In
this set of two essays I explain why we should hate Christopher Columbus rather
than revere him, and why the celebration of Columbus Day is an insult to all
human decency.
First,
about Columbus. I have used William Least Heat-Moon’s book Columbus in the Americas as the immediate source of this
information, but have confirmed much of it elsewhere. Christopher Columbus made
the first European contact with Native Americans on October 12, 1492. It was,
from the very start, genocide. Here are the reasons.
Columbus’ deep
motives.
Christopher Columbus seemed fascinated by his first encounter with what he
insisted all his life was India. It seemed like a Garden of Eden to him, and he
wrote glowingly about the sweetness of the flowers, which is something that
single-minded conquistadors do not generally do. He also admired the Tainos,
the Natives who lived in the vicinity of his first landfall. He marveled at
their friendliness and their willingness to give him gifts, which further
enhanced the image of a Garden of Eden. This does not sound like the writings
of a man whose immediate thought was to kill them. He also admired some of
their technology, most notably hammocks and canoes (the latter word coming from
the Taino language). Perhaps most significantly, the Tainos showed great
empathy and energy when they helped Columbus and his men gather up the wreckage
of the Santa Maria to use for
constructing the first European city in the New World, La Navidad.
But,
right from the start, Columbus did have the subjugation of the Tainos in mind.
From his very first encounter with them, he wrote that they would make good
servants for the Spaniards, and he speculated that fifty armed Spaniards could
easily conquer them. Therefore he immediately began thinking of them as
resources, not persons. And it was not merely the gold and servitude that they
could provide to the Spaniards that fascinated Columbus. He noted glowingly
that most of the women were entirely naked. Historians concede that, were it
not for Tainos sharing their food, all the Spaniards would have starved.
Columbus noted, “They love their neighbors as themselves,” but rather than
reflecting on how much more Christian the Taino behavior was than the behavior
of the Spaniards, he seems to have considered this evidence that they were ripe
for easy enslavement.
And
while Columbus himself apparently did not go around raping and pillaging, he
was certainly complicit in these actions. One of his men was a childhood
friend, Michele de Cuneo, whom Columbus
allowed to capture a Native woman. Apparently she was Carib, rather than a
compliant Taino, and she screamed and scratched when de Cuneo tried to rape her
in his room. De Cuneo beat her with ropes until she complied. Once she
complied, she might have thought that she could get more resources from de
Cuneo by pleasing him, and, in de Cuneo’s words from a letter he wrote home,
“She seemed to have been brought up in a school of harlots.”
Was
Columbus’ motivation to establish a colony for Spain? No, it could not have
been. Even with his fourth and final voyage, there was no pre-planning for
agriculture. A few colonists came, but the people were overwhelmingly men who
wanted gold and slaves. The cities that Columbus and his men established were
called “trading posts” precisely because of this objective. The entire
motivation was rapine and plunder. Colonization came later, after the Natives
were slaughtered and, for some tribes, sent into extinction.
Columbus’
actions.
While Columbus seems to have made sincere efforts on his first voyage to create
goodwill and cooperation with the Natives, his motivation seems to have
entirely disappeared by his second voyage. He used war dogs to kill resistant
Tainos, and captured as many Tainos as he could. He sent 500 Tainos to the
Seville slave market under cramped fetid conditions that most people associate
only with the African slave trade. He gave another 500 Tainos to his men for
whatever use they desired to make of them. And he allowed about 500 to flee
into the mountains.
And
Columbus was extremely brutal in his punishments. A Native caught pilfering
could have his ears cut off or be beheaded. But the most horrifying example of
Columbus’ cruelty is the story I am about to relate. If you have a sensitive stomach, stop reading now. As a matter of fact,
if you have a sensitive stomach, you have no business learning anything at all
about the realities of history. You should just spend your time fantasizing
about what a blessing the whites have been to the rest of the world.
Columbus
required each Taino male over 13 years of age to bring in a hawk’s-bell volume
of gold each three months. Those who
failed to do so had one of their hands cut off.
