GUEST EDITORIAL
On Oct. 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on San Salvador, an island in the present-day Bahamas.
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Of the native Arawaks he encountered there, Columbus wrote in his diary, “They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features …They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance.
“They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane…They would make fine servants … With 50 men, we could subjugate them and make them do whatever we want.”
He later added, “As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.”
On his way back from his first voyage he penned a letter to “Their Catholic Highnesses” Ferdinand and Isabella, promising “as much gold as they want …spices and cotton, as much as their Highnesses shall command … and slaves, as many as they shall order, who will be idolators.”
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On his second voyage, Columbus established a settlement, named La Isabella, on an island he called Hispaniola, in present-day Haiti. He enslaved thousands of Arawaks there, working many to death in a futile attempt to extract gold from ground that contained but scant amounts of the metal.
He sent 500 slaves back to Spain; 200 perished on the journey. Undeterred, he wrote, “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”
We have an exhaustive, and gruesome, first-hand account of the horrors Columbus and his followers brought to the Caribbean from Bartolome de las Casas, a Dominican priest who documented his experience in Cuba and elsewhere in his “History of the Indies.”
In Book Two de las Casas writes, “Endless testimonies … prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives … But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then …The admiral (Columbus), it is true, was blind as those who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians…”
Of the Arawaks enslaved to work in the mines we hear, “Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or nine months and when they meet they are so exhausted and depressed on both sides …they cease to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7,000 children died in three months.
“Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation. In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk …and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile, was depopulated. My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write…”
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Even Columbus’s most sympathetic and famous biographer, Harvard’s Samuel Eliot Morison, admitted, almost in passing, “The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.”
Columbus did not invent slavery, but he practiced it with a vengeance. Appallingly, enslavement of peoples conquered by Christians, whether Moslems, African Blacks, or native Americans, was explicitly approved in edicts from a succession of popes, from Nicholas V in 1455 to Alexander VI in 1493.
The violence unleashed by Columbus and his followers, coupled with diseases they transmitted (mostly influenza, smallpox, and measles) resulted in the virtual annihilation of Native Americans in the Caribbean within 100 years.
That Columbus brought slavery, torture, and rape to every part of the “New World” he touched is incontrovertible. His own words, and those of contemporary observers, provide overwhelming evidence of his depredations.
Those who wish to venerate and commemorate Columbus as an intrepid explorer must face up to his extensive, well-documented, and gruesome dark side.
Italian Americans, and all Americans, can easily find much more worthy historical figures to put on pedestals.
Dr. Louis Balizet is a retired Pueblo oncologist.
Source: https://t-tees.com
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