IN THE YEAR 1513 a group of men led by Vasco Núñez de Balboa marched across the Isthmus of Panama and discovered the Pacific Ocean. They had been looking for it—they knew it existed—and, familiar as they were with oceans, they had no difficulty in recognizing it when they saw it. On their way, however, they saw a good many things they had not been looking for and were not familiar with. When they returned to Spain to tell what they had seen, it was not a simple matter to find words for everything.
For example, they had killed a large and ferocious wild animal. They called it a tiger, although there were no tigers in Spain and none of the men had ever seen one before. Listening to their story was Peter Martyr, member of the King’s Council for the Indies and possessor of an insatiable curiosity about the new land that Spain was uncovering in the west. How, the learned man asked them, did they know that the ferocious animal was a tiger? They answered “that they knewe it by the spottes, fiercenesse, agilitie, and such other markes and tokens whereby auncient writers have described the Tyger.” It was a good answer. Men, confronted with things they do not recognize, turn to the writings of those who have had a wider experience. And in 1513 it was still assumed that the ancient writers had had a wider experience than those who came after them.
Columbus himself had made the assumption. His discoveries posed for him, as for others, a problem of identification. It seemed to be a question not so much of giving names to new lands as of finding the proper old names, and the same was true of the things that the new lands contained. Cruising through the Caribbean, enchanted by the beauty and variety of what he saw, Columbus assumed that the strange plants and trees were strange only because he was insufficiently versed in the writings of men who did know them. “I am the saddest man in the world,” he wrote, “because I do not recognize them.”
By 1524, when Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, a Spanish royal official, sat down to write about the wonders of the new land, explorers were assuming a more skeptical attitude toward the knowledge that could be gained from the ancients. Oviedo had just returned to Spain from several years in Darien, on the isthmus earlier crossed by Balboa. He, too, had encountered the alleged tiger, but he was not so sure that it was in fact a tiger. “I will not obstinately stand in opinyon,” he said, “whether these beastes bee tygers or Panthers, or of the number of any other such beastes of spotted heare.” It was quite possible, he thought, that this was “sum other newe beaste unknowen to the owlde wryters,” for by 1524 it had become clear that “thys greate parte of the worlde was unknowen to the antiquitie.”
As the century wore on and the caravels of Spain probed the dimensions of the new land, it gradually expanded into a New World, and the challenge to traditional ideas expanded with it. The Jesuit missionary José de Acosta, sailing to Peru in 1570, still thought it proper to prepare himself by reading what the old writers had said of lands in that latitude, and having read he feared the worst. The heat, they said, would be too great for human life, the sun too hot to bear. But arriving in Peru in what was summer there, the month of March, he found the weather so cold that he welcomed the chance to bask in the sun. “What could I else do then,” he asked, “but laugh at Aristotle’s…Philosophie, seeing that in that place and at that season, whenas all should be scorched with heat, accordinge to his rules, I, and all my companions were a colde?”
America released Father Acosta from Aristotle’s error, and it almost released him from the Bible, too. A better botanist than Columbus, he recognized that many of the plants and animals of the New World were unique, unlike anything known to the ancients from their experience of Europe, Asia, and Africa. And he asked himself how this could be. How did they get to America and not to Europe? It occurred to him that they might have come into existence there. But if this was the case, he realized, it made the whole story of Noah’s ark a little shaky; “neither was it then necessary to save all sorts of birds and beasts, if others were to be created anew. Moreover, wee could not affirme that the creation of the world was made and finished in sixe days, if there were yet other kinds to make, and specially perfit beasts, and no lesse excellent than those that are knowen unto us.”
Father Acosta, discerning a few of the consequences of his daring thought, drew back from it, as did everyone else. He concluded at length that the universal deluge had been followed by an immediate dispersal from the ark and that some animals went in one direction and some in another. Thus he preserved Noah and the deluge and left the Bible unassailed as a source of historical knowledge.
