I did not get this essay from Bob Shepherd in time to post it on Columbus Day. Some years ago, I read the book by the priest Bartolomeo de las Casas to which he refers, and it made me so sick with disgust and sorrow that I could not finish it. Some illustrations show the Spanish conquistadores turning people on a spit, as if they were pigs. Too harrowing for me.
A Short Love Letter to Prezidoodle Donnie Trumpty-Dumpty
Re: Chrissie Columbus, by Robert D. Shepherd
We have two national holidays named after people, one for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and one for Christopher Columbus.
Columbus thought he had landed near Japan. He wrote a letter back home saying that the natives were so “artless” and “generous” that it would be easy to have whatever he wanted of them. He was, ofc, looking for a quick and easy route to the Far East so that he could trade in spices, silks, gemstones, and so on. When he didn’t find those, he set up a quota for gold to be delivered to him by every native over 14 years of age. When they didn’t meet their quotas, he cut off pieces of their anatomy–fingers, hands, feet. But there was no gold.
Terrified by the prospect of displeasing his sponsors back home, he hit upon enslaving the natives to work in mines and to produce crops that could be traded or sold. He instructed his overseers to pull one of the enslaved natives from the fields every once in a while and slaughter him or her in full view of the others to encourage them to work harder. He wrote a letter back home telling a friend that it was easy to keep his men in line by rationing out to them the native females for sexual purposes. He said, “THOSE FROM NINE TO TEN are now in demand.” He set armored dogs on the indigenous babies and toddlers for sport. He instituted the first European-run slave plantations in the New World AND the first trans-Atlantic slave trading. In a couple decades, he had almost entirely wiped out the Caribbean Arawaks–an estimated quarter of a million of them.
We have a contemporary account of these depredations by a priest named Bartolomeo de las Casas who, horrified, witnessed them first-hand and wrote a book to try to get King Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, to make it stop. In his book, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, de las Casas tells how the Spanish celebrated Easter by hanging thirteen Indians from a gibbet–one for each of the apostles and one for Christ–and flaying them alive. And there are bits about how much fun Christopher’s men had cutting open the bellies of living pregnant women and pulling the babies out.
So, Martin Luther King, Jr., and this guy, Columbus, notable for enslavement, genocide, the most ghastly conceivable tortures, and trading in children for unspeakable purposes–the fellow just honored as a “courageous . . . man of faith” in a proclamation by, you guessed it, agent Orange himself, Prezidoodle Donnie Trumpty-Dumpty.
