Chapter One / A People's History of the United
States of America
By: Howard Zinn
Columbus, the Indians, & Human
Progress
Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full
of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and
swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus
and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks
ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of
this in his log:
"They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and
many other things which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks'
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."
These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland,
who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again)
for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not
stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the
religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that
marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas,
Christopher Columbus.
Columbus wrote:
"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."
The information Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had
persuaded the king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the
lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic
-- the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. For like other informed people
of his time, he knew the world was round and he could sail west in order
to get to the Far East.
Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states, like
France, England, and Portugal. Its population, mostly poor peasants,
worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent of the population and owned
95 percent of the land. Spain had tied itself to the Catholic Church,
expelled all the Jews, driven out the Moors. Like other states of the
modern world, Spain sought gold, which was becoming the new mark of
wealth, more useful than land because it could buy anything.
There was gold in Asia, it was thought, and certainly silks and spices,
for Marco Polo and others had brought back marvelous things from their
overland expeditions centuries before. Now that the Turks had conquered
Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean, and controlled the land
routes to Asia, a sea route was needed. Portuguese sailors were working
their way around the southern tip of Africa. Spain decided to gamble
on a long sail across an unknown ocean.
In return for bringing back gold and spices, they promised Columbus
10 percent of the profits, governorship over new-found lands, and the
fame that would go with a new title: Admiral of the Ocean Sea. He was
a merchant's clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, part-time weaver
(the son of a skilled weaver), and expert sailor. He set out with three
sailing ships, the largest of which was the Santa Maria, perhaps 100
feet long, and thirty-nine crew members.
Columbus would never have made it to Asia, which was thousands of miles
farther away than he had calculated, imagining a smaller world. He would
have been doomed by that great expanse of sea. But he was lucky. One-fourth
of the way there he came upon an unknown, uncharted land that lay between
Europe and Asia --- the Americas. It was early October 1492, and thirty-three
days since he and his crew had left the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic
coast of Africa. Now they saw branches and sticks floating in the water.
They saw flocks of birds. These were signs of land. Then, on October
12, a sailor called Rodrigo saw the early morning moon shining on white
sands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, the Caribbean
sea. The first man to sight land was supposed to get a yearly pension
of 10,000 maravedis for life, but Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed
he had seen a light the evening before. He got the reward.
So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians, who swam
out to greet them. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had a developed
agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they
bad no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny
gold ornaments in their ears.
This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus to take some
of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they guide
him to the source of the gold. He then sailed to what is now Cuba, then
to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the Dominican
Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask
presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of
gold fields.
On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria, which had run aground,
Columbus built a fort, the first European military base in the Western
Hemisphere. He called it Navidad (Christmas) and left thirty-nine crew
members there, with instructions to find and store the gold. He took
more Indian prisoners and put them aboard his two remaining ships. At
one part of the island he got into a fight with Indians who refused
to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two were
run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta
set sail for the Azores and Spain. When the weather turned cold, the
Indian prisoners began to die.
Columbus's report to the Court in Madrid was extravagant. He insisted
he had reached Asia (it was Cuba) and an island off the coast of China
(Hispaniola). His descriptions were part fact, part fiction:
"Hispaniola is a miracle. Mountains and hills, plains and pastures,
are both fertile and beautiful ... the harbors are unbelievably good
and there are many wide rivers of which the majority contain gold ...
There are many spices, and great mines of gold and other metals..."
The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with
their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe
it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the
contrary, they offer to share with anyone...." He concluded his
report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return
he would bring them from his next voyage "as much gold as they
need ... and as many slaves as they ask." He was full of religious
talk: "Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who
follow His way over apparent impossibilities."
Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition
was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim
was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean,
taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans' intent
they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the
sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with
the Indians, after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold,
taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor.
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 en 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."
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 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 quantity 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.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around
was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted
down with dogs, and were killed.
Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards
who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners
they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides
began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the
Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half
of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.
