Late in the night of October 12, 1492, in the crow’s nest high on the main mast of the Pinta, the fastest of Columbus’s ships, it was one of the crew’s Marranos, Rodrigo de Triana, who spotted a reflected light on the horizon, the moon’s glow on beach sand. “Tierra! Tierra!” he called out. Land!
The first man to make such a sighting had been promised a substantial bonus, but Columbus, in keeping with his self-identification with Moses—the first to lay eyes on the Land of Canaan—claimed to have seen the light earlier that evening. When the full crews of all three ships began to search the horizon, others began to see the light as well. The first glimpse they had of what would soon be called the “Fourth Part of the World”—a mysterious new land added to the current understanding of the earth as consisting of Europe, Asia, and Africa—resembled only the light of “a wax candle rising and falling.” According to the Admiral’s journal, many doubted this tiny glimmer could be the land they had all but given up hope of reaching. Both Columbus and Triana believed, however, even if only one would be rewarded.
Triana’s response to the slight of being denied his bonus, which Columbus claimed for himself, went undocumented. However, stories told about him for centuries have attempted to fill in the gaps. After the journey home, disappointed to return to a country still hostile to his religious ancestry, Triana is said to have drifted to North Africa, where reports began to circulate that the first European to see the New World had begun to follow Islam. As a nineteenth-century account put it, “It is hardly to be wondered at, that one treated so unjustly should abandon his native land and new religion, to seek shelter with the Moors, whom he counted less inclined to take from a poor man his just deserts.” Born a Jew, living as a Christian, destined to die as a Muslim, he was a man with a hidden spiritual arc to his life that is mostly missing from tales of Europe’s discovery of the continent.
The differences between the three faiths of Rodrigo de Triana would have been incomprehensible to the Taino, a people who had many gods because the world had many needs. They may have found the warring theologies of Spain impoverished in their singularity, despite the obvious wealth of those who brought them.
When the Taino spotted three great wooden vessels drifting toward their lands, groups of young men swam out to investigate, calling back to those on shore. The words they used were unintelligible to those whose memory would win the day—but of those on board the ships, at least one believed the Taino were singing about them as if they were zemies made flesh. Columbus alone thought he could understand the cries of the Taino. He recorded the initial interactions of the Old World and the New in his meticulous journal of the voyage: “Come and see the men who have come from the heavens!” he later claimed to have heard them shout.
Despite his questionable interpretation of the words that greeted him, Columbus would soon also say that as far as he could tell, the Taino were a people without religion—an assessment, we now know, that would be no more true of Rome.
In an era when one’s creed was much less a matter of choice than we might assume it is today, being without religion was nearly unheard of; the very possibility was an indication that the world may not be as it seemed. The universe of Columbus’s time was divided neatly among Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Mongols. Theologically, the assumption that the Taino had no religion raised for Columbus the question of whether or not such people had souls, which in turn suggested that they may not be human at all.
One can see in Columbus’s own writings how this unmoored him. In the years that followed his first encounter with the Taino, his understanding of where he had been, and whom he had met, would change wildly. For a time he believed he had found Paradise itself; he imagined the world at the time not as an almost perfect sphere but rather as a shape closer to a pear, with the vestiges of Eden poking up from the top of the globe like, in his words, a nipple on a breast. Alternately, he wondered if he had found a spot inhabited by the lost tribes of Israel. He would devote his later years to the production of a text, written in collaboration with a cloistered monk, proving through biblical citation that his discoveries had ensured that Jerusalem would be retaken for Christendom, bringing about the second coming of Christ. In his largely forgotten Book of Prophecies, Columbus identifies himself as a figure whose arrival is hinted at throughout scripture. “I have already said that for my voyage to the Indies neither intelligence nor mathematics nor world maps were of any use to me,” he wrote. “It was the fulfillment of the prophecy of the Prophet Isaiah.”
All these thoughts had their beginnings as he looked upon the Taino and heard their awestruck shouts as hosannas of welcome, believing they were overjoyed to see a man so grand he must be their savior.
Very likely they believed quite the opposite. If the Taino had feared their neighbors the Caribs as lethal goblins from the underworld, bringers of the end of days, what would they have thought of this new “race of men wearing clothes”? What would the zemies say such men might do to their children and their gods?
On this score, there is no need to speculate. At least some among the Taino looked upon the three ships of Columbus as Christians might have looked upon the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, forms given to the fears of a culture nearing its end.
Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, the Italian-born chronicler of the final days of the Taino, wrote in 1511, “When the Spaniards landed the islanders then referred the prophecy to them, as being the people whose coming was announced. And in this they were not wrong… for under the domination of the Christians, those who resisted have been killed.”
Soon after landing—though not immediately—Columbus realized he was nowhere near the place he called “India” or the prince he called “the Great Khan.” One wonders if the frustration and befuddlement he felt at this revelation could have rivaled the emotions that inspired the fabled “Moor’s last sigh.” That earlier lament had been offered for a kingdom and a fortune lost; Columbus’s grief now was for a kingdom and fortune of his own that never would be. If he had not reached the lands known as the East, there would be no large-scale conversion of the Mongol Empire. The lucrative new trade route with the Orient he had promised his royal patrons was now proved a fiction. Judged by its initial intentions, Columbus’s mission was a failure both spiritually and commercially. The only way to salvage his reputation would be to find some way to wring profit from an otherwise disastrous expedition. After a mostly fruitless search for gold, he chose the only commodities readily available: land and bodies. To claim the former, he planted the same Catholic standards he had seen raised over Alhambra, and established beneath them a fort he named for the birth of Christ, Navidad. To claim the latter, he took five hundred Taino by force and shipped them back to Spain. More than half died on the way—a horrific rate of survival that nonetheless offered better chances than those faced by all who remained, for whom murder, disease, and forced labor were the immediate implications of life under the banner of Christendom.
As it was chronicled by the sixteenth-century Dominican historian Bartolomé de las Casas in his A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, the decades that followed Columbus’s arrival rivaled any torment dreamed up by the Inquisition. “The Spaniards first assaulted the innocent Sheep… like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv’d,” las Casas wrote, “studying nothing, for the space of Forty Years, after their first landing, but the Massacre of these Wretches, whom they have so inhumanely and barbarously butchered and harassed with several kinds of Torments never before known or heard… that of Three Millions of Persons, which lived in Hispaniola itself, there is at present but the inconsiderable remnant of scarce Three Hundred.” Elsewhere in the Caribbean, las Casas continues, three hundred would have seemed a multitude:
The Isle of Cuba, which extends as far as Valledolid in Spain is distant from Rome, lies now uncultivated, like a Desert, and intomb’d in its own Ruins. You may also find the Isles of St. John, and Jamaica, both large and fruitful places, unpeopled and desolate
. The Lucayan Islands on the North Side, adjacent to Hispaniola and Cuba, which are Sixty in number… is now laid waste and uninhabited; and whereas, when the Spaniards first arriv’d here, about Five Hundred Thousand Men dwelt in it, they are now cut off, some by slaughter, and others ravished away by Force and Violence, to work in the Mines of Hispaniola, which was destitute of Native Inhabitants… There are other Islands, Thirty in number, and upward bordering upon the Isle of St. John, totally unpeopled; all which are above Two Thousand miles in Length, and yet remain without Inhabitants.
Las Casas was all but alone among the Spanish in his attempt to look to his faith for sources of sympathy for a vanishing people. He compared them to the hermits of the early church for the holy simplicity of their lives, and noted the zeal and fervor of their spiritual sentiments. Far more common than his approach to the native population, however, was the use of religion as the justification for, and even the methodology of, their subjugation. On the island of Hispaniola, in the shadow of the fort Columbus had named for the birth of Christ, specially designed gallows were constructed to hang the Taino thirteen at a time, “in Honour and Reverence” to the “Redeemer and his Twelve Apostles.” The executioners made sure these gibbets were “large, but low made,” so that the feet of the dead almost reached the ground, where “they made a Fire to burn them to Ashes,” oblivious to the fact that this tableau of thirteen souls arranged in a line transformed the classic depiction of the Last Supper into an icon of death.
