Columbus Day
The Real Story
Christoforo Colombo (aka Cristofõm Colon) claimed to have been born in Genoa in 1451, but there are doubts about this so called fact. He arrived in the Bahamas after originally setting out to find a new trade route to India. At first he believed that he had found Asia or an outer island of India. He had left Spain on August 3, 1492 with three ships containing about 100 men...the Nina, the Pinta and the flagship Santa Maria.
The Arawak/Taino Indians of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, hospitable and willing to share. These traits were uncommon in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings and the frenzy for money that marked western civilization...and its first emissary to the Americas was Christopher Columbus.
Columbus wrote: "As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts."
The information Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded Ferdinand and Isabella, king and queen of Spain, and the Vatican to finance an expedition to the west. The wealth he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic...the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. Spain had tied itself to the Church, expelled all the Jews and driven out the Moors. Like other states in that era, both Spain and the Vatican sought gold, which was becoming the new mark of wealth...more useful than land because it could buy anything. In return for bringing back slaves, gold and spices, they promised Columbus ten percent of the profits, governorship over new-found lands and the fame that would go with a new title: Admiral of the Ocean Sea. In the Papal Bull of September 26, 1493, entitled "Dudum Siquidem," Pope Alexander VI aka Rodrigo Borgia (yes, the Pope's daughter was the infamous Lucrezia Borgia) extended Spain's rights to the New World. Columbus' "Book of Privileges," written in 1502 before his final voyage, has a transcription of this Papal Bull (a copy of which is in the US National Archives).
The Arawak/Taino Indians were friendly. They lived in village communes and had a developed agriculture. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears. This was to have enormous consequences...it led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold. He sailed to what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola. There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of gold fields.
On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria which had run aground, Columbus built a fort...the first European structure in the Western Hemisphere was a military base. He called it Navidad (Christmas) and left thirty-nine crew members there, with instructions to find and store the gold. He took more Indian prisoners and put them aboard his two remaining ships. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. When the weather turned cold, the Indian prisoners began to die.
Columbus's report to the Court in Madrid was extravagant. He insisted he had reached Asia (it was Cuba) and an island off the coast of China (Hispaniola). His descriptions were part fact, part fiction:
"Hispaniola is a miracle. Mountains and hills, plains and pastures, are both fertile and beautiful...the harbors are unbelievably good and there are many wide rivers of which the majority contain gold ... There are many spices...and great mines of gold and other metals..." The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone..." He concluded his report by asking for financing from their Majesties and the Pope, and in return he would bring them "as much gold as they need...and as many slaves as they ask."
Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans' intent they found more and more empty villages.
Now, from his base on Hispaniola, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up the Arawak/Taino men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en-route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the royals and clergy. Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."
Columbus' purpose from the beginning was not mere exploration or even trade, but conquest and exploitation, for which he used religion as a rationale. Typically, after "discovering" an island and encountering a tribe of Indians new to them, the Spaniards would read aloud (in Spanish) what came to be called "The Requirement." Here is one version..."I implore you to recognize the Church as a lady and in the name of the Pope take the King as lord of this land and obey his mandates. If you do not do it, I tell you that with the help of God I will enter powerfully against you all. I will make war everywhere and every way that I can. I will subject you to the yoke and obedience to the Church and to his majesty. I will take your women and children and make them slaves...The deaths and injuries that you will receive from here on will be your own fault and not that of his majesty, of the Church, nor of the gentlemen that accompany me." Over the next several years, Columbus shipped about 5,000 Native American slaves to Europe.
Disease and death was another consequence of Columbus' voyages. Pre-Columbian America had been isolated from many infections that had swept through Europe. Native Americans had never been exposed to the infectious diseases common to European societies, so they had a total lack of immunity to them. The 'New World' thus provided a fertile environment for epidemics of smallpox, influenza, and measles.
The eight million Arawak Indians who lived on Hispaniola, site of the first Spanish New World colony, were reduced to ten thousand by 1520. And of course, the example set by Columbus lead to the great American land grab by other European powers eager to colonize. What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas and the Taino of the Caribbean, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots. As a result, countless Native American cultures were wiped out.
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