So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians, who
swam out to greet them. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had a
developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and
weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but
they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.
This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus to take
some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they
guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed to what is now
Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and
the Dominican Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a
gold mask presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild
visions of gold fields.
On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria, which had
run aground, Columbus built a fort, the first European military base in
the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad (Christmas) and left
thirtynine
crewmembers there, with instructions to find and store the
gold. He took more Indian prisoners and put them aboard his two
remaining ships. At one part of the island he got into a fight with
Indians who refused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his
men wanted. Two were run through with swords and bled to death.
Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. When
the weather turned cold, the Indian prisoners began to die.
Columbus's report to the Court in Madrid was extravagant. He
insisted he had reached Asia (it was Cuba) and an island off the coast
of China (Hispaniola). His descriptions were part fact, part fiction:
Hispaniola is a miracle. Mountains and hills, plains and pastures, are
both fertile and beautiful ... the harbors are unbelievably good and
there are many wide rivers of which the majority contain gold. . . .
There are many spices, and great mines of gold and other metals....
The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with
their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would
believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To
the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...." He concluded his
report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he
would bring them from his next voyage "as much gold as they need and as many slaves as they ask." He was full of religious talk: "Thus the
eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over
apparent impossibilities."
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
island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as
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, after they had
roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and
children as slaves for sex and labor.
Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after
expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill
up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year
1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred
Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by
Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to
load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The
rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon
of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the
day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than
animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity
go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."
But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus,
desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to
make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of
Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to
exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a
certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they
were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found
without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only 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.
Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants
were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through
murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti
were dead.