American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  By the time the sixteenth century had ended perhaps 200,000 Spaniards had moved their lives to the Indies, to Mexico, to Central America, and points further to the south. In contrast, by that time, somewhere between 60,000,000 and 80,000,000 natives from those lands were dead. Even then, the carnage was not over.127

  4

  IN THE AREA around the town of Barquicimeto, in the lowlands near the northern coast of Venezuela, a mysterious fire like a will o’ the wisp sometimes seems to be burning in the marshes. It is, tradition has it, the “soul of the traitor Lope de Aguirre [who] wanders in the savannahs, like a flame that flies the approach of men.”1

  Aguirre’s 1561 expedition from Peru, across the Andes and down to the Venezuelan seacoast, has become “a byword for sensational horror,” writes one historian, adding that “no pirates who infested the Caribbean before or since proved more rapacious and merciless,” and no military campaign was more “notorious for its atrocities” than the one driven by “Aguirre’s mad rage.”2 In fact, Aguirre’s rampage through South America was a good deal less destructive than those of any number of long-forgotten conquistadors. What has made it so memorable, so worthy of evocation in books and poems and films, was Aguirre’s propensity for killing Spaniards as well as Indians. This is what made him “the traitor Aguirre”—a traitor to nothing less than his race.

  For this reason there never has been any doubt that Aguirre was an evil man. For this reason also, when he was captured, Aguirre’s fellow Spaniards cut off his head and placed it on display in an iron cage. Beyond Aguirre, however, debate has gone on almost non-stop for four centuries about the behavior of other conquistadors—about what in some quarters has come to be called the “Black Legend.” Proponents of this idea hold that the Spanish have been unduly and unfairly criticized for their behavior in the New World. They base this contention on two general principles: first, that the stories of Spanish cruelties toward the Indians, almost entirely traceable, it is said, to the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas, are untrue, or at least are exaggerations; and, second, that the cruelties of other European nations against the native peoples of the Americas were just as condemnable.3

  The first of these charges has now largely fallen into disuse as historian after historian has shown not only that Las Casas’s reports were remarkably accurate (and often, in quantitative terms, even underestimates) but that they were supported by a host of other independent observers who, like Las Casas, spent a good deal of time in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America during the sixteenth century.4 It is the second of the complaints by Black Legend advocates that remains worthy of consideration—that is, as one supporter of this view puts it, that “the Spaniards were no more and no less human, and no more and no less humane” than were other Europeans at that time.5 Of particular concern to those who hold this position is the behavior of the British and, later, the Americans. To be sure, on occasion this line of Spanish defense has been stretched to the point of absurdity. One historian, for example, has suggested quite seriously that—apart from their murderous treatment of the Indians—the Spaniards’ public torture and burning of Jews and other alleged heretics and heathens was simply “pageantry,” comparable, albeit on a different level, to American Fourth of July celebrations.6 But the larger argument that the Spanish were not unique in their murderous depredations—that others of European ancestry were of equally genocidal temperament—is, we shall see, both responsible and correct.

  II

  During the latter half of the sixteenth century, while the Spanish and Portuguese were busy “pacifying” the indigenous peoples in Mexico and on to the south (with additional forays up into Florida and Virginia), the English were preoccupied with their own pacification of the Irish. From the vantage point of the present it may seem absurd that the English of this time were accusing anyone of savagery or barbarism. After all, this was a society in which a third of the people lived at the bare margin of subsistence, a society in which conditions of health and sanitation were so appalling that it was rare for an individual to survive into his or her mid-thirties.7 As for the superior qualities of the English cast of mind, in the closing years of the sixteenth century (the era that British historians of philosophy call the dawn of the Age of Reason) the courts of Essex County alone brought in about 650 indictments for more than 1500 witchcraft-related crimes. And this, says the historian who has studied the subject most closely, “was only the projecting surface of far more widespread suspicions.”8

  Still, Britain’s people considered themselves the most civilized on earth, and before long they would nod approvingly as Oliver Cromwell declared God to be an Englishman. It is not surprising, then, that English tracts and official minutes during this time described the “wild Irish” as “naked rogues in woods and bogs [whose] ordinary food is a kind of grass.” Less ordinary food for the Irish, some reported, was the flesh of other people, sometimes their own mothers—which, perhaps, was only fair, since still other tall tales had it that Irish mothers ate their children. The Irish were, in sum, “unreasonable beasts,” said William Thomas, beasts who “lived without any knowledge of God or good manners, in common of their goods, cattle, women, children and every other thing.”9

  Such brutishness was beyond the English capacity for tolerance. Especially when the vulgarians in question occupied such lovely lands. So, as they had for centuries, the English waged wars to pacify and civilize the Irish. One of the more successful English soldiers in the Irish wars was the Oxford-educated half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, one Humphrey Gilbert—himself later knighted for his service to the Crown. Gilbert devised a particularly imaginative way of bringing the Irish to heel. He ordered that

  the heddes of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which were killed in the daie, should be cutte off from their bodies and brought to the place where he incamped at night, and should there bee laied on the ground by eche side of the waie ledyng into his owne tente so that none could come into his tente for any cause but commonly he muste passe through a lane of heddes which he used ad terrorem.10

