Less Than Human

by Smith, David Livingstone

  When Columbus set sail from Palos de la Frontera in southwestern Spain, the harbor was glutted with Jewish refugees trying to escape before the final curtain fell. “It was pitiful to see their sufferings,” wrote one eyewitness. “Many were consumed by hunger.… Half-dead mothers held dying children in their arms.”7 Columbus turned his back to the human catastrophe unfolding in Europe, and headed west. But he was unknowingly bound for a vastly more hideous calamity; one that he himself was destined to foment.

  In October, Columbus made landfall somewhere in the Bahamas, and then sailed on to plant the Spanish flag on an island that he named “the Spanish land” (Hispaniola). On his triumphant return to Spain, along with half a dozen captive natives to exhibit to his countrymen, Columbus was awarded the title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and appointed viceroy and governor of all the new lands that he had discovered. He became an instant celebrity.

  Columbus set out again a year later with a fleet of seventeen ships, more than 1,200 men, and a pack of twenty dogs. This time, deadly microbes came along for the ride. Disease ravaged the Caribbean islands, as it would later decimate the rest of the Americas, and untold numbers of Indians died. The Spaniards also brought carnage. Equipped with the finest instruments of death that fifteenth-century technology had to offer, they killed, raped, and pillaged the islands. Even their greyhounds and mastiffs were trained to attack and disembowel Indians on command. As a reward, they were permitted to gorge on the flesh of their human prey.8

  Decades later, a Dominican missionary named Bartolomé de Las Casas chronicled the Spanish depredations. “Once the Indians were in the woods,” he wrote in a typical passage from his monumental History of the Indies, “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.… So they would cut an Indian’s hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and they would send them 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.9

  Las Casas had firsthand knowledge of the colonial project. Born in 1484, as a nine-year-old boy he was one of the throng that lined the streets to watch Columbus parading captive Indians through Seville. A year later, his father Pedro sailed with Columbus on his second voyage, and returned with an Indian slave as a gift to his son.10 According to one eyewitness “we gathered together in our settlement 1,600 people male and female of those Indians … of whom … we embarked … 550 souls. Of the rest who were left the announcement went around that whoever wanted them could take as many as he pleased.” Around 600 of the remaining Indians were taken as slaves. Most of the original 550 captive Indians died en route, and were thrown overboard for the sharks to eat. Historian David Stannard remarks, “No one knows what happened to those six hundred or so left-over natives who were enslaved, on the Admiral’s orders, by ‘whoever wanted them’.…” However, we do know that one of them reached Spain alive, and was given to the adolescent Bartolomé de Las Casas as a personal servant.

  In 1502, father and son traveled together to Hispaniola, where Pedro had been awarded an encomienda—a grant of land and a supply of Indian slaves—for his service to the Crown. As a young man, Las Casas witnessed Indians being worked to death in mines and on plantations. Later, he would describe how newborn babies died from malnutrition, and how women would kill their infants, or induce miscarriage, to spare them such suffering.11

  Las Casas also witnessed the atrocities of war. As a chaplain during the invasion of Cuba, he looked on as:

  A Spaniard … suddenly drew his sword. Then the whole hundred drew theirs 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.… 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.12

  When Columbus made landfall in 1492, Hispaniola was home to around a million people. By 1510, only eighteen years later, a lethal cocktail of virgin soil infection and Spanish oppression had reduced them to 46,000. In 1509, something between 600,000 and one million souls inhabited the neighboring islands of Jamaica, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, but by 1552 no more than two hundred were left.13 At the same time, similar events were unfolding all over the New World—in Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, Florida, and elsewhere. One eyewitness reported that in Panama the Spaniards hacked off limbs “like butchers cutting up beef and mutton for market,” and another complained that “some Indians they burned alive; they cut off the hands, noses, tongues, and other members of some; they threw others to the dogs; they cut off the breasts of women.”14 A group of Dominican friars protested to the future king and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V that:

  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.15

  In 1511, Las Casas heard a priest named Antonio Montesinos preach against the Spanish barbarities. “I am the voice crying in the wilderness…,” Montesinos told his congregation, “the voice of Christ in the desert of this island … [saying that] you are all in mortal sin … on account of the cruelty and tyranny with which you use these innocent people. Are these not men? Have they not rational souls? Must not you love them as you love yourselves?”16 After listening to Montesinos, Las Casas experienced a crisis of conscience, gave up his slaves, and campaigned for Native American rights—tirelessly writing, preaching, and petitioning the Crown on their behalf. Because of his efforts, the King of Spain, probably the most powerful man in the world at the time, ordered that a debate take place between Las Casas and a man named Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the legitimacy of using force against the Indians. It took place in the northern Spanish city of Valladolid in the year 1550.

