American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  Between the time of his return from the first voyage and the date of embarkation for the second journey, word had spread everywhere in Spain of the gold and souls that Columbus had found. No longer would there be any need to enlist the services of wanted criminals or other lowlife to staff the ships of the enterprise to the Indies. The Admiral’s enthusiasm was infectious, as was his avarice. The others aboard the ships that sailed with Columbus on this second voyage—and those who were to follow in years and decades to come—rarely were possessed by the array of motives that drove his quest for discovery and conquest. Some just wanted to save heathens. Far more just wanted to get rich. But operating in tandem, these two simple goals spelled disaster for the indigenous peoples who welcomed the shiploads—in time the floodtide—of Europeans who came as reapers of souls and of gold. That is because, initially at least, there were few souls wishing to be converted and very little gold to be had. Nor was either pursuit much helped by the furious epidemics that were unleashed by the Europeans soon after they came into contact with their native hosts.

  The men aboard the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María almost certainly spread strange, new diseases among the people of the islands they visited during the first Spanish excursion through the Caribbean from October of 1492 through January of 1493. But, as we saw in an earlier chapter, it was with the landing of the ships of the second voyage, on the northern coast of Hispaniola in January of 1494, that the first known explosion of European epidemic disease occurred. Ferdinand and Isabella had instructed Columbus not to mistreat the Indians he encountered on this second voyage. That was their word. With their deed, however, they loaded his ships with hundreds of heavily armed and armored infantry and cavalrymen, many of them battle-hardened and fresh from victory over the hated Moors in Granada. As Hispaniola’s natives retreated inland from the deadly epidemics that followed immediately upon the landing of the Spanish troops, they were pursued by these soldiers of fortune who had no time to waste.

  Consulting his classical sources, Columbus determined that “according to Ptolemy there must be plenty of gold in the rivers” of this huge island. When one of the military parties he sent out returned with three pieces of gold that had been taken from an Indian settlement, Columbus “and all of us made merry,” recalled one of the participants in the revelry, “not caring any longer about any sort of spicery but only of this blessed gold. Because of this,” he continued, “the Lord Admiral wrote to the King that he was hoping to be able shortly to give him as much gold as the iron mines of Biscay gave him iron.”22 In this excited mood Columbus sent a number of ships back to Spain—and 500 troops inland to find the gold. Although “not too well fitted out with clothes,” wrote Michele de Cuneo, they set out on their trek:

  [B]etween going, staying, and returning, we spent 29 days with terrible weather, bad food and worse drink; nevertheless, out of covetousness of that gold, we all kept strong and lusty. We crossed going and coming two very rapid rivers, as I have mentioned above, swimming; and those who did not know how to swim had two Indians who carried them swimming; the same, out of friendship and for a few trifles that we gave them, carried across on top of their heads our clothes, arms and everything else there was to be carried.23

  The trip was a painful ordeal covering many miles through difficult country. And when they reached the place they were seeking they “built a fort of wood in the name of St. Thomas.” There these hundreds of Spanish troops and adventurers frantically fished in the rivers that Ptolemy had said would be filled with treasure, “but,” wrote Cuneo, “never was found by anyone a single grain of gold.” He then added portentously: “For this reason we were very displeased with the local Indians.”24

  For months to follow, this pattern was repeated. Although there was gold on the island, and although the conquistadors ultimately found whatever was there—and forced the natives to mine it for them—never did the holdings of the Indians or the products of the island’s mines and rivers produce riches of the sort the soldiers had been led to expect. Unable to believe what was apparent, that this was no King Solomon’s mine, the troops convinced themselves that the Indians cared as much as the Spanish did for the precious metal and that they were hoarding it in secret caches. To these men whose profession was violence, only violence could be counted on to wrest from the natives what God and the Lord Admiral had promised them.

