After departing Spain’s Atlantic coast, Columbus’s little fleet made for harbor in the Canary Islands, a volcanic archipelago off the northwest coast of Africa. There, at the Castilian port of San Sebastián on the island of Gomera, the crews restocked and made repairs, finally setting off for God Knows Where on September 6, just as the great volcano of Tenerife erupted behind them, seeming to offer a portent, whether of good fortune or ill no one could be certain.
It is instructive to consider for a moment these islands from which Columbus left “the known world,” that is, the world known to Europeans. The islands had been familiar to the imperial Romans, who called one of the larger ones Insula Canaria, Doggie Island, perhaps an allusion to large dogs, perhaps an allusion to the sea dogs, or seals, with which the second-largest island, still called Gran Canaria, was once well supplied. The seals were long ago hunted to extinction, a foreshadowing of the fate that lay in wait for the islands’ human inhabitants. The indigenous populations, Neolithic in their technology but culturally varied from one island to another, were collectively called Guanches by the Europeans, who subdued them slowly but inexorably, the Castilians gaining complete control only three years after Columbus sailed. For a long time, other European powers contested Spain’s overlordship, especially the seafaring nations of Portugal, Holland, and England, which fought bloody battles on the islands, drawing the natives into their wars. The Spaniards imposed single-crop cultivation on the Canaries, which became a chief European source of cane sugar and, later, of wine. In the sixteenth century enormous houses and churches would be built, expressions of the Canaries’ explosive prosperity, as the islands came to serve as a first stop on the trade route to the Americas.
What became of the original inhabitants? They no longer exist as identifiable groups. Slaughtered, indentured, exiled, or enslaved, they can be traced in the genes of a fraction of today’s Canary Islanders. But only occasionally does one now pass a person whose appearance corresponds to the medieval descriptions of the native population of fair-haired, heavy-browed, thick-bodied, copper-colored Cro-Magnons. The beautiful blond women of Tenerife, largest of the islands, who were once the subject of exclamations by medieval sailors, are no more. Did they ever exist, or were they simply creatures of an overheated Spanish imagination? We can never know, because the cultures, religions, worldviews, and indeed even the identities of the Guanches were almost completely erased. I, looking around on the island I inhabit, Manhattan, never see a face or body that could be representative of the people who once hunted here, whose very name is now uncertain.
The connection between the fate of the Guanches and the fate of the natives of the lands that Columbus and his successors were about to discover is not accidental but profound. It speaks to the assumptions of Europeans in 1492 about the nature of humanity, about the God they claimed to serve, and about the limitations on activities that this God could be said to approve.
On October 12, 1492, as all Americans know, land was sighted from the deck of the Pinta by a sailor named Rodrigo de Triana. The time was 2 a.m. The sighting came not a moment too soon for Columbus. They had sailed for five weeks and were beginning the second day of their sixth week. The crew, among whom served a sprinkling of convicts with little to lose, were growing nervous about the unlikelihood of their return if their outward voyage should continue to drag on. Columbus, though a charismatic leader, could not have commanded their compliance much longer. The land was an island in what is now the Bahamas. Though the captain christened it San Salvador, we are no longer certain which island it was.
As the ships approached the island in the light of dawn,
they presently saw naked people, and the Admiral went ashore in the armed ship’s boat with the royal standard displayed. So did the captains of Pinta and Niña…in their boats, with the banners of the Expedition, on which were depicted a green cross with an F [for Ferdinand] on one arm and a Y [for Ysabella] on the other, and over each his or her crown. And, all having rendered thanks to Our Lord kneeling on the ground, embracing it with tears of joy for the immeasurable mercy of having reached it, the Admiral arose and gave this island the name San Salvador. Thereupon he summoned to him the two captains, Rodrigo de Escobedo secretary of the armada and Rodrigo Sánchez of Segovia, and all others who came ashore, as witnesses [to the claim he was about to make]; and in the presence of many natives of that land assembled together, took possession of that island in the name of the Catholic Sovereigns with appropriate words and ceremony. And all this is set forth at large in the testimonies there set down in writing. Forthwith the Christians hailed him as Admiral and Viceroy [the titles promised him by the Sovereigns, should he reach the Indies] and swore to obey him as one who represented Their Highnesses, with as much joy and pleasure as if the victory had been all theirs, all begging his pardon for the injuries [that is, the mutinous grumbling that had preceded the sighting of land] through fear and inconstancy they had done him. Many Indians having come together for that ceremony and rejoicing, the Admiral, seeing that they were a gentle and peaceful people and of great simplicity, gave them some little red caps and glass beads which they hung around their necks, and other things of slight worth, which they all valued at the highest price.8
Poor naked people. “Discovered” after thousands of years of living in their island home, they were about to be eliminated. The Tainos and other native peoples whom Columbus encountered on this first voyage, as well as the additional peoples he met on his three subsequent voyages, were all grouped together in the Admiral’s mind as “los indios,” the Indians, people of “the Indies,” the all-purpose word that Europeans sometimes employed to refer to various nations of South and East Asia. Despite subsequent evidence to the contrary, Columbus could never—except for a few moments of exceptional clarity—admit that he had failed to sail as far as the Orient. He even ordered that any sailor who said otherwise be given one hundred lashes, be assessed a considerable fine, and have his tongue cut out. Unwilling to be hailed the discoverer of a new land, he failed in the end to see it named for him. It would be named—by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller fifteen years after Columbus’s first voyage, when European exploration of the Americas was in full swing—for Columbus’s exploring rival and fellow Italian Amerigo Vespucci.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto points out the peculiarity of Columbus’s mention of the people’s nakedness long before he describes their land (“well watered and wooded with an abundance of fruit,” which Fernández-Armesto labels a promoter’s description). The nakedness of the people puts them in a category: “A late fifteenth-century reader would have understood that Columbus was confronting ‘natural men,’ not the citizens of a civil society possessed of legitimate political institutions of their own. The registering of this perception thus prepared the way for the next step, the ritual appropriation of sovereignty to the Castilian monarchs, with a royal banner streaming and a scribe to record the act of possession.” Lucky naked people: they are now Spanish subjects.
