Lies My Teacher Told Me (9 page)

Having as yet found no fields of gold, Columbus had to return some kind of dividend to
Spain. In 1495 the Spanish on Haiti initiated a great slave raid. They rounded up 1,500
Arawaks, then selected the 500 best specimens (of whom 200 would die en route to Spain).
Another 500 were chosen as slaves for the Spaniards staying on the island. The rest were
released. A Spanish eyewitness described the event: “Among them were many women who had
infants at the breast. They, in order the better to escape us, since they were afraid we
would turn to catch them again, left their infants anywhere on the ground and started to
flee like desperate people; and some fled so far that they were removed from our
settlement of Isabela seven or eight days beyond mountains and across huge rivers;
wherefore from now on scarcely any will be had.”“ Columbus was excited. ”In the name of
the Holy Trinity, we can send from here all the slaves and brazil-wood which could be
sold,“ he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1496. ”In Castile, Portugal, Aragon, . . .
and the Canary Islands they need many slaves, and I do not think they get enough from
Guinea.“ He viewed the Indian death rate optimistically: 'Although they die now, they will
not always die. The Negroes and Canary Islanders died at first.”

In the words of Hans Koning, “There now began a reign of terror in Hispaniola.”
Spaniards hunted Indians for sport and murdered them for dog food. Columbus, upset because
he could not locate the gold he was certain was on the island, set up a tribute system.
Ferdinand Columbus described how it worked: “(The Indians) all promised to pay tribute to
the Catholic Sovereigns every three months, as follows: In the Cibao, where the gold mines
were, every person of 14 years of age or upward was to pay a large hawk's bell of gold
dust; all others were each to pay 25 pounds of cotton. Whenever an Indian delivered his
tribute, he was to receive a brass or copper token which he must wear about his neck as
proofthat he had made his payment. Any Indian found without such a token was to be
punished.”" With a fresh token, an Indian was safe for three months, much of which time
would be devoted to collecting more gold. Columbus's son neglected to mention how the
Spanish punished those whose tokens had expired: they cut off their hands.

All of these gruesome facts are available in primary source material-letters by Columbus
and by other members of his expeditionsand in the work of Las Casas, the first great
historian of the Americas, who relied on primary materials and helped preserve them. I
have quoted a few primary sources in this chapter. Most textbooks make no use of primary
sources. A few incorporate brief extracts that have been carefully selected or edited to
reveal nothing unseemly about the Great Navigator.

The tribute system eventually broke down because what it demanded was impossible. To
replace it, Columbus installed the tncomenda system, in which he granted or “commended” entire Indian villages to individual colonists
or groups of colonists. Since it was not called slavery, this forced-labor system escaped
the moral censure that slavery received. Following Columbus's example, Spain made the encomienda system official policy on Haiti in 1502; other conquistadors subsequently introduced it
to Mexico, Peru, and Florida.

The tribute and encomienda systems caused incredible depopulation. On Haiti the colonists made the Indians mine gold
for them, raise Spanish food, and even carry them everywhere they went. The Indians
couldn't stand it. Pedro de Cordoba wrote in a letter to King Ferdinand in 1517, “As a
result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen
suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. Trie women, exhausted by
labor, have shunned conception and childbirth . . . Many, when pregnant, have taken
something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with
their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery.”

American History reproduces “Columbus Landing in the Bahamas,” the first of eight huge “historical”
paintings in tbe rotunda of the U.S. Capitol (above). The 1847 painting by John vanderlyn
illustrates the heroic treatment of Columbus in most textbooks. An alternative
representation of Columbus's enterprise might be Theodore de Bry's woodcut, created around
1504 (opposite). De Bry based this engraving on accounts of Indians who impaled
themselves, drank poison, jumped off cliffs, hanged themselves, and killed their children.
The artist squeezed all of these fatal deeds into one picture! De Bry's images became
important historical documents in their own right. Accompanied by Las Casas's writings,
they circulated throughout sixteenthcentury Europe and gave rise to the “Black Legend”
of Spanish cruelty, which other European countries used to denounce Spain's colonialism,
mostly out of envy. No textbook includes any visual representation of the activities of
Columbus and his men that is other than glorious.

