"It was a general rule among the Spaniards to be cruel," he wrote. Bartolomée de Las Casas (1474–1566), who knew Columbus and first voyaged to Hispaniola in 1502 as a settler, eventually became a priest and bitterly denounced the treatment of native peoples. The pattern repeated itself throughout the islands. There were an estimated 500,000 to 750,000 Indians on Hispaniola when Columbus arrived by 1514 that number had dwindled to 29,000, and by 1550 they were all but gone. Through disease, murder, and overwork, their numbers decreased dramatically in a short time. "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold," Columbus wrote.Ĭaribbean Indians were put to work in mines or on plantations. Five hundred Indians were sent back to Spain in chains to begin a lifetime of slavery. On Columbus's second voyage, he began taking captives from various islands, all the while demanding gold. Slavery thus existed, at least in the minds of Europeans, from the moment they first set foot in the Caribbean. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone." With a little financial help from the Crown, he said, he would be able to provide "as much gold as they need … and as many slaves as they ask" (Zinn 1980, p. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. He reported to the king and queen of Spain that the Indians "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want (Zinn 1980, p. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They willingly traded everything they owned…. They … brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. Columbus recorded his thoughts about them in his log: The first people he met, in the Bahamas, were a friendly indigenous tribe called the Arawaks. On subsequent voyages he would visit other islands, as well as the South and Central American mainlands. Columbus, on his first voyage, visited the Bahamas, Cuba, and the island that he named Española (Hispaniola, to the English) but its natives, the Taino-Arawak, called Ayiti. Europeans arrived in the islands of the Caribbean in 1492.
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