Admiral of the Ocean Seas

Five hundred and fourteen years ago next Thursday, a sailor on one of Christopher Columbus's ships spotted the island of Hispaniola, thus initiating the European conquest of the New World. A man of somewhat uncertain origins, Columbus has been variously claimed by Genoa, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Judaism. He was the greatest mariner of his age, a brilliant leader, an inspired (if deluded) navigator, brave, indefatigable and pius. He was also a monster.

In his generally admiring and occasionally adulatory biography, title as above, Samuel Eliot Morison notes Columbus's extermination of the native Taino Indians:

Those who fled to the mountains were hunted with hounds, and of those who escaped starvation and disease took toll, whilst thousands of the poor creatures in desperation took cassava poison to end their miseries. So the policy and acts of Columbus for which he and he alone was responsible began the depopulation of the terrestial paradise that was Hispaniola in 1492. Of the original natives, estimated by a modern ethonlogist at 300,000 in number, one third were killed off between 1494 and 1496. By 1508, an enumeration showed only 60,000 alive. Four years later that number was reduced by two thirds; and in 1548 Oveido doubted whether 500 Indians remained. Today the blood of the Tainos exists only mingled with the more docile African Negroes who were imported to do the work that they could not and would not perform.

The fate of this gentle and almost defenceless people offers a terrible example to Americans who fancy that they will be allowed to live in peace by people overseas who covet what they have.

(That last remark is perhaps more meaningful when you know that the copyright year is 1942.)

The monstrous policies that drove this extermination were motivated by the greed of Columbus and his royal sponsors for gold. This opening act of history's greatest genocide was done in the name of gold, God, and the Crown, and justified by piety. Three hundred thousand might not seem like many compared to the approximately thirty million whose death in Mexico was occasioned by the Spanish conquest, but it seems somehow worse. The Aztecs were even more bloodthirsty than the Spanish, after all, but they lacked their terrible weapons, of which by far the most destructive were Old World diseases.