Alvarado, of course, was but one among many engaged in this genocidal enterprise. Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán was one of those who led armies to the north, torturing and burning at the stake native leaders, such as the Tarascan king, while seizing or destroying enormous native stores of food. Guzmán later was followed by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, by Francisco de Ibarra, and countless other conquerors and marauders. As elsewhere, disease, depredation, enslavement, and outright massacres combined to extinguish entire Indian cultures in Mexico’s northwest. Among the region’s Serrano culture groups, in barely more than a century the Tepehuán people were reduced in number by 90 percent; the Irritilla people by 93 percent; the Acaxee people by 95 percent. It took a little longer for the various Yaqui peoples to reach this level of devastation, but they too saw nearly 90 percent of their numbers perish, while for the varied Mayo peoples the collapse was 94 percent. Scores of other examples from this enormous area followed the same deadly pattern.85
To the south the story was the same—and worse. By 1542 Nicaragua alone had seen the export of as many as half a million of its people for slave labor (in effect, a death sentence) in distant areas whose populations had been destroyed. In Honduras about 150,000 were enslaved. In Panama, it was said, between the years of 1514 and 1530 up to 2,000,000 Indians were killed. But again, since numbers such as these are so overwhelming, sometimes it is the smaller incident that best tells what it was like—such as the expedition to Nicaragua in 1527 of Lopez de Salcedo, the colonial governor of Honduras. At the start of his trip Salcedo took with him more than 300 Indian slaves to carry his personal effects. Along the way he killed two-thirds of them, but he also captured 2000 more from villages that were in his path. By the time he reached his destination in León only 100 of the more than 2300 Indian slaves he had begun with or acquired during his journey were still alive.86 All this was necessary to “pacify” the natives.
As Bishop Diego de Landa (who was a brutal overlord himself) described the process in his region of the Yucatan: “the Spaniards pacified [the Indians of Cochua and Chetumal] in such a way, that these provinces which were formerly the thickest settled and most populous, remained the most desolate of all the country.” In these besieged provinces, added Fray Lorenzo de Bienvenida, “the Indians fled from all this and did not sow their crops, and all died of hunger. I say all, because there were pueblos of five hundred and one thousand houses, and now one which has one hundred is large.”87 The Spanish had a saying, recalled Alonso de Zorita, that it was easy to find one’s way from province to province, because the paths were marked with the bones of the dead. There are “certain birds,” he added, “that, when an Indian falls, pick out his eyes and kill and eat him; it is well known that these birds appear whenever the Spaniards make an incursion or discover a mine.”88 Indeed, to this day there exist in Yucatán towns and villages Spanish buildings and monuments that celebrate the sixteenth-century slaughter. One example is Montejo house in Mérida—on the coast, near the sites of the ancient Maya cities of Uxmal and Chichén Itzá—whose façade is decorated with two proud and preening conquistadors, each of whom has his feet planted atop the severed heads of Indians.89
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.”90 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.”91
Vasco Núñez 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.92 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.93
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. Men who could take pleasure in this sort of thing had little trouble with less sensitive matters, such as the sacking and burning of entire cities and towns, and the destruction of books and tablets containing millennia of accumulated knowledge, wisdom, and religious belief.
