Excerpts from "American Genocide"
by
David Stannard
Pestilence and Genocide
p57
The Spain that Christopher Columbus and his crews left behind before
dawn on August 3, 1492, as they sailed forth from Palos and out into the
Atlantic, was for most of its people a land of violence, squalor,
treachery, and intolerance. In this respect Spain was no different from
the rest of Europe.
Epidemic
outbreaks of plague and smallpox, along with routine attacks of measles,
influenza, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid fever, and more, frequently swept
European cities and towns clean of 10 to 20 percent of their populations
at a single stroke. As late as the mid-seventeenth century more than
80,000 Londoners-one out of every six residents in the city-died from
plague in a matter of months. And again and again, as with its companion
diseases, the pestilence they called the Black Death returned. Like most
of the other urban centers in Europe, says one historian who has
specialized in the subject, "every twenty-five or thirty years-sometimes
more frequently-the city was convulsed by a great epidemic." Indeed, for
centuries an individual's life chances in Europe's pesthouse cities were
so poor that the natural populations of the towns were in perpetual
decline that was offset only by in-migration from the
countryside-in-migration, says one historian, that was "vital if [the
cities] were to be preserved from extinction."
Famine,
too, was common. What J. H. Elliott has said of sixteenth century Spain
had held true throughout the Continent for generations beyond memory:
"The rich ate, and ate to excess, watched by a thousand hungry eyes as
they consumed their gargantuan meals. The rest of the population
starved." This was in normal times. The slightest fluctuation in food
prices could cause the sudden deaths of additional tens of thousands who
lived on the margins of perpetual hunger. So precarious was the
existence of these multitudes in France that as late as the seventeenth
century each "average" increase in the price of wheat or millet directly
killed a proportion of the French population equal to nearly twice the
percentage of Americans who died in the Civil War.
That was
the seventeenth century, when times were getting better. In the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries prices fluctuated constantly, leading
people to complain as a Spanish agriculturalist did in 1513 that "today
a pound of mutton costs as much as a whole sheep used to, a loaf as much
as a fanega [a bushel and a half] of wheat, a pound of wax or oil as
much as an arroba [25 Spanish pounds]." The result of this, as one
French historian has observed, was that "the epidemic that raged in
Paris in 1482 fits the classic pattern: famine in the countryside,
flight of the poor in search of help, then outbreak of disease in the
city following upon the malnutrition." And in Spain the threat of famine
in the countryside was especially omnipresent. Areas such as Castile and
Andalusia were wracked with harvest failures that brought on mass death
repeatedly during the fifteenth century. But since both causes of death,
disease and famine, were so common throughout Europe, many surviving
records did not bother (or were unable) to make distinctions between
them. Consequently, even today historians find it difficult or
impossible to distinguish between those of the citizenry who died of
disease and those who merely starved to death.
Roadside
ditches, filled with stagnant water, served as public latrines in the
cities of the fifteenth century, and they would continue to do so for
centuries to follow. So too would other noxious habits and public health
hazards of the time persist on into the future-from the practice of
leaving the decomposing offal of butchered animals to fester in the
streets, to London's "special problem," as historian Lawrence Stone puts
it, of "poor's holes." These were "large, deep, open pits in which were
laid the bodies of the poor, side by side, row upon row. Only when the
pit was filled with bodies was it finally covered over with earth." As
one contemporary, quoted by Stone, delicately observed: "How noisome the
stench is that arises from these holes so stowed with dead bodies,
especially in sultry seasons and after rain."
Along
with the stench and repulsive appearance of the openly displayed dead,
human and animal alike, a modern visitor to a European city in this era
would be repelled by the appearance and the vile aromas given off by the
living as well. Most people never bathed, not once in an entire
lifetime. Almost everyone had his or her brush with smallpox and other
deforming diseases that left survivors partially blinded, pock-marked,
or crippled, while it was the norm for men and women to have "bad breath
from the rotting teeth and constant stomach disorders which can be
documented from many sources, while suppurating ulcers, eczema, scabs,
running sores and other nauseating skin diseases were extremely common,
and often lasted for years."
