What Did The Author Mean When He Said They Showed "No More Embarrassment Than Animals

From the kickoff affiliate of Howard Zinn'due south classic The People's History of the United States (1980). For ~~Columbus Solar day~~ Indigenous People's Day.

Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from isle to island in the Caribbean area, taking Indians as captives. But every bit word spread of the Europeans' intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, later they had roamed the island in gangs looking for aureate, taking women and children every bit slaves for sexual activity and labor.

Now, from his base on Republic of haiti, Columbus sent expedition subsequently trek into the interior. They institute no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Espana with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a nifty slave raid, rounded up xv hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded past Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, ii hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale past the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the twenty-four hours they were built-in," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity become on sending all the slaves that can be sold."

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And then Columbus, drastic to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to brand proficient his promise to make full the ships with golden. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gilded fields to be, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gilded every three months. When they brought information technology, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians institute without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to expiry.

The Indians had been given an incommunicable task. The simply gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Amongst the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava toxicant. Infants were killed to salve them from the Spaniards. In ii years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, one-half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were expressionless.

When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, at that place were perhaps l thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A study of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.

The chief source-and, on many matters the only source-of information about what happened on the islands afterwards Columbus came is Bartolome de las Casas, who, as a young priest, participated in the conquest of Republic of cuba. For a time he owned a plantation on which Indian slaves worked, but he gave that up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty. Las Casas transcribed Columbus'due south journal and, in his fifties, began a multivolume History of the Indies. In it, he describes the Indians. They are agile, he says, and can swim long distances, particularly the women. They are not completely peaceful, considering they do boxing from time to time with other tribes, merely their casualties seem small, and they fight when they are individually moved to do so because of some grievance, non on the orders of captains or kings.

Source: https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2019/10/14/let-us-in-the-name-of-the-holy-trinity/

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