We need not deride Father Acosta’s reluctance to give up the world that he knew from books. Only idiots escape entirely from the world that the past bequeaths. The discovery of America opened a new world, full of new things and new possibilities for those with eyes to see them. And Father Acosta saw many of them. But the New World did not erase the Old. Rather, the Old World for several centuries determined what men saw in the New and what they did with it. What America became after 1492 depended both on what men found there and on what they expected to find, both on what America actually was and on what old writers and old experience led men to think it was or ought to be or could be made to be.
I cannot attempt here to give an account of what America became or was made to become by the men who invaded the continent after 1492, but I hope to tell a small early part of the story, a first chapter that may stand as an emblem or symbol of the whole. I want to describe Europe’s first encounter with America on the island of Española, known also as Hispaniola and as Haiti. I want to suggest how the ideas that Columbus brought with him shaped the lives of the people of Española, which I believe will also suggest how those ideas were to affect the history of the nearby continents of North and South America.
DURING THE DECADE before 1492, as Columbus nursed a growing urge to sail west to the Indies, he was studying the old writers to find out what the world and its people were like. He read the Ymago Mundi of Pierre d’Ailly, a French cardinal of the early fifteenth century, the travels of Marco Polo and of Sir John Mandeville, Pliny’s Natural History, and the Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II). Columbus was not a scholarly man. He could take a ship where no one had dared go before and bring it back again, but he did so by the dead reckoning of the practical sailor, not by the scholarly methods of celestial navigation. He probably learned to read only after he had grown up. And while he had the genius of simplicity, the nerve to act on a thought, he never shone at the things one learned from books. Yet he studied these books, made hundreds of marginal notations in them, and came out with ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and strong and sometimes wrong, the kind of ideas that the self-educated person gains from independent reading and clings to in defiance of what anyone else tries to tell him.
The strongest one was a wrong one—namely, that the distance between Europe and the eastern shore of Asia was short. According to Cardinal d’Ailly, Columbus noted, Aristotle and Seneca both thought that the ocean separating Spain from China could be traversed in a few days. And his own erroneous calculations of the small size of the earth led him to a similar conclusion. Although he was familiar enough with the waters of the eastern Atlantic to know that the distance could not be quite as short as the cardinal said, he thought it was much less than most of his own contemporaries supposed. He believed that Spain was closer to China westward than eastward.
Columbus never abandoned this conviction. And before he set out to prove it by sailing west from Spain, he studied his books to find out all he could about the lands that he would be visiting: China, Japan, and India, the lands known to Europe as the Indies. From Marco Polo, the Venetian who had traveled there two centuries earlier, he learned that the Indies were rich in gold, silver, pearls, jewels, and spices. The Great Khan, whose empire stretched from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean, had displayed to Marco Polo a wealth and majesty that dwarfed the splendors of the courts of Europe. The khan’s family of four thousand retainers dined together in one great hall from golden dishes; his twelve thousand barons were dressed in cloth of gold with belts of gold. When traveling, he slept in tents that could hold two thousand men and that were wrought with gold and lined with ermine and sable.
Marco Polo also had things to say about the ordinary people of the Far East. Those in the province of Mangi, where they grew ginger, were averse to war and so had fallen an easy prey to the khan. On Nangama, an island off the coast, described as having “great plentie of spices,” the people were far from averse to war: they were anthropophagi—man-eaters—who devoured their captives. There were, in fact, man-eating people in several of the offshore islands, and in many islands both men and women dressed themselves with only a small scrap of cloth over their genitals. On the island of Discorsia, in spite of the fact that they made fine cotton cloth, the people went entirely naked. In one place there were two islands where men and women were segregated, the women on one island, the men on the other.
Marco Polo occasionally slipped into fables like this last one, but most of what he had to say about the Indies was the result of actual observation. Sir John Mandeville’s travels, on the other hand, were a hoax—there was no such man—and the places he claimed to have visited in the 1300s were fantastically filled with one-eyed men and one-footed men, dog-faced men, men with two faces, and men with no faces. But the author of the hoax did draw on the reports of enough genuine travelers to make some of his stories plausible, and he also drew on a legend as old as human dreams, the legend of a golden age when men were good. He told of an island where the people lived without malice or guile, without covetousness or lechery or gluttony, wishing for none of the riches of this world. They were not Christians, but they lived by the golden rule. A man who had decided to see the Indies for himself could hardly have failed to be stirred by the thought of finding such a people.