  Needless to say, this “lane of heddes” leading to Gilbert’s tent did indeed cause “greate terrour to the people when thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolke, and freinds” laid out “on the grounde before their faces.”11 Lest anyone think to quibble over such extreme methods of persuasion, however, the British frequently justified their treatment of the Irish by referring to the Spanish precedent for dealing with unruly natives.12

  In the meantime, a few English expeditions had gone forth to explore the lands of the New World, but they concentrated on areas far to the north of where the Spanish were engaged in their exploits. The first serious attempt by the English to set up a colony in America was on Baffin Island, where they thought they had discovered gold. As it turned out, the mineral they discovered was fool’s gold and the colony was abandoned, but not before the leader of the expedition, Martin Frobisher, had captured and kidnapped a handful of the “sundry tokens of people” he found there.

  On his first trip to the area Frobisher seized a native man who approached his ship in a kayak and returned with him and his kayak to England. The man soon died, however, so on his next voyage Frobisher took on board an old woman and a young woman with her child—this, after he and his men had “disposed ourselves, contrary to our inclination, something to be cruel,” and destroyed an entire native village. After stripping the old woman naked “to see if she were cloven footed,” they sent her on her way, but kept the young woman and child, along with a man they also had captured in a separate raid.13 They then brought the man and woman together, with the crew assembled “to beholde the manner of their meeting and entertainment,” as though they were two animals. The crew was disappointed, however, for instead of behaving in bestial fashion, the captive Indians showed themselves to be more restrained and dignified and sensitive than their captors.

  At theyr first encountering, they behelde eache th
e other very wistly a good space, withoute speeche or worde uttered, with greate change of coloure and countenance, as though it seemed the greefe and disdeyne of their captivitie had taken away the use of their tongues and utterance: the woman of the first verie suddaynely, as though she disdeyned or regarded not the man, turned away and beganne to sing, as though she minded another matter: but being agayne broughte togyther, the man brake up the silence first, and with sterne and stayed countenance beganne to tell a long solemne tale to the woman, whereunto she gave good hearing, and interrupted him nothing till he had finished, and, afterwards being growen into more familiar acquaintance by speech, were turned togither, so that (I think) the one would hardly have lived without the comfort of the other.14

  Much to the surprise of the inquiring English, however, the captive Indians maintained their sexual distance. Although they frequently comforted one another, reported a member of the crew, “only I thinke it worth the noting the continencie of them both; for the man would never shifte himselfe, except he had first caused the woman to depart out of his cabin, and they both were most shamefast least anye of their privie parts should be discovered, eyther of themselves or any other body.”15

  Upon their arrival in England the kidnapped man unsurprisingly displayed “an Anglophobia,” reported one observer who disapproved. And when it was discovered that he was seriously ill from broken ribs that had punctured a lung, the presiding physician recommended blood-letting, but “the foolish, and only too uncivilised, timidity of this uncivilised man forbade it.” He died soon thereafter, as had the man they captured on their previous expedition. This was very upsetting to all concerned. As the physician in charge recalled: “I was bitterly grieved and saddened, not so much by the death of the man himself as because the great hope of seeing him which our most gracious Queen had entertained had now slipped through her fingers, as it were, for a second time.”16 His body was dissected and buried, by which time the native woman had also fallen ill. Before long, she was dead as well, and her child followed soon thereafter.

  If the fate of Indians captured by the English for display and viewing in London was routinely the same as that suffered by natives in Spanish captivity, there also was a similarity in the fate of those Indians, north and south, who remained at home. By the time the English announced the settlement of Jamestown in Virginia (marking their dominion, as did the Spanish, with a cross), the lands the Spanish and Portuguese had conquered already were an immense and bone-strewn graveyard. Indians in the many tens of millions had died horribly from the blades and germs of their Iberian invaders. As far north as Florida and southern Georgia, for every ten Timucuan Indians who were alive in 1515 only one was alive in 1607. And by 1617, a short decade later, that number was halved again. According to the most detailed population analysis of this region that ever has been done, in 1520 the number of Timucuan people in the area totaled over 720,000; following a century of European contact they numbered barely 36,000. Two-thirds of a million native people—95 percent of the enormous and ancient Timucuan society—had been obliterated by the violence of sword and plague.17

  But the Spanish didn’t stop at Florida and Georgia. As early as the summer of 1521, while Cortés and his army were still completing the destruction of Tenochtitlán, Spanish ships under the command of Pedro de Quejo and Francisco Gordillo landed on the coast of what is now South Carolina, near Winyah Bay, north of Charleston. Each man independently claimed possession of the land for his particular employer—and each one also denounced the other for doing so. But on one thing, at least, they agreed. Their mission was to find and capture as many Indians as possible and to bring them back to labor in the Bahamas, whose millions of native people by then—less than 30 years after Columbus’s first voyage—had largely been exterminated. They did their job well. After two weeks of friendly contact with the Indians living around Winyah Bay, Quejo and Gordillo invited them to visit their ships. Once the natives were on board, however, the two captains raised anchor and set sail for Santo Domingo.

