Pestilence and Genocide
excerpted from the book
American Holocaust
by David Stannard
Oxford University Press, 1992
p57
The Spain that Christopher Columbus and his crews left behind
before dawn on August 3, 1492, as they sailed forth from Palos
and out into the Atlantic, was for most of its people a land of
violence, squalor, treachery, and intolerance. 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, frequently 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 more than
80,000 Londoners-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 pestilence they called the Black Death
returned. Like most of the other urban centers in Europe, says
one historian who has specialized in the subject, "every
twenty-five or thirty years-sometimes more frequently-the city
was convulsed by a great epidemic." 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 offset only by in-migration 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 consumed
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 of perpetual hunger. So precarious was
the existence of these multitudes in France that as late as the
seventeenth century each "average" increase 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 in search of help,
then outbreak of disease in the city following upon the malnutrition."
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 citizenry 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 follow.
So too would other noxious habits and public health hazards of
the time persist on into the future-from the practice of leaving
the decomposing offal of butchered animals to fester in the streets,
to London's "special problem," as historian Lawrence
Stone puts it, of "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 pit was filled with bodies
was it finally covered over with earth." As one contemporary,
quoted by Stone, 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
everyone 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 common, and often lasted for years."
Street crime in most cities lurked around
every corner. One especially popular technique for robbing 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, observes Norbert Elias, when "it
was one of the festive pleasures of Midsummer Day to burn alive
one or two dozen cats," and when, as Johan Huizinga once
put it, "the continuous disruption of town and country by
every kind of dangerous rabble [and] the permanent threat of harsh
and unreliable law enforcement nourished a feeling 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 residential turf
of thieves and brigands, and where the wealthy were forced to
hire torch-bearing bodyguards 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 word
hardly does it justice-was the Peasants' War, which broke out
in 1S24 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 summary of what historians
for the past several decades have been uncovering in their research
on rustic communities in Europe at large during the entire late
medieval to early modern 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 turn 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 experiencing
the same feelings of tenderness and love and fear and sadness,
however constricted by the limitations of their existence, as
did, and do, all human beings in every corner of the globe.
But what Lawrence Stone has said about
the typical English village also was likely true throughout Europe
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 accused of witchcraft
and where ten out of every hundred 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 allegedly Satanic
activities. The tiny village of Wiesensteig saw sixty-three women
burned to death in one year alone, while in Obermarchtal fifty-four
people-out of a total population of barely 700-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."
At the time La Bruyere was writing (which
was a good bit later than the time of Columbus, during which time
conditions had improved), the French "knew every nuance of
poverty... At the top were those who "at best lived at subsistence
level, at worst fell far below," while at the bottom were
those described as dans un e'tat d'indigence absolue, meaning
that "one had no food or adequate clothing or proper shelter,
that one had parted with the few battered cooking-pots and blankets
which often constituted the main assets of a working-class family."
Across the whole of France, between a third and half the population
fell under one of these categories of destitution, and in regions
such as Brittany, western Normandy, Poitou, and the Massif the
proportion ascended upwards of two-thirds. In rural areas in general,
between half and 90 percent of the population did not have land
sufficient for their support, forcing them to migrate out, fall
into permanent debt, or die.
And France was hardly unique. In Genoa,
writes historian Fernand Braudel, "the homeless poor sold
themselves as galley slaves every winter." They were fortunate
to have that option. In more northern climes, during winter months,
the indigent simply froze to death. The summer, on the other hand,
was when the plague made its cyclical visitations. That is why,
m summer months, the wealthy left the cities to the poor: as Braudel
points out elsewhere, Rome along with other towns "was a
graveyard of fever" during times of warmer weather.
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 malnutrition,
one of the causes for such a high infant mortality rate (close
to three out of ten babies in Spain did not live to see their
first birthdays) was abandonment. 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.
East European children, particularly Romanians,
seem to have been favorites of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
slave trade, although many thousands of adults were enslaved as
well. Child slaves, however, were as expensive as adults, for
reasons best left to the imagination, as is indicated by a fourteenth-century
letter from a man involved in the business: "We are informed
about the little slave girl you say you personally need,"
he wrote to his prospective client, "and about her features
and age, and for what you want her.... Whenever ships come from
Romania, they should carry some [slave girls]; but keep in mind
that little slave girls are as expensive as the grown ones, and
there will be none that does not cost 50 to 60 florins if we want
one of any value." Those purchasing female slaves of child-bearing
age sometimes were particularly lucky and received a free bonus
of a baby on the way. As historian John Boswell has reported:
"Ten to twenty percent of the female slaves sold in Seville
in the fifteenth century were pregnant or breast-feeding, and
their infants were usually included with them at no extra cost."