Columbus learned from books what to expect of the Indies. But besides his expectations of gold and silver and spices, of man-eating monsters and guileless men, he also carried with him some ideas of what he would do about these things when he found them. He surely expected to bring back some of the gold that was supposed to be so plentiful. The spice trade was one of the most lucrative in Europe, and he expected to bring back spices. But what did he propose to do about the people in possession of these treasures?
Since he did not know that the Tartar dynasty of khans had fallen more than a century before, he probably intended to establish trading relations with countries belonging to the Great Khan. But he also intended to take possession himself of at least some of the lands he encountered. When he set out, he carried with him a commission from the king and queen of Spain, empowering him “to discover and acquire certain islands and mainland in the ocean sea” and to be “Admiral and Viceroy and Governor therein.” If the king and Columbus expected to assume dominion over any of the Indies or other lands en route, they must have had some ideas, not only about the Indies but also about themselves, to warrant the expectation. What had they to offer that would make their dominion welcome? Or if they proposed to impose their rule by force, how could they justify such a step, let alone carry it out? The answer is that they had two things: they had Christianity and they had civilization.
Christianity has meant many things to many men, and its role in the European conquest and occupation of America was varied. But in 1492 to Columbus there was probably nothing very complicated about it. His simplicity of mind would have reduced it to a matter of corrupt human beings, destined for eternal damnation, redeemed by a merciful savior. Christ saved those who believed in him, and it was the duty of Christians to spread his gospel and thus rescue the heathens from the fate that would otherwise await them.
Although Christianity was in itself a sufficient justification for dominion, Columbus would also carry civilization to the Indies; and this, too, was a gift that he and his contemporaries considered adequate recompense for anything they might take. When people talked about civilization—or civility, as they usually called it—they seldom specified precisely what they meant. Civility was closely associated with Christianity, but the two were not identical. Whereas Christianity was always accompanied by civility, the Greeks and Romans had had civility without Christianity.
One way to define civility was by its opposite, barbarism. Originally the word “barbarian” had simply meant “foreigner,” to a Greek someone who was not Greek, to a Roman someone who was not Roman. By the fifteenth or sixteenth century, it meant someone not only foreign but with manners and customs of which civil persons disapproved. North Africa became known as Barbary, a sixteenth-century geographer explained, “because the people be barbarous, not onely in language, but in manners and customs.” Parts of the Indies, from Marco Polo’s description, had to be civil, but other parts were obviously barbarous, for example, the lands where people went naked. Whatever civility meant, it meant clothes.
But there was a little more to it than that, and there still is. Civil people distinguished themselves by the pains they took to order their lives. They organized their society to produce the elaborate food, clothing, buildings, and other equipment characteristic of their manner of living. They had strong governments to protect property, to protect good persons from evil ones, to protect the manners and customs that differentiated civil people from barbarians. It was conceded that barbarians might have governments of a sort but insufficient to curb their depraved habits or to nurture better ones. The superior clothing, housing, food, and protection that attached to civilization made it seem to the European a gift worth giving to the ill-clothed, ill-housed, and ungoverned barbarians of the world.
The Europeans’ knowledge of barbarians did not all come from books. They had had contact with nearby Barbary itself and also with the much more barbarous Canary Islands, which they had rediscovered in the fourteenth century. By 1492 the Spaniards had subdued every island but Tenerife to Christianity, civilization, and slavery.
Slavery was an ancient instrument of civilization, and in the fifteenth century it had been revived as a way to deal with barbarians who refused to accept Christianity and the rule of civilized government. Through slavery they could be made to abandon their bad habits, put on clothes, and reward their instructors with a lifetime of work. The Spanish government frowned on the enslavement of submissive natives, and in the Canaries it was mostly the recalcitrant who became slaves. But not all Europeans, or indeed all Spaniards, discriminated between submissive and nonsubmissive barbarians. Throughout the fifteenth century, as the Portuguese explored the coast of Africa, large numbers of well-clothed sea captains brought civilization to naked savages by carrying them off to the slave markets of Seville and Lisbon.
