CONQUEST, SLAVERY, AND PILLAGE TRUE COLUMBUS "LEGACY"

By Juan Montoya

My Native American family doesn't celebrate Columbus Day, opting instead to call it Indigenous Peoples' Day. And given the effect on the native tribes by the rapacious, gold-greedy Europeans, who can blame them?

It's now 531 years ago that natives of a Caribbean island woke up to find three boatloads of hungry (and lost) Europeans announcing to them that they had been discovered. What’s more, they said the land now belonged to them and their distant king.

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

But 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 transfer for sale in Spain and the rest of Europe to enrich himself.

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."

The so-called Columbian Exchange was a lopsided affair. The Old World got the riches of these nations, and “America” got disease and slaughter in return. The Old World got unimaginable wealth in the form of foodstuffs that saved entire European nations from famine (potatoes), and gave humanity a crop that would in time become the most important addition to the world’s granary – corn.

Today, corn, a wild grass domesticated by the natives some 15,000 years ago, is now the biggest cash crop in the United States, if not the world. Some of the earliest pollen of domesticated corn has been found in cave hearths and middens as far north as Tampico in the Sierra Madre Oriental in northeast Mexico.

Further north, in the United States, the newcomers adopted a policy of genocide against its natives. Those it could not kill outright were dispossessed of their ancestral lands and forcibly moved across the country to unimaginably uninhabitable terrain to be fenced off in reservations.

The Trail of Tears remains very real to them. Some natives won't take a $20 bill because Andrew

Jackson, the prime mover behind the forcible relocation of the tribes that resulted in de facto genocide bears his image.

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 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.")

As I said at the start of this post, Columbus' introduction of slavery, the subsequent decimation of the natives, and the pillaging of their continent is not something my Native American relatives think is worth celebrating. Would you?