  There is some dispute as to how many Indians were captured that day by the Spanish—somewhere between 60 and 130—but there is no disagreement about what happened next. Upon their arrival in Santo Domingo the natives were enslaved and put to work on plantations, though for food they had to fend for themselves. They were reduced to scavenging through decaying garbage and eating dead and decomposing dogs and donkeys. By 1526, four years after their capture, only one of them was still alive.18

  It was a fitting start for all that was to follow. For the next half-century and beyond, the Spanish and French and English plied the waters off the coast of Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia—with raiding parties marching inland to capture slaves and spread disease and depredation. Before the last of the slaves from the Quejo-Gordillo expedition had been killed, Giovanni de Verrazzano was leading a fleet of French ships into the area, followed by Jacques Cartier in 1534, and numerous others after him. Their impact on the lives of the native peoples they encountered varied, as did their specific intentions. But for most, their intentions were clear in what they brought with them. Thus, in 1539, Hernando de Soto landed with a force of 600 armed men, more than 200 horses, hundreds of wolfhounds, mastiffs, and greyhounds, a huge supply of neck chains for the slaves they planned to capture, and a portable forge in case that supply proved inadequate.19

  By the 1560s and 1570s European militiamen were traveling throughout the southeast, spreading disease and bloody massacre everywhere they went. Still, in the early 1570s—even after a series of devastating European diseases had attacked the Virginia Indians for more than half a decade—the Jesuit Juan Rogel, generally regarded as the most reliable of all the early Spanish commentators on this region, wrote of coastal Virginia: “There are more people here than in any of the other lands I have seen so far along the coast explored. It seemed to me that the natives are more settled than in other regions I have been.”20 And Father Rogel previously had lived in densely populated Florida. Twenty-five years later, when the British colonizing troops arrived at Jamestown, they found “a lande,” wrote one of them, “that promises more than the Lande of promisse: In steed of mylke we fynde pearl. / & golde Inn steede of honye.” But by now the people they found were greatly reduced in number from what they had been before the coming of the earlier Europeans. The signs of the previous invaders’ calling cards could not be missed, “for the great diseaze reignes in the [native] men generally,” noted an anonymous correspondent, “full fraught with noodes botches and pulpable appearances in their for-heades.”21

  A decade earlier, in 1596, an epidemic of measles—or possibly bubonic plague—had swept through Florida, killing many native people. It may have made its way to Virginia as well, since on previous occasions the two locales had been nearly simultaneous recipients of European pestilence: in 1586, for instance, Thomas Hariot’s English troops left disease and death throughout Virginia at the same time that Francis Drake had loosed some “very foul and frightful diseases” (at least one of which appears to have been typhus) among the Indians at St. Augustine; and in 1564, a six-year siege of disease and starvation began that reduced Virginia’s population drastically, at the same time that a devastating plague of some sort was killing large numbers of Florida’s Timucuan people.22

  Invariably, in the New World as in the Old, massive epidemics brought starvation in their wake, because the reduced and debilitated populations were unable to tend their crops. As one Jesuit wrote of Virginia in the fall of 1570:

  We find the land of Don Luis [the Spanish name given an Indian aboard ship who had been taken from Virginia to Spain some years earlier] in quite another condition than expected, not because he was at fault in his description of it, but because Our Lord has chastised it with six years of famine and death, which has brought it about that there is much less population than usual. Since many have died and many also have moved to other regions to ease their hunger [and unwittingly spread disease inland] there remain but few of
the tribe, whose leaders say that they wish to die where their fathers have died. . . . They seemed to think that Don Luis had risen from the dead and come down from heaven, and since all who remained are his relatives, they are greatly consoled in him. . . . Thus we have felt the good will which this tribe is showing. On the other hand, as I have said, they are so famished that all believe they will perish of hunger and cold this winter.23

  It was not likely an exaggeration, then, when the British settlers in Jamestown were told in 1608, by the elderly leader of the Indians whose land they were there to take, that he had witnessed “the death of all my people thrice, and not one living of those 3 generations, but my selfe.”24 England’s formal contribution to this holocaust was next.

  Despite the horrors they had endured in recent decades, the Indians’ continuing abilities to produce enormous amounts of food impressed and even awed many of the earliest British explorers. Beans, pumpkins, and many other vegetables, especially corn, which was greatly superior in its yield (about double that of wheat) and in its variety of uses to anything Europeans had ever seen, were grown in fields tended with such care that they looked more like huge gardens, it was said, than farmlands. So too did at least some British, despite their general disdain for the Indians, initially praise their technological ingenuity, marveling as well at their smooth-functioning but complex machineries of government—government that was commonly under the control of democratic councils, but that also produced individual leaders of dignity and civility. As one historian has noted, the contrast in regal manner between the Indian and British leaders was especially extreme at the time of the British settlement of Virginia, because England was then ruled by King James I who was notorious for his personal filthiness, his excessive and slobbering ways of eating and drinking, and his vulgar and boorish style of speech and overall behavior.25