Street
crime in most cities lurked around every corner. One especially popular
technique for robbing someone was to drop a heavy rock or chunk of
masonry on his head from an upper-story window and then to rifle the
body for jewelry and money. This was a time, observes Norbert Elias,
when "it was one of the festive pleasures of Midsummer Day to burn alive
one or two dozen cats," and when, as Johan Huizinga once put it, "the
continuous disruption of town and country by every kind of dangerous
rabble [and] the permanent threat of harsh and unreliable law
enforcement nourished a feeling of universal uncertainty." With neither
culturally developed systems of social obligation and restraint in
place, nor effective police forces in their stead, the cities of Europe
during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were little more than
chaotic population agglomerates with entire sections serving as the
residential turf of thieves and brigands, and where the wealthy were
forced to hire torch-bearing bodyguards to accompany them out at night.
In times of famine, cities and towns became the setting for food riots.
And the largest riot of all, of course-though the word hardly does it
justice-was the Peasants' War, which broke out in 1S24 following a
series of local revolts that had been occurring repeatedly since the
previous century. The Peasants' War killed over 100,000 people.
As for
rural life in calmer moments, Jean de La Bruyere's seventeenth century
description of human existence in the French countryside gives an apt
summary of what historians for the past several decades have been
uncovering in their research on rustic communities in Europe at large
during the entire late medieval to early modern epoch: "sullen animals,
male and female [are] scattered over the country, dark, livid, scorched
by the sun, attached to the earth they dig up and turn over with
invincible persistence; they have a kind of articulate speech, and when
they rise to their feet, they show a human face, and, indeed, they are
men. At night they retire to dens where they live on black bread, water,
and roots."
To be
sure, La Bruyere was a satirist and although, in the manner of all
caricaturists, his portrait contains key elements of truth, it also is
cruel in what it omits. And what it omits is the fact that these
wretchedly poor country folk, for all their life-threatening
deprivations, were not "sullen animals." They were, in fact, people
quite capable of experiencing the same feelings of tenderness and love
and fear and sadness, however constricted by the limitations of their
existence, as did, and do, all human beings in every corner of the
globe.
But what
Lawrence Stone has said about the typical English village also was
likely true throughout Europe at this time-that is, that because of the
dismal social conditions and prevailing social values, it "was a place
filled with malice and hatred, its only unifying bond being the
occasional episode of mass hysteria, which temporarily bound together
the majority in order to harry and persecute the local witch." Indeed,
as in England, there were towns on the Continent where as many as a
third of the population were accused of witchcraft and where ten out of
every hundred people were executed for it in a single year. In one
small, remote locale within reputedly peaceful Switzerland, more than
3300 people were killed in the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
for allegedly Satanic activities. The tiny village of Wiesensteig saw
sixty-three women burned to death in one year alone, while in
Obermarchtal fifty-four people-out of a total population of barely
700-died at the stake during a three-year period. Thus, while it is true
that the Europeans of those days possessed the same range of emotions
that we do, as Stone puts it, "it is noticeable that hate seems to have
been more prominent an emotion than love."
At the
time La Bruyere was writing (which was a good bit later than the time of
Columbus, during which time conditions had improved), the French "knew
every nuance of poverty... At the top were those who "at best lived at
subsistence level, at worst fell far below," while at the bottom were
those described as dans un e'tat d'indigence absolue, meaning that "one
had no food or adequate clothing or proper shelter, that one had parted
with the few battered cooking-pots and blankets which often constituted
the main assets of a working-class family." Across the whole of France,
between a third and half the population fell under one of these
categories of destitution, and in regions such as Brittany, western
Normandy, Poitou, and the Massif the proportion ascended upwards of
two-thirds. In rural areas in general, between half and 90 percent of
the population did not have land sufficient for their support, forcing
them to migrate out, fall into permanent debt, or die.
And
France was hardly unique. In Genoa, writes historian Fernand Braudel,
"the homeless poor sold themselves as galley slaves every winter." They
were fortunate to have that option. In more northern climes, during
winter months, the indigent simply froze to death. The summer, on the
other hand, was when the plague made its cyclical visitations. That is
why, m summer months, the wealthy left the cities to the poor: as
Braudel points out elsewhere, Rome along with other towns "was a
graveyard of fever" during times of warmer weather.
Throughout Europe, about half the children born during this time died
before reaching the age of ten. Among the poorer classes-and in Spain
particularly, which had an infant mortality rate almost 40 percent
higher even than England's-things were much worse. In addition to
exposure, disease, and malnutrition, one of the causes for such a high
infant mortality rate (close to three out of ten babies in Spain did not
live to see their first birthdays) was abandonment. Thousands upon
thousands of children who could not be cared for were simply left to die
on dungheaps or in roadside ditches. Others were sold into slavery.
