American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  95. In Morison, ed., Journals and Other Documents, p. 212.

  96. Quoted in Todorov, Conquest of America, p. 139.

  97. Sherman, Forced Native Labor, p. 311.

  98. Ibid., pp. 315–16.

  99. Ibid., p. 316.

  100. For the examples cited, see Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, The Indian Population of Central Mexico, 1531–1610, Ibero-Americana, Number 44 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); Woodrow Borah and Sherburne F. Cook, The Aboriginal Population of Central Mexico on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest, Ibero-Americana, Number 45 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963); Peter Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 22–25; Peter Gerhard, The Southeast Frontier of New Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 25; Peter Gerhard, The North Frontier of New Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 23–25; Clinton R. Edwards, “Quintana Roo: Mexico’s Empty Quarter” (Master’s Thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 1957), pp. 128, 132; W. George Lovell, Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatan Highlands, 1500–1821 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985), p. 145; David R. Radell, “The Indian Slave Trade and Population of Nicaragua During the Sixteenth Century,” in William M. Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), pp. 67–76; Newson, The Cost of Conquest, p. 330; and Patrick J. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), p. 95.

  101. Leon-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears, pp. 137–38.

  102. Quoted in Nathan Wachtel, The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru Through Indian Eyes, 1530–1570, translated by Ben and Sian Reynolds (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1977), p. 31.

  103. Noble David Cook, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 114.

  104. Quoted in John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. 359.

  105. Pedro de Cieza de León, The Incas, translated by Harriet de Onis (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), p. 62.

  106. Ibid., pp. lviii-lix.

  107. Hemming, Conquest of the Incas, p. 351.

  108. Ibid., pp. 363–64.

  109. Ibid., pp. 368–69.

  110. Ibid., p. 372.

  111. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), p. 596.

  112. Hemming, Conquest of the Incas, p. 348.

  113. Quoted in Salvador de Madariaga, The Rise of the Spanish American Empire (New York: Macmillan, 1947), pp. 90–91.

  114. Quoted in Cook, Demographic Collapse, p. 199. For detailed discussion of some of the matters mentioned in the preceding paragraph, see the same volume, pp. 199–210.

  115. Ibid., p. 207.

  116. Quoted in John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians, 1500–1760 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 139.

  117. All citations in this paragraph are from Hemming, Red Gold, pp. 139–41.

  118. For maps and a history of the captaincies, see Lyle N. McAlister, Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492–1700 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 260–66.

  119. Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 7. For a close and revealing look at plague in the country with Europe’s best-organized system of public health—and in which 50 to 60 percent of infected individuals died—see Carlo M. Cipolla, Cristofano and the Plague: A Study in the History of Public Health in the Age of Galileo (London: William Collins Sons & Co., 1973).

  120. Quoted in Hemming, Red Gold, p. 142.

  121. Ibid., p. 143. See also, Alden and Miller, “Unwanted Cargoes,” pp. 42–43.

  122. Hemming, Red Gold, pp. 143–44; Stuart B. Schwartz, “Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European Demands and Indian Responses in Northeastern Brazil,” American Historical Review, 83 (1978), 51.

  123. Schwartz, “Indian Labor and New World Plantations,” 55–56, 76.

  124. Jones, Maya Resistance to Spanish Rule, p. 276.

  125. Varner and Varner, Dogs of the Conquest, pp. 87, 178.

  126. See J. Eric S. Thompson, Maya History and Religion (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), pp. 48–83; and Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, “The Population of Yucatán, 1517–1960” in their Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), Volume Two, pp. 1—179. The mere fact of Maya survival is testament to their resiliency; that so much of their culture and their forms of social organization continue to thrive, despite nearly five centuries of genocide that persists to this day, is a mark of truly astonishing cultural strength. In Guatemala today, for example—despite ongoing genocidal warfare against them—the native people continue to speak at least twenty-two distinct dialects of their ancestral Maya tongue. For discussion of a range of social and cultural continuities in this region, see Robert M. Hill and John Monaghan, Continuities in Highland Maya Social Organization: Ethnohistory in Sacapulas, Guatemala (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987).