  Sepúlveda was a well-known humanist and Aristotelian scholar, and he based his case on Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, arguing that Native Americans are “slaves by nature, uncivilized, barbarian and inhuman.” In approaching the matter in this way, Sepúlveda was part of a scholarly tradition that had been going on since at least 1510, when the Scottish philosopher and theologian John Mair described the indigenous people of the Caribbean as natural slaves who “live like beasts” (Mair’s work was well known in Spain, and was cited in Spanish debates about Native American rights). However, Sepúlveda pressed the idea of Indian barbarism further than his predecessors had done. He insisted that there is almost as great a difference between Indians and Spaniards as between monkeys and men, and assured the jury that “you will scarcely find even vestiges of humanity” in them, and that, although the natives are not “monkeys and bears,” their mental abilities are like those of “bees and spiders.” Why bees and spiders? This is probably a reference to a passage from Aristotle’s Physics. The context is a discussion of purposive behavior by animals. Behavior that is purposive but nonetheless irrational is evident “in the case of animals other than man, since they use neither craft nor inquiry nor deliberation in producing things—indeed this is why some people are puzzled about whether spiders, ants, and other such things operate by understanding or in some other way.” Aristotle believed that only humans can think. So, in comparing the behavior of Indians to that
of spiders and ants, Sepúlveda implicitly denied that they are rational—and therefore human—beings.17

  Sepúlveda also referred to the Indians as homunculi. The notion of the homunculus was a fixture of the medieval imagination. Homunculi were thought to be humanoid entities produced in an unnatural manner from human sperm. There were two theories of how homunculi come into being. Some alchemists claimed to be able to create homunculi in the laboratory, rather like medieval test-tube babies. A writer known as Pseudo-Thomas (thus named, because he tried to pass his writings off as authored by Thomas Aquinas) described an experiment in which one “takes the semen of a man and places it in a clean vessel under the heat of dung for thirty days” after which “a man having all the members of a man is generated there.” Pseudo-Thomas claimed that, although this creature would outwardly resemble a human being, it would not possess a human soul (Pseudo-Thomas lifted this story from the writings of the ninth-century Arab alchemist Abū Bakr Muhammad Ibn Zakarīyā al-Rāzī). Writing in a similar vein, the Spanish theologian Alonso Tostado described an experiment supposedly performed by the Spanish alchemist/physician Arnald of Villanova, who sealed some human semen in a container with some unspecified drugs. He reported, “Finally after some days, many transmutations having occurred, a human body was formed out of it, but not perfectly organized.” Arnald reportedly destroyed his homunculus by smashing the vessel in which it was growing, because he was uncertain whether God would infuse a human soul into the artificial being that he had created.18

  At the time of the debate in Valladolid, the world authority on homunculi was none other than Paracelsus, the grandiose Swiss physician and alchemist whom we met in Chapter Two. Although he doubted that homunculi could be produced in the lab, Paracelsus accepted their reality. He expounded on the topic in a tract entitled De homunculis, written circa 1530. You may recall that Paracelsus believed that human beings possess both an animal and a spiritual nature. Homunculi are offspring of the animal component. As William R. Newman explains it, in his fascinating book Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature, “the animal body of man exists independent of the soul, and it produces a defective, soulless sperm when one is possessed by it. Paracelsus … tells us, that homunculi and monsters are produced: therefore they have no soul.”19 Homunculi are generated from decaying semen. When a man experiences lust, animal sperm is produced, which either “putrefies” inside of him if not ejaculated, resulting in the growth of homunculi internally, or—if he discharges his sperm through lustful intercourse—causes homunculi to grow in the body of his sexual partner (oral sex causes homunculi to grow in the throat, and anal sex produces them in the intestines).

  Paracelsus proposed a radical intervention for men anxious to avoid producing soulless offspring.

  [I]f a man wants to keep himself chaste by force, and relying on his own strength, he should be castrated or castrate himself, that is, dig out the fountain where that lies of which I write. Therefore God has formed it … in front of the body on the outside.20

  We can’t be certain why Sepúlveda called Native Americans homunculi, but it seems likely that he was trying to convey the idea that they did not have human souls. Sepúlveda’s image of the Indians was not exceptional. Fourteen years earlier, another missionary and advocate of Indian rights, Bernardino de Minaya, complained that the Spanish considered Indians as “not true men, but a third species of animal between man and monkey created by God for the better service of man,” while others denigrated them as “talking animals” and “beasts in human form.” Sepúlveda simply put an academic gloss on preexisting bigotry, as did other scholars of the day who proposed that Indians were not descended from Adam and Eve, but were formed from the decaying debris left behind by the Great Flood. Those who denied the Indians’ humanity on the grounds of their non-Adamic lineage included the philosopher Giordano Bruno, the physicians Andrea Cesalpino and Paracelsus, and the mathematician Gerolamo Cardano.21

  Las Casas didn’t dispute the Aristotelian theory that barbarians are natural slaves, but he challenged the claim that Native Americans were barbarians, addressing Sepúlveda’s arguments point by point. The debate continued for about a month. During this time, the two men never confronted one another in the flesh. Each separately presented his case to a fourteen-man jury that was appointed by the king. Although there’s no record of their decision, Sepúlveda later wrote that all but one of them supported his position.

