Columbus, the Indians, and Human

Columbus, The Indians, And Human Progress

A Different View of European Explorers

Historian Howard Zinn paints a picture of European colonization of the New World that conflicts dramatically with the impressions suggested by most contemporary historical accounts. According to Zinn, heroes of Western civilization like Columbus, Cortes, Pizarro, and the English settlers of the future American states Massachusetts and Virginia actually perpetrated brutal genocide against the native peoples of the Americas. Specifically, Zinn details the rape, pillage, enslavement, and wholesale slaughter of the peaceful Arawak Indians of the Bahamas by Columbus, and the very similar exploitation and destruction of the Aztecs of Mexico by Cortes, the Incas of Peru by Pizarro, and the Powhatans and the Pequots of North America by the English settlers.

A Record of Cultural Exploitation, Savagery, and Societal Destruction

According to the author, the era of European exploration and colonization of the Americas was characterized by a one-dimensional search for gold to repay those who originally financed exploratory voyages. Zinn provides ample evidence of all of his major claims. With respect to the manner in which Columbus and the Spaniards brutalized the Arawak, he writes:

" & #8230; 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. & #8230; 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. & #8230; 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."

Zinn details similar atrocities committed by Cortes against the Aztecs. He was also a Spaniard whose expeditions were financed predicated "and blessed by the deputies of God" and predicated on the hope of repayment in gold from the New World:

"Cortes then began his march of death from town to town, using deception, turning Aztec against Aztec, killing with the kind of deliberateness that accompanies a strategy-to paralyze the will of the population by a sudden frightful deed. And so, in Cholulu, he invited the headmen of the Cholula nation to the square. And when they came, with thousands of unarmed retainers, Cortes's small army of Spaniards, posted around the square with cannon, armed with crossbows, mounted on horses, massacred them, down to the last man. Then they looted the city and moved on. When their cavalcade of murder was over they were in Mexico City, Montezuma was dead, and the Aztec civilization, shattered, was in the hands of the Spaniards."