Quote:Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress
excerpted from a
People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn
Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:
"They... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned.... They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane.... They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."
These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, 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 that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold?
****
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 a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage "as much gold as they need . . . and as many slaves as they ask." He was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities."
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. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor.
Now, from his base on Haiti, 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 fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, 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 archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."
But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.
Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.
When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.
The chief source-and, on many matters the only source-of in formation about what happened on the islands after Columbus came is Bartolome de las Casas, who, as a young priest, participated in the conquest of Cuba. For a time he owned a plantation on which Indian slaves worked, but he gave that up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty.
*****
In Book Two of his History of the Indies, Las Casas (who at first urged replacing Indians by black slaves, thinking they were stronger and would survive, but later relented when he saw the effects on blacks) tells about the treatment of the Indians by the Spaniards. It is a unique account and deserves to be quoted at length:
"Endless testimonies . . . prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives.... But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then.... The admiral, it is true, was blind as those who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians..."
Las Casas tells how the Spaniards "grew more conceited every day" and after a while refused to walk any distance. They "rode the backs of Indians if they were in a hurry" or were carried on hammocks by Indians running in relays. "In this case they also had Indians carry large leaves to shade them from the sun and others to fan them with goose wings."
Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades." Las Casas tells how "two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys."
The Indians' attempts to defend themselves failed. And when they ran off into the hills they were found and killed. So, Las Casas reports. "they suffered and died in the mines and other labors in desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world to whom they could tun for help." He describes their work in the mines:
"... mountains are stripped from top to bottom and bottom to top a thousand times; they dig, split rocks, move stones, and carry dirt on their backs to wash it in the rivers, while those who wash gold stay in the water all the time with their backs bent so constantly it breaks them; and when water invades the mines, the most arduous task of all is to dry the mines by scooping up pansful of water and throwing it up outside....
After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died. While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides . . . they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk . . . and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile ... was depopulated.... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write...."
When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, "there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it...."
Thus began the history, five hundred years ago, of the European invasion of the Indian settlements in the Americas. That beginning, when you read Las Casas-even if his figures are exaggerations (were there 3 million Indians to begin with, as he says, or less than a million, as some historians have calculated, or 8 million as others now believe?) is conquest, slavery, death. When we read the history books given to children in the United States, it all starts with heroic adventure-there is no bloodshed-and Columbus Day is a celebration.
*****
The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks) the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.
"History is the memory of states," wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those states men's policies. From his standpoint, the "peace" that Europe had before the French Revolution was "restored" by the diplomacy of a few national leaders.
But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation-a world not restored but disintegrated.
*****
When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, created the excuse to take Indian land by declaring the area legally a "vacuum." The Indians, he said, had not "subdued" the land, and therefore had only a "natural" right to it, but not a "civil right." A "natural right" did not have legal standing.
The Puritans also appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." And to justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."
*****
The Indian population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would ultimately be reduced to less than a million. Huge numbers of Indians would die from diseases introduced by the whites. A Dutch traveler in New Netherland wrote in 1656 that "the Indians . . . affirm, that before the arrival of the Christians, and before the smallpox broke out amongst them, they were ten times as numerous as they now are, and that their population had been melted down by this disease, whereof nine-tenths of them have died." When the English first settled Martha's Vineyard in 1642, the Wampanoags there numbered perhaps three thousand. There were no wars on that island, but by 1764, only 313 Indians were left there. Similarly, Block Island Indians numbered perhaps 1,200 to 1,500 in 1662, and by 1774 were reduced to fifty-one.
Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property. It was a morally ambiguous drive; the need for space, for land, was a real human need. But in conditions of scarcity, in a barbarous epoch of history ruled by competition, this human need was transformed into the murder of whole peoples.
Edited By Sir O on 1097508160
Yeah, I have the book.
When is Columbus Day anyway?
I like how I get off all the Jewish holidays, but Columbus Day, not important, no holiday.
Evil whitey strikes again.
so fucking what. People died. Boo hoo. It was a land grab. The weaker/pacifist/outnumbered people will die.
Columbus was a Spaniard anyhoo. So it was minority vs minority, which is perfectly acceptable.
You know, if we didn't kill all those injuns with our boomsticks and diseases, they might have held onto more land, and we coulda had more casinos and tax free gas available to us. Oh, the lament!
Quote:Once you start getting into Haitian history, you start to get why people play rough down there:
because somebody else played way rough with them. Play the tape as far back as you want, and there's always some badder gang moving in and stomping the Haitians into hamburger.
It was going on when Columbus arrived. Hispaniola, the island Haiti's on, was a paradise when he got there. The locals were a tribe called the Taino, a branch of the Arawaks, who were by all accounts these cool, relaxed people who believed in free love, the Dick Gregory Bahamian diet, and hanging out on the beach. Like stone-age hippies. Columbus hated to leave (for one thing, the Arawaks had no problem handing over their wives to the Europeans for a week or so) but had to report back to Isabella, so he left some men who started building a settlement. By the time he got back, the place was burnt to the ground by the Caribs, a cannibal tribe that thought "Arawak" meant "BBQ." They ate Columbus's men too -- a little white meat for variety -- and moved on.