That religion was the cudgel with which they were being beaten was not lost on the Taino. While at first many among them may have, as las Casas notes, “reverenced [the Spanish] as Persons descended from Heaven,” within a generation it was clear that the newcomers and their God had only ill intentions.
In 1511, on the island of Cuba, a cacique named Hatuey who had escaped the torments on Hispaniola gathered his people together to discuss rumors that the Spanish would soon be upon them. While there was general agreement that they were “cruelly and wickedly inclined,” no one could guess why this was so. Pressing the issue, Hatuey asked, “Do you not know the cause and reason of their coming?” They did not, the people replied. “They adore a certain Covetous Deity,” Hatuey explained, “whose cravings are not to be satisfied by a few moderate offerings, but they may answer his Adoration and Worship, demand many unreasonable things of us, and use their utmost endeavors to subjugate and afterwards murder us.” Hatuey then took up a chest full of gold and gems and showed them its glittering contents. “This is the Spaniards’ God,” he said. “If we Worship this Deity… we shall be destroyed. Therefore I judge it convenient, upon mature deliberation, that we cast it into the River.” And with agreement from all, this is just what they did.
Yet though the symbol of the alien god had been easily fed to the waters and swept away, its emissaries would not be so easily dispatched. Hatuey led an armed resistance against the Spanish across the island but soon was captured and condemned. Bound to a post with kindling strewn about his feet, he was again confronted with the newcomers’ God, this time in the person of a Franciscan priest. The friar spoke to him of “eternal glory” and everlasting life open to those who believe. As Las Casas records the conversation that followed: “After Hatuey had been silently pensive sometime, he asked the Monk whether the Spaniards also were admitted into Heaven.”
“The Gates of Heaven are open to all that are Good and Godly,” the monk answered.
Hearing this, Hatuey “replied without further consideration.” He would rather go to hell, he said, than risk sharing heaven with “so Sanguinary and Bloody a Nation.”
Far from an aberration, Hatuey’s story of spiritual resistance is the norm in las Casas’s history, which serves as a catalogue not only of the torments inflicted by the Spanish but of the lengths to which the people of the Americas would go in order to maintain their traditional practices and beliefs even in the face of certain slaughter. Rather than die at the hands of Christians preaching their love of a God of mercy as they unsheathed their swords, Taino by the “multitude,” in las Casas’s estimation, took their own lives to “put an end to those Calamities.” Because of the ferocity of just one particular “Spanish tyrant,” las Casas adds, “above Two Hundred Indians hang’d themselves of their own accord.” Peter Martyr d’Anghiera adds that it was not merely for the living that the Taino took such extreme actions but for those yet to be born. The treatment by the Spanish, he wrote, “is killing them in great numbers and reducing the others to such a state of despair that many kill themselves, or refuse to procreate their kind. It is alleged that the pregnant women take drugs to produce abortion, knowing that the children they bear will become the slaves of the Christians.”
This battle of religious will was fought not only over lives but over objects of devotion. Ramón Pané describes attempting to convert a Taino village by presenting it with a collection of sacred images and asking the villagers to keep them safe. No sooner had the missionary left, however, than several men among the Taino threw the images on the ground, covered them with dirt, and urinated on them, mocking the missionary’s attempts to plant his faith in this soil by saying, “Now will you yield good and abundant fruit?” A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies further recounts tales of zemies and other religious items that were defended as zealously as a mother defended her daughter when “a profligate Christian attempted to devirginate the Maid.” In every case, such altercations ended well for no one: mother, daughter, or the believers protecting the objects of their devotion. For the mother’s offense of preventing rape, las Casas notes, “the Spaniard[,] enraged, cut off her Hand with a short Sword, and stab’d the Virgin in several places, till she Expir’d, because she obstinately opposed and disappointed his inordinate Appetite.” The same might be said of the native beliefs that resisted Christian advances. Though their holiest objects were merely small statues fashioned from the world around them, they seemed to the faithful to suffer and die as surely as if they were flesh and bone.