The wealthy had their problems too. They
hungered after gold and silver. The Crusades, begun four centuries
earlier, had increased the appetites of affluent Europeans for
exotic foreign luxuries-for silks and spices, fine cotton, drugs,
perfumes, and jewelry-material pleasures that required pay in
bullion. 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 precious metal, by way of the Middle
East and Africa, had always been uncertain. Now, however, the
wars in eastern Europe had nearly emptied the Continent's coffers.
A new supply, a more regular supply-and preferably a cheaper supply-was
needed.
Violence, of course, was everywhere, as
alluded to above; but occasionally it took on an especially perverse
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 torn 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 untrue accusations
of such activities formed the basis for many of the witch hunts
and religious persecutions-particularly of Jews-during this time.
In precisely 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 believed
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 I beheaded, flayed alive, or drawn and quartered.
***
p63
If it sounded like Paradise, that was no accident. Paradise 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 capable 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 little thing of whatever kind may be
given to them.
***
p66
I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully
enter into your country and shall make 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 Highnesses. We shall
take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves
of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as Their Highnesses
may command. And we shall take your goods, 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.
a statement Spaniards were required to
read to Indians they encountered in the New World
***
p69
Wherever the marauding, diseased, and heavily armed Spanish forces
went out on patrol, accompanied by ferocious armored dogs that
had been trained to kill and disembowel, they preyed on the local
communities- already plague-enfeebled-forcing 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 maintained over his men disappeared as
he went through 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
ineffective 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 murder, to the native peoples'
woes.
***
p70
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
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 missionaries from that trip recalled:
Once the Indians were in the woods, the
next step was to form 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 so that
harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians 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 disorganized and indiscriminate
killings, the Admiral then set about the task of systematizing
their haphazard enslavement 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 presented with a token to wear around his or
her neck 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 quotas of the
ore at the expense of other endeavors, including food production.
The famines 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 malnourished 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 dashed 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 this 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 of blood 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 Zucayo, 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 proceeded to devour
it before the mother's eyes.... When there were among the prisoners
some women who had recently 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 witnessed:
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 torn 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 distant past, the
familiarity is reinforced by the term the Spanish used to describe
their campaign of terror: "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 island'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, accelerated.
In plotting on a graph the decline of
Hispaniola's native population there appears a curious bulge,
around the year 1510, when the diminishing numbers 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 replacements 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, the 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, when Cortes arrived in the region, all
the Bay Islands themselves had been entirely shorn of their inhabitants.
In order to exploit most fully the land
and its populace, 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 referred to, in a revised version, as the system
of encomiendas. This was a dividing-up, not of the land, but of
entire peoples and communities, and the bestowal 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 firestorm of human devastation.
Caring only for short-term material wealth that could be wrenched
up from the earth, the Spanish 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 Spanish overseers, known as mineros in
the mines and estancieros 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-nothings and demanded stiff punishment.
The visitador 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 illness, 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 unaccustomed
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 gasping and moaning in their death agony, repeating "Hungry,
hungry."
In the face of utter hopelessness, the
Indians began simply surrendering their lives. Some committed
suicide. 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 despoiled
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 torn
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 reunited 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 famished, 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 desperation,
while others caused themselves to abort with certain herbs that
produced stillborn children. In this way husbands died in the
mines, wives died at work, and children 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 unfortunate, was depopulated.
By 1496, we already have noted, the population
of Hispaniola had fallen from eight million to between 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 normal lifetime of a
single human being, an entire culture of millions of people, thousands
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, Gypsies,
Ibos, Bengalis, Timorese, Kampucheans, Ugandans, and more, none
has come close to destroying this many-or this great a proportion
of wholly innocent people.
And then the Spanish turned their attention
to the mainland of Mexico and Central America. The slaughter had
barely begun. The exquisite city of Tenochtitlan was next.
