water had been achieved. Small men were protected by stable communities of adulados, which were equipped with institutions of justice sufficient to resolve day-to-day problems without recourse to the wasteful judicial

structure of the realm and without the loss of local capital in expensive appeals to the Peninsula. On the other hand, the monarchs and their representatives had firmly resisted any attempts to distribute water more equably or to wrest waters from the control of large-scale cultivators and millers. Juan de Siberio’s murder of Luis de Armas achieved nothing in the long run, for Luis’s brother succeeded him in the same role with redoubled protection from the monarchs and governors,” and several large estates continued in uninterrupted enjoyment of the lost waters.

9A.G.S. 14, 17 December 1515, Plasencia.

VI

THE EMERGENCE OF A FRAMEWORK OF GOVERNMENT Vos, Sancho, iréis vestido parte de letrado y parte de capitan, porque en la insula que os doy tanto son menester las armas como las letras y las letras como las armas.'

Enough has been shown of the social and economic structure of early colonial society in the Canaries — or, at least, in Tenerife,

Gran Canaria, and La Palma — to see how its configurations

were moulded from within by the accidents of wealth and blood. But there was also a structure imposed from without: a

political, hierarchical structure determined in part by the commands of the Castilian monarchs and modified by local conditions and historical circumstances. The distinction among the settlers between office-holders and non-office-holders corresponds roughly with that between irrigators and dry farmers, rich and poor; the institutions by which the islands were admini-

stered are therefore important in strict relation to their social and economic history. But they also command our attention because of their significance for the study of two problems that have long occupied historians of the Spanish monarchy: the problems of the origins of Spanish institutions in America, and of the relative roles in the early madern period of the crown and devolved sources of authority in remote parts of the monarchy. It is the aim of the next two chapters to approach those problems through the study of royal government in the Canary Islands in the era of settlement. The early administrative institutions of Gran Canaria on the one hand and Tenerife and La Palma on the other reflected differences in their methods of conquest. Gran Canaria was conquered with profits from the sale of indulgences and the royal share of booty; the monarchs’ contribution was substan"Don Quixote, U1. hi.

A FRAMEWORK OF GOVERNMENT 115 tial and their control was strict. But as the conquest of the islands wore on amd more expeditions were dispatched, private sources of finance and means of recruiting tended increasingly

to displace royal ones. Instead of wages, the conquistadores would receive the promise of a share of the conquered land; instead of the yield from indulgences or the direct use of the royal fifth to meet the expenses of war, fifths yet uncollected were pledged as rewards to conquerors who could raise the necessary finance elsewhere. Alonso de Lugo conquered La Palma and Tenerife almost without recourse to royal funds. In consequence, as a framework of government emerged, Gran Canaria was characterized by a diversification of power among

monarchs, governor, and lesser officials, elected as well as appointed; but in the other islands, power tended far more at first to be concentrated in the governor’s hands; the popular contribution was slight, and the monarchs’ influence largely limited to the authorization of gubernatorial acts and the initiation of periodic enquiries into the governor’s conduct. The most conspicuous of the offices and institutions of government in the royal islands — and one of the first to be established — was the governorship itself. The plethora of titles bestowed on Pedro de Vera when he was appointed to that position on 2

February 1480 reflects the monarchs’ uncertainty as to the governor’s proper function’. The names ‘capitan’ and ‘alcalde de la fortaleza’ suggested a military role; that of ‘corregidor’ implied a civil official appointed to a settled community as royal

representative with supervisory powers, whereas that of ‘governador’ in Castile was novel in a civil context and ambigu-

ous: traditionally, it had a military meaning, associated with fortresses and garrison towns; for the first time, as far as I am aware, in Castilian history, it came in the Canaries to have the modern sense of the word ‘governor’ — the administrator of an outlying province or dependency, representing the monarchs, not with mere supervisory powers, like the corregidor, but sovereign ones. The title next occurs among those Columbus claimed

in the Capitulations of Santa Fe, and in the New World, while acquiring increasing precision, it was to have much the same meaning as in the Canaries. Pedro de Vera continued in office for more than a decade. But 7A.G.S. 4 February 1480; ibid., no. 2433.

116 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

owing to his successful completion of the conquest, as the military side of the governor’s functions diminished in importance and civil preoccupations came to the fore, the nature of the dignity changed and a new type of man, a civil servant rather than a conquistador, was needed for the job. Columbus was to find that the same was true of Hispaniola, where from 1498 he begged the monarchs to send a ‘lettered’ official to assist him in

the administrative duties for which his own preparation as discoverer and conquistador so ill equipped him. During his term of office de Vera in any case became increasingly engrossed in his peninsular interest. In 1483, 1487—8, and again, perhaps, in 1490, he made visits to mainland Spain.* By August 1491 the

documents were speaking of his governorship in the past*. In

the interim a civilian, Francisco Maldonado, had _ been appointed by royal command of 30 March 1492,° not only to make a judicial visitation of Gran Canaria but also to take over

de Vera’s gubernatorial powers; not only to determine the

manner in which de Vera had acted in the conduct of

government, administration of justice, and apportionment of property among the settlers,° but also to replace him (‘tomar en vos las varas dela justicia e governacion della’). ‘The people of the island were to treat Maldonado as Governor, not de Vera or any of his officials; from April 1492 Maldonado actually began to be referred to as ‘governador’ in royal correspondence. He found he had a large backlog of grievances to deal with, and was able to provide tardy redress in some cases; on the other hand

during his own judicial investigation and governorship new complaints arose, which it was left to the subsequent governors

to deal with; in fact, Maldonado’s experience showed that frequent changes of governor were necessary to the good government of Gran Canaria, since the delay and cost involved

in making appeals to the peninsula against gubernatorial 3H. Sancho de Sopranis, ‘Pedro de Vera y los gomeros’, RHC, xx (1954), 53; ibid., xviii (1952), 224; A.G.S. 11 May 1490, ff. 265, 323 (Cat. XH, vit, nos. 1561 and 1565). 4A.G.S. 19 August 1491, f. 92 (Cat. XIV, viii, no. 2211). SEl Mus. Can. xiv (1953), 36. The claim of Chil (Estudios historicos, ii. 294) to knowa

document of 27 September 1489, in which Maldonado was instructed to pay the outstanding wages of some of the conquistadores, must presumably arise from some confusion. ®Cat. XLT, ix, nos. 1280, 2035.

A FRAMEWORK OF GOVERNMENT 117 judgements meant that most complaints awaited the arrival ofa new governor. Maldonado himself, indeed, was soon replaced’ and the next Governor, Alonso de Fajardo, had similar judicial functions and the same duty of conducting an investigation into his predecessor’s work.® This duty of performing the reszdencia,

as the inquiry was called, exercised on Gran Canaria by the incoming governor, was on Tenerife and La Palma, where Alonso de Lugo held the governorship for life, the charge of special officials; frequent judicial inquiries fulfilled the same

function there as frequent changes of governor on Gran

Canaria.’ The governorship was not the only post on Gran Canaria which dated from the years of the conquest. There is early evidence of a well-developed colonial administration. When de Vera was appointed he was empowered to make elections to all

offices for fixed terms, or for life, or hereditarily (‘para que podades . . . nombrar elegir oficios de Regimientos e jurados e otros oficios . . . para que sean cadaneros o por vida or perIn A.G.S. 3 December 1493, f. 115 (Cat. XIII, x, no. 3098) Maldonado’s son, Rodrigo, is referred to as ‘juez de residencia de la Gran Canaria’: this may mean that

the father was replaced in the first instance by the son (perhaps as a temporary arrangement on the father’s recall) or may merely, be the result of confusion. In any event, the governor in 1495 was Alonso Fajardo. Morales Padrén, ‘Canarias en el Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla’, AFA (1961), 267. In January 1494 the post would secm to have been vacant from the style of one royal letter addressed to ‘vos el governador o juez de residencia que es 0 fuere dela isla de Gran Canaria;. FRC, vi. 195. *Maldonado’s was obviously not a pesquisa — that is, a one-off judicial investigation

carried out by a visiting official — in the strict sense. Although in the earliest documents relating to his enquiry, Maldonado is called juez pesquisidor, it was really of the sort more usually called restdencia —- an inquiry made by an incoming permanent official into his predecessor’s conduct. It was first referred to as such only retrospectively in A.G.S. 28 January 1492, ff. 124,177, 183 (Cat. XII, x, no. 1009): cf. A.G.S. 29 October 1492, f. 60 (Cat. XIII, x, no. 2866). The obverse of the residencia was the governor's right of appeal, which de Vera exercised, as appears from a royal command that his witnesses’ evidence be taken (A.G.S. 1 October 1492, £. 40 (Cat. XII, ix, no. 3165) ). The governor was accused of arbitrary hangings and confiscations, including one of slaves from the future conquistador of Tenerife, Lope de Salazar, whose efforts to

raid Tenerife he is said to have obstructed (‘por que diz estorbo una presa que yva a hazer a Tenerife’), and of overlooking the crimes of his sons, servants, and appointed officials. ‘The governor was further accused of seizing the property of those who died intestate, including Bishop Juan de Frias. A more obscure and perhaps more serious charge was that ‘they made certain leagues and confederacies in the said island to our disservice and the harm of the said island’ (‘fizieron algunas ligas e confederaciones en la dicha ysla en deservicio nuestro y en dario de la dicha ysla’), but no details are given. ’Lugo’s governorship is discussed in chapter VII.

5). 10 cL: : ; - -

118 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

petuos’);'° this would seem to imply a quasi-municipal administration imposed from above without any corresponding popular institution, such as the concejos of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura,

to share in appointments and other business. But if this was what was intended it appears to have been envisaged only as a temporary expedient; by August 1484 the ‘concejo de la villa del

Real de Las Palmas’ was in existence,'! and subsequent royal ordinances for the government of the island provided, as we shall see, for the participation of this popular assembly in the appointment of the officers of the municipality, though de Vera

had already appointed various judicial deputies under the powers conferred upon him at his appointment. The concejo on Gran Canaria may have been presaged as early as 1480 in the meeting of conquistadores summoned by Bishop Frias to dis-

cuss divisions among the commanders.'* In Tenerife and La Palma, the monarchs firmly intended that concejos should exist (possibility in order to limit Alonso de Lugo’s exercise of his powers as governor), for the writ which promised Lugo the governorship of La Palma’ also ordered the ‘Concejo, regidores, cavalleros, escuderos e omes buenos’ to meet in their ‘Goncejo o Cabildo’ to receive him; as Governor of Tenerife also, he was similarly to be received by the concejos of the island;'* moreover, though the writ which appointed him expressly gave him the right to nominate deputies with judicial powers nothing 1s said of the executive members of the island council, the regzdores, whom, one must suppose, it was assumed

that the concejo would elect; but it would seem that the royal design was frustrated and that the concejo’s rights received no further affirmation from the monarchs. The appointment of all officials remained a privilege of the governor throughout the period. Thus, in spite of their early appearance in the docuChil, Estudios historicos, ii, 237n. Chil, following Viera y Clavijo, misdates this document 1484, even though this error had already been rectified by J. M. Zuaznavar y Francia, Compendio de la historia de Canarias (Santa Cruz, 1863), p. 19. ''Ladero, ‘Las cuentas’, p. 74. Viera, Noticias, ii (1773), 54; cf. however, the editor’s preface to Libro rojo de Gran Canaria, p. xv; he thinks of this assembly as more closely resembling a cabildo. '56 June 1492, FRC, iii. 147; DJ. Wélfel, ‘Un episodio desconocido de la conquista de La Palma’, Investigacion y progreso (1931), p. 102, wrongly states that this writ conferred the governorship on Lugo. '4P.A. del Castillo Ruiz de Vergara, Descripctén histérica de las Islas Canarias, ed. M. Santiago, tt (1960), 656. Dated 5 November 1496.

A FRAMEWORK OF GOVERNMENT 119 ments, popular institutions did not play the large role in Tenerife

and La Palma that they enjoyed on Gran Canaria and the seigneurial islands. Between the governor and the concejo in the early colonial institutional heirarchy, came the island council, the cabzldo or ayuntamiento; or rather, the concejo, the popular organ, and the cabildo, the oligarchic institution, were themselves at opposed poles, corresponding to the social divisions which have already

been observed within the islands’ population. The officeholders were drawn from among the sugar-planters and merchants; and foreigners were disproportionately represented among the council’s members and more important servants. The first formally constituted council on Gran Canaria, in May 1485, according to the authority of the sixteenth-century Franciscan antiquary, Abreu de Galindo,’* consisted, in addition to the council’s scribe or secretary and the governor’s chief judicial deputy (escribano de cabildo and alguacil mayor) of twelve councillors, a public scribe, a fiel eyecutor, whose duties were the regula-

tion of markets, weights, and measures, a jurado and a trompeta — this last presumably more accurately a ‘pregonero’ or herald; the reference to a fie eecutor, though it was unusual for there to

be only one, perhaps indicates that the concejo was already functioning as an organ of local government and that the appointment of this official, at least, was in its hands; but in general, it is

impossible to be clear from Abreu’s list about the functions of the officers of the council or their relations with other institutions and with each other. On 20 January 1487 the Catholic Monarchs proclaimed the incorporation of Gran Canaria ‘in

our patrimony and royal crown’ (‘en nuestro patrimonio e corona real’), more closely defined as that of the crown of Castile and Leon, on the same terms as the ‘kingdoms’ conquered from the Moors.’® The monarchs would soon add the title ‘Rey e Reyna de la Yslas de Canaria’ to their royal style.” The first step in the reconstitution of the Canaries as a kingdom dependent on, but distinct from the crown of Castile was in itself a great event in the institutional history of the islands; it also inaugurated a period of legislation for Gran Canaria by 'S Historia de la conquista, p. 94 (If. 26).

‘Libro rojo, p. 2; see below, p. 125. '"M.S. Martin Postigo, La cancilleria real de los Reyes Catolicos (Valladolid, 1959), p. 23.

120. THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

royal writ, in which the island’s institutions, and the council in particular, were to receive special attention.'® It was now necessary to determine exactly how the business of administration, which in the case of previous conquests had been left to the seigneurs, could best be placed in the hands of officials. To this end the monarchs issued a long and detailed

Fuero — a charter of privileges and local administrative regulations — for Gran Canaria on 20 December 1494:'° this specified the number, nature, and means of election of the civil officers together with a host of lesser regulations connected with the administration. Las Palmas was to have six councillors, a

treasurer, four minor judicial officers, (three alcaldes and an alguacil) and a scribe; all but the last of these were to be chosen

annually by lot from among the nominees of six electors, | themselves chosen by three of the outgoing councillors, who, in turn, were to be chosen by lot. The decision of chance was then to be submitted for the approval of the monarchs — a process

which at once left everything and nothing to chance. A councillor could not be elected for a third term, except after a

four-year interval. The scribeship was to be a purely royal appointment, though the incumbent had always to be a citizen of Las Palmas. ‘There was also to be a personero, who combined

the duties of a cryer with the responsibility of representing the council in its corporate character. As for the functions of these officials, the alcaldes and alguacil

were to deputize for the governor in his absence. The alcades were to hear civil and criminal cases during their term of office, each of them being individually able to hear an accusation, take © a preliminary hearing and, in criminal cases, order the arrest of

the culprit; after the arrest, however, they would have to proceed in concert. The alguacil properly had less initiative in the dispensation of justice than the alcaldes, being rather an enforcer 'SAt the time of the incorporation the people of Gran Canaria were exempted from all taxes save a 3% import and export tax, /bid., p. 89; Chil, Estudios Aistoricos, 111, 410n. Noteworthy from an institutional point of view is the exception made in the charter of incorporation to the rule that no part of the island would be alienated from the crown:

although the monarchs made exception of alienations to the church (‘lo por nos mandado para el obispo qu es 0 fuera de la dicha ysla o para las yglesias della’), it was _ not, apparently, until more than three years later, in April 1491, that they made over the territory of Agiimes for the bishops to rule as feudal lords. Viera, Noticias, 11 (1951), 101; A.G.S. 10 April 1491, £10 (Cat. XII, viii, no. 12, 91). Libro rojo, pp. 4 fF.

A FRAMEWORK OF GOVERNMENT 12] of judicial decisions, but he could deputize for the alcaldes and

make arrests on his own cognizance. None of these judicial officers could vote at meetings of the council, only the justice and councillors having that privilege; the council’s decision would normally be taken by a simple majority, though the justice, if he saw fit, could always refer a decision to which he did not conform to the consideration of the monarchs. The personero was charged with the defence of the council’s interests

and the enforcement of its commands. The treasurer was entrusted with the council’s finances; he was not admitted to its deliberations, but required its authorization for any expenditure and its approval of his annual accounts; in the case of public works, the statement of account had to be attested by an overseer appointed by the council and by a public scribe before the treasurer could pay it. The job of the scribe was, of course, to keep a record of all municipal business and to keep the monarch informed. In addition to these officers there were to be others, not in any

sense part of the council: six public scribes, popularly elected

from among the citizens of the town and confirmed by the monarchs, and as many assistants as from time to time was thought necessary. The council itself was to have a porter, two gaolers (one ‘verdugo’ and one ‘carcelero’), and a herald. There

had also to be two deputies elected by the councillors from among their own number, to hold office for thirty days and to see that all municipal ordinances were observed; two superintendents (alarifes) were to supervise public works ‘and the other things pertaining to their office’. Finally, there were to be two proctors (procuradores), to be elected annually at Epiphany by all

the tax-paying citizens in the presence of the justice and of course a scribe; their role was to be like that of proctors on university committees — to represent the ordinary residents of the island at the deliberations of the council, to see whether ‘the things there debated and done are for the common good’ and, in particular, to scrutinize the division of the landed wealth of the island and to ensure that it was carried out legally.

It will be seen that, in general, the Fuero accords with the Catholic Monarchs’ policy of strengthening central authority in

the municipalities of the Peninsula, while at the same time it makes some concessions to the traditional strength of Canarian

122. THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

popular institutions. The presentation and content link the conquest of the Canaries with the Reconquest — parallels have been observed with the contemporary charter of privileges of

Seville (where a new charter was issued by Ferdinand and Isabella) and Granada and much of the same common ground

is shared with the Fuero de Baza.*® Its form was that of a concession by royal grace, not a pact;*! moreover, no decision could be taken by the municipality — concejo or council — without royal ratification. The appointment of the justice, the most important official, and the scribe of the concejo, whose practical power was enormous, were in royal hands, and that of the councillors was left out of the hands of the people. Of course,

the charter of privileges does not describe an existing state of affairs, and it may be that many ofits provisions never operated In practice; but it seems probable that any departures from the letter of the /uero tended to favour the crown rather than the municipal liberties; in particular, the procuradores, the only real

agents of democratic control, being compelled to act through

the monarchs, had, in part, the character of royal servants; popular participation in their appointment seems to have ended early in the history of this island;”* the public scribes, though popularly elected, were not in a position to bring much influ-

ence to bear on the council which, by nature of its method of election, could easily become a self-regenerating oligarchy dependent upon nothing outside itself save royal ratification of its nominees and enactments. Gran Canaria had no traditions of local government and the monarchs were all but free to impose upon it any system they chose; the other townships proved even more submissive than Las Palmas, and were content to be ruled by officials set over them by the governor without even formal

municipal councils of their own. Yet it would be wrong to minimize the role of popular institutions on Gran Canaria, much more so the Canaries as a whole. The very setting up ofa concejo on Gran Canaria at a time when they were disappearing

from the Peninsula was a notable achievement (and perhaps illustrates the Catholic Monarchs’ respect for tradition): the 20Moreno Casado, Fuero de Baza (Granada, 1968); J. Lalinde Abadia, ‘El derecho castellano en Canarias’, AEA, xvi (1970), 17-21, 24 fF "Ide la Rosa, Evolucion del regimen local en Canarias, p. 41.

2 Ibid., p. 59.

A FRAMEWORK OF GOVERNMENT 123 concejo showed itself to be a vital body in the role it played in the

land distribution of 1485, and the degree of devolution which the monarchs conceded is striking in an age of centralization. Above all, what is remarkable about Gran Canaria compared with Tenerife and La Palma is the way in which gubernatorial

independence was circumscribed by the presence of welldefined institutions — whether popular or oligarchic — and by

repeated royal involvement in insular affairs: in Alonso de Lugo’s jurisdiction many of the functions which on Gran Canaria belonged to concejo, council, or crown, remained the exclusive province of the governor.

Perhaps the most important administrative act with which these well-formulated institutions of Gran Canaria had to cope in our own period was the distribution of territory, the repartimiento. Pedro de Vera had been empowered to share out the land (‘todos los exidos e dehesas e heredamientos’) among conquerors and immigrants on the day of his appointment as governor,”

although the monarchs had shortly afterwards given supervisory powers over the repartimiento to their receiver, Miguel de Muyica. As it happened, however, the governor did not turn to the problem of the repartimiento until after the military phase of the conquest was over and Mujica dead. Even then, he seems to

have been reluctant to proceed with the division of the spoils, since it was only a meeting of the concejo of the island, no doubt

consisting almost entirely of land-hungry conquistadores, which, as late as 19 May 1485, required that the division of spoils should commence.” Accordingly, de Vera appointed a commission for that purpose, to consist of one representative of his own, three from each of the chief townships — Las Palmas

and Galdar (one of the representatives of Las Palmas being Alonso de Sotomayor) — and two from Telde. The first lands were distributed in June and October of that year. De Vera’s

brief to apportion land was renewed to his successor, Maldonado, in October 1492,” less for its non-completion than for its inefficiency. ‘Grievances, frauds, doubts and debates’, however, were still rife even when Maldonado had finished and new instructions to put the distribution of land to rights had to 3 Libro rojo, p. |.

° 251 ibro 79}0, p. 4. ,

g) orales Padron, ‘Canarias en el Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla’, AEA, vii (1961),

124 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

be issued to Alonso Fajardo:*® some lands still remained unshared. The need to share out the soil was also a problem which faced Alonso de Lugo on Tenerife (and presumably, though informa-

tion 1s lacking, on La Palma). On 24 December 1493 he had been empowered to populate Tenerife, after the completion of the conquest, with 300 citizens, ‘rewarding each according to his rank’ (“dandoseles a cada uno tierras e heredamientos segun

la calidad de su persona’);”’ in fact, in contrast with Pedro de Vera, he was not reluctant to begin the distribution, but only too eager, and had already begun it on paper before the conquest was over.”* The reason for the contrast is not far to seek: though de Vera had a large financial investment in the conquest, he had not, like Lugo, to find virtually the whole finance himself and attract backers on the basis of just such prospects of gain as the right to make land-grants implied. ‘The rapidity with

which Lugo embarked on the distribution of his grants is perhaps reflected in their apparent lack of any plan. His methods of

administering the division of the soil also differed markedly from those employed by de Vera. Instead of allowing himself to be bullied by conquistadores and settlers or setting up commis-

sions with large popular representation, Lugo kept the machinery of land distribution firmly in his own hands. Espinosa

says that he delegated Hernando de Trujillo, Lope Fernandez,

Pedro de Vergara, and Guillén Castellano to carry out the division of the soil for him; in fact, however, as Professor Serra

Rafols has shown, although the last three all appear in the documents as repartidores, their only function was to measure and hand over the grants which Lugo alone could confer.”” The Governor’s intense interest in the details of the grants 1s indicated by the many emendations to them which survive in his own hand. The disposal of the land was only one aspect of the administrative task that faced the first governors; the other was the disposal of the population. Generally, two conditions governed

the natives’ treatment in the Canaries: their standing 1n the 6Tbid., p. 11; Morales Padron, op. cit., p. 267; Chil, Estudzos historicos, ii, 422n. 27A G.S. £. 53 (Cat. XIII, i, no. 3264). 28 grant of his has survived from the year 1495. Castillo, Descripct6n histonca, i. 645. 9Serra Rafols, ‘Las Datas en Tenerife’, p. 4.

A FRAMEWORK OF GOVERNMENT 125 indigenous society, and whether they had offered resistance to the conquerors. The criterion for the latter condition was later enshrined in the Requerimtento made to the natives of the New

World from 1513: conversion to Christianity and obedience before the Catholic Monarchs would guarantee peace and even some privileges; failure to conform meant war. On Gran Canaria the elements of the Requerimiento were in their infancy and not yet formalized, but similar terms can be seen to have operated

from a privilege apparently granted to a submissive group of Canarians in May 1481;°° they were taken under royal protection (‘so nuestra guarda e amparo e defendimiento real’) and given the same rights of movement and trade as other subjects. The formula thus far strongly resembles the ‘capitulations’ of

Moorish towns during the Granada war: the submission of Moors evidently was a model on which the royal chancery drew

at the submission of these Canarians. But other phrases in the same document evoke the Requerimiento as much as the Moorish

capitulations: ‘reduced and converted to our holy Catholic faith, they sent to us to give and tender their obedience and fealty (a dar e prestar su obediencia e felicidad [sic.] and acknowledged us to be King and Queen and natural lords (senores naturales)’. Pedro de Vera is said to have proposed the same terms — conversion and obedience or war — to Doramas before the battle of Arucas in 1480, but the proud chieftain was

loath to yield his hard-won sovereignty; no doubt the same formula was accepted by the guanarteme (or native chieftain) of Galdar, later don Fernando Guanarteme, at his capture or surrender, apparently in February 1482. By the time the conquest of Gran Canaria was complete, these elements of the Requerimiento had become more formalized and customary. Fray

Anton Quesada (or Cruzada) was commissioned to proclaim them to the peoples of La Palma and Tenerife in 1485: Alonso de Lugo put them formally to the people of La Palma, including

the point made in the privilege of 148] that those natives who submitted were to be treated on terms of equality with the Catholic Monarchs’ Spanish subjects.*’ It was not, of course, 2 Wolfel, ‘La curia romana’, pp. 1077-9. 31K spinosa, Origen y milagros, III, 4; S. Zavala, Estudios indianos (Mexico, 1948), p. 29. Lugo’s success in La Palma is explained by the preparatory activities of Francisca , Gazmira; a hispanicized and Christian native, whom the bishop of the islands had sent to La Palma to prepare the conversion ofits people. Wolfel ‘Un episodio, desconocido’.

126 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST possible to formulate the Requerumiento of later years with its fully

elaborated historical and juridical arguments, until after the Alexandrine Bulls on the conquest of America. Bernaldez says that the natives of Tenerife were agreeable to the terms offered, but that Lugo denied them peace because of the expense of the expedition that had been prepared against them and because of the natives’ previous record of bad faith in respect of promises made to Europeans;* and this is borne out in part by the known fact: the menceyates of Anaga, Abona, Adeje, and Guimar were classed after the pacification of the island as ‘bandos de paces’,

which means that they must have accepted the Castilians’ terms. It was said, moreover, that Lugo and his backers did not

respect the protected status of the inhabitants of those areas,

but enslaved them with the same rapacity as those of the ‘bandos de guerra’.

Evidently the attitude the Spaniards later adopted towards the Indians of the New World and the question of their juridical

standing were not dissimilar from those they evinced towards the Canary Islands: the implicit doctrine that the monarchs’ title to the unconquered islands gave them the right to wage war upon the inhabitants, was also present, mutatis mutandis, in the great Alexandrine Bulls on the conquest of the New World and in the Requerimiento. The likelihood that the Spaniards’ experience in the Canaries may have influenced or predisposed them

in their relations with the Indians seems strongly suggested; again the islands may have helped to develop an institution of the conquest of America — the Requerimiento — from remoter

origins in the Reconquest, for the military leaders in the Canaries would certainly have been familiar with the desafios or

challenges common between Christians and Moors and the capitulaciones or terms of surrender of the conquered Granadine towns. However the challenges I have described to the savages of the islands more closely resemble the Requerimiento: certainly

they are juridically closer to the latter, for the pagan and unaggressive islanders were not comparable to the Moors. It must be remembered, however, that during the conquest of the islands Spanish attitudes to the savages were still at a protean phase. One of the most curious documents in the history of the 32 Memorias, p. 340. His actual words were ‘fueron requeridos muchas veces’. Bernaldez perhaps confused Tenerife and La Palma.

