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Columbus’ Confusion About the New World

The European discovery of America opened possibilities for those

with eyes to see. But Columbus was not one of them

Edmund S. Morgan

October 2009

Christopher Columbus carried ideas that boded ill for Indies natives. The Gallery Collection / Corbis

In the year 1513, a group of men led by Vasco Núñez de Balboa marched across the

Isthmus of Panama and discovered the Paci�c Ocean. They had been looking for it—they

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knew it existed—and, familiar as they were with oceans, they had no di�culty in

recognizing it when they saw it. On their way, however, they saw a good many things

they had not been looking for and were not familiar with. When they returned to Spain

to tell what they had seen, it was not a simple matter to �nd words for everything.

For example, they had killed a large and ferocious wild animal. They called it a tiger,

although there were no tigers in Spain and none of the men had ever seen one before.

Listening to their story was Peter Martyr, member of the King's Council of the Indies and

possessor of an insatiable curiosity about the new land that Spain was uncovering in the

west. How, the learned man asked them, did they know that the ferocious animal was a

tiger? They answered "that they knewe it by the spottes, �ercenesse, agilitie, and such

other markes and tokens whereby auncient writers have described the Tyger." It was a

good answer. Men, confronted with things they do not recognize, turn to the writings of

those who have had a wider experience. And in 1513 it was still assumed that the

ancient writers had had a wider experience than those who came after them.

Columbus himself had made that assumption. His discoveries posed for him, as for

others, a problem of identi�cation. It seemed to be a question not so much of giving

names to new lands as of �nding the proper old names, and the same was true of the

things that the new lands contained. Cruising through the Caribbean, enchanted by the

beauty and variety of what he saw, Columbus assumed that the strange plants and trees

were strange only because he was insu�ciently versed in the writings of men who did

know them. "I am the saddest man in the world," he wrote, "because I do not recognize

them."

We need not deride Columbus' reluctance to give up the world that he knew from books.

Only idiots escape entirely from the world that the past bequeaths. The discovery of

America opened a new world, full of new things and new possibilities for those with eyes

to see them. But the New World did not erase the Old. Rather, the Old World

determined what men saw in the New and what they did with it. What America became

after 1492 depended both on what men found there and on what they expected to �nd,

both on what America actually was and on what old writers and old experience led men

to think it was, or ought to be or could be made to be.

During the decade before 1492, as Columbus nursed a growing urge to sail west to the

Indies—as the lands of China, Japan and India were then known in Europe—he was

studying the old writers to �nd out what the world and its people were like. He read the

Ymago Mundi of Pierre d'Ailly, a French cardinal who wrote in the early 15th century, the

travels of Marco Polo and of Sir John Mandeville, Pliny's Natural History and the Historia

Rerum Ubique Gestarum of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II). Columbus was not a

scholarly man. Yet he studied these books, made hundreds of marginal notations in

them and came out with ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and

strong and sometimes wrong, the kind of ideas that the self-educated person gains from

independent reading and clings to in de�ance of what anyone else tries to tell him.

The strongest one was a wrong one—namely, that the distance between Europe and the

eastern shore of Asia was short, indeed, that Spain was closer to China westward than

eastward. Columbus never abandoned this conviction. And before he set out to prove it

by sailing west from Spain, he studied his books to �nd out all he could about the lands

that he would be visiting. From Marco Polo he learned that the Indies were rich in gold,

silver, pearls, jewels and spices. The Great Khan, whose empire stretched from the Arctic

to the Indian Ocean, had displayed to Polo a wealth and majesty that dwarfed the

splendors of the courts of Europe.

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Polo also had things to say about the ordinary people of the Far East. Those in the

province of Mangi, where they grew ginger, were averse to war and so had fallen an easy

prey to the khan. On Nangama, an island o� the coast, described as having "great

plentie of spices," the people were far from averse to war: they were anthropophagi—

man-eaters—who devoured their captives. There were, in fact, man-eating people in

several of the o�shore islands, and in many islands both men and women dressed

themselves with only a small scrap of cloth over their genitals. On the island of Discorsia,

in spite of the fact that they made �ne cotton cloth, the people went entirely naked. In

one place there were two islands where men and women were segregated, the women

on one island, the men on the other.