East
European children, particularly Romanians, seem to have been favorites
of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century slave trade, although many
thousands of adults were enslaved as well. Child slaves, however, were
as expensive as adults, for reasons best left to the imagination, as is
indicated by a fourteenth-century letter from a man involved in the
business: "We are informed about the little slave girl you say you
personally need," he wrote to his prospective client, "and about her
features and age, and for what you want her.... Whenever ships come from
Romania, they should carry some [slave girls]; but keep in mind that
little slave girls are as expensive as the grown ones, and there will be
none that does not cost 50 to 60 florins if we want one of any value."
Those purchasing female slaves of child-bearing age sometimes were
particularly lucky and received a free bonus of a baby on the way. As
historian John Boswell has reported: "Ten to twenty percent of the
female slaves sold in Seville in the fifteenth century were pregnant or
breast-feeding, and their infants were usually included with them at no
extra cost."
The
wealthy had their problems too. They hungered after gold and silver. The
Crusades, begun four centuries earlier, had increased the appetites of
affluent Europeans for exotic foreign luxuries-for silks and spices,
fine cotton, drugs, perfumes, and jewelry-material pleasures that
required pay in bullion. Thus, gold had become for Europeans, in the
words of one Venetian commentator of the time, "the sinews of all
government . . . its mind, soul . . . its essence and its very life."
The supply of the precious metal, by way of the Middle East and Africa,
had always been uncertain. Now, however, the wars in eastern Europe had
nearly emptied the Continent's coffers. A new supply, a more regular
supply-and preferably a cheaper supply-was needed.
Violence,
of course, was everywhere, as alluded to above; but occasionally it took
on an especially perverse character. In addition to the hunting down and
burning of witches, which was an everyday affair in most locales, in
Milan in 1476 a man was torn to pieces by an enraged mob and his
dismembered limbs were then eaten by his tormenters. In Paris and Lyon,
Huguenots were killed and butchered, and their various body parts were
sold openly in the streets. Other eruptions of bizarre torture, murder,
and ritual cannibalism were not uncommon.
Such
behavior, nonetheless, was not officially condoned, at least not
usually. Indeed, wild and untrue accusations of such activities formed
the basis for many of the witch hunts and religious
persecutions-particularly of Jews-during this time. In precisely those
years when Columbus was trekking around Europe in search of support for
his maritime adventures, the Inquisition was raging in Spain. Here, and
elsewhere in Europe, those out of favor with the powerful-particularly
those who were believed to be un-Christian-were tortured and killed in
the most ingenious of fashions: on the gallows, at the stake, on the
rack-while others were crushed I beheaded, flayed alive, or drawn and
quartered.
***
p63
If it sounded like Paradise, that was no accident. Paradise filled with
gold. And when he came to describe the people he had met, Columbus's
Edenic imagery never faltered:
The
people of this island and of all the other islands which I have found
and ,\ seen, or have not seen, all go naked, men and women, as their
mothers bore / them, except that some women cover one place only with
the leaf of a plant or with a net of cotton which they make for that
purpose. They have no iron or steel or weapons, nor are they capable of
using them, although they are well-built people of handsome stature,
because they are wondrous timid. . . . [T]hey are so artless and free
with all they possess, that no one would believe it without having seen
it. Of anything they have, if you ask them for it, they never say no;
rather they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as if
they were giving their hearts; and whether the thing be of value or of
small price, at once they are content with whatever little thing of
whatever kind may be given to them.
***
p66
I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter
into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners
that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the
Church and of Their Highnesses. We shall take you and your wives and
your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and
dispose of them as Their Highnesses may command. And we shall take your
goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to
vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and
contradict him.
a
statement Spaniards were required to read to Indians they encountered in
the New World
***
p69
Wherever the marauding, diseased, and heavily armed Spanish forces went
out on patrol, accompanied by ferocious armored dogs that had been
trained to kill and disembowel, they preyed on the local communities-
already plague-enfeebled-forcing them to supply food and women and
slaves, and whatever else the soldiers might desire. At virtually every
previous landing on this trip Columbus's troops had gone ashore and
killed indiscriminately, as though for sport, whatever animals and birds
and natives they encountered, "looting and destroying all they found,"
as the Admiral's son Fernando blithely put it. Once on Hispaniola,
however, Columbus fell ill-whether from the flu or, more likely, from
some other malady-and what little restraint he had maintained over his
men disappeared as he went through a lengthy period of recuperation. The
troops went wild, stealing, killing, raping, and torturing natives,
trying to force them to divulge the whereabouts of the imagined
treasure-houses of gold.