A FRAMEWORK OF GOVERNMENT 127 Spanish empire records that in the summer of 1492 Lope de Salazar ‘vecino del Real de Las Palmas’, no doubt the conquistador of that name whom the chronicles and other records mention, went to Tenerife to make a peace treaty with one of the tribes (‘a concertar pazes entre la dicha ysla e el dicho vando de

Anagan’). We are given no details of the terms he made, but they included the stipulation that the natives of other tribes could be raided by the Spaniards; immunity from such attacks was evidently the price of the Anagans’ friendship. This case must be unique in the annals of Spanish colonizing, where a native tribe was treated with on equal terms, without having to start from an inferior juridical position. Elsewhere, the natives were held in law to be subjects already of the Spanish crown,

and could only either acquiesce in the requirements the Spaniards made of them or be treated as rebels. ‘The crown’s representatives on Gran Canaria honoured Lope’s treaty with, if anything, supererogatory zeal, for in 1493, when the peacemaker made a raid in which three natives were seized (‘avia ydo a saltear e que tomo fuera de los dichos limites tres canarios del

Gran Rey’ — perhaps a reference to the mencey of Taoro), Francisco Maldonado pretended to agree to their sale, but sent his son with the officials from Gran Canaria to impound the captives and arrest Salazar ‘as a treaty-breaker’ (‘como quebrantador de pazes’).*° Social standing was protection even against administrators as ruthless as Lugo. The Spaniards were generally more sensitive to differences of class than those of race or culture, and the cream of the old indigenous society found protection and even welcome in early colonial society. Much of the Canarian nobility was integrated by marriage into the Castilian, the daughters of don Fernando Guanarteme, for instance, marrying one into the Guzman family — the house of the dukes of Medina Sidonia — the other into the Béthencourts. Nor was don Fernando himself

the only leader of the old society to prosper under the new; though they were not allowed the share in government which, as we Shall see, the erstwhile chieftain of Galdar had in Gran Canaria, the scions of the Tenerife chiefs were treated as SA.G.S. 24 January 1494, Valladolid, f. 84 (Cat. XIII, xi, no. 44). The monarchs ordered the witnesses in the case to be heard more than three years later. A.G.S. 27 August 1497, Medina del Campo, f. 21.

128. THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

notables by the administration of Alonso de Lugo. Of course, many of the natives, especially on Tenerife, fell

into neither of the protected categories (bandos de paz nor nobility), and many of those who theoretically should have been protected as the result of their adherence to the terms of the inchoate Requerimiento were, in fact, treated otherwise. Pedro de Vera’s solution to the native problem was mass deportations; this idea seems to have been inspired by the problem of the large

number of natives who had been attracted inside the Spaniards’ stockade at an early stage of the campaign, and whom de Vera regarded as only incompletely won over to the Castilian cause;

fearing an uprising and being short of supplies, both for the

natives and his own men, the Governor, in the words of Bernaldez,** ‘saying that they should accompany him in the caravelles to make a raid and run to Tenerife, in order to seize clothing materials for them, by means of this trick, in the holds of the caravelles, he carried them off to Spain. And they took them to Cadiz and Puerto (de Santa Maria) in the year 1483.’ But for this, Bernaldez continues, ‘it would have been a miracle

had he been able to overcome them’ (‘fuera gran maravilla poderlos sojuzgar’) as they numbered 600 strong fighting men.

The colony of Canarians which was thereby established in Seville continued in existence in August 1485, when Don Fernando Guanarteme interested himself in its well-being.*° The policy of deportation seems to have gone on after the conquest was over;*° in part, it certainly had the authority of the

monarchs behind it — a fact all the more surprising in that many of the individuals affected were at least nominally Christians who had subscribed to terms suggestive of the Requerimiento. However, the accounts of the receiver Antonio de

Arévalo include disbursements to merchants who had transported the Canarians whom their Highnesses ordered to be deported (‘los canarios e canarias que Sus Altezas mandaron sacar’);>’ moreover, in 1491, when the concejo of Gran Canaria

was expressing its fears of the still uncomfortably large and

**Bernaldez, Memorias, p. 142. , SWolfel, ‘La curia romana’, p. 1062. In 1494 Pedro Miguel, a merchant of Seville,

bought hides from ‘ciertos canarios veginos del Arahal del Conde de Urena’. A.G.S. 3 January 1495, Madrid, {. 257.

FRC, il. 8. >”Tadero, ‘Las cuentas’, p. 88. ,

A FRAMEWORK OF GOVERNMENT 129

potentially dangerous native population, the Catholic Monarchs clearly ordered the councils of various Andalusian ports and of the Canary Islands themselves not to permit any

Canarian to embark for Gran Canaria without the express permission of the monarchs themselves, who had prohibited

such Canarians from being there and had ordered their expulsion; any native who returned without permission would be put to death (‘que muriese por ello’).** In these circumstances, it was fortunate for the natives that not all of them were subject to the colonial administration on Gran Canaria; some of them continued their old way of life in arms, as we learn from the record in April 1485 ofan expedition against insurgents in the mountainous interior (‘los canarios que andavan alcados en esta ysla’).*? But there was an important group which lived together quite legally under the rule of Fernando Guanarteme; apparently in 1483, and probably quite soon after the completion of the conquest,* the monarchs had given don Fernando permission to take forty members of his tribe (‘parientes suyos’) under his wing and govern them as a

kind of enclave apart from the rest of colonial society. Not unnaturally, however, the administration resented their special status and by 1491 was claiming that their number had risen to an illicit 150.47 Their fate is unknown, but for as long as they

survived they constituted an intriguing anomoly and their method of government a curious survival of indigenous institutions into the colonial period. At least the natives of Gran Canaria escaped inclusion in the

Repartimientos, a curious fact which sets the Canary Islands apart from the development of the encomienda in Spain and the New World. From early in the Middle Ages, feudal grants in

| Spain had included solares poblados, a type of grant which was 38A.G.S, 23 December 1491, f. 168 (Cat. XII, viii, no. 3480); D. J. Wélfel, ‘Don Juan , de Frias’, El Mus. Can., xiv (1953), 34. *°Ladero ‘Las cuentas’, p. 82. The same point is made by a number of witnesses who stress Fernando Guanarteme’s part in pacifying these insurgents in the ‘Informacién de Dita Margarita Fernandez’ (1526), published in Chil, Estudios historicos, iii, 203—34. AL Serra Rafols in RHC, xx (1954), 163. See also his ‘La repoblacién de Canarias’, ° 4TA.G.8S, 27 September 1491, f. 81 (Cat. XI//, vii, no. 2605); Wélfel, ‘Don Juan de Frias’, p. 31. We may recall that in the Indies from June 1511, each cacique was allowed

to nave forty dependants (naborias) under him. A.G.I. Indiferente General 418, III, f.

130) THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

carried to America but not the Canaries, while in the Indies the inhabitants were shared out with or (as was more usual) without the land. Although it could be plausibly argued in the Canaries, as indeed it was by captains desirous of selling their captives as slaves outside the islands,* that the natives were infidels lacking in juridical identity or legal rights, yet this outlook, which exposed many natives to enslavement both inside and outside their homeland, did not lead to an extension of the encomienda system to the Canaries themselves.** Even in the jurisdiction of Alonso de Lugo, the natives were not actually included in the Repartimeento, but were disposed of separately by the governor as

part of his booty. The fact that Lugo controlled the disposal of slaves in Tenerife and La Palma is a reflection of the governor’s generally strong hold on the institutions of these islands. He claimed before his restdencia in 1508 that he had conquered Tenerife for the honour and profit of the crown (‘para Sus Altezas en acrecentamiento de sus rentas e patrimonio’)** but, in fact, the influence of the monarchs was much less on his islands than on Gran Canaria, and he ruled largely for the benefit of himself. This was made possible by the fact that he had been personally responsible for the finance and recruitment necessary for the conquest; in order

to reward him adequately and provide incentives for his backers, the Catholic Monarchs had from the first endowed him with powers far more extensive than those accorded to the governors of Gran Canaria. In consequence, the role both of the crown and of popular institutions was much more restricted in the early administraion of Tenerife (and probably La Palma)

than the other islands. The writs appointing Lugo to his 42. Garcia Gallo, ‘Las Bulas de Alejandro VI y el ordenamiento juridico de la expansi6n portuguesa y castellana en Africa e Indias’, Anuario de historia del derecho espanol, xxvii—xxviii (1957-8), 617. #3 Abreu de Galindo (Historia de la conquista, 11, 26) speaks ofa repartimiento of Canarian

children by the Bishop, but this would appear to be for purposes of instructing them in the faith. A larger proportion of enslaved islanders were from Tenerife than from Gran

Canaria. See Cortés, ‘La Conquista de Canarias’. (Srta Cortés’s main point, that supplies of slaves were related to the progress of the conquest, does not take account of her own figures, which show that the price curve and the supply curve followed the same fluctuations: this would seem to indicate that supply was regulated by demand rather than the vicissitudes of the conquest. Slaves were not obtained chiefly by means of regular military operations but by raids [cabalgadas and entradas}). “FRC, in. 116.

A FRAMEWORK OF GOVERNMENT 131 governorships also gave him the right to control entry and exit from the islands, to carry out the Repartimiento on his own, to exercise civil and criminal jurisdiction and decide all cases at

law and to appoint and dismiss judicial deputies;** the monarchs apparently wished, as a limitation of Lugo’s power, that the concejo should elect the councillors, but as the founder of

new townships Lugo had the right of nominating the first councillors and continued in practice to appoint their successors for years.*© The first council of Tenerife was appointed on 20 October 1497,*7 when Lugo ‘because it was needful for the

service of God and their Highnesses’ (‘por quanto hera nece-

sario al servicio de Dios e de Sus Altezas’) appointed six councillors including his old colleagues, Lope Fernandez and

Guillén Castellano, and his kinsman, Pedro Benitez. This | suggests that the form of the council, if not the manner of its election, was to resemble that of Gran Canaria. Again, it was Lugo, not, as on Gran Canaria, the monarchs, who appointed the scribe. It is curious amid this evidence of a gubernatorial monopoly of appointments that almost the only known fact

concerning the administration of La Palma relates to a popularly elected official, called the personero: presumably he more closely corresponded to the procuradores of Gran Canaria than to its personero.®

Yet, for all his power, Lugo was never allowed to achieve the

quasi-seigneurial independence which would perhaps have suited him. Only about a year after he took up his governorship, at the end of 1497 or beginning of 1498, his conduct during the conquest and acts of rapacity against officially protected natives (‘los guanches que quisieron nombrar de pazes’) was made the subject of an inquiry by a judge from Seville, before whom the bishop of the islands and Governor Valenzuela, the new governor of Gran Canaria, gave evidence.*? And it seems that in some respects the situation of ‘Tenerife was being assimilated to that

of Gran Canaria: a royal writ of 1510 shows approval being *[bid., 147-50, 154-5; Castillo, Descripcién histérica, ii. 637—8, 656; Chil, Estudios historicos, i. 422—6; Arch. La Lag. RI (Reales Cédulas), 1. 46 FRG, iii, p. iii,

ERC, iv. 3. *®de la Rosa, Evolucton del régimen local, p. 60, n. 45.

“FRC, ili. pp. xi-Xil.

132. THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

bestowed upon the elections of public scribes on ‘Tenerife in the

manner of the ordinances made in 1494 for Gran Canaria; the elections were now apparently made by the concejo rather than the governor, though the governor’s approval, as well as the sovereign’s, was still necessary.*° Throughout this period of

slow tempering of gubernatorial powers, the monarchs pre- | served their vigilance by means of periodic residencias, conducted into the affairs of the governor during the currency of his period of office rather than at the end as was more usually the

case. By the time Alonso de Lugo was granted the hereditary title of Adelantado de Canarias in 1503 (a title implying but not conferring supreme judicial and administrative authority under the crown), the period of his greatest power was probably over, and a more normal institutional situation reasserting itself; but the Canaries’ normality was Castile’s singularity. ‘Che remoteness of the islands from royal justice continued in the next two decades to allow a broad margin of licence for abuses by governors and crimes by antisocial elements.

“Arch, La Lag. RI, nos. 9 and 11.

Vil ADMINISTRATIVE AND JUDICIAL PROBLEMS Y en las partes, y lugares donde los Reyes, y Principes no puedan intervenir, ni regir, y governar por si la Republica, no hay cosa en que la puedan hacer mas segura, y agradable merced que en darla Ministros, que en su nombre, y lugar la rijan, amparen y administren, y distribuyan justicia, recta, limpia, y sanamente, sin la qual, no pueden consistir, ni conservarse, los Reynos.' . .. los excesos e insolencias que en Provincias tan remotas puede, y suele ocasionar la mano poderosa de los que se hallan tan lexos de la Real.”

The administrative framework described in the last chapter was

gradually modified in the first generation of settlement by pressure from four sources. The increasing population, combined with the reciprocal enmity of rival groups and individuals in colonial society, caused a volume of litigation and a number of appeals that strained the existing judicial institutions beyond their capacity; the truculence and recalcitrance of the governors compelled the monarchs to seek ‘new counterweights ‘to their

power; and the remoteness of the archipelago, adding to the intractability of the problems of government, lent urgency to that search. Royal policy was preoccupied with control of the sources of power: Jurisdiction, revenues, and patronage, and the

prevention of their abuse. This implied control of the three persons or institutions that exercised devolved authority in the

islands: the Church, the seigneurs, and the governors. The progress and outcome of the monarchs’ relations with these three form the subject of this chapter. Between the ecclesiastical and lay powers, the conclusion of

the conquest had done much to establish peace; mutual recriminations over their respectively protective and hostile 'J. de Sol6rzano y Pereyra, Politica indiana (Madrid, 1972), iv. +1. *Ibid., iv. 160.

134 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

attitudes to the natives were now largely a thing of the past; differences over tithes and taxes were rare, compared with the crowded and embittered proceedings between the Church and the local seigneurs that had animated the years of the conquest. The Church’s right to tithes of all the principal products of the seigneurial islands, with clerical exemption from seigneurial taxation, was settled by the fiat of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1487.° Some differences did arise over the place in the islands of

the tercias reales, the monarchs’ third share in the tithes of the peninsular Church, until the question was definitively settled in the monarchs’ favour by Alexander VI in 1501; it may be that

the tithes were paid directly to the monarchs, who then returned to the clergy the portion that was their due.* A concession peculiar to the Canaries was that the monarchs exempted the clergy from paying éercias on the tithes levied on their own properties.° The only continuing source of difficulty between Church and

lay authorities was the great episcopal liberty of Aguimes in eastern Gran Canaria, over which the governors of the island repeatedly attempted to extend their jurisdiction; as early as 1498 Bishop Diego de Muros was compelled to appeal to the monarchs to define its boundaries, while the local secular justices rejoined that ‘the said place is very near the ports of the said island, especially that of Agudon (sic), which is the best port there 1s, where the best fisheries are; and they say that this is a district of good grazing, wherefore if boundaries are fixed for

the said place there would always be disputes with the Church.’® The prediction indeed proved fair. In 1501 the Governor was in dispute with the Bishop over their respective

jurisdictions,’ while in 1507 and 1508 the inhabitants of Aguimes attempted to exploit their status as episcopal vassals to evade royal taxation.® >Viera, Noticias, ii (1951), 113; ii (1952), 176. ‘J. Peraza de Ayala, ‘EI real patronato de Canarias’, Anuario de historia del derecho espanol, xxix (1960), pp. 122-4. °A.G.S. 15 August 1499, Granada. °A.G.S. 8 March 1498, Alcala de Henares.

Ibid., 22 October 1501, Granada. *Ibid., 24 March 1509, Burgos. I have been able to find only one record ofa riot or

dispute provoked by the Inquisition. According to a deposition in the Inquisition archives, dated November/December 1524, a difference occurred between the President of the inquisitorial tribunal at Las Palmas and the Governor over their respective

ADMINISTRATIVE AND JUDICIAL PROBLEMS 135

On the whole, however, the foundation of the good relations prevailing between Church and crown in the islands was the monarchs’ control of ecclesiastical patronage there. Ferdinand and Isabella believed that a right of presentment belonged to them by custom in conquered territories, but required a specific

commitment from the Supreme Pontiff that they and their successors would enjoy such an entitlement in the Canary Islands. In 1484 they instructed representatives in Rome to obtain a concession in appropriate terms. The first result seems to have been a bull of Innocent VIII of 14 May 1486, confirming an earlier pronouncement of Eugenius IV and restating in general terms the royal right of presentment in areas liberated

by reconquest from the infidel. But the monarchs were evi-

dently dissatisfied, and in December 1486, by the bull ‘Orthodoxae Fidei’, the patronage of all ecclesiastical appoint-

ments worth over two hundred florins a year was formally conferred upon them, specifically in the Kingdom of Granada and the Canary Islands; in practice this meant an universal right of presentment, since the exclusion of less valuable offices was ignored and a further limitation, on priories and nunneries, which figured in the original bull, was omitted in early Castilian

translations. Occasional appointments continued to be made without reference to the monarchs as late as 1507, but the Castilian crown was an institution wary of its rights: in 1502 Diego Deza, then Bishop of Palencia, was charged with ensuring that royal patronage was unviolated in the churches of Granada, the Canaries, and Puerto Rico — a nice combining of

three areas of conquest — and thereafter lapses in the

monarchs’ control diminished.’

It is interesting that ‘Orthodoxae Fidei’ should have included in a single embrace the churches of Granada and the Canaries; in part this recalls the fifteenth-century tradition in

Castile that the subjection of the Canaries was part of the Reconquest. But, more significantly, it counts as one among jurisdictions. At the same time, the deposition continues, citizens were being held prisoner in the Bishop’s house, which was besieged by an armed mob, including Juan de Siberio, who believed that his paramour was among those incarcerated. Inquisition MS LXXII-11, & 1-3.

goog de Ayala, ‘El real patronato’, pp. 130—7; Viera, Noticias, iti (1952),

136 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

several instances of how the institutions of the Canary Islands and, in some cases, of the New World, owed their particular modalities to juridical traditions developed during the peninsular Reconquest. In Castilian law, since the thirteenth century at the latest, territories won from the infidel by royal prowess were

treated on a different footing from the monarchs’ inherited patrimony. The placing of ecclesiastical appointments in the sovereign’s gift paralleled the liberty he enjoyed to dispose of

the lands and lay dignities of the conquered territories as though they were his personal possessions, rather than, in the case of lands, part of the inalienable heritage of the crown or, in the case of offices, the property of their holder or of some other source of authority. The importance of this fact becomes apparent when we consider how the Canaries came to be thought of

as a ‘kingdom’ incorporated in but distinct from the crown of Castile, like the realms of the Reconquest and those of the future

in the New World. In the sphere of Church patronage, its significance is less marked, since the progressive extension of royal control over ecclesiastical preferments throughout the

monarchy of Ferdinand and Isabella made for greater uniformity and outmoded the distinction between reconquered and other areas. But the coupling of the Canaries with Granada perhaps helped to ensure that ecclesiastical appointments in the islands tended in the next century to share the same forms of procedure as those of the Peninsula, whereas in the New World,

although Alexander VI repeated the concession of rights of presentment to the monarchs in terms similar to those Innocent

had applied in the earlier case, the greater distance involved resulted in procedural peculiarities and the devolution of royal functions. Of the secular sources of power in the archipelago, which the monarchs sought to control, the hereditary seigneurs appeared at first more formidable than the royally appointed governors. Even before the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, the lords of the Canary Islands had a long history of disputed authority with the crown. Béthencourt at the beginning of the fifteenth century

had founded what was virtually a territorial principality or vassal state in Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, and Hierro, nominally under the Castilian crown but subject to no effective authority of the suzerain. Successive generations of seigneurs

ADMINISTRATIVE AND JUDICIAL PROBLEMS 137 continued to resist the royal ‘superior lordship’ (senorio superior

or supremo) — which meant in practice their vassals’ right of appeal from their judgements to the royal courts — while the monarchs repeatedly asserted and gradually enforced 1t. As late as 1477, Diego de Herrera and Inés Peraza were still attempting to deny this principle.*° With Ferdinand’s and Isabella’s intervention in the conquest, however, seigneurial independence was doomed; for henceforth a permanent royal representative was close at hand in the person of the governor of Gran Canaria. In fact, the competence of the royal governors in the seigneurial islands was ill defined from the first. On 12 May 1478 the

Catholic Monarchs had issued an assurance that none of their captains would dispossess the Herreras of any of their islands,'* but this did not preclude all gubernatorial activity within them. Twice in the next decade, the governors of Gran Canaria had to invade Gomera on the seigneurs’ behalf, in order to suppress native rebellions.'? If only as the royal representative nearest at hand, the governor of Gran Canaria was bound to have dealings with the Herreras’ vassals which, in time of differences between

the monarchs and lords or at times when the monarchs were anxious to extend their authority, could well take on the character of interference. Moreover, although the earliest grants of office on Gran Canaria were specifically restricted to that island, more ambiguous wording soon crept in. The terms ‘ysla

de Gran Canaria’ and ‘yslas de Gran Canaria’ were used interchangeably in royal correspondence with the governors. It was not, however, only royal design that led to the increased role which the crown’s Senorio superior was to play in the seigneu-

rial islands in the years ahead; as the islands were developed

and exploited, as the number of peninsular immigrants increased, as trade expanded, and as military necessities in the

area grew, it was inevitable that more and more litigation connected with the islands should come before the royal officers

and, indeed, the monarchs themselves. In December 1483 the 0See their submissions at an inquiry of 1476—7 that the case should be tried on Lanzarote and that the appellants, as rebels, were ineligible to be heard. Chil, Estudzos historicos, it. 526-8, 537, 'TA.G.S., n.d., f. 99 (Cat, XTH, ii, no. 545). '2A,G.8. 26 May 1478, f. 100 (Cat XII, ii, no. 597); Wolfel, ‘La curia romana’, p. 1060; ‘Los gomeros vendidos por Pedro de Vera y Beatriz de Bobadilla’, £l Mus. Can.,1

(1933); Chil, Estudios historicos, iti. 289. ,

138° THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

seigneurs complained of interference by the Governor, captain,

justices, and other officials of Gran Canaria (‘vosotros vos aveis : entremetido y entremeteis a entender en la governacion e mandado de las dichas islas e en los Vasallos e merinos e jurisdiccion dellas’). Inés Peraza petitioned the monarchs, who in reply ordered their people ‘to refrain from meddling in the

islands of Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, Hierro, and Gomera because they belong to the said lady’.’® In 1484 the seigneurs themselves petitioned their suzerains to limit emigration from the seigneurial to the newly conquered islands; and a dispute over ecclesiastical dues and revenues on the seigneurial islands

came before the royal court.'* Inés Peraza seems to have interested herself about that time in shipping merchandise — no doubt an increasingly profitable line of business in the area — and again had recourse to royal justice in connexion with that.'> Most important of all, there was the death of Hernan Peraza, the Herreras’ heir, in a native insurrection in 1488, which at once necessitated the presence of the Governor of Gran

Canaria on Gomera, and then caused litigation to break out between Inés Peraza and her formidable in-laws; that, in turn, ended in the division of the seigneury into four small units.'® , ‘The division of the patrimony reduced the lords’ power; and the litigation involved them in constant appeals to the peninsula —

the very transgression on their own supposed rights that they had sought to forbid to their vassals before 1477.

Despite the singular position from which the history of seigneurial government in the Canaries started at the beginning of the fifteenth century, its course seems to accord quite well

with what we know of relations between the monarchs and

nobles of Castile generally and the ebb and flow of mercedes and

rewindicaciones (grants of lordship and their recovery by the crown). The jurisdiction that was at issue between the Catholic Chil, Estudios histortcos, iii. 236 n. 2; A.G.S. 22 December 1483, f. 227 (Cat. XII, iii, no. 2113).

Sn December 1483 the monarchs forbade cattle exports by emigrants from minor islands (Chil, Estudios Aistéricos, ii. 236 n. 1); the next month, they issued a general prohibition. A.G.S. 5 January 1484, f. 6 (Cat. XTIT, iii, no. 2173). SE. A.G.S. 25 August 1484, f. 133; 3 April 1490, f. 115; 8 June 1490, f. 36 (Cat. XIII, vii, nos. 1390, 1839). FRC, vi. 149-89; Viera, Noticias, ii (1951), 270-1; J. Peraza de Ayala, ‘Terceria de Guillén de Las Casas al Senorio de La Gomera en 1504’, El Mus. Can., xx (1960).

ADMINISTRATIVE AND JUDICIAL PROBLEMS 139 Monarchs and the Herreras was senorio superior or supremo dominio

—— the monarchs were neither willing nor able to curtail the lords’ dispensation of justice to their vassals, as long as the crown’s pre-eminent rights were recognized and appeals to the

Peninsula allowed. This was not the context of nascent

absolutism, but a good example of what Vicens Vives called _ “pre-eminent monarchy’ (‘monarquia preeminencial’).”” It is worth observing, finally, that seigneurial or ‘feudal’ institutions, contrary, perhaps, to first appearances, were byno | means characteristic of Castilian colonial societies, as they were

of Portuguese or French. Once the Catholic Monarchs had taken the conquest of the Canary Islands under their own wing, they created only one lordship there — the small fief of Agtiimes

in eastern Gran Canaria, reserved for the bishop. Columbus was able to enjoy few of the privileges of his quasi-seigneuria! rights of justice in the New World in his lifetime, and they were

whittled away subsequently in his family’s long legal conflict with the crown (the Pleitos de Col6n), just as those of the lords of

the Canaries had been eroded in the inquiry of 1467~7, which

preceded royal intervention in the conquest. In Granada, Ferdinand and Isabella were more generous in granting lordships — or perhaps one should say that the compulsion was stronger because of the big aristocratic contribution to the conquest, but Ladero Quesada has shown that jurisdictional fiefs were largely confined there to areas from which the native population was not displaced; in the parts of the kingdom which were colonized in the true sense by Castilian settlers, the senorios

were almost as infrequent as in the Canaries or New World. Although the Catholic Monarchs’ successors were notoriously more careless with their jurisdiction in the Peninsula, which they alienated lavishly, the example set by Ferdinand and Isabella in their own conquered territories was on the whole upheld in the sixteenth century in the New World. Jurisdiction was usurped, especially by settlers with extensive grants of Indian labour services or tribute, but was granted away only sparingly, for exceptional services, as in the marquessates of Cortés and Pizarro, the lordship of Alvarado, and a very few cases besides. This is not surprising, in view of the slight interest Estructura administrativa estatal’, Obra dispersa (Barcelona, 1967), i. 364.

140 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

in Overseas expansion evinced by the Castilian nobility, but it does help to modify the view that Castilian expansion normally carried with it the characteristic institutions of seigneurialism and vassaldom, in short, of ‘feudalism’. This 1s not to say that there were no resemblances between feudal forms of government and those by which Castilian overseas possessions were sometimes initially ruled, as Charles Verlinden has argued."® But the influence of medieval institutional models was small and restricted to an early phase of Castilian expansion, which

soon developed genuinely original institutions, created and

moulded by the new experiences and demands of unac-

customed environments in the Canaries and the New World. Governors appointed by the monarchs emulated and even excelled the hereditary seigneurs in the abuse of power. In their case it might take the form of judicial excesses like those of the lords,'!? or recourse to violence outside the limits of justice, peculation from royal dues, and disregard of the established conventions in appointing to offices. A representative crosssection of allegations was made by Martin de Vera in 1513 and directed particularly against Lope de Sosa, Governor of Gran Canaria: governors and their underlings levied charges 1n cases of debt in which they found for the creditor, before the success-

ful litigant had a chance to recover his money; men were imprisoned without trial and even without being charged, and the governor thereby eliminated political opponents from the

island council; there were too many minor judicial offices, created merely to keep the governor’s lackeys employed or extend his patronage. De Vera suggested that the members of the island council should hold a visitation of the prison for the relief of those unjustly incarcerated, and that when councillors

unterum.*° |

were imprisoned, they should be able to appoint deputies ad Alonso de Lugo combined the office of Governor on Tenerife

and La Palma with the duties of a seigneur in Gomera and Hierro, where he exercised lordship by virtue of his tutelage of '8C.. Verlinden, Cristébal Colin (Madrid, 1957), ch. V; Les Origines de la civilisation atlantique (Paris, 1966), pp. 164—5; Précédents médtévaux de la colonte en Amérique, pp. 26-42.