  127. J.H. Elliott has estimated that about 118,000 Spaniards had settled in the New World by 1570; at that rate more than 150,000 would have been in place by the turn of the century. Elliott, Imperial Spain, p. 176. More recent estimates put the figure at closer to 200,000 and perhaps a bit more, although there also was a very heavy traffic in returnees to Spain. See Peter Boyd-Bowman, Patterns of Spanish Emigration to the New World, 1493–1580 (Buffalo: State University of New York Council on International Studies, 1973), p. 2; and Magnus Mörner, “Spanish Migration to the New World Prior to 1810: A Report on the State of Research,” in Fredi Chiappelli, ed., First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), Volume Two, pp. 737–82. The estimate of Indian dead is calculated from pre-Columbian population estimates for these regions of between 65,000,000 and 90,000,000. The former figure is the most recent estimate, that of Russell Thornton; the latter is the midpoint of the most widely quoted range of figures, that calculated by Henry Dobyns. See Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), pp. 22–32; and Henry F. Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate,” Current Anthropology, 7 (1966), 395–416. This range of estimated native dead may be too conservative, however, for two reasons. First, Dobyns may be correct in now believing that his original estimates were too low, as discussed in Appendix One. And second, this calculation is based on approximately 90 percent decline rather than the more conventional 95 percent and more over the span of a century or so. This was done to account for native peoples not contacted until after the beginning of the seventeenth century, although all the major population centers—which accounted for the bulk of the Mesoamerican and South American populations, and which were the hardest hit both by genocidal violence and disease—were contacted, and collapsed, within the first few decades of the conquest.

  Chapter Four

  1. Pedro Simon, The Expedition of Pedro de Ursúa and Lope de Aguirre in Search of El Dorado and Omagua in 1560–1561, translated by William Bollaert (London: Hakluyt Society, 1861), p. 228.

  2. Louis B. Wright, Gold, Glory and the Gospel: The Adventurous Lives and Times of the Renaissance Explorers (New York: Atheneum, 1970), pp. 264–66.

  3. See Charles Gibson, The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), pp. 1–27.

  4. For detailed analyses and bibliography on these points, see Benjamin Keen, “Introduction: Approaches to Las Casas, 1535–1970,” Manuel M. Martínez, “Las Casas on the Conquest of America,” and Juan Comas, “Historical Reality and th
e Detractors of Father Las Casas,” in Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen, eds., Bartolomé de Las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and His Work (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971), pp. 3–63, 309–49, and 487–537.

  5. Bruce B. Solnick, “After Columbus: Castile in the Caribbean,” Terrae Incognitae, 4 (1972), 124.

  6. Philip Wayne Powell, Tree of Hate: Propaganda and Prejudice Affecting United States Relations with the Hispanic World (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 27. This particular author’s determination to protect the fifteenth and sixteenth century Spanish from criticism is so extreme that he even defends the Inquisition as a reasonable affair brought on by traitorous Jews who were “enemies of the state” and who themselves taught the supposedly tolerant Spanish in the ways and wiles of intolerance. For this latter claim, Powell cites Salvador de Madariaga, “certainly one who could not fairly be tarred with the epithet ‘antisemitic,’” he says—failing to note that, among other examples, Madariaga claimed that Columbus was a Jew, based on the “evidence” that the admiral was “greedy,” that he had a strong “bargaining sense,” and a “typically Jewish mobility.” On Madariaga and Columbus, see the brief but telling discussion in Leonardo Olschki, “What Columbus Saw on Landing in the West Indies,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 84 (1941), 654–55.

  7. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 64, 68.

  8. A.D.J. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 60–61.

  9. Quoted in Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World: American Culture—the Formative Years (London: Chatto and Windus, Ltd., 1964), p. 169.

  10. Nicholas P. Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 30 (1973), 582.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid., 593–95.

  13. From the account of the voyage by Dionise Settle in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, Volume Five (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1907), pp. 144–45.

  14. Richard Collinson, The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher (London: Hakluyt Society, 1867), pp. 144–45.

  15. Ibid., p. 145.

  16. “Postmortem Report of Dr. Edward Dodding,” in Collinson, Three Voyages, pp. 189–91.

  17. Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), p. 292.

  18. Paul E. Hoffman, A New Andalucia and a Way to the Orient: The American Southeast During the Sixteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 10–17. For a higher estimate of the number of slaves seized during this raid, see Garcilaso de la Vega, The Florida of the Inca, translated by John G. Varner and Jeannette J. Varner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1951), p. 10.

  19. Hoffman, A New Andalucia, p. 91. Among the dogs the Spanish brought with them was a greyhound named Bruto, the favorite of de Soto, and a dog celebrated among the Spanish for his ability to track down Indians and tear them to pieces. See the discussion in John Grier Varner and Jeannette Johnson Varner, Dogs of the Conquest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), pp. 104–110.

  20. Letter of Juan Rogel to Francis Borgia (28 August 1572) in Clifford M. Lewis and Albert J. Loomie, eds., The Spanish Jesuit Mission in Virginia, 1570–1572 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Virginia Historical Society, 1953), p. 111.

  21. Sir Walter Cope to Lord Salisbury (12 August 1607) in Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter, 1606–1609 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1969), Volume One, p. 108; Anonymous [Gabriel Archer?] description of Virginia and her people (May-June 1607) in ibid., p. 104.

  22. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned, pp. 275–76.

  23. Letter of Luís de Quirós and Jean Baptista de Segura to Juan de Hinistrosa (12 September 1570), in Lewis and Loomie, eds., The Spanish Jesuit Mission in Virginia, pp. 89–90.