The
Indians tried to retaliate by launching ineffective ambushes of stray
Spaniards. But the combined killing force of Spanish diseases and
Spanish military might was far greater than anything the natives could
ever have imagined. Finally, they decided the best response was flight.
Crops were left to rot in the fields as the Indians attempted to escape
the frenzy of the conquistadors' attacks. Starvation then added its
contribution, along with pestilence and mass murder, to the native
peoples' woes.
***
p70
The massacres continued. Columbus remained ill for months while his
soldiers wandered freely. More than 50,000 natives were reported dead
from these encounters by the time the Admiral had recovered from his
sickness. And when at last his health and strength had been restored
Columbus's response to his men's unorganized depredations was to
organize them. In March of 1495 he massed together several hundred
armored troops, cavalry, and a score or more of trained attack dogs.
They set forth across the countryside, tearing into assembled masses of
sick and unarmed native people, slaughtering them by the thousands. The
pattern set by these raids would be the model the Spanish would follow
for the next decade and beyond. As Bartolome de Las Casas, the most
famous of the accompanying Spanish missionaries from that trip recalled:
Once the
Indians were in the woods, the next step was to form squadrons and
pursue them, and whenever the Spaniards found them, they pitilessly
slaughtered everyone like sheep in a corral. It was a general rule among
Spaniards to be cruel; not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that
harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians from daring to think of
themselves as human beings or having a minute to think at all. So they
would cut an Indian's hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin
and they would send him on saying "Go now, spread the news to your
chiefs." They would test their swords and their manly strength on
captured Indians and place bets on the slicing off of heads or the
cutting of bodies in half with one blow. They burned or hanged captured
chiefs."
At least
one chief, the man considered by Columbus to be Hispaniola's ranking
native leader, was not burned or hanged, however. He was captured, put
in chains, and sent off by ship for public display and imprisonment in
Spain. Like most of the Indians who had been forced to make that voyage,
though, he never made it to Seville: he died en route.
With the
same determination Columbus had shown in organizing his troops'
previously disorganized and indiscriminate killings, the Admiral then
set about the task of systematizing their haphazard enslavement of the
natives. Gold was all that they were seeking, so every Indian on the
island who was not a child was ordered to deliver to the Spanish a
certain amount of the precious ore every three months. When the gold was
delivered the individual was presented with a token to wear around his
or her neck as proof that the tribute had been paid. Anyone found
without the appropriate number of tokens had his hands cut off.
Since
Hispaniola's gold supply was far less than what the Spaniards' fantasies
suggested, Indians who wished to survive were driven to seek out their
quotas of the ore at the expense of other endeavors, including food
production. The famines that had begun earlier, when the Indians
attempted to hide from the Spanish murderers, now grew much worse, while
new diseases that the Spanish carried with them preyed ever more
intensely on the malnourished and weakened bodies of the natives. And
the soldiers never ceased to take delight in killing just for fun.
Spanish
reports of their own murderous sadism during this time are legion. For a
lark they "tore babes from their mother's breast by their feet, and
dashed their heads against the rocks." The bodies of other infants "they
spitted . . . together with their mothers and all who were before them,
on their swords." On one famous occasion in Cuba a troop of a hundred or
more Spaniards stopped by the banks of a dry river and sharpened their
swords on the whetstones in its bed. Eager to compare the sharpness of
their blades, reported an eyewitness to the events, they drew their
weapons and began to rip open the bellies, to cut and kill those
lambs-men, women, children, and old folk, all of whom were seated, off
guard and frightened, watching the mares and the Spaniards. And within
two credos, not a man of all of them there remains alive. The Spaniards
enter the large house nearby, for this was happening at its door, and in
the same way, with cuts and stabs, begin to kill as many as they found
there, so that a stream of blood was running, as if a great number of
cows had perished.... To see the wounds which covered the bodies of the
dead and dying was a spectacle of horror and dread.