Beyond acts of individual cruelty, the Spanish disrupted the Indian ecosystem and culture.
Forcing Indians to work in mines rather than in their gardens led to widespread
malnutrition. The intrusion of rabbits and livestock caused further ecological disaster.
Diseases new to the Indians played a role, although smallpox, usually the big killer, did
not appear on the island until after 1516. Some ofthe Indians tried fleeing to Cuba, but the Spanish soon followed them there.
Estimates of Haiti's pre-Columbian population range as high as 8,000,000 people. When
Christopher Columbus returned to Spain, he left his brother Bartholomew in charge of the
island. Bartholomew took a census of Indian adults in 1496 and came up with 1,100,000. The
Spanish did not count children under fourteen and could not count Arawaks who had escaped into the mountains.
Kirkpatrick Sale estimates that a more accurate total would probably be in the
neighborhood of 3,000,000. “By 1516,” according to Benjamin Keen, “thanks to the sinister
Indian slave trade and labor policies initiated by Columbus, only some 12,000 remained.”
Las Casas tells us that fewer than 200 Indians were alive in 1542, By 1555, they were all
gone.

Thus nasty details like cutting off hands have somewhat greater historical importance than
nice touches like “Tierra!” Haiti under the Spanish is one of the primary instances of
genocide in all human history. Yet only one of the twelve textbooks. The American Pageant, mentions the extermination. None mentions Columbus's role in it.

Columbus not only sent the first slaves across the Atlantic, he probably sent more
slavesabout five thousandthan any other individual. To her credit, Queen Isabella opposed
outright enslavement and returned some Indians to the Caribbean. But other nations rushed
to emulate Columbus. In 1501 the Portuguese began to depopulate Labrador, transporting the
now extinct Beothuk Indians to Europe and Cape Verde as slaves. After the British estab
lished beachheads on the Atlantic coast of North America, they encouraged coastal Indian
tribes to capture and sell members of mote distant tribes. Charleston, South Carolina,
became a major port for exporting Indian slaves. The Pilgrims and Puritans sold the
survivors of the Pequoi War into slavery in Bermuda in 1637. The French shipped virtually
the entire Natchez nation in chains to the West Indies in 1731.

A particularly repellent aspect of the slave trade was sexual. As soon as the 1493
expedition got to the Caribbean, before it even reached Haiti, Columbus was rewarding his
lieutenants with native women to rape.64 On Haiti, sex slaves were one more perquisite that the Spaniards enjoyed. Columbus wrote a
friend in 1500, “A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm,
and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.” The slave trade destroyed whole Indian nations. Enslaved Indians died. To replace the dying Haitians, the Spanish imported tens of thousands more Indians from the
Bahamas, which “are now deserted,” in the words of the Spanish historian Peter Martyr,
reporting in 1516.M Packed in below deck, with hatchways closed to prevent their escape, so many slaves died
on the trip that “a ship without a compass, chart, or guide, but only following the trail
of dead Indians who had been thrown from the ships could find its way from the Bahamas to
Hispaniola.”67 Puerto Rico and Cuba were next.

Because the Indians died, Indian slavery then led to the massive slave trade the other way
across the Atlantic, from Africa. This trade also began on Haiti, initiated by Columbus's
son in 1505. Predictably, Haiti then became the site of the first large-scale slave
revolt, when blacks and Indians banded together in 1519. The uprising lasted more than a
decade and was finally brought to an end by the Spanish in the 1530s.6S Of the twelve textbooks, only six mention that the Spanish enslaved or exploited the
Indians anywhere in the Americas. Of these only four verge on mentioning that Columbus was
involved. The Untied StatesA History of the Republic places the following passage about the fate of the Indians under the heading “The Fate of
Columbus”: “Some Spaniards who had come to the Americas had begun to enslave and kill
the original Americans. Authorities in Spain held Columbus responsible for the
atrocities.” Note that A History takes pains to isolate Columbus from the enslavement chargeothers were misbehaving. Life and Liberty implies that Columbus might have participated: “Slavery began in the New World almost as
soon as Columbus got off the boat.” Only The American Adventure clearly associates Columbus with slavery. American History levels a vague charge: “Columbus was a great sailor and a brave and determined man. But he
was not good at politics or business.” That's it. The other books simply adore him.