Since Columbus had lived in Lisbon and sailed in Portuguese vessels to the Gold Coast of Africa, he was not unfamiliar with barbarians. He had seen for himself that the torrid zone could support human life, clothed as well as unclothed, and he had observed how pleased barbarians were with trinkets on which civilized Europeans set small value, such as the little bells that falconers placed on hawks. Before setting off on his voyage, he laid in a store of hawk’s bells. If the barbarous people he expected to find in the Indies should think civilization and Christianity an insufficient reward for submission to Spain, perhaps hawk’s bells would help.
Columbus sailed from Palos de la Frontera on Friday the third of August, 1492, reached the Canary Islands six days later, and stayed there for a month to finish outfitting his ships. He left on September 6, and five weeks later, in about the place he expected, he found the Indies. What else could it be but the Indies? There on the shore were the naked people. With hawk’s bells and beads he made their acquaintance and found some of them wearing gold nose plugs. It all added up. He had found the Indies. And not only that. He had found a land over which he would have no difficulty in establishing Spanish dominion, for the people showed him an immediate veneration. He had been there only two days, coasting along the shores of the islands, when he was able to hear the natives crying in loud voices, “Come and see the men who have come from heaven; bring them food and drink.” If Columbus thought he was able to translate the language in two days’ time, it is not surprising that what he heard in it was what he wanted to hear or that what he saw was what he wanted to see—namely, the Indies, filled with people eager to submit to their new admiral and viceroy.
Columbus made four voyages to America, during which he succeeded in exploring an astonishingly large area of the Caribbean and a part of the northern coast of South America. Everything he saw fitted his conception of the Indies. Cuba, he believed, was a peninsula on the mainland of China, a part of the province of Mangi; he named the easternmost point of it Cape Alpha et Omega and contemplated the awesome fact that the entire landmass of the world stretched continuously westward between him and Cape St. Vincent in Portugal, the western-most extension of Europe.
From the moment of his first landfall, Columbus was looking for spices and gold. The reason he was so distraught at not recognizing trees and plants was that he thought that some of them must be valuable spices, which he ought to bring back with him in quantity. But gold was unquestionably more important than spices or even than pearls and precious stones, and Columbus had his heart set on finding gold. “Gold,” he rhapsodized, “is most excellent…and he who possesses it may do what he will in the world, and may so attain as to bring souls to paradise.” At every island the first thing he inquired about was gold, taking heart from every trace of it he found. And at Haiti he found enough to convince him that this was Ophir, the country to which Solomon and Jehosophat had sent for gold and silver. Since its lush vegetation reminded him of Castile, he renamed it Española, the Spanish island, which was later latinized as Hispaniola.
Española appealed to Columbus from his first glimpse of it. From aboard ship it was possible to make out rich fields waving with grass. There were good harbors, lovely sand beaches, and “trees of a thousand kinds, all laden with fruit, which the admiral believed to be spices and nutmegs, but they were not ripe and he did not recognize them.” The people were shy and fled whenever the caravels approached the shore, but Columbus gave orders “that they should take some, treat them well and make them lose their fear, that some gain might be made, since, considering the beauty of the land, it could not be but that there was gain to be got.” And indeed there was. Although the amount of gold worn by the natives was even less than the amount of clothing, it gradually became apparent that there was gold to be had. One man possessed some that had been pounded into gold leaf. Another appeared with a gold belt. Some produced nuggets for the admiral. Española accordingly became the first European colony in America. Although Columbus had formally taken possession of every island he found, the act was mere ritual until he reached Española. Here he began the European occupation of the New World, and here his European ideas and attitudes began their transformation of land and people.
