1000 word American History Essay using 3rd person past tense/active voice

Columbus-Holocaust-Article.pdf

Home >History homework help >American history homework help >1000 word American History Essay using 3rd person past tense/active voice

1 The American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World

DAVID E. ~TANNARD

Contrary to legend, the European discovery of America took place quite by accident. The story of that discovery begins in the fifteenth century, when the European world was slowly spinning its way out if the Middle Ages, slowly becoming aware of the treas ures-and mysteries-if distant Asia. There were many who dreamed cif the fabled Orient, but none with more enterprise than a Genoese sailor named Christopher Columbus, who was certain that he could reach the Orient by sailing westward across largely uncharted waters. The nation that financed his project, Columbus contended, would enjoy the shortest route to the riches ifJapan and India--silks, gems, tapestries, and highly prized spices.

Since the Crusades, Europeans had bought these luxuries from Italian merchants, who got them from Arab traders in the Holy lAnd. But in the thirteenth and faurteenth centuries, travelers like Marco Polo reported that Asia was the sowce of the succulent goods the Italians brought out of the Near East. After the rise of Europe's nation states, Portugal sought an ocean route to Asia's fortunes; in the fifteenth century, her hardy navigators, pioneers of nautical astronomy, sailed around the African Cape and opened a sea route to India. Meanwhile, Columbus dreamed if a western route across the At lantic-which was not infeasible, since intelligent Europeans in the fijteenth century knew the world was round. Finally, he persuaded the king and queen of Spain to com mission him Admiral of the Ocean Sea and to provide money, men, and ships jar his voyage. He /llouid sail under the flag of Spain and would receive a share cif the profits securedjrom whatever lands he reached in Asia.

Most of us have certain preconceptions about Columbus and his jabled voyage: every Columbus Day we commemorate the myth of the bold, visionary hero who defied COI1 temporary superstition and plunged across a storm-tossed Atlantic against all odds, dis covered America, and made the United States possible. In reality, of course, Columbus did not "discover" America; the Native Americans, or Indians, had done that some thirty thousand years before. And other Europeans had probably seen the New World before Columbus embarked on his voyage. vVhat is more, Columbus never believed that he had found a new continent, instead insisting that he had seen islands of the Orient proof of all his theories, goal of all his dreams. In sum, he realized none of his dreams save that of navigating the Atlantic. He died in 1506, unaware that his explorations had given Spain a claim to a vast New World and opened it for the profit and glory of the Old.

To be sure, Columbus had courage, imagination, and persistence, and he was a superior navigator. But his significance was considerably d!fferent from what most

GLOS

INQUISITIO monarchs of S explorations, e Christianity OJ

THE AMERICAN HOLOCAUST

Americans realize. Named rifter Saint Christopher, the legendary pagan turned saint who became the "Christ-bearer," Columbus conceived it his destiny to carry Christian

ity across the ocean to the "pagan" countries of the Orient. In executing his divine mis

sion, the great explorer was the jlagbearer if European values and aspirations, which he unwittingly transported to the shores of the New World. In fact, Columbus's "Christ

ian expeditionary force" established the first outpost if European civilization there, in augurating three centuries of exploration and conquest that changed the course of mod

em history.

On the positive side, the European arrival led to "the Columbian Exchange," de

scribed by two authors as "a global swap if animals, plants, people, ailments and ideas" that had a proJound impact on Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Among other things,

this exchange sent American com to AJrica and American tobacco, potatoes, beans,

squash, tomatoes, and peanuts to Europe. It also brought to the New World horses, cows, chickens, pigs, honeybees, cqffee, wheat, and rice.

But there was another side to the European discovery oj America, a dark side. From

the viewpoint if the first Americans, to whom Columbus gave the name Indios, the Eu ropean invasion if their world was a catastrophe. Columbus himself set the example for subsequent Europeans, initiating a policy of genocide, if enslavement and killing that was to result in the near extermination (if the first Americans. David E. Stannard, au thor if the followin~ selection, calls it "the American holocaust." To make matters worse, the Indians were not immune to the communicable diseases the Europeans carried

to the New World. Epidemics if measles, typhoid, smallpox, dysentery, tuberettlosis, and alcoholism were to sweep through the original Americans, killing them by the count less thousands. Modem demographers estimate that in 1492 some 12 million Indians inhabited the New World north of Mexico; in the ensuing centuries if white conquest, the number of Indians fell by about 90 percent.