'° Beatriz de Bobadilla was arraigned for arbitrarily hanging her vassals in Gomera in 1501 and 1503. FRC, v. 189. 20A.G.8. 5 June 1513, Valladolid.

ADMINISTRATIVE AND JUDICIAL PROBLEMS 14]

the heirs to those islands, his wife’s children by her former marriage. Consistently with what has already been said of his pesonality, and his power, he seems to have been guilty of more

and worse excesses than any of his contemporaries in the islands. Complaints filed against him at the monarchs’ court in

1501 accused him of using arbitrary arrest of persons and sequestration of goods — and even of recourse to murder — in his attempts to monopolize the trade with mainland Africa.?' In

1504 he violated sanctuary to seize and imprison a settler on Tenerife who had accused him — not implausibly — of peculation from the royal revenues to the value of a million mrs. yearly, and had observed mildly that he was ‘a man quick to take offence’ (‘hera onbre que se henojara presto’); nor was the Governor slow to take the imprisoned man’s goods for himself.” Between 1497 and 1505 Lugo supplemented his own depredations by abetting those of his ‘nephew’, Juan de Lugo, who had

fled to La Palma to escape his obligations to the crown; his ‘uncle’ installed his as deputy governor and was said to protect him from the just complaints of the settlers.7? Alonso de Lugo’s

local reputation for ferocity was admirably highlighted at the time of his residencia in 1508, when Pedro Fernandez, an island councillor of ‘Tenerife who was a frequent source of suggestions for administrative reforms in the islands, warned the monarchs that witnesses at the restdencia would be deterred from testifying by the prevailing fear of the Governor; the queen responded by issuing a general safe conduct for all who should give evidence

at the enquiry.** Lugo could even intimidate Hernando del Hoyo, King Ferdinand’s favourite and member of the royal household, to whom the Governor denied possession of lands on

Tenerife that were his by grants as a participant in the conquest; in the course of the long suit which he fought at the royal

court in defence of his rights, Hoyo had ample occasion to 71A.G.8. 20 September 1501. 22 _G.S. 14 January 1505, Toro, f. 48.

PAGS, 2 January 1505; strictly speaking, I suspect, Juan was Alonso’s second

HA GS. 2 March 1508, Burgos; on 6 March Fernandez is recorded as having complained that Lugo had threatened him (‘a grandes vozes le dixo que le echaria por

las ventanas abaxo’) and actually assaulted him for voting in council against the governor’s interest. It is worth recalling that Lope de Sosa was appointed to conduct a residencia into Lugo’s general conduct on 4 March.

142 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

observe that ‘the said governor is powerful and does and has done what he likes, like a de facto absolute lord’.*°

[t is evident that Alonso de Lugo’s standards of gubernatorial conduct were emulated by the governors of Gran Canaria,

despite their more restricted opportunities, and, to a smaller extent, by the crown’s lesser officials in the islands. Antonio de Torres, Golumbus’s former companion who served briefly as

Governor of Gran Canaria, had arbitrary imprisonments and ‘affronts and unreasons’ laid to his charge;”° and Lope de Sosa, the longest-serving Governor of the island in the period, rapidly

acquired a reputation for precisely the kind of judicial abuses from which the monarchs had ordered him to protect Alonso de Lugo’s victims. In November 1509 it was alleged at the royal court that the common people of the island dared not prepare complaints against Sosa for trial, lest he should use his powers to imprison them for conspiracy.*” In June 1514 the monarchs granted the right to bear weapons to Michel de Moxica, island councillor of Gran Canaria, who went in fear of his life because

he had dared to bring various accusations against Sosa at a restdencia.*®

Of minor officials, it was the governors’ judicial deputies, the

alcaldes, who had the greatest opportunities and incentives to abuse their office, especially because of the system, which a complaint of April 1513 attributed to Lope de Sosa’s devising, of sharing the fines imposed by the islands’ courts between the *5Further complaints of Pedro Fernandez: Lugo had refused to hand over Hoyo’s lands at Realejo and Treslatadere, taking the best for himselfand giving away the rest; he apparently insisted that Hoyo take over a debt of his to ‘un Rafael mercader’ — no doubt Rafael Font. Hoyo agreed, ‘viendo el dicho Hoyos (sic) que el dicho governador es poderoso e que a fecho e faze lo que quiere de hecho como sefior asoluto (sic)’. A.G.S. 9 March 1508, Burgos. On Hoyo, see A. de Lorenzo-Caceres, ‘Historia de la casa Hoyo-Solérzano’ in the revised edition of Fernandez de Béthencourt, Nodbzliario de Canarias, iti. 180-200. 6A .G.S. 17 February 1503, Alcala: Grigorio de Trujillo for Fernando del Castillo

complained that Torres imprisoned him a year previously and his case remained unheard; Ibid., 24 May 1503, Alcala: Lope Sanchez de Valenzuela lodged appeal against the ‘agravios e synrazones’ of Antonio de Torres and his officials and asked that the juez de restdencia, Alonso Escudero, be appointed to investigate. 27A.G.S. 15 November 1509, Valladolid: complaint of Francisco Mercado, personero of the concejo of Gran Canaria, that the concejo dare not meet to prepare such documents ‘puesto que el dicho governador pudiese mandarles presos por liga e monopodio’. In

1507, Mercado had been unwilling to take up his office as personero, and had to be compelled to it by royal command. Ibid., 24 November 1507, Burgos. 78A.G.5S. 11 June 1514, Segovia.

ADMINISTRATIVE AND JUDICIAL PROBLEMS 143

presiding alcalde and the man who brought the successful accusation.”? As well as the excesses this system implied, the courts suffered from the corruptibility of these officials. An

allegation of March 1507 suggests that the Governor and a lesser alcalde of Gran Canaria had conspired three years previously to prevent damaging documents from reaching the royal court and to harass the man responsible for their despatch.*° Blas Afonso, resident of Gran Canaria, claimed to have suffered

particularly from persecution by his neighbour, Pedro de Hervas, who mounted many lawsuits against him and seized his cows, because of the partiality of the local judge.*?

Fiscal abuses were as frequent as judicial excesses. The peculations of Alonso de Lugo, already mentioned, were only the most conspicuous of many cases.** In August 1502, for instance, Antonio de Torres and his officials were upbraided for not remitting to the royal treasury the public fines still owing

from the period of the previous Governor’s incumbency.* Ferdinand and Isabella were aware that governors Lope

Sanchez de Valenzuela and Antonio de Torres both held back | monies due to the treasury.** And when Torres died at sea at the end of his term of office, his own outstanding revenue from

judicial profits, which should have gone to his heirs, was misappropriated by his officials;*° it is not known what order of sum might have been involved; the governor was entitled to the judicial perquisites of his office, plus an annual salary of 20,000 mrs., payable by the residents of the island.*° At a time when patronage was in some ways as important as

wealth as a source of status and form of fortune, it was not surprising that appointments to offices should have been further objects of gubernatorial cupidity in the Canaries. One of 9A.G.S. 23 April 1513, Valladolid: Fernando de Aguayo complained that this system led to abuses. 3°A.G.S. 30 March 1507, Plasencia. 94A.G.S. 22 November 1507, Burgos.

In March 1503 a large part of the royal share of the ecclesiastical revenue of Tenerife and La Palma, as well as Gran Canaria, which it was the governor’s duty to remit, was also reported as missing. A.G.S. 24 March 1503, Alcala. 8A.G.S. 8 August 1503, Toledo. °4A.G.8. 18 May 1503, Alcala. 38A,G.S. 23 April 1503, Alcala. *°According to the letter in which the island of Gran Canaria was apprised of the appointment of Lope de Sosa (A.G.S. 5 November 1507, Burgos).

144 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

the complaints most frequently heard by the monarchs from the

islands in the period was that appointments were not being made in accordance with the Fuero of 1494. As early as 1501, they were told that Lope Sanchez de Valenzuela and his nominees on the island council had been ignoring the due forms

in electing new councillors.*’ The following year Antonio de Torres was ordered to proceed to new elections in conformity with the fuero.** Some councillors, indeed, appear to have been displaced, but Torres held no proper elections.?® The monarchs

tolerated this situation only briefly. In 1502 Dr Alonso de Escudero arrived to conduct the investigation due at the expiry of Antonio de Torres’s governorship, and by the time the ques-

tion of elections to local office next occurs in the records, in 1504, the #wero seems to have been operating in accordance with

the royal wishes,*° a pattern that was upheld on the next occasion, in 1507.4! One of the men then elected was the Francisco Mercado mentioned before; five years later the monarchs appointed one Nicolas Rodriguez to succeed him, apparently without consulting the wishes of the island council and to its members’ great displeasure. It was represented by Rodriguez’s opponents firstly that he had obtained the office by making a false declaration of his predecessor’s death and subse-

quently that he was disqualified anyway as the grandson of a condemned heretic.** As in the earlier disputes over appointments to island councillorships, the dominant theme in this incident was the clash of local with royal interests; but this time it appears to have been the crown that was exceeding the terms

374,G.S. 4 December 1501, Ecija. |

8A G.S., 14 July 1502, Toledo. |

On 22 February 1503 the monarchs ordered an investigation into the complaints of displaced officials (A.G.S. Alcala). But in June of the same year Bartolomé Ramirez, ‘nuestro procurador sindico’ of Gran Canaria, obtained for the existing councillors and other office~holders confirmation for the time being on the grounds that controversy over the form of election had made elections impossible for the previous two years ‘e que la dicha eleccion non se podria agora faser como deve fasta tanto que el doctor Alfonso Escudero que va por nuestro juez de residencia de la dicha ysla fuese ydo a ella’. A.G.S. 16 June 1503, Alcala. *A.G.S. 15 April 1504, Medina del Campo: confirms election ‘conforme al fuero’. *1A.G.8. 6 November 1507, Burgos: confirms election for 1507 and 1508 (‘para este ano e para el venidero conforme a la ley del fuero’). 7A.G.S. 4 June 1513, Valladolid: complaint of Crist6bal de Bivas, vegino and councillor, who said additionally that Francisco de Mercado had been a royal nominee (Ibid., 23 September 1514, Valladolid).

ADMINISTRATIVE AND JUDICIAL PROBLEMS 145

of the Fuero, whereas previously it had always been the governors or councillors; but if there was any conscious policy on the royal part of arrogating to the crown the sole right of nomination to these offices, nothing ever came of it: the Fuero seems to have represented a compromise on which both sides fell back.

The outcome of Nicolas Rodriguez’s case is not known and there seem to have been no further cases in which the terms of the Fuero were set aside.

The situation was, of course, somewhat different in Tenerife and La Palma, where, as we have seen, Alonso de Lugo enjoyed the right of nomination to all offices for his lifetime as part of the

concessions he received from Ferdinand and Isabella at the

time of the conquest. He so far abused that power, however, by the appointment of his friends and relations, regardless either of

their merits or the royal wishes, that the monarchs appear to have resolved to strip him of it. For the first decade and more of his governorship, Lugo was left undisturbed in his rights, appointing councillors, deputy governors, and public scribes at will. As late as March 1510 the King-Regent Ferdinand was willing to confirm the incumbent public scribes and their right to be appointed locally;** but by then the rivalry between Lugo and the crown was already coming to a head. The monarchs had successfully imposed one nominated scribe on Tenerife in 1506-7, who was still exercising his office, much to the resentment of Alonso de Lugo, the island council, and the other scribes.** In June 1511 the monarchs established a bridgehead, so to speak, in Lugo’s domain by sending a new representative of its own, the Licenciate Crist6bal Lebron, to Tenerife, to renew the investigation of the governor, with sweeping and unparalleled powers, which we shall enumerate in a moment. Welcomed by the common settlers and by the many enemies Lugo had made, he was able to exploit local feeling against the Governor with telling effect. Specifically charged with the right to nominate officials with judicial powers, he rapidly turned his attention to the appointment of councillors; on 1 September 1512 he overturned the elections Lugo had most recently made, procured the resignations of other councillors, and had them 43]. Nunez de la Pena, Historia y antigiiedades de las Islas Canarias (Santa Cruz, 1847),

pp. 188~9, (II, 3). 44Marrero, in Introduction to FRC, xviii. 13.

146 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

replaced before the end of the year by royal nominees inimical to Lugo’s interest, including Lugo’s enemy, Rafael Font, who thereafter consistently used his vote in the council against the Governor.** Lebron had founded his action on the contention that the appointment of councillors was reserved to the crown;

and it was indeed the case that in all other localities the monarchs reserved the right at least of confirmation, if not of nomination. On Tenerife, however, Lugo’s singular prerogative derived from a royal concession, which does not appear ever to have been revoked; yet Lugo surrendered to Lebrén’s ruling, and henceforth all the councillors of Tenerife were appointed directly and exclusively by the crown. That was not the

end of disputes over appointments on Tenerife. When the crown attempted to interfere further with the distribution of scribeships by establishing an escribania del crimen in 1513 to keep

records of criminal cases, and appointed Hernando del Hoyo, Lugo’s adversary, to the job, the opposition from the Governor’s party on the island council was so fierce that the monarchs decided to relent.*® But the Governor’s monopoly of this type of patronage was now broken for good.

What was more, there was henceforth a permanent royal representative on the island, in the person of the Licenciate Lebron or his successors, to offset Lugo’s power. We saw how at

the end of the conquest the only means available to the monarchs, remote in peninsular Spain, to regulate the excesses

of their officials in the archipelago were frequent changes of governor on Gran Canaria, and the judicial investigation into a governor’s conduct (the pesquisa or residencia) conducted periodically in ‘Tenerife and at the end of each governor’s term of office on Gran Canaria. Thereafter, indeed, the residencias took place with unfailing regularity,*’ incoming governors or specially appointed officials setting eagerly about the task, outgoing governors trying to evade the consequences by appeal or even flight.*® On Tenerife, Alonso de Lugo underwent three FRC, v. 266-77. 46Mfarrero, FRC, xviii. 24~7; FRC, v. 279-80, and xiii. 249—50. “When Antonio de Torres died before his restdencia could take place, the investiga-

tion proceeded anyway, confining its inquiries to the conduct of his subordinates (A.G.S. 12 January 1505, Madrid). 48 According to a deposition considered by the monarchs in 1302, ‘Lope Sanchez de Valenzuela, nuestro governador que ha seydo desa dicha ysla ha ganado una nuestra

ADMINISTRATIVE AND JUDICIAL PROBLEMS 147

residencias by visiting judges before his term of office expired with his life in 1525.* But in the latter island and in La Palma, where Lugo’s life interest in his office created a peculiar set of problems, the monarchs found that the appointment of permanent representatives of their own to offset the Governor’s power was a far more effective form of control: hence the controversy

over councillorships and scribeships. Lugo’s practice of appointing “deputy governors’ offered a further opportunity to the

monarchs. It was with the title of Deputy Governor that Cristobal Lebron arrived in 1511; his powers were defined as the exercise of justice and appointment of officials with judicial powers (alcaldes); he was to enjoy the profits of his office and to

receive the lion’s share of Lugo’s own salary — 70,000 out of 100,000 mrs. yearly.*° He was addressed in royal correspondence as ‘nuestro alcalde mayor’ — a term which implied direct responsibility to the crown and a high degree of judicial authority. He at once took personal charge of all lawsuits pending on the island in which Lugo was involved as principal — a practice

which must have given him a hold over the Governor — and rapidly encroached on Lugo’s patronage. Lugo was never again free of an éminence grise, a lettered official appointed nominally to

assist but actually to offset or supplant him in the royal interest.

In March 1515 Lebrén was succeeded by the Licentiate Cristobal de Valcarcel, and from the following month Lugo was

formally excluded from the exercise of his judicial functions, which henceforth were to be reserved entirely to the deputy

governor.°' Lugo achieved a better understanding with Valcarcel’s successor, Dr Sancho de Lebrija, son of the great grammarian, Antonio de Nebrya, but their entente broke down in 1520~1 in a dispute over the appointment of subordinate officials and for a time Lugo attempted to revert to choosing a deputy governor of his own. The rebellious interlude was shortcarta cabtelosamente para se venir de la dicha ysla por no estar en ella presente para haser la resydencia’. A.G.S. 24 February 1502, Seville. “By Lope de Sosa (1508), Cristébal Lebrén (1511), and Sebastian de Brizianos (1518). There were also an inquiry into his sales of slaves by the Licentiate Maluenda (1497-8) and the reform of the division of the land by Ortiz de Zarate in 1506. *°A.G.S, 20 June 1511, Seville. His commission to complete the residencia is printed in

FRC, iti. 138-44. aw 15 March 1515, Medina del Campo; Serra Rafols, Alonso Fernandez de Lugo, p. 33.

148 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

lived, from March to May 1521.°? Lugo and Lebrija needed each other. It was no longer practical for Lugo to be an independent

paladin. The position of surly autonomy from which he had begun to rule at the conclusion of the conquest had now been overturned and replaced by a more normal situation; the relationship of Tenerife and La Palma to the crown was no longer much different, in effect, from that of Gran Canaria. There now wanted only one further stage in the institutional development of the islands for the whole archipelago to be integrated under a single organ of judicial administration.

For, from the crown’s point of view, the judicial and administrative problems of the Canaries were a matter not only of abuse but also inconvenience, caused by the great distance at which they lay from the Peninsula, and by the expense in time

and money of supervising the administration of justice and hearing appeals. Periodic judicial inquiries and permanent deputy governors were only a partial solution. For much of the period, royal policy was divided between two courses: to restrict the number of appeals to the Peninsula would put more power

into the hands of local sources of authority, with whom the monarchs were already too often in dispute; to restrict the local entertainment of appeals would add to the inconvenience and expense of the process. ‘Thus, although from 1505 the monarchs forbade Alonso de Lugo to hear appeals,* in 1510 they ordered the island councils of Tenerife and La Palma to hear appeals in cases involving between 3,000 mrs. and 10,000 mrs. on the spot because of the great distances and costs involved in appeals to the royal tribunal in Granada.** The same provision had been made on Gran Canaria five years previously.*> The resolution of the dilemma was found in an institution that had already been

introduced in the New World. The establishment of a permanent royal judicial tribunal in the Canary Islands in December 1526 belongs to the same phase of royal policy as the foundation of Reales Audiencias in Santo Domingo in 1526 and New Spain in

1527. There were to be three judges, sitting in Las Palmas, to 524 Cioranescu, Los hijos de Antonio de Nebrija en Canarias’, RHC, xxxiv (1971-2),

90-1; FRC, xvi. 83, 313-14. BERC, ii. 163. “Ibid., v. 264; A.G.S. 20 March 1510, Madrid. **Tbid., 13 June 1504, Medina del Campo.

ADMINISTRATIVE AND JUDICIAL PROBLEMS 149

hear petitions and appeals — trials at second instance — from all over the archipelago and to determine disputes between the civil and ecclesiastical courts of the three areas.*° So far, the tribunal resembled the Audiencias established or shortly to be founded in the New World, and the permanent royal courts of the Peninsula, including the Chancillerias or Audiencias of Valladolid and Granada. Yet its jurisdiction was more limited, for not only could appeals involving disputes over sums up to 6,000 mrs. be decided by the island councils sitting as courts (Justicia y

Regimiento) but great cases, involving more than 10,000 mrs.,

had to be referred to Granada. In this respect, the Canarian court more closely resembled the fixed tribunal set up in Galicia

by Ferdinand and Isabella, later to be styled Real Audiencia, while likewise had an upper limit on its jurisdiction, expressed in terms of the value at stake in the case.*’ And like that court, the Canarian tribunal was not called Real Audiencia from its foundation, though it rapidly came to be styled informally, and the name of ozdores — members of a Real Audiencia — was for long officially withheld from its judges.*®

It is tempting to try to classify the Canarian court in terms of Solorzano y Pereira’s well-known characterization of the differ-

ences between the Castilian and American tribunals.*’ The difference was one of emphasis in the tribunals’ functions. Though all were essentially judicial organs, the tribunals of the

New World took an important share in the administration of the country, whereas those of Valladolid and Granada had no significant administrative functions, and for the Galician tribunal the emphasis was on the trial of cases at law. Unlike those

of the Audiencia of Manila, the ordinances of the Canarian tribunal were never included in the royal codifications or collections of New World law (Recopilaciones de leyes de Indias). And,

initially, it was certainly not the royal intention that the Audiencia de Canarias should meddle in administration, save of justice; the judges were actually reprimanded by the King in May 1531 for “exceeding their instructions and powers’ and °°Libro rojo, p. 77.

57T,, de la Rosa Olivera, ‘La Real Audiencia de Canarias: notas para su historia’, AFA, iui (1957), 112. S41 bid., p. 102. 5° Politica indiana, iv. 39-59.

150 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

interfering in cases that concerned the management and provi-

sioning of settlements, public works, and commons. And in the same year the court was ordered to enforce the regulations of the island councils for matters of local government: this was the recommendation of Francisco Ruiz de Melgarejo, who conducted a judicial visitation of the islands for the King in 1529.° It is equally apparent, however, that the tribunal did encroach on the executive sphere; in the next century, its character was more overtly like that of an Audtencia of the Indies.

In fact, all the permanent royal tribunals, whether in the Peninsula, the islands, or the New World, were underlain by a

~ common purpose. The writ in which Charles V founded the Audtencia de Canarias declared its aim to be ‘the greater relief of

our subjects, considering the distance of the great journey, by both sea and land, that separates the said city [Granada, the nearest seat of a Real Audiencia] from the said islands and in

order that their residents should encounter no vexation nor

fatigue in coming to prosecute their suits’.®* There was much

truth in that. But the royal courts existed for the sake of the King as much as of his subjects, to offset provincial centres of power, especially in the remotest parts of the monarchy and, as Solorzano said of those of the New World, chiefly to guard royal

rights of jurisdiction, patronage, and revenue and prevent usurpations of the monarchs’ authority. In the Canaries, where judicial abuses were so rife and appeals to the Peninsula so difficult, the Real Audiencia was a salutary necessity. It brought to an end gubernatorial and seigneurial control of the dispensation of justice; it united the archipelago under a single judicial

authority. Its establishment coincided with the virtual end of settlement in the islands and the opening up of remote frontiers across the Atlantic; with the end of lawlessness, the end of settlement, and the displacement of the frontier, the era of Canarian history that is the subject of this work was evidently drawing to a close.

“Arch. La Lag. RI, 63, f. 195; quoted by de la Rosa, ‘La Real Audiencia’ p. 128.

*! Libro rojo, p.103. de la Rosa, ‘La Real Audiencia’, p. 128. Libro rojo, p. 78.

Vil TRADE ... questi [gl’isolani] per la natura del luogo maritimo et per l’influentie delle stelle, et per le contrattioni et mercantie secondo Platone non sono liberi in generale d’alcuni calunie et vitii notabili. Conciosiacosa che la vita degli huomin1 in queste isole sotto Parte et mercantie si regge da filosofia chimata effettiva, alla quale ha forza il segno movibile del Cancro, et la varie nature della luna.' ~... quelque soit l’importance des communications avec |’Amérique espagnole, ces communications ne representent qu’une partie des communications globales de l’archipel.?

When Isabella the Catholic died, the island councillors of Gran Canaria fittingly bedecked themselves in imported mourning;

but the heavy expense only added to their grief. As the new monarchs wrote in sympathy, ‘It cost you a heavy price, because the said island is not a place where cloth is made, and the coin

there is very debased, so that each yard of the said mourning cost you 300 mrs. in the money that is current in these our realms.*? This incident is revealing of the conditions in which trade began to grow in the years after the conquest. The islands badly needed imports, especially of clothing materials, but were seriously short of the usual means of exchange. And yet in the compass of the period they developed trading relations of great

importance with other Atlantic archipelagoes, peninsular Spain and Portugal, mainland Africa, Flanders, England, and the New World. Considered from one point of view, the islands’

trade 1s only marginal to the subject of Canarian society and government. But it 1s necessary, for two reasons, to devote a 'L. Vorriani. ‘Descrittione et historia del regno de I’Isole Canarie’, ch. +2, p. 152. *Chaunu, Séville, viii, part I (1959), 390. ‘This, of course, merely recapitulates the wording of an earlier supplication of the council’s to the crown (A.G.S, 25 February 1506, Salamanca, f. 13).'The Queen's death

was proclaimed on Tenerife by a king of arms attired in black silk (‘vestido todo de ropas de seda negra’) (FRC, v. 236). The price on Gran Canaria scems to have been a bargain by the standards of Tenerile.

Is52. 0 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

chapter to it: first, merchants, scarcely less than settlers, are

significant vectors of cultural influence, and in order to

understand the relationship of the civilizations of the Mediterranean and Atlantic in the early modern period, it is essential first to have accurate knowledge about the routes of commerce that linked them. Secondly, trade was the most important element in the economic life of the archipelago, and commerce, as Torriani later observed in the passage quoted as an epigraph to this chapter, was a characteristic part of the islanders’ work. The islands’ reputation for ‘debased’ (baxa) or ‘bad’ (mala)* money 1s apparent: but what exactly did this mean? The islands

did not have a peculiar kind of coinage, nor is there any evidence of minting facilities in the royal islands before 1513. Reference was made to ‘la moneda de Gran Canaria’ as early as 1484 or 1485,° but its special character was a matter not of form or substance but of the peculiar value assigned to it locally.° In

Castile, for instance, after the Catholic Monarchs’ monetary reforms of 1497, the coin of the realm, valued in terms of the general unit of account (the maravedi) was worth 375 mrs. in the case of the gold ducat (excelente de Granada, a contrived name

which popular conservatism eschewed in favour of dodla or ducado) or thirty-four mrs. for the silver real. On Tenerife for most of the period the corresponding values were 500 mrs. for a

ducat and forty-two for a real.’ We know that Gran Canaria’s rate was fixed at the same or nearly the same, since a supplication of the concejo of that island to the monarchs in 1511 spoke of a uniform rate throughout the archipelago prior to 1509,® while in 1510 the currency of Gran Canaria was estimated to be worth

some 25 per cent less, in terms of gold and silver, than that of Castile.’ For the common currency, the cash used for everyday transactions was neither of silver nor gold. The ducat and real were 4*A.G.S. 9 March 1510, Madrid. >Ladero, ‘Las cuentas’, p. 81. °On the genera! fluctuation of values of coin from place to place (and according to date of issue and intrinsic value) before 1497, see J. Lluis y Navas Brusi, La amonedacién espanola bajo los Reyes Catolicos, i (1960), 39—55.

"FRC, v, 106; v. E. Serra Rafols in the introduction to the same volume, p. xiv. 8A.G.S. 4 September 1511, Burgos. °A.G.S. 9 March 1510, Madrid.

TRADE 153 - of excessive denomination."® The eighth-real or octavo was too inconvenient and 1s rarely found 1n surviving coin deposits. But small copper coins, collectively called vellén, circulated freely throughout the Catholic Monarchs’ realms, both in the form of the Castilian blanca, nominally worth half a maravedi (or 750 blancas to the ducat) or the Aragonese penny (dinero), of which 252 made a ducat. It is well known, however, that because of the

restricted issue of copper currency under Ferdinand and Isabella, foreign coinage was used as a makeweight and circulated in formidable quantities. Nowhere, perhaps, was this more apparent than in the Canaries, where the ceuti of Portugal was among the regular means of exchange."' In fact, the shortage of

small coin, which affected Castile generally, affected the Canaries in particular in greater measure. If it was not possible

to revalue the money of the islands, that was because the shortage of gold and silver in the insular economy was even more acute. Indeed, in 1509, Alonso de Lugo actually attempted

a further devaluation of the common currency on Tenerife by ten per cent, making a ducat worth 550 mrs., the real 46 mrs., and the d/anca equivalent to one maravedi,'? in order — as the popular assembly of Gran Canaria alleged and Lugo himself admitted — to attract more specie to the island." If the apparent paradox of a coinage that was at once scarce and undervalued is sufficiently explained by the even greater scarcity of gold and silver money, the over-all shortage of specie remains to be accounted for. Serra Rafols’s advocacy ofa simple

solution —an adverse balance of trade — is no doubt largely right.'* In May 1509 popular demands were heard on Tenerife (‘en nombre de la republica y poblazon’) to force the merchants to accept payment in grain and local truck (‘y cosas de la tierra’) because of the high prices demanded for provisions from abroad and clothing materials;'> the island council acknowledged that cf. C. Sanz Arimendi, ‘Primeras acufiaciones de los Reyes Catélicos’, Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, xli (1920), 73.