The people of Española were the handsomest that Columbus had encountered in the New World and so attractive in character that he found it hard to praise them enough. “They are the best people in the world,” he said, “and beyond all the mildest.” They cultivated a bit of cassava for bread and made a bit of cottonlike cloth from the fibers of the gossampine tree. But most of the day they spent like children idling away their time from morning to night seemingly without a care in the world. Once they saw that Columbus meant them no harm, they outdid one another in bringing him anything he wanted. Never had there been such generosity. It was impossible to believe, he reported, “that anyone has seen a people with such kind hearts and so ready to give the Christians all that they possess, and when the Christians arrive, they run at once to bring them everything.”
To Columbus the people of Española seemed like relics of the golden age. On the basis of what he told Peter Martyr, who recorded his voyages, Martyr wrote, “If we shall not bee ashamed to confesse the Trueth, they seeme to live in that golden worlde of the which olde writers speake so much, wherein menne lived simply and innocently without enforcement of lawes, without quarreling, judges, and libelles, content onely to satisfie nature, without further vexation for knowledge of things to come.”
As the idyllic Arawak Indians of Española conformed to one ancient picture, their enemies the Caribs conformed to another that Columbus had read of, the anthropophagi. According to the Arawaks, the Caribs or Cannibals were man-eaters, and as such their name eventually entered the English language. The Caribs lived on islands of their own and met every European approach with poisoned arrows, which men and women together fired in showers. They not only were fierce but, by comparison with the Arawaks, also seemed more energetic, more industrious, and, it might even be said, sadly enough, more civil. After Columbus succeeded in entering one of their settlements on his second voyage, a member of the expedition reported, “This people seemed to us to be more civil than those who were in the other islands we have visited, although they all have dwellings of straw, but these have them better made and better provided with supplies, and in them were more signs of industry, both of men and women.”
Columbus had no doubts about how to proceed, either with the lovable but lazy Arawaks or with the hateful but industrious Cannibals. He had come to take possession and to establish dominion. The Arawaks of Española would obviously make good subjects. He had no sooner set eyes on them than he began making plans. In almost the same breath he described their gentleness and innocence and then went on to assure the king and queen of Spain, “They have no arms and are all naked and without any knowledge of war, and very cowardly, so that a thousand of them would not face three. And they are also fitted to be ruled and to be set to work, to cultivate the land and to do all else that may be necessary, and you may build towns and teach them to go clothed and adopt our customs.”
So much for the golden age. Columbus had not yet prescribed the method by which the Arawaks would be set to work, but he had a pretty clear idea of how to handle the Caribs. On his second voyage, after capturing a few of them, he sent them in slavery to Spain, as samples of what he hoped would be a regular trade. They were obviously intelligent, and in Spain they might “be led to abandon that inhuman custom which they have of eating men, and there in Castile, learning the language, they will much more readily receive baptism and secure the welfare of their souls.” The way to handle the slave trade, Columbus suggested, was to send ships from Spain loaded with cattle (there were no native domestic animals on Española), and he would return the ships loaded with Cannibals. This plan of replacing Cannibals with cattle was never put into operation, partly because the Spanish sovereigns did not approve it and partly because the Cannibals did not approve it. They defended themselves so successfully with their poisoned arrows that the Spaniards decided to withhold the blessings of civilization from them and to concentrate their efforts on the seemingly more amenable Arawaks of Española.
The process of civilizing the Arawaks got under way in earnest after the Santa Maria ran aground, Christmas Day, 1492, off Caracol Bay. The local leader in that part of Española, Guacanagari, rushed to the scene and with his people helped the Spaniards to salvage everything aboard. Once again Columbus was overjoyed with the remarkable natives. They are, he wrote, “so full of love and without greed, and suitable for every purpose, that I assure your Highnesses that I believe there is no better land in the world, and they are always smiling.” While the salvage operations were going on, canoes full of Arawaks from other parts of the island came in bearing gold. Guacanagari “was greatly delighted to see the admiral joyful and understood that he desired much gold.” Thereafter it arrived in amounts calculated to console the admiral for the loss of the Santa Maria, which had to be scuttled. He decided to make his permanent headquarters on the spot and accordingly ordered a fortress to be built, with a tower and a large moat.
