Columbus, The Indians + Human Progress

Thus began the history, five hundred years ago, of the European invasion of the Indian settlements in the Americas. When we read the history books given to children in the United States, it all starts with heroic adventure- there is no bloodshed- and Columbus Day is a celebration.

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Samuel Eliot Morison, The Harvard historian, was the most distinguished writer on Columbus, the author of a multi-volume biography, tells about the enslavement and the killing:

The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.

That is on one page, buried halfway into the telling of a grand romance. He does not omit the story of mass murder; he does something else–he mentions the truth quickly and goes on to other things more important to him.

To state the facts and then bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important.

The easy acceptance of atrocities is a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress– that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks.

This learned lack of moral proportion and sense, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.

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What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortes did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the Enlgish settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.

Hernando Cortes came from Spain with an expedition financed by merchants and landowners with one obsessive goal: to find gold.
Cortes then began his march of death from town to town, using deception, turning Aztec against Aztec, killing with the kind of deliberateness that accompanies a strategy–to paralyze the will of the population by a sudden frightful deed.

And so, in Cholulu, he invited the headmen of the Cholula nation to the square. And when they came, with thousands of unarmed retainers, Cortes’s small army of Spaniards, posted around the square with cannon, armed with crossbows, mounted on horses, massacred them, down to the last man. Then they looted the city and moved on. When their cavalcade of murder was over they were in Mexico City, Montezuma was dead, and the Aztec civilization, shattered, was in the hands of the Spaniards.
All this is told in the Spaniards’ own accounts.

In Peru, that other Spanish conquistador Pizarro, used the same tactics, and for the same reasons–the frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, and to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism.

These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics, and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.

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In the North American English colonies, the pattern was set early, as Colombus had set it in the islands of the Bahamas.

Jamestown itself was set up inside the territory of an Indian confederacy, led by the chief, Powhatan. Powhatan watched the English settle on his people’s land, but did not attack, maintaining a posture of coolness. When the English were going through their “starving time” in the winter of 1610, some of them ran off to join the Indians, where they would at least be fed. When the summer came, the governor of the colony sent a messenger to ask Powhatan to return the runaways, whereupon Powhatan, according to the English account, replied with “noe other than prowde and disdaynefull Answers.” Some soldiers were therefore sent out “to take Revendge.” They fell upon an Indian settlement, killed fifteen or sixteen Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing around the village, took the queen of the tribe and her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard “and shoteinge owtt their Braynes in the water.” The queen was later taken off and stabbed to death.
Twelve years later, the Indians, alarmed as the English settlements kept growing in numbers, apparently decided to try to wipe them out for good. They went on a rampage and massacred 347 men, women, and children. From then on it was total war.

Not able to enslave the Indians, and not able to live with them, the English decided to exterminate them.

When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians.

The Puritans appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” And to justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: ” Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.”

The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the Pequot Indian, who occupied what is now southern Connecticut and Rhode Island. The murder of a white trader, Indian-kidnaper, and troublemaker became an excuse to make war on the Pequots in 1636.
A punitive expedition left Boston to attack the Narrangansett Indians on Block Island, who were lumped with the Pequots.

The English landed and killed some Indians, but the rest hid in the thick forests of the island and the English went from one deserted village to the next, destroying crops. Then they sailed back to the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the cost, destroying crops again.
One of the officers of that expedition, in his account, gives some insight into the Pequots they encountered: “The Indians spying of us came running in multitudes along the water side, crying, What cheer, Englishmen, what cheer, what do you come for? They not thinking we intended war, went on cheerfully….”
So, the war with the Pequots began. . .