“Clothes,” continues Fernández-Armesto, “were the standard by which a people’s level of civilization was judged in medieval Latin Christendom. It became an almost frantic preoccupation of Spanish governors early in the history of the New World to persuade the natives to don European dress, just as Spaniards at home had been to much trouble and expense to persuade conquered Moors to ‘dress like Christians’ and had troubled deeply over the nakedness of the aboriginal Canary Islanders.” These Caribbean natives “presented, because of their innocence, a unique opportunity for spreading the Gospel; because of their primitivism, an unequalled chance to confer on them the presumable benefits of Latin civilization; and because of their defencelessness, an irresistible object of exploitation.”
Perhaps half the natives of the Americas would fall to European diseases against which they had no resistance. Most of those who remained standing would be mutilated for imaginary offenses (such as failing to hand over gold, for which both hands were severed and the
offender was left to bleed to death), or shot dead in skirmishes with Spaniards (or with subsequent waves of European conquerors), or worked to death in mines established to yield fantastic quantities of precious metals, or otherwise enslaved on their own soils or, occasionally, sold in Europe. The wide-open spaces of the Americas were not found as uninhabited lands; they were made so. All in all, it was an easy conquest. Naked people with bows and arrows were no match for armored men with firepower. It is difficult to disagree with the conclusion of Eduardo Galeano that “Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations.”
Within fifteen years of Columbus’s first voyage, the Spaniards who continued to cross the Atlantic in search of new lands to subdue had worked out to their own satisfaction a little ritual for assuaging whatever dim objections their strangled consciences might have voiced about these adventures in exploitation. As they reached a new shore, the sailors would plant the standards of the Catholic Monarchs, now Ferdinand and Juana la Loca (Joan the Mad),9 the daughter who on the death of Isabella in 1504 had succeeded her mother; and accompanied by a Spanish notary, the leader of the expedition would read the following notice to the curious natives, whether naked or clothed, who invariably ventured forth from under the canopy of trees:
In the stead of the King, Don Fernando, and of Dona Juana, his daughter, Queen of Castile and León, subduers of the barbarous nations, we their servants do notify and make known to you, as best we can, that the Lord our God, Living and Eternal, created the Heaven and the Earth, and one man and one woman, of whom you and we, and all the men of the world, were and are all descendants, and all those who come after us.
Of all these nations God our Lord gave charge to one man, called Saint Peter, that he should be lord and superior of all the men in the world, that all should obey him, and that he should be the head of the whole human race, wherever men should live, and under whatever law, sect, or belief they should be; and he gave him the world for his kingdom and jurisdiction.
Wherefore, as best we can, we ask and require that you consider what we have said to you, and that you take the time that shall be necessary to understand and deliberate upon it, and that you acknowledge the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world.
But if you do not do this, and maliciously make delay in it, I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their Highnesses; we shall take you, and your wives, and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey, and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him: and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their Highnesses, nor ours, nor of these cavaliers who accompany us.
Variations on the standard text were often introduced into this bizarre ceremony, but these tended only to elaborate on the centrality of the church and the role of the pope (“that you acknowledge the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world and the high priest called Pope,” to whom God had given “the world for his kingdom and jurisdiction” and the right “to judge and govern all Christians, Moors, Jews, Gentiles, and all other sects”).
The claims made for church and pope, which will necessarily strike the modern reader as absurd, were in fact part and parcel of an extreme monarchical papalism that had blossomed into a dramatically evil flower in the course of the Middle Ages. Once viewed simply as an office of service to others, the office of bishop—and especially bishop of Rome—was gradually attracting to itself all the worst trappings of absolute monarchy. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great had rejected the title of “universal pope,” asserting that the only title he wanted was “servant of the servants of God.” But a famous forgery, called the Donation of Constantine, in which the fourth-century Roman emperor Constantine was shown to have handed over his supposedly universal power to the pope, was the shaky basis for all this papal trumpery.