***
p82
The gratuitous killing and outright sadism
that the Spanish soldiers had carried out on Hispaniola and in
Central Mexico was repeated in the long march to the south. Numerous
reports, from numerous reporters, tell of Indians being led to
the mines in columns, chained together at the neck, and decapitated
if they faltered. Of children trapped and burned alive in their
houses, or stabbed to death because they walked too slowly. Of
the routine cutting off of women's breasts, and the tying of heavy
gourds to their feet before tossing them to drown in lakes and
lagoons. Of babies taken from their mothers' breasts, killed,
and left as roadside markers. Of "stray" Indians dismembered
and sent back to their villages with their chopped-off hands and
noses strung around their necks. Of "pregnant and confined
women, children, old men, as many as they could capture,"
thrown into pits in which stakes had been imbedded and "left
stuck on the stakes, until the pits were filled." And much,
much more.
One favorite sport of the conquistadors
was "dogging." Traveling as they did with packs of armored
wolfhounds and mastiffs that were raised on a diet of human flesh
and were trained to disembowel Indians, the Spanish used the dogs
to terrorize slaves and to entertain the troops. An entire book,
Dogs of the Conquest, has been published recently, detailing the
exploits of these animals as they accompanied their masters throughout
the course of the Spanish depredations. "A properly fleshed
dog," these authors say, "could pursue a 'savage' as
zealously and effectively as a deer or a boar.... To many of the
conquerors, the Indian was merely another savage animal, and the
dogs were trained to pursue and rip apart their human quarry with
the same zest as they felt when hunting wild beasts.''
Vasco Nunez de Balboa was famous for such
exploits and, like others, he had his own favorite dog-Leoncico,
or "little lion," a reddish-colored cross between a
greyhound and a mastiff-that was rewarded at the end of a campaign
for the amount of killing it had done. On one much celebrated
occasion, Leoncico tore the head off an Indian leader in Panama
while Balboa, his men, and other dogs completed the slaughter
of everyone in a village that had the ill fortune to lie in their
journey's path. Heads of human adults do not come off easily,
so the authors of Dogs of the Conquest seem correct in calling
this a "remarkable feat," although Balboa's men usually
were able to do quite well by themselves. As one contemporary
description of this same massacre notes:
The Spaniards cut off the arm of one,
the leg or hip of another, and from some their heads at one stroke,
like butchers cutting up beef and mutton for market. Six hundred,
including the cacique, were thus slain like brute beasts. ...Vasco
ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs.
Just as the Spanish soldiers seem to have
particularly enjoyed testing the sharpness of their yard-long
rapier blades on the bodies of Indian children, so their dogs
seemed to find the soft bodies of infants especially tasty, and
thus the accounts of the invading conquistadors and the padres
who traveled with them are filled with detailed descriptions of
young Indian children routinely taken from their parents and fed
to the hungry animals.
***
p85
... overall in central Mexico the population fell by almost 95
percent within seventy-five years following the Europeans' first
appearance - from more than 25,000,000 people in 1519 to barely
1,300,000 in 1595.
***
p91
For the Andean society as a whole ... within a century following
their first encounter with the Spanish, 94-96 percent of their
once-enormous population had been exterminated; along their 2000
miles of coastline, where once 6,500,000 people had lived, everyone
was dead.
***
p135
The earliest European mariners and explorers
in California ... repeatedly referred to the great numbers of
Indians living there. In places where Vizcaino's ships could approach
the coast or his men could go ashore, the Captain recorded, again
and again, that the land was thickly filled with people. And where
he couldn't approach or go ashore "because the coast was
wild," the Indians signaled greetings by building fires-fires
that "made so many columns of smoke on the mainland that
at night it looked like a procession and in the daytime the sky
was overcast." In sum, as Father Ascension put it, "this
realm of California is very large and embraces much territory,
nearly all inhabited by numberless people."
But not for very long. Throughout the
late sixteenth and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spanish
disease and Spanish cruelty took a large but mostly uncalculated
toll. Few detailed records of what happened during that time exist,
but a wealth of research in other locales has shown the early
decades following Western contact to be almost invariably the
worst for native people, because that is when the fires of epidemic
disease burn most freely. Whatever the population of California
was before the Spanish came, however, and whatever happened during
the first few centuries following Spanish entry into the region,
by 1845 the Indian population of California had been slashed to
150,000 (down from many times that number prior to European contact)
by swarming epidemics of influenza, diphtheria, measles, pneumonia,
whooping cough, smallpox, malaria, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis,
dysentery, syphilis, and gonorrhea-along with everyday settler
and explorer violence. As late as 1833 a malaria epidemic brought
in by some Hudson's Bay Company trappers killed 20,000 Indians
by itself, wiping out entire parts of the great central valleys.