Marco Polo occasionally slipped into fables like this last one, but most of what he had to

say about the Indies was the result of actual observation. Sir John Mandeville's travels,

on the other hand, were a hoax—there was no such man—and the places he claimed to

have visited in the 1300s were fantastically �lled with one-eyed men and one-footed

men, dog-faced men and men with two faces or no faces. But the author of the hoax did

draw on the reports of enough genuine travelers to make some of his stories plausible,

and he also drew on a legend as old as human dreams, the legend of a golden age when

men were good. He told of an island where the people lived without malice or guile,

without covetousness or lechery or gluttony, wishing for none of the riches of this world.

They were not Christians, but they lived by the golden rule. A man who planned to see

the Indies for himself could hardly fail to be stirred by the thought of �nding such a

people.

Columbus surely expected to bring back some of the gold that was supposed to be so

plentiful. The spice trade was one of the most lucrative in Europe, and he expected to

bring back spices. But what did he propose to do about the people in possession of

these treasures?

When he set out, he carried with him a commission from the king and queen of Spain,

empowering him "to discover and acquire certain islands and mainland in the ocean

sea" and to be "Admiral and Viceroy and Governor therein." If the king and Columbus

expected to assume dominion over any of the Indies or other lands en route, they must

have had some ideas, not only about the Indies but also about themselves, to warrant

the expectation. What had they to o�er that would make their dominion welcome? Or if

they proposed to impose their rule by force, how could they justify such a step, let alone

carry it out? The answer is that they had two things: they had Christianity and they had

civilization.

Christianity has meant many things to many men, and its role in the European conquest

and occupation of America was varied. But in 1492 to Columbus there was probably

nothing very complicated about it. He would have reduced it to a matter of corrupt

human beings, destined for eternal damnation, redeemed by a merciful savior. Christ

saved those who believed in him, and it was the duty of Christians to spread his gospel

and thus rescue the heathens from the fate that would otherwise await them.

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Although Christianity was in itself a su�cient justi�cation for dominion, Columbus would

also carry civilization to the Indies; and this, too, was a gift that he and his

contemporaries considered adequate recompense for anything they might take. When

people talked about civilization—or civility, as they usually called it—they seldom

speci�ed precisely what they meant. Civility was closely associated with Christianity, but

the two were not identical. Whereas Christianity was always accompanied by civility, the

Greeks and Romans had had civility without Christianity. One way to de�ne civility was

by its opposite, barbarism. Originally the word "barbarian" had simply meant

"foreigner"—to a Greek someone who was not Greek, to a Roman someone who was not

Roman. By the 15th or 16th century, it meant someone not only foreign but with

manners and customs of which civil persons disapproved. North Africa became known

as Barbary, a 16th-century geographer explained, "because the people be barbarous,

not onely in language, but in manners and customs." Parts of the Indies, from Marco

Polo's description, had to be civil, but other parts were obviously barbarous: for

example, the lands where people went naked. Whatever civility meant, it meant clothes.

But there was a little more to it than that, and there still is. Civil people distinguished

themselves by the pains they took to order their lives. They organized their society to

produce the elaborate food, clothing, buildings and other equipment characteristic of

their manner of living. They had strong governments to protect property, to protect

good persons from evil ones, to protect the manners and customs that di�erentiated

civil people from barbarians. The superior clothing, housing, food and protection that

attached to civilization made it seem to the European a gift worth giving to the ill-

clothed, ill-housed and ungoverned barbarians of the world.

Slavery was an ancient instrument of civilization, and in the 15th century it had been

revived as a way to deal with barbarians who refused to accept Christianity and the rule

of civilized government. Through slavery they could be made to abandon their bad

habits, put on clothes and reward their instructors with a lifetime of work. Throughout

the 15th century, as the Portuguese explored the coast of Africa, large numbers of well-

clothed sea captains brought civilization to naked savages by carrying them o� to the

slave markets of Seville and Lisbon.

Since Columbus had lived in Lisbon and sailed in Portuguese vessels to the Gold Coast of

Africa, he was not unfamiliar with barbarians. He had seen for himself that the Torrid

Zone could support human life, and he had observed how pleased barbarians were with

trinkets on which civilized Europeans set small value, such as the little bells that

falconers placed on hawks. Before setting o� on his voyage, he laid in a store of hawk's

bells. If the barbarous people he expected to �nd in the Indies should think civilization

and Christianity an insu�cient reward for submission to Spain, perhaps hawk's bells

would help.

