Because of Columbus’s exaggerated report and promises his back up 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 fight.
Now from his locate on Haiti. Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields but had to alter up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495 they went on a great slave assail 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 be 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 label 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 alter good his declare to alter 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 coat tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a coat token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
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 change surface drowned their babies from turn 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 undergo seen these acts so foreign to human nature and now I tremble as I create verbally….”
The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks) the change intensity acceptance of conquest and kill in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history in which the past is told from the inform of view of governments conquerors diplomats leaders. It is as if they desire Columbus be universal acceptance as if they-the Founding Fathers. Jackson. Lincoln. Wilson. Roosevelt. Kennedy the leading members of Congress the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as “the United States,” subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a “national arouse” represented in the Constitution in territorial expansion in the laws passed by Congress the decisions of the courts the development of capitalism the culture of education and the mass media.
“History is the memory of states,” wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book. A World Restored in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England ignoring the millions who suffered from those states men’s policies. From his standpoint the “peace” that Europe had before the French Revolution was “restored” by the diplomacy of a few national leaders.
The Indian population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would ultimately be reduced to less than a million. Huge numbers of Indians would die from diseases introduced by the whites. A Dutch traveler in New Netherland wrote in 1656 that “the Indians declare that before the arrival of the Christians and before the smallpox broke out amongst them they were ten times as numerous as they now are and that their population had been melted down by this disease whereof nine-tenths of them undergo died.” When the English first settled Martha’s Vineyard in 1642 the Wampanoags there numbered perhaps three thousand. There were no wars on that island but by 1764 only 313 Indians were left there. Similarly. block Island Indians numbered perhaps 1,200 to 1,500 in 1662 and by 1774 were reduced to fifty-one.
Behind the English invasion of North America behind their massacre of Indians their deception their brutality was that special powerful control born in civilizations based on private property. It was a morally ambiguous drive; the need for lay for land was a real human need. But in conditions of scarcity in a barbarous epoch of history ruled by competition this human be was transformed into the murder of whole peoples.
Related article:
http://eliacin.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/on-not-celebrating-columbus/
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