When Christopher Columbus arrived in America, he couldn’t find all the gold he had promised to bring home to his sponsors, the Spanish Crown.
As consolation, he and his men went on what today’s historians call “a slave raid.” This resulted in the capture of 1,500 of Haiti’s Arawak Indian men, women and children. Columbus had 500 of the “best specimens” selected to take to Spain. Some 200 died during the voyage. Those who made it to Spain were ultimately sold by the local arch-deacon to the highest bidders.
Howard Zinn, author of the 1980 revolutionary and revelatory, “A People’s History of the United States,” writes that Columbus’ sorties, repeatedly seeking gold, repeatedly ended in settling for shipfulls of Indian slaves – a convenient “consolation prize” to please his financiers. Soon Indian slaves were forcibly working in “great mines of gold and other metals.”
And today, in growing swaths, America is refusing to embrace Columbus as a heroic, glorious discoverer of a New World. That reputation is being replaced by the rejection of his savage money-making capture, death and sale of American indigenous natives, whom he refused to recognize as human beings.
After all, John Cabot stepped onto American soil in 1497. Earlier, Lief Eriksson, born around 980, was to move to Iceland from Greenland, about A.D. 1000. Sailing from Iceland to his home in Greenland, Eriksson went off course, landing on the North American continent in a place he called Vineland because of the abundance of wild grapes growing there. This is said to have occurred four centuries before Christopher Columbus landed in the Indies.
But the ravaging of that southerly piece of New World by Columbus and his associates led Spanish historian and “polemicist,” Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, to harshly expose and condemn such brutality. In what seems an ironic coincidence, Las Casas was born to a well-to-do family in the Spanish city of Seville in 1474. Columbus’ family also lived in Spain. The resulting association was the reason for the older men of Las Casas’ clan to join Columbus‘ second journey to the Americas. He arrived in Santo Domingo somewhat later, April 15, 1502, and soon observed the massacre of large numbers of Indian leaders.
An appalled Las Casas openly deplored these killings. While traveling as a provisioner for his father he began to see first-hand the disruption of native life caused by the wide-spread Spanish enslavement of indigenous inhabitants. The consequence of this: He soon was known as “The Defender and Apostle to the Indians,” for condemning violent treatment of native Americans by Spain’s New World colonizers.
He soon began writing extensively and in unforgiving detail regarding this bloody-mindedness. Yet despite angry counter-criticism – and threats – in 1543 he was named Bishop of Chiapas in Mexico, and remained in that position until returning to Madrid in 1549.
Lst year, South Dakota, and Berkeley, California became the first United States locales to designate the second Monday of October as the day to formally recognize Columbus Day as something else: A time to recognize the “Indigenous Peoples Day,” marking their tragic history. This year, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Portland, Oregon and Bexjar County, Texas were scheduled to eliminate Columbus Day, replacing it with Indigenous Peoples Day.
Las Casas’ most famous and biting work is ‘The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account.” Written in 1542 and published ten years later in Seville – without the consent of the Royal Council – the work is his most unrelenting assault on Spanish colonial acts and policies in America. Officially banned in Spain by the Holy Tribunal of Zaragoza in 1660, new editions nonetheless continued to appear periodically throughout Europe. It is still being issued today.