What followed is a long, complicated, and unpleasant story. Columbus returned to Spain to bring the news of his discoveries. The Spanish monarchs who had backed his expedition were less impressed than he with what he had found, but he was able to round up a large expedition of Spanish colonists to return with him and help exploit the riches of the Indies. At Española the new settlers built forts and towns and began helping themselves to all the gold they could find among the natives. These creatures of the golden age remained generous. But precisely because they did not value possessions, they had little to turn over. When gold was not forthcoming, the Europeans began killing. Some of the natives struck back and hid out in the hills. But in 1495 a punitive expedition rounded up fifteen hundred of them, and five hundred were shipped off to the slave markets of Seville.
The natives, seeing what was in store for them, dug up their own crops of cassava and destroyed their supplies in hopes that the resulting famine would drive the Spaniards out. It was a shrewd strategy because a civil man reportedly ate more in one day than a whole family of barbarians in a month. But it did not work. The Spaniards were not to be shaken off. They were sure there was more gold in the island than the natives had yet found, and they determined to make them dig it out. Columbus built more forts throughout the island and decreed that every Arawak of fourteen years or over was to furnish a hawk’s bell full of gold dust every three months. The various local leaders were made responsible for seeing that the tribute was paid. In regions where gold was not to be had, twenty-five pounds of woven or spun cotton could be substituted for the hawk’s bell of gold dust.
Unfortunately Española was not Ophir, and it did not have anything like the amount of gold that Columbus thought it did. The pieces that the natives had at first presented him were the accumulation of many years. To fill their quotas by washing in the riverbeds was all but impossible, even with continual daily labor. But the demand was unrelenting, and those who sought to escape it by fleeing to the mountains were hunted down with dogs taught to kill. A few years later Peter Martyr was able to report that the natives “beare this yoke of servitude with an evill will, but yet they beare it.”
The tribute system, for all its injustice and cruelty, preserved something of the Arawaks’ old social arrangements: they retained their old leaders under control of the king’s viceroy, and royal directions to the viceroy might ultimately have worked some mitigation of their hardships. But the Spanish settlers of Española did not care for this centralized method of exploitation. They wanted a share of the land and its people, and when their demands were not met they revolted against the government of Columbus. In 1499 they forced him to abandon the system of obtaining tribute through the Arawak chieftains for a new one in which both land and people were turned over to individual Spaniards for exploitation as they saw fit. This was the beginning of the system of “repartimientos” or “encomiendas” later extended to other areas of Spanish occupation. With its inauguration Columbus’s economic control of Española effectively ceased, and even his political authority was revoked later in the same year when the king appointed a new governor.
For the Arawaks the new system of forced labor meant that they did more work, wore more clothes, and said more prayers (their owners were supposed to convert them). Peter Martyr could rejoice that “so many thousands of men are received to bee the sheepe of Christes flocke.” But these were sheep prepared for slaughter. If we may believe Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican who spent many years among them, they were tortured, burned, and fed to the dogs by their masters. They died from overwork and from new European diseases. They killed themselves. And they took pains to avoid having children. Life was not fit to live, and they stopped living. From a population of 100,000 at the lowest estimate in 1492, there remained in 1514 about 32,000 Arawaks in Española. In 1542, according to Las Casas, only 200 were left. In their place had appeared slaves imported from Africa. The people of the golden age had been exterminated.
Why? What is the meaning of this tale of horror? Why is the first chapter of American history an atrocity story? Bartolomé de Las Casas, who watched it happen had a simple answer, greed: “The cause why the Spanishe have destroyed such an infinitie of soules, hath been onely, that they have helde it for their last scope and marke to gette golde.” The answer is true enough. But we shall have to go further than Spanish greed to understand why American history began this way. The Spanish had no monopoly on greed. There is very little reason to suppose that if the English or French had been first on the scene the results would have been different. Enslavement, torture, and murder on a large scale, not to mention catastrophic epidemics, have often accompanied Western occupation of countries inhabited by people lacking in Christianity, civility, and guns. In most cases the cause may be identified as greed. Perhaps we can begin to understand not only Spanish greed but Western greed in general, not only this first atrocity story of American history but a number of later, less spectacular atrocities, if we look at the victims through the eyes of the victors.
