People\'s History of the United

PEOPLE'S HISTORY of the UNITED STATES

In his book, historian Howard Zinn presents accounts of conduct of the Spanish explorers, most notably, Columbus and his armies, that matches the retrospective presented by Stannard. However, much of Zinn's account is based on the first-hand, eyewitness, Las Casas, a missionary who actually had the misfortune of watching some of the atrocities committed by the Spaniards on the peaceful people inhabiting some of the lands that Columbus "discovered." From the moment Columbus landed on the Bahamas, they returned generosity and goodwill with brutality, oppression, enslavement, cruelty, and murder perpetrated against the peaceful Arawak Indians, among other native peoples. Columbus's first descriptions recount his realization that he could (and would soon) overpower the entire native population of the Bahamas with fifty armed men.

Having exaggerated the resources supposedly available on those distant shores in order to secure financing in Spain, Columbus was under pressure to produce them, especially gold. Unfortunately (especially for the innocent native populations), gold was extremely scarce and buried deep in the mountains where only perpetual back-breaking labor could possible succeed in extracting it. Columbus, who is still referred to as a "hero" in contemporary educational literature, immediately enslaved the native populations, forcing them to dig for gold and shipping them back to Spain in chains in conditions that caused approximately half of them to die en route. According to the notes from Las Casas, they may have been some of the luckier ones.

On the islands themselves, Columbus's men routinely slaughtered men, women, and children senselessly, and often for mere amusement and relief from their boredom as for any other reason. They conducted contests to see who could kill people more quickly; they tested the sharpness of their swords on human beings, and they hunted people down with trained hunting dogs like animals if they tried to flee from their tormentors. More specifically, Columbus's men ordered all male Arawaks to dig for gold and to produce a certain quantity every three months in return for which they were given a copper token to wear from their necks. If any of them was found without a token he was either murdered or had his hands severed to die more slowly in front of his community to serve as a warning against defying Columbus's orders.

Perhaps the greatest irony in these atrocities is that the Spaniards (and the other European explorers) all sailed flying the flags of Christianity and that they referred to themselves as "civilized" and the native peoples as "savages." Meanwhile, it was the native "savages" who had lived in peace for thousands of years and it was the Spaniards whose homeland was, at the very time of their explorations, fully engaged in torturing and killing some of their own population in connection with the infamous Spanish Inquisition and the reign of the "civilized" religious authorities who oversaw it. The Arawak Indians, who had never heard of Christianity or of Christ's teachings, had developed a society in which greed, and even proprietary ownership of any kind was unknown, freely sharing or giving away anything in their possession to anyone who asked, including complete strangers arriving on ships from foreign lands.