Near the end of his treatise las Casas writes with exhausted finality, “This Deep, Bloody American Tragedy is now concluded.” But of course it had only just begun.
The events that today suggest Columbus, wittingly or not, initiated a genocide are well known. Yet there remains something useful, even hopeful, in an untold meeting that occurred before the worst of this history began.
Within a week of his arrival in the islands of North America, Columbus sent an interpreter to try to communicate with the native people. Because he imagined himself taking part in a religious adventure that would complete narratives begun in the Bible, the interpreter Columbus had chosen to bring on this journey, Luis de Torres, was himself a secret Jew—and among the languages with which he was familiar were Hebrew and Arabic. It was through this translator that the first prolonged encounter between Europe and the Americas took place.
To see the world as Columbus saw it—with himself divinely ordained to find a place he at times believed to be Eden—requires a significant leap of the imagination. It takes far less to imagine what transpired when Columbus’s Marrano translator made his way cautiously into the Taino village. The first greeting would have been offered in one of the non-Christian languages that de Torres had been brought to speak. It has become a popular trope of Jewish American humor to propose that he may have said “shalom.” Yet given his linguistic repertoire, and the symbolic connections the Spanish would soon begin making between Indians and the Arab world (to be discussed in the next chapter), de Torres just as likely hailed them as a Muslim might, with the words “a salaam aleikum.”
Whatever his language, this greeting and the unrecorded response of the Taino were likely spoken under the banner of the cross—as all words on these islands soon would be. On balance, it cannot be denied that the beliefs brought ashore by Columbus had a greater impact on the future of the land and the people who would come to live here than did those of the man in the crow’s nest who traded one faith for another,
or the men, women, and children whose faith would soon seemingly disappear. Yet like the beliefs and practices of Jews and Muslims in Catholic Spain, many of the ways of the Taino did not simply vanish; they went underground. Even as the newcomers to the island fulfilled the prophecy heard by the caciques by capturing and slaughtering those who had been there for generations, certain elements of indigenous spiritual practices remained. Soon not just forts but churches were built by the European conquerors, and in their shadow small statues of stone or wood continued to be carved and imbued with religious significance.
Over time, the people who made the statues ceased calling them zemies, giving them instead a name more in keeping with the culture that had come to rule the land. The statues the true believers prayed to and beseeched for visions of the future were now called santos, images of Christian saints carved from conch shells, mangrove trees, coral rock; three-dimensional scriptures made from the formless materials of the earth. They can be seen in churches and bodegas from Havana, to Los Angeles, to the place the descendants of the Spanish and the Taino would later call Nueva York. They are relics of a faith forced into exile, still hiding in plain sight.
Cortes, with the Moorish soldier Estevanico, entering Mexico, c. 1550. Mexican School/Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris/The Bridgeman Art Library.
CHAPTER 2
An American Jihad
1513–1540
When Mustafa Zemmouri was a boy, he saw the towering masts of invading gunships become as much a part of the Azemmour skyline as its minarets. Three days on foot from Casablanca (then known in the Berber language as Anfa), the walled Moroccan port city was named for the groves of wild olive trees, azemur, that grew in the surrounding countryside. It would later become infamous as a slave market, where thousands would be sold into captivity and sent on the often fatal journey to the Americas. But in 1513, the occupation of Azemmour by the Portuguese was only just beginning, the trans-Atlantic slave trade not yet born, and the lone individual enslavement of enduring significance soon to take place in the city was that of a Muslim boy not much older than thirteen.
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