As I have already mentioned, from the moment they set foot on Española, the Spaniards noted that the Indians were surprisingly unattached to the things of this world. They were content to eat almost anything that happened to come along, including spiders, lizards, and worms. But by Spanish standards they ate very little of anything. They spun and wove a little cotton, but preferred to go naked. Even their houses were flimsy, temporary structures. Because they had no desire to acquire or keep anything for which they felt no present need, they were generous beyond belief; and, without the covetousness or acquisitiveness attendant upon worldly appetites, they seemed able to live together happily and peacefully, unassisted by the restraints of government.
The Indians’ austere way of life could not fail to win the admiration of the invaders, for self-denial was an ancient virtue in Western culture. The Greeks and Romans had constructed philosophies and the Christians a religion around it. The man who would imitate Christ had to deny himself, give his all to the poor, love his neighbor as himself, curb his natural appetites, and set his heart on God alone. The monastic life was an organized effort to live this way. The Indians, and especially the Arawaks, gave no sign of thinking much about God, but otherwise they seemed to have attained the monastic virtues. They had also attained an impressive freedom. Plato had emphasized again and again that freedom was to be reached by restraining one’s needs, and the Arawaks had done just that. According to Peter Martyr, who sometimes despaired of his own countrymen’s debilitating self-indulgence, the Indians’ “contentation with the benefites of nature doth playnly declare that men may lead a free and happye life without tables, table clothes, carpettes, napkins, and towels, with suche other innumerable….” Europeans would do well to learn from these children of nature, who scorned superfluities, he said, “as hindrances of their sweete libertie.”
But even as they admired the Indians’ simplicity, the Europeans were troubled by it, troubled and offended. Innocence never fails to offend, never fails to invite attack, and the Indians seemed the most innocent people anyone had ever seen. Their freedom from acquisitive instincts was delightful to behold but disturbingly effortless. Without the help of Christianity or of civilization, they had attained virtues that Europeans liked to think of as the proper outcome of Christianity and civilization. The fury with which the Spaniards assaulted the Arawaks even after they had enslaved them must surely have been in part a blind impulse to crush an innocence that seemed to deny the Europeans’ cherished assumption of their own civilized, Christian superiority over naked, heathen barbarians.
The affront went deep, and the cruelty and greed it provoked were symptoms of a conflict that has lasted in one form or another to the present day and can end only when the West has achieved what is now known as “modernization” of the entire world. The life of the Arawaks, for all its admirable simplicity and austerity, was incompatible with the kind of existence that Europeans, for all their praise of self-denial, thought right. The self-denial that civilized Christians were supposed to practice did not eventuate in nakedness. Christians might deny themselves silks and velvets, but they must not deny themselves clothes; they might embrace poverty but not idleness; they might fast, but they must not neglect to work for bread. Europeans, while telling themselves to curb their appetites, had organized a civilization that required them to extract from nature a greater abundance of goods than the Arawaks cared to have.
The Arawaks were actually skilled agriculturists; with a minimum of labor, they made their island support an enormous population, and with their apparent intelligence, they could certainly have produced more food, more clothing, better shelters. But their needs were small, and they wanted no more than they needed. They preferred to spend their days in what seemed to the European mere play and idleness. When European confronted Indian, then, friction could scarcely have failed to develop.