"A decade later," writes one historian, "there
still remained macabre reminders of the malaria epidemic: collapsed
houses filled with skulls and bones, the ground littered with
skeletal remains."
Terrible as such deaths must have been,
if the lives that preceded them were lived outside the Spanish
missions that were founded in the eighteenth century, the victims
might have counted themselves lucky. Two centuries earlier the
Puritan minister John Robinson had complained to Plymouth's William
Bradford that although a group of massacred Indians no doubt "deserved"
to be killed, "Oh, how happy a thing had it been, if you
had converted some before you had killed any!" That was probably
the only thing the New England Puritans and California's Spanish
Catholics would have agreed upon. So, using armed Spanish troops
to capture Indians and herd them into the mission stockades, the
Spanish padres did their best to convert the natives before they
killed them.
And kill they did. First there were the
Jesuit missions, founded early in the eighteenth century, and
from which few vital statistics are available. Then the Franciscans
took the Jesuits' place. At the mission of Nuestra Senora de Loreto,
reported the Franciscan chronicler Father Francisco Palou, during
the first three years of Franciscan rule 76 children and adults
were baptized, while 131 were buried. At the mission of San Jose
Cumundu during the same time period 94 were baptized, while 241
died. At the mission of Purisima de Cadegomo, meanwhile, 39 were
baptized-120 died. At the mission of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe
the figures were similar: 53 baptisms, 130 deaths. The same held
true at others, from the mission of Santa Rosalia de Mulege, with
48 baptisms and 113 deaths, to the mission of San Ignacio, with
115 baptisms and 293 deaths-all within the same initial three-year
period.
***
p142
By 1845 the Indian population of California
was down to no more than a quarter of what it had been when the
Franciscan missions were established in 1769. That is, it had
declined by at least 75 percent during seventy-five years of Spanish
rule. In the course of just the next twenty-five years, under
American rule, it would fall by another 80 percent. The gold rush
brought to California a flood of American miners and ranchers
who seemed to delight in killing Indians, miners and ranchers
who rose to political power and prominence-and from those platforms
not only legalized the enslavement of California Indians, but,
as in Colorado and elsewhere, launched public campaigns of genocide
with the explicitly stated goal of all-out Indian extermination.
***
p145
Between 1852 and 1860, under American
supervision, the indigenous population of California plunged from
85,000 to 35,000, a collapse of about 60 percent within eight
years of the first gubernatorial demands for the Indians' destruction.
By 1890 that number was halved again: now 80 percent of the natives
who had been alive when California became a state had been wiped
out by an official policy of genocide. Fewer than 18,000 California
Indians were still living, and the number was continuing to drop.
In the late 1840s and 1850s one observer of the California scene
had watched his fellow American whites begin their furious assault
"upon [the Indians], shooting them down like wolves, men,
women, and children, wherever they could find them," and
had warned that this "war of extermination against the aborigines,
commenced in effect at the landing of Columbus, and continued
to this day, [is] gradually and surely tending to the final and
utter extinction of the race." While to most white Californians
such a conclusion was hardly lamentable, to this commentator it
was a major concern-but only because the extermination "policy
[has] proved so injurious to the interests of the whites."
That was because the Indians' "labor, once very useful, and,
in fact, indispensable in a country where no other species of
laborers were to be obtained at any price, and which might now
be rendered of immense value by pursuing a judicious policy, has
been utterly sacrificed by this extensive system of indiscriminate
revenge."
***
p146
... between 95 and 98 percent of California's Indians had been
exterminated in little more than a century. And even this ghastly
numerical calculation is inadequate, not only because it reveals
nothing of the hideous suffering endured by those hundreds of
thousands of California native peoples, but because it is based
on decline only from the estimated population for the year 1769-a
population that already had been reduced savagely by earlier invasions
of European plague and violence. Nationwide by this time only
about one-third of one percent of America's population-250,000
out of 76, 000,000 people-were natives. The worst human holocaust
the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop
for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of
millions of people, finally had leveled off. There was, at last,
almost no one left to kill.
***
p147
During the course of four centuries - from the 1490s to the 1890s
- Europeans and white Americans engaged in an unbroken string
of genocide campaigns against the native peoples of the Americas.
American
Holocaust