Zusammenfassung
Slavery and serfdom
The natives of the island were systematically subjugated via the encomienda system implemented by Columbus.[152] Adapted to the New World from Spain, it resembled the feudal system in Medieval Europe, as it was based on a lord offering “protection” to a class of people who owed labor.[153] In addition, Spanish colonists under his rule began to buy and sell natives as slaves, including children.[154]
When natives on Hispaniola began fighting back against their oppressors in 1495, Columbus’s men captured 1,500 Arawak men, women, and children in a single raid. The strongest were transported to Spain to be sold as slaves;[155] 40 percent of the 500 shipped died en route.[58] Historian James W. Loewen asserts that “Columbus not only sent the first slaves across the Atlantic, he probably sent more slaves—about five thousand—than any other individual.”[156]
Columbus’s forced labor system was described by his son, Ferdinand: “In the Cibao, where the gold mines were, every person of fourteen years of age or upward was to pay a large hawk’s bell of gold dust; all others were each to pay twenty-five pounds of cotton. Whenever an Indian delivered his tribute, he was to receive a brass or copper token which he must wear about his neck as proof that he had made his payment; any Indian found without such a token was to be punished.” [157] A claim popularized by Hans Koning’s 1976 biography of Columbus and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States that the said punishment was cutting off the hands of those without tokens, letting them bleed to death.[58][158] A letter from Ferdinand and Isabella on the tribute calls for a light punishment. [159] Thousands of natives committed suicide by poison to escape their persecution.[155]
Violence towards Natives and Spanish colonists
During his brief reign, Columbus executed Spanish colonists for minor crimes, and used dismemberment as another form of punishment.[160]
When Columbus fell ill in 1495, “what little restraint he had maintained over his men disappeared as he went through a lengthy period of recuperation. The troops went wild, stealing, killing, raping, and torturing natives, trying to force them to divulge the whereabouts of the imagined treasure-houses of gold.”[161] According to Las Casas, 50,000 natives perished during this period, although Las Casas’ account has been criticized by modern historians as lacking objectivity and his population estimates are often dismissed.[162] Upon his recovery, Columbus organized his troops’ efforts, forming a squadron of several hundred heavily armed men and more than twenty attack dogs. Dogs were used to hunt down natives who attempted to flee.[155] Columbus’s men tore across the land, killing thousands of sick and unarmed natives. Soldiers would use their captives for sword practice, attempting to decapitate them or cut them in half with a single blow.[163]
The Arawaks attempted to fight back against Columbus’s men but lacked their armor, guns, swords, and horses. When taken prisoner, they were hanged or burned to death. Desperation led to mass suicides and infanticide among the natives. Howard Zinn states, although without quoting any sources, in just two years under Columbus’s governorship, over 125,000 of the 250,000–300,000 natives in Haiti were dead,[58] many died from lethal forced labor in the mines, in which a third of workers died every six months.[164] Within three decades, the surviving Arawak population numbered only in the hundreds.[164] “Virtually every member of the gentle race … had been wiped out.”[155] Disease, warfare and harsh enslavement contributed to the depopulation.[165][166][167]
Within indigenous circles, Columbus is often viewed as a key agent of genocide.[168] Samuel Eliot Morison, a Harvard historian and author of a multivolume biography on Columbus, writes, “The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.”[169] Loewen laments that while “Haiti under the Spanish is one of the primary instances of genocide in all human history”, only one major history text he reviewed mentions Columbus’s role in it.[170]
Black Legend, relativism, and disease
Some of these accounts may be part of the Black Legend, an intentional defamation of Spain,[171][172][173] while others challenge the genocide narrative.[160][174] Noble David Cook, writing about the Black Legend and the conquest of the Americas wrote, “There were too few Spaniards to have killed the millions who were reported to have died in the first century after Old and New World contact”. He instead estimates that the death toll was caused by diseases like smallpox,[175] which according to some estimates had an 80–90% fatality rate in Native American populations.[176] Disease played a significant role in the destruction of the natives. Indirect evidence suggests that some serious illness may have arrived with the 1500 colonists who accompanied Columbus’s second expedition in 1493.
By the end of 1494, disease and famine had claimed two-thirds of the Spanish settlers.[148][177] A native Nahuatl account depicted the social breakdown that accompanied the pandemics: “A great many died from this plague, and many others died of hunger. They could not get up to search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds.”[178] When the pandemic finally struck in 1519, it wiped out much of the remaining native population.[179][180] Charles C. Mann wrote “It was as if the suffering these diseases had caused in Eurasia over the past millennia were concentrated into the span of decades.”[181]
Some historians have argued that, while brutal, Columbus was simply a product of his time, and being a figure of the 15th century, should not be judged by the morality of the 20th century.[182]
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