What follows is afresh, accurate, and vivid telling of the Columbus story and the be

ginnings if European genocide against the Indians. As you read this selection, how would you explain the treatment if the Indians? Was it all about greed for gold, land, and other riches? Was it prejudice toward a supposedly inferior race? Was it a terribly

misguided conception if religious conversion on the part of the conquerors? Or was it a combination iffactors?

GLOSSARY remained faithful to Islam or Judaism were exiled, tortured, qr killed.

INQUISITION Ferdinand and Isabella, the LAS CASAS Bartolome de Las Casas was a young monarchs of Spain at the time of Columbus's priest who transcribed Columbus's journals and explorations, established religious tribunals to impose became a severe critic of the Spanish cruelties against Christianity on all of their subjects. Those who the native people they encountered. Las Casas is an

;

THE EUROPEAN DISCOVERY

important primary source in the documentation of Spanish attitudes and practices in the New World.

PEASANTS' WAR Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand people perished in 1524 as a result of this uprising. It was a product of famine, poverty, high taxes, and even the inspirational teachings of Martin Luther.

POOR'S HOLES Mass graves for the dead found in European cities during Columbus's time. Starvation and disease resulted in a high mortality rate even in the best of times. Droughts, crop shortages, and downturns in the economy drained fifteenth-century cities of their poverty-stricken population.

REPARTIMIENTO This system of Indian grants, initiated by Columbus, placed entire groups of native people under Spanish masters called mineros in the mines and estancieros on the plantations. The process encouraged further cruelty since the conquerors frequendy worked the enslaved to death in order to receive "short-term material wealth."

REQUERIMIENTO An oath of allegiance to the Catholic church, the Pope, and the Spanish crown. It was read to the native people Columbus enco~mtered in a language that they could not possibly understand. Failure to obey would lead to a holy war that would result in the confiscation of property, slavery, and/or death.

SWINE INFLUENZA (FLU) The domesticated pigs that Columbus took with him on his second voyage were the likely carriers of a highly infectious flu that killed massive numbers of natives and many Spanish.

T he Spain that Christopher Columbus and his crews left behind just before dawn on Au

gust 3, 1492, as they sailed forth from Palos and out into the Adantic, was for most of its people a land of violence, squalor, treachery, and intoler

ance. 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, frequendy 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 m~re than 80,000 Lon

doners--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 pesti

lence they called the Black Death returned. Like most of the other urban centers in Europe, says one

historian who has specialized in th~ subject, "every twenty-five or thirty years---sometimes more fre quendy-the city was convulsed by a great epi

demic." 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 offiet only by in-migra tion 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 co~sumed 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· the existencf late as the s

crease in the

proportion 0 twice the pe Civil War.

That was

were getting centuries pric

to complain that "today

whole sheep bushel and a much as an

of this, as 0 that "the epi;

classic patter

the poor to t of disease in tion." And countryside

as Castile an failures that 1 the fifteenth disease and

Europe, mar were unable

Consequend or impossibll izenry who

starved to de Roadside,

as public latr and theywol low. So too

health hazarc from the pra

butchered ar "special prot

Press, Inc. of the poor,

the margins of perpetual hunger. So precarious was the existence of these multitudes in France that as late as the seventeenth century each "average" in

crease 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 to the city in search of help, then outbreak of disease in the city following upon the malnutri tion." 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 cit izenry 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 fol low. So too would other noxious habits and public

health hazards of the time persist on into the future from the practice ofleaving the decomposing offal of

butchered animals to fester in the streets, to London's "special problem," ... "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 AMERICAN HOLOCAUST

the pit was filled with bodies was it finally covered

over with earth." As one contemporary . . . 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 every

one 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 com mon, and often lasted for years."

Street crime in most cities lurked around every comer. One especially popular technique for rob bing 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 ... when "it was one of the festive

pleasures of Midsummer Day to burn alive one or two dozen cats," and when ... "the continuous dis ruption of town and country by every kind of dan

gerous rabble [and] the permanent threat of harsh and unreliable law enforcement ... nourished a feel

ing 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 resi

dential turf of thieves and brigands, and where the wealthy were forced to hire torch-bearing body

guards 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 EUROPEAN DISCOVERY

the word hardly does it justice----was the Peasants'

War, which broke out in 1524 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 sum

mary of what historians for the past several decades

have been uncovering in their research on rustic com

munities in Europe at large during the entire late me

dieval to early modem 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 tum 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 experi

encing the same feelings of tenderness and love and

fear and sadness, however constricted by the limita

tions of their existence, as did, and do, all human be

ings in every comer of the globe.

