Seized by a rush of greedy optimism, Columbus delivered a message to the Spanish royalty asking for further investment, describing the, “wide rivers full of gold and great mines of gold and other metals.” He promised, should they increase their sponsorship of the expedition, to send back, “as much gold as they need…and as many slaves as they ask.” (4) By 1495 they had located no fields of gold, but had to send back some kind of compensation to their European investors, and so loaded the ships with Arawak slaves; 500 of them. Although 200 died en route to Spain, the rest were sold by priests upon arrival. However, too many slaves had died for a large enough return on their investment, and Columbus was made aware of their displeasure.
Anxious to pay back European investors and make his mark in the New World (which he still believed to be a series of islands off of China), he enslaved the entire population of Arawak Indians. Male Indians over the age of 14 were given quotas of gold to turn in each month, and for each quota met they were collared with copper bands. Those found without bands on their necks had their hands cut off. Unfortunately there was very little gold available; only what could be picked out of local streams. The Arawaks that attempted to rebel against their Spaniard captors were massacred by muskets, swords, and fire. There were mass suicides among the natives with cassava poison, infants smothered to save them from Spaniard persecution. By 1495 fully half of the native Arawak population had perished.
Bartolome de las Casas, a young priest that had participated in the early conquest, turned later in life and heavily criticized the Spanish occupation. He remains the definitive source on what happened in those early years and afterward in his multivolume, History of the Indies. He describes the native Arawaks in almost utopian terms; their culture, their social organization, their customs and habits. He also describes the cruelty of the Spanish in great detail, how they forced labor in the mines, how they tested their swords on innocent children and would actually “ride” the natives people if they were in a hurry. By 1508, Las Casas writes, “there were 60,000 people living on the island, including the Indians, so that from 1494 to 1508 over 3 million people had perished from slavery, war, and the mines.”(7) Though the exact numbers are in dispute, even the most conservative numbers place the native population at 1 million. By any standards, this is a successful policy of genocide.
What Howard Zinn goes on to articulate in the later part of this chapter, is the precedent that this event set for the rest of history in the western hemisphere. “What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortex did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, the English of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and Pequots.” (11) In each case a systematic approach to the extermination of native populations was followed without credit or conscience. Not only was a precedent set in the way that our forebearers practiced single-minded imperialism, but in the way that history was revised as part of a narrative of progress and manifest destiny.
The stories that our children hear about Christopher Columbus do not even resemble the reality of his “contribution” to our nation. In fact, his holiday is often accompanied by stories of heroic adventure and bloodless exploration. The natives, likewise, are often characterized as either friendly and benevolent allies or primitive savages. Neither one is entirely true, though the former is much closer to the reality. The Arawak, Powhatan, and Pequot were peaceful peoples that approached their European invaders with gifts and openness, or at least watchful tolerance. It was only after the Europeans began their procedural extermination of these peoples that they fought back. By the time that the U.S. was pushing the western tribes onto uninhabitable reservations they had lived down to Americans characterizations of their savagery, but only once they figured out that there would be no compromise, no negotiation, no cohabitation with their white invaders.
People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn 5th edition
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