  When the crossbow was invented centuries earlier the Church had decreed it to be such a terrifying weapon that it could be used only on infidels.25 On Hispaniola, and then on Jamaica, and elsewhere in the Caribbean it was used routinely—along with the lance and the sword and the armored and hungry dog—to terrorize and subdue those natives who somehow were surviving the lethal pathogens that the invaders carried in their blood and their breath. Within a matter of months 50,000 Indians were dead, the proportional equivalent of 1,500,000 American deaths today. Europe at this time was still excited over the mysteriousness of these new-found lands and their handsome and innocent people, but the men on the front lines of the endeavor to strip the Indies of its gold had long since overcome their sense of wonder with their greed and their furious sadism.

  Even the most educated and cultured and high-minded among the voyagers on this second expedition wasted no time in expressing their contempt for the native people. Cuneo, for example, the Italian nobleman and apparent boyhood friend of Columbus, repeatedly referred to the natives as “beasts” because he could not discern that they had any religion, because they slept on mats on the ground rather than in beds, because “they eat when they are hungry,” and because they made love “openly whenever they feel like it.”26 This judgment comes, it will be recalled, from a man who took a fancy to a beautiful young native woman during this trip and, when she rebuffed his advances, thrashed her with a rope, raped her, and then boasted of what he had done.

  Cuneo’s opinion of the natives was echoed by Dr. Diego Alvarez Chanca, a physician on the voyage who later was singled out by the Crown for a special award in recognition of his humanitarianism. For various reasons, including his disapproval of the Indians’ method of laying out their towns and the fact that they ate cooked iguana (which the Spanish themselves later came to regard as a delicacy), Dr. Chanca declared that the natives were barbarous and unintelligent creatures whose “degradation is greater than that of any beast in the world.”27 Cuneo and Chanca and other island visitors who recorded their thoughts for posterity probably had little influence on the lance- and sword- and crossbow-wielding conquistadors who accompanied them, but that is only because the conquistadors did not need the encouragement of their superiors to carry out what Las Casas called their “massacres and strange cruelties” against the native people.

  Back in Europe, on the other hand, these reports were read with avidity. And before long a consistent picture began to emerge. The lands of the Indies were indeed as wondrous as Columbus originally had described them. Thus, Andrés Bernáldez—chaplain to the Archbishop of Seville, member of the Royal Council, and Grand Inquisitor—described for his faithful readers the delightful islands of Hispaniola and Cuba, “the most lovely that eyes have seen,” whose “fields were such that they appeared to be the loveliest gardens in the world.” The people of the islands, however—said this holy man who once had rejoiced in the burning of Jews and Moors “in living flames until they be no more”—were but “a brutish race . . . [who] take no pleasure in anything save eating and women.”28

  Even before his first voyage was complete, Columbus had written to Ferdinand and Isabella promising to bring back from subsequent expeditions “slaves, as many as [the Crown] shall order”—while assuring his king and queen that such Indian bondsmen “will be idolators,” that is, non-Christians, which would make their trade legitimate in the supervisory view of the Church.29 In the eyes of Hispaniola’s Spanish invaders, however, hardly had the second voyage completed its minimal tasks ashore when the native “idolators” were turning into full-fledged beasts. To some, that helped ex
plain why the natives were dying so quickly and in such huge numbers; but in any case, die though they might, there were millions of them who could still be enslaved, and there was work to be done—much gold remained to be seized.

  It is by no means surprising, then, that in only the second printed chronicle from the New World (the first being Columbus’s report to the Crown on his initial voyage), the Spanish nobleman Guillermo Coma of Aragon dwelt at great length and in minute detail on the allegedly “very dark and grim-visaged” cannibals of the Indies. “They customarily castrate their infant captives and boy slaves and fatten them like capons,” was but one of his numerous imaginings. And with equal vividness and equal falsity he described the great quantities of gold that awaited the adventurous, who could gather nuggets almost like fruit from a tree. “In that region,” he told his readers, there are “a large number of rivers and more than 24 streams,—a country of such bountifulness that it is marvellous to describe and unbelievable to hear about.” He continued:

  Gold is collected by cutting away the river banks. First the water rushes in, frothing and somewhat muddy; then it becomes clear again and the heavy grains of gold which lie at the bottom are plainly revealed. They weigh a drachma [about 60 grains] more or less. . . . There is a very lovely tale, which I should have been ashamed to relate if I had not got it from a credible witness, that a rock close to the mountain, when struck with a club, poured out a great quantity of gold and that gold splinters flashed all over with indescribable brightness.30

  The story continues, reporting on other discoveries, such as that of a native goldsmith who supposedly crafted solid gold plates so large that no one man could lift them, and of rivers that flowed over beds that were thick with gold-bearing sand. And then Coma put all the pieces together, in homage to Columbus and the king and queen of Spain, linking the recent “memorable victory” over the infidel Moors in Granada, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and now the exploration of “the shores of the Orient,” all events destined and intended “for the enhancement of the religion of Christ.”31

  Thus, the Indies: the most beautiful lands on earth, filled with more wealth than anyone could imagine, but also inhabited by “very dark and grim-visaged” cannibals and other uncivilized brutes who hoarded and hid the gold that the Spanish needed to fulfill the prophecies of the faith—the prophecies ordering them to convert or destroy the ungodly, be they Moors, Jews, or the beastly denizens of “the shores of the Orient,” and to bring God’s kingdom home. Such was the rationale, at least, for the carnage that already was well under way, and no doubt there were those who believed it. Others were less starry-eyed, such as the famed conquistador (and official historian of the Conquest) Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, who advised would-be adventurers to mouth all the right words when applying for passage to the Indies, but who added that he knew as well as they “that the truth is just the opposite; you are going solely because you want to have a larger fortune than your father and your neighbors.” It was this same sort of cynicism (later repeated by Cortés, Pizarro, and others) that allowed Oviedo elsewhere to write sardonically of the sanctity he felt when killing Indians: “Who can deny that the use of gunpowder against pagans is the burning of incense to Our Lord?”32

  This is not to say that belief in the earthly paradise and its golden race of people disappeared. After all, Columbus sincerely continued to look for it—and thought he had found it when he encountered, as we saw earlier, people “whiter than any others I have seen in the Indies,” and who, not incidentally, were “more intelligent and have more ability.” But as time wore on the dominant European image of the New World’s indigenous peoples was one that fit well with other very ancient Old World traditions: Columbus’s story of “men with one eye, and others with dogs’ noses,” who ate men after decapitating them, castrating them, and finally drinking their blood soon became an article of faith among many Europeans; moreover, elsewhere in the Caribbean, it was said, there existed islands inhabited only by Amazons and others with people whose skin color was blue and whose heads were square.33 And everywhere, whatever their physical appearance, the sins of the natives were the same—lust, gluttony, carnality, and all the other untamed and un-Christian pleasures of the flesh that long had been the distinguishing characteristics of wild men and the monstrous, beastly races.

  Some of this had been heard before, of course, during the long centuries of holy war with the Muslims and the equally holy persecution of the Jews. But in associating the Indians with wild men and the monstrous races described in the works of Pliny and John Mandeville something new was being added—the question of race, the question of the native peoples’ very humanity. For while those like Señor Coma of Aragon were drawing a parallel between darkness of flesh and commitment to cannibalism—while Columbus and others were expounding on an opposite relationship (but one with identical consequences) involving light skin, intelligence, and closeness to God—still more Spaniards were locating evidence for the Indians’ alleged inferiority within their very biology, in what was said to be the “size and thickness of their skulls,” writes J.H. Elliott, “which indicated a deformation in that part of the body which provided an index of a man’s rational powers,” and which could be used to support the increasingly popular idea that the Indians were made by God to be the “natural slaves” of the Spanish and, indeed, of all Europeans.34