But what Lawrence Stone has said about the typi

cal English village also was likely true throughout Eu rope 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 ac

cused of witchcraft and where ten out of every hun dred 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 al

legedly Satanic activities. The tiny village of Wiesen

steig saw sixty-three women burned to death in one

year alone, while in Obermarchtal fifty-four peo ple-out of a total population of barely 70o--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....

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 malnu

trition, one of the causes for such a high infant mor

tality rate (close to three out of ten babies in Spain

did not live to see their first birthdays) was abandon

ment. 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....

The wealthy had their problems too. They hun

gered after gold and silver. The Crusades, begun four

centuries earlier, had increased the appetites of affiu

ent Europeans for exotic foreign luxuries-for silks

and spices, fine cotton, drugs, perfumes, and

jewelry-material pleasures that required pay in bul

lion. 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 pre

cious metal, by way of the Middle East and Africa,

had always been uncertain. Now, however, the wars

in eastern Europe had nearly emptied the Conti

nent's coffers. A new supply, a more regular sup ply-and preferably a cheaper supply-was needed.

Violence, of course, was everywhere, as alluded to

above; but occasionally it took on an especially per

verse character. I

burning of wite!

most locales, in

pieces by an el

limbs were then

Lyon, Hugueno

their various be streets. Other el

and ritual cannib

Such behavie

condoned, at lea

true accusations

for many of the

tions-particular

cisely those ye,

around Europe i

adventures, the

Here, and else" with the powed

lieved to be un

in the most ingf

the stake, on th

beheaded, flayed

On the very

on his journey t

of the city he s:

were deporting. pulsion was COli

Jews had been < ables, often me

and then they" porary describec

I t was pitiful to s(

by hunger, espe<

Half-dead mother

can hardly say ho

by those who tra

the avarice of the

pay their passage!

This was the

named Christol

THE AMERICAN HOLOCAUST

verse 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 tom 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 un

true accusations of such activities fomled the basis

for many of the witch hunts and religious persecu

tions-particularly ofJews-during this time. In pre cisely 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 be

lieved 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,

beheaded, flayed alive, or drawn and quartered.

On the very day that Columbus finally set forth

on his journey that would shake the world, the port

of the city he sailed from was filled with ships that

were deportingJews from Spain. By the time the ex

pulsion was complete between 120,000 and 150,000

Jews had been driven from their homes (their valu

ables, often meager, having first been confiscated)

and then they were cast out to sea. As one contem

porary described the scene:

It was pitiful to see their sufferings. Many were consumed

by hunger, especially nursing mothers and their babies.

Half-dead mothers held dying children in their arms. . .. I

can hardly say how cruelly and greedily they were treated

by those who transported them. Many were drowned by

the avarice of the sailors, and those who were unable to

pay their passage sold their children.

This was the world an ex-trader of Mrican slaves

named Christopher Columbus and his shipmates left

Far from idealizing Christopher Columbus as a bold adventurer,

Ghirlandaio's portrait suggests instead a determined man if the Old Tllorld who brought destruction and violence into new lands

that the explorer described in his journals as "beautiful and rich

for planting." Columbus added that the natives in this Garden of

Eden show "as much love as if they were giving their hearts. "

behind as they sailed from the city of Palos in August

of 1492. It was a world wracked by disease---disease

that killed in massive numbers, but, importantly, that

also tended to immunize survivors. A world in

which all but the wealthy often could not feed themselves, and in which the wealthy themselves

hungered after gold. It was a world, as well, of cruel

violence and certainty of holy truth. Little wonder,

then, mat the first report back from that Atlantic

voyage, purportedly to the Orient, caused such sen

sations across the length and breadth of Europe.

THE EUROPEAN DISCOVERY

In a letter composed aboard the Nina, as the re

turning ships passed through the Azores, Columbus

described his discovery, during the previous fall and

winter, of what he thought was the Indian Sea and

its "many islands filled with people without num

ber." One of the first major islands, which he called

Juana, known to us today as Cuba, "was so long that

1 thought it must be the mainland, the province of [Cathay]." Another large island-the one we now

know as Hispaniola, containing the nations of Haiti

and the Dominican Republic-he called La Spaiiola.

Columbus had reason to be impressed with the size

of these two islands, since together they were two

thirds as large as his home country ofItaly.

