Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [119]
In time, the Indians depleted the island’s limited supply of gold, and what seemed like a modest amount became increasingly difficult to acquire, even with unremitting effort picking through sand and shrubs. The system was in some ways worse than slavery, and it obliterated any chance that the Indians would assist or cooperate with the Spanish in any other endeavor besides the pointless tributes of gold. By imposing this system, Columbus ensured a modest supply of gold would be his, at the cost of everything else he needed or could have wished. For example, Guarionex, the influential cacique, argued that the land used to provide a minimal amount of gold could grow enough wheat to feed all of Spain, not just once, but ten times, but Columbus refused to consider the idea, deciding instead to halve the tribute and perpetuate the offense.
Recounting this policy, Las Casas howled with indignation. “Some complied,” he noted, “and for others it was impossible, and so, falling into the most wretched way of living, some took refuge in the mountains whilst others, since the violence and provocation and injuries on the part of the Christians never ceased, killed some Christians for special damages and tortures that they suffered.” The Christians responded by murdering and torturing their antagonists, “not respecting the human and divine justice and natural law under whose authority they did it.” There is no denying the force of Las Casas’s outrage, but Indians were not the innocents of his imagination; they had been slaveholders long before the Europeans arrived. Fernández de Oviedo noted that in war, contesting Indian tribes “take captives whom they brand and keep as slaves. Each master has his own brand and some masters pull out one front tooth of their slaves as a mark of ownership.”
Demoralized by the Spanish tribute system, and unnerved by their own prophecies, many Indians took steps to escape in the only way left to them. Columbus became aware of the dimensions of the tragedy decimating the Indians when “it was pointed out to him that the natives had been vexed by a famine so widespread that more than 50,000 men had died, and every day they fell everywhere like sickened flocks,” in the words of Peter Martyr.
The reality was even more terrible than famine; it was self-inflicted. The Indians destroyed their stores of bread so that neither they nor the invaders would be able to eat it. They plunged off cliffs, they poisoned themselves with roots, and they starved themselves to death. Oppressed by the impossible requirement to deliver tributes of gold, the Indians were no longer able to tend their fields, or care for their sick, children, and elderly. They had given up and committed mass suicide to avoid being killed or captured by Christians, and to avoid sharing their land with them, their fields, groves, beaches, forests, and women: the future of their people. It was an extraordinary act of despair and self-destruction, so overwhelming that the Spanish could not comprehend it.
All of them, fifty thousand Indians, dead by their own hand.
The Spanish refused to shoulder the blame. The mass suicide resulted from the Indians’ “own stubbornness,” said Peter Martyr. “The Indians purposely destroyed all their bread [cassava] fields,” Columbus told his Sovereigns in October 1495. “To prevent my searching for gold the Indians put up as many obstacles as they could.” At the same time, he acknowledged that “nothing else makes them so sad and upset as the fact that we are coming into their territory.” But in reality, the Indians had little interest in gold, especially in comparison to Columbus. In his version, the Indians, after realizing that they would not be able to divert him from his hunt for gold, belatedly “resumed planting and seeding the land because they were starving, but heaven did not help them out with rain this time and they were ruined and died and are dying at an incredible rate.” He ascribed their deaths to “starvation.”
The dwindling number of survivors