Christopher Columbus, Mariner?

The story of Christopher Columbus in Hispaniola can never be told by the people who already lived in present-day Haiti and Dominican Republic, the Arawak, when Columbus arrived there in 1492.  The reason for this is because the Arawak preserved and passed along their history, their collective cultural mindset and psyche, orally, and within fifty years of Columbus' arrival the Arawak had been virtually killed off.

We can, however, glean a lot about Columbus from his very own journal.  Yes, Columbus kept a journal, and Western historians are very aware of it, and only within the past couple decades have they begun using it in their assessment of Columbus and his exploits in Hispaniola.

In his journal Columbus described how the people who greeted him when he landed in Hispaniola (the Arawak) waded out into the sea to greet him and his men, and how they brought them gifts of various kinds.  He described them as peaceable, gentle, and said: "They do not bear arms, and do not know (what a sword is) for when I showed them a sword they took it by the edge and cut themselves...they are very simple and honest and exceedingly liberal with all they have...they would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

And what did Columbus want?  This is not hard to determine.  In the first two weeks of journal entries there is one word that recurs seventy-five times: oro.  That is, gold!  Columbus wanted gold.  

In the standard Western-centric accounts of Columbus, what is emphasized, again and again, by many historians is his desire to convert the native peoples to Christianity, and his reverence for the Bible.  Columbus probably was concerned about God in a kind of 'God is on our side' sort of way, but what is not ambiguous is his desire to attain large amounts of gold.  According to Columbus himself, he ordered the Arawak to find a certain amount of gold within a certain period of time.  If they they did not meet their quota, their punishment would be to have their hands or arms hacked off.

Samuel Eliot Morison (1887 – 1976), Harvard historian and admiring Columbus biographer who wrote Christopher Columbus, Mariner, published in 1955, confirms these stories and even far worse atrocities for that matter, yet still speaks of Columbus in heroic terms.  Morison blames Columbus for the depopulation of Hispaniola of its native peoples, yet speaks of Columbus as a man who loved and served God.

Modern ethnologists estimate the number of Arawak at around 300,000 in 1492, 100,000 by 1496, 60,000 by 1508, and about 500 by 1548, just fifty-two years after Columbus' arrival.

What the Spaniards who came to Hispaniola did to the Arawak in the years proceeding Columbus is told in detail by the Spanish Dominican priest, Bartolomé de las Casas (1484 – 1566), who came to the "New World" a few years after Columbus' arrival, spending forty years there ministering to the Arawak, and ultimately trying to protect them from the heavy-handed Spanish authorities.

In his book, The Devastation of the Indies, las Casas, writes of the Arawak: "...these people are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity, yet into this sheepfold came the Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening beasts. Their reason for killing and destroying is that Christian's have an ultimate aim which is to acquire gold."  Las Casas reports that he saw soldiers stabbing the Arawak for sport, and smashing the heads of infant children with rocks.

Most Americans, from elementary school on up, learn about Columbus and his exploits from a Western-centric perspective, the likes put forth by Samuel Morison.  But few are privy to Columbus’ own version of what transpired, or that of las Casas.  Samuel Morison does spend some time detailing the treatment of the Arawak by Columbus and his men, and uses the word "genocide" to describe the overall result of his "discovery."  But Morison submerges Columbus' atrocities under the wake of a long and admiring treatment of Columbus, saying:

"He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great--his superb faith in God and in his own mission as the Christ-bearer to lands beyond Christendom.”

There was a lot of controversy during the 1992 quincentennial of Christopher Columbus' "discovery" of the "New World".  There was much indignation on the part of Native Americans and others about the glorification of Columbus, while still others fomented a heated defense of Columbus.  A hundred years earlier, in 1892, during the quadricentennial of Columbus' "discovery", it was a different story.  There were huge celebrations in certain major U.S. cities such as Chicago and New York.  In New York, for example, there were five days of parades, fireworks, military marches, and naval pageants.  Over a million visitors flocked to the city.  A memorial statue of Columbus was unveiled at a corner of Central Park, now known as Columbus Circle.  It was the glorification of expansion and conquest, which Columbus symbolized and America then represented as it had nearly completed the task of conquering and "subduing" the Native American population from east to west.  The "patriotism" invoked in celebrating Columbus was profoundly tied to the notion of inferiority of the conquered peoples.

Columbus' destruction of the native Arawak had been justified by the status of "sub-human", given to them in word and deed by their European conquerors.  The official historian of Hispaniola in the early sixteenth century, Fernandes de Oviedo, did not deny what had been done to the Arawak by the Spanish.  He acknowledged "innumerable cruel deaths...as countless as the stars."  But this was acceptable, he said, because: "to use gunpowder against pagans is to offer incense to the Lord."  Even the sixteenth-century Catholic theologian, Juan Gines de Sepulveda, declared:  "How can we doubt that these people, so uncivilized, so barbaric, so contaminated with so many sins and obscenities, have been justly conquered."

The dehumanization of the "enemy" or "the other" has always accompanied wars of conquest.  It is easier to justify atrocities if they are committed against "infidels", "pagans", and peoples of an "inferior race".  The jubilation  for Columbus in 1892 was seen as a celebration, not just of his maritime exploits, but of human "progress".  The issues that people began having with Columbus and what he came to represent less than one hundred years later, leading up to the quincentennial in 1992, were not with the benefits of "progress", that is, advancement of technology, science, standards of living, etc., but rather with whether or not this "progress" is justified in light of such human misery.  Historians, political scientists, and social scientists are now asking if progress is simply to be measured only in terms of industrial, economic, social, and technological increase without regard to the immense costs suffered by certain peoples, cultures and populations who were destroyed or decimated because they were deemed or understood to be obstacles to "progress."