Spanish Atrocities in the New

¶ … Spanish Atrocities in the New World

Contemporary history books regard the European explorers as courageous men who risked life and limb on the vast oceans searching for lands to expand European society. Every October, the United States celebrates Columbus Day, and thousands of American streets are named in his honor. However, the historical record actually reveals that the "heroic" European explorers were brutal murders, and as guilty of genocide in their era as the worst despots in modern history, perhaps even exceeding monsters like Hitler in the numbers of their innocent victims. Virtually without exception, when men such as Columbus, Cortes, and Pizzarro claimed new lands on behalf of their nations, it was over the bodies of thousands of native peoples of those lands; if one counts the entire toll of the era of European exploration and expansion, the number of innocent victims was in the millions. Ironically, Eurocentric beliefs about the superiority of "civilized" man in general and of Christian soldiers in particular were the primary justifications relied upon to ignore the natural rights of native peoples and to discount their suffering at the ends of Christian swords, especially those forged in Spain.

Details of the Atrocities Committed by the Spanish Explorers

Columbus was primarily motivated by greed and the fanatical beliefs about vast fields of gold waiting for him on distant shores (Schwartz, 2000). His voyages were financed on speculation by the Spanish Crown that Columbus would eventually be returning with ships full of precious metals and spices. However, Columbus discovered lands that were virtually devoid of riches, at least devoid of riches in the forms they had sought originally (Schwartz, 2000).

On Columbus's first voyages to the Americas he encountered native peoples such as the Arawak Indians of Haiti and the native inhabitants of modern-day Bahamas. The Europeans were immediately surprised to discover societies of people who had no weapons, knew no warfare, and barely even acknowledged concepts such as proprietary ownership (Schwartz, 2000; Zinn, 2008). Instead of learning from them or appreciating the example of communal harmony in which they lived, Columbus and his men exploited their superior military power, rounded up hundreds of human beings, and shipped them back across the oceans to Europe as slaves (Zinn, 2008).

On the new territories, the Spaniards set about enslaving the native populations, mainly in the search for gold ore which they required all males of adolescent age and above to work gold mines searching for the precious metals that were supposed to have funded their voyages. In addition to enslaving them, they routinely brutalized and murdered them, often for not reason whatsoever other than sport and because they could (

). In that regard, there were two principal reasons that they could: First, the native populations knew nothing of weaponry and were at the mercy of the European canons, muskets, and metal swords; second, the Europeans had the moral backing of the Christian Church.

Specifically, the Spaniards believed that the native peoples they encountered were "uncivilized" "savages" who had no natural rights under the laws of the Christian God and the superiority of Christians (Schwartz, 2000; Stannard, 1993). The Spanish Royal Crown officially declared that the only salvation possible for the native populations was to accept their opportunity to adopt Christianity. In fact under a concept known as Requerimiento, the Spaniards were required to give the native people a "fair" opportunity to do just that before they disposed of them as savages instead of respecting them as human beings created in God's image. As Eurocentric a concept as Requerimiento was, even that edict was routinely ignored by Columbus's men (Schwartz, 2000; Stannard, 1993). They enslaved men, rapes women, and murdered children virtually at will. They imposed "quotas" of minimum amounts of gold ore to be collected daily and imposed penalties of mutilation and death, often depending on whether or not their victims survived after having limbs hacked off as a message to their companions and their communities that the Spaniards were deadly serious about expecting them to find their gold (Stannard, 1993; Zinn, 2008).

Furthermore, even their enslavement for this purpose was officially sanctioned by the Spanish authorities under the doctrine of Encomienda, according to which the native peoples of foreign lands had a duty to accept the teachings of Christ when they were presented to them by their conquerors (Stannard, 1993; Zinn, 2008). If they resisted this obligation, their enslavement under the Encomienda system was considered part of the persuasion necessary to break them of their "uncivilized" habits and to teach them discipline (Stannard, 1993; Zinn, 2008). Within two decades of Columbus's first arrival on the shores of the Americas, only approximately 50,000 Arawak Indians remained on Haiti, from an original population of more than 250,000 first encountered by the Europeans. Those numbers pale in comparison to at least 8 million natives of Hispaniola and virtually all of the original 25 million people killed in Central Mexico in less than a century of European "exploration" (Stannard, 1993).