This
particular slaughter began at the village of Zucayo, where the townsfolk
earlier had provided for the conquistadors a feast of cassava, fruit,
and fish. From there it spread. No one knows just how many Indians the
Spanish killed in this sadistic spree, but Las Casas put the number at
well over 20,000 before the soldiers' thirst for horror had been slaked.
Another
report, this one by a group of concerned Dominican friars, concentrated
on the way the Spanish soldiers treated native infants:
Some
Christians encounter an Indian woman, who was carrying in her arms a
child at suck; and since the dog they had with them was hungry, they
tore the child from the mother's arms and flung it still living to the
dog, who proceeded to devour it before the mother's eyes.... When there
were among the prisoners some women who had recently given birth, if the
new-born babes happened to cry, they seized them by the legs and hurled
them against the rocks, or flung them into the jungle so that they would
be certain to die there.
Or, Las
Casas again, in another incident he witnessed:
The
Spaniards found pleasure in inventing all kinds of odd cruelties, the
more cruel the better, with which to spill human blood. They built a
long gibbet, low enough for the toes to touch the ground and prevent
strangling, and hanged thirteen [natives] at a time in honor of Christ
Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles. When the Indians were thus still
alive and hanging, the Spaniards tested their strength and their blades
against them, ripping chests open with one blow and exposing entrails,
and there were those who did worse. Then, straw was wrapped around their
torn bodies and they were burned alive. One man caught two children
about two years old, pierced their throats with a dagger, then hurled
them down a precipice.
If some
of this has a sickeningly familiar ring to readers who recall the
massacres at My Lai and Song My and other Vietnamese villages in the not
too distant past, the familiarity is reinforced by the term the Spanish
used to describe their campaign of terror: "pacification." But as
horrific as those bloodbaths were in Vietnam, in sheer magnitude they
were as nothing compared with what happened on the single island of
Hispaniola five hundred years ago: the island's population of about
eight million people at the time of Columbus's arrival in 1492 already
had declined by a third to a half before the year 1496 was out. And
after 1496 the death rate, if anything, accelerated.
In
plotting on a graph the decline of Hispaniola's native population there
appears a curious bulge, around the year 1510, when the diminishing
numbers seemed to stabilize and even grow a bit. Then the inexorable
downward spiral toward extinction continues. What that little blip on
the demographic record indicates is not, however, a moment of respite
for the island's people, nor a contradiction to the overall pattern of
Hispaniola's population free-fall following Columbus's arrival. Rather,
it is a shadowy and passing footnote to the holocaust the Spanish at the
same time were bringing to the rest of the Caribbean, for that fleeting
instant of population stabilization was caused by the importation of
tens of thousands of slaves from surrounding islands in a fruitless
attempt by the Spanish to replace the dying natives of Hispaniola.
But death
seized these imported slaves as quickly as it had Hispaniola's natives.
And thus, the islands of the Bahamas were rapidly stripped of perhaps
half a million people, in large part for use as short-lived replacements
by the Spanish for Hispaniola's nearly eradicated indigenous
inhabitants. Then Cuba, with its enormous population, suffered the same
fate.
With the
Caribbean's millions of native people thereby effectively liquidated in
barely a quarter of a century, forced through the murderous vortex of
Spanish savagery and greed, the slavers turned next to the smaller
islands off the mainland coast. The first raid took place in 1515 when
natives from Guanaja in the Bay Islands off Honduras were captured and
taken to forced labor camps in depopulated Cuba. Other slave expeditions
followed, and by 1525, when Cortes arrived in the region, all the Bay
Islands themselves had been entirely shorn of their inhabitants.
In order
to exploit most fully the land and its populace, and to satisfy the
increasingly dangerous and rebellion-organizing ambitions of his
well-armed Spanish troops, Columbus instituted a program called the
repartimiento or "Indian grants"-later referred to, in a revised
version, as the system of encomiendas. This was a dividing-up, not of
the land, but of entire peoples and communities, and the bestowal of
them upon a would-be Spanish master. The master was free to do what he
wished with "his people"-have them plant, have them work in the mines,
have them do anything, as Carl Sauer puts it, "without limit or benefit
of tenure."
