Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery

by Justin Winsor

The mines which Columbus went to seek were hard to find. The people he went to save to Christ were easy to exterminate. He mourned bitterly that his own efforts were ill requited. He had no pity for the misery of others, except they be his dependents and co-sharers of his purposes. He found a policy worth commemorating in slitting the noses and tearing off the ears of a naked heathen. He vindicates his excess by impressing upon the world that a man setting out to conquer the Indies must not be judged by the amenities of life which belong to a quiet rule in established countries. Yet, with a chance to establish a humane life among peoples ready to be moulded to good purposes, he sought from the very first to organize among them the inherited evils of "established countries." He talked a great deal about making converts of the poor souls, while the very first sight which he had of them prompted him to consign them to the slave-mart, just as if the first step to Christianize was the step which unmans.

The first vicar apostolic sent to teach the faith in Santo Domingo returned to Spain, no longer able to remain, powerless, in sight of the cruelties practiced by Columbus. Isabella prevented the selling of the natives as slaves in Spain, when Columbus had dispatched thither five shiploads. Las Casas tells us that in 1494-96 Columbus was generally hated in Española for his odiousness and injustice, and that the Admiral's policy with the natives killed a third of them in those two years. The Franciscans, when they arrived at the island, found the colonists exuberant that they had been relieved of the rule which Columbus had instituted; and the Benedictines and Dominicans added their testimony to the same effect.

He urges enslaving the natives from the first.

The very first words, as has been said, that he used, in conveying to expectant Europe the wonders of his discovery, suggested a scheme of enslaving the strange people. He had already made the voyage that of a kidnapper, by entrapping nine of the unsuspecting natives.

On his second voyage he sent home a vessel-load of slaves, on the pretense of converting them, but his sovereigns intimated to him that it would cost less to convert them in their own homes. Then he thought of the righteous alternative of sending some to Spain to be sold to buy provisions to support those who would convert others in their homes. The monarchs were perhaps dazed at this sophistry; and Columbus again sent home four vessels laden with reeking cargoes of flesh. When he returned to Spain, in 1496, to circumvent his enemies, he once more sought in his turn, and by his reasoning, to cheat the devil of heathen souls by sending other cargoes. At last the line was drawn. It was not to save their souls, but to punish them for daring to war against the Spaniards, that they should be made to endure such horrors.

It is to Columbus, also, that we trace the beginning of that monstrous guilt which Spanish law sanctioned under the name of repartimientos, and by which to every colonist, and even to the vilest, absolute power was given over as many natives as his means and rank entitled him to hold. Las Casas tells us that Ferdinand could hardly have had a conception of the enormities of the system. If so, it was because he winked out of sight the testimony of observers, while he listened to the tales prompted of greed, rapine, and cruelty. The value of the system to force heathen out of hell, and at the same time to replenish his treasury, was the side of it presented to Ferdinand's mind by such as had access to his person. In 1501, we find the Dominicans entering their protest, and by this Ferdinand was moved to take the counsel of men learned in the law and in what passed in those days for Christian ethics. This court of appeal approved these necessary efforts, as was claimed, to increase those who were new to the faith, and to reward those who supported it.

Peter Martyr expressed the comforting sentiments of the age: "National right and that of the Church concede personal liberty to man. State policy, however, demurs. Custom repels the idea. Long experience shows that slavery is necessary to prevent those returning to their idolatry and error whom the Church has once gained." All professed servants of the Church, with a few exceptions like Las Casas, ranged themselves with Columbus on the side of such specious thoughts; and Las Casas, in recognizing this fact, asks what we could expect of an old sailor and fighter like Columbus, when the wisest and most respectable of the priesthood backed him in his views. It was indeed the misery of Columbus to miss the opportunity of being wiser than his fellows, the occasion always sought by a commanding spirit, and it was offered to him almost as to no other.

Progress of slavery in the West Indies.

There was no restraining the evil. The cupidity of the colonists overcame all obstacles. The Queen was beguiled into giving equivocal instructions to Ovando, who succeeded to Bobadilla, and out of them by interpretation grew an increase of the monstrous evil. