“…with fair weather we reached Cuba. On landing we paid our respects to the Governor, who was pleased to see us and promised us Indians as soon as there were any to spare. I was at the time twenty-four.”
Bernal and his companions idled away their time and hunted defiant Indians on the island of Cuba for three years, which brought them no significant wealth, apparently the only Indians to spare being diehards who had to be put down. Henceforth Cuba would be renowned as the center for breeding Indian-hunting dogs of the Italian Mastiff, Greyhound, and Irish Wolfhound stocks.
The Entrada* of Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba
“After spending three fruitless years in Tierra Firma and Cuba, about a hundred and ten of us, settlers from Tierra Firme or Spaniards who had come to Cuba but received no grant of Indians, decided to make an entrada to seek new lands in which to try our fortunes and find occupation.
We arranged with Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba, a rich man who owned a village on the island, that he should be our leader, and he was well fitted to the post.**
“With this entrada in view, we purchased three ships, two of them a good capacity and a third a barque [shallow keeled or ‘flat-bottomed’] bought on credit from the Governor Diego Velazquez, who let us have it on condition that all three vessels should go to some islands, lying between Cuba and Honduras, and now called the Guanaxes Islands, and there fight the natives, whom we could then sell to him for slaves and thus pay for the barque. Realizing the wickedness of the Governor’s demand, we answered that it would be against the laws of God and the king*** for us to turn free men into slaves; and when he learnt our plans, he decided they were better than his, so helped us with provisions for our entrada.”
Bernal and the others were now free to organize as they saw fit under the leadership of an influential and respected man with the blessings of the scheming Governor.
*This word is usually translated into English as expedition. Doing so obscures the entire point of the word, which means ‘to enter’ or ‘invade’ and was in fact a term for exploratory conquest that would have been well understood by Alexander the Great, Caesar or the Mongols or Vikings, and is not adequately expressed by the term expedition, as the entrada was primarily a mission of conquest. The fact that they were setting off into unknown lands added novelty and heightened their peril, but was not the point, which was conquest. They did not call themselves conquistadors for nothing.
**Read this sentence again, and amplify its key points ‘owned a village’ [think about being a villager there] and ‘well fitted to the post’ [Which means he was the kind of man that 110 heavily armed and ruthless adventurers would follow into danger. Now reconsider that villager’s plight, the plight of medieval European peasants for a millennium—abject slavery.]
***Note the lack of racist justification for slavery, but rather its caste basis. Free men were to stay free and slaves were to remain slaves. When the Spanish took over Native American civilizations they permitted cooperative men of the warrior and priest castes to remain in their fairly autonomous social role, as intermediaries and tax collectors. On the other hand, those Indians that had already been in a working role as farmers and such would pass to the ownership of the Spanish lord who had murdered their Indian chief, which the Spanish referred to after the Taino [the natives of the larger islands of the West Indies] term cacique.