We must, of course, remember that European production in the fifteenth century was nowhere near as efficient as it has since become. By modern standards Europeans of Columbus’s time lived an unorganized and ineffective life. Indeed, the upper classes, when they were not busy fighting holy wars, aspired to a way of life that required no more work than an Arawak would do. But by comparison with the Arawaks, fifteenth-century Europeans made spectacularly high demands, if not on themselves, at least on those who stood in the lower ranks of society. They had developed ideas about work that were wholly incompatible with the seeming fecklessness of the Arawaks of Española. Behind the Spanish assault on the Indians lay a conviction that men must work, if not for themselves then for their betters, in the interests of civility and Christianity. It was this conviction that allowed Peter Martyr to hymn the Indians’ asceticism and love of liberty but then go on to censure them because the object of both virtues was mere “play and idleness.” For the same reason Columbus could admire the Indians even while he made plans to enslave them.
The Spanish government was not unmindful of what was going on in its new lands across the sea and made periodic efforts to control the abuse of the Indians. It even authorized a few abortive experiments in setting the Indians free. But it could not condone a liberty that resulted in idleness. The only way to keep Indians at work, it seemed, was to make them work for Spaniards. In 1517 when a team of Jeronymite friars quizzed the oldest Spanish inhabitants of Española about the capacities and capabilities of the natives, there was unanimous agreement that the Arawaks were unwilling to work unless forced to. They must be made to work for Spain, as the Spanish government had proclaimed in 1513, “to prevent their living in idleness and to assure their learning to live and govern themselves like Christians.”
The Spanish determination that the Indians should not live in idleness was reinforced in Española by Columbus’s expectations of the country he thought he had reached and by the similar expectations of other Spaniards. The true Indies were already geared to the European economy: merchants for centuries had been sending the products of European labor eastward to the Orient in exchange for spices and other treasures. Española in the role of Ophir was expected to yield its riches to Columbus as it had to Solomon. When it became evident that Española was not Ophir and that America was not the Indies but a new world, that whole new world had to be transformed. It had to be organized and exploited to produce the things expected of it.
Columbus’s first method of exploiting Española, when the natives failed to produce what was expected of them, was crude: to ship the inhabitants to Spain as slaves was to make no more effective use of the island than the neighboring Caribs did in occasionally harvesting a crop of Arawaks to eat. To put them to work under their chieftains was far more productive. To give them at last to Spanish masters who could extract more work than the chieftains could was still more effective—except that the Arawaks died. Probably more died from other causes than from overwork, but it would be hard to say how much work was overwork for an Arawak. Work had not been an important part of human life in Española before Columbus.
That the Indians were destroyed by Spanish greed is true. But greed is simply one of the uglier names we give to the driving force of modern civilization. We usually prefer less pejorative names for it. Call it the profit motive, or free enterprise, or the work ethic, or the American way, or, as the Spanish did, civility. Before we become too outraged at the behavior of Columbus and his followers, before we identify ourselves too easily with the lovable Arawaks, we have to ask whether we could really get along without greed and everything that goes with it. Yes, a few of us, a few eccentrics, might manage to live for a time like the Arawaks. But the modern world could not have put up with the Arawaks any more than the Spanish could. The story moves us, offends us, but perhaps the more so because we have to recognize ourselves not in the Arawaks but in Columbus and his followers.
The Spanish reaction to the Arawak was Western civilization’s reaction to the barbarian: the Arawaks answered the Europeans’ description of men, just as Balboa’s tiger answered the description of a tiger, and being men they had to be made to live as men were supposed to live. But the Arawaks’ view of man was something different, and they were unable to recognize themselves as men in the role in which the invaders cast them. They were offered civility in the shape of clothing that they did not want, in return for work that they did not wish to perform.
Civility and Christianity in the form of a cotton shirt and baptism were not adequate recompense for the liberty without which they had no will to live. They died not merely from cruelty, torture, murder, and disease but also, in the last analysis, because they could not be persuaded to fit the European conception of what they ought to be. Since they would not or could not accept the place assigned them in the Old World scheme for America, they had to give place to new men, African or European, who would make the country yield what was expected of it. The Arawaks of Española were the first to be pushed aside in this way but by no means the last. Although their story was only a small early incident in the Europeans’ total transformation of the Western Hemisphere, and ultimately of the world, it epitomized that transformation. It was indeed the first chapter of American history, as we know it, the first chapter of our history.