Serra Rafols in Introduction to FRC, v, p. xiv; ibid., pp. 64, 83. 2Ibid., pp. 34, 106. 'Ibid., p. 34; A.G.S. 4 September 1511, Burgos. But the shortage of money had probably preceded Lugo’s devaluation, even on Gran Canaria, and certainly on Tenerife. 4 FRC, v, p. xv. 'SERC, v. 33.

l54 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

‘the merchants took all the money of the island, (and) that it

seemed that the residents of the island were left without money.’'® It is surprising that this state of affairs should have coincided with the ‘boom years’ of the sugar industry, which was wholly dedicated to export. Yet it must be remembered that because the islands were not self-supporting they were in a sense at the merchants’ mercy,"’ in spite of the high value of their produce. Moreover, there was no source of coin within the islands. The Catholic Monarchs were most reluctant to permit an increase in the number of licensed mints. It is significant, and highlights the desperate nature of the islands’ starvation of specie, that in 1510 the Sevillan mint was ordered to coin halfa million maravedis’ worth of copper coinage for Gran Canaria.'® This seems an enormous amount by Castilian standards for such a small population. Yet when minting rights were finally conceded to

the island in 1513, a staggering production of three million maravedis was authorized.’ [t is unthinkable that such a limit can have been attained. We should surely have evidence of a transition from dearth to glut of coin, and of severe economic dislocation, if it were so. But the establishment of a local mint greatly eased the situation, and we at least hear no more of the need for specie on Gran Canaria thereafter. Tenerife, too, must

have been favourably affected, though in 1516 shortage of currency (‘La notoria falta de dineros’) could still be lamented there, and the island council still decree that ‘sugar be current among residents and settlers like coined money’.”° A system of barter, in a framework of commodity values fixed by the island council was, indeed, the inevitable consequence of the shortage of specie. Almost anything might be given in truck. Before the commencement of the large-scale export of sugar, the

council of Tenerife obliged merchants to accept grain and cheese.*' But it is no doubt true that generally where barter is

eI bid., p. 30. ,

"We may recall the difficulty of orchil-gatherers in 1499 in obtaining cash for their wares from the merchants. See above, p. 73. '®\.G.S. 20 September 1511, Burgos. '9A.G.8. 10 May 1513, Valladolid. ?’'he best white sugar being fixed at 400 mrs. per arreba — an increase of 100 mrs. on the price five years previously (v.s. see above, p. 82), but still cheaper than on Gran Canaria (FRC, xiii. 165). ERC, iv. 9, 11, 12.

, TRADE 155 practised the most saleable commodity will tend to be used as a

medium of commerce.” In these islands, therefore, sugar rapidly became the normal means of exchange, accounting, for instance, for over half the transactions recorded by the notary Hernan Guerra in 1508.”* But the breadth of range of payment in kind, even at that date, particularly at the humbler economic levels of the pastoralists and dry-farmers, can be seen from the obligation of ‘Pablo Martin, canario’, vecino of Tenerife, to meet

a debt for clothing materials in 1509 in ‘pitch, cheese, or meat’.** The previous year the philanthropic Guanches (natives), Fernando de ‘Tacoronte and Ant6én Azate, agreed to pay 14,000 mrs. for the liberation of an enslaved compatriot in ‘cash, corn, leather, cattle, cheese, or anything except fodder.’*°

It may be necessary to point out that although barter accounted for more transactions than conventional purchase and sale, the economy of the Canaries after the conquest could not be classified as ‘non-monetary’. In the first place, the use of the maravedi for agreeing prices and calculating relative values introduced a monetary element into all transactions. This puts the Canaries after the conquest in a different category from the entirely non-monetary economies of — for example — parts of Polynesia, where relative values cannot be expressed in terms of prices but are determined, if at all, by a ‘hierarchy’ of goods.”®

Moreover, although I have frequently found evidence of a correspondence between possession of sugar and social status, sugar could not be said to be an index of status, except by way of being an index of wealth. This was not, therefore, a situation

which would fit the structural theories of Lévi-Strauss and

other anthropologists about primitive economies.”’ On the con?2°Those commodities, which relatively to both space and time, are most saleable, have in every market become the wares which it is not only in the interest of everyone to accept in exchange for his own less saleable goods, but which also are those he actually does readily accept.’ K. Menger, ‘On the Origin of Money’, Economic Journal, ii (1892), 248; cf. M. Douglas, ‘Primitive Rationing’, in R. Firth, ed., Themes in Economic Anthropology (London, 1967), p. 121. I have drawn most of my references on barter economies from this book. 237. Gentil da Silva’s calculation. ‘Exchange et troc: l’exemple des Iles Canaries,’ Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, xvi (1961), 1005.

4FRC, vii. 150 (2,023 mrs; 31 August 1509). , **Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 181, f. 506 (20 December 1508). ?°R. Firth, Social Change in Tikopia (London, 1959), pp. 138-41; Primitive Polynesian Economy (London, 1965), pp. 338-44, 347-54. "Eg. The Elementary Structures of Kinship (London, 1969), p. 54.

156 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

trary, the object of barter in the Canaries was indistinguishable from the object of commerce in the Europe of the time: its aims were purely economic, concerned with profit-making and set in a context of productive economic specialization — the growth and manufacture of sugar. There is not even a true analogy to be made with those recognizably primitive economies which

did possess a general means of exchange, partly because the Canaries idiosyncratically borrowed from Castile a hypothetical unit of account (which did not circulate like the shells and beads of parts of Africa or Melanesia), partly because some cultures which use shells are marked off by the non-monetary values (talismanic, ornamental, or social) assigned to their ‘currency’. Only the clearly monetary use of shells and beads in

cultures like those of the Solomon and Admiralty Islands can helpfully be likened to the exchange of commodities that went on in the Canaries in the age of settlement — and that is only because they are also the ‘primitive’ economies most closely akin to the fully monetary system of Europe.”* Conspicuous handling, disposal, and accumulation of capital

by the wealthiest settlers and those with mercantile interests were possible, even given the prevalence of barter. In particu-

lar, we have already seen evidence of the great wealth wielded , by Rafael Font, in the course of his loans to sugar producers in

return for the mortgage of their crops, in the years 1506-10. The brothers Font were, like the Riberols, impatient of barter, and claimed their debts in gold. In January 1510, for instance, Gonzalo de Cordoba, merchant, resident of Tenerife, owed ‘Miguel and Rafael Font 283 Castilian ducats of good gold and lawful weight and 365 mrs.’ value, for certain clothing and merchandise which he received from Jaime Joven and ‘‘Francisco Florentin’’, factors of the said Miguel and Rafael Font in this island’.*? Thanks to the records of marine insurance from the notarial archives of Barcelona, published by J. M. Madu-

rell, it can now be confirmed that the Font brothers were shipping considerable quantities of specie to the Canaries in the early years of the sixteenth century.*° The cargoes they can be **Douglas, ‘Primitive Rationing’, p. 124; L. Pospisil, Kapauku Papuan Economy (New Haven, 1963), p. 402 ff D. L. Oliver, A Solomon Island Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1955),

pp. 339-45. *°He mortgaged his house in La Laguna, which stood next to that of Tomas Justiniano. Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 186, f. 337 (8 January 1510). 3°}. M. Madurell Marim6n, ed., ‘Los seguros maritimos y el comercio con las islas de la Madera y Canarias’, AFA, v (1960).

TRADE 157 shown to have sent from Cadiz to the islands in 1505 and 1506, which included gold and silver together with unspecified merchandise and (curiously enough) slaves, were insured for a total of 2,850 ducats.*! Not all of that figure represents the value of the specie, but no doubt other shipments are unrecorded in the surviving documents. It is surely a suggestive coincidence that

this is precisely the period in which Rafael Font began to advance large loans to the sugar producers.*” Those who profited from the shortage of money must, however, have been few. For the poorer settlers and wage-earners there can have been few benefits in the system of barter. Gentil

da Silva has suggested that the doctrine of “disguised saving potential’ might be applied to the Canarian economy in these years;*? but men who received wages in kind — like the sugarestate workers who accounted for so much of the population — were faced with the harsh reality of converting that merchandise into food and clothing at rates which the island councils attempted to regulate but which the merchants in fact controlled. Contemporaries were in no doubt of the evil consequences of the prevalence of truck; as the concejo of Gran Canaria complained, ‘In the said island there is great need of much copper money, because on account of the shortage of it, the poor people cannot buy food or the many things that are needful for commerce.’** Barter did not prevent accumulation of capital or capital goods by the already wealthy; neither, however, did it make capital accumulation accessible to the already poor. Overwhelmingly, it was for clothing that the outgoing sugar and lesser truck was exchanged. But although many surviving records refer vaguely to ‘cloth and other merchandise’, there are only a few specific indications of what was being imported in

these years. Fortunately, two price-lists enumerate what may be the complete range of imported cloths. The first is that decreed by the council of Tenerife in 1500; the second a transac-

tion of February 1506 between Tomas Justiniano and Pedro *'Tbid., pp. 550 (19 June 1505; 600 ducats), 556 (7 November 1505; 1,000 ducats), 561 (30 January 1506; 525 ducats including slaves), 563 (18 February 1506; 725 ducats including slaves). 32See above, p. 82. 33°Echange et troc’, 1010. 344.G.8, 20 September 1511, Burgos.

198 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

Lopez de Villeras (both familiar names, the one for his Genoese provenance, the other for his foundation of the hospital of San

Sebastian**). Justiniano purchased from Lépez Villeras 120 deal planks, 700 fanegas of corn valued at 200 mrs. per fanega, and 200 cheeses: the total sum owing of 128,400 mrs. could be met in any combination from a selection of clothing materials which Justiniano had imported. Reduced to a standard form of mrs. per vara (or yard of 835 mm) and tabulated for comparison, the details of the two price-lists are as shown in Table 11. ‘Table 11: Price-lists of imported cloths

1500 1506

fine linen (presylla) 70 84 English cloth (panos de Londres) 620 700°

Frisian cloth cloth (drtstoles) (antonas) 400 500 Bristol 400 Brittany linen 70 Anges cloth(dbretana) (anges)6363

linen canvas (lzengo de vitres) 50 50 “canvas (zagas de canamo) 42 35 fine lined black cloth (delarte) 1,000

Cuenca coarse cloth (palmilla) 100

fine cotton material (florete) 500 wool lining (/7isa) | 80—100 peninsular (?) cloth (panos de trerra) 300

cloaks 252 Sevillan mantas 450 narrow material of good quality (dureles) 300

Sources: FRC, iv. 29-30 (24 April 1500); Arch. Prov. Tenerife, unnumbered leg. (S. Paez, no, 3 — but there are in fact two ledgers of this notary which bear the same number), f. 53* (5 February 1506). A blank denotes no information, “unspecified quantity bef. the case of Diego Fernandez, ‘valenciano’, who owed ‘R de la Fuente, vecino de Gran Canara’ (could this be Rafael Font?) 3,600 mrs. for 42 varas of Londres on 20 May 1506 (= 800 mrs./vara). Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 181, f. 362.

The apparent increases may be deceptive: the island council in 1500 may have been trying to fix prices at an unrealistically low level. A standard of comparison is provided by a price-list of 1503, relating to Hispaniola, where a yard of Londres de color cost, in Canarian terms, nearly 2,500 mrs. (four pesos de oro); of bretana *°See below, p. 195.

TRADE 159 or anges about 310 mrs., and of presilla some 450 mrs.*° It is curious to see the cases of Hispaniola and the Canaries juxta-

posed. Both at that time had economies dependent on the export of a local product; but the gold of Hispaniola caused a surfeit of specie in these early years and correspondingly high prices, while Canarian sugar (although a surer source of future

wealth) left the islands short of coin. The need for clothing materials and the range of imports of that type were evidently much the same in both colonies. Most of the remaining specific evidence about imports to the Canaries deals with English cloth — panos de Londres. No doubt

this is a trick of the evidence. The common generality, ropa, probably covers the whole range of cheaper materials, whereas ‘Londres’, precisely because of its expense and rarity, enjoys an unfair share of specific mentions. In October 1508 thirty-three

yards of Londres in dark green and brown changed hands on Tenerife at 650 mrs. per yard;°’ while six and a quarter yards of Londres and twenty of holanda, supplemented by a small quantity of assorted goods, fetched fifty arrobas of sugar — equivalent to

15,000 mrs. at the standard valuation. If we treat holanda as comparable with the anionas of ‘Tomas Justiniano, we find that the cloth in this case was worth 12,285 mrs. at 1506 prices. Taking the unspecified goods into account, these figures tally quite satisfactorily with those in the table. The prices, article by article, are closely comparable; and as in the Hispaniola pricelist, too, the differentials between articles are maintained. Turning now to consider the extent of the Canaries’ trade and the destinations of the islands’ exports, unfortunately, there are no registers of shipping or records of import and export tolls to guide us. We have, however, on the one hand the evidence of the provenance of the merchants, which indicates the breadth of scope of Canarian commerce even in the earliest years; and on the other, a few recorded agreements between merchants and ships’ masters on Tenerife, which set the islands in a narrower context of commercial navigation among the Atlantic archipelagos and to and from the Iberian peninsula. Lisbon, Cadiz, Madeira, the Cape Verde Islands, Gomera, and 3°]. de Ayala, A Letter to Ferdinand and Isabella (Minneapolis, 1965).

>’Debt of Hernando del Hoyo to Jaime de Luna and Jaime de Santa Fe, merchants, 19 October (Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 181, f! 504).

160 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

the Atlantic Castilian coast are all mentioned in these contracts or fletamientos, and no other destination. The cargoes given are

sugar, grain, orchil, and pitch. Though the number of documents 1s small and extends over only five years between 1506 and 1513, these cargoes and destinations do not seem unrepresentative. Some important merchants — Francisco de Riberol, the brothers Romano, Jacques Casteleyn, Bernaldo Escarlaty, Juan Jacome Carminatis — figure in them, though one of the largest merchants, Rafael Font, is not included. There are other obvious omissions. In only one contract is there evidence of the

slave trade with the Barbary coast; although many slaves, especially those of ‘Berber’ rather than Negro race, were no doubt obtained by piracy and razzia rather than strictly by way of trade, it seems overwhelmingly probable that Negroes were purchased peacefully in the towns of the mainland. Tagaoz, the town where Canary Island merchants were most active, was the principal slave-market of the region.** I have already drawn attention to the significant extent of illegal grain exports to the same area, especially from Tenerife: it is not hard to see why

that particular form of trade is unmentioned in the shipping contracts. [he instance of a voyage from Tenerife to the Cape Verde Islands may well relate to another trade which it is surprising to find unrepresented in our documents: the purchase of Negroes in the Portuguese offshore emporia of Cape Verde and Sao Thomeé. As far as it goes, however — and it is understood that it is not a complete picture — Table 12, of commercial shipping contracts from Tenerife, is a not unhelpful guide.

The table shows that the ships and their masters are

generally drawn from the same ‘inner Atlantic circle’ as the routes traversed, though the merchants are sometimes from further afield. ‘Two contracts mention remoter destinations, Flanders and Santo Domingo, and indeed, when we turn to evidence of merchants’ provenance and to the Castilian royal

ordinances regulating trade, we find that the islands also maintained relations with an ‘outer Atlantic circle’, touching England, the Low countries, and the Indies. Flemish intercourse with the Canaries has long been known Ricard, ‘Recherches sur les relations des Hes Canaries et de la Berbérie’, pp. 82—5.

| TRADE 16] in a general way and historians are beginning to build up a detailed picture. In a sense, the first recorded commerce between the Low Countries and the islands was that brought by Eustache de la Fosse of Tournai, who sailed from Bruges in 1479 ‘jusques en Seville ou mon maistre avoit envoiet la mar-

chandise que je debrois mener avecques moy pour aller a la mine d’or’.*? He went by caravel, stopping in the Canaries on the way, on one of the illicit voyages to Portuguese waters which

the Catholic Monarchs licensed during the war of 1474-9. Captured and condemned by the Portuguese, he escaped by bribing his gaoler; but it is an equal pleasure to record — and more germane to my present purpose — that even in those latitudes at that early date he was able to buy ‘une aulne de drap de Londres pour me faire une pair de chauces’.*® The earliest known commercial venture by men of the Low Countries

in the Canaries is recorded in a mural by Piet Vanhaert in Antwerp town hall, which represents the arrival of ships charged with molasses in 1508.*' Thereafter, allusions to

Flemings in Canarian records are numerous. Jacques

Casteleyn, for instance, a Flemish merchant, was already doing business on Tenerife by 1509.*? Within a year, he was joined by

Jean Jenbreux (whose name is variously rendered by the Castilian notaries), to whom he sold a Berber slave in June 1510.43 In December of that year, Luis de Axcaca (no doubt the scribe’s corruption of the common name Eustache) purchased a

Negro slave on the same island** and there is a record of ‘Antonio del Estaxa, mercader flamenco’ who appears incidentally as a witness to two documents in 1511. Tenerife was not the only island to attract Flemings. Two further cases of Flemish merchants, both unknown —as far as I can judge — on Tenerife, can be attributed to Gran Canaria “Voyage a la céte occidentale d’Afrique, en Portugal et en Espagne’, ed. R. Fouché-Delbosc, Revue hispanique, iv (1897), 176.

“Tbid., 187. “7, Dénucé, Collection de documents pour histoire du commerce, ii: L’Afrique au XVI siécle et

le commerce anversois (Antwerp, 1937), 24.

“In January he was exchanging cloth and linens for sugar with Bartolomé de Milan — this pattern of mercantile activity was characteristic. FRC, vii. 566. His brother, Isembard, worked with him. Ibid., p. 69. Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 186, f. 346.

“4Tbid., leg. 3, cuad. VIII, f. 475”. , “Tbid., legs. 178, f. 204; 186, f. 135.

lo62. THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

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TRADE 163

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164 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

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TRADE 167 and La Palma in 1514 and 1515 respectively. From a much deteriorated notarial document of Las Palmas, it appears that ‘Uberto Guymon, mercader flamenco’, was associated in business on Gran Canaria with a fellow national, Martin Castelot. Two other Flemings appear as witnesses.*° That case is obscure, but that from La Palma is well known — as well as yielding further interest, since it concerns the first Fleming who can be shown to have settled permanently in the Canaries and established a family there. Jacob Groenenberch arrived as the factor of the Antwerp-based merchant, Johann Biess of Cologne, in 1510, and purchased lands from the Welzer in Tazacorte. He

established a flourishing sugar business in his own right and became known at home as ‘Heer van Canarien’. He started a slow but abiding fashion. Between 1525 and 1530 members of the van Walle family and other Bruges merchants set up permanent homes in the Canaries, and yet more families followed in the second half of the sixteenth century, at a period when there was little immigration to the islands from other areas.*’ It was expressly to trade with Flanders that a consortium of predominantly Florentine merchants* was formed in Tenerife before October 1513. They dealt in ‘sugar, orchil, molasses, wax, silk, cloth, linen, bread, wheat and fodder, sugar [sic. — the repetition of the most important commodity may have been a Freudian slip] and other merchandise’ — it is not hard to see which of these were the imports and which the exports — between the seven inhabited islands and Flanders, Cadiz, and Seville, as well as ‘properties and movable and immovable goods’. If we can take literally the reference to seven islands, that raises the presumption that other merchants on Tenerife 46Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 733, f. 1514. “"Deénucé, “Collection de documents’ p. 24; F. Donnet, ‘Anversois aux Canaries’, Bulletin de la Société Royale de Géographie d’Anvers, xix (1895); J. A. Van Houtte and E. Stols, ‘Les Pays-Bas et la ““Méditerranée Atlantique” au XVIF siécle’, Mélanges en l’honneur de F. Braudel, i (1973), 646-51. I have not had an opportunity to consult M. Marrero Rodriguez, “Los flarnencos en los comienzos hispanicos de Tenerife’. Studi in memoria di Federigo Melts, iti (1978).

141. ,

“In Castilian orthography: Bernaldo Escarlati, Juan and Pedro Rondinel, Antonio Pinelo, Jacome Fantones, Juan Alberto, Juan Romano, Francisco Giraldin. At least four of these were certainly Florentines. Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 6, f. 1298. In a letter of Guicciardini of June 1513 ‘Jacome Fantoni’ is said to trade from Lisbon with Malacca. J. M. Alonso Gamo, El viaje a Espaiia de F. Guicctardini (Valencia, 1952), p.

168 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

may have spread their activities more widely in the archipelago. Francisco Riberol can also be shown to have been involved in

the Flanders trade: he sent a consignment of Canarian sugar and orchil there from Sanlicar, not directly from the islands, towards the end of 1508.*?

It would indeed be surprising if this picture of Canarian commerce, carried to northern waters partly by Netherlanders

and partly by Italians, did not include England. Dr Morales Lezcano, in his Uwluminating study of England’s trade with the

Atlantic archipelagos, though beginning his story with the establishment of the Casa de Contrataci6n in 1503, adduces no

cases of English merchants in the Canaries prior to the well-

known instance of Thomas Nicols in the muid-sixteenth century.”’ In fact, English merchants were already active there in the second decade of that century. Sugar was produced for export on La Palma in 1515 by Thomas Mallard, who 1s well known for his early participation in the New World trade from

his office in Seville? His Canarian operations were in

partnership with the Genoese, Francesco Spinola. Another

Englishman, known as Guillén Guillota — perhaps a

corruption of William Willet or of some similar name — was buying sugar in Tenerife as early as 1512 and at one stage held a mortgage on a sugar-mill of Pedro de Lugo’s on Gomera; but,

although the Canarian sources leave no doubt of his English nationality he cannot be easily identified, as Malliard can, from English records.*°

It was presumably for export that men lke Mallard sought sugar. And perhaps it was the sought-after London cloth that they imported in exchange. Certainly Thomas Nichols’s trade, in company with his colleague, Edward Kingsmill, in the midcentury, was of this nature.** At least part of his business went through Cadiz, and one wonders whether direct maritime relaPORRC, xvii. 1ST. 5°\" Morales Lezcano, Las relaciones mercantiles entre Inglaterra_y los archipiélagos atlanticos

(La Laguna, 1973). 5'See A. Cioranescu, Thomas Nicols: mercader de aztcar, hispanista y hereye (La Laguna,

POG. Connell-Smith, /orerunners of Drake (London 195+), p. 20. 33.4.G.8. 31 March 1515, Medina del Campo, and 30 July 1515, Burgos; Arch. Prov. Tenerile, leg. 5, {. 783. 4Cioranescu, Thomas Nicols, p. 17.

TRADE 169 tions existed between England and the islands as early as the pioneering days of Malliard and ‘Guillota’, or whether the Canarian wares were only picked up by English vessels at some intermediate point, such as Cadiz or Malliard’s pred-a-terre in Seville. The suspicion that the two Englishmen I have been able to name in the early days were only a representative sample and that others may have been active in the islands receives some support from the fact that, in 1513, a public scribe on Tenerife could write ‘ingleses’ by mistake for ‘italianos’ or possibly for the surname, Inglasco. No doubt all foreigners were much alike to him, but he must have had some reason to think that his clients in this case were English and the most likely explanation is surely that he knew of ‘genuine’ Englishmen on the island at the time.** The trade which Hakluyt knew Nicholas Thorne of

Bristol to have plied with the Canary Islands in 1526 was in sugar, orchil, and goatskins, exchanged for cloth “both coarse and fine, broad and narrow, of divers sorts and colours’ together with packthread and soap; he employed two Englishmen as his factors in Santa Cruz.*°

By far the biggest element in the business of all foreign merchants was the export of sugar and the importation of cloth. Few of them were above other speculations. They bought dyestuffs, skins, pitch, wood, wine, and cheeses for export. ‘They dealt in slaves. They even financed fishing expeditions.*’ They

were frequent lenders and holders of mortgages. Often, especially in the Italians’ case, they acquired property and settled down to join the community of colonists. In short, they

were a vital part of the colonizing process. Their capital lubricated every aspect of the islands’ economy. There were myriad opportunities for profit within the archipelago, but the Canaries also represented for these foreign merchants a chance to share in the exploitation of the developing New World. Not only was the Canary archipelago the only part of Castile’s overseas empire which was virtually open to foreigners without

serious legal restraint, but it was also an ideal entrepot of transatlantic trade. $‘Blasino Romano e Juan Felipe su hermano, yngleses’. Their signatures appear at the end of the document in Italian: ‘Blasino Romano, Giovanni Romano’. Arch. Prov. Tenerife, unnumbered leg., f. 90". °°R, Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations of the English Nation, vi (London, 1904), 124. 57Verlinden, Beginnings of Modern Colonization, pp. 138, 153-4.

170 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

The remotest point on what we have called the ‘outer circle’

of Canarian trade was the Indies. The work of Chaunu, Morales Padron, and Peraza de Ayala has made the Canaries’ place in the New World trade the best-known aspect of their history in the sixteenth century.*® We know of the islands’ importance as a staging-post on the way to the New World in the path of the north-east trades;*? and of their role as a centre of

fraud, piracy, and interloping, damaging the Sevillan and, indeed, the Spanish monopoly of trade and navigation.© Already in the first quarter of the century, much of that future history was prefigured. The commerce of the Canaries came under the jurisdiction of the Casa de Contratacién as soon as it was founded,*' but merchants in the islands did not — to judge from the evidence already reviewed — confine their peninsular voyages to Seville or Cadiz. And to prohibit vessels bound for the Indies from loading or even starting in the Canaries would

have been neither practicable nor expedient. The Canaries were evidently a well-established stopping-point on the Indies run from Columbus’s first voyage. I have shown how the early entrepreneurs of the New World commerce, Juanoto Berardi and Francisco de Riberol, were men with Canarian interests. In 1505, by way of added confirmation, a cargo of oil worth

30,000 mrs. was consigned from Seville ‘para Canarias o Indias’.®°

The only surviving contract for the charter of a ship in the Canaries to make the New World run in these years™ shows the 388P. Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique, viii (Paris, 1959), part I; F. Morales Padrén, E/ comercio canario-americane (Seville, 1955), and Sevilla, Canarias y América (Las Palmas, 1970); J. Peraza de Ayala, El régimen comercial de Canarias con las Indias (Seville, 1977). See additionally S. E. Morison, The European Discovery of America: the Southern Voyages

(New York, 197+), pp. 54, 221; Cioranescu, Colon y Canarias, pp. 179-88. See especially on illegal emigration and navigation to the New World, F. Morales Padron, ‘Canarias en los cronistas de Indias’, AEA, x (1964), 175-96; id., ed., Cedulario de Canarias (Seville, 1970), 1, pp. tx—x1. SUG.S. 30 June 1503, Alcala. 6()n Berardi’s attempts to open the Indies trade, 1494-7, see Coleccién de documentos inéditos del Archivo de Indias, xxi. 509; xxx. 199; xxxi. 557 f., etc. On Riberol, see Pike, Enterprise and Adventure, pp. 51, 99, 138, and J. de Ayala, Letter to Ferdinand and Isabella,

which mentions a forthcoming vessel from Hispaniola in June 1503, consigned by Riberol and Juan Sanchez de Mercaderia. 6]. Oris Capdequi, ed., Mondos americanos del Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla, v.20 (2 May

1505).

*4 Printed in fullin FRC, vii. 384-7.