As Kirkpatrick Sale poetically sums up, Columbus's “second voyage marks the first extended
encounter of European and Indian societies, the clash of cultures that was to echo down
through five centuries.”69 The seeds of that fivecentury battle were sown in Haiti between 1493 and 1500. These are
not mere details that our textbooks omit. They are facts crucial to understanding American and
European history. Capt. John Smith, for example, used Columbus as a role model in
proposing a get-tough policy for the Virginia Indians in 1624: “The manner how to suppress
them is so often related and approved, I omit it here: And you have twenty examples of the
Spaniards how they got the West Indies, and forced the treacherous and rebellious infidels
to do all manner of drudgery work and slavery for them, themselves living like soldiers
upon the fruits of their labors.”70 The methods unleashed by Columbus are, in fact, the larger part of his legacy. After all,
they worked. The island was so well pacified that Spanish convicts, given a second chance
on Haiti, could “go anywhere, take any woman or girl, take anything, and have the Indians
carry him on their backs as if they were mules.”71 In 1499, when Columbus finally found gold on Haiti in significant amounts, Spain became
the envy of Europe. After 1500 Portugal, France, Holland, and Britain joined in
conquering the Americas. These nations were at least as brutal as Spain. The British, for
example, unlike the Spanish, did not colonize by making use of Indian labor but simply
forced the Indians out of the way. Many Indians fled British colonies to Spanish
territories (Florida, Mexico) in search of more humane treatment.

Columbus's voyages caused almost as much change in Europe as in the Americas. This is the
other half of the vast process historians now call the Columbian exchange. Crops, animals, ideas, and diseases began to cross the oceans regularly. Perhaps the
most far-reaching impact of Columbus's findings was on European Christianity. In 1492 all
of Europe was in the grip of the Catholic Church. As L-trousu puts it, before America, “Europe was virtually incapable of self-criticism.”“ After
America, Europe's religious uniformity was ruptured. For how were these new peoples to
be explained? They were not mentioned in the Bible. The Indians simply did not fit within
orthodox Christianity's explanation of the moral universe. Moreover, unlike the Muslims,
who might be written off as ”damned infidels," Indians had not rejected Christianity, they
had just never encountered it. Were they doomed to hell? Even the animals of America posed
a religious challenge. According to the Bible, at the dawn of creation all animals lived
in the Garden of Eden. Later, two of each species entered Noah's ark and ended up on Mt.
Ararat. Since Eden and Mt. Ararat were both in the Middle East, where could these new
American species have come from? Such questions shook orthodox Catholicism and contributed
to the Protestant Reformation, which began in 1517.

Politically, nations like the Arawakswithout monarchs, without much hierarchystunned
Europeans. In 1516 Thomas More's Utopia, based on an account of the Incan empire in Peru, challenged European social organization by suggesting
a radically different and superior alternative. Other social philosophers seized upon
the Indians as living examples of Europe's primordial past, which is what John Locke meant
hy the phrase “In the beginning, all the world was America.” Depending upon their
political persuasion, some Europeans glorified Indian nations as examples of simpler,
better societies, from which European civilization had devolved, while others maligned
the Indian societies as primitive and underdeveloped. In either case, from Montaigne,
Montesquieu, and Rousseau down to Marx and Engels, European philosophers' concepts of the
good society were transformed by ideas from America.

America fascinated the masses as well as the elite. In The Tempest, Shakespeare noted this universal curiosity: “They wi!l not give a doit to relieve a
lambe beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.”76 Europe's fascination with the Americas was directly responsible, in fact, for a rise in
European self-consciousness. From the beginning America was perceived as an “opposite” to
Europe in ways that even Africa never had been. In a sense, there was no “Europe” before
1492. People were simply Tuscan, French, and the like. Now Europeans began to see
similarities among themselves, at least as contrasted with Native Americans. For that
matter, there were no “white” people in Europe before 1492. With the transatlantic slave
trade, first Indian, then African, Europeans increasingly saw “white” as a race and race
as an important human characteristic.