Snuff It #2

Happy Columbus Day

If you live in America and you haven't read Howard Zinn's incredible book A People's History of the United States, you should do so immediately. He starts out with one of my all-time favorite quotes, from Columbus's journal:

"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."

Columbus didn't waste any time! Where's the damn GOLD? No wonder he's such a big hero! I wonder what the natives learned? Maybe how to lick boots, or kill themselves...

"They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawk's 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."

What a MAN! He gets me all excited when he talks like that! Apparently the Spaniards got tired of walking after a while, "and rode on the back of Indians if they were in a hurry." They were also fond "of knifing them by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades."

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 on 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."

In God we trust! How come I don't remember reading any of this in grammar school? I must have been sick that day...

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 on 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 amount 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.

After all the natives were dead, African slaves were imported, but that's another story. Isn't it great to be an American?

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