Columbus sailed from Palos de la Frontera on Friday, August 3, 1492, reached the

Canary Islands six days later and stayed there for a month to �nish out�tting his ships.

He left on September 6, and �ve weeks later, in about the place he expected, he found

the Indies. What else could it be but the Indies? There on the shore were the naked

people. With hawk's bells and beads he made their acquaintance and found some of

them wearing gold nose plugs. It all added up. He had found the Indies. And not only

that. He had found a land over which he would have no di�culty in establishing Spanish

dominion, for the people showed him an immediate veneration. He had been there only

two days, coasting along the shores of the islands, when he was able to hear the natives

crying in loud voices, "Come and see the men who have come from heaven; bring them

food and drink." If Columbus thought he was able to translate the language in two days'

time, it is not surprising that what he heard in it was what he wanted to hear or that

what he saw was what he wanted to see—namely, the Indies, �lled with people eager to

submit to their new admiral and viceroy.

Columbus made four voyages to America, during which he explored an astonishingly

large area of the Caribbean and a part of the northern coast of South America. At every

island the �rst thing he inquired about was gold, taking heart from every trace of it he

found. And at Haiti he found enough to convince him that this was Ophir, the country to

which Solomon and Jehosophat had sent for gold and silver. Since its lush vegetation

reminded him of Castile, he renamed it Española, the Spanish island, which was later

Latinized as Hispaniola.

Española appealed to Columbus from his �rst glimpse of it. From aboard ship it was

possible to make out rich �elds waving with grass. There were good harbors, lovely sand

beaches and fruit-laden trees. The people were shy and �ed whenever the caravels

approached the shore, but Columbus gave orders "that they should take some, treat

them well and make them lose their fear, that some gain might be made, since,

considering the beauty of the land, it could not be but that there was gain to be got."

And indeed there was. Although the amount of gold worn by the natives was even less

than the amount of clothing, it gradually became apparent that there was gold to be

had. One man possessed some that had been pounded into gold leaf. Another appeared

with a gold belt. Some produced nuggets for the admiral. Española accordingly became

the �rst European colony in America. Although Columbus had formally taken possession

of every island he found, the act was mere ritual until he reached Española. Here he

began the European occupation of the New World, and here his European ideas and

attitudes began their transformation of land and people.

The Arawak Indians of Española were the handsomest people that Columbus had

encountered in the New World and so attractive in character that he found it hard to

praise them enough. "They are the best people in the world," he said, "and beyond all

the mildest." They cultivated a bit of cassava for bread and made a bit of cottonlike cloth

from the �bers of the gossampine tree. But they spent most of the day like children

idling away their time from morning to night, seemingly without a care in the world.

Once they saw that Columbus meant them no harm, they outdid one another in bringing

him anything he wanted. It was impossible to believe, he reported, "that anyone has

seen a people with such kind hearts and so ready to give the Christians all that they

possess, and when the Christians arrive, they run at once to bring them everything."

To Columbus the Arawaks seemed like relics of the golden age. On the basis of what he

told Peter Martyr, who recorded his voyages, Martyr wrote, "they seeme to live in that

golden worlde of the which olde writers speake so much, wherein menne lived simply

and innocently without enforcement of lawes, without quarreling, judges and libelles,

content onely to satis�e nature, without further vexation for knowledge of things to

come."

As the idyllic Arawaks conformed to one ancient picture, their enemies the Caribs

conformed to another that Columbus had read of, the anthropophagi. According to the

Arawaks, the Caribs, or Cannibals, were man-eaters, and as such their name eventually

entered the English language. (This was at best a misrepresentation, which Columbus

would soon exploit.) The Caribs lived on islands of their own and met every European

approach with poisoned arrows, which men and women together �red in showers. They

were not only �erce but, by comparison with the Arawaks, also seemed more energetic,

more industrious and, it might even be said, sadly enough, more civil. After Columbus

succeeded in entering one of their settlements on his second voyage, a member of the

expedition reported, "This people seemed to us to be more civil than those who were in

the other islands we have visited, although they all have dwellings of straw, but these

have them better made and better provided with supplies, and in them were more signs

of industry."

