15th century AD

Monthly Review, July-August, 1992 by Hans Koning

When, in 1976, I wrote my short biography Columbus: His Enterprise for Monthly Review Press, neither I nor my editor Harry Braverman used the term "revisionist history." I was not going to unearth unknown data; I was simply going to try to write history not just from the viewpoint of the winners but also from that of the losers. The facts were assuredly known. They had been on record since 1552 when Bartolome de las Casas' Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies was published. Contrary to what editors and letter writers in our major papers and magazines announce, there is no veil of doubt over the events of the early Spanish Conquest; the Library of the Indies in Spain has thousands of manuscripts and they are well-nigh unanimous on the basic events.

There is nothing "radical" about the cruel historical facts in my book, but possibly (and it seems a shameful possibility) one has to be radical to write this cruel truth and to publish it.

Las Cassas was certainly no radical. He was an Establishment man, an early admirer of Columbus, the first bishop ordained in the Americas. Here is how he describes that famous landfall of 1492 which has given us our yearly parades and Columbus Circles and Avenues and which assorted heads of state and business firms invite us to celebrate with special zest in this quincentennial year: "Into this sheepfold, this land of meek outcasts" (he speaks of Hispaniola--now Haiti and the Dominican Republic--where Columbus landed) "came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening and famished wild beasts... with the strangest and most varied methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before... I have not described the thousandth part of what the Indians endured. God is my witness."

He writes of men and women burned alive in rows of thirteen "in honor of our Redeemer and his twelve Apostles." He describes how their chiefs were roasted on slow fires and once, when their cries kept a certain captain awake who ordered the executioner to strangle them, the executioner put wooden slats over their tongues instead, to silence their cries--"and I know him, and I know his family in Seville."

Columbus had promised "mountains of gold" to his backers and his obsessive need to prove himself right, to squeeze such wealth out of the simple native societies of Hispaniola, caused the deaths of half its population between 1493 and 1500, the seven years that he and his brothers were in charge of the island. The estimated number varies from 125,000 to half a million. (Las Casas' estimate of the population was too high). Within two generations the island people were wiped out and ships went to the other islands to bring in fresh slave labor. Cuba,Jamaica, and San Juan (as Puerto Rico was then called) became deserts too, and the slavers went as far as the Bahamas, then called "The Useless Islands," which meant without gold. There is not one conversion to Christianity of a native islander on record during Columbus' rule (conversion had been one of his selling points at the Court). In those seven years there is not one recorded moment of awe, of joy, of love, of a smile. There is only anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death. Ten years after Columbus' death, the Dominican provincial Pedro de Cordoba wrote to the King, "People so gentle, obedient, and good have been kept at excessive labors, so that in Hispaniola alone more than a million of your vassals have been destroyed."

Such is the record and nothing else is relevant when we discuss the way to commemorate the quincentennial, neither the cruel religion of the Aztecs whose turn to be burned alive and hanged came later, nor the beauty of Latin American literature, nor the role the United States would come to play as a refuge for the poor of other lands. To focus on it is not "Columbus Bashing" as the New York Times and Newsweek have called it; Columbus has been dead for 496 years and I wish we could forget him. But the Columbus legacy is not dead, and we must ask a crucial question: why have we kept this record hidden from ourselves and from our children? There are intense psychological and indeed political reasons for that. The myth of Columbus as the lone hero is interwoven with the lore and the myths of this country, of its innate goodness, and of the superiority of white civilization. That is the basis of our patriotism (or jingoism) which takes the place of ideology and is meant to create the American consensus.

From Columbus it is but a step to that governor of "His Majesty's Province of Massachusetts-Bay," who offered 40 for every male Indian scalp brought to him in Boston and 20 for every scalp of a female Indian or a male under twelve years of age. The human species has an amazing capacity for compartmentalizing its knowledge: this nation in which the last of the Pequots were burned to death at Mystic in New England in 1637 now has a Pequot Library and a Pequot Inn and even a Pequot golf course not far from that place. Writing in 1964, history professor Alden Vaughan of Columbia University called the massacre "a regrettable episode" but found "small but real consolation" in his judgment that "the blame lies somewhat more heavily upon the Pequots than the Puritans." Even the most serious academicians and right up to the present are aware of the crimes but switch effortlessly from portraying them to admiration for Columbus and those other "early explorers."