Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress
excerpted from a
People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn
Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged
from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to
get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his
sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks
ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote
of this in his log:
"They... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears
and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads
and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned....
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 fifty men we could subjugate them
all and make them do whatever we want."
These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians
on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were
to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in
sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance,
dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of
kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and
its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.
"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."
The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the
The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so
free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed
them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they
never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...."
He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their
Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage
"as much gold as they need . . . and as many slaves as they
ask." He was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal
God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over
Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his
second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve
hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from
island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives.
But as word spread of the Europeans' intent they found more and
more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left
behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians,
after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking
women and children as slaves for sex and labor.
Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after
expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had
to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend.
In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up
fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens
guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best
specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred
died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up
for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although
the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they
showed "no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus
later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on
sending all the slaves that can be sold."
But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus,
desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had
to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province
of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields
to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to
collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they
brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their
necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut
off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold
around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled,
were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.
Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks
faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the
Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death.
Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants
were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through
murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on
Haiti were dead.
When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians
were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas.
They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands.
By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left.
By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows
none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the
The chief source-and, on many matters the only source-of in
formation about what happened on the islands after Columbus came
is Bartolome de las Casas, who, as a young priest, participated
in the conquest of Cuba. For a time he owned a plantation on which
Indian slaves worked, but he gave that up and became a vehement
critic of Spanish cruelty.
In Book Two of his History of the Indies, Las Casas (who at
first urged replacing Indians by black slaves, thinking they were
stronger and would survive, but later relented when he saw the
effects on blacks) tells about the treatment of the Indians by
the Spaniards. It is a unique account and deserves to be quoted
"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, 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
Las Casas tells how the Spaniards "grew more conceited
every day" and after a while refused to walk any distance.
They "rode the backs of Indians if they were in a hurry"
or were carried on hammocks by Indians running in relays. "In
this case they also had Indians carry large leaves to shade them
from the sun and others to fan them with goose wings."
Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards "thought
nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting
slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades." Las
Casas tells how "two of these so-called Christians met two
Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots
and for fun beheaded the boys."
The Indians' attempts to defend themselves failed. And when
they ran off into the hills they were found and killed. So, Las
Casas reports. "they suffered and died in the mines and other
labors in desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world to
whom they could tun for help." He describes their work in
"... mountains are stripped from top to bottom and bottom
to top a thousand times; they dig, split rocks, move stones, and
carry dirt on their backs to wash it in the rivers, while those
who wash gold stay in the water all the time with their backs
bent so constantly it breaks them; and when water invades the
mines, the most arduous task of all is to dry the mines by scooping
up pansful of water and throwing it up outside....
After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was
the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting,
up to a third of the men died. While the men were sent many miles
away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced
into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills
for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight
or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed
on both sides . . . 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, 7000 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...."
When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, "there
were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians;
so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished
from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will
believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness
can hardly believe it...."
Thus began the history, five hundred years ago, of the European
invasion of the Indian settlements in the Americas. That beginning,
when you read Las Casas-even if his figures are exaggerations
(were there 3 million Indians to begin with, as he says, or less
than a million, as some historians have calculated, or 8 million
as others now believe?) is conquest, slavery, death. When we read
the history books given to children in the United States, it all
starts with heroic adventure-there is no bloodshed-and Columbus
Day is a celebration.
The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the
Arawaks) the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name
of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history,
in which the past is told from the point of view of governments,
conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus,
deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers,
Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members
of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent
the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such
a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional
conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people
with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national
interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial
expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the
courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education
and the mass media.
"History is the memory of states," wrote Henry Kissinger
in his first book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to
tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint
of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who
suffered from those states men's policies. From his standpoint,
the "peace" that Europe had before the French Revolution
was "restored" by the diplomacy of a few national leaders.
But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored
people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except
in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger,
exploitation-a world not restored but disintegrated.
When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming
not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians.
The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, created
the excuse to take Indian land by declaring the area legally a
"vacuum." The Indians, he said, had not "subdued"
the land, and therefore had only a "natural" right to
it, but not a "civil right." A "natural right"
did not have legal standing.
The Puritans also appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask
of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance,
and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession."
And to justify their use of force to take the land, they cited
Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth
the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves
The Indian population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico
when Columbus came would ultimately be reduced to less than a
million. Huge numbers of Indians would die from diseases introduced
by the whites. A Dutch traveler in New Netherland wrote in 1656
that "the Indians . . . affirm, that before the arrival of
the Christians, and before the smallpox broke out amongst them,
they were ten times as numerous as they now are, and that their
population had been melted down by this disease, whereof nine-tenths
of them have died." When the English first settled Martha's
Vineyard in 1642, the Wampanoags there numbered perhaps three
thousand. There were no wars on that island, but by 1764, only
313 Indians were left there. Similarly, Block Island Indians numbered
perhaps 1,200 to 1,500 in 1662, and by 1774 were reduced to fifty-one.
Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their
massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that
special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private
property. It was a morally ambiguous drive; the need for space,
for land, was a real human need. But in conditions of scarcity,
in a barbarous epoch of history ruled by competition, this human
need was transformed into the murder of whole peoples.
History of the United States