Columbus had no doubts about how to proceed, either with the lovable but lazy Arawaks

or with the hateful but industrious Caribs. He had come to take possession and to

establish dominion. In almost the same breath, he described the Arawaks' gentleness

and innocence and then went on to assure the king and queen of Spain, "They have no

arms and are all naked and without any knowledge of war, and very cowardly, so that a

thousand of them would not face three. And they are also �tted to be ruled and to be set

to work, to cultivate the land and to do all else that may be necessary, and you may build

towns and teach them to go clothed and adopt our customs."

So much for the golden age. Columbus had not yet prescribed the method by which the

Arawaks would be set to work, but he had a pretty clear idea of how to handle the

Caribs. On his second voyage, after capturing a few of them, he sent them in slavery to

Spain, as samples of what he hoped would be a regular trade. They were obviously

intelligent, and in Spain they might "be led to abandon that inhuman custom which they

have of eating men, and there in Castile, learning the language, they will much more

readily receive baptism and secure the welfare of their souls." The way to handle the

slave trade, Columbus suggested, was to send ships from Spain loaded with cattle (there

were no native domestic animals on Española), and he would return the ships loaded

with supposed Cannibals. This plan was never put into operation, partly because the

Spanish sovereigns did not approve it and partly because the Cannibals did not approve

it. They defended themselves so well with their poisoned arrows that the Spaniards

decided to withhold the blessings of civilization from them and to concentrate their

e�orts on the seemingly more amenable Arawaks.

The process of civilizing the Arawaks got underway in earnest after the Santa Maria ran

aground on Christmas Day, 1492, o� Caracol Bay. The local leader in that part of

Española, Guacanagari, rushed to the scene and with his people helped the Spaniards to

salvage everything aboard. Once again Columbus was overjoyed with the remarkable

natives. They are, he wrote, "so full of love and without greed, and suitable for every

purpose, that I assure your Highnesses that I believe there is no better land in the world,

and they are always smiling." While the salvage operations were going on, canoes full of

Arawaks from other parts of the island came in bearing gold. Guacanagari "was greatly

delighted to see the admiral joyful and understood that he desired much gold."

Thereafter it arrived in amounts calculated to console the admiral for the loss of the

Santa Maria, which had to be scuttled. He decided to make his permanent headquarters

on the spot and accordingly ordered a fortress to be built, with a tower and a large

moat.

What followed is a long, complicated and unpleasant story. Columbus returned to Spain

to bring the news of his discoveries. The Spanish monarchs were less impressed than he

with what he had found, but he was able to round up a large expedition of Spanish

colonists to return with him and help exploit the riches of the Indies. At Española the

new settlers built forts and towns and began helping themselves to all the gold they

could �nd among the natives. These creatures of the golden age remained generous.

But precisely because they did not value possessions, they had little to turn over. When

gold was not forthcoming, the Europeans began killing. Some of the natives struck back

and hid out in the hills. But in 1495 a punitive expedition rounded up 1,500 of them, and

500 were shipped o� to the slave markets of Seville.

The natives, seeing what was in store for them, dug up their own crops of cassava and

destroyed their supplies in hopes that the resulting famine would drive the Spaniards

out. But it did not work. The Spaniards were sure there was more gold in the island than

the natives had yet found, and were determined to make them dig it out. Columbus built

more forts throughout the island and decreed that every Arawak of 14 years or over was

to furnish a hawk's bell full of gold dust every three months. The various local leaders

were made responsible for seeing that the tribute was paid. In regions where gold was

not to be had, 25 pounds of woven or spun cotton could be substituted for the hawk's

bell of gold dust.

Unfortunately Española was not Ophir, and it did not have anything like the amount of

gold that Columbus thought it did. The pieces that the natives had at �rst presented him

were the accumulation of many years. To �ll their quotas by washing in the riverbeds

was all but impossible, even with continual daily labor. But the demand was unrelenting,

and those who sought to escape it by �eeing to the mountains were hunted down with

dogs taught to kill. A few years later Peter Martyr was able to report that the natives

"beare this yoke of servitude with an evill will, but yet they beare it."

The tribute system, for all its injustice and cruelty, preserved something of the Arawaks'

old social arrangements: they retained their old leaders under control of the king's

viceroy, and royal directions to the viceroy might ultimately have worked some

mitigation of their hardships. But the Spanish settlers of Española did not care for this

centralized method of exploitation. They wanted a share of the land and its people, and

when their demands were not met they revolted against the government of Columbus.