TRADE 171 re-export of cloth, combined with the conveyance of livestock, to have been a part of the commerce between the islands and the Indies. On 19 March 1510, in Tenerife, one Juan de Llerena,

merchant, chartered a vessel of seventy or eighty tons from Francisco Rodriguez Zarco and Rodrigo Narvaez, the latter of whom would serve as master, to load to capacity with 120 sheep, clothing materials, and provisions for the voyage at Cosme de Riberol’s cove near Orotava (‘la caleta de La Orotava, do ten la casa micer Cosme’) and take them to Santo Domingo. The master undertook to make the crossing in thirty days (‘desdel dia que se encomengare a descargar la ropa en treynta dias’). It has already been established that clothing materials fetched between three and six times as much in Hispaniola as on Tenerife in ¢.1503, so it is not surprising that,

despite the local need of and demand for such commodities, Canarian entrepreneurs should have been tempted to re-export them to the Indies. Though the freight charge is given in the text of the contract, it is not possible to make any estimate of the

possible profit, since the charge is expressed in tons (14,000 mrs. by the reckoning of Hispaniola per ton) and our surviving price-lists are in terms of varas or yards. But the commercial incentive was probably good, even for the re-export of cloth, which was by no means one of the main components of the trade. Yet, despite the common sense and natural advantages of loading in the Canaries on the transatlantic run, the Casa de Contrataci6n appears to have opposed the practice from the first. In February 1508 Alonso de Valladolid, a merchant of Gomera, had to obtain royal permission to export the remarkable cargo of six camels in order to introduce them in Hispaniola.®’ If the voyage was made, the design was frustrated: camels were not destined to join pigs, sheep, rabbits, and goats among the livestock to be introduced from the Canaries into the New World.® Later that year the islands obtained normal royal permission to embark wares for the Indies with the proviso that STbid., i. 217. °*Pigs, sheep, goats: B. de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, i. 351 (I, Ixxxiii); sheep and goats: Coleccién de documentos inédttos de ultramar, v. 159 (there-was also, by the way, a herd

of 500 sheep sold in La Palma in December 1509 ‘con saca para las Indias’, FRC, vii. 53; rabbits: see above, p. 77.

172. THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

they should be registered by an official appointed by the Casa, no doubt because of the need for provisions on Hispaniola.” That was not, however, the end of controversy, for in 1511 King Ferdinand’s correspondence with the Casa and the royal representatives in the Canaries shows a determined effort to stop unreasonable interference with the Canaries— Indies trade. Morales Padrén quotes him as writing to the Casa, ‘I held it for

certain that the ships that went to Hispaniola loaded in the Canaries the things necessary for the Indies; and now the Admiral has written to me that they do not allow or consent to

the said captains ‘loading anything’. In January he com-

manded the Governor of Gran Canaria to forbid interference with the loading of flour and cheese for the Indies®® — inter| ference which must, presumably, have come from the Casa — and in July added cattle, slaves ‘and all the other things available in the islands which are greatly needed in Hispaniola’.”® Exports of this sort — cheese, flour, livestock — were useful for victualling the ships as well as provisioning the transatlantic

colonies; but they had only a restricted future, as the Indies would gradually become less dependent on provender from outside. The reference to slaves — presumably black re-exports

from mainland Africa — is interesting, but there is no other evidence that the Canaries constituted in any sense a market for

the New World slave trade.7! On the other hand, one commodity from the Canaries which certainly did increase in importance was wine; indeed, it is tempting to think that demand : for wine in the New World may have been partly responsible for the development of Canarian viticulture, which was traced above, and the transition from production for the domestic market to production on an exportable scale. By August 1525 the traditional bread and cheese was holding its own, but wine had been added to it, as appears from the terms of a royal 67 Coleccion de documentos inéditos de ultramar, v. 159.

°° El comercio canario-americano, p. 172; I have been unable to find this letter in A.G.I. ©A.G.1. 418, HI, £. 162.

I bid., ff. 122°, 126°: ‘todas las otras cosas que en ellas oviere de grand menester en la dicha ysla’. Cf. Morales Padr6én, El comercio canario-americano, p. 173.

™ Unless one may adduce the fact that Alonso de Palma, clothier, of Seville, entrusted a black slave and an empty case to one Juan Genoves, a ship’s master from Seville, in Gomera for sale in the New World (‘para que los vendiese en Indias’). Ots Capdequi, Catalogo de fondos americanos, v.145.

TRADE 173 privilege to the island of Tenerife, permitting the export of food and wine to the Indies without restriction for two years, under

the supervision of the Casa de Contrataci6n.” The continued importance of victualling of ships is confirmed by the ‘Secret Instruction for Navigation between Spain and the Isle of Santo

Domingo’ of 1526: , ... the course which is set for the said Isle of Haiti [‘Ayti’] once the ships have

emerged from San Lucar, where the River Guadalquivir empties into the Ocean Sea, they make sail for the Islands of Canarias, called the Fortunate Islands . . . [or] one of them, especially Gran Canaria or La Gomera or La Palma, because they lie in the most direct way for the purpose [‘estan en mas derecha derrota e al proposito’} and they are fertile and abound in the provisions

and what is needful for them that make this long voyage. There the ships victual with water and wood, fresh bread, chickens, calves, kids, cows, salt meat and cheeses, fish, salted chickens and other provisions...”

In a sense, one would expect the intercourse of the Canaries

with the New World to be a one-way commerce. It was not necessary — indeed, it was not normal — for returning ships to stop over in the islands, since the prevailing winds favoured the route via the Azores. Nor, at first glance, would one expect the Canaries to have any use for the exports of the New World (save gold, which was destined to go elsewhere). There was, however, one New World product of great curiosity and significance to be found in the Canaries in the early years of the sixteenth century. In March 1506 Tomas Justiniano purchased ‘an Indian slave’

from the Romano brothers;’* and in February 1511, Lope Fernandez sold ‘an Indian slave’ to a farmer or labourer.” These isolated instances may not appear to amount to very much; but when added to the fact that among the cargoes insured by the brothers Font for shipment from Spain to the 72.4.G.1. 421, XI, f. 104°, Granada; this also serves to show that the ordinance of 1518 in which the future Charles V freed Canarian exports to the New World of tolls (printed in FRC, xi. 259-60) cannot have had much practical significance. Coleccion de documentos inéditos del Archivo de Indias, xlii. 541 (€.; tt is odd that special

attention is not drawn to Tenerife. I can suggest no reason for this, though the same omission is made by Oviedo, and it appears to have been true that Tenerife was a much less frequented port of call in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than Gran Canaria or Gomera. Historia natural de Indias, p. 36 (11, 9); Chaunu, Seville et l’Atlantique,

vii (1957), 21: viii (1959), 359-65. ™Una esclava india llamada Inés’, Arch. Prov. Tenerife, unnumbered leg. (S. Paez, no. 3), f. 90° (sold for 17,000 mrs.). Gonzalo de Cérdoba, ‘labrador’; ‘un esclavo indio’, sold for 13,000 mrs. Ibid., leg. 3, cuad XX, f. 601.

174 ‘THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

islands were at least two consignments of slaves, and when all these points are added in turn to our knowledge of the exploitation of black and Berber slaves in the Canaries in the years of colonization, a phenomenon of crucial importance begins to emerge. From being exclusively an exporter of slaves during the conquest, the islands rapidly became a net importer after its termination. A few Canarian slaves were still sold in Valencia and Barcelona and Seville;’® but the flood of enslaved natives that poured forth from the islands in the 1480s and 1490s dried to a trickle in the next decade. The causes of this are not far to seek. The sources of the Canarian slave-trade had been diminished by the conquest, deportations, and plague. The action of the crown, ecclesiastical authorities, Hispanicized natives of

philanthropic inclinations, and their legal representatives protected the liberty of the natives who remained mn the islands after the conquest was completed. But above all, the advent of the sugar industry had transformed the islands’ economic needs and created a shortage of sturdy labour. The commercially active islands were those concentrated in the centre and west of the archipelago. They were on the rumbo, |

the conventional route, to the New World, and the ‘Secret Instruction’ makes plain what an advantage that was. But it was above all their sugar production that made them so busy with trade: in other words, the significant relationship from a Canarian point of view was with the Old World, the importer of sugar, rather than the New World, the customer for livestock and foodstuffs. By the end of the period the emergence of the Canary wine trade may have helped to balance the values of the two termini of the archipelago’s transatlantic commerce; but it is probably fair to say that historians have tended to stress the

importance of the Canaries as a stage on the New World voyage, the carrera de Indias, without doing justice to the more 76For two Canarian slaves sold in Barcelona in 1498 and 1501 see J. M. Madurell Marimon, ‘El antiguo comercio con las Islas Canarias y las Indias’, AFA, vii (1961),

; 82~3: for Valencia (2 in 1499, | in 1500,! in 1502, and 1 in 1511), V. Cortés, ‘La conquista de Canarias a traves de las ventas de esclavos en Valencia’, pp. 305, 343-4; for Seville (2 in 1500, 4 in 1501, 3 in 1502, 3 in 1504, | in 1506, | in 1507, | in 1529), Morales Padroén, ‘Canarias en el Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla’, (1961) 283-4, 292-3, 295, 298-9, 302, 306, 316, 318, 327—8, 334, 372~3, (1962) 108, 113. Most of

these slaves were probably imported during the conquest and resold in the years indicated. By 1503 there are more references to free than enslaved Canarians in the Seville notarial archives.

TRADE 1795 complex relationships — the ‘inner and outer circles’ — which can truly be said to have joined the shores of the Atlantic espace

and given in commerical unity. It is worth noting in this connection that Hierro is barely mentioned in any of the sources in the context of trade, despite its westerly position, partly, no doubt, because it was still little populated in this period and partly because it lacks a deep-water harbour, but especially because, while producing some orchil, it had little or no sugar. We must also observe that there is scant evidence that the ‘outer circle’ of Canarian trade reached as far into the Mediterranean as Barcelona or even much beyond Valencia in the early sixteenth century. Despite the large numbers of Italian merchants in the islands, Canarian wares only reached Italy, as far aS we can say for certain, by way of re-export from Spain. Bernaldo Escarlaty’s consortium mentioned ‘Flanders, Cadiz, and Seville’ as the destinations of their consignments, not Florence, whence most of the merchants in that company seem to have come. Nor, from the point of view of convenience of navigation, is this surprising. A consignment of Canarian sugar for Civitavecchia, insured for 260 ducats in 1527, was consigned first to Barcelona and only then resold to Italy.”’

The islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura can have had few or no links with the outer circle of Canarian commerce. They are not recommended by the ‘Secret Instruction’ for navigators to the Indies. Their lack of sugar made them of little interest to the international mercantile community. They lived

by a cruder form of exchange than commerce — that is by piracy on the seas and raids on the coasts of Barbary. The words of the seigneurs of these islands in a petition to the crown may

be exaggerated, but are surely not untruthful: ‘since these islands were conquered, they have lived by war both in the conquest of the other islands and thereafter in attacking and making war on the Moors’.”®

Like that of the early Vikings, or generally of nomadic peoples on the borders of more opulent empires, the economy of ™Madurell, ‘Antiguo comercio’, 90-9 (16 September); cf. J. Heers, ‘L’expansion maritime portugaise: la Méditerranee’, Revista da Faculdade de Letras, xxii (Lisbon 1956),

9. [tis worth noticing that Canarian sugar, at least, was not controlled by a Portuguese-

~Genoese monopoly, and that Catalan merchants were playing an important role throughout the period. *8Millares MS, II, f. 41.

176 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

the poorest Canary Islands was bound to be parasitical and piratical. It would be wrong, however, to infer from the wellknown history of fraud, interloping, and smuggling which characterized Canarian trade with the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that the archipelago as a whole, and particularly the productive islands of Tenerife, Gran Canaria, La Palma, and Gomera had a similar relationship with America to that of the easternmost islands with Barbary. On the contrary, it is apparent that the Canaries played a fruitful and important role in the growth of the Atlantic economy from the earliest years of the sixteenth century, and formed a vital link in two rings of commerce, which joined the

Atlantic archipelagos and Africa with Europe and the New World.

IX

MORALE AND DEVOTION Group feeling results only from (blood) relationship or something

akin to it.’! |

51 vuestra senoria fuese servido en darme una tantica parte del cielo, aunque no fuese mas de media legua, la tomaria de mejor gana que la mayor insula del mundo.’

The notarial archives of Santa Cruz and Las Palmas have served with great constancy as a source for almost every chapter

of this study. Their special value, which they share with the notaries’ records of the entire Spanish-speaking world, is that they cast a little light on all aspects of the everyday lives of people at all social levels — not only their material interests and

economic transactions, but also their spiritual concerns and personal or family relationships. Although the surviving information Is sparse, it is possible at least to approach, through the colonists’ wills and the records of their confraternities, the questions of the cults to which they were devoted and the charities they performed. From the Inquisitorial records, one can add details of their more aberrant forms of devotion; and one can tentatively examine some areas of inter-action between their beliefs and behaviour, their morals and mores. The aim of this chapter — if it does not sound canting to express it thus — is to open a window on men’s souls and to attempt to answer the question: what were the settlers like? The result will inevitably be a partly miscellaneous collection of fragmentary evidence; but it is only through the accumulation of a mass of details that an over-all picture of Canarian society in the area of colonization can gradually be built up.

In part, the answer to the question confirms conventional presuppositions about the nature of “frontier societies’. There ‘Ibn Khaldun, The Mugaddimah, 11. 8 (trans. F. Rosenthal (London, 1958), i. 264). 2Don Quijote, 11. 42.

178 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

were evidently criminals and fugitives among the colonists of the Canaries, who stood as individuals outside the usual social configurations or groups, or whose links were with others of their own kind. Condemned criminals were recruited for the conquest of the royal islands, but they were obliged to serve for only six months? and it is impossible to say whether any of them remained as settlers. Soon, however, exiled criminals undoubt-

edly began to join the colony. In 1529 one Gonzalo Martin, a witness before the Holy Office, was said to have ‘come as an

exile from the public gaol of Seville to the islands [szc.] of Tenerife as a prisoner aboard ship, with other malefactors who

came condemned to exile’.4 Other criminals, as_ yet unpunished, used the islands as a refuge from the consequences of their misdeeds. Among them was Juan de Lugo, ‘sobrino’, probably second cousin, of Alonso de Lugo and son of that Juan

de Lugo who had helped to finance the conquest. With his partner in crime, Diego de Llanos, he absconded with 150,000 mrs., of which 107,000 mrs. corresponded to his own share, intended for the royal garrisons of Leon, Aroche (Huelva), and Constantina (in the Sierra Morena). Perhaps this was money

owed to the royal treasury in fines. In any event, it was rumoured that the miscreants sought refuge in Tenerife in order to enjoy Alonso de Lugo’s illegal protection.° In view of the antecedents of some of the colonists, and the lawlessness of some of their governors, the incidence of violent crime in the islands does not seem to have been high. Most of the recorded instances involve quarrels between husbands and wives.° [The vendettas, like those I have mentioned between the

families of de Vera and Riberol or Siberio and de Armas, certainly betoken an inadequate judicial administration, but probably no more so than the feuds of contemporary Seville, of which they were, in part, an extension.’ It remains true, how9A.G.S. 20 February 1490, Ecija (Cat. XIIT, vii, no. 453). ‘Inquisition MS, CXXI-31, f. 72”. |

5A.G.S. 24 November 1502, Madrid; allegations of Juan de Figueroa. *See below, pp. 180-2. A different kind of domestic tragedy befell Teresa de Prado,

of Gran Ganaria, condemned by the local justice for the murder of a black slavewoman, whom she chastised with excessive zeal, dealing her a fatal blow over the head with a stick (“que una vez castigandole le distes una herida en la cabeca con un palo de la qual herida dende a cierto tiempo murio’). She was later pardoned by the crown. A.G.S. 5 January 1516, Trujillo. de la Rosa, ‘Francisco de Riberol’, p. 37.

MORALE AND DEVOTION 179 ever, that the prosecution of crime and exaction of Justice was

exceptionally difficult in the Canaries, because of the long distances which separates the archipelago from the sources of justice in peninsular Spain; this was the chief cause of the power to disregard the law of locally strong individuals like Alonso de Lugo; additionally, punishment could be delayed or evaded by

appeals to the Peninsula. In 1513 the monarchs heard complaints from Fernando Ahuayo, vecino and island councillor of Gran Canaria, against ‘Ruiz de Herena e Diego Ramirez e Bermejo e Morales’, who had been sentenced to exile from Gran

Canaria five years previously for violence and outlawry (‘por

capeadores y alborotadores de pueblos e rebolvedores de | ruidos’) and because they had conspired to seize a ship in the port. Following a partly successful appeal, they had continued their careers of crime ‘especially the said Diego Ramirez, who is

alleged in the island of ‘Tenerife to have raped a woman and knifed a justice and in Gran Canaria to have knifed another man’.®

It seems at first glance paradoxical that this society should have been litigious as well as lawless, like the England of the Pastons and Berkeleys or early sixteenth-century Castile or, generally, any society whose judicial institutions are developing but still inadequate for the relief of tension between neighbours.

In many cases in the Canaries, however, the litigious settlers were precisely those who sought protection or redress against the lawless ones. In 1500 Alonso de Lugo arbitrarily usd his authority in Tenerife to declare that debts to himself and his wife should be discharged before all other outstanding debts on the island; Mateo Vina, to whom some hundred debtors owed a total of over 450,000 mrs., protested to the monarchs and asked them to appoint ‘a good man from whom he might obtain his just due, because in the said island of ‘Tenerife he could never obtain justice’.’ | cannot say whether there were any professional advocates on the island at that early date; from 1505, however,

conferments of powers of attorney, often to professional lawyers, formed the largest single category of notarial transSAGS 21 April 1513, Valladolid. 2A.G.S. 10 December 1500, Granada. ‘The monarchs appointed Lope Sanchez de Valenzuela, Governor of Gran Canaria: whether this answered Vifa’s requirements must be doubted, from what one knows of that corrupt and tyrannical official.

I80) “THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

actions. From a source on Tenerife outside the island council, the monarchs received a complaint in 1510 that ‘there is no sure number of lawyers, whence many persons take up advocacy and cause a large number of lawsuits’.’° On Gran Canaria it was already the governors’ opinion that the lawyers were too

numerous. In 1503 the monarchs rescinded an ordinance of Antonio de ‘Torres, who had forbidden lawyers to practise unless they resided on the island with a wife.'' Lope Sanchez de

Valenzuela had an evil reputation for his short — and often dishonest — way with litigants.'? One is reminded of the complaints of the Licenciate Zuazo against the plague of lawyers and lawsuits early in the colonization of the Antilles; but the governors of the Canaries, with their extensive control over the executive and judicial institutions of the islands, were in a much less disinterested position than Zuazo, and may have resented the lawyers more as a source of restrictions on their own powers

than as an unproductive sector of society. The situation was only significantly improved with the establishment of the Audtencia at Las Palmas in 1526, which short-circuited appeals to the Peninsula and broke the governors’ virtual monopoly of

justice.’ Lawlessness and litigiousness met in the courts. It is in a sense satisfactory from the student’s point of view that most surviving evidence of legal proceedings should be connected with matrimonial misdemeanours, since these have an obvious sociological significance. Bigamy was a crime evidently much "The petition goes on to ask that Diego Riquel (future victim of the Inquisition), Manuel Gibraleén, and Diego de Caceres be named ‘procuradores de la ysla’. The petiion’s logic ts clearly faulty: the number of amateur meddlers in the law must have been a consequence of the demand for advocates. ‘To judge from the account of his life given at his own trial, Riquel must have been just such a legal interloper, with little likelihood of any formal professional training. His father had been a judicial functionary but he himself had dwelt in the islands, where no formal education and surely no training in law was available, from the age of nine. By his own testimony, Riquel had been a worker in sugar-mills (‘despues de acabada la conquista, trabajando en los ingenios’). Inquisition MS, CX XI1-31, { 1, 7, 73. The appointments requested by the peution of 1510 were made and ratified by the island council in April or May, 1511, even though the councillors suspected that it had been Riquel himself who made the original supplication to the monarchs. FRC, v. 107. MA.G.S. 11 February 1513, Aleala. '*Supplication of Alonso de Matos, vecino of Velde, and Diego de Cabrera, vecino of Gran Canaria. A.G.S. 6 March 1500, n.p. de la Rosa, ‘La Real Audiencia’, pp. 111-16, 122-4, 128-9.

MORALE AND DEVOTION 181 practised among the settlers, but one which was very understandably committed in the islands; it was often a result and not a cause, like so many of the colonists’ other crimes, of departure from the old country, though its occurrence raises the presump-

tion that some settlers had been stimulated to emigrate by an unsuccessful married life at home. I have already discussed the most notorious case — that of the younger Pedro de Vera, whose imprudently espoused wife in Naples was a cause of so much subsequent embarrassment to him and so much bloodshed between the houses of de Vera and Riberol, into which he later presumed to marry.'* But the severity with which the courts 1n the island dealt with this crime is best illustrated by the equally interesting case of Juan de Melo, who left his wife, Mari Fernandez, ‘vecina del reino de Portugal,’ at home, crossed to the Canaries and, while she still lived, went through a form of marriage with Leonor Fernandez, vecina of Tenerife, daughter of

one Diego Fernandez Amarillo. He was condemned to ride an ass, his hands tied and his neck in a halter, preceded through the streets of La Laguna by a public proclamation of his crime; he was then put in the stocks and branded on the forehead. To complete his chastisement, his ‘wife’ subsequently sued for an

annulment." ' Adultery as much as bigamy was a cause of disturbances in the matrimonial lives of the islanders. It was a custom of the Spanish monarchs, especially on feast days but also at other times, to pardon the murderers of adulterous wives.’* In 1499

Lopé Fernandez of Gran Canaria took advantage of that indulgence. His wife, Catalina Rodriguez, was, he said, by way of tiitigation, ‘a very dissolute woman and committed adultery with many persons and in particular he said that he had found her committing adultery with Francisco de Segovia and he said

that he killed them both and . . . ‘that he had killed the said Francisco de Segovia and Catalina Rodriguez justly’.!7 No doubt it was because of adultery that Pedro Garcia de Herrera, '*See de la Rosa, ‘Francisco de Riberol’, p. 37. '514 September 1508, FRC, vii. 96.

'eThis is apparent from the Registro del Sello; cf. Guicciardini’s remarks (Opere (Milan, 1953), p. 32): ‘vi sieno pene gravissime alli adulteri; perche el marito puo amazzare la donna e lo adultero sanza pena nessuna, trovandogli nello atto, o provando che lo abbino commesso’. '7A.G.S. 4 September 1499, Granada.

182. THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

son of the seigneurs of the lesser Canaries, killed his wife, Antonia, in Seville before fleeing to the islands. In 1494 he received a royal pardon for the murder ‘for which our Justice in the city of Seville proceeded against you in your absence and

contempt’.’* On other occasions, quarrels arising from adulteries could be more amicably settled. In the monastery of San Francisco in La Laguna, for instance, on 6 November 1513, Alexandro Rodriguez, resident on Tenerife, ‘for reverence of God our Lord and His blessed mother’ forgave his wife, Ana,

‘any fault she may hitherto have committed by way of adultery’.’? Diego de Guimar, a native who showed equal under-

standing of canon law and Christian charity, forgave his wife, Elvira, her adultery in 1507, because he suffered from leprosy.”°

In 1511, one Juan de Arjona, whose name sounds indigenous, sued his wife, Leonor de Bique, for an annulment on grounds of adultery, but the result is not recorded.*’ ‘These cases raise the question of how the native Canarians’ standards of morality were affected by the evangelization and settlement, and how far their conversion was successful. First, however, while on the subject of the settlers’ sexual mores, it

may be pertinent to mention the cases of prostitution and venereal disease that occur in the surviving records, especially as they present some interesting and original features. On Gran Canaria, prostitution became a public service, run for the profit of the community, early in the period of settlement. In 1498 the concejo petitioned the monarchs with the familiar complaint that the island lacked propios — communal property to yield public

funds — and asked successfully for the island’s brothel and tavern to be made over for this purpose.” ‘Tenerife followed suit in 1510, eight years after the concession had been made to Gran Canaria.”? But Alonso de Lugo had already proclaimed, without royal authorization, as early as 1505 that the concejo of ‘Venerife could appropriate brothels.** The situation may only have been '810 November 1494, Madrid, f. 414 (Cat. X///, xi, no. 3726). '°Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 6, f 1402. *°Tbid., leg. 180, f. 235 (December 1507). *1Tbid., leg. 3, cuad. XXII, f. 703 (13 August 1511). 224 .G.S. 8 March 1498, Alcala, where the brothel and tavern are described as newly erected. Cf. A.G.S. 2 May 1502, Alcala (where the concession to the propios is granted). ?3A.G.S,. 23 February 1510, Madrid. 4 ERC, iv. 193.

MORALE AND DEVOTION 183 regularized by the application to the monarchs in 1510, or perhaps Lugo’s decree, like so many of the islands’ ordinances, proved ineffective. Between 1505 and 1510 communal brothels do not seem to have monopolized business. A case ofa designated prostitute in 1508 occurs on Tenerife in the record of a purchase ofa slave-girl by Mari Fernandez la Bermeja, ‘mujer de amores’.”5

It may be that the brothels were largely staffed by slaves. Whether or not as a result of the ministrations of these women,

venereal disease was soon common in Tenerife. Alonso de Lugo’s son and son-in-law suffered from it as early as 1507. In

June 1508 a sugar-refiner of Portuguese origin named Blas Afonso paid twelve arrobas of sugar in advance for a course of treatment for the same infirmity;7° more costly and more expert

attention could be had in 1513 from the physician Master Bernardo, newly come to the island, for the efficacy of whose remedies his patients were willing to vouch.?’ On the whole, the matrimonial customs and sexual morality of the native Canarians reveal few singularities and suggest a remarkably thorough absorption of Christianity, at least among the urbanized, Hispanicized natives whose doings were recorded

by public notaries. As early as 1494 or 1495 on La Palma, the indefatigable Francisca Gazmira (the native neophyte who had begun the evangelization of the island before the conquest) was able to claim that many of the natives had been married according to the Christian rite.7* Like Diego de Giimar, ‘Catalina Guancha, natural de Tenerife’, showed appreciation of matrimonial canon law in 1509, when she sought an annulment on

grounds of non-consummation.”? It may be, however, that some of the finer points of law on consanguinity were less well appreciated among the Canarians. Remarkably, the only cases explicitly involving people of indigenous race to be tried before the Canarian Inquisition in the first fifty years of its operation

concerned matters not of faith but of morals. It is uncertain whether this was because moral indiscipline was prima-facie evidence of deficiency of faith or because the Inquisitors’ terms 25 ERC, vii. 131 (14 November 1508).

Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 184, f. 50. *7T he cost was 12 dodblas. Ibid., leg. 6, cuad. XXIII, f 1184. 8A .G.S. 13 February 1495, Madrid, f. 49. 9 FRC, vii. 53-4.

184 = THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

of reference actually included questions of morals. The fact is that at least twice, in 1509 and 1510, natives were arraigned for offences within the forbidden limits of consanguinity. The first was “Alonso de Lugo, vecino natural’, who after an affair with one Leonor de Alcala married her cousin, Catalina Ynfanta.*° Almost a year later, ‘Diego de Salazar, vecino de Tenerife’ was charged with illicit relations with ‘a daughter of Guillén Castellano’s with whom he is related by blood’.*! Guillén Castellano was one of the best known of the Hispanicized Canarians, who had served as a conquistador in Tenerife and became an island councillor.** Such cases as these, of course, might have occurred

as much in defiance as ignorance of the law, and were not confined to the natives. They cannot therefore modify our impression from the Inquisitorial records that the Canarians were thoroughly evangelized. An eloquent indication of this is that no surviving record of Inquisitorial proceedings can be linked with pre-conquest beliefs or practices. It is not impossible that this reflects lack of

interest on the inquisitors’ part or an inability among the Spaniards to identify features of indigenous religion when they saw them. Sahagun’s, Diego Duran’s, and Acosta’s complaints against the ignorance of pre-conquest religion among Christians

in sixteenth-century New Spain might have been applicable mutatis mutandis to the Canary Islands. The Canarians after their conversion appear at least to have continued to tend and even to use their ancestral, troglodyte burial-places. A deponent

complained to the Inquisition in December 1505 that he had seen relatively fresh corpses interred in an ancient sepulchre near Telde and that it aroused his suspicions (‘tom6 mala sospecha’); but the general opinion prevailed that the Canarians were ‘good Christians’ and there is no evidence that any investigation was made.** Accounts of ancient, tended graves among a Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 2, cuad. XIV, f. 873; the annulment is recorded at f. 901. >!) ] August 1510, Inquisition MS, LXXI-12, f. 2. **L. de la Rosa Olivera, ‘Guillén Castellano’, RHC, xx (1954), 1~36, points out that there is no certain evidence to support the tradition that he was a native. Dr de la Rosa has found evidence of a resident of Lanzarote or Fuerteventura of the same name, who may have fought in the conquest of Gran Canaria: but it is not unusual for a baptized native to have a homonymous Spanish godfather. Dr de la Rosa accepted the authenticity of the tradition in his ‘Las sefales de los antiguos canarios’, ibid., xii (1946). **Inquisition MS, Bute, I, f. 61°.

