The Legacy of Columbus

Below is an excerpt from Thom Hartmann's book "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight." This book transformed my view of the problems facing our world, and as Daniel Quinn (author of "Ishmael") put it, it's "A wake-up call, loud and clear, that must literally be heard round the world."

On this Columbus Day, I share the following passage, for your consideration:

"Christopher Columbus not only opened the door to a New World, but also set an example for us all" - George H.W. Bush (b. 1924), 1989 speech

If you fly over the island of Hispaniola off Haiti, the island on which Columbus landed, it looks like somebody took a blowtorch and burned away anything green. Even the ocean around the capital of Port-au-Prince is choked for miles with the brown of human sewage and eroded topsoil. From the air, it looks like a lava flow spilling over into the sea.

The history of this small island is, in many ways, a microcosm for whats happening in the whole world.

When Columbus first landed on Hispaniola in 1492, almost the entire island was covered by lush forest. The Taino "Indians" who lived there had an idyllic life prior to Columbus, from the reports left to us by literate members of Columbus's crew, such as Miguel Cuneo.

When Columbus and his crew arrived on their second visit to Hispaniola, however, they took captive about sixteen hundred local villagers who had come out to greet them. Cuneo wrote; "When our ships... were to leave for Spain, we gathered... one thousand six hundred male and female persons of those Indians, and of these we embarked in our ships on February 17, 1495.... For those who remained, we let it be known [to the Spaniards who manned the island's fort] in the vicinity that anyone who wanted to take some of them could do so, to the amount desired, which was done."

Cuneo further notes that he himself took a beautiful teenage Carib girl as his personal slave, a gift from Columbus himself, but that when he attempted to have sex with her, she "resisted with all her strength." So, in his own words, he "thrashed her mercilessly and raped her."

It was a common reward for Columbus's men for him to present them with local women to rape. As he began exporting Taino as slaves to other parts of the world, the sex-slave trade became an important part of the business, as Columbus wrote to a friend in 1500: "A hundred castellanoes [a Spanish coin] are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten [years old] are now in demand."

While Columbus once referred to the Taino Indians as cannibals, there was then and today still is no evidence that this was so. It was apparently a story made up by Columbus-- which is to this day still taught in some U.S. schools -- to help justify his slaughter and enslavement of the people. He wrote to the Spanish monarchs in 1493: "It is possible, with the name of the Holy Trinity, to sell all the slaves which it is possible to sell.... Here there are so many of these slaves, and also brazilwood, that although they are living things they are as good as gold."

However, the Taino turned out not to be particularly good workers in the plantations that the Spaniards and later the French established on Hispaniola: they resented their lands and children being taken, and attempted to fight back against the invaders. Since the Taino were obviously standing in the way of Spain's progress, Columbus sought to impost discipline on them. For even a minor offense, an Indian's nose or ear was cut off, so he could go back to his village to impress the people with the brutality the Spanish were capable of. Columbus attacked them with dogs, skewered them on poles from anus to mouth, and shot them. Eventually, life for the Taino became so unbearable that, as Pedro de Cordoba wrote to King Ferdinand in a 1517 letter, "As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth.... Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery."

Eventually, Columbus, and later his brother Bartholomew Columbus, whom he left in charge of the island, simply resorted to wiping out the Taino altogether. Prior to Columbus's arrival, most scholars place the population of Haiti/Hispaniola at around 300,000 people. By 1496, it was down to 110,000, according to a census done by Bartholomew Columbus. By 1516, the indigenous population was 12,000, and according to Las Casas (who were there), by 1542 fewer than 200 natives were alive. By 1555, every single one was dead. (Today not a single Taino is alive: their culture, people, and genes have vanished from the planet.)

As the transplanted population of slaves brought from Africa grew in Haiti, people began cutting the forests to create farmland and to use the trees as firewood for cooking and boiling water. As a result, today trees cover less than 1 percent of Haiti. The denuded land, exposed to rainfall and runoff sped up by the slope of the country's hills, has been so thoroughly eroded that it has mixed with sewage and carried the stain a full four miles out to sea from Port-au-Prince. Millions of people are crowded into the cities, where they provide a ready pool of ultra-cheap labor for multinational corporations, as well as cheap domestic help and inexpensive child and adult prostitutes for the European and American managers of those corporate interests and occasional tourist.

The legacy of Columbus is that life in Haiti is more than poor, it is desperate. As much as 16 hours a day are spent by the average country-dweller in search of food or firewood, and an equal amount of time is spent by city-dwellers in search of money or edible garbage. Diseases ranging from cholera to AIDS run rampant through the overcrowded population.

While Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, it is not unique. The Dominican Republic, which shares the island, is moving in the same direction, as is much of the rest of Central and South America.