The Admiral continued his description of the

wonders he had seen, in a passage that must be

quoted at length if we are to achieve even a small

understanding of the impact his voyage almost im

mediately had on the people of Europe, living under

the wretched conditions of their time and just com

ing out of another cold and miserable winter:

As Juana, so all the other [islands] are very fertile to an ex

cessive degree, and this one especially. In it there are many

harbors on the sea coast, beyond comparison wirh others

which I know in Christendom, and numerous rivers, good

and large, which is marvelous. Its lands are lofty and in it

there are many sierras and very high mountains, to which

the island Tenerife is not comparable. All are most beauti

ful, of a thousand shapes, and all accessible, and filled with

trees of a thousand kinds and taIl, and they seem to touch

the sky; and I am told that they never lose their foliage,

which I can believe, for I saw them as green and beautiful

as they are in Spain in May, and some of them were flow

ering, some with fruit. . . . And there were singing the

nightingale and other little birds of a thousand kinds in the

month of November, there where I went. There are palm

trees of six or eight kinds, which are a wonder to behold

because of their beautiful variety, and so are the other trees

and fruits and plants; therein are marvelous pine groves,

and extensive meadow country; and there is honey, and

there are many kinds of birds and a great variety of fruits.

Upcountry there are many mines of metals, and the popu

lation is innumerable. La Spaiiola is marvelous, the sierras

and the mountains and the plains and the meadows and

the lands are so beautiful and rich for planting and sowing,

and for livestock of every sort, and for building towns and

villages. The harbors of the sea here are such as you could

not believe it without seeing them; and so the rivers, many

and great, and good streams, the most of which bear gold.

If it sounded like Paradise, that was no accident. Par

adise 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 capa

ble 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 litde thing of whatever kind may be given to

them.

For years to come Columbus repeatedly would

insist that his expeditions and adventures in the New

Wodd had nothing to do with "mere reason, mathe

matics, and maps," as two scholars of the subject put

it, but rather that "his 'execution of the affair of the

Indies' was a fulfillment of prophecies in Isaiah." In

addition to helping explain, if taken seriously, why

Columbus in many respects was a less successful nav

igator and helmsman than is commonly supposed

(once into the Caribbean he rarely seemed to know

where he was and routinely lost ships that were

under his cc

guidance is ;

action to his

Numerou

alyzed the e

on the mine of Discover'!

up imagmu

fields, of 11 beasts, was a

acal, Europe

of gold and

there was tl successfully

nocents" to

ing, then, tl brated letter

the lands th,

taken posses

tion and wil

body object<

with a few

sand of a ti

disputed to

Columbus

and had in

of years ear

and of all t jected." CI

So it we

throughout

lumbus pIa

declarations

ship of the

Despite the

nal of the

not underst

of particul

any of the

ject to his

was taking

under his command), this rhetorical claim of biblical

guidance is a clue to understanding the European re

action to his reported find ....

Numerous modem scholars have dissected and an

alyzed the effects of both biblical and classical myth

on the minds of Europeans during this so-called Age

of Discovery. But at least as strong as all the rnixed

up imaginings of terrestrial heavens and Elysian

fields, of lusty maidens and cannibalistic human

beasts, was a fervent, and in many cases a truly mani

acal, European craving for raw power and the wealth

of gold and silver. Among the clergy, meanwhile,

there was the promise of God's favor should they

successfully introduce the New World's "pagan in

nocents" to the glory of his grace. It is not surpris

ing, then, that in the very first sentence of his cele

brated letter to the Spanish Crown Columbus says of

the lands that he has found, "and of them all have I

taken possession for Their Highnesses, by proclama

tion and with the royal standard displayed, and no

body objected." Consider the picture: standing alone

with a few of his fellow officers in the white coral

sand of a tiny island whose identification remains

disputed to this day, an island "discovered" by

Columbus despite the fact that it was well populated

and had in fact been discovered by others thousands

of years earlier, the admiral "took possession" of it

and of all the people it contained. And "nobody ob jected." Clearly, God was on the Spaniards' side.

So it went, from island to island, small and large,

throughout the Caribbean. Wherever he went Co

lumbus planted a cross, "making," as he said, "the

declarations that are required," and claiming owner

ship of the land for his royal patrons back in Spain.

Despite the fact that Columbus noted in his own jour

nal of the voyage that "the people of these lands do

not understand me nor I them," it seems to have been

of particular satisfaction to him that never once did

any of the onlooking Arawak-speaking islanders ob

ject to his repeated proclamations in Spanish that he

was taking control oftheir lands away from them. Lu-

THE AMERICAN HOLOCAUST

dicrous though this scene may appear to us in retro

spect, at the time it was a deadly serious ritual, similar

in ways equally ludicrous and deadly to the other fa

mous ritual the Spanish bestowed upon the non

Spanish-speaking people of the Americas, the reque

rimiento.