, MORALE AND DEVOTION 185 native community that still spoke the Guanche language in seventeenth-century Guimar”™ suggest that there were still some

unhispanicized natives who preserved certain of their old, ata-

vistic rites as late as that. The problems of evangelizing the natives of outlying areas — such as Giimar and the whole of Tenerife south of that district — were not unperceived by the island council of Tenerife, which ordered, no doubt vainly, in December 1511, that Guanches should live in the towns to facilitate their conversion.*°

The question of the survival of the ancient tongue may be significant. That neophytes should absorb the language and customs of the conquerors was an important objective of Spanish

missionary methods among the Moors and perhaps the Canar- , ians as well. Certainly in 1515 Maria de Adeje, a native of Tenerife, had to have the services of the more thoroughly Hispanicized Guanche, Anton de Azate, as interpreter when pleading in court for the guardianship of her son after her husband’s death;*° but at that early juncture one would hardly

expect all the natives to have been instructed in the Spanish tongue. The woman had a baptismal name;”’ her use of the processes of law shows her to have been at home in colonial society. She was probably less ignorant of Christian faith than of Castilian speech. It may be helpful to recall that the enthusiasm of crown and conquistadores for spreading the Spanish language with the faith in the New World was not always shared by religious missionaries, who actually neglected that aspect of their task.*° The only case known to me of a native impugned before the Inquisition on grounds of faith was that of ‘Agustin Hernandez, guanche’, condemned for apostasy at the late date of 1557, but 34C.. de la Ronciére, Histoire de la Découverte de la Terre (Paris, 1938), p. 88; T. Sprat, History of the Royal Society (London, 1667), pp. 200-13.

FRC, iv. 135. 3°Arch. Prov. Las Palmas, leg. 189, f. 381 (31 July 1513). Her husband, named Don Pedro de Adeje, was presumably son of the former mencey of that bando. 37Cf. The will of Juan Azanos, Guanche (18 November 1510), in which two sons are mentioned, Pedro de Aganos (sic) and another who was enslaved and converted; his father then lost track of him and did not know his baptismal name but remembered that he was formerly called Gualcirca (‘fue cautivado y convertido y del que no sabe nada sino que se llamaba Gualcirca antes de su conversion’). Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 3, cuad. VIII, f. 471. 38R. Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico (Berkeley, 1966), pp. 288, 290.

186 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

it was not for any pre-conquest religion that he abjured the faith; rather, it was to Islam that he was seduced on a visit to the Barbary coast.*? Many of the crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims of the Canaries in the period looked to Africa for friendship from

within their respective communities; they crossed the Mar Pequena to practise their devotion. Francisco Diaz ‘judio por-

tugues’ was accused of apostasy in Barbary after a visit to Marrakesh in 1524, and according to his denouncer ‘many others have done the same’.*° In 1521 ‘Juan de Lugo, morisco converso’ was acquitted of taking part in attacks on Barbary as

a pretext for returning to the bosom of Islam.*’ Gonzalo de Burgos, public scribe of Gran Canaria and protégé of Pedro de Vera, can also be shown to have taken refuge with the Jewish community in Tagaoz. L.B. Wolf showed thirty years ago, from

documents in the Bute collection, that much of the evidence against Burgos was fabricated from malice — such as the charge that his wife cooked lamb for Friday supper, an allegation equally improbable in either a Christian or a Jew.** Buta document unknown to Wolf considerably strengthens the case against the scribe.** The renowned Canarian antiquarian, the late Agustin Millares ‘Torres, seems to have exceeded an archivist’s brief in abstracting this document bodily from the Inquisition records and adding it to his private archive, but no doubt felt justified by the circumstance that both collections were in

his keeping and deposited, thanks to him, side by side in El Museo Canario. The item 1n question is a deposition of August 1502 by Bartolomé Ramirez Nieto, who was procurator of the concejo of Gran Canaria to the royal court, alleging that a young Genoese had claimed to have made inquiries, on behalf of the Inquisition of Seville, about Burgos among the Jews of Tagaoz (clerta pesquysa entre los moros y jiudios de Tagaoz acerca del dicho Gonzalo de Burgos’). Even if the contents of this docuInquisition MS, CLX XVI, f. 145. Another record of the same case in Inquisition MS, Bute, III, f. 318 (Birch, Catalogue of Manuscripts of the Inquisition in the Canary Islands,

i. 68-9) is dated 4 June 1552, but it may have taken fully five years to resolve the case.

“Inquisition MS, XXIV-3, f. 797.

pp. 82-5. , *'Rodriguez, ‘Catalogo y extractos’, no. 9. *? Jews in the Canary Islands, pp. vii-xi.

**Millares MS, XX, unnumbered folio. R. Ricard knew of Burgos’s alleged flight to

‘Tagaoz — see his ‘Relations des Iles Canaries et de la Berbérie’, Etudes hispano-africaines,

MORALE AND DEVOTION 187. . ment are deemed untrustworthy as specific evidence against Burgos, it strongly supports the suggestion that the heretics and

apostates of the Canaries formed important links with coreligionists in African towns.“ That heresy should be rife and apostasy frequent in the islands 1s not surprising in view of the large numbers of moriscos and conversos, some of whom were enumerated in the chapter on settlers. Many of them were only nominal or superficial converts. Pedro Salema, ‘cristiano nuevo

de moro’ of Gran Canaria, made a revealing remark to an acquaintance (who denounced him to the Inquisition for his pains) when he said that if he was a Christian, it was by force and not of his own will*® — an instance which speaks volumes

on the Christian Spaniards’ illusion that the conversions achieved by the Catholic Monarchs were voluntary. There were few instances of heresy not associable with Judaiz-

ing or the influence of Islam. One penitent before the Inquisi-

tion in 1509 had derided the image of St. Peter in a shop, commenting, ‘It’s that little drunkard, St. Peter’.*° But his case is as obscure as was his apparent sense of humour. He 1s more likely to have been a converso than to have derived his iconoclasm

from any other source. Lutheranism made an early appearance:

Dr Alejandro Cioranescu has drawn attention to cases dating from 1526 to 1529,*7 but omits what may be the record of the introduction of this heresy by Flemish merchants in 1526. The appearance in that year of ‘Juan de Almer’ and “Levi Bonoga’ before the inquisitor Don Luis de Padilla in Las Palmas has a suggestive flavour, especially as we find that they were required

to translate certain letters from the Flemish ‘which treat of Luther’s books, that they be not brought to Spain’.** This is 4Cf. the case of Juan Fernandez, neophyte from Judaism (‘xiano nuevo de judio’) who fled to Tagaoz, leaving incriminating evidence behind him in the form of Hebrew books (‘tenia ciertos libros en hebreo que al huir a Tagaoz dejo en poder del vicario de Langarote, Fernando Arias’) (May 1512). Rodriguez, ‘Catalogo y extractos’, no. 10. On the profitable and peaceful trade between Tenerife and Tagaoz, see Ricard, op. cit.,

pp. 90-2. Inquisition MS, CXXV-~8, f. 3 (11 August 1510). **Inquisition MS, LX XI-—12. The homonymous Pedro Dorador, tailor, native of Cérdoba, resident of Gran Canaria, acquitted after penance by the Inquisition in 1512 and recorded as a bigamist in 1524, may have been the same man as was accused of having made this remark. Ibid., CLII—1, f. 48. 47°T)iscipulos de Lutero en Canarias’, AEA, xii (1966). 48°T raducieron cartas del flamenco, que trata (stc) de que no traigan a Espana libros

de Lutero’, Inquisition MS, CXXVIT-9.

188 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

nonsense as it stands: why should these foreigners be provided with such letters? It 1s far more likely that they were documents

of a Lutheran character and that Don Luis was deceived.

Alternatively, we may simply be faced with a scribe’s error: if the entry read ‘translated into Flemish’ instead of ‘from Flemish’,

we should understand that the linguistic knowledge of the merchants had been employed 1n the cause of the dissemination

of a Spanish decree. In any event, the Lutheran darnel bore scant fruit. Apart from Alonso Bautista de Canarias (one of the

many future Protestants nurtured in the Colegiata de San Isidoro in Seville) the Canarian sixteenth century was barren of conspicuous reformers.*? There is no evidence of new devotional trends from any other source — neither from the Francis-

cans, who were quiescent after the conquest, nor the noted Erasmian, Alonso de Virtiés, who was Bishop of the Canaries

from 1538 until his death in 1545 at Telde. That brilliant scholar must have viewed Canarian intellectual life with disappointment (for this was the era in which parts of the lamentable

chronicles of the conquest were written) but regarded — one hopes — the devotional conservatism of the islands with approbation (for his Erasmianism was of an orthodox character).*°

The best evidence about the settlers’ devotion and the apparently thorough Christianity of the converted natives 1s to be found in their testamentary dispositions, though all but three of the surviving examples come from Tenerife. It 1s remarkable that on the one hand particular groups, such as the Portuguese settlers and native Canarians, clearly had their own favourite cults, while on the other, no cult was exclusive to any single section of society. It is not surprising that the Guanches should have shown a special attachment to the Virgin of Candelaria, whose image, according to tradition, appeared miraculously on the island before the conquest and was revered by the natives even before they understood its significance. Writing towards the end of the sixteenth century, Fray Alonso de Espinosa still identified her cult with the Guanches.*’ The only native will “°E. Boehmer, Spanish Reformers, ii (1883), 103 n. 2; Biblioteca Wiffeniana, iii (1904), 151, 57-8; and E. Schafer, Bettrage zur Geschichte der Spanischen Protestantismus, \i (Gunter-

shoh, 1902), 312. | am grateful to Dr A. G. Kinder for pointing out this reference. OM. Bataillon, Erasmo y Espana (Mexico, 1966), pp. 306. >! Origen y milagros, passim.

MORALE AND DEVOTION 189 which does not make a specific bequest to this Virgin 1s that of Don Fernando Guanarteme, who was not a native of Tenerife

but of Gran Canaria and only settled in the more westerly island after serving there as a conquistador.*? His fellowcountryman, Pedro de la Lengua, however, was sufficiently sympathetic to the traditions of ‘Tenerife to leave a bequest for two masses to be celebrated at the shrine of the Candelaria for his soul.*? It is an interesting feature of both these wills that they were made because the testators had joined King Ferdinand’s

expedition to Navarre.** The following year, Fernan Pérez, ‘natural de Tenerife’, willed one ducat towards construction of the Virgin’s shrine and commissioned masses for his own soul and those in Purgatory.*° Only one Guanche can be shown to have made specific legacies to other cults. This was Catalina de Guimar, ‘natural de la isla’. She made an interesting personal bequest — of a cloak to an aunt in La Palma, together with the return of five ducats which she had originally borrowed from this aunt for its purchase, with a request that the money be spent in charitable works ‘to do good for her soul’. She asked to be buried in ‘Santa Maria’, presumably the Church of the Conception, the oldest in La Laguna, and left one ducat to that church with small donations to all the others in the town: the Franciscan monastery (3

reales), the Augustinian Church of Santo Espiritu and San Miguel (Alonso de Lugo’s oratory at the southern end of the town (1 real each). She left two reales each to Santa Maria de Gracia, the oratory or hermitage below La Laguna on the site of

Lugo’s first victory over her people. Another real was bequeathed to San Lazaro — perhaps the leper hospital of Gran Canaria, since there is no other record of any foundation of that name at this date on Tenerife. And money and a candle (‘algunos reales e una candela de cera’) went to the confraternity of **Millares MS, XVI (6August 1512). Arch Prov. Tenerife, leg. 188, f. 724; Guillén Castellano left 200 mrs. to the Virgin (de la Rosa, ‘Guillén Castellano’, p. 36). 54°Pedro de la Lengua, natural de Gran Canaria, vecino, hace su testamento porque marcha a la guerra contra el Rey de Francia (He left a herd of 100 goats and wheatlands [tierras sequero de pan] in Realejo, “Tiayga’ [Icod], Abona and Taoro); D. Fernando: ‘por cuanto yo voy en la Armada que el Rey N.S. envio a fazer en estas Islas contra el Rey de Francia’. Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 189, f. 351.

190 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

| San Sebastian: this bequest may be explained by the possibility that her husband, who is mentioned in the will, and whose baptismal name was Sebastian, was a member of that guild,

which at that time was preparing to build a hospital. The Guanches’ patroness, the Virgin of the Candelaria, received five reales towards the construction of her shrine.*°

If she was particularly esteemed by the natives, the Virgin was not unloved of the immigrants. Leonel de Cervantes, a settler from Castile and probably from Tarancén or Burguillos, which are mentioned tn his will, left 500 mrs. to Our Lady of Candelaria. His other devotional bequests were 300 mrs. for construction at the Franciscan house, where he wished to be buried, 500 mrs. to the Augustinians, 100 mrs. to ‘Santa Maria de la Villa de Arriba, (i.e. the Church of the Conception), 200 mrs. each to two foundations in Burguillos, and 200 mrs. each to

Saints Sebastian and Marina ‘saints who are to be found in Tarancon in Castile... This money will be carried by Pedro de Isasarga when he goes to Castile in two years’ time but in case he does not go, it will be given to the Church of San Francisco

for two images of S. Sebastian and S. Marina’.*’ Juan de Vitoria, from Segovia, remembered the Lady of the Guanches in his will to the extent of half an arroba of wax or its value in cash, and confirmed his lack of partisanship by bequeathing 1,000 mrs. to the predominantly Portuguese confraternity of Nuestra Senora de la Antigua for the construction of its hospital.°* Gonzalo de Castaneda in 1512 included the Candelaria in his will with both the Church of the Conception and its recently

founded rival in La Laguna (later destined to become the cathedral), Nuestra Senora de los Remedios.*? The only devotional legacy of Geronimo de Valdés, whose origin is unspecified, was a chapel to be dedicated to the Virgin of Candelaria in

the Augustinian Church. And Catalina Fernandez be56 FRC, vii. 157 (16 April 1509).

S7FRC, vii. 210 (21 May 1508). **Tbid., pp. 253-6; his other devotional bequests were 5 ‘dineros’ each the Merced,

Cruzada, and Trinidad ‘y todas las ermitas acostunbradas’, 2,000 mrs. to Santo Espiritu, and ‘un misal grande’ to the Church of the Conception (3 April 1509). *°Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 5, cuad. XV, f. 27; on the history of the two churches and their rivalry, Cioranescu, La Laguna, pp. 32, 66—7, Castaneda describes Los Remedios as ‘una ermita — a hermitage or shrine. Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 2, f. 7° (November 1507).

MORALE AND DEVOTION 19] queathed to the shrine a silver real and ‘one of my best ornaments

(paramentos) that are painted on canvas’.®' In 1518 the inland council of Tenerife intervened to facilitate the annual pilgrimage and celebration of the feast of Candelaria. The pilgrimage and vigil were observed ‘with devotion by many people’ but the site of the shrine in Giimar (at the village now called Candelaria) was an infertile spot. The island council therefore ordered the collection of ‘provisions and other necessary sustenance for the refreshment and comfort of them that go on and take part in the said pilgrimage and vigil’.® Despite the confidence reposed in this Virgin by immigrants as well as natives, she is bound to arouse the suspicion of readers

versed in anthropological and historical studies of conversion and ‘mixed religion’. The devotion evinced by the Guanches towards an image whose origins, miracles, and cult admittedly all preceded the conquest casts at best an oblique light on the subject of the efficacy of their evangelization. Espinosa is quite positive that the image ‘was even the principal reason why the infidel nations of this island were converted to the faith, for they had made festivals for it in the time of their infidelity and looked upon it as a divine thing.® His admission that if the Guanches

had remained unevangelized they would have regarded the Virgin as a goddess may conceal more than it discloses. Some of

the functions which the worthy Dominican ascribes to her in post-conquest society would be perfectly consistent with primitive, animistic religion: she was invoked, for instance, at times of

dearth or want of rain. She could intervene to save merchants from losses. Before the conquest, at the time of her original appearance or materialization, she is said to have performed what may be an oracular function, first paralysing or wounding

two Guanches who tried to do her harm, then releasing or FRC, vil. 251-2 (27 November 1508); her other bequests were 300 mrs. to S.M. de

la Concepcion, | ducat to S. Espiritu, | real to S. Francisco, 2 fanega wheat or equivalent to S.M. de Gracia, and ¥ real each to churches of ‘la Consolacién’ (for ‘Concepcion’?) and ‘la Santa Cruz en el puerto de Santa Cruz’. Unless ‘Concepciém is

meant, this would mean that there were 3 churches in a port which, according to witnesses at the Reformacion of 1506 had only 12—20 vecinos. ‘S. Cruz’ may have been a

mere shrine. The testator also left | veal to S, Catalina in Tacoronte. ©2‘nara refrigerio y consolaci6n de los que van y estan en la tal romera y vegilia’. FRC,

xin. 210 (29 January). Quoted from C. Markham’s translation for the Hakluyt Society, The Guanches of Tenerife (London, 1907), p. 13.

192. THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

healing them in the presence of the people and chief when they

approached her reverently. Most of her miracles, however, must be acknowledged to have been in the nature of personal favours — above all, healings and cures, effected in some cases

by oil from her lamp, resuscitations of the dead, liberation in one case from demonic possession, restoration to a mother of her son, boats saved from wreck or men from drowning and, in two cases, the conversion of Moors to Christianity, Additionally,

she could move spontaneously, be in two places at once, and materialize wax for her own use. On one occasion she is said to have been stolen by Sancho de Herrera, son of the lords of the seigneurial islands, and carried into Babylonish captivity in Fuerteventura; but the Virgin turned her face to the wall and would not look on her ravishers till she was duly restored to the

island of her choice.

The religious houses — Augustinian and Franciscan — of La Laguna clearly attracted much devotion in the period of coloni-

zation. [hey received frequent bequests, and it was on their ground, as well as in the beloved parish church of the Conception, that the people of the island wished to be buried. Santo Espiritu, the Augustinian Church, won the entire devotion of Alonso Méndez (save for five reales ‘de bulas al abad que esta en

Tacoronte’ — presumably crusading indulgences); he wished to be buried there, and left 200 mrs. to the friars and five or six fanegadas of land in Tacoronte for their prayers for his soul (‘para que ruegen por su anima’).® Alonso Vazquez’s humble bequest to the friars of a yoke of oxen ‘that they may do good works for my soul’ amounted to a fifth of his worldly goods; he

also wished to be buried in the church.® Alonso de Lugo favoured the foundation of the community with concessions of land,°®’ but his affection for the Franciscan house was greater: in

this he seems to have been representative of the colonists gene“Espinosa, Origen y milagros, pp. 23-7 (II, 2), 39-41 (II, 12), 34-5 (II, 10). The people of Tenerife, at least, still invoke Our Lady of Candelaria for every kind of material purpose. My own landlady there told me that she was convinced that the Virgin’s ministrations had saved her sister from death during an illness; but then she also believed that the Santisimo Cristo of La laguna prevented rain on his feast-day and that her own success 1n a lottery had been secured by the intervention of the Holy Infant Jesus of Prague. FRC, vii. 201 (21 August 1508). $I bid., 284 (9 July 1509). ©’Viera, Noticias, III (1952), 322.

MORALE AND DEVOTION 193 rally, for rather more elected to be buried here than at Santo Espiritu. It was in recognition of Lugo’s favourite cult that the Franciscan house was dedicated to San Miguel de la Victoria; he was buried there; and according to tradition, the community’s greatest treasure, the image of the Santisimo Cristo de La Laguna, was his gift. ‘The Franciscans received other large

bequests from three of his closest associates, Pedro de Lugo, Lope Fernandez, and Andrés Suarez Gallinato.” On Gran Canaria the sources are too exiguous to give us an over-all idea of the churches that attracted most devotion. No doubt the cathedral might appear among them if more wills survived. The first bishop to have his seat there, Juan de Frias, left a good part of his estate to the construction fund, and most of the rest to the Dean and Chapter for general purposes.” The

church of Galdar, Santa Maria de Guia, was built by the beneficence of the conquistador, Sancho de Vargas, as his will records;’° and Francisco de Carrion, who called himself grandiloquently ‘vecino de la ciudad de Telde’ bequeathed a chapel to the Church of St. John of that place, which was then about to be erected, in 1527,’! but we do not know to what cult the chapel

was to be consecrated. The confraternities (cofradias) of the period all existed for the creation or maintenance of hospitals,’ with which Tenerife and Gran Canaria were not ill provided. The leper hospital on the latter island, which was in existence by 1510, was maintained by the concejo and its statutes borrowed from the corresponding institution in Seville.”* Tenerife was loath to adopt a compar-

able measure; in 1511 the island council decided to send its lepers to Las Palmas and not until 1518 was a decision taken to establish a casa de San Lazaro in Santa Cruz,’* to be supported by *8Tbid., ch. vii. The Dominicans were established in both Las Palmas and La Laguna at the latest from 1522. The only evidence of a benefaction prior to that date occurred on 30 June 1509, when some Dominicans appeared briefly in La Laguna with a claim to a piece of property given by one of their brethren, Juan Estévez. FRC, vii. 40. °?Millares MS, II. 94—6 (October 1485). FRC, vii. 238-9 (8 August 1509). Another version was printed as appendix to S. Jiménez, Primeros repartimientos de tierra _y aguas en Gran Canaria (Las Palmas, 1946),

™Millares MS, I. 151 (22 May). 7?QOn the hospitals, see J. Bosch Millares, El hospital de San Martin (Las Palmas, 1940), Los hospitales de San Lazaro de Las Palmas (Las Palmas, 1954); E. Gonzalez Yanes, ‘Las primeras entidades de asistencia publica en Tenerife’, RHC, xxi (1955).

, 73A.G.S. 14 November 1510, Seville. “FRC, v, p. Xi; Xill, p. Xv.

194 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

private alms. Of the remaining hospitals of the period, those of

San Martin in Las Palmas and San Sebastian and Nuestra

Senora de la Antigua in La Laguna were the work of confraternities. San Martin was unquestionably the oldest, dating from the

fifteenth century. ‘Bartolome trompeta’, who served in the. conquest of Gran Canaria, 1s described in his will, dated 12 May 1489, as ‘cofrade del dicho hospital’ in company with one of the witnesses, Cristobal Lopez.’*> Although the will is dated from

Telde and the hospital is described in the bequest as ‘desta villa’, it is clear that Las Palmas is meant. Bartolomé granted the reversion of all his property, should his daughter and heiress

die, as well as a smaller direct bequest to ‘the Hospital of the Lord San Martin of this town del Real’ (the habitual way of referring in these years to Las Palmas, which had originated as an encampment during the conquest — like the ‘villa del Real de Santa Fe’ during the conquest of Granada) ‘in order that the members of the confraternity may forever remember to pray to God for my soul’.

| Contrary to what has hitherto been believed,”® it is clear that the first hospital on Tenerife was that of Nuestra Senora de la Antigua. Its site was acquired from ‘Afons Anton, clerigo’ (acting for his brother, Juan) by Diego Fernandez as treasurer

of the confraternity of the hospital of Nuestra Senora la Antigua’ for seventy ducats in August 15087’ and by March 1509 the first patients were already in residence.’”? Among the

records of the hospital’s grants, legacies, and business transactions, it is impossible not to notice the recurrence of Portuguese names. The brothers Anton were almost certainly Portuguese. In January 1510 ‘Diego Afon, portugues’ gave eight fanegadas of land and some springs in Tacoronte to the hospital,’? to which in September ‘Gomez Gonzalez, portugues’ ”$Millares MS VI. 25; Bartolomé must have been dead by 21 July of that year, when Pedro de Vera made a new grant of some of his former land. Ibid., VII. 11. 76See the Introduction to FRC, v, p. xi. ™ Arch, Prov. Tenerife, leg. 184, f. 134 (26 August). The will of Francisco Rodriguez, estante, was drawn up in the hospital where he was a patient (‘donde se encuentra;) on 12 March 1509. FRC, vii. 222. On 6 April 1509, Diego Alonso, estante, left 2,000 mrs. to the hospital ‘donde se encuentra enfermo’, FRC, vii. 206. ™ Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 184, f 594.

MORALE AND DEVOTION 195 added six fanegadas of irrigable land in Busadero.”° Pedro del

Puerto and Francisco Fernandez, both described with the epithet ‘portugues’, figure as tenants of the hospital in 1512;°) and Pedro Alvarez, who elected to be buried in the Franciscan friary in June 1509 and to be borne to his grave by members of the confraternity (‘y que lo lleven los cofrades de la cofradia de Santa Maria la Antigua’) may have been Portuguese too.** Ina surviving list of cofrades*? one was French,** seven almost

certainly Portuguese;® five others had names which can definitely be ascribed to Portuguese settlers,®° leaving eight of

altogether uncertain provenance.*’ It seems odd that the Portuguese should be so prominent in a cult traditionally associated with Seville; but no doubt the fame of Our Lady of Antigua spread far beyond the city of her principal shrine. The hospital of Nuestra Senora de la Antigua has not survived; but that of San Sebastian, founded shortly afterwards,

still houses veteran soldiers and aged citizens in its modest premises near the old Franciscan house. On 9 May 1511 an extraordinary meeting of the island council of Tenerife was held in the oratory of San Miguel. Pedro Lépez de Villeras, vecino of the island, had left what must have been a substantial amount

of property (though a horse and a cup are the only items enumerated) to go towards the founding of a hospital at his death some two years previously. He had apparently named the ‘concejo, Justicia y Regimiento’ of the island as executors and now, constituting themselves as ‘patronos del hospital de San Sebastian’ the island council took exclusive control of the legacy.

They appointed Mateo Juan Carbon, who already managed Tbid., leg. 3, cuad. VI, £407.

®"1Tbid., leg. 5, cuad. XVII, f. 765°. ,; 82 FRC, vi. 296.

®3Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 5, cuad. XVII, f. 772. *4Juan Bardon. See above, p. 34. 8STuis Alvarez, Pedro del Puerto, Pedro Yanes, Pedro Estevanes, Niculas Alvarez, Alfonso Vello (see above, p. 19), Blas Fernandez. 8Jorge Sanchez, Alonso Marqués, Alvar Gonzalez, Alvaro Vaez, Pedro Fernandez.

87‘Juan Capata, prioste’, Juan de Ortega, Fernando de Torres, Lope de Buysan (apparently no Castilian name), Miguel Brizeho, Gonzalo de Cordoba, Juan Vaca, Francisco de Sepilveda. We may add Fernan Martin and Mateo Juan Carbon (treasurer of the confraternity), who received a gross of planks (a year’s rent) on 26 February 1511 from a Basque named Lope de “Guirre’ (perhaps Aguirre?) ‘for the fourth part of

hospital’. .

the water-bearing uplands (la serrania del agua) of Orotava belonging to the said

196 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

the property of La Antigua, to realize the value of Lépez’s bequest.*®> By 3 September 1512 Juan Pérez de Sorroza had taken over as manager and employed Blas Afonso, workman

(albanil) to construct a church and _ hospital for the

confraternity.*’ It is a pleasure to record that this was not the full extent of Sorroza’s charitable activities: in March 1510 he

had promised Alonso Manuel, an attorney with official responsibility for the affairs of orphaned children (‘procurador

| de los huerfanos y menores’) that he would house an orphan.” I have found no other records of the Hospital of San Sebastian, nor of this equally interesting procedure for the care of orphans in the period, but one may infer from the survival of the hospital that it, at least, must have gone on to flourish.”!

A curious, if unfruitful, attempt to start a new cofradia was mounted in 1514 by a Portuguese tanner named Alfonso Vaez. He drew up statutes in the Augustinian monastery and canvassed some support, but according to information laid before the island council ‘he went too far in his manner of receiving members and, it may be believed, with ill intentions, taking from them publicly oaths as to their ancestry, causing division

and separation, and much scandal has resulted’. The island council decided to suppress his activities, because otherwise divisions would be created and occasion given for scandal and contention between the citizens of the island, for it is said that he goes making and does make investigations concerning each of the said members, as who 1s of what lineage, and that the candidate for admission to the confraternity must follow the said Alfonso Vaez in word and deed.”

One would like to know whom Vaez was seeking to exclude from the confraternity and what impurities of origin he sought to expose. In the absence of other evidence it would be prudent 81 bid., leg. 3, cuad. XVI, ff. 812—14".; cf. FRC, v. 64, 91, 103. **Tbid., leg. 188, f. 666 (3 September). It was still under construction in March 1517. Ibid., f, 204; FRC, xiii. 66, 88.

