American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  Believing that El Dorados existed in the Amazon, the conquistadors drove thousands of natives before them in their desperate searches for gold mines in the jungles. “Some two or three hundred Spaniards go on these expeditions,” wrote Domingo de Santo Tomas, but “they take two or three thousand Indians to serve them and carry their food and fodder. . . . Few or no Indians survive, because of lack of food, the immense hardships of the long journeys through wastelands, and from the loads themselves.” Added Diego de Almagro—in an account that was typical of countless others—Hernando Pizarro would “take Indians in chains to carry what [the conquistadors] had pillaged. . . . When the Indians grew exhausted, they cut off their heads without untying them from the chains, leaving the roads full of dead bodies, with the utmost cruelty.” Entire towns and provinces were wiped out by these and similar practices.108

  Those who did survive the Spanish gifts of plague and famine and massacre, and who were not force-marched into jungles as the conquistadors’ enslaved beasts of burden, were subject to being herded together and driven from their highland residences in the Andes to coca plantations on the sweltering peripheries of low-lying tropical rain forests. There, their lungs—long adapted to the cool, thin air of mountain altitudes—were assaulted by a barrage of still more strange, debilitating, and murderous diseases, including uta or mal de los Andes, which ate away at noses, mouths, and throats before bringing on terrifyingly painful death. So many were succumbing at such a rapid rate, in fact, that even the Spanish Crown began worrying about the long-term success of their enterprise should too many Indians be destroyed. Because “an infinite number of Indians perish,” observed King Philip himself in a belated imperial decree, “and others emerge so sick and weak that they never recuperate,” the coca trade, he urged, must be moderated or discouraged. The Spanish on the scene, trying for more precision than their king regarding the matter of Indian mortality, estimated that “between a third and half of the annual quota of coca workers died as a result of their five month service” in the fields. And those who did survive, and the fewer still who lived out the remainder of the year, had only the next round of lethal work to face in the coming season ahead. Still, despite the urgings of the Crown, the trade in coca grew—because, as Hernando de Santillan put it, “down there [in the coca plantations] there is one disease worse than all the rest: the unrestrained greed of the Spaniards.”109

  Work in the silver mines, if anything, was worse. Dropped down a shaft bored as far as 750 feet into the earth, taking with them only “some bags of roasted maize for their sustenance,” observed Rodrigo de Loaisa, the miners remained below ground for a week at a time. There, in addition to the dangers of falling rocks, poor ventilation, and the violence of brutal overseers, as the Indian laborers chipped away at the rock faces of the mines they released and inhaled the poisonous vapors of cinnabar, arsenic, arsenic anhydride, and mercury. “If twenty healthy Indians enter [a mine] on Monday,” wrote Loaisa, “half may emerge crippled on Saturday.” Crippled, if they were lucky. To enter a mine, wrote Santo Tomás, was to enter “a mouth of hell.”110

  For as long as there appeared to be an unending supply of brute labor it was cheaper to work an Indian to death, and then replace him or her with another native, than it was to feed and care for either of them properly. It is probable, in fact, that the life expectancy of an Indian engaged in forced labor in a mine or on a plantation during these early years of Spanish terror in Peru was not much more than three or four months—about the same as that of someone working at slave labor in the synthetic rubber manufacturing plant at Auschwitz in the 1940s.111

  So immense was the indigenous population of the Andes that the Spanish seemed to think at first that the supply of labor was infinite and inexhaustible. Whole valleys, once filled with thriving villages and hundreds of thousands of native people, were picked clean of human life. But at last the friars and some settlers began writing to their king in Spain, asking him to use his influence to moderate the holocaust, lest the absence of any Indians—a prospect that was beginning to seem imminent—serve to shut their enterprises down.112

  The Crown consented. On Christmas Day in 1551, the king decreed that henceforth all Indian labor in the mines must be voluntary. The mine owners countered by using forced Indian laborers to carry supplies to the remote and isolated mining regions (that form of involuntary servitude was unaffected by the king’s decree) and then trying to coax those laborers into working “voluntarily” in the mines. Others “rented out” Indian workers from Spanish labor overlords. But still the supply of workers, along with all the native people, continued to disappear.

  Finally, in the 1560s, the Spanish viceroy on the scene countermanded the royal decree and declared that “for the good of the realm” one-seventh of the native tributary population living within approximately 150 miles of a mine would be drafted to labor in the mine pits. After four months that group would be replaced by another collection of conscripts from the same area. Although such draftees were treated better than the earlier slaves, and were allowed to spend each night above ground rather than in the mines—they were, after all, now a much scarcer and thus more valuable commodity—conditions during the day below ground were as bad as they had always been. Indeed, even the trek up the mountains to reach the mines remained a murderous journey. One Spaniard described a march he witnessed of “more than seven thousand souls” from the province of Chuquito to the “silver mountain” of Potosí. It covered a “distance of about one hundred leagues [and] takes two months” he wrote, because the cattle which were driven up the mountain alongside the people “cannot travel quicker, nor [can] their children of five and six years whom they take with them.” He continues:

  Of all this mankind and common wealth which they take away from Chuquito, no more than two thousand souls ever return, and the remainder, about five thousand, in part, they die, and in part they remain in Potosí. . . . And for this, and the work, so excessive that, of six months, four in the mines, working twelve hours a day, going down four hundred and twenty and at times seven hundred feet, down to where night is perpetual, for it is always necessary to work by candlelight, the air thick and ill-smelling being enclosed in the entrails of the earth, the going up and down most dangerous, for they come up loaded with their small sack of metal tied up to their backs, taking quite four to five hours, step by step, and if they make the slightest false step they may fall seven hundred feet; and when they arrive at the top out of breath, find as shelter a mineowner who scolds them because they did not come quickly enough or because they did not bring enough load, and for the slightest reason makes them go down again.113

  These were the “improved” conditions in the Spaniards’ Andean silver mines, where still two-thirds of those who ascended the mountains soon died or withered away. Even the initial survivors’ lives were brief, however, since most of them soon developed mal de la mina, or mine sickness, which—before it killed—began with ulcers on the gums and soon progressed to rotting and destruction of the mouth and jaw, while its victims coughed up sputum mixed with mercury and blood. Understandably, before too long, likely draftees started moving out of the conscription zones around the mining regions, which only heightened the Spaniards’ need for more recruits—recruits whose terms of labor then also necessarily grew longer, which in turn drove still more of them to migrate from the area. As Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala explained:

  Some absent themselves from their communities to avoid going to the mines where they would suffer agony and martyrdom, and in order to avoid experiencing such hell, hardship and torment of the devils, others flee the mines, and still others take to the roads to avoid the mines and would rather chance dying suddenly than to suffer a slow death. They say that they reach such a state because contracting mercury sickness one dries up as a stick and has asthma, and cannot live day or night. It goes on in this manner a year or two and they die.114

  But by moving away from the reach of the Spanish mine recruiters, Indi
ans had to break up their families and communities and move down to the lowlands where the Europeans’ epidemic diseases—such as measles, mumps, typhus, influenza, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and hemorrhagic smallpox, to mention only those diseases that are known to have broken out here during these years—spread more easily in the warm and muggy air. The would-be conscripts, therefore, were trapped: they could either be drafted and destroyed in the torture of the mines, or they could move down to a hot and humid seething pesthouse—where, recent research has shown, the population was disintegrating at about twice the speed that it was even in the mining regions.115

  Whether or not to migrate from the highland regions, then, was an agonizing individual and family decision. For Andean society as a whole, however, no alternatives were afforded. Within a century following their first encounter with the Spanish, 94 to 96 percent of their once-enormous population had been exterminated; along their 2000 miles of coastline, where once 6,500,000 people had lived, everyone was dead.

  And then there was Brazil. Here, the Englishman Anthony Knivet once had said, you could travel from the Atlantic coast across the continent to Potosí in the Andes “and all the way as you go, you shall have great townes of Indians. . . . You shall have five hundred of these Indians by the way as you travell readie with Nets [hammocks] to carry you.” So thick with a vast variety of cultures and peoples were Brazil’s coastal and riverine areas that the first Portuguese governor of the region, Tomé de Sousa, declared that it was impossible for there ever to be a lack of natives, “even if we were to cut them up in slaughterhouses.”116 It was one of those rare statements that was both prescient and wrong: the effect of European conquest in Brazil was indeed as damaging as if the people had been cut up in slaughterhouses; but the number of natives was not inexhaustible.

  The Portuguese governorship of Brazil was established with Sousa’s arrival in the Bay of Bahia in March of 1549. Within just twenty years—when, in 1570, King Sebastião emptily declared that natives should not be enslaved unless they were captured in “just wars”—the native peoples of Brazil already were well along the road to extinction. From the first days of the colony, in 1549 and on into the 1550s, as Pero de Magalhães Gandavo wrote at the time, “the governors and captains of the land destroyed [the natives] little by little and killed many, and others fled into the interior.” In 1552, and again in 1554, and again in 1556, and again in 1559 through 1561, epidemic diseases brought by the Europeans swept the coasts and countryside, preying heavily on the weakened bodies of enslaved Indians whose ancestors had never encountered such pestilences. In 1552, wrote Francisco Pires, of those natives who came down with the fever “almost none of these has survived.” In 1554 an epidemic of “bloody fluxes,” reported Simão de Vasconcellos, “struck with such violence that as soon as it appeared it laid them low, unconscious, and within three or four days it carried them to the grave.” In 1556 another epidemic destroyed “an infinite number of savages,” recalled André Thevet. And for two years, from 1559 to 1561, horrifying hemorrhagic fevers, dysentery, and influenza or whooping cough, raked the populace that remained. The natives everywhere “were terrified and almost stunned by what was happening to them,” wrote António Blásques: “They no longer performed their songs and dances. Everything was grief. . . . there was nothing to be heard but weeping and groaning by the dying.”117

  In the midst of all this the enslavement and forced labor continued. King João III had earlier divided the 2500 miles of the Indians’ Brazilian coastline into fourteen so-called “captaincies,” or private grants of land, each one extending inland from a coastal strip that might be anywhere from 100 to 400 miles long.118 In the captaincy with the best existing records, the Bahia captaincy, at least 40,000 Indians toiled in forced plantation labor as the decade of the 1560s began. Other captaincies had similar numbers of Indian slaves.

