American Heroes

by Edmund S. Morgan

  The people of Española were the handsomest that Columbus had encountered in the New World and so attractive in character that he found it hard to praise them enough. “They are the best people in the world,” he said, “and beyond all the mildest.” They cultivated a bit of cassava for bread and made a bit of cottonlike cloth from the fibers of the gossampine tree. But most of the day they spent like children idling away their time from morning to night seemingly without a care in the world. Once they saw that Columbus meant them no harm, they outdid one another in bringing him anything he wanted. Never had there been such generosity. It was impossible to believe, he reported, “that anyone has seen a people with such kind hearts and so ready to give the Christians all that they possess, and when the Christians arrive, they run at once to bring them everything.”

  To Columbus the people of Española seemed like relics of the golden age. On the basis of what he told Peter Martyr, who recorded his voyages, Martyr wrote, “If we shall not bee ashamed to confesse the Trueth, they seeme to live in that golden worlde of the which olde writers speake so much, wherein menne lived simply and innocently without enforcement of lawes, without quarreling, judges, and libelles, content onely to satisfie nature, without further vexation for knowledge of things to come.”

  As the idyllic Arawak Indians of Española conformed to one ancient picture, their enemies the Caribs conformed to another that Columbus had read of, the anthropophagi. According to the Arawaks, the Caribs or Cannibals were man-eaters, and as such their name eventually entered the English language. The Caribs lived on islands of their own and met every European approach with poisoned arrows, which men and women together fired in showers. They not only were fierce but, by comparison with the Arawaks, also seemed more energetic, more industrious, and, it might even be said, sadly enough, more civil. After Columbus succeeded in entering one of their settlements on his second voyage, a member of the expedition reported, “This people seemed to us to be more civil than those who were in the other islands we have visited, although they all have dwellings of straw, but these have them better made and better provided with supplies, and in them were more signs of industry, both of men and women.”

  Columbus had no doubts about how to proceed, either with the lovable but lazy Arawaks or with the hateful but industrious Cannibals. He had come to take possession and to establish dominion. The Arawaks of Española would obviously make good subjects. He had no sooner set eyes on them than he began making plans. In almost the same breath he described their gentleness and innocence and then went on to assure the king and queen of Spain, “They have no arms and are all naked and without any knowledge of war, and very cowardly, so that a thousand of them would not face three. And they are also fitted to be ruled and to be set to work, to cultivate the land and to do all else that may be necessary, and you may build towns and teach them to go clothed and adopt our customs.”

  So much for the golden age. Columbus had not yet prescribed the method by which the Arawaks would be set to work, but he had a pretty clear idea of how to handle the Caribs. On his second voyage, after capturing a few of them, he sent them in slavery to Spain, as samples of what he hoped would be a regular trade. They were obviously intelligent, and in Spain they might “be led to abandon that inhuman custom which they have of eating men, and there in Castile, learning the language, they will much more readily receive baptism and secure the welfare of their souls.” The way to handle the slave trade, Columbus suggested, was to send ships from Spain loaded with cattle (there were no native domestic animals on Española), and he would return the ships loaded with Cannibals. This plan of replacing Cannibals with cattle was never put into operation, partly because the Spanish sovereigns did not approve it and partly because the Cannibals did not approve it. They defended themselves so successfully with their poisoned arrows that the Spaniards decided to withhold the blessings of civilization from them and to concentrate their efforts on the seemingly more amenable Arawaks of Española.

  The process of civilizing the Arawaks got under way in earnest after the Santa Maria ran aground, Christmas Day, 1492, off Caracol Bay. The local leader in that part of Española, Guacanagari, rushed to the scene and with his people helped the Spaniards to salvage everything aboard. Once again Columbus was overjoyed with the remarkable natives. They are, he wrote, “so full of love and without greed, and suitable for every purpose, that I assure your Highnesses that I believe there is no better land in the world, and they are always smiling.” While the salvage operations were going on, canoes full of Arawaks from other parts of the island came in bearing gold. Guacanagari “was greatly delighted to see the admiral joyful and understood that he desired much gold.” Thereafter it arrived in amounts calculated to console the admiral for the loss of the Santa Maria, which had to be scuttled. He decided to make his permanent headquarters on the spot and accordingly ordered a fortress to be built, with a tower and a large moat.

  What followed is a long, complicated, and unpleasant story. Columbus returned to Spain to bring the news of his discoveries. The Spanish monarchs who had backed his expedition were less impressed than he with what he had found, but he was able to round up a large expedition of Spanish colonists to return with him and help exploit the riches of the Indies. At Española the new settlers built forts and towns and began helping themselves to all the gold they could find among the natives. These creatures of the golden age remained generous. But precisely because they did not value possessions, they had little to turn over. When gold was not forthcoming, the Europeans began killing. Some of the natives struck back and hid out in the hills. But in 1495 a punitive expedition rounded up fifteen hundred of them, and five hundred were shipped off to the slave markets of Seville.