Not everyone believed in the theory built so airily on the false Donation. Indeed, it may be that no one really believed in it except for a few benighted Roman clerics. Certainly, power players like Ferdinand paid it no heed, unless it served their purposes rhetorically, as in the text above. But what were illiterate natives half a world away from Europe to make of it? Or to make of the supposed rights of the Spanish monarchs, who had been assigned their lordship by the pope?10 The native peoples had never even heard of such roles; they knew nothing of the histories and cultures of Europe, Africa, or Asia. They knew nothing even of the existence of these vast other worlds. And in any case, El Requerimiento, as it was called, was usually read to them without translation in Castilian, which none of them understood. What was important to the Spaniards was that all legal requirements had now been fulfilled for the utter usurpation of native rights. To imagine the encounter, full of faux dignity on the part of the Spaniards and of complete incomprehension on the part of the natives, is (once more) to summon up a scene of seeming comedy worthy of Monty Python. But there was nothing funny about what followed.
The simple natives, naked or half dressed in their unseemly costumes, could not possibly harbor “societies” in the European sense, complete with monarchies and other political structures, great buildings, ecclesial structures, and elaborated philosophies and theologies. They were obviously in need of these; and the Catholic Monarchs and their collaborators would happily supply them. Had the natives exhibited more complex social structures—as would be expected of, say, the Chinese, about whose exemplary society the Europeans knew from the writings of Marco Polo—Columbus and those who followed him would have been persuaded to follow a different approach. Columbus had with him letters from the Monarchs to the Great Khan, who was thought to rule the Chinese, though the last of the Mongolian khans had vanished from China more than a century before Columbus’s voyage. These letters presumed to express friendship for the Khan, his name cringingly Latinized as Magnus Canus (Big Old Guy—almost Big Dog), and stated that the Monarchs had heard of his admiration for their great realm, though no Chinese emperor had ever heard of little Spain or its presumptuous kings.11 No European would have been so stupid as to imagine that China, so awesomely described by Polo, could be conquered by European firepower, its inhabitants forcibly converted and enslaved. China would be approached only with the most delicate diplomacy.
Naked natives were another matter, however. The Tainos, whom Columbus encountered throughout his island landfalls—in the Bahamas, Hispaniola (today divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti), Cuba, and Puerto Rico—are now nowhere to be found as a distinct group. Their genes may be traced in some present-day inhabitants of mixed blood, but their only certain legacy is in the evocative words they left behind: canoe, hammock, tobacco, potato, barbecue, hurricane. Otherwise, they continue to live and move in the recorded impressions of Columbus himself:
They traded with us and gave us everything they had, with good will. They took great delight in pleasing us. They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil: nor do they murder or steal. Your Highnesses may believe that in all the world there can be no better people. They love their neighbors as themselves, and they have the sweetest talk in the world, and are gentle and always laughing.
We cannot simply take such words at face value. We must always recall that Columbus and those who followed in his wake were entrepreneurs, selling themselves and their enterprises and manipulating their audiences for preconceived objectives. What Columbus is selling here is the Myth of Eden. All right, he hadn’t yet quite reached Japan or China and all the fabulous riches of the East. Forget that inconsequential business and look here: he had come upon Adam and Eve before the Fall. His audience is first of al
l the sovereigns, then all of literate Europe, which would soon be lapping up Latin versions of his letters.
But we can surely take at face value the descriptions of the rape of native societies by Spanish adventurers, as recounted by the Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas:
[The Spaniards] made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow; or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babes from their mothers’ breasts by their feet and dashed their heads against the rocks.… They spitted the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers, and all who were before them, on their swords … and by thirteens, in honor and reverence for our Redeemer and the twelve Apostles, they put wood underneath and, with fire, they burned the Indians alive.
Las Casas, who had been an admiring boy standing on the quay at Seville when Columbus returned in triumph from his first voyage, eventually sailed with the Admiral, even becoming a landowner in Hispaniola. But, as the cruel despotism of his fellow Spaniards gradually impressed itself upon him, he turned against the whole system of oppression and became a champion of the Indians. The descriptions he has left us in his History of the Indies are as chilling today as they were when they were first published four and a half centuries ago. Las Casas describes Indian men being forcibly separated from their women so that they could be sent off to mine for gold and silver, while their wives were forced to till the soil without them. Reunited briefly after months of separation, they were “so exhausted and depressed on both sides that … they ceased to procreate.” As for the few children brought to birth, their mothers, “overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, seven thousand children died in three months.” In desperation, mothers and fathers drowned their babies, and there were even instances of large-scale mass suicides, adults drowning their children, they themselves jumping off cliffs or eating poisonous plants. “And in a short time, this land, which was so great, so powerful and fertile, was depopulated.… My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write.”
Heretics and Heroes Page 7