When Columbus finally crossed the Atlantic and reached the island, which is known today as the Bahamas, he was shipwrecked before he could set anchor. The Lucayan natives of the island spent hours in rescuing his ship, and saved his crew and cargo.
And Columbus realized what a great people they were, he wrote about them in his memoirs and called them healthy, generous, and hospitable people. He saw them wearing gold jewellery and his mind was fixated on that gold, and he crossed all limits in the pursuit of that gold.
This is how Columbus repaid their kindness
When he returned home from this first journey, he kidnapped twenty-five Lucayan people from the island and took them with him. Eighteen of them died on the way, getting abused, beaten, and overworked – only seven survived. He sold these people as slaves in Europe.
These were the same people who went to great lengths to rescue his ship, his crew, and his cargo – fed him, clothed him, and healed him.
“They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things. They willingly traded everything they owned. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.”
And he thought of their kindness as a weakness. He said:
“I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men and govern them as I pleased.”
When he met the Queen of Spain after his return, he told her the tale of a promised land abounding in gold and unimaginable wealth. So she gave him seventeen ships with fifteen hundred people and an arsenal that had swords, crossbows, and cannons.
His second journey back to the Caribbean islands
When he returned, the natives were not pleased to see him. He was the man whose life they had saved, and in returned he had kidnapped twenty five of their people. So they flat out told him that he wasn’t welcome on their shores.
But Columbus wasn’t an easy man to stave away, he brought forth his army and demanded the native people that they supply him with food, gold, and sex.
They refused.
So he decided to cut off their ears and sent them back to their villages, to serve as a warning.
They were peaceful and polite till now, but they didn’t tolerate this violence against their own people. A rebellion ensued.
Native people’s rebellion was squashed brutally by Columbus
But this rebellion was brought to naught as Columbus had deadlier weapons and he slaughtered entire villages and wreaked havoc of pillage and plunder upon people who had offered him nothing but love.
He killed them and then fed them to his hungry dogs. Most of the time, he would just set the dogs on injured native peoples to hunt them down and eat them while they were still alive.
These were the people who had no concept of war or conquest, the only weapons they had were hunting spears and fishing rods – they didn’t even know what a sword was.
“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 have no iron. Their spears are made of cane. They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
What was the Turtle Island and where is it now?
Obviously, Lucayans and most of the native people of this continent that, in their languages, they used to call “The Turtle Island” – which was later named to America after the Italian cartographer Amerigo Vespucci – they were a peaceful people, who had ample land and resources and very little of greed.
They knew little of war, and conquest was something they had never known. They learned only to hunt and fish, they were never prepared to fight other human beings who were this vicious, merciless, and ungrateful.
When he had first arrived at their shores, drowning and dying – they had saved his life. And in return, he offered them death and rape and slavery. Yet the Europeans, for hundreds of years, had the gall to call everyone else the savages except themselves.
In this war, he captured one thousand five hundred men, women, and children – loaded them into ships and sent them to Spain. Two hundred of these died on the way.
Columbus wrote about this:
“Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”
Columbus’s thirst for gold and blood
After which he started hunting for gold, he learned that the natives brought gold from Cicao in Haiti so he ordered every person older than 14 to bring a certain amount of gold for him every three months.
In return, he gave them a token to wear around their neck which had an expiry date. Till the expiry date was over, these people would be free since they had completed their quota. If they failed to reach their quota, Columbus had their hands cut and hung around their neck with a rope – as a form of punishment.
But these mines had no more gold, and there was nothing these people could bring back to Columbus so most of them ran away into the hills.
Columbus and his people hunted them down and killed them all, one by one.
They hunted the native people for fun, kidnapped little girls
The Europeans were so cruel that another one of them, a priest, wrote in his book:
“Spaniards thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades. Two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys.”
Columbus and his men rode on the backs of native people, and most of the times they just hunted them down for sport, laughing while chasing them and wounding them and again chasing them as these innocent people ran for every last breath of their life. He got them killed and fed their bodies to his dogs.
Crimes of Columbus don’t end here.
Once he had kidnapped enough people and sent them to be sold as slaves, and there was no more gold to be found, he started preying on little girls. He captured girls who were as young as nine years old, and sold them into sexual slavery where they were used as currency and raped by him and his crew.
“A hundred castellenoes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten years old are now in demand.”
He also introduced new diseases to the natives against which they had no immunity
He also deliberately exposed the natives to European diseases such as smallpox against which they had no immunity.
The natives of Turtle Island had made the mistake of saving some drowning sailors and those sailors brought slavery, war, genocide, hunger, and disease to the natives. Within next fifty years, nearly five million people died.
And since Columbus was now stealing gold from Bahamas and Haiti, and exporting it to other countries – the gold-based economy of Gold Coast in Africa collapsed. Soon, the Europeans were able to capture this country and kidnap the African people to sell them as slaves in the new land they called America.
Columbus did not just commit genocide and slavery on the Turtle Island, he also started the slavery of the African people.
Yet, he is one of the only three people in USA to have a federal holiday named after him. The other two are Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.
The saddest and most gruesome tale is of the Arawak people who lived on the island of Haiti
They were already facing extinction because of the diseases introduced by Europeans against which they had no immunity. Eventually, they decided to fight back but they couldn’t win against the deadlier and stronger weaponry of the Europeans.
Columbus and his crew started hanging and burning the Arawak people they had captured. They captured the healthy and uninjured to be sold as slaves.
This was the tipping point for Arawak people who started to die by mass suicides, they fed cassava poison to their children and themselves to avoid getting captured and turned into slaves.
There population was nearly 250,000 when Columbus arrived in Haiti. Within two years, half of them were dead. Within next fifty years, most of them died as only 500 of them survived. Within the next century, every last one of the Arawak people were wiped away from these islands.
So now, Columbus is being brought down
This is the Christopher Columbus that the white people of USA celebrate, and he has had a holiday in his name in 30 countries of the Americas and Europe. Only recently, they have begun to change the meaning of this holiday from celebrating Columbus to honoring the indigenous lives whose blood was on his hands.
Descendants of the natives of Turtle Island, descendants of the Africans who were brought there as slaves – they have known their history, and tearing down statues of Columbus is just a start for them as they wipe out the celebration of genocide from their land. Reparations would come after.
All Featured Images Courtesy: Common Media