History of La Gomera

When Europeans arrived in La Gomera, the island was inhabited by the ancient Gomerans and divided into four bands or cantons: Mulagua, Agana, Ipalan —also written Hipalán— and Orone. According to the tradition gathered by the chroniclers, this division arose upon the death of King Amaluyge, when the territory was fragmented under four captains: Aberbequeye in Mulagua, Alguabozegue in Agana, Halbagal in Ipalan and Masegue Conche in Orone. The bands kept up continuous dissensions and quarrels among themselves, and the memory of their brave men —Aguacoromos, Aguanahuche, Amanhuy or Gralhegueya— endured in the island's songs. It was told of Gralhegueya that, being a shellfish gatherer of great size and strength, he grappled with a shark at the bottom of the sea to frighten off the others and allow his companions to reach the shore, a feat still remembered in the days of the first historians.

One trait of the Gomerans powerfully caught the attention of the first European chroniclers: describing the island's inhabitants, they wrote that «they speak with their lips as if they had no tongue», and recorded the legend of a great prince who, as punishment, had banished them to the island after having their tongues cut out. They were referring to the silbo, the whistled language that made it possible to communicate over great distances across the deep Gomeran ravines. At the end of the nineteenth century, the French anthropologist René Verneau observed with astonishment how the islanders whistled his name, nationality, profession and the purpose of his journey, to the point that on his arrival in each village a crowd of sick people already awaited him, knowing he was a doctor.

Contacts with Europe came early. Before the arrival of Jean de Béthencourt it was told that a knight named Fernando de Castro had landed at the port of Ipalan and that, after being besieged in the natural fortress of Argodey, he was pardoned and entertained by King Amaluyge, who is said to have later received baptism under the name of Don Fernando. When Béthencourt reached the island he found it divided into the four bands and subdued it with ease, favoured by the preaching of a cleric who had remained there years before. In the following decades La Gomera was integrated into the seigneurial regime that Maciot de Béthencourt and, later, the house of the Perazas and the Herreras exercised over the seigneurial islands.

On the death of Diego García de Herrera in 1485, his favourite son, Hernán Peraza the Younger, inherited by preference the islands of La Gomera and El Hierro. Married to Doña Beatriz de Bobadilla, the young lord demanded from his vassals heavy tributes and burdensome excise duties and created new levies, until he provoked a serious uprising. Besieged in the tower of San Sebastián, the island's capital, he asked for help from his mother, Doña Inés Peraza, lady of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, who wrote to the governor of Gran Canaria, Pedro de Vera. He came with caravels and men-at-arms, dispersed the rebels, made an exemplary punishment of some of them, and returned to Gran Canaria taking with him more than two hundred Gomerans in 1488.

The peace was short-lived. In November of that same year, Hernán Peraza went to the district of Guahedún to meet a beautiful Gomeran woman with whom he was having a love affair. The elderly Pablo Hupalapu, whom the Gomerans revered as a father and who had vainly advised the lord to treat his vassals well, had arranged with the men of the Mulagua band to seize him; but the young herdsman Pedro Hautacuperche got ahead of them, and as Peraza left the cave disguised in a woman's skirt he hurled a shaft with a two-span iron head that pierced him between the cuirass and the neck. From the hilltops the Gomerans proclaimed that «the gánigo of Guahedún is now broken». Doña Beatriz de Bobadilla shut herself up with her children in the seigneurial tower of San Sebastián —today's Torre del Conde— where she withstood a long siege, secretly supplied by the townsfolk and by the Gomerans of the Orone band, until Hautacuperche fell dead from a crossbow bolt fired through an arrow slit.

The vengeance was terrible. Pedro de Vera returned to the island with some four hundred men and resorted to a ruse: he had the funeral honours of Hernán Peraza proclaimed and declared a traitor any Gomeran who did not attend the church. Those who came were seized, and the governor condemned to death as traitors the males over fifteen years of age of the Orone and Agana bands: many were dragged, hanged or drowned in the sea, and numerous women and children were sold as slaves. The chronicles stress that the killers had been few and those who paid for it were many, and the cruelty of the punishment provoked the protest of Bishop Miguel de la Serna, who carried his complaints all the way to the Catholic Monarchs.

Barely four years later, La Gomera entered universal history. On his first voyage, Christopher Columbus reached the port of San Sebastián on 12 August 1492; there he took on water, firewood and meat, replenished his provisions and reinforced his crew with people of the country, and in early September he put out to sea toward the unknown. The island was then governed by the widow Doña Beatriz de Bobadilla, who is said to have received the Admiral warmly. Columbus called again at La Gomera on his second voyage of 1493 and on his third of 1498, making the island his customary provisioning place and the true antechamber of the New World. Viera y Clavijo even recorded the tradition of the pilot Alonso Sánchez de Huelva, who is said to have died in the house of Columbus, then residing in La Gomera, after revealing to him the existence of lands to the west.

The later Gomeran society was for centuries one of farmers and seafarers. The scarcity and fragmentation of arable land scattered the population into small villages perched on the hillsides, beside the terraced fields of the midlands, while the four main ravines —San Sebastián, Hermigua, Vallehermoso and Valle Gran Rey— concentrated the water, the crops and most of the inhabitants. At the beginning of the twentieth century, export monocultures and three small fish canneries doubled the population, which by 1940 exceeded eighty inhabitants per square kilometre on an island with less than ten per cent of land fit for cultivation; once that model was exhausted, emigration acted as a safety valve, and between 1871 and 1975 more than forty thousand people —half of those born on the island— left La Gomera, temporarily or permanently, bound for Cuba, Venezuela or Tenerife. Tuna fishing and salted fish keep the seafaring tradition alive in Valle Gran Rey and Playa Santiago, and the silbo, made a compulsory school subject by the Order of 5 July 1999 and recognised as a cultural asset of the historical heritage of the Canary Islands, remains the island's most recognisable voice.