In 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail across the Atlantic, hoping to find a westward sea route to China and India. His mission, supported by Spain’s monarchs Ferdinand II and Isabella I, aimed at evangelizing and colonization. Coulombs wrote in his journal, “Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians, and princes who love and promote the holy Christian faith, and are enemies of the doctrine of Mahomet, and of all idolatry and heresy, determined to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the above mentioned countries of India, to see the said princes, people and territories, and to learn their disposition and the proper method of converting them to our holy faith.” So holy that Columbus behaved like “a cruel and greedy tyrant with a brutal disregard for humanity.’’ According to historians commenting on documents recently discovered at Valladolid (north-western Spain), where he died 500 years ago. But the twin objectives were amply fulfilled in the following decades, in the form of vast riches and the Christianization of all natives.
From the latter’s point of view, however, the picture was very different: they lost their land their land, their freedom, their honor, their lives, and their culture. As soon as they set foot on the “New World,” colonizers indulged in speakable cruelty on those they called “Indians.” In his 1906 Christopher Columbus and the New World of his Discovery, historian Filson Young wrote:
“Lust and bloody cruelty, of a kind not merely indescribable but unrealizable by sane men and women, drenched the once happy island [Hispaniola] with anguish and terror. And in payment for it the Spaniards undertook to teach the heathen the Christian religion.’’
Young then narrates the courageous but hopeless rebellion by a few Indian chiefs, which resulted in the wholesale slaughter of their clans. “After that,’’ he continues, “there was never any more resistance; it was simply a case of extermination, which the Spaniards easily accomplished by cutting of the heads of women as they rode through the villages. Thus, in the twelve years since the discovery of Columbus, between half a million and a million natives, perished; and as the Spanish colonization spread afterwards from island to island, and the banner of civilization and Christianity was borne farther abroad throughout the Indies, the same hideous process was continued. In Cuba, in Jamaica, throughout the Antilles, the cross and the sword, the whip-lash are only Gospel advanced together; wherever the Host was consecrated, hideous cries of agony to and suffering broke forth; until happily, in the fullness of time, the dire business was complete, and the whole of the people who had inhabited this garden of the world were exterminated and their blood and race wiped from the face of the earth.’’
A few voices protest were heard, notably that of the Spanish priest Bartoleme de Las Cases rightly traced the atrocities to greed: “The reason why the Christians have killed and destroyed such an infinite number of souls is that they have been moved by their wish for gold and their desire to enrich themselves in a very short time.’’ Colonization was, he wrote,’’ born in blood and fire,’’ and he feared that Spain-even the Church-may have to suffer divine retribution for the black deeds of the conquistadors.
Historian David Stannard uses a similar language in his American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (1992): “The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.’’ Stannard, advances 100 million as the number of indigenous victims right up to the nineteenth century; asking “What kind of people do such horrendous things to others?’’, he answers squarely: Christians, tracing the problem to their attitudes towards sex, race and war. Claims of racial superiority as well as exclusive ownership of the truth in the form of Christianity certainly provided convenient pretexts to the colonizers.
In fact, back in Spain, to justify the treatment of Amerindians, an influential Jesuit maintained that they were “inferior to the Spaniards just as children are to adults, women to men and indeed, one might even say, as apes are to men.’’ Some asserted that they had no soul; while others were sure they had no intelligence. In view of Catholic theology, therefore. Indians were born slaves (similar arguments will later be used towards the Blacks.) Las Cases again rose to the occasion and confronted these views in 1550 at the famous Council of Valladolid. Arguments were heard by theologians for ever a year, during which Las Cases hammered the point that “All the nations of the world are human and all share in the same definition: they are rational beings. All have intellect and will, as created in God’s image and similitude.’’ Las Cases resolutely went against the colonial stream, and eventually won the debate through his learning and deep conviction that Native Americans had a right to be treated as free men. Though it would make little immediate difference to their lives, it was an important victory in the realm of humanist ideas.
At the age of eighty-one, still gnawed by anguish at the fate of Amerindians, Las Cases wrote to the Pope boldly demanding his urgent intervention to restore their rights, as the suffering inflicted on them may otherwise bring about “ the damnation and destruction of the Church.’’ He asked the pope to excommunicate “all those who affirm that wars against the infidels are just if waged to combat idolatry, or for the convenience of spreading the Gospel, specially in regard to those infields who have never injured or are not injuring us.’’