Think
about that. Columbus must have intended this as torture and terrorism. Cutting
a man’s hand off will not make him better able to gather gold. You would have
to be fucking stupid to believe that. Columbus was not stupid. He knew what he
was doing. I can only conclude that Columbus, perhaps slightly less so than his
men, got a sensual thrill out of torturing Natives.
The
net result of Columbus’ direct and indirect actions was, according to his son
Ferdinand, that a Spaniard could go anywhere on Hispaniola that he desired and
take all the food and women he wanted, without fear of danger. And the effect
on the population of Natives was predictable, not only because Spaniards killed
them but because the natives killed themselves out of despair. The basic food
of these Natives was cassava, which has to be processed to remove bitter
poison. Many Natives drank the poison rather than to become slaves. Also, in
one case on a later voyage, when Natives were locked into a slave hold on a
ship, they found ropes and hung themselves, even though there was not enough
headroom to do this: they had to hold up their knees while the ropes suffocated
them. Here are the population figures for Natives on Hispaniola:
1492 300,000
1496 200,000
1508 60,000
1548 500
Before 1600 Extinct
Columbus’ binary
classification.
Columbus classified everyone into two categories: the Europeans, whom God was
blessing, and the “Indians,” whom God was delivering into the hands of
Europeans. He noted, but gave no importance to, the differences among tribes.
The
main distinction Columbus saw right away was between Tainos and Caribs. The
Caribs were cannibals who preyed upon the Tainos. The Caribs would capture
Taino women and children. They would caponize the boys (cutting off their
genitals) so that they would grow up tender. But they would impregnate the
women in order to produce the ultimate Carib delicacy: roast baby. In at least
one instance, Columbus rescued Tainos from Carib captivity. Once his men
captured a naked Taino woman, but Columbus ordered her sent back (clothed) to
her tribe as an act of goodwill. (The fact that the Caribs were evil people
does not make their enslavement and eradication justified.) Native Americans had
as much diversity as Europeans. But in the end Columbus, despite his initial
admiration of the Tainos, treated all natives the same; it was Taino captives
whom he sent to the Seville slave market.
Spain’s motives. Even though
Columbus appeared to have a streak of decency, Spain did not. Ferdinand and
Isabella barely gave Columbus enough resources to launch his first voyage,
because they were skeptical of his prospects. But they richly endowed his
second voyage with lots of ships and resources. The reason was that Columbus
had proven to them that “India” was a promising source of gold and slaves.
There appears to have been very few resources dedicated to starting up an
agricultural economy and a self-sustaining Spanish colony. The Spanish cities,
of which only Santo Domingo continues to exist, were meant as places for
gathering slaves and gold. Had it been otherwise, the ships of the second
voyage would have been provisioned differently. The main nonhuman animals on
the ships were war dogs, which the Spaniards could unleash on Natives to kill
them. Incidentally, the money to fund the second voyage came from resources
taken from the recently-expelled Jews.
It
didn’t take long for the Natives to resist. Before returning to Spain on his
first voyage, Columbus established La Navidad. When he returned he found it had
been destroyed. He discovered the reason for it: the Spaniards had raided Taino
villages and stolen women as sexual slaves; each Spaniard had four or five sex
slaves.
Another
aspect of the Columbus story that is interesting to scientists is that Columbus
used a method often called “cherry-picking” to prove that he had, indeed,
reached Asia. He ignored all contrary evidence. And he grabbed at any shred of
evidence that could be construed to prove he was in Asia. He assumed that one
Taino place name was a variant of Mangi, a province in China. And when he heard
of a tribe whose leader wore a white tunic, he assumed this man was a
descendant of Prester John. But Columbus went beyond this. He forced all his
men to sign a deposition stating that they were, in fact, in Asia; and the
punishment for a man saying that they were not in Asia was that his tongue
would be cut out. This was Columbus’ scientific method of determining truth.
This essay also appeared on my evolution blog. Next
entry: how conservatives sanitize and sanctify Columbus.