I bid., leg. 184, f. 598 (5 March 1510). On the remaining hospital of the period, that of N.S. de los Dolores (founded 25 August 1517), which survives and flourishes today but does not belong to the history of Canarian devotion, being a pontifical foundation maintained in its early years from the sale of indulgences, see Gonzalez Yanes, ‘Las primeras entidades’, 51—88. The interesting feature of its foundation was the struggle, in supplications to the pope, between the

citizens of Tenerife, who desired the hospital, and the Bishop and Chapter in Las Palmas, who resented the creation ofa new, privileged institution outside their control. The text is printed in FRC, xiii. 2 (10 February 1514).

MORALE AND DEVOTION 197 to suppose that his qualms were conventionally caused by moriscos and conversos, rather than indigenous Canarians.

The study of early sixteenth-century morale and devotion in the Canary Islands suggests conclusions about the efficacy of the ‘spiritual conquest’ which are worth enumerating. There

appears be a conflict of evidence. Their testamentary dispositions offer conclusive proof of the thoroughgoing Christianity of those natives whom the records reflect. It is equally apparent, however, that the conversion of Canarians in outlying areas was much less effective. ‘The absorption of the Christian religion and of Spanish customs — like racial integration and social assimilation — probably affected most deeply or in most cases, Canarians of high social rank. Among the examples I have reviewed, Don Fernando Guanarteme was a leader of indigenous society,

whose wealth was increased by the conquest, who took a : Spanish bride and whose nobility was acknowledged. Pedro de la Lengua, though his herd of a hundred goats is. picturesque

evidence of a less than total break with the traditions of his

people, had sufficient landed property to assure him ofa certain social standing. Maria de Adeje was probably of the family of a mencey. Catalina de Giiimar was evidently an urban dweller, almost all of whose devotional bequests were to foundations in La Laguna: it was not for the likes of her that the island council

ordered the settlement of Guanches in the towns in hopes of facilitating their evangelization. One must also remember that the settlement of immigrants was confined within a very small compass: in Gran Canaria and Tenerife, where settlers were most numerous, they hardly penetrated beyond the northern coasts and the nearest inland valleys. This must have been a factor which militated against the assimilation of natives whose ' heartlands were outside the zone of settlement or who withdrew into the interior after the conquest. Whether conversacién or prolonged contact with Spanish settlers was a necessary condition of successful evangelization is another matter: no doubt

| Las Casas, had he applied his characteristic theories to the Canaries, would have denied it. But it was the prevailing opinion in the early history of the spiritual conquest of the New World that conversacién was essential; in the Canaries this would appear to have been assumed, since the evidence of missionary activity terminates with the completion of the conquest.

198 THE CANARY ISLANDS AFTER THE CONQUEST

It may be that in the cult of the Virgin of the Candelaria we have a faint Canarian echo of a phenomenon which is familiar to historians of the New World, and which has recently been perceived in an increasing number of cases by students of the

evangelization of Europe and the Mediterranean in the late antique and early medieval periods:® the survival in Christian guise, and usually in the form of a local ‘patron saint’ of preChristian cults. It is a sad fact, however, that we know too little of ancient Canarian religion to press this speculation further. In general, for all its shortcomings, the conversion of the Canarians

appears to have been remarkably successful, at least at the levels of society visible above the surface of the documents. It 1s apparent, finally, that there was an approximate correspondence between specific cults — those of Our Lady of Antigua and the Virgin of the Candelaria — and identifiable social and

cultural groups, the Portuguese and native Canarians. But in neither case was the cult confined to the group particularly associated with it, nor did it command the exclusive devotion of its adherents. Pre-conquest Canarian society had been characterized by what sociologists call ‘permanent structures’: its configurations were fixed by birth into and kinship with a tribe. With the conquest these were rapidly replaced by characteristically European structures, based on wealth and interest; but in a colonial society made up of a number of national and racial groups, a flavour of more primitive social organization persisted; Cf. for instance the confusion between Tonantzin and the BVM in sixteenthcentury Mexico and the scruples of the Junta Eclesiastica of 1539 about the proliferation of small chapels ‘just like those they once had for their particular gods’, Ricard, Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, pp. 56, 269; and identification of Our Lady with PachaMama in Bolivia and Peru, A. Métraux, ‘Croyances des Indiens Uro-Cipaya’, Religion et magie indiennes (Paris, 1957), p. 253. There is an obvious resemblance between the Guanches’ devotion to the Virgin of the Candelaria and that of the Mexican Indians for the Virgin of Guadalupe. It is worth recalling that the latter cult was suspected of being an idolatrous practice in the 1550s, though there seems to be no evidence to link it with a specific pre-conquest cult. M. Gamid, La poblacién del valle de Teotthuacan, i (pt. 11) Mexico, 1922), 479-81. The Church in Haiti is said to have tried to suppress the cult of the Virgin of Saut d’Eau because of her identification or confusion with a pagan deity. A. Métraux, Harti: Black Peasants and their Religion (London, 1960), pp. 92—4; cf. pp. 60-1 for some examples of the use — without any apparent confusion — of Christian images in pagan worship. Professor Wallace-Hadrill has recently observed of the early Middle Ages, ‘We begin to see the saint for what he was, the successor of the local deity, some of whose attributes he might inherit.’ Early Medieval History (Oxford, 1976), p.3.

MORALE AND DEVOTION 199 the behaviour and relationships of such individuals as have been encountered in this chapter were determined in a small but significant sphere by their provenance — and especially so, it seems, in the native Canarians’ case.

CONCLUSION The era of intensive colonization of the islands ended with a well-defined series of events in the middle years of the 1520s. For after the conquest of New Spain, the Canaries could no

longer rival America as a destination for emigrants from Castile; the decade saw immigration to the archipelago dwindle to insignificance and new settlement come to an end. In 1526

the Real Audiencia de Canarias was set up at Las Palmas: gubernatorial and seigneurial independence that dated from the conquest were brought to a close by the establishment of a supreme judicial tribunal, independent save of the crown; for the first time, all the islands were united by the supereminence

of a single institution of government. Meanwhile, in 1525, Alonso de Lugo died. He was a genuinely representative figure of the age of the conquest, which he had captained, and that of colonization, which he had done so much to promote, distinguished equally as a late paladin of the Middle Ages and early

frontiersman of modern times by his spirit of adventure, his indifference to legal or practical constraints, and his arbitrary rule of the islands he conquered. He left rough-hewn his own vision of his islands. One side of the elegant square he founded to be the heart of the capital city of La Laguna was still planted with vines. There was a conspicuous gap between the ceremoni-

ous pretensions of colonial government and the rough and ready reality of the emulous and often violent settler society. Nevertheless, enduring features of the colonial Canary Islands

were already taking shape. , By the 1520s, the primitive culture of the pre-conquest islanders had been overwhelmed by the civilization of the invaders and replaced (at least in Tenerife, Gran Canaria, La Palma, and Gomera) by a new society that was an amalgam of both. Despite the large number of natives lost to war, deportation, enslavement, and disease, colonial society in the Canaries was, in part or in patches, a miscegenated society and its culture to some extent a hybrid culture. Present-day islanders conserve

CONCLUSION 201 traces of the pre-conquest past in a few areas of folklore, diet,

dances, and other entertainments, and the rhythms of their popular rhymes.' But the mixture was uneven: the immigrant element greatly outweighed the indigenous. Ultimately, the ancient Canarians were neither exterminated nor ‘acculturated’, but simply assimilated. Gaspar Frutuoso’s description of La Palma? at the end of the sixteenth century is an eloquent testimony: the three main elements of the population of that island — Castilian, Portuguese, and indigenous — were more

or less equally mixed, according to his impression, and interbred already to a great extent; those who conserved their racial identity coexisted as equals, by his report, and were indistinguishable in faith and habit. All but a tiny minority among the islanders today regard themselves as Spaniards. When they recall the conquest, they do not think ofit as an alien

triumph, like contemporary Mexicans or Peruvians, but, like Costaricans or North Americans of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ descent, they identify with the conquerors. As in the New World, the ‘Black Legend’ in the Canaries is

neither wholly true nor wholly false. The Spaniards of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were adept in their overseas colonies at what 1s now called racial integration; but as has been shown, there were some natives — numbered only in hundreds

in Tenerife where they were most numerous — who, neither destroyed in the conquest nor absorbed during the colonization, survived in diminishing numbers, at least in the recesses of Tenerife, until well into the seventeenth century. Hints of the sufferings to which they were exposed have come down to us in the pages of Espinosa, who found the surviving Guanches of his

own day sullen, intimidated, and uncommunicative; a generation earlier, Benzoni had encountered only one old native in La

Palma ‘all whose delight was in getting intoxicated’.? The syndrome of alcoholism and fear is familiar enough among conquered primitives suffering from ‘cultural shock’. While the SA. Lefranc’, Lo guanche en la musica popular canaria (La Laguna, 1942); ‘Las endechas

aborigenes’, RHC, xix (1953), 33-69; J. Alvarez Delgado, ‘Las canciones populares canarias’, Tagéro, i (1944), 120—6; M. R. Alonso Rodriguez, ‘Las endechas a la muerte de Guillén Peraza’, AEA, i (1956), 468-71. 2FRC, x (1964), 3Espinosa, Origen y milagros, p. 17 (I, ix); G. Benzoni, History of the New World (London, 1857), p. 260.

2()2 CONCLUSION native races lived on, it was chiefly political considerations and respect for nobility which governed the Spaniards’ treatment of them. The leaders of indigenous society and their descendents were welcome among the conquerors; there was no creation of an upstart nobility of local chiefs and headmen, caciques and

curacas, aS would later occur in Mexico and Peru, but the Spanish monarchs were loyally served by some of the outgoing

rulers. It is also clear, on the other hand, that even the Hispanicized natives who received a share in the distribution of

the land were less generously treated than European settlers, and that they were actively discouraged from participating in the new and lucrative agronomy introduced by the newcomers. Miscegenation was less marked in the Canaries than the New World, not only because the natives were fewer but also because

the importation of negro slaves was on a much smaller scale. There were never any ‘plantations’ manned by slaves in these islands. Sugar was farmed by share-croppers of European, often of Portuguese, origin. Negro labour was required only in mills,

and even there for but a short time. The Canarian sugar industry, like that of Hispaniola, collapsed in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, probably because of Brazilian competi-

tion. [he Negro and mulatto never became typical features of Canarian society, as they did in the Cape Verde Islands, Sao Thomé, or parts of America. From within Europe, the Canaries were colonized at an early stage, compared with the New World, by a cosmopolitan population and especially by Portuguese and Italians, on whose expertise and wealth the establishment of the sugar industry depended. I have suggested that the early differences between the economies of the Canaries and the Antilles can be partly explained in terms of the earlier foreign settlement of the former

islands; and I have noted more similarities in the period between the economies of Madeira and the Canaries than between those of the Canaries and the Caribbean. The fact that so many of the Portuguese settlers of the Canaries actually came from Madeira suggests that these resemblances were the result

of Madeiran influence, not mere coincidences arising from similarities of climate and geography. The short-term differences between the archipelagos of the eastern and western Atlantic were, no doubt, less significant than the longer-term

CONCLUSION 203 likeness: by the miud-sixteenth century, both groups of islands had witnessed a transference, with modifications and develop-

ments, of western Mediterranean life, to adapt a phrase of Braudel’s, ‘avec ‘des gros bagages’ — crops, livestock, methods of cultivation and irrigation — which utterly transformed their

destinations twice over in a generation’s span. Hispaniola, for instance, was turned from its traditional economy to the exploitation first of gold, then of sugar; Madeira and the Canaries, also to sugar, buat first to grain. The source of the impulse that achieved these transformations was not rnerely direct demographic pressure, nor solely strategic considierations, much less a superabundance of energy

in an Old World where life was precarious and poor, but a search for new’ resources in a developing society, which had barely enough disposable resources to spare for the search. It is apparent that not all the movement of emigrants from Castile under Ferdinand and Isabella was spontaneous or even volun-

tary. To some extent, what the monarchs did not compel for confessional reasons they procured by economic concessions. Certainly in tlhe Canaries one may say that settlers came not because of irresistible demographic factors but in part because of royal policy — the combined effects of the inducements the | monarchs offered and the individual aspirations and circumstances of countless migrants. The monarchs’ own motives were mixed, but, where properly economic, they were a matter above

all of the desire to promote the cultivation of sugar and, to a lesser extent, of grain. Demand for these commodities was the result again of more than directly demographic causes: in the case of sugar, perhaps, the destruction of or threat to traditional centres of production in the eastern Mediterranean, combined with a modification of prevailing taste; in that of grain, increas-

ing problems of production and supply. It could be said, in short, that the beginnings of Castilian overseas expansion represented the search not of an over-populated country for additional space but of a developing country for surplus resources,

commodities, and wealth. |

The colonial society that took shape in the Canaries at the end of the fifteenth century and early in the sixteenth century marked something of a new departure in the history of European overseas colonization. Its distinguishing features were the

204 CONCLUSION wide assortment of the social origins of the colonists, drawn principally from humble — not exclusively or even largely aristocratic or mercantile — backgrounds, w.ho might in many cases work the settled land themselves; reliance on immigrants or imported labour as well as, or rather than, the indigenous; miscegenation among the consequent plurality of races; and the introduction of new crops and methods of cultivation, effecting - at least a partial displacement of the economic structure: a new exploitation, in short, of the colonized country. Many of the

same features also characterized the settlement of other

Atlantic archipelagos and parts of the Hispanic: New World, at roughly the same period. But among earlier meclieval examples,

the crusader colonies of Outremer were too aristocratic, too aloof from the local population, and economica lly too uninven-

tive to be classifiable under the same heading; there were peasant emigrants to Frankish Syria, but the peaisants of France

generally became burgesses in Jerusalem, and the few who settled and tended vineyards in village communi ties remained a

small and marginal phenomenon.* The Italian merchantquarters in the eastern Mediterranean and Levant drew on the economic life of the societies that surrounded them without profoundly changing it — though the Genoese and Venetians

did extend an existing sugar industry in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Elsewhere, when a new agronomy was introduced, as in the conquests of the Teutonic Order, where grainlands were extended and coarser cereals displaced by wheat, still the soil was worked by the existing peasantry: hundreds of German villages were established in West Prussia, but in the East, where economic innovation was greatest, colonization was least.° Atlantic colonial societies, in short — and that of the Canaries in particular — were markedly different from those which preceded them. As well as being one of rapid and total change, the period was, for most of the islands, ore of the beginnings of prosperity. In the context of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries this is a paradox which a modern reader might not grasp at once. Small islands then were habitually, almost fiecessarily, poor, struggl-

ing for survival, lacking exportable produce on a sufficient 4]. Prawer, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (London, 1972), pp. 76-84. SF. Carsten, The Origins of Prussia, (Oxford, 1954), pp. 55, 59-60, 65, 69-71.

CONCLUSION 205 scale. But the grain, sugar, dyestuffs, and wine of the Atlantic archipelagos were to give some of their constituent islands an

economic importance out of proportion to their size and to

enable them to attain a prosperity which only the larger Mediterranean islands enjoyed. Moreover, as is already well

known, the Canaries and the Azores derived an immense advantage from their positions on the New World trade routes; but I have suggested very strongly that it would be wrong to minimize the economic importance of the Canaries in their own right, at least in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, when their most important commercial relations were with the Old World rather than the New, and with that complex network of Atlantic trade of which they already formed the nexus. Abundance, of course, never embraced the whole archipelago. Lanzarote and Fuerteventura were condemned to unrelieved poverty by their infertility and commercial uselessness; they lived by

piracy and parasitism. Even within the richer islands the economic dominance of sugar, and the structure of the sugar industry caused an uneven distribution of wealth which was a source of constant social tensions and problems of government. Nor did the era of plenty last very long. As the New World grew in importance, the Canaries declined relatively in their own right, and became of value only or largely for the sake of the

New World trade. When, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the New World grew more self-sufficient and the activities of foreign interlopers more damaging, even this relative importance of the Canary Islands was eroded. Moreover, the single-crop economies of the Canaries were particularly vulnerable to foreign competition — in the sixteenth century from Brazilian sugar, in the seventeenth from Portuguese and Madeiran wines. For the whole Hispanic world, and for no part of it more than the Canaries, if the sixteenth century had beena time of prosperity, the seventeenth was a century of incipient

decline, and the eighteenth of dearth. The islands retained a vital importance — they were the most important part of the monarchy in the estimation of Philip IV° — but their signi*In a document of 20 August 1643: ‘es lo mas importante que yo tengo... por ser paso

y camino derecho para las Indias y navegacién de ellas a Castilla’, quoted by F. Morales Padrén in E/ comercio canario-americano. 1 have been unable to trace this document in A.G.I. It is curious that the Canaries are mentioned as a staging-post on the way back from the New World, but perhaps the usual stopping-place, the Azores, was inaccessible to Castilian ships after the revolt of the Portuguese.

206 CONCLUSION ficance existed only in relation to the New World and was more

strategic than commercial. |

Experience gained in the Canaries may have helped to form Castilian approaches and policies towards economic activity in the New World, notably in the exploitation of sugar, dyestuffs,

and native Spanish crops and livestock. In that respect, it is possible to accept the view that the Canaries constituted a ‘laboratory’’ for the exploitation of the New World. If, however,

the focus is shifted from economic to political history, the picture appears much less clear. There are similarities and dissimilarities between the islands and the Indies to be taken into account on three distinct levels: administration of conquered races: disposal of land for settlement; and establishment of particular organs or institutions of colonial government. In considering at least the first two of these headings, it may be helpful to include the roughly contemporary colonization of the Kingdom of Granada in the comparison. From the Canaries to the Indies, the administration of the conquered peoples shared certain similarities, some of which also embraced the Kingdom of Granada. I have noticed the remarkable similarities between challenges addressed to the

Moorish cities conquered by the Catholic Monarchs (and reflected in the term of submission or capitulaciones), challenges to the Canarians, and Requerimientos addressed to the American Indians. We have seen how elements of the Requertmtento were

first put to the Canarians, and how some of the monarchs’ policies towards the Indians were anticipated by their attitudes to the islanders. ‘The monarchs’ approach to the problems of rule of the native populations of the three areas might thus be

said to have varied within a single tradition. The absence of common institutions for the administration of natives in the various zones of Castilian expansion can be explained in terms of the different environments, different indigenous traditions, different scales of survival of the native populations and, above all, differences of faith and race in the context of which Spanish administrators had to operate.

The disposal of the conquered lands for settlement in Granada, the Canaries, and the New World, though not withVerlinden, Précédents médiévaux, p. 60; J. H. Elliott, Zmperial Spain (London, 1963), p. 46.

CONCLUSION 207 out some variations from place to place, does seem to have been

underpinned by a measure of what one might call ‘conceptual continuity’ — by similarities, that is, in the way the monarchs and the jurists who advised them thought of these conquests. Spanish and Latin American historiography has been much exercised by one aspect of this problem in relation to the history

of the New World: the question of justos titulos, that is, of conquest rights. But, in the present context® of colonization, it is resemblances and possible influences between the three phases

of Castilian settlement in the Peninsula, the islands, and the Indies that require attention; not, in short, justos titulos but, as far as juridical problems are at all relevant, administrative law.

In that connection, it appears to be true that the Catholic Monarchs treated all their gains, whether in the Kingdom of Granada, the Canary Isles, or the farther Atlantic, consistently

with long-standing royal practice and principles of native Spanish jurisprudence. The sovereigns’ anxiety to people (‘poblar’) their new conquests evokes the old law that he who | first settled an unoccupied property became its owner: in the code of the Stete Partidas this is specifically applied to islands, though it is assumed that the occupier will owe allegiance to the

prince to whose realms the island belongs.? Ferdinand and Isabella matched their obligation to settle their new realms with a desire to make land-grants in them, in order to exploit these newly-won sources of patronage. The practice which Castilian kings had long adopted in lands reconquered from the

Moors of granting away jurisdiction as well as land was not sustained by the Catholic Monarchs in the Canaries, save in the episcopal fief of Agiimes, nor, after the barely effective lordship

enjoyed by Columbus as Admiral of the Ocean Sea, by the Spanish sovereigns in the New World: the marquessates of Cortés and Pizarro and Alvarado’s seigneury were the only substantial exceptions.'° Land-grants, however, (as distinct from grants of jurisdiction) were the most important instrument of royal policy in Granada, the Canaries, and the New World ®! hope to deal with Castilian rights to the conquest of the Canaries in a forthcoming work. See meanwhile A. Pérez Voituriez, Problemas juridicos internacionales de la conquista

de Canartas (La Laguna, 1959). *Codigos Espanoles — Codigo de las Siete Partidas, ii (Madrid, 1848), 344—5.

See above, pp. 136-40.

208 CONCLUSION alike. The disposal of the conquered land in patronage forms a link between the three areas and distinguishes them collectively from the monarchs’ inherited patrimony — the demesne of the crown of Castile, which was, by universal agreement, inalienable; in other words, the monarchs appear to have thought of their Granadine, Canarian, and American territories in the way

traditionally reserved in Castile for the lands of the Reconquest."" Scrutiny of the particular institutions of colonial government

: which recur in the histories of the Canaries and the New World

does not suggest that there was any clear pattern of influence of the former on the latter. To take the similarities between them before the dissimilarities: the municipal form of the colonies’ organization, and the functions of that mainstay of government

in remote parts of the monarchy, the island council, seem to have been closely comparable in the Canaries and the New World. It was in the Canaries that the term ‘governor’ first seems to have been applied to a Castilian royal official in a civil

context before being echoed in the Capitulations of Santa Fe _and repeated in the titles of Columbus, Ovando, and their successors. The reszdencia (or official inquiry) was used in both the Canaries and the New World as a means of overseeing the governors’ conduct. It is worth recalling that unlike peninsular

officials Lugo underwent this process not at the end of his governorship but in mid-term. In his day, the only other servants of the Castilian crown to undergo restdencias while still in office — as far as I can judge — were Columbus and Diego Col6én; but the dividing line between residencia and pesquisa was

so imperfectly drawn that it would be unwise to draw any

conclusions from this apparent coincidence. ;

A major peculiarity separating the Canaries from the rest of the lands of the Castilian crown was that the islands went their own way in the matter of their popular institutions, the concejos, which were in decline in the Peninsula by the fifteenth century tJ. Manzano Manzano, ‘La adquisici6én de las Indias’, Anuario de historia del derecho espanol, xxi (1952) 17—18, 32—45, If Manzano’s conclusion (Ibid., p. 73) is somewhat

idiosyncratic, or if it seems discordant with the evidence he presents, that is perhaps because of the excess of polemical enthusiasm with which he seeks to rebut the views of

his colleagues in the University of Madrid. He is right to point out the differences between the contemporary jurists’ concepts of the two Atlantic conquests but, heedless of the beguiling contradictions of the evidence, he ignores the similarities.

CONCLUSION 209 and were not transmitted beyond the Atlantic; yet in the Canaries the concejo seems to have received a new lease of life,

perhaps owing in part to the influence of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, whose concejos — serving as the focuses of rebel-

lion against their lords in the fifteenth century — conserved a

peculiar strength. In this respect, the islands more closely resembled the lands of the crown of Aragon, with their strong traditions of municipal liberty, whereas it 1s well known that from the first the monarchs of Spain were intent on preventing any such development from occurring in the New World and

modelled its municipalities narrowly on those of Castile. Although various townships existed on the different islands of

the Canaries, each island was treated in some respects as a municipality: it was to the islands that the concejos and island

councils pertained, rather than to any particular town within them, and to the islands that the Fueros were granted. The presence of the Fuero laws appears to link the Canaries with the history of the Reconquest, but not with the New World, where their embrace never reached. Finally, the Real Audiencia, though

it was an institution of judicial administration of the highest importance in the Canaries and America alike, made its first appearance in the latter place; if this was a case of influence, its direction was in this instance reversed. This inconsistent hodgepodge of institutional similarities and

dissimilarities is, perhaps, no more than a historian would expect to find as he scanned the different areas of Castilian expansion in this period. But it makes one hesitate to ascribe to the Canarian experience any formative influence on the institutions of government of the Hispanic New World. The islands were not necessarily a ‘laboratory’ of colonial government, in which controlled experiments were consciously carried out or in which lessons were mastered and applied elsewhere. Rather, in these pages the Canaries have appeared as a crucible into which

ingredients were flung at random, as though by a sorcerer’s apprentice, not by a laboratory technician. The ingredients mingled in this crucible in the course of the conquest and colonization were Castilian political traditions, Portuguese and Italian economic expertise, a mixed population of divers origins, and the terras bravas of a new and previously underexploited physical environment. The changes wrought were

210 CONCLUSION alchemical. The society and economy of the islands were more than the sum of their parts. For all their Mediterranean origins,

they were products of subtle transmutation. Each stage of European expansion occurring in a new setting and new circumstances, displayed novelties as well as continuity. To change the metaphor, if the Atlantic was a mirror of the Mediterranean, it was a distorting mirror. The new worlds reflected the old without reproducing it.

APPENDIX OF DOCUMENTS

1. Memorandum of Genoese properties on Gran Canaria liable to confiscation by the crown (see

above, pp. 26—7) Las Palmas, ¢.1500 A.G.S. Diversos Castilla, I. 735 (9-24).

This document illustrates something of the extent of Genoese involvement in sugar production on Gran Canaria and, in particular, of the formidable presence of the Riberol or Rivarolo family. The crown’s efforts to limit foreign settlement in the islands are also illustrated.

Las faziendas que tienen los ginoveses en la isla de la Grand Canaria e [sic.] pertenecen a Sus Altesas por aver sido rrebeldes e ynobidientes a sus rreales mandamientos son los siguientes: + dos engenios de Francisco de Riberol ginoves el uno se dize El Sirago con sus tierras que lo rrenta

trezientos mill maravedis ccc M

+ el otro engenio del dicho Frangisco de Riberol esta en Galdar que lo rrenta con las tierras e molino a el pertenescientes trezientos

mill maravedis cada afio ccc M + otro engenio en Galdar ques de Pedro Cairrasco ginoves que vale con las tierras e molino e otras cosas a el pertenescientes mas de

mull ducados de rrenta ccclxxv M

+ otro engenio questa en el Agaete ques de Francisco Palomar ginoves. Vale con las tierras e molino e todo lo a el [sic.] anexo mas de dos mill ducados de rrenta y esto es de sus altesas por dos partes la una pues lo tiene perdido por rrebelde ynobidiente e la otra por que se lo

fiso mer¢ed por falsa ynformacion que fiso dccl M

-+- otro engenio de Gironimo [?] de Cairasco ques en la villa del Real de Las Palmas que vale de rrenta con sus tierras

, e molinos mas de mill e dozientos docados ccccl M + otro engenio en Galdar que fiso Gironymo de Oredio. Es de Sus Altezas por dos

212 APPENDIX OF DOCUMENTS rrazones: la una por rrebelde e ynobidiente, la otra por que lo fizo en una dehesa sin licencia ni mandado de Sus Altezas ni de quien su poder toviese. Vale de rrenta

tresientos mill maravedis ccc M

+ tiene Bautista de Riberol una fuente e un pedaco de la dehesa de Galdar por si e sin titulo justo syno que Alonso Fajardo [?] governador en la isla fizo en conbyte [? sic. ]

alos labradorese unas[... ... illegible] mas un pedaco de la dehesa que valdra con. . . {erasure] la dicha fuente quinientos ducados de rrenta. Tene lo perdido e pertenece a Sus Altezas por rrebelde e ynobidiente e por

lo tener sin titulo justo clxxxvili Md

+ tiene mas el dicho Bautista de Riberol casas e huertas e otras faziendas gruesas + tiene mas Gironimo de Oredio casas ¢€ huertas e tiendas e otras faziendas de mucho valor + tienen otros ginoveses otras muchas faziendas gruesas de mucho valor + asi que valen a lo menos las faziendas que tienen los ginoveses en la dicha isla de Grand Canaria que justamente pertenecen a Sus Altezas dos cuentos e seyscientos mill [erased]

e sesenta mill maravedis ii dclx M

2. The Catholic Monarchs to Lorenzo Fernandez (see above, pp. 18-27)

Seville, 2 February 1502 (A.G.S. Seville).