Following Columbus, each time the Spanish en

countered a native individual or group in the course

of their travels they were ordered to read to the In

dians a statement informing them of the truth of

Christianity and the necessity to swear immediate al

legiance to the Pope and to the Spanish crown. After

this, if the Indians refused or even delayed in their

acceptance (or, more likely, their understanding) of

the reqllerimiento, the statement continued:

I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall power

fully enter into your country and shall nuke 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 High

nesses. We shall take you and your wives and your children,

and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dis

pose of them as Their Highnesses may command. And we

shall take your good" 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.

In practice, the Spanish usually did lIot wait for the

Indians to reply to their demands. First the Indians

were manacled; then, as it were, they were read their

rights. As one Spanish conquistador and historian de

scribed the routine: "After they had been put in

chains, someone read the Reqllerimiento without

knowing their language and without any inter

preters, and without either the reader or the Indians

understanding the language they had no opportunity

to reply, being immediately carried away prisoners,

the Spanish not failing to use the stick on those who

did not go fast enough.

In this perverse way, the invasion and destruction

of what many, including Columbus, had thought

was a heaven on earth began. Not that a reading of

THE EUROPEAN DISCOVERY

the requerimiento was necessary to the inhuman vio

lence the Spanish were to perpetrate against the na

tive peoples they confronted. Rather, the proclama

tion was merely a legalistic rationale for a fanatically

religious and fanatically juridical and fanatically bru

tal people to justify a holocaust. After all, Columbus

had seized and kidnapped Indian men, women, and

children throughout his first voyage, long before the

requerimiento was in use, five at one stop, six at an

other, more at others, filling his ships with varied

samples of Indians to display like exotic beasts in

Seville and Barcelona upon his return.

On at least one occasion Columbus sent a raiding

party ashore to capture some women with their chil

dren to keep his growing excess of captured native

males company, "because," he wrote in his journal,

his past experience in abducting Mrican slaves had

taught him that "the [Indian] men would behave

better in Spain with women of their country than

without them." On this date he also records the vi

gnette of "the husband of one of these women and

father of three children, a boy and two girls," who

followed his captured family onto Columbus's ship

and said that if they had to go "he wished to come

with them, and begged me hard, and they all now

remain consoled with him."

But not for long. As a harbinger of things to

come, only a half-dozen or so of those many cap

tured native slaves survived the journey to Spain,

and of them only two were alive six months later.

On his second voyage Columbus tried an even more

ambitious kidnapping and enslavement scheme. It is

described by an Italian nobleman, Michele de

Cuneo, who accompanied Columbus on this voy

age:

When our caravels in which I wished to go home had to

leave for Spain, we gathered together in our settlement

1600 people male and female of those Indians, of whom,

among the best males and females, we embarked on our

caravels of 17 February 1495, 550 souls. Of the rest who

were left the announcement went around that whoever

wanted them could take as many as he pleased; and this

was done. And when everybody had been supplied there

were some 400 of them left to whom permission was

granted to go wherever they wanted. Among them were

many women who had infants at the breast. They, in order

the better to escape us, since they were afraid we would

turn to catch them again, left their infants anywhere on the

ground and started to flee like desperate people.

No one knows what happened to those six hundred

or so left-over natives who were enslaved, on the

Admiral's orders, by "whoever wanted them," or the

four hundred or so who fled in terror, or their aban

doned infants-but by the time Columbus's ships

entered the waters outside Spain, of the 550 cap

tured Indians he took with him two hundred had

died. Says Cuneo: "We cast them into the sea."

When they reached Cadiz, half of the remaining 350

slaves were sick and dying. Only a relative few sur

vived much longer, because, Cuneo surmised, "they

are not working people and they very much fear

cold, nor have they long life."

This final point-"nor have they long life"

would not have been true a few years earlier: the

health and life expectancy of the natives had been far

superior to that of the Europeans prior to the

Columbian invasion. But by the time Cuneo was

writing he was certainly correct. Once the first

Spanish settlements had taken root, the hold on life

that any Indian had, at any given moment, was tenu

ous at best. Spanish diseases had begun their own in

vasion of the Americas almost from the moment

Columbus and his crews first breathed upon their

New World hosts. But the systematic, genocidal de

struction of the Indians did not begin until Colum

bus's return.