Soon there were so few Arawak left that the price per pound was too high even for a Carib planning a big backyard cookout. And in a couple of generations there were no Arawak at all.
Then instant karma kicked in, when the Spanish came back with more men, more guns and wiped out the Caribs. The Caribs went out in style: the last few just jumped off cliffs instead of letting the Europeans capture them and put them to work on the sugar cane plantations the whites were setting up.
Well, that meant a shortage of free labor, which cut into the profit margin. So the plantation owners started buying Africans. Lots and lots of Africans. Nobody's sure how many, but it's well into seven figures. Most of them died on the voyage, or under the whip, or from disease, but there were enough left to keep the cane plantations going. And that was important, not just to the local colonists but to France, which ruled the whole island by that time. You have to remember, the Europeans were focused on the West Indies back then. They didn't think much of North America at the start of the 1700s. It was just a big cold wilderness with no gold, and no potential for raising the tropical crops that really made money. Barbados meant more to England than Virginia, and Hispaniola meant more to France than Canada.
Cotton hadn't come in yet (remember ninth-grade history? Does the name "Eli Whitney" ring a bell?) It was sugar cane that made the big money. And it's a real labor-intensive crop. It's also some of the worst work in the world, by all accounts. One ex-cutter said it was like trying to cut fiberglass poles all day with your bare hands. You come home full of slashes, cuts, bits of bamboo jammed into your hands and arms and face.
Twelve hours, fourteen hours of that a day, every day, with a white guy on a horse whipping your enthusiasm up every time you stop to wipe the sweat out of your eyes. And then, lucky you, you get to go home to a cage and a bowl of corn mush before sacking out for a few hours. Then it's up at the crack of dawn, or rather whip, and back into the fields.
That was life for black Haitians for a long, long time. And it got them seriously pissed off. The revolts started early and just kept on coming. Now this is a weird thing, the way the Haitian slaves kept on fighting back. Because -- and I'm sorry to be so un-PC here, but it's the truth -- slaves in the British possession didn't revolt much. There never was a big, serious slave revolt in the South, for example. Not even when the Union troops got close. Even then the slaves did what their masters told them to do.
But the French didn't do as good a job of breaking down the new slaves. The English in Jamaica, Barbados and the Southern US states made sure slaves from different tribes were mixed up, made it punishable by flogging or worse to speak African languages, and forced the blacks to find Christ or die. (Ah, you gotta love those Evangelical assholes!)
The French were sloppy. They let slaves from the same tribes stay together and speak their African languages. They let escaped slaves set up their own villages way inside the tropical forests. They let the slaves keep up African religions -- that's what voodoo is. And they started up a separate mulatto class.
The mulattos are the hardest thing for Americans to understand about Haiti. The thing is, everybody's racist, everybody in the damn world -- but different countries are racist in different ways. Example: I was watching the Ali G show and he's messing with some stuffed-shirt Oxford guy who says to Ali, "Well, you're only saying that because you're black." I'm watching, thinking, "He's not even brown. He's barely tan!" Well, that's because they've got their own racism, where I guess anybody who's not totally white is black.
American racism down South was kind of like that. If you had any black blood, you were black. That was it, period. You were a nigger, and not a person.
The French didn't do it that way. They had this half-and-half class, the mulattos, who were free, could get rich, even get educated. And the French treated them sort of like semi-human beings. So the mulattos started identifying with the French, trying to be French, and then getting mad when they were kept out of power. So sometimes they backed the French, sometimes the slaves. They were the wild card -- they could go either way.
So when the rebellions started around 1750, you had this amazing, totally messed-up little island full of crazy people who were all going crazy in different ways. Out in the forests are escaped slaves still speaking African languages, doing voodoo and sharpening their machetes. On the plantations there are hundreds of thousands of black slaves getting worked to death under the whip -- and they've got machetes too. In the cities and in little towns are the mulattos, who speak French and wear those George-Washington three-cornered hats and want a bigger piece of the pie. On top of them is a thin layer of jumpy French colonists who have a shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude with any slave who gets uppity. And on top of them are a few French government types who keep trying to put the whole mess back into control and make it a nice, comfortable French province.
Guess what? It blowed up. It blowed up real good. The first big explosion was in 1751. A voodoo priest stirred up the escaped slaves in the forest and they attacked the settlements. The field slaves joined them, and 6,000 people died before the French captured the voodoo priest and burned him at the stake. And what saved the French was that this time, the mulattos weighed in against the rebels. They didn't like these crazy African voodoo guerrillas any more than the French did. They just wanted to eat their croissants and talk about l'amour with the white folks.
Things were quiet for a while -- that is, just slaves being whipped to death, runaway slaves burning down isolated settlements, small stuff.
Then came the French Revolution. Kaboom! All Hell breaks loose, not just in Europe but everywhere the French had colonized. The radicals in Paris order that any mulatto who owns land can vote and be a citizen. The Haiti colonists say no way.
So this time it's the mulattos who revolt, in 1790. And the funny part is that this time, the black slaves get payback on their light-skinned ex-friends by joining the French to stomp the rebel mulattoes. See what I mean? A three-sided fight is a LOT more complicated than a simple two-man bout, and all the Haitian wars were three-sided or more.