The monarchs grant Lorenzo Fernandez, a Portuguese settler, immunity from prosecution or penalization for possessing more than the 200,000 mrs.’ worth of property permitted to foreigners on Tenerife. Reference is made to Fernandez’s claim to have been one of the first cultivators of sugar on the island and to have taught the art to many

other settlers. at

DON FERNANDO E DONA YSABEL [etc.] Por quanto por parte de vos Lorenco Ferrandez, natural del Reyno de Portugal, nos fue fecha relacgion [etc.] que puede aver quinze afios mas o menos vos os venistes a bibir e poblar

en la ysla de la Grand Canaria e que fuistes uno de los primeros que comencaron a facer acucar en ella e que despues aca vos aveys comprado en la dicha ysla algunas tierras de acucar de otros bienes e heredamientos e cierta parte de un yngenio e que a muchos vecinos de la dicha ysla aveys mostrado haser acucar, de lo qual se ha seguido mucho provecho a la dicha ysla e que

APPENDIX OF DOCUMENTS 213 agora a vuestra noticia es venido que nos ovimos mandado por una nuestra

carta que ningun estrangero pudiese comprar nin tener en la dicha ysla hasienda de rays mas de en quantia de doscientas mill maravedis e que vos lemeys que por no ser natural de nagion de nuestros rreynos como quiera que bibis en la dicha ysla de asienda que vos seria puesto algund embaraco en la dicha vuestra hasienda. Por ende que nos suplicabades [szc.| ¢ pediades [szc. | por merced vos diesemos ligengia e facultad para que pudiesedes tener toda la hasienda que teniades e aviades comprado en la dicha ysla e comprar lo que mas quisieredes en ella libremente, no embargante lo que por nos estava

mandado, e vos fisiesemos merged de qualquier pena en que por aver comprado lo que fasta aqui teneys pudiesedes aver yncorrido e como la nuestra merced fuere. E nos por vos fazer bien e merged tovimoslo por bien, e por la presente vos damos licengia e facultad para que podays tener e gosar de aqui adelante de toda la hasienda que hasta agora aveys comprado ¢ teneys en

la dicha ysla ec de aqui adelante compraredes en ella commo sy fucredes natural de nuestros reynos, ca por la presente para esto vos hasemos natural dellos c vos hasemos merced de qualquier pena que por aver comprado lo que

fasta aqui teneys en la dicha ysla avays caydo e yncurrido de lo qual vos mandamos dar [etc. ]. 3. Queen Juana to the Governor of Gran Canaria concerning the settlement of some Moors (sec

above, p. 36-7) Segovia, 31 August 1503 (A.G.S. Segovia, f. 98).

The Queen acknowledges the rights of Moors from mainland Africa, who had travelled

to Gran Canaria under safe conduct and accepted the Catholic faith, to remain at liberty. Not all the supplicants had in fact been converted to Christianity but the Queen’s favour is expressly reserved for those who had.

DONA JUANA [etc.]. .. Sepades que por parte de Hernando alfaqui que fue de ¢iertos moros de Berveria e de Juan de Bajahamar e de tres hijos de Fatima la grande e de sus mugeres e de Juan e de Francisco Pescador ¢ de Alonso ¢ Francisco, christianos, naturales de la Berveria fasta en numero de veynte e quatro personas hombres e mugeres, me han fecho relacion [etc.] .. . que ellos pasaron de Berberia a esta dicha ysla de Grand Canaria, con seguro que le [szc.] dio Alonso Fajardo, en nombre del Rey mi sefor padre e de la Reyna mi senora madre, que aya santa gloria, como su governador que era a la sason para que pudiesen andar libres e contratar e haser de sy lo que quisiesen. E que estando en esta dicha ysla Antonio de Torres, defunto, governador de los dichos Reyes mis senores, el y otros vecinos de esa dicha ysla los tomaron en manera de cabtivos e presos e los han tenido ansi de seys o syete afios a esta

parte fasta agora aprovechandose dellos, no dexandolos andar libres nin

contratar nin faser de sy lo que quisiesen, aunque los mas dellos se convertieron a la santa Fe catolica, segund parescera por una ynformacion que ante mi en el mi consejo fue presentada; ¢ que sy asy pasase quc ellos rescibiran much agravio e danio. E por su parte me fue suplicado e pedido por merced, que avia consideracion a que ellos vinieron a esa dicha ysla por el

214 APPENDIX OF DOCUMENTS asiento e scguro quc les fue dado por el dicho Alonso Fajardo en nombre de los

dichos Reyes mis senores, los mandase reponer e repusiese en libertad para que ellos y sus hijos fuesen libres y pudiesen contrabtar e haser de sy lo que quisyesen e sobrellos proveyese de remedio con justicia 0 como la mi merced fuese. E lo qual visto en el mi consejo e la dicha ynformagion que por los susodicho [sic.] por sy y en nombre de todos los otros fasta en el dicho numero fue presentada, fue acordado que devia mandar e mando que los Moros que

pasaron a esa dicha ysla e se convirtieron a nuestra santa fe catolica que los devo dar e do por libres e quitos para que puedan haser de sy lo que quisyesen e libres puedan andar e contrabtar en donde quisieren e por bien tovieren, asi ellos como sus fijos e mugeres, aunque los dichos sus fijos nascieren despues que pasaron a esa dicha ysla. E otrosy, que los otros que pasaron con los que estan convertidos y estan moros y vos el dicho mi governador hallardes que

pasaron a esa dicha ysla desde Berveria por el seguro que les dio el dicho Alonso Fajardo en nombre de los dichos Reyes mis sefores, aunque el dicho Alonso Fajardo no toviese poder para ello, los doy por libres e los repongo en libertad a ellos c a sus mugeres que con ellos pasaron ¢ a sus hijos aunque sean enjendrados despues que pasaron a esa dicha ysla. Pero si dentro de treynta dias despues que esta mi carta les fuere notificada non se convirtieren a la santa le catolica, que pasado el dicho termino se buclvan a la dicha Berveria e vos el dicho mi governador los apremieys que luego salgan de toda-la ysla [etc. ].

4. Acknowledgement of a debt for orchil to Juan de Betancor and Juan de Plasencia by Gonzalo del

Castillo, agent of Teresa Enriquez (see above, p. 73)

La Laguna, 18 July 1510 (Arch. Prov. Tenerife, leg. 3, f. 303 [f.) ‘This document is a good example, ina well-preserved condition, of the formulae used in

recording a debt before a public notary, and provides useful information about the trade in dyestuffs. ‘he monopoly of orchil enjoyed by Teresa Enriquez, as heir to her dead husband, Gutierre de Cardenas, was farmed out to the Riberol family. Cosme de Riberol is said to owe Betancor and Plasencia 14,824 mrs. and 8,000 mrs. respectively for the orchil they have collected and delivered. But should the debt remain outstanding for over three days more, Castillo undertakes to pay it and to compensate the two

gatherers at the rate of 68 mrs. daily: this is not represented as interest but as compensation for loss of earnings incurred as a result of time wasted in pursuit of the debt.

Sepan quantos esta carta vieren commo yo, Gongalo del Castillo, vegino de la

ysla de Tenerife, criado e mayordomo de dona ‘Teresa Enriquez, otorgo e conosco que vos es devido a vos, Juan de Betancor, catorze mill e ochocientos e veynte-quatro maravedis desta moneda que se usa en esta ysla de Tencrife, ea

vos, Juan de Plasencia, ocho mill maravedis de la dicha moneda, todos los quales dichos maravedis se vos deven e son devidos de orchilla que aves cogido e pagado en esta ysla de Tenerife que ya es cargada por Cosme de Riberol asy commo arrendador della; e por que el dicho Cosme de Riberol os deve e es obligado a vos dar e pagar los dichos maravedis desuso declarados asy commo

APPENDIX OF DOCUMENTS 215 arrendador, yo vos he dado ¢cedulas a cada uno de vos de la dicho cuantia dirigidas al dicho Cosme de Riberol para que a tres dias vista cunpla e pague a vos los susodichos los dichos maravedis en ellas contenidos. FE, porque vosotros

los susodichos os recgelais que no vos cunplira ni paga [sic.] los dichos maravedis e por vuestra seguridad, me obligo e pongo con vosotros e con cada uno de vos que pasados los dichos tres dias e trayendome por testimonio de

commo se le yntimase la dicha cedula con las diligencias que en esto se requieren que yo vos quede por debdor e por debdor de agora para enton¢es, e de estonces para agora me constituyo e me obligo e pongo con vosotros que luego vos de y pague e dare e pagare los dichos maravedis con mas todos los dias que vos detuvieredes en la yntimacion y espera de los dichos tres dias fasta que vos los de y pague yo los dichos maravedis, por cada un dia dos reales de plata por suspensyon del trabajo de vuestras personas, por que trabajar no

podres andandoos enpedidos en la cobranga de lo susodicho, e asy no lo haziendo e cunpliendo que vos dare e pagare los dichos maravedis con la pena

del doblo, a la qual pena pagar me obligo commo el prencipal por pena e postura e por pura promision, firme e derecha estipulacion, convenencia valedera asosegada que por nonbre de propio ynterese con vos fago e pongo, e la dicha pena pagada 0 non que todavia sea tenido e obligado a conplir e pagar todo lo que dicho es, para lo qual obligo mi persona e todos mis bienes asy muebles commo rrayzes, avidos e por aver, doquier que los yo aya e tenga e me fueren fallados e oviere e toviere de aqui adelante, e por esta presente carta

ruego e pido e do todo mi poder conplido a todas e qualesquier justicias e juezes, asy de Casa e Corte de la Reyna nuestra senora commo de todas las cibdades, villas e lugares de todos los sus rreynos e senorios y especialmente de

la dicha ysla de ‘Tenerife, ante quien esta carta paresciere e della o de parte della fuere pedido conplimiento de justicia, fagan como deven haser entrega y

esecucion en mi persona e todos los dichos mis bienes, los quales vendan, rematen en publica almoneda a buen barato 0 a malo, como quisyeren e por bien tuvieren, e de los maravedis de su valor vos fagan entero e conplido pago

asy del dicho debdo prencipal como de la dicha pena del doblo sy en ella cayere, bien asy commo sy sobre lo susodicho ovieramos contendido en juysio ante jues conpetente e fuese pasado en cosa jusgada por mi consentida e non apelada ni suplicada, en rrazon de lo qual renusc¢io todas e qualesquier leyes, fueros e derechos e vsos e costunbres e hordenamientos reales, canonicos €

municipales e civiles e todas cartas de mercedes, prematicas, franquesas, libertades, estatutos fechos e por hazer por qualesquier reyes e prencipes o senores e todas esenciones e defensyones e buenas razones que son en contrario, y especialmente renuscio la ley e regla del derecho en que diz que general renusciacion de leyes fecha que non vala. E por questo sea cierto e firme e non venga en duda otorgue esta carta antel escrivano publico a testigos deyuso escriptos, la qual firme de mi nonbre. Fecha la carta en el registro de Anto (erased) escriptorio de Anton de Vallejo, escrivano publico e testigos

| (erased) del Concejo de la ysla de Tenerife, a dies e ocho dias del mes de jullio, anno del nas¢imiento de nuestro Salvador [hesuchristo de mill e quinientos e

diez annos. Testigos que fueron presentes, Juan d’Escobedo y Gaspar Velasques, estantes en la dicha ysla de Tenerife. — Gonzalo del Castillo.

216 APPENDIX OF DOCUMENTS 3. Last Will and Testament of Alonso Bello (see above, pp. 19-20, 89-90)

La Laguna, | May 1511 (Arch. Prov. Tenerife, 6g. 4, f. 669°f.).

Alonso Bello makes a number of bequests which illuminate problems of economic, demographic, and devotional history. He makes a typical range of donations to places of worship in Tenerife, showing special devotion to the Franciscan and Augustinian houses in La Laguna and to Santa Maria de la Concepcion, the parish church of the villa de arriba. He includes the Hospital of Nuestra Senora de la Antigua, maintained by : a confraternity of his fellow-Portuguese. His Madeiran provenance is betrayed in various references to debts to be paid or collected there and in the information that he

had a house there. He refers to his trade in grain, sugar, and shells, and to his pig-breeding business. ‘There is a mention of a black slave left in Madeira as surety for a

debt. This document is included for its intrinsic interest and as a representative example both of notarial sources and of the type of testamentary evidence much used in

, chapter IX above.

Sepan quantos esta carta de testamento e postrimera voluntad e mandas vyeren como yo, Afonso Vello, portugues, vecino de la ysla de Tenerife, estando enfermo del cuerpo e sano de la voluntad, en mi propio seso e entendymiento tal qual Dios nuestro Sefior tuvo por bien de me lo querer dar, creyendo como creo fyrmemente en la Santisima Trenidad, ques Padre e Fyjo e Espyritu Santo, que son tres personas e vn solo Dios verdadero que bive e rreyna por sienpre syn fyn, encomendandome a nuestra sehora Santa Maria

su madre, vyrgen antes del parto e en el parto e despues del parto, encomendandome a todos los santos e santas de la Corte del Cielo, hago e hordena este mi testamento e postrymera voluntad e mandas en la forma syguiente. Primeramente mando mi anima a mi Senor Ihesuchristo, que la conpro e redimio por su preciosa sangre, e mando el cuerpo a la tierra donde fue formado. Mando que si Dios nuestro Senor tuviere por bien de me llevar desta presente vida que mi cuerpo Sea sepultado en el monesterio de senor San

Francisco desta ysla de Tenerife, en la parte e lugar que a mis albaceas paresciere segun la calidad de mi persona e mi hazienda lo sufriere, y que se pague por la sepultura lo acostunbrado. Mando que antes de mi fynamiento me sea dado e vestydo en mi cuerpo el abito de senor San Francisco por que sea mi abogado e gane las enduljencias e perdones que son otorgados por los Sumos Pontifiges e que por el abito se de la limosna que se suele dar. Mando que me digan mi novenario de misas, vigilias, noturnos de fynados ofrendado de pan e vino e cera, syendo la primera misa cantada e la postrimera de todas nueve misas, e questas misas con todo lo que dicho es digan los frayles del dicho monesterio e se les pague lo acostunbrado. Mando que me digan un treintanario revelado todos los dichos frayles e que se pague lo acostunbrado. Otrosy que los padres frailes del dicho monesterio me digan otro treyntanario

abyerto ¢ se les pague lo acostunbrado e que la mitad de este treyntanario sea ofrescido a reverencia de nuestra senora. Mando a las yglesyas e monesterios las limosnas acostunbradas. Mando vn frontal para el altar del monesterio de senor Santespiritus desta ysla que cueste mill maravedis en que se fygure la Santysyma Trenidad. Mando para la yglesia mayor de nuestro senora de la Concebg¢ion mill maravedis para su obra. Mando para techar de teja el espital

APPENDIX OF DOCUMENTS 217 de nuestra senora de la Antigua mill maravedis. Mando a senor San Francisco desta ysla de Tenerife para ayuda a una vestimenta para con que se diga misa en el monesterio tres doblas de oro. Mando que en el dicho monesteryo de senor Francisco se digan cinco misas ofrendadas de pan e vino e cera, a honor e reverencia de las cinco plagas de nuestro senor, por el alma de mi fijo Pedro Vello. Mando a todas las otras yglesias y hermitas desta ysla de Tenerife a cada vna dellas cincuenta maravedis con mas otros ¢incuenta a sehora Santa

Catalina de Tacoronte, en manera que la yglesya de senora Santa Catalina aya mas ¢incuenta maravedis que todas las otras yglesias e hermitas. Mando que todas las conchas que yo tengo en mi poder de Alfonso Alvares, que en mi

deposito la justicia desta ysla commo bienes pertenescientes a la rreina Nuestra Senora, que todas se buelvan a la justigia e al dicho Alfonso Alvares

para quien fueron conpradas con sus dyneros, segun e de la manera que parescera por un proceso que sobre ello paso ante Sevastyan Paez, escrivano publico desta ysla, en el qual parescera la rrazon de todo ello. Y nueve conchas que dellas tome mando que paguen por ellas a quien de derecho lo oviere de aver treinta e vn real e medio. Otrosi mando que cunplan e paguen a Maria Afonso, mi fija, ¢incuenta mill maravedis que le mande en casamiento con Vasco Gongales, fyjo de Gongalo Vaez el Viejo, segun que se contyene en vna carta que paso ante Anton de Vallejo, escrivano publico e del Concejo desta ysla de Tenerife, e asy cunpla el dicho Gongalo Vaez con el dicho su fyjo otros ¢incuenta mill maravedis que le mando en casamiento. Otrosi digo que ove mandado en casamiento a mi fyjo Vastian Afonso con una entenada de Gorje Goncalez, vecino desta ysla, treynta mill maravedis de la moneda desta ysla, e

, sobre el dicho casamiento ay pleito e debate. Mando que sy el dicho

casamiento se hiziere que se le paguen e den en casamiento al dicho mi fyjo los dichos treynta mill maravedis, y el dicho Jorge Gongalez e su muger cunplan otros treynta mill maravedis que le ovieron mandado en el dicho casamiento. Mando que paguen a vna hija de Gongalianes, trabajador, vegino de la ysla de la Madera, ques ya fallescido, y hella hera fyja de vna esclava d vna hermana del capitan, Ysabel Texera, tres mill maravedis de la moneda de la dicha ysla

de la Madera, la rrazon de lo qual sabe mi muger Blanca Alonso, los quales dichos tres mill maravedis mando que se le den e paguen segtin dicho es.

, Mando que paguen a Alonso Yanes, ya difunto, trabajador, vecino que fue de la ysla de la Madera, o a sus herederos, ocho arrovas de acgucar blanco o su valor, la razon de lo qual sabe la dicha mi muger. Mando que cobren treynta e seis arrovas de acucar de Pero Dias Pigarro, vecino de la ysla de la Madera en Machico, que me deve de resto de ochenta e siete arrovas de acucar que me

devia, segun que parescera por una sentencia que paso ante Engriete Gil, vecino de la ysla de la Madera, escrivano publico de Machico. Mando que cobren de mis cunhados, hermanos de mi muger, vecinos de la ysla de la Madera en Machico, vnas mis casas que son en Machico, las quales yo tenia alquiladas a Marote [?] Afonso, mi suegro, el qual despues de fallescido se metyeron en ellas, que puede aver quel dicho mi suegro con los dichos mis cunados tovieron las dichas casas doze annos, las quales mando que cobren con todos los alquileres a rrazon de a dozientos maravedis cada mes de buena moneda; e mando que a estos mis mysmos cufados se les paguen ocho mill maravedis que yo les devo, tomando en quenta todo lo que se montare de los

218 APPENDIX OF DOCUMENTS dichos alquileres. Mando que paguen ginco cahizes de buen trigo a Diego Hernandez, mercador, estante en la ysla de la Madera, que yo le devo por un alvala que yo le hize, e pagados los dichos ¢inco cahyzes cobrese del una esclava que por ellos le dexe enpefiada, que ha nonbre Maria, de color negra. Mando que todas e qualesquier debdas que yo deviere en qualquier manera que sean pagadas a quien yo las deviere e asymismo se cobre todo aquello que a mi fuere devido en qualquier manera. Mando que den y paguen a Fernando, porquero, mi criado que fue, dos mill maravedis que le so en cargo. Y hecho e conplido todo lo en este mi testamento e mandas contenido, mando que todos mis byenes remanentes, asy muebles commo rrayzes e semovientes, los ayan y

hereden mis hijos legitymos Vastian Afonso e Polonia e Maria Alfonso e Violante e Alfonso e Ximé6n e Felipe ygualmente commo hermanos, tanto al vno commo al otro por yguales partes en manera que no lleve mas el vno qual otro e que sy dote ovieren rrescibido en sus casamientos que si quisyeren los traygan a monton, por manera que ninguno dellos no reciba agravio. Mando que cobren de los arrendadores de mis parrales que yo tengo en el Savsal e de los arrendadores de mis tierras e bueyes de Tacoronte todo el dinero, trigo e otras qualesquier cosas que me sean obligados a pagar ante Anton de Vallejo, escribano publico e del con¢gejo desta dicha ysla, e ante Hernand Guerra, escribano publico della, rregibiendoles en quenta todo aquello que paresciere que han pagado por mis alvalaes. Otrosi se vea el arrendamiento que hyze a

Savastyan Rodriguez de gierto ganado porcuno, commo parescera por mi alvala. Mando que sc le conserve el arrendamiento segun e commo con el lo hize, asy por la dicha alvala commo por otro congierto que con el yzo el dicho

Gonzalo Vaez el Viejo. Mando que de todo lo susodicho, en quanto a las dichas debdas pagar e cobrar e arrendamientos susodichos, que se ynformen de la dicha mi muger e del dicho Gongalo Vaez. Mando que cobren de Diego Martin, carretero, el Viejo, vecino desta dicha isla en el Sabsal, diez fanegas de trigo que me deve. Mando que cobren de Diego Martin el Mogo, su fyjo, dos ruedas nuevas con su ex de paloblanco y que le paguen al dicho Diego Martin el Moco seyscientos maravedis en trigo o en dinero. Digo segun que

dicho tengo que en todo lo susodicho los dichos mis hijos e hiyas e sus nonbrados sean mis herederos. Mando que otro testamento, manda, cobdicilo O postrimera voluntad que yo aya fecho antes deste que no valga, asy los que aya fecho ante escrivano publico e testigos en publico o en escondido o en otra qualquier manera e¢ todo lo revoco e anulo para que no tengan fuer¢a ni vygor salvo este mi testamento, e sy no valiere por testamento valga por codigillo e si no valiere por codicillo valga por mi postrimera voluntad o en aquella mejor manera que de derecho aya lugar. Pero quiero que vn escryto de memoria que

yo dexe e puse en poder de frey Antono, fraile de la horden de senor Sant Francisco, sacerdote de misa, que aquel se cunpla con todo lo en el contenido, que son cosas que tocan a la dicha mi muger. Mando e hordeno e establesco por mis albaceas e testamentarios e esecutores deste mi testamento e mandas e€ postrymera voluntad a la dicha mi muger Blanca Afonso e a Luis Alvares, vecino desta dicha ysla, a los quales e a cada uno dellos doy e otorgo todo mi

poder conplido para que entren en todos mis bienes muebles e rrayzes e semovientes, los quales vendan e rrematen en publica almoneda o fuera della , e dellos o de su valor cunplan e paguen todo lo en este mi testamento

APPENDIX OF DOCUMENTS 219 contenido, en lo qual les encargo las conciengias, que asi commo ellos lo hyzieren conmigo asy depare Dios quien haga por sus animas quando deste mundo partyeren quando Dios fuere servido de los llevar. E por su trabajo mando que paguen al dicho Luis Alvares dos mill maravedis, los quales dichos dos mill maravedis el aya e cobre de los dichos mis bienes. E por questo sea cierto e fyrme e en duda non venga otorgue esta carta antel escrivano publico e testigos divso [sic.] escritos. Fecha la carta en la villa de San Christoval ques en la ysla de Tenerife, dentro de las casas de la morada del dicho Afonso Vello, en

jueves primero dia del mes de mayo, anno del nascimiento de nuestro Salvador [hesuchristo de mill e quinientos e honze annos. ‘Testigos que fueron presentes a todo lo que dicho es, llamados e rogados, Gongalo Vaez el Viejo e Fernandianes e Fernan Martin e Gongalo de Castaneda e Pedrianes e'Trystan Vaez, vesynos de la dicha ysla de Tenerife. Otrosy mando que del quinto e tercio de mis bienes se cunpla todo lo que mando que se haga en mi enterramiento, treintanarios e novenario e limosnas e obras pias, e lo que restare del dicho quinto € tercio se tome y se reparta en quatro partes y la vna se dea la iglesia de nuestra senora Santa Maria de la Concebgion para su obra e para el

monesterio de sefior Santespiritus e para el espital de nuestra senora de la Antigua e para el monesterio de senor San Frangisco para sus obras por yguales partes; e si el dicho quinto e tergio puedo mandar que valga, o si puedo

mandar el quinto que valga, o sy el tergio que valga, en manera que todo qualquier parte dello valga. Fecho en el momento, dia, mes e anno, testigos los dichos. E a mayor firmeza lo fyrmo de su nombre en el rregistro desta carta. [Signed] Afon Vello. 6. Queen Juana to Ariton Welzer and Company (see above, p. 80)

Valladolid, 10 January 1513 (A.G.S. Valladolid). The Welzers, through the good offices of agents or employees established on the island of La Palma, had purchased lands and plant for cultivating and refining sugar. Other land for the same purpose had been granted to them by Alonso de Lugo. They had entered into a partnership with the royal secretary. Lope de Conchillos (who also had extensive interests in Gran Canaria). The Queen confirms their grant and purchases, and grants them exemption from penalties incurred by foreigners possessing more than 200,000 mrs.’ worth of property on the island.

DONA JUANA [etc.] Por quanto por parte de vos, Antonio Velzer e conpania, por vos y en nombre de los companeros alemanes que teneys, fatores negociadores en la ysla de San Miguel de La Palma, me fue fecha relacgion que vosotros comprastes una hazienda e tierras e aguas del nascimiento del agua fasta la mar e desde anbas a dos partes de la syerra de lamas alta tierra de aguas vertientes con un yngenio de moler acgucar con todo el cobre que el dicho yngenio tenia y el dicho yngenio moliente corriente con su casa de purgar, con sus formas e andamios, pileras e casas de mieles e otras cosas pertenescientes a la dicha hasienda ansy como Juan Fernandez [sic.] de Lugo e Ines Gutierrez, su muger, vecino de la dicha ysla lo avian dado e [séc.] Ali bin Bonova, lo qual conprastes de Diego de Yuare, el qual lo avia todo conprado del dicho Juan

220 APPENDIX OF DOCUMENTS Fernandez de Lugo e de Ines Gutierrez de los Rios, su muger, lo qual todo vuestros fatores e hazedores gozan e poseen en vuestro nombre e de vuestra

conpania, como vuestro; € que ansy mismo el] adelantado Don Alonso Fernandez de Lugo vos dio e dono por virtud de los poderes nuestros que tenian [sic.] veynte cayces o mas sy mas fueren de tyerra de regadio del agua del barranco de Tacacorte, en el termino de los Llanos de San Miguel, que es en el termino de Tacacorte, que son de la caldereta debaxo fasta la mar e de una parte comarca con el mal pays e la otra parte con el barranco que va de la Caldereta abaxo hasta el mar, la qual dicha tyerra Don Alfonso Fernandez de Lugo la dio a Juan de Augusto, fator del dicho Antonio Velzer e conpania e sus fatores para lo qual labrasedes e ronpiesedes e quedase por vuestro e que ansy lo teneys... E-yo, acatando algunos servicios que me aveys fecho e por quanto estays conc¢ertados con Lope Conchillos, mi secretario, a quien yo tengo fecha mer¢ed de todo le que qualesquier estrangeros tuvieren e ovieren conprado en todas las dichas yslas de Canaria 0 en qualesquier dellas, demas de las dichas dozientas mill mrs. e nos pertenes¢e por la dicha causa, e tanbien el me lo ha suplicado e pedido por merced, tovelo por bien c por la presente vos confyrmo e apruevo la conpra que hezistes del dicho Jacobo [szc.] de Yvarte de los dichos bienes de sus nombrados segun ¢ de la manera que aqui van declarados, e la

donacion quel dicho adelantado hizo a Juan Augusto, vuestro fator, de los dichos veynte cayzes de tierra e mas sy mas fueren con las aguas de suso declaradas .. . E: vos doy ligengia e facultad para que aunque seays estrangeros de mis reynos, podays tener e gozar todos los dichos bienes a cada cosa e parte dellos bien e tan complidamente como e segund los puedan tener e

gozar mis subditos e naturales destos dichos reynos, que para en quanto a tener e gozar los dichos bienes e cada cosa e parte dellos yo por la presente vos

fago naturales con todos vuestros fatores e negociadores que teneys e tovieredes en la dicha ysla el tiempo que residieren e tovieren cargo de las dichas haziendas en quanto a ellas, a que sean avydos por tales . . . e sy negesario €s, por esta mi merced vos fago mer¢ed de toda la demasya de las dichas dozientas mill mrs. [etc. ].

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