The
result was an even greater increase in cruelty and a magnification of
the firestorm of human devastation. Caring only for short-term material
wealth that could be wrenched up from the earth, the Spanish overlords
on Hispaniola removed their slaves to unfamiliar locales-"the roads to
the mines were like anthills," Las Casas recalled-deprived them of food,
and forced them to work until they dropped. At the mines and fields in
which they labored, the Indians were herded together under the
supervision of Spanish overseers, known as mineros in the mines and
estancieros on the plantations, who "treated the Indians with such rigor
and inhumanity that they seemed the very ministers of Hell, driving them
day and night with beatings, kicks, lashes and blows and calling them no
sweeter names than dogs." Needless to say, some Indians attempted to
escape from this. They were hunted down with mastiffs. When found, if
not torn apart on the spot, they were returned and a show-trial was held
for them, and for the edification of other Indians who were made to
stand and watch. The escapees were brought before the visitador [Spanish
inspector-magistrate] and the accuser, that is, the supposedly pious
master, who accused them of being rebellious dogs and good-for-nothings
and demanded stiff punishment. The visitador then had them tied to a
post and he himself, with his own hands, as the most honorable man in
town, took a sailor's tarred whip as tough as iron, the kind they use in
galleys, and flogged them until blood ran from their naked bodies, mere
skin and bones from starvation. Then, leaving them for dead, he stopped
and threatened the same punishment if they tried it again.
Occasionally, when slaves were so broken by illness, malnutrition, or
exhaustion unto death that they became incapable of further labor
output, they were dismissed from the mines or the fields where they
worked. Las Casas estimated that perhaps 10 percent of the Indian
conscripts survived long enough for this to happen. However, he
continued:
When they
were allowed to go home, they often found it deserted and had no other
recourse than to go out into the woods to find food and to die. When
they fell ill, which was very frequently because they are a delicate
people unaccustomed to such work, the Spaniards did not believe them and
pitilessly called them lazy dogs, and kicked and beat them; and when
illness was apparent they sent them home as useless, giving them some
cassava for the twenty- to eighty-league journey. They would go then,
falling into the first stream and dying there in desperation; others
would hold on longer, but very few ever made it home. I sometimes came
upon dead bodies on my way, and upon others who were gasping and moaning
in their death agony, repeating "Hungry, hungry."
In the
face of utter hopelessness, the Indians began simply surrendering their
lives. Some committed suicide. Many refused to have children,
recognizing that their offspring, even if they successfully endured the
Spanish cruelties, would only become slaves themselves. And others,
wrote Las Casas, saw that without any offence on their part they were
despoiled of their kingdoms, their lands and liberties and of their
lives, their wives, and homes. As they saw themselves each day perishing
by the cruel and inhuman treatment of the Spaniards, crushed to the
earth by the horses, cut in pieces by swords, eaten and torn by dogs,
many buried alive and suffering all kinds of exquisite tortures . . .
[they] decided to abandon themselves to their unhappy fate with no
further struggles, placing themselves in the hands of their enemies that
they might do with them as they liked.
Other
natives, in time, did find ways to become reunited with whatever
remained of their families. But when most wives and husbands were
brought back together, they were so exhausted and depressed on both
sides that they had no mind for marital communication and in this way
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, 7,000 babies died in three months.
Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation, while
others caused themselves to abort with certain herbs that produced
stillborn children. In this way husbands died in the mines, wives died
at work, and children died from lack of milk, while others had not time
or energy for procreation, and in a short time this land which was so
great, so powerful and fertile, though so unfortunate, was depopulated.
By 1496,
we already have noted, the population of Hispaniola had fallen from
eight million to between four and five million. By 1508 it was down to
less than a hundred thousand. By 1518 it numbered less than twenty
thousand. And by 1535, say the leading scholars on this grim topic, "for
all practical purposes, the native population was extinct."
In less
than the normal lifetime of a single human being, an entire culture of
millions of people, thousands of years resident in their homeland, had
been exterminated. The same fate befell the native peoples of the
surrounding islands in the Caribbean as well. Of all the horrific
genocides that have occurred in the twentieth century against Armenians,
Jews, Gypsies, Ibos, Bengalis, Timorese, Kampucheans, Ugandans, and
more, none has come close to destroying this many-or this great a
proportion of wholly innocent people.
And then
the Spanish turned their attention to the mainland of Mexico and Central
America. The slaughter had barely begun. The exquisite city of
Tenochtitlan was next.