In 1791, just one year after they helped the French crush the mulatto rebellion, the blacks started their own. It was the big one, with a half-dozen brilliant guerrilla commanders, some of them smart and decent like Toussaint l'Ouverture, and others just plain scary, like Jeannot, the guy whose armies marched with a white baby on a pike as their flag.They had a simple policy: kill every white you find, and burn everything. They torched the whole island. Ships at sea said the place was smoking literally for months.
Then the vultures dropped in: the Spanish and British landed to take advantage of the chaos and divide the island between them. By this time everybody was killing everybody. There were even black slaves fighting to restore the French king. Toussaint, the smartest leader of the rebellion, decided Haiti would be better off making a deal with the radicals in Paris than the Spanish and British, who'd reestablished slavery everywhere they went. He joined the French forces, kicked the Spanish and British out and beat the mulatto army. He was in charge until Napoleon came into power.
Napoleon had plans for the island. And he had a surplus brother-in-law, LeClerc, who he was sick of seeing around the home office in Paris. So it was the old story: the boss sends his useless brother-in-law on a long business trip to get him out of sight. LeClerc landed in Haiti in 1802 with 20,000 men. Toussaint, who was definitely the noblest man in the whole mess, surrendered to avoid more slaughter. The French made him a lot of promises, broke them in about five seconds and sent Toussaint to France in chains, where he died in a freezing dungeon a couple of years later.
And that was the last good guy in the story. From here on, it's just bad guys vs. worse guys, vs. even worse guys, vs. guys who would scare Charles Manson.
But there was one last twist before the next cycle of killing. Haiti got its independence after all, in 1803, only a year after Toussaint was tricked and captured. LeClerc's army was melting like popsicles, dying from every tropical disease. LeClerc died of yellow fever, taking the easy way out. Meanwhile, Napoleon was getting ready to kick some major ass in Europe and he lost interest in America. It was right then, if you recall, that he sold Louisiana to Jefferson for 3 cents an acre (a good buy except for Mississippi, which I personally wouldn't pay even 1 cent per square mile for).
With Louisiana sold off and his army dead or dying, Napoleon cut his losses. LeClerc's replacement took what was left of his troops to Jamaica. He figured he was safer surrendering to the British than the Haitians.
Haiti was -- ta-da! -- a free country.
The Jays Wrote:I like how I get off all the Jewish holidays, but Columbus Day, not important, no holiday.
my school isn't closed today either. so its off to work i go.
Mad Wrote:Columbus was a Spaniard anyhoo. So it was minority vs minority, which is perfectly acceptable.
Columbus was Italian, not Spanish.
Hawt Baux Wrote:Mad Wrote:Columbus was a Spaniard anyhoo. So it was minority vs minority, which is perfectly acceptable.
Columbus was Italian, not Spanish.
Prove it.
He didn't know how to read or write Italian, only Spanish. Further more, there was no proof of him ever being born in Italy. Keep believing the myth if it helps you sleep at night.
Like everyone else who is born outside the US, he's a spic no matter where he was born.
i'm not a spic!
and i thought he was italian but the trip was financed by spain.
Mad Wrote:Hawt Baux Wrote:Mad Wrote:Columbus was a Spaniard anyhoo. So it was minority vs minority, which is perfectly acceptable.
Columbus was Italian, not Spanish.
Prove it.
He didn't know how to read or write Italian, only Spanish. Further more, there was no proof of him ever being born in Italy. Keep believing the myth if it helps you sleep at night.
whats the proof that he was born in spain, cause he spoke spanish? He also knew latin by the way, which was all he could learn along with basic mathematics since he was only schooled till the age of 13 in italy, he left italy to sail at 14. Keep being a paranoid rebel who thinks everyones in the dark except for you, if it makes you feel better.
If you're gonna try to prove otherwise, make sure its not off an angelfire page atleast.
The History Channel did a special on it a couple of months ago. The conclusion, Columbus was Spanish as they could find no proof that he was born in Italy. His family all lived in Spain and they had several letters written to his brother. Nothing in Italian.
yeah ok, so the history chanel said so. Yeah they do a lot of myth shows, but doesnt make it fact. So you chose to believe what you saw on a history chanel show, yet didnt go to try and back it up with any research from written documents, yet you try to make hawt look like a sheep.. good one.
Cause they found a few letters in spanish, yeah columbus adopted spain as his country cause they funded his expedition. He tried to convince portugal before spain, so if that had worked out he'd be speaking and writing in portuguese.
The fact that he spoke and read spanish isnt weird, he had been in spain since he was a young teen. My uncle lived in italy for 2 years and he spoke the language fluently when he came back.
Prove that he was a guinea wop then, assfucko.
which one of the thousands of references must I quote? The plain and simple fact is that he was born in italy. Do a google search and pick your reference, go to the library and pick a book. The burden of proof lies with you, you made refernce that he was born in spain.
I dont argue the fact he was probably more comfortable or fluent in spanish, fact remains majority still believes and acknowleges he was born in spain.