Columbus: The Four Voyages by Laurence Bergreen

Author:Laurence Bergreen
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: History
ISBN: 9781101544327
Publisher: Viking Adult
Published: 2011-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Spanish refused to shoulder the blame. The mass suicide resulted from the Indians’ “own stubbornness,” said Peter Martyr. “The Indians purposely destroyed all their bread [cassava] fields,” Columbus told his Sovereigns in October 1495. “To prevent my searching for gold the Indians put up as many obstacles as they could.” At the same time, he acknowledged that “nothing else makes them so sad and upset as the fact that we are coming into their territory.” But in reality, the Indians had little interest in gold, especially in comparison to Columbus. In his version, the Indians, after realizing that they would not be able to divert him from his hunt for gold, belatedly “resumed planting and seeding the land because they were starving, but heaven did not help them out with rain this time and they were ruined and died and are dying at an incredible rate.” He ascribed their deaths to “starvation.”

The dwindling number of survivors found themselves trapped in a survivalist endgame. Some took refuge in the mountains, where Spanish dogs set upon them. Those who avoided the dogs succumbed to starvation and illness. Although estimates of the population are inexact, the trend is plain. Of the approximately 300,000 Indians in Hispaniola at the time of Columbus’s first voyage in 1492, 100,000 or so died between 1494 and 1496, half of them during the mass suicide. Las Casas estimated that the Indian population in 1496 was only one-third of what it had been in 1494. (“What a splendid harvest and how quickly they reaped it!” he wrote acidly.) Twelve years later, in 1508, a census counted 60,000 Indians, or one-fifth of the original population, and by 1548 Fernández de Oviedo found only five hundred Indians, the survivors of the hundreds of thousands who had populated the island when Columbus arrived, and who had seen him as the fulfillment of a longstanding prophecy. It was only now that the meaning of that prophecy became clear: his presence meant their extinction.

In time the Taínos made peace with their adversaries. A tribe combining both Caribs and Taíno emerged, and seemed to point the way to coexistence. The arrival of Columbus’s fleets, one after the other, disturbed the spontaneous compromise, and added a new level of stress and conflict to this volatile society. The leading figure was Columbus’s adversary, Caonabó, the Carib cacique who married a Taíno wife, Behechio’s sister, Anacaona. Not long before Columbus’s arrival, other Taínos had married Caribs who renounced cannibalism; in this, Caonabó and Anacaona were not alone. A third tribe, the Ciguayo, appeared to be a hybrid of the two former adversaries. Las Casas reported that they had forgotten their native tongue and instead “spoke a strange language, almost barbaric” that might have combined their idiom with the Taínos’ speech. Like the Caribs, they grew their hair long, and used liberal applications of red and black war paint, but unlike them, the Ciguayo did not poison their arrows. It was the Ciguayo who fired off arrows at

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