  In the preceding chapter we noted that race is an ancient Western concept and that skin color has long been one of the many characteristics with which it has been associated. (“It is significant,” writes David Brion Davis, for example, that during the thirteenth-century slave trade “Sicilian officials qualified the general designation for ‘Moor’ or ‘Saracen’ with the Latin terms for ‘white,’ ‘sallow,’ and ‘black.’” Adds Elena Lourie, also writing of the thirteenth century: “Only with great difficulty, after he had already been sold as a Muslim slave, did a ‘very black man,’ ‘with thick features,’ prove to the authorities that he was in fact a good Catholic.”)35 For most of the duration of this idea’s existence, however, race was not seen as an immutable phenomenon. Skin color, for instance, commonly was viewed as environmentally changeable and, as we have seen, even semihuman monstrosities—such as the dog-headed beast who became St. Christopher—were susceptible to favorable transformation. Such permutability of human essence was thoroughly compatible during Christianity’s reign in Europe with the Church’s fervent crusade to bring all the world’s people under its heavenly wing. However, a little more than a century before Columbus put to sea on his journey that would shake the world, cracks began to appear in the edifice of Christianity’s racial ecumenism. The cause of the problem was slavery.

  The booming slave trade in the fourteenth-century Mediterranean was at least a two-way operation. That is, while Christian Europeans were buying shiploads of captured infidels, Muslims were doing the same thing—except that many of their purchased slaves were Christians. This greatly upset the Church and led to various methods of discouraging trade in Christian captives, including efforts to cut off all trade of any sort with Muslim countries and the excommunication of Christians caught buying or selling their religious brethren as bondsmen. (At that time it generally was agreed that free Christians could not be enslaved by other Christians except as punishment for certain crimes.) However, since the Church remained devoted to its evangelical mission and to supporting the slave trade in general, a difficulty of potentially major proportions soon developed: what to do with the legally enslaved infidel who saw the light and converted to Catholicism? To order the manumission of such a person might rapidly undermine the lucrative trade in captive infidels, but to fail to free him or her would be to condone the enslavement of Christians. It was on the horns of this dilemma, writes David Brion Davis, that the Church made an ominous decision:

  In 1366 the Priors of Florence, who had previously given their sanction to the import and sale of infidel slaves, explained that by “infidel” they had meant
“all slaves of infidel origin, even if at the time of their arrival they belong to the Catholic faith”; and “infidel origin” meant simply “from the land and race of the infidels.” With this subtle change in definition the Priors of Florence by-passed the dilemma of baptism by shifting the basis of slavery from religious difference to ethnic origin.36

  It may have been a subtle change in definition, but the larger meaning of this declaration would signal an alteration in consciousness containing enormous and far-reaching implications. From this point forward the “race of the infidels” would be sufficient to justify their enslavement, and no transformations of any sort—including conversion to the faith of Christ—would have any bearing on their worldly condition. Less than a century later a functionally similar declaration was imposed upon Spain’s Jews. In the wake of the anti-Jewish riots of 1449 in Toledo, Jews were barred from holding public office in the city; only those citizens who could demonstrate Christian “purity of blood,” said the first decree of limpieza de sangre, were eligible for such positions. Conversion to Catholicism would no longer suffice, for oneself or even for one’s descendants. Blood—in effect, race—was now the fundamental criterion.

  The conceptual underpinnings for this ominous shift in consciousness had been building for a very long time. As early as the ninth century in Aragon and Castile the general term for nobility, caballero hidalgo, was reserved for those of specified “blood” and lineage; achieved economic or other influence was insufficient to overcome the genetic exclusivity of the institution. At issue was the nobleman’s allegedly unique possession of verguenza—the sense of honor—that was bestowed solely through genealogical inheritance. As Alfonso X of Castile explained:

  In ancient times, in order to create knights, men chose hunters in the mountains who were men of great endurance, and carpenters and smiths and masons because they were accustomed to giving blows and their hands are strong. Also butchers, because they were used to killing live things and shedding their blood. Such men are well formed, strong and lithe. The Ancients chose knights in this manner for a very long time. But when they saw that in many cases their proteges, lacking verguenza, forgot the reasons for their elevation and instead of defeating their enemies were defeated themselves, men knowledgeable in these matters looked for knights who, by their nature, possessed verguenza. . . . For they held a weak man with the will to endure far preferable to a strong one who easily fled. Because of this the authorities saw to it that knights should be men of good lineage.37