In 1499 they forced him to abandon the system of obtaining tribute through the Arawak

chieftains for a new one in which both land and people were turned over to individual

Spaniards for exploitation as they saw �t. This was the beginning of the system of

repartimientos or encomiendas later extended to other areas of Spanish occupation. With

its inauguration, Columbus' economic control of Española e�ectively ceased, and even

his political authority was revoked later in the same year when the king appointed a new

governor.

For the Arawaks the new system of forced labor meant that they did more work, wore

more clothes and said more prayers. Peter Martyr could rejoice that "so many

thousands of men are received to bee the sheepe of Christes �ocke." But these were

sheep prepared for slaughter. If we may believe Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican

priest who spent many years among them, they were tortured, burned and fed to the

dogs by their masters. They died from overwork and from new European diseases. They

killed themselves. And they took pains to avoid having children. Life was not �t to live,

and they stopped living. From a population of 100,000 at the lowest estimate in 1492,

there remained in 1514 about 32,000 Arawaks in Española. By 1542, according to Las

Casas, only 200 were left. In their place had appeared slaves imported from Africa. The

people of the golden age had been virtually exterminated.

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Why? What is the meaning of this tale of horror? Why is the �rst chapter of American

history an atrocity story? Bartolomé de Las Casas had a simple answer, greed: "The

cause why the Spanishe have destroyed such an in�nitie of soules, hath been onely, that

they have helde it for their last scope and marke to gette golde." The answer is true

enough. But we shall have to go further than Spanish greed to understand why

American history began this way. The Spanish had no monopoly on greed.

The Indians' austere way of life could not fail to win the admiration of the invaders, for

self-denial was an ancient virtue in Western culture. The Greeks and Romans had

constructed philosophies and the Christians a religion around it. The Indians, and

especially the Arawaks, gave no sign of thinking much about God, but otherwise they

seemed to have attained the monastic virtues. Plato had emphasized again and again

that freedom was to be reached by restraining one's needs, and the Arawaks had

attained impressive freedom.

But even as the Europeans admired the Indians' simplicity, they were troubled by it,

troubled and o�ended. Innocence never fails to o�end, never fails to invite attack, and

the Indians seemed the most innocent people anyone had ever seen. Without the help

of Christianity or of civilization, they had attained virtues that Europeans liked to think of

as the proper outcome of Christianity and civilization. The fury with which the Spaniards

assaulted the Arawaks even after they had enslaved them must surely have been in part

a blind impulse to crush an innocence that seemed to deny the Europeans' cherished

assumption of their own civilized, Christian superiority over naked, heathen barbarians.

That the Indians were destroyed by Spanish greed is true. But greed is simply one of the

uglier names we give to the driving force of modern civilization. We usually prefer less

pejorative names for it. Call it the pro�t motive, or free enterprise, or the work ethic, or

the American way, or, as the Spanish did, civility. Before we become too outraged at the

behavior of Columbus and his followers, before we identify ourselves too easily with the

lovable Arawaks, we have to ask whether we could really get along without greed and

everything that goes with it. Yes, a few of us, a few eccentrics, might manage to live for a

time like the Arawaks. But the modern world could not have put up with the Arawaks

any more than the Spanish could. The story moves us, o�ends us, but perhaps the more

so because we have to recognize ourselves not in the Arawaks but in Columbus and his

followers.

The Spanish reaction to the Arawaks was Western civilization's reaction to the barbarian:

the Arawaks answered the Europeans' description of men, just as Balboa's tiger

answered the description of a tiger, and being men they had to be made to live as men

were supposed to live. But the Arawaks' view of man was something di�erent. They died

not merely from cruelty, torture, murder and disease, but also, in the last analysis,

because they could not be persuaded to �t the European conception of what they ought

to be.

Edmund S. Morgan is a Sterling Professor emeritus at Yale University.

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Bartolomé de Las Casas lamented that "the Spanishe have destroyed such an infinitie of soules" in their search for gold. North Wind Picture Archives / Alamy

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Christopher Columbus carried ideas that boded ill for Indies natives. The Gallery Collection / Corbis

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