American Heroes (3 page)

The Europeans' knowledge of barbarians did not all come from books. They had had contact with nearby Barbary itself and also with the much more barbarous Canary Islands, which they had rediscovered in the fourteenth century. By 1492 the Spaniards had subdued every island but Tenerife to Christianity, civilization, and slavery.

Slavery was an ancient instrument of civilization, and in the fifteenth 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. The Spanish government frowned on the enslavement of submissive natives, and in the Canaries it was mostly the recalcitrant who became slaves. But not all Europeans, or indeed all Spaniards, discriminated between submissive and nonsubmissive barbarians. Throughout the fifteenth century, as the Portuguese explored the coast of Africa, large numbers of well-clothed sea captains brought civilization to naked savages by carrying them off 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, clothed as well as unclothed, 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 off on his voyage, he laid in a store of hawk's bells. If the barbarous people he expected to find in the Indies should think civilization and Christianity an insufficient reward for submission to Spain, perhaps hawk's bells would help.

Columbus sailed from Palos de la Frontera on Friday the third of August, 1492, reached the Canary Islands six days later, and stayed there for a month to finish outfitting his ships. He left on September 6, and five 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 difficulty 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, filled with people eager to submit to their new admiral and viceroy.

Columbus made four voyages to America, during which he succeeded in exploring an astonishingly large area of the Caribbean and a part of the northern coast of South America. Everything he saw fitted his conception of the Indies. Cuba, he believed, was a peninsula on the mainland of China, a part of the province of Mangi; he named the easternmost point of it Cape Alpha et Omega and contemplated the awesome fact that the entire landmass of the world stretched continuously westward between him and Cape St. Vincent in Portugal, the western-most extension of Europe.

From the moment of his first landfall, Columbus was looking for spices and gold. The reason he was so distraught at not recognizing trees and plants was that he thought that some of them must be valuable spices, which he ought to bring back with him in quantity. But gold was unquestionably more important than spices or even than pearls and precious stones, and Columbus had his heart set on finding gold. “Gold,” he rhapsodized, “is most excellent…and he who possesses it may do what he will in the world, and may so attain as to bring souls to paradise.” At every island the first 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 first glimpse of it. From aboard ship it was possible to make out rich fields waving with grass. There were good harbors, lovely sand beaches, and “trees of a thousand kinds, all laden with fruit, which the admiral believed to be spices and nutmegs, but they were not ripe and he did not recognize them.” The people were shy and fled 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 first 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 people of Española were the handsomest 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 fibers of the gossampine tree. But most of the day they spent 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. Never had there been such generosity. 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 people of Española seemed like relics of the golden age. On the basis of what he told Peter Martyr, who recorded his voyages, Martyr wrote, “If we shall not bee ashamed to confesse the Trueth, 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 satisfie nature, without further vexation for knowledge of things to come.”

As the idyllic Arawak Indians of Española 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. The Caribs lived on islands of their own and met every European approach with poisoned arrows, which men and women together fired in showers. They not only were fierce 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, both of men and women.”

Columbus had no doubts about how to proceed, either with the lovable but lazy Arawaks or with the hateful but industrious Cannibals. He had come to take possession and to establish dominion. The Arawaks of Española would obviously make good subjects. He had no sooner set eyes on them than he began making plans. In almost the same breath he described their 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 fitted 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 Cannibals. This plan of replacing Cannibals with cattle 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 successfully with their poisoned arrows that the Spaniards decided to withhold the blessings of civilization from them and to concentrate their efforts on the seemingly more amenable Arawaks of Española.

The process of civilizing the Arawaks got under way in earnest after the
Santa Maria
ran aground, Christmas Day, 1492, off 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 who had backed his expedition 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 find 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 fifteen hundred of them, and five hundred were shipped off 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. It was a shrewd strategy because a civil man reportedly ate more in one day than a whole family of barbarians in a month. But it did not work. The Spaniards were not to be shaken off. They were sure there was more gold in the island than the natives had yet found, and they determined to make them dig it out. Columbus built more forts throughout the island and decreed that every Arawak of fourteen 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, twenty-five 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 first presented him were the accumulation of many years. To fill 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 fleeing 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 fit. This was the beginning of the system of “repartimientos” or “encomiendas” later extended to other areas of Spanish occupation. With its inauguration Columbus's economic control of Española effectively ceased, and even his political authority was revoked later in the same year when the king appointed a new governor.