***
p82
The
gratuitous killing and outright sadism that the Spanish soldiers had
carried out on Hispaniola and in Central Mexico was repeated in the long
march to the south. Numerous reports, from numerous reporters, tell of
Indians being led to the mines in columns, chained together at the neck,
and decapitated if they faltered. Of children trapped and burned alive
in their houses, or stabbed to death because they walked too slowly. Of
the routine cutting off of women's breasts, and the tying of heavy
gourds to their feet before tossing them to drown in lakes and lagoons.
Of babies taken from their mothers' breasts, killed, and left as
roadside markers. Of "stray" Indians dismembered and sent back to their
villages with their chopped-off hands and noses strung around their
necks. Of "pregnant and confined women, children, old men, as many as
they could capture," thrown into pits in which stakes had been imbedded
and "left stuck on the stakes, until the pits were filled." And much,
much more.
One
favorite sport of the conquistadors was "dogging." Traveling as they did
with packs of armored wolfhounds and mastiffs that were raised on a diet
of human flesh and were trained to disembowel Indians, the Spanish used
the dogs to terrorize slaves and to entertain the troops. An entire
book, Dogs of the Conquest, has been published recently, detailing the
exploits of these animals as they accompanied their masters throughout
the course of the Spanish depredations. "A properly fleshed dog," these
authors say, "could pursue a 'savage' as zealously and effectively as a
deer or a boar.... To many of the conquerors, the Indian was merely
another savage animal, and the dogs were trained to pursue and rip apart
their human quarry with the same zest as they felt when hunting wild
beasts.''
Vasco
Nunez de Balboa was famous for such exploits and, like others, he had
his own favorite dog-Leoncico, or "little lion," a reddish-colored cross
between a greyhound and a mastiff-that was rewarded at the end of a
campaign for the amount of killing it had done. On one much celebrated
occasion, Leoncico tore the head off an Indian leader in Panama while
Balboa, his men, and other dogs completed the slaughter of everyone in a
village that had the ill fortune to lie in their journey's path. Heads
of human adults do not come off easily, so the authors of Dogs of the
Conquest seem correct in calling this a "remarkable feat," although
Balboa's men usually were able to do quite well by themselves. As one
contemporary description of this same massacre notes:
The
Spaniards cut off the arm of one, the leg or hip of another, and from
some their heads at one stroke, like butchers cutting up beef and mutton
for market. Six hundred, including the cacique, were thus slain like
brute beasts. ...Vasco ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by
dogs.
Just as
the Spanish soldiers seem to have particularly enjoyed testing the
sharpness of their yard-long rapier blades on the bodies of Indian
children, so their dogs seemed to find the soft bodies of infants
especially tasty, and thus the accounts of the invading conquistadors
and the padres who traveled with them are filled with detailed
descriptions of young Indian children routinely taken from their parents
and fed to the hungry animals.
***
p85
... overall in central Mexico the population fell by almost 95 percent
within seventy-five years following the Europeans' first appearance -
from more than 25,000,000 people in 1519 to barely 1,300,000 in 1595.
***
p91
For the Andean society as a whole ... within a century following their
first encounter with the Spanish, 94-96 percent of their once-enormous
population had been exterminated; along their 2000 miles of coastline,
where once 6,500,000 people had lived, everyone was dead.
***
p135
The
earliest European mariners and explorers in California ... repeatedly
referred to the great numbers of Indians living there. In places where
Vizcaino's ships could approach the coast or his men could go ashore,
the Captain recorded, again and again, that the land was thickly filled
with people. And where he couldn't approach or go ashore "because the
coast was wild," the Indians signaled greetings by building fires-fires
that "made so many columns of smoke on the mainland that at night it
looked like a procession and in the daytime the sky was overcast." In
sum, as Father Ascension put it, "this realm of California is very large
and embraces much territory, nearly all inhabited by numberless people."
But not
for very long. Throughout the late sixteenth and the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, Spanish disease and Spanish cruelty took a large
but mostly uncalculated toll. Few detailed records of what happened
during that time exist, but a wealth of research in other locales has
shown the early decades following Western contact to be almost
invariably the worst for native people, because that is when the fires
of epidemic disease burn most freely. Whatever the population of
California was before the Spanish came, however, and whatever happened
during the first few centuries following Spanish entry into the region,
by 1845 the Indian population of California had been slashed to 150,000
(down from many times that number prior to European contact) by swarming
epidemics of influenza, diphtheria, measles, pneumonia, whooping cough,
smallpox, malaria, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, dysentery, syphilis,
and gonorrhea-along with everyday settler and explorer violence. As late
as 1833 a malaria epidemic brought in by some Hudson's Bay Company
trappers killed 20,000 Indians by itself, wiping out entire parts of the
great central valleys. "A decade later," writes one historian, "there
still remained macabre reminders of the malaria epidemic: collapsed
houses filled with skulls and bones, the ground littered with skeletal
remains."