  24. John Smith, et al., A Map of Virginia, With a Description of the Countrey, the Commodities, People, Government and Religion (Oxford, 1612), reprinted in Barbour, ed., Jamestown Voyages, Volume Two, p. 426.

  25. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and American Cultures in America, 1580–1640 (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), p. 51.

  26. Quoted in James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 303. On favorable early British attitudes toward the Indians, and the reality of those perceptions, see Kupperman, Settling With the Indians, esp. pp. 141–58. See also, Richard Drinnon, White Savage: The Case of John Dunn Hunter (New York: Schocken Books, 1972).

  27. Axtell, Invasion Within, p. 303.

  28. Ibid., p. 327.

  29. Edward Arber and A.G. Bradley, eds. Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, President of Virginia and Admiral of New England, 1580–1631 (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1910), Volume One, pp. 65, 75.

  30. Jones, O Strange New World, pp. 170–71.

  31. See, for example, Ralph Lane, “An Account of the Particularities of the Imployments of the Englishmen Left in Virginia,” in David B. Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1955), Volume One, p. 262.

  32. George Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon of the Procedeinges and Occurrentes of Momente which have hapned in Virginia,” Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine, 3 (1922), 280.

  33. On this, and on the Roanoke settlement in general, see Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery—American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), pp. 25–43.

  34. Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon,” 271.

  35. Ibid., 272–73.

  36. Morgan, American Slavery—American Freedom, p. 99.

  37. Edward Waterhouse, A Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in Virginia (London, 1622), p. 23.

  38. James Axtell, “The Rise and Fall of the Powhatan Empire,” in Axtell, After Columbus, Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) pp. 218–19. For an example of colonists poisoning the Indians—in this case killing about 200 people in a single incident—see Robert Bennett to Edward Bennett, “Bennetes Welcome,” [9 June 1623], William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd Series, 13 (1933), 122.

  39. Ibid., pp. 219, 221.

  40. The number of Indians under Powhatan’s control in 1607 comes from Axtell, “Rise and Fall of the Powhatan Empire,” p. 190. The reference to a population of more than 100,000 prior to European contact is in J. Leitch Wright, Jr., The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the Indians in the Old South (New York: Free Press, 1981), p. 60. The colonist population at the end of the seventeenth century—estimated at 62,800—is from Morgan, American Slavery—American Freedom, p. 404. The number of Powhatan people at the century’s close is based on a multiplier of four times the number of Powhatan bowmen estimated in Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia [1705], ed. Louis B. Wright (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), pp. 232–33.

  41. Morgan, American Slavery—American Freedom, p. 233; Gwenda Morgan, “The Hegemony of the Law: Richmond County, 1692–1776” (Doctoral dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1980), Chapter One.

  42. Sherburne F. Cook, “The Significance of Disease in the Extinction of the New England Indians,” Human Biology, 45 (1973), 485–508; Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 33 (1976), 289–99. For a study that uses death rates of 50 and 60 percent as the norm for single epidemics, see William A. Starna, “Mohawk Iroquois Population: A Review,” Ethnohistory, 27 (1980), 37–677. Long-running controversies regarding the total European death rate from the Black Death now seem reasonably settled around an overall mortality of a
bout one-third; see William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Doubleday, 1976), p. 168.

  43. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Modern Library, 1967), pp. 270–71.

  44. Thomas Morton, New English Canaan (Boston: Prince Society, 1883), p. 133.

  45. John Winthrop to Sir Nathaniel Rich, May 22, 1634, in Everett Emerson, ed., Letters from New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), pp. 115–16.

  46. Thomas Budd, Good Order Established in Pennsylvania & New jersey in America (London, 1685), p. 33.

  47. Adam J. Hirsch, “The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth Century New England,” Journal of American History, 74 (1988), 1190.

  48. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934), pp. 30–32.

  49. George Bird Grinnell, “Coup and Scalp Among the Plains Indians,” American Anthropologist, 12 (1910), 216–17.

  50. Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1974), pp. 156–57. Las Casas had said much the same thing of the wars waged among themselves by the peoples of the Indies, describing them as “little more than games played by children.” Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, translated by Herma Briffault (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), p. 43. There are, of course, exceptions to this as to other generalizations. It is worth noting, therefore, that warfare in the Great Plains area could on occasion be highly destructive, as is evident in the remains from an early fourteenth-century battle that took place in what is now south-central South Dakota. The archaeological and osteological data on those remains are most thoroughly discussed in P. Willey, Prehistoric Warfare on the Great Plains: Skeletal Analysis of the Crow Creek Massacre Victims (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990).

  51. John Underhill, Newes from America; or, A New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England (London, 1638), p. 40; Henry Spelman, “Relation of Virginea” (London, 1613), in Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works of John Smith, Volume One, p. cxiv.