  Dramatic though it was, the debate at Valladolid was inconclusive, and had no discernible impact on Spanish colonial policy. However, Las Casas’s relentless campaign for Indian rights, and his arguments that they were human beings, bore fruit. Thanks to his efforts, Pope Paul III proclaimed in 1537 that the Indians were human beings with rational souls and therefore should not be enslaved, and Las Casas was also instrumental in bringing about sweeping reforms of the ecomienda system of quasi-slavery, which, in principle if not in practice, gave indigenous people some protection from oppression and abuse.22

  VIRGINIA, MASSACHUSETTS, AND BEYOND

  If dogs were trained up to hunt Indians as they do bears, we should be quickly sensible of a great advantage thereby.… The dogs would do a great deal of execution upon the enemy and catch many an Indian that would be too light of foot for us.

  —REV. SOLOMON STODDARD, LETTER TO GOVERNOR JOSEPH DUDLEY23

  In North America, settlers put down roots along the northeast coast of what is now the United States just over a century after the Spanish established their first permanent settlement in the Caribbean.

  The story begins in 1607, when an enterprising group of English businessmen called the London Company established a colony in what is now Virginia. They called it Jamestown.

  At first, the settlers failed to thrive. Food shortages led to famine so severe that they turned to cannibalism. Two-thirds of them died during the first year, but by 1619 the colony had become the center of a burgeoning and lucrative tobacco industry. A steady stream of vessels from England disgorged their cargo of would-be entrepreneurs looking to get a cut of the action, and indentured servants hoping to create a new life in a new world. As the population swelled, plantation owners cleared and cultivated land at a feverish pace in their efforts to satisfy the new European craving for tobacco, and as their footprint grew larger, tensions between the settlers and Native Americans escalated, reaching a boiling point in 1622, when Powhatan warriors attacked settlements along the James River, killing about a quarter of the inhabitants, including elderly men, women, and children.

  The massacre of 1622 marked a turning point in English-Indian relations. Previously, aggression against the Indians had been sporadic, but after 1622 it became policy. It was at this point that the dehumanization of Native Americans began to get real traction. Captain John Smith set the tone in his description of the Indians as “cruell beasts” with “a more unnatural brutishness than beasts,” while back in England, Samuel Purchas, a well-known compiler of travel books, informed his readers that Indians are organisms “having little of Humanitie but shape … more brutish than the beasts they hunt, more wild and unmanly than that unmanned wild Country, which they range rather than inhabite.” The poet Christopher Brooke was even more explicit, describing the Indians of Virginia as “creatures,” and adding, by way of explanation, “I cannot call them men.” He made a point of casting them as “of inhuman birth,” “dregs,” and “garbage,” and asserted that they were not of the lineage of Adam and Eve, but had “Sprung up like vermine of an earthly slime.” The colonists also enlisted Aristotle in their campaign, calling Indians “barbarous” and “naturally born slaves.”24

  Meanwhile, English Puritans were busy carving out a new life in Massachusetts. Brimming with religious enthusiasm, they initially targeted the Indians as heathens ripe for conversion to Christianity, but as the white population increased and competition for resources intensified, missionary zeal gave way to genocidal hostility. The first all-out war between American colonists and Nati
ve Americans (King Philip’s War) erupted when settlers began moving into Pequot Indian territory in Connecticut. In its culminating episode, Englishmen joined Narragansett and Mohegan Indians, surrounding a Pequot village near Mystic, Connecticut, and setting it on fire. All of the inhabitants—some 800 to 900 men, women, and children—were killed, many of them burned alive. Not long after the English victory, when most of the remaining Pequot had been mopped up and either executed or sold into slavery in the Caribbean, Plymouth governor William Bradford wrote exultantly that the burning bodies and streams of blood

  seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.25

  Once again, the dehumanizing process took its deadly course. Wait Winthrop openly expressed the new sensibility in a 1675 poem celebrating the hoped-for extermination of Native Americans. Still reeling from the defeat of colonial troops by Narragansett Indians in the battle of Great Swamp, Winthrop encouraged his readers to look forward to the happy day when the Indians, who were variously described as “flies,” “rats,” “mice,” and “swarms of lice,” would be driven to extinction.26 Winthrop’s aspirations were widely shared for centuries to come. Around the time of the American Revolution, the Indians (who sided with the British) were castigated as “copper Colour’d Vermine” fit to be “massacre[d] to such a degree that [there] may’nt be a pair of them left, to continue the Breed upon the Earth” and a decade later a British visitor to the newly minted republic reported that white Americans “have the most rancorous antipathy to the whole race of Indians; and nothing is more common than to hear them talk of extirpating them totally from the face of the earth, men, women, and children.”27