  Meanwhile, in Europe, bubonic plague and smallpox both were raging once again. With case mortality rates as high as 60 percent and more for either of the scourges by itself—and with most deaths occurring within a week of first infection, even among people with centuries of exposure and thus a measure of resistance—the Continent was reeling.119 About 40,000 people died in Lisbon alone from this single epidemic. People with no history of the maladies, of course, would succumb at an even greater rate. The 100,000 natives who had died in the Rio de la Plata two years earlier were mute testament to that. And so, in January of 1563, the plague and smallpox left a ship that was anchored off the coast and accompanied their human hosts onto the mainland of Brazil.

  The resulting carnage beggared all description. The plague was first. It seemed as though everyone was infected. At least everyone who was a native. As is common when a contagion invades a people with no previous exposure to it, the first generation of symptoms are like nothing anyone, even anyone with long experience with the infection, has ever seen: “The disease began with serious pains inside the intestines,” wrote Simão de Vasconcellos, “which made the liver and the lungs rot. It then turned into pox that were so rotten and poisonous that the flesh fell off them in pieces full of evil-smelling beasties.” Thousands died in a matter of days, at least 30,000 within three months. Then, among the plague’s survivors, the smallpox was discovered. Wrote Leónardo do Vale:

  When this tribulation was past and they wanted to raise their heads a little, another illness engulfed them, far worse than the other. This was a form of smallpox or pox so loathsome and evil-smelling that none could stand the great stench that emerged from them. For this reason many died untended, consumed by the worms that grew in the wounds of the pox and were engendered in their bodies in such abundance and of such great size that they caused horror and shock to any who saw them.120

  As had been the case in the Caribbean and Mexico and Central America and Peru before, the secondary consequences of the epidemic were as bad or worse than the monstrous diseases themselves. With no one healthy enough to prepare food or to draw water or even to comfort the others, multitudes starved to death, died of dehydration, or of outright despair, even before the infection could run its deadly course. Children were the worst afflicted. “In the end,” recalled Vale, “the thing grew so bad that there was no one to make graves and some were buried in dunghills and around the huts, but so badly that the pigs routed them up.”121

  If enslavement had weakened the Indians, increasing their susceptibility to the fatal microbes, the destruction of their ways of life by armadas of disease in turn made them more susceptible to enslavement. For many, whose crops now were gone, because there was no one strong enough to tend them while the epidemic raged, giving themselves over to servitude became the only way they could even hope to eat. They approached plantation masters and begged to be taken in. “There are some who were not even wanted as slaves,” wrote Vale, so they “had themselves shackled so that they would be taken: it seemed less likely that they would be rejected if already in irons.” Added Vasconcellos: “One man surrendered his liberty for only one gourd of flour to save his life. Others hired themselves out to work all or part of their lives, others sold their own children.” Within three decades at least 90 percent of the region’s native people had been destroyed.122

  This was, of course, far from the last of it. An unending rhythm of attack from slaving parties, punctuated by furious epidemic disease episodes brought by those same slavers, as well as by missionaries, and then military assault again, became the norm of Brazilian Indian life for most of the next two centuries. Even when nominally free, the natives were being systematically destroyed. Thus, for example, by the 1630s those Indians still living in the municipal council of Salvador who were able to work for wages earned on average between one-eighth and one-sixteenth of what black slaves were paid—and often such “wages” were doled out in flour, cloth, and alcohol, if they were paid at all. Frequently they were not. Even if paid, however, and paid in hard currency, such earnings were far from sufficient for survival.123 If there is anything that now seems sur
prising in light of all this, it is the extraordinary level of resistance the natives continued to mount even as they watched their own populations falling rapidly toward non-existence. The story of Ajuricaba, heroic eighteenth-century chief of the powerful Manau tribe, who fought ferociously to preserve his people from abduction and enslavement—and who leapt to his own death rather than be captured—is still remembered today among Brazilians who care about such things. But, in fact, Ajuricaba was only one of many.

  From the very beginning—from at least that day in 1493 when a “very beautiful Carib woman” fought off the violent advances of Michele de Cuneo, before being thrashed with a rope and then raped by him—the people of the Americas resisted. None did so more successfully than the Maya, who combined retreats into the deep jungle cover of the Yucatan lowlands—where, as one historian puts it, the pursuing conquistadors “soon found themselves adrift in a green expanse of forest without food to eat, souls to convert, or labor to exploit”—with relentless military counterattacks that finally led to temporary expulsion of the Spanish in 1638.124 And neither did any people resist with more symbolism than the Maya, who made a practice of destroying not only Spanish soldiers but whatever foreign things the Spanish had brought with them—horses, cattle, cats, dogs, trees, and plants.125 In the end, however, the Maya too lost 95 of every 100 of their people—a price for their resistance that most outsiders, if they know of it, can hardly hope to comprehend.126