When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken
as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were
worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515,
there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were
five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks
or their descendants left on the island. The chief source --- and, on
many matters the only source of information --- about what happened
on the islands after Columbus came is Bartolome' de las Casas, who,
as a young priest, participated in the conquest of Cuba. For a time
he owned a plantation on which Indian slaves worked, but he gave that
up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty. Las Casas transcribed
Columbus's journal and, in his fifties, began a multivolume History
of the Indies. In it, he describes the Indians. They are agile, he says,
and can swim long distances, especially the women. They are not completely
peaceful, because they do battle from time to time with other tribes,
but their casualties seem small, and they fight when they are individually
moved to do so because of some grievance, not on the orders of captains
or kings.
Women in Indian society were treated so well as to startle the Spaniards.
Las Casas describes sex relations:
"Marriage laws are non-existent: men and women alike choose their
mates and leave them as they please, without offense, jealousy or anger.
They multiply in great abundance; pregnant women work to the last minute
and give birth almost painlessly; up the next day, they bathe in the
river and are as clean and healthy as before giving birth. If they tire
of their men, they give themselves abortions with herbs that force stillbirths,
covering their shameful parts with leaves or cotton cloth; although
on the whole, Indian men and women look upon total nakedness with as
much casualness as we look upon a man's head or at his hands."
The Indians, Las Casas says, have no religion, at least no temples.
"They live in large communal bell-shaped buildings, housing up
to 600 people at one time ... made of very strong wood and roofed with
palm leaves .... They prize bird feathers of various colors, beads made
of fishbones, and green and white stones with which they adorn their
ears and lips, but they put no value on gold and other precious things.
They lack all manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely
exclusively on their natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely
generous with their possessions and by the same token covet the possessions
of their friends and expect the same degree of liberality...."
In Book Two of his History of the Indies, Las Casas (who at first urged
replacing Indians by black slaves, thinking they were stronger and would
survive, but later relented when he saw the effects on blacks) tells
about the treatment of the Indians by the Spaniards. It is a unique
account and deserves to be quoted at length:
"Endless testimonies ... prove the mild and pacific temperament
of the natives. . - . But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill,
mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of
us now and then.... The admiral, it is true, was blind as those who
came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed
irreparable crimes against the Indians...."
Las Casas tells how the Spaniards "grew more conceited every day"
and after a while refused to walk any distance. They "rode the
backs of Indians if they were in a hurry" or were carried on hammocks
by Indians running in relays. "In this case they also had Indians
carry large leaves to shade them from the sun and others to fan them
with goose wings."
Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards "thought nothing
of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them
to test the sharpness of their blades." Las Casas tells how "two
of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying
a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys."
The Indians' attempts to defend themselves failed. And when they ran
off into the hills they were found and killed. So, Las Casas reports,
"they suffered and died in the mines and other labors in desperate
silence, knowing not a soul in the world to whom they could turn for
help." He describes their work in the mines:
"...mountains are stripped from top to bottom and bottom to top
a thousand times; they dig, split rocks, move stones, and carry dirt
on their backs to wash it in the rivers, while those who wash gold stay
in the water all the time with their backs bent so constantly it breaks
them; and when water invades the mines, the most arduous task of all
is to dry the mines by scooping up pansfull of water and throwing it
up outside...."
After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time
required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third
of the men died.
While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained
to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making
thousands of hills for cassava plants.
"Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or
ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on
both sides ...they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they
died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk
to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children
died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer
desperation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died
at work, and children died from lack of milk and in a short time this
land which was so great, so powerful and fertile was depopulated....
My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble
as I write...."
When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, "there were
60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that
from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war,
slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this?
I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe
it .... "
Thus began the history, five hundred years ago, of the European invasion
of the Indian settlements in the Americas. That beginning, when you
read Las Casas -- even if his figures are exaggerations (were there
3 million Indians to begin with, as he says, or 250,000, as modem historians
calculate? -- is conquest, slavery, death. When we read the history
books given to children in the United States, it all starts with heroic
adventure---there is no bloodshed---and Columbus Day is a celebration.
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