Even when supposedly undoing the more extreme acts of violence perpetrated by their compatriots, the conquistadors seemed unable to restrain themselves from one last act of savagery. For a number of years Indians who were enslaved had their chattel status burned into their faces with branding irons that stamped them with the initials of their owners. When sold from one Spaniard to another, a replacement brand was made. Consequently, some slaves’ faces were scarred with two or three or four branding mutilations identifying them as transferable pieces of property. Once, however, writes William Sherman, “when a ship put in at a Nicaraguan port loaded with illegally enslaved encomienda Indians, the governor freed them and sent them home. But first the natives, some of whom were women and suckling children, had their face brands canceled. Fresh letters spelling ‘libre’ were burned into their scarred faces.”94
The treatment of Indian females is particularly revealing, in light of the Catholic machismo ideology of the Spanish that celebrated the purity of their own women. The tone for such treatment was set at the start, with the first description that exists of a sexual encounter between a European and an Indian woman. It occurred during Columbus’s second voyage and was described by the protagonist himself, not a Spaniard in this case, but the Italian nobleman Michele de Cuneo:
While I was in the boat I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me, and with whom, having taken her into my cabin, she being naked according to their custom, I conceive
d desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her finger nails in such a manner that I wished I had never begun. But seeing that, (to tell you the end of it all), I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard of screams that you would not have believed your ears. Finally we came to an agreement in such manner that I can tell you she seemed to have been brought up in a school of harlots.95
Cuneo here expresses an attitude toward raped women that soon would become a staple of violent pornography and male sadistic fantasy: she enjoyed it. While still in the Caribbean, a report to the king’s minister by a group of Dominicans provides a different, but equally vivid, example of the other classic function and fantasy of rape—the demonstration of power and the degradation of both the victim and her loved ones. Typically, when an enslaved workman returned from the mines at the end of a day, the friars reported, “not only was he beaten or whipped because he had not brought up enough gold, but further, most often, he was bound hand and foot and flung under the bed like a dog, before the [Spanish] foreman lay down, directly over him, with his wife.”96
These were just precursors to the open trade in enslaved women that the Spanish delighted in as the decades wore on. Native women—or indias—were gambled away in card games and traded for other objects of small value, while stables of them were rented out to sailors who desired sexual accompaniment during their travels up and down the coast. If an india attempted to resist, she was whipped or tortured or burned alive. Even when laws were passed to curb the more extreme of such atrocities, the penalties were a joke. When, for example, an uncooperative Nicaraguan Indian woman was burned to death in her hut by a Spaniard who tried to rape her, he was prosecuted by the governor—and fined five pesos.97
Those women who were not valued as enslaved concubines were forced to do back-breaking work. Writes one modern historian:
Some of the indias even as late as the 1580s were being broken physically, their insides literally bursting in some instances from the heavy loads they had to carry. Unable to endure more, some of them committed suicide by hanging, starving themselves, or by eating poisonous herbs. Encomenderos forced them to work in open fields where they tried to care for their children. They slept outside and there gave birth to and reared their babies, who were often bitten by poisonous insects. Mothers occasionally killed their offspring at birth to spare them future agonies. . . . [Other] working mothers present a poignant image when we hear of them returning home after weeks or months of separation from their children, only to find that they had died or had been taken away.98
Concludes this writer: “All of those factors help explain the fact that on tribute rolls married couples were frequently entered as having no children at all or only one, and seldom more than two.”99 In even the most healthful of environments birth rates of this level will mean zero population growth at first, and then increasingly precipitous decline. In an environment of such enormous mortality from genocide and firestorms of disease, as was the rule in the Americas during the Spanish conquest, birth rates this low were a blueprint for extinction.
And that is precisely what happened in community after community. Almost everyone was killed. There were, of course, exceptions. But 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. And central Mexico was typical. Even using moderate estimates of the pre-1492 population, in southeastern Mexico the number of inhabitants dropped from 1,700,000 to less than 240,000 in a century and a half. In northern Mexico, over a somewhat longer period, the native population fell from more than 2,500,000 to less than 320,000. Wherever the invaders went, the pattern was the same. On the island of Cozumel, off the eastern coast of Mexico, more than 96 percent of the population had been destroyed less than 70 years after the Spaniards’ first arrival. In the Cuchumatan Highlands of Guatemala the population fell by 82 percent within the first half-century following European contact, and by 94 percent—from 260,000 to 16,000—in less than a century and a half. In western Nicaragua 99 percent of the people were dead (falling in number from more than 1,000,000 to less than 10,000) before sixty years had passed from the time of the Spaniards’ initial appearance. In western and central Honduras 95 percent of the people were exterminated in half a century. In Córdoba, near the Gulf of Mexico, 97 percent of the population was extinguished in little more than a century, while simultaneously, in neighboring Jalapa, the same lethal pattern held: 97 percent of the Jalapa population was destroyed—falling from 180,000 people in 1520 to 5000 in 1626. With dreary regularity, in countless other locales across the length and breadth of Mexico and down into Central America, the European intrusion meant the sudden and near total disappearance of populations that had lived and flourished there for thousands upon thousands of years.100
Those natives who survived remembered, however, and in poetry they passed on to posterity the dreadful tale of what had happened. Recalled an Aztec poet:
Broken spears lie in the roads;
we have torn our hair in grief.
The houses are roofless now, and their walls
are red with blood.
Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas,
and the walls are splattered with gore.