  The natives, seeing what was in store for them, dug up their own crops of cassava and destroyed their supplies in hopes that the resulting famine would drive the Spaniards out. It was a shrewd strategy because a civil man reportedly ate more in one day than a whole family of barbarians in a month. But it did not work. The Spaniards were not to be shaken off. They were sure there was more gold in the island than the natives had yet found, and they determined to make them dig it out. Columbus built more forts throughout the island and decreed that every Arawak of fourteen years or over was to furnish a hawk’s bell full of gold dust every three months. The various local leaders were made responsible for seeing that the tribute was paid. In regions where gold was not to be had, twenty-five pounds of woven or spun cotton could be substituted for the hawk’s bell of gold dust.

  Unfortunately Española was not Ophir, and it did not have anything like the amount of gold that Columbus thought it did. The pieces that the natives had at first presented him were the accumulation of many years. To fill their quotas by washing in the riverbeds was all but impossible, even with continual daily labor. But the demand was unrelenting, and those who sought to escape it by fleeing to the mountains were hunted down with dogs taught to kill. A few years later Peter Martyr was able to report that the natives “beare this yoke of servitude with an evill will, but yet they beare it.”

  The tribute system, for all its injustice and cruelty, preserved something of the Arawaks’ old social arrangements: they retained their old leaders under control of the king’s viceroy, and royal directions to the viceroy might ultimately have worked some mitigation of their hardships. But the Spanish settlers of Española did not care for this centralized method of exploitation. They wanted a share of the land and its people, and when their demands were not met they revolted against the government of Columbus. In 1499 they forced him to abandon the system of obtaining tribute through the Arawak chieftains for a new one in which both land and people were turned over to individual Spaniards for exploitation as they saw fit. This was the beginning of the system of “repartimientos” or “encomiendas” later extended to other areas of Spanish occupation. With its inauguration Columbus’s economic control of Española effectively ceased, and even his political authority was revoked later in the s
ame year when the king appointed a new governor.

  For the Arawaks the new system of forced labor meant that they did more work, wore more clothes, and said more prayers (their owners were supposed to convert them). Peter Martyr could rejoice that “so many thousands of men are received to bee the sheepe of Christes flocke.” But these were sheep prepared for slaughter. If we may believe Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican who spent many years among them, they were tortured, burned, and fed to the dogs by their masters. They died from overwork and from new European diseases. They killed themselves. And they took pains to avoid having children. Life was not fit to live, and they stopped living. From a population of 100,000 at the lowest estimate in 1492, there remained in 1514 about 32,000 Arawaks in Española. In 1542, according to Las Casas, only 200 were left. In their place had appeared slaves imported from Africa. The people of the golden age had been exterminated.

  Why? What is the meaning of this tale of horror? Why is the first chapter of American history an atrocity story? Bartolomé de Las Casas, who watched it happen had a simple answer, greed: “The cause why the Spanishe have destroyed such an infinitie of soules, hath been onely, that they have helde it for their last scope and marke to gette golde.” The answer is true enough. But we shall have to go further than Spanish greed to understand why American history began this way. The Spanish had no monopoly on greed. There is very little reason to suppose that if the English or French had been first on the scene the results would have been different. Enslavement, torture, and murder on a large scale, not to mention catastrophic epidemics, have often accompanied Western occupation of countries inhabited by people lacking in Christianity, civility, and guns. In most cases the cause may be identified as greed. Perhaps we can begin to understand not only Spanish greed but Western greed in general, not only this first atrocity story of American history but a number of later, less spectacular atrocities, if we look at the victims through the eyes of the victors.

  As I have already mentioned, from the moment they set foot on Española, the Spaniards noted that the Indians were surprisingly unattached to the things of this world. They were content to eat almost anything that happened to come along, including spiders, lizards, and worms. But by Spanish standards they ate very little of anything. They spun and wove a little cotton, but preferred to go naked. Even their houses were flimsy, temporary structures. Because they had no desire to acquire or keep anything for which they felt no present need, they were generous beyond belief; and, without the covetousness or acquisitiveness attendant upon worldly appetites, they seemed able to live together happily and peacefully, unassisted by the restraints of government.

  The Indians’ austere way of life could not fail to win the admiration of the invaders, for self-denial was an ancient virtue in Western culture. The Greeks and Romans had constructed philosophies and the Christians a religion around it. The man who would imitate Christ had to deny himself, give his all to the poor, love his neighbor as himself, curb his natural appetites, and set his heart on God alone. The monastic life was an organized effort to live this way. The Indians, and especially the Arawaks, gave no sign of thinking much about God, but otherwise they seemed to have attained the monastic virtues. They had also attained an impressive freedom. Plato had emphasized again and again that freedom was to be reached by restraining one’s needs, and the Arawaks had done just that. According to Peter Martyr, who sometimes despaired of his own countrymen’s debilitating self-indulgence, the Indians’ “contentation with the benefites of nature doth playnly declare that men may lead a free and happye life without tables, table clothes, carpettes, napkins, and towels, with suche other innumerable….” Europeans would do well to learn from these children of nature, who scorned superfluities, he said, “as hindrances of their sweete libertie.”

