GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL KILLED, BUT HOW ABOUT SLAVERY?

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

Most of us have accepted the mainstream historians' assertion that the mass die-off of natives in the Americas was due primarily to their lack of immunity to diseases such as measles, smallpox and influenza that the Europeans brought with them from the Old World during the Columbian Exchange.

But a new branch of research is emerging which shifts the focus from disease to slavery and overwork to which Christopher Columbus and succeeding conquistadores subjected the thousands of natives they encountered in the Caribbean and later on the American continent.

In "Steel, Guns, and Germs," by Jared Diamond – a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book n 1998 – he makes the assertion that Old World disease was the main killer of the natives.

Now other writers are challenging that assumption and say that even before the natives suffered the ravages of strange diseases for which they had no immunity, the unbelievably avaricious and cruel conquistadores – starting with Columbus, the so- called the Admiral of the Ocean Sea – had already depleted the native populations through overwork as slaves in silver mines, searching for gold, and by slaver raids to sell them in the transatlantic slave trade. In other words, they were not only after gold and spices, but also after slaves.

Most of us think about the enslavement of Africans by Portuguese, English, and Spanish slavers and the trans-Atlantic voyage to the New World. But it was Columbus who started the enslavement of New World natives and their sale in Spain and the rest of Europe to enrich mimself.

In "The Other Slavery," a Bancroft Award winner of 2016, Andres Reséndez documents Columbus' fixation on the value of the natives to be sold as slaves. Using Spanish records on the issuance of slaving licenses in the Caribbean approved by royal authorities, he traces the evolution of this peculiar institution n the New World and points to Columbus as the original slaver.

"Columbus captured perhaps two dozen Indians during his first voyage," Reséndez writes. "Strictly speaking these were not slaves, but 'showpieces' intended as proof of his discovery."

On his return voyage, he began to fully develop his economic plans which included the wholesale export of native slaves. In his very first letter to the royal comptroller, he promised gold, spices, cotton, and "as many slaves as their majesties order to made, from among those who are idolaters." 

This cloaking of enslaving human beings under the pretext that they were heathens, cannibals and captured in a "just war" that needed to be christianized would be used as a justification for the conquistadores to deplete entire populations of the Caribbean islands and later of the mainland and up the Gulf coast. But at the core of these justifications was a very clear economic interest in selling them for profit.

Under his agreement with Ferdinand and Isabella, he got to keep one-tenth of the proceeds from the sale of these captives.On his second voyage, Columbus sent dozens of Carib Indians back to Spain with the first returning ships. 

In his letter to the monarchs, he traded on the subject lightly.

"May Your Highnesses judge whether they ought to be captured, for I believe we could take many of the males every year and and infinite number of women...May you also believe that one of them would be worth more than three black slaves from Guinea (Africa) in strength and ingenuity, as you will gather from those that I am shipping now." 

In a later letter, he requested more caravels of wine and wheat from the crown and proposed that they could be paid for with slaves.

"We could pay for all that with slaves from among the cannibals, a people very savage and suitable for the purpose, and well made, and of very good intelligence."

(Along with textiles and feathers, Spanish encomenderos occasionally requested Indians as tribute. In 1529 Nuño de Guzman received eight males and 12 women, all tethered by the neck, from the people of Huejotozinco, as shown in this page from an account book.) From Reséndez, "The Other Slavery."  

Reséndez documents the Admiral's brisk trade in human beings captured in slaver raids in the New World. On February 1495, he sent 550 Indians to Española "the best males and females" crammed in four caravels bound for the slave market in southern Spain. Some 1,600 had been captured, but space restrictions limited the voyage to Spain to only 550 captives. The rest were distributed among Europeans who stayed behind. 

During the voyage, approximately 200 natives perished "because they were not used to the cold weather...and we cast their bodies into the sea."

His slaving efforts reached a peak in 1495-1496 when he again wrote Ferdinand and Isabella that "Under the protection of the Holy Trinity, from here we can send all the slaves needed...and if the the   information I have is correct, we could sell 4,000 slaves who will be worth at the very least 20 cuentos (20 million maravedis, or 10 times the total cost of Columbus' first voyage.")

If his plans had panned out, that many natives would have to be transported to Spain in 30 to 40 shiploads, but the payoff to Columbus would have been enormous even if his calculations were only half correct. In one of his memoriales he said he would have sent many more, and that their forced labor was the greatest wealth of all. 

"The Indians of Española were and are the greatest wealth of the island, because they are the ones who dig, and harvest, and collect the bread and other supplies, and gather the gold from the mines, and do all the work of men and beasts alike."

And then we wonder why Native Americans don't celebrate Columbus Day.