From hunters to hell hounds: the dogs of Columbus and transformations of the human-canine relationship in the early Spanish Caribbean

Christopher Columbus first used dogs for military purposes in the NewWorld during his second voyage, a war technology that continued to be employed by the conquistadors for more than a century. John and Jeannette Varner, authors of the comprehensive history Dogs of the Conquest, which surveys the military and administrative use of war dogs in the New World, argued that the dogs were brought on the second voyage because the cleric in charge of provisioning the seventeen ships, Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca (‘Fonseca,’ 1451–1524), realized that to obtain the cooperation of Indigenous people, a level of coercion would be necessary. They support this supposition by describing the dogs of the second voyage as mastiffs and greyhounds, and the dogs that Columbus used at the Battle of Vega Real in March 1495 as mastiffs (Varner and Varner 1983, xiv, 4, 8). Were they correct in this description of the breeds involved, it might be difficult to dispute their logic concerning Fonseca’s motive, but the dogs at Vega Real were described as lebreles, greyhounds or sighthounds, not mastines, mastiffs, and there is little reason to think that a large number of mastiffs would have been considered essential in Hispaniola when Columbus’s second fleet was provisioned. The ships carried livestock but most of these would have been preserved to establish self-sustaining herds before harvesting to feed the human population (Las Casas 1875–1876, 2:2, 3). Versatile hunting dogs could help supply meat.