The water has turned red, as if it were dyed,
and when we drink it,
it has the taste of brine.
We have pounded our hands in despair
against the adobe walls,
for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead.101
The Maya book of Chilam Balam adds “what the white lords did when they came to our land”:
They taught fear and they withered the flowers. So that their flower should live, they maimed and destroyed the flower of others. . . . Marauders by day, offenders by night, murderers of the world.102
Then the Spanish, joined now by other European adventurers and their military escorts, pushed on into South America.
IV
Peru and Chile, home of the Incas and one of the wealthiest and largest empires anywhere, covering virtually the entire western coast of the South American continent, had contained at least 9,000,000 people only a few years before the Europeans arrived, possibly as many as 14,000,000 or more. As elsewhere, the conquistadors’ diseases preceded them—smallpox, and probably other epidemics swept down through Mexico and across the Andes in the early 1520s, even before Pizarro’s first foray into the region—but also as elsewhere the soldiers and settlers who followed wreaked terrible havoc and destruction themselves. Long before the close of the century, barely 1,000,000 Peruvians remained alive. A few years more and that fragment was halved again. At least 94 percent of the population was gone—somewhere between 8,500,000 and 13,500,000 people had been destroyed.103
Here, as in the Caribbean and Mexico and Central America, one could fill volumes with reports of murderous European cruelties, reports derived from the Europeans’ own writings. As in those other locales, Indians were flogged, hanged, drowned, dismembered, and set upon by dogs of war as the Spanish and others demanded more gold and silver than the natives were able to supply. One ingenious European technique for getting what they wanted involved burying Indian leaders in earth up to their waists after they had given the Spanish all the goods that they possessed. In that helpless position they then were beaten with whips and ordered to reveal the whereabouts of the rest of their treasure. When they could not comply, because they had no more valuable possessions, more earth was piled about them and the whippings were continued. Then more earth. And more beating. At last, says the Spanish informant on this particular matter, “they covered them to the shoulders and finally to the mouths.” He then adds as an afterthought: “I even believe that a great number of natives were burned to death.”104
Pedro de Cieza de León, in what is justly regarded as the best firsthand account of the conqu
est of the Incas, describes in page after page the beautiful valleys and fields of this part of the world, the marvelous cities, the kind and generous native people—and the wholesale slaughter of them by the Spanish “as though a fire had gone, destroying everything in its path.”105 Cieza de León was himself a conquistador, a man who believed in the right of the Spaniards to seize Indians and set them to forced labor, but only, he wrote, “when it is done in moderation.” He explains:
I would not condemn the employment of Indian carriers . . . but if a man had need of one pig, he killed twenty; if four Indians were wanted, he took a dozen . . . and there were many Spaniards who made the poor Indians carry their whores in hammocks borne on their shoulders. Were one ordered to enumerate the great evils, injuries, robberies, oppression, and ill treatment inflicted on the natives during these operations . . . there would be no end of it . . . for they thought no more of killing Indians than if they were useless beasts.106
But, like many others, Cieza de León’s point is better made in incidentals of detail than with grand pronouncements—as in the offhand reference, in his immediately succeeding sentence, to “a Portuguese named Roque Martin, who had the quarters of Indians hanging on a porch to feed his dogs with, as if they were wild beasts.”
Despite all the savage face-to-face cruelties, however, it was enslavement on the Spaniards’ plantations and in their silver mines, in addition to the introduced diseases and starvation, that killed the most Indians directly. Immediately upon entering this region, the conquistadors laid waste the Incas’ roads and bridges, agricultural terraces, and canals. They looted heavily stocked storehouses and granaries, and gratuitously slaughtered llamas by the thousands. “It is said,” wrote one later Spanish official, “that [the soldiers] killed great numbers of llamas simply to eat the marrow-fat, and the rest [of the meat] was wasted.” Others described the Spaniards’ almost unbelievable destruction of agriculture and animal life, and “in this way,” wrote one, “all the food, the vegetables, llamas and alpacas that were in that valley and district were totally consumed.” Added Pascual de Andagoya as early as 1539: “The Indians are being totally destroyed and lost. . . . They [beg] with a cross to be given food for the love of God. . . . [The soldiers are] killing all the llamas they want for no greater need than to make tallow candles. . . . The Indians are left with nothing to plant, and since they have no cattle and can never obtain any, they cannot fail to die of hunger.”107
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