  But even as they admired the Indians’ simplicity, the Europeans were troubled by it, troubled and offended. Innocence never fails to offend, never fails to invite attack, and the Indians seemed the most innocent people anyone had ever seen. Their freedom from acquisitive instincts was delightful to behold but disturbingly effortless. Without the help of Christianity or of civilization, they had attained virtues that Europeans liked to think of as the proper outcome of Christianity and civilization. The fury with which the Spaniards assaulted the Arawaks even after they had enslaved them must surely have been in part a blind impulse to crush an innocence that seemed to deny the Europeans’ cherished assumption of their own civilized, Christian superiority over naked, heathen barbarians.

  The affront went deep, and the cruelty and greed it provoked were symptoms of a conflict that has lasted in one form or another to the present day and can end only when the West has achieved what is now known as “modernization” of the entire world. The life of the Arawaks, for all its admirable simplicity and austerity, was incompatible with the kind of existence that Europeans, for all their praise of self-denial, thought right. The self-denial that civilized Christians were supposed to practice did not eventuate in nakedness. Christians might deny themselves silks and velvets, but they must not deny themselves clothes; they might embrace poverty but not idleness; they might fast, but they must not neglect to work for bread. Europeans, while telling themselves to curb their appetites, had organized a civilization that required them to extract from nature a greater abundance of goods than the Arawaks cared to have.

  The Arawaks were actually skilled agriculturists; with a minimum of labor, they made their island support an enormous population, and with their apparent intelligence, they could certainly have produced more food, more clothing, better shelters. But their needs were small, and they wanted no more than they needed. They preferred to spend their days in what seemed to the European mere play and idleness. When European confronted Indian, then, friction could scarcely have failed to develop.

  We must, of course, remember that European production in the fifteenth century was nowhere near as efficient as it has since become. By modern standards Europeans of Columbus’s time lived an unorganized and ineffective life. Indeed, the upper classes, when they were not busy fighting holy wars, aspired to a way of life that required no more work than an Arawak would do. But by comparison with the Arawaks, fifteenth-century Europeans made spectacularly high demands, if not on themselves, at least on those who stood in the lower ranks of society. They had developed ideas about work that were wholly incompatible with the seeming fecklessness of the Arawaks of Española. Behind the Spanish assault on the Indians lay a conviction that men must work, if not for themselves then for their betters, in the interests of civility and Christianity. It was this conviction that allowed Peter Martyr to hymn the Indians’ asceticism and love of liberty but then go on to censure them because the object of both virtues was mere “play and idleness.” For the same reason Columbus could admire the Indians even while he made plans to enslave them.

  The Spanish government was not unmindful of what was going on in its new lands across the sea and made periodic efforts to control the abuse of the Indians. It even authorized a few abortive experiments in setting the Indians free. But it could not condone a liberty that resulted in idleness. The only way to keep Indians at work, it seemed, was to make them work for Spaniards. In 1517 when a team of Jeronymite friars quizzed the oldest Spanish inhabitants of Española about the capacities and capabilities of the natives, there was unanimous agreement that the Arawaks were unwilling to work unless forced to. They must be made to work for Spain, as the Spanish government had proclaimed in 1513, “to prevent their living in idleness and to assure their learning to live and govern themselves like Christians.”

  The Spanish determination that the Indians should not live in idleness was reinforced in Española by Columbus’s expectations of the country he thought he had reached and by the similar expectations of other Spaniards. The true Indies were already geared to the European economy: merchants for centuries had been sending the products of European labor eastward to the Orient in exchange for spices and other treasures. Espa
ñola in the role of Ophir was expected to yield its riches to Columbus as it had to Solomon. When it became evident that Española was not Ophir and that America was not the Indies but a new world, that whole new world had to be transformed. It had to be organized and exploited to produce the things expected of it.

  Columbus’s first method of exploiting Española, when the natives failed to produce what was expected of them, was crude: to ship the inhabitants to Spain as slaves was to make no more effective use of the island than the neighboring Caribs did in occasionally harvesting a crop of Arawaks to eat. To put them to work under their chieftains was far more productive. To give them at last to Spanish masters who could extract more work than the chieftains could was still more effective—except that the Arawaks died. Probably more died from other causes than from overwork, but it would be hard to say how much work was overwork for an Arawak. Work had not been an important part of human life in Española before Columbus.