Terrible
as such deaths must have been, if the lives that preceded them were
lived outside the Spanish missions that were founded in the eighteenth
century, the victims might have counted themselves lucky. Two centuries
earlier the Puritan minister John Robinson had complained to Plymouth's
William Bradford that although a group of massacred Indians no doubt
"deserved" to be killed, "Oh, how happy a thing had it been, if you had
converted some before you had killed any!" That was probably the only
thing the New England Puritans and California's Spanish Catholics would
have agreed upon. So, using armed Spanish troops to capture Indians and
herd them into the mission stockades, the Spanish padres did their best
to convert the natives before they killed them.
And kill
they did. First there were the Jesuit missions, founded early in the
eighteenth century, and from which few vital statistics are available.
Then the Franciscans took the Jesuits' place. At the mission of Nuestra
Senora de Loreto, reported the Franciscan chronicler Father Francisco
Palou, during the first three years of Franciscan rule 76 children and
adults were baptized, while 131 were buried. At the mission of San Jose
Cumundu during the same time period 94 were baptized, while 241 died. At
the mission of Purisima de Cadegomo, meanwhile, 39 were baptized-120
died. At the mission of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe the figures were
similar: 53 baptisms, 130 deaths. The same held true at others, from the
mission of Santa Rosalia de Mulege, with 48 baptisms and 113 deaths, to
the mission of San Ignacio, with 115 baptisms and 293 deaths-all within
the same initial three-year period.
***
p142
By 1845
the Indian population of California was down to no more than a quarter
of what it had been when the Franciscan missions were established in
1769. That is, it had declined by at least 75 percent during
seventy-five years of Spanish rule. In the course of just the next
twenty-five years, under American rule, it would fall by another 80
percent. The gold rush brought to California a flood of American miners
and ranchers who seemed to delight in killing Indians, miners and
ranchers who rose to political power and prominence-and from those
platforms not only legalized the enslavement of California Indians, but,
as in Colorado and elsewhere, launched public campaigns of genocide with
the explicitly stated goal of all-out Indian extermination.
***
p145
Between
1852 and 1860, under American supervision, the indigenous population of
California plunged from 85,000 to 35,000, a collapse of about 60 percent
within eight years of the first gubernatorial demands for the Indians'
destruction. By 1890 that number was halved again: now 80 percent of the
natives who had been alive when California became a state had been wiped
out by an official policy of genocide. Fewer than 18,000 California
Indians were still living, and the number was continuing to drop. In the
late 1840s and 1850s one observer of the California scene had watched
his fellow American whites begin their furious assault "upon [the
Indians], shooting them down like wolves, men, women, and children,
wherever they could find them," and had warned that this "war of
extermination against the aborigines, commenced in effect at the landing
of Columbus, and continued to this day, [is] gradually and surely
tending to the final and utter extinction of the race." While to most
white Californians such a conclusion was hardly lamentable, to this
commentator it was a major concern-but only because the extermination
"policy [has] proved so injurious to the interests of the whites." That
was because the Indians' "labor, once very useful, and, in fact,
indispensable in a country where no other species of laborers were to be
obtained at any price, and which might now be rendered of immense value
by pursuing a judicious policy, has been utterly sacrificed by this
extensive system of indiscriminate revenge."
***
p146
... between 95 and 98 percent of California's Indians had been
exterminated in little more than a century. And even this ghastly
numerical calculation is inadequate, not only because it reveals nothing
of the hideous suffering endured by those hundreds of thousands of
California native peoples, but because it is based on decline only from
the estimated population for the year 1769-a population that already had
been reduced savagely by earlier invasions of European plague and
violence. Nationwide by this time only about one-third of one percent of
America's population-250,000 out of 76, 000,000 people-were natives. The
worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two
continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of
countless tens of millions of people, finally had leveled off. There
was, at last, almost no one left to kill.
***
p147
During the course of four centuries - from the 1490s to the 1890s -
Europeans and white Americans engaged in an unbroken string of genocide
campaigns against the native peoples of the Americas.
reprinted from the Third World Traveler
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