Columbus Day

Columbus Day, a celebration:

Surely one of the greatest ironies of all time has to be the fact that those who were in the process of labeling others as savages were themselves at the same time guilty of acts of savagery often beyond even the imagination of those being savaged. No doubt a clue as to what was to follow can be found in the famous voyages of Christopher Columbus. On his very first encounter with the Arawak Indians in the Bahamas he captured some of them by force. As they wore small earrings of gold he wanted them to show him the source of that much desired treasure. Then, on another encounter, when the Indians refused to do what he wished, two of them were run through with swords and left to bleed to death. Then on Haiti, where Columbus believed there would be gold fields, he ordered everyone older than fourteen to collect so much gold every three months. If they brought it in they were given a copper token. As there were no gold fields as such, merely bits of gold dust, the Indians could not comply. No matter, when they did not have a copper Columbus had their hands cut off and let them bleed to death. If they tried to run away they were hunted down with dogs and killed. Failing to find the gold he wanted Columbus loaded his ships with slaves to be sold in Spain.

Columbus gave such a glowing account of the islands he had discovered that on his second voyage he was in charge of seventeen ships and twelve hundred men. Their mission was to acquire gold and slaves. Columbus had left 39 men on Hispaniola (the island that is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) to find and store gold. Upon his return he learned they had been killed by the natives, murdered because they had roamed the island taking slaves for labor and sex. Columbus sent many expeditions around the islands searching for gold. When they did not find it they filled the ships with slaves, picking the best 500 from the 1500 they had rounded up and penned. Two hundred died on the voyage to Spain. The Arawaks tried to resist but they were no match for the muskets and swords and horses of the Spanish. When the Spanish took prisoners they either burned them alive or hanged them. The Indians began mass suicides using poison made from the cassava plant. They killed their infants to save them from the Invaders. Within two years half of the original population of Haiti, 250,000 individuals, were dead. By 1515 there were perhaps 50,000 Indians left, in 1550 there were only five hundred. By 1650 there were none.
See Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, 1980

Let's hear it for Columbus, rah, rah, rah.