Columbus's second voyage was the true beginning

of the invasion of the Americas. The royal instruc

tions authorizing the expedition had directed that

the finest ships in Andalusia be outfitted for the trip

and that they be commanded by the most expert pi

lots and nav:

made the va) than 1200 sol,

cavalry troop

Along the w

passengers we

and eight pigs

below.

In early Jal

place on th< Columbus ha,

tal, his town

urtloaded, ho'

the crews. It had come to

fruits, "as if,

one of the m

Admiral's suq

had fallen ill, Columbus diI

crews to expll

the fabulous I But many oft

come down

way.

For years hi

epidemic was

killed so man: might have b

while Samuel

malaria or son

and eating str,

Sale has opte'

too lists malar

culprits. Oth<

smallpox to y

probably) that

afllictions, th<

the signs of sy in the Indies

many years to

not have bee

lots and navigators in the realm. Seventeen ships

made the voyage and aboard those ships were more than 1200 soldiers, sailors, and colonists-including a

cavalry troop of lancers and half a dozen priests.

Along the way, at the Canary Islands, some other passengers were boarded: goats and sheep and cattle, and eight pigs, were placed on deck and in the holds below.

In early January of 1494 the fleet arrived at the

place on the northern coast of Hispaniola that

Columbus had chosen to build his New World capi tal, his town of Isabela. No sooner were the ships urtloaded, however, than sickness broke out among

the crews. It quickly spread among the natives, who

had come to greet the ships with gifts of fish and

fruits, "as if we had been their brothers," recalled one of the men on board. Within a few days, the

Admiral's surgeon reported, a third of the Spaniards had fallen ill, while natives everywhere were dead.

Columbus directed groups of the healthy among his

crews to explore the island's inland regions and find the fabulous gold mines they all were sure existed.

But many of those men returned to the ships, having come down with the mysterious illness along the

way.

For years historians have speculated as to what the epidemic was that laid low so many Spaniards and

killed so many native people. Carl Sauer thought it might have been some sort of intestinal infection, while Samuel Eliot Morison diagnosed it as either

malaria or something caused by "drinking well water and eating strange fish." Most recently, Kirkpatrick

Sale has opted for bacillic dysentery-although he too lists malaria or even syphilis as among the likely

culprits. Others have thought it everything from

smallpox to yellow fever. While it is possible (even probably) that more than one disease was causing the

afflictions, the reported symptoms had nothing of the signs of syphilis, and malaria Was not then present

in the Indies or the Americas, not would it be for many years to come. For the same reasons, it could

not have been yellow fever or smallpox that was

THE AMERICAN HOLOCAUST

wreaking all this havoc, and it certainly did not de

rive from something the Spanish ate or drank, be cause it spread like wildfire not only among the

Spanish, but Yvith particular virulence among the In dian people all across the island. No, the most recent

and original medically informed hypothesis-and the

one that goes the furthest in explaining reported symptoms, including high mortality, and the extra ordinary contagiousness-identifies influenza as the

cause, influenza carried by those Canary Islands pigs.

If, as the Spanish physician and medical historian Francisco Guerra now contends, the epidemic that

ravaged Hispaniola in 1494 was swine influenza, it would have been a pestilence of devastating propor tions. For it now appears that it was swine flu that

swept the world in 1918, killing off at least

20,000,000 people before it finally dissipated. Like other people in the Americas, and unlike the Span ish, the natives of Hispaniola had no previous expo sure to the virus-nor to the numerous other dis

eases that historically, in other parts of the world,

had spread from domesticated animal hosts. Other

than small dogs in some locations and llamas in the Andes, few animals were domesticated anywhere in

the hemisphere. And of the many plagues that in time would overwhelm the Americas' native peo

ples, influenza-of various types, from both humans

and non-human vectors-was second only to small pox and maybe measles as the most rapid epidemic killer of them all.

Whatever it was, in any case, the imported

pathogen moved among the native people with a re

lentlessness that nothing ever had in all their history. "So many Indians died that they could not be

counted," wrote Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, adding that "all through the land the Indians lay dead

everywhere. The stench was very great and pestifer

ous." And in the wake of the plague they had intro duced, the Spanish soldiers followed, seeking gold from the natives, or information as to where to find

it. They were troubled by the illness, and numbers of them died from it. But unlike the island natives the

THE EUROPEAN DISCOVERY

Illustrated works like Pere Bartolome de Las Casas' Very Brief

Account of the Destruction of the Indies helped to spread the

story of Spanish atrocities in the New World. The young priest

European invaders and their forebears had lived with

epidemic pestilence for ages. Their lungs were dam

aged from it, their faces scarred with pocks, but ac

cumulations of disease exposure allowed them now

to weather much. So they carried infections with

them everywhere they went-burdensome, but

rarely fatal, except to the natives that they met.

Following the Admiral's orders, reconnaissance

parties were sent out across the island and off to Cuba,

Jamaica, and to other nearby lands. The Spanish

plagues raced on ahead. Still, the natives, as Columbus

had observed during his first voyage, continued to be

kind and generous to their guests, and so innocent in

the use of dangerous weapons that when Columbus

"showed them swords," he said, "they grasped them

by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance."

described in his journals how the conquerors pursued the natives

and "pitilessly slaughtered everyone like sheep in a corral."

(Clements Library, University of Michigan)

Wherever the marauding, diseased, and heavily

armed Spanish forces went out on patrol, accompa

nied by ferocious armored dogs that had been

trained to kill and disembowel, they preyed on the local communities-already plague-enfeebled-forc

ing 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 main

tained over his men disappeared as he went through

a lengthy p

wild, stealiIl

trying to fo

the imagine,

The Indi,

tive ambush

killing force

might was £;

ever have il

response wa

fields as the

the conquist

contribution

der, to the n

Some des]

lands. One c

with him to he could-a

Once there,

bled his foll,

the treasures

what the Spa

endy were 0

vaders. Whe

greed and sa

the gold to tl It didn't VI

people, kille(

condemned 1

edly, as they

can friar urgt

his soul migh

hell. Hatuey

Christians w(

The massa

for months VI

than 50,000

encounters b

from his sick

strength had

his men's une

them. In Mal

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 ineffec

tive 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 mur der, to the native peoples' woes.

Some desperate Hispaniola natives fled to other is

lands. One of these, a cacique named Hatuey, brought with him to Cuba as many of his surviving people as

he could-and what little gold that they possessed.

Once there, in a place called Punta Maisi, he assem

bled his followers together and displayed for them

the treasures that they had, explaining that this was

what the Spanish troops were after, that these appar

ently were objects of worship to the murderous in

vaders. Whereupon, to protect his people from the

greed and savagery of these vile strangers, he threw

the gold to the bottom of a nearby river.

h didn't work. The Spanish found Hatuey and his

people, killed most of them, enslaved the others, and

condemned their leader to be burned alive. Report edly, as they were tying him to the stake, a Francis

can friar urged him to take Jesus to his heart so that

his soul might go to heaven, rather than descend into

hell. Hatuey replied that if heaven was where the

Christians went, he would rather go to hell.

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

THE AMERICAN HOLOCAUST

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 mission

aries from that trip recalled:

Once the Indians were in the woods, the next step was to fonn 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 50 that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent In

dians 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 disorgan

ized and indiscriminate killings, the Admiral then set

about the task of systematizing their haphazard en

slavement 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 pre

sented with a token to wear around his or her neck

THE EUROPEAN DISCOVERY

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 quo

tas of the ore at the expense of other endeavors, in

cluding food production. The fanunes 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 malnour

ished 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

da<;hed 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 ,his 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 ofhlood 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 Zu

cayo, 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 pro

ceeded to devour it before the mother's eyes.... When

there were among the prisoners some women who had re

cently 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 wit

nessed:

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

tom 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 dis

tant past, the familiarity is reinforced by the tenn the

Spanish used to describe their campaign of terror:

"pacificatio

were in Vi

nothing cor

island of H

land's popu

the time of

declined by

out. And at

celerated.

In plottin

native pOpl

around the

bers seemed

the inexoral

continues. 'I record indi,

respite for tl the overall 1

fall followin

shadowy an(

Spanish at tb the Caribbea

stabilization

thousands 01

fruitless atte~

natives of Hi

But death

as it had HisI

the Bahamas

million peop:

placements 1 eradicated in

its enonnou

With the (

thereby effec

century, for<

Spanish saval

to the smallel

raid took pIa

in the Hay 1:

taken to fon

Other slave

"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 is

land'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, ac

celerated.

In plotting on a graph the decline of Hispaniola's

native population there appears a curious bulge,

around the year 1510, when the diminishing num bers 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 re placements 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, thc 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.

THE AMERICAN HOLOCAUST

when Cortes arrived in the region, all the Bay Is lands themselves had been entirely shorn of their in

habitants. In order to exploit most fully the land and its pop

ulace, 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 re

ferred to, in a revised version, as the system of en comimdas. This was a dividing-up, not of the land,

but of entire peoples and communities, and the be stowal 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 firestonn of human devas

tation. Caring only for short-term material wealth

that could be wrenched up from the earth, the Span

ish 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 Span

ish overseers, known as mineros in the mines and es

tancieros 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

THE EUROPEAN DISCOVERY

nothings and demanded stiff punishment. The visitadQr 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 ill ness, 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 un

accustomed 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 g:lsping and moaning in their death

agony, repeating "Hungry, hungry."

In the face of utter hopelessness, the Indians began

simply surrendering their lives. Some committed sui

cide. 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 de

spoiled 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 tom 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 re

united 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 fam

ished, 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 des

peration, while others caused themselves to abort with cer

tain herbs that produced stillborn children. In this way

husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and chil

dren 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 unfortu

nate, was depopulated.

By 1496, we already have noted, the population

of Hispaniola had fallen from eight million to be

tween 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 nonnallifetime of a single human

being, an entire culture of millions of people, thou

sands 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, Gyp

sies, Ibos, Ben!

dans, and more

this many-or

nocent people.

And then tl the mainland a

slaughter had b:

This, of course, ~

caust perpetrated

Spaniards, then t

the Anglo-Ameli the early Indian J

dent AndrewJack

QUEST

1 Describe life

Columbus set sa

and why did it s. Describe the gre

rich and poor in

2 If one venture

the quality of Ii the graphic desci

in this essay, e:

sies, Ibos, Bengalis, Timorese, Kampucheans, Ugan dans, and more, none has come close to destroying this many-or this great a proportion-of wholly in nocent people.

And then the Spanish turned their attention to the mainland of Mexico and Central America. The slaughter had barely begun.

This, if course, was only the beginning of the Indian holo caust perpetrated by the invading Europeans-first the Spaniards, then the Portuguese, then the British, and later the Anglo-Americans. Selection 21 will introduce you to the early indian policy if the United States, and to Presi dent AndrewJackson's ruthless treatment of the Cherokees.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 Describe life in the big cities of Europe when Columbus set sail in 1492. What was "in-migration," and why did it save those early cities from extinction? Describe the great disparity that existed between the rich and poor in fifteenth-century Europe.

2 If one ventured outside the cities of Europe, was the quality of life better in the countryside? Given

the graphic descriptions of living conditions pictured in this essay, explain why the people of Europe

THE AMERICAN HOLOCAUST

frequently turned on each other during witchcraft hysteria.

3 What perceived needs preoccupied the wealthy of Europe, and why were these desires an incentive for the voyages of Columbus and his contemporaries? Did the native people that Columbus encountered have an abundance of gold? Explain the system that Columbus developed to encourage these people to find gold and the punishment he inflicted if they

failed.

4 Describe Columbus's first impressions of the new land he "discovered" and the people who inhabited it. What significance did his landing in the New World have to the Catholic church in Spain?

5 In what way was the requerimiento only an excuse to treat native people brutally, confiscate their land, and enslave them? What was the likely disease that killed so many Native Americans when Columbus returned on his second voyage and established the town of Isabella? Why were the native people more vulnerable to this plague than the Spanish?

6 Genocide and holocaust are strong value-laden words that are usually associated with the horrible actions of Nazi Germany during World War II. Do these words apply to what the Spanish did to the native people they encountered? If so, what motivated such unpar donable actions-was it a conscious greed for gold or an unconscious disregard for human life?

sies, Ibos, Bengalis, Timorese, Kampucheans, Ugan dans, and more, none has come close to destroying this many--or this great a proportion-of wholly in nocent people.

And then the Spanish turned their attention to the mainland of Mexico and Central America. The slaughter had barely begun.

This, of course, was only the beginning if the Indian holo caust perpetrated by the invading Europeans-first the

Spaniards, then the Portuguese, then the British, and later

the Anglo-Americans. Selection 21 will introduce you to the early Indian policy of the United States, and til Presi

dent AndrewJackson's ruthless treatment ifthe Cherokees.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

2 If one ventured outside the cities of Europe, was the quality of life better in the countryside? Given the graphiC descriptions of living conditions pictured in this essay, explain why the people of Europe

THE AMERICAN HOLOCAUST

frequently turned on each other during witchcraft hysteria.

4 Describe Columbus's first impressions of the new land he "discovered" and the people who inhabited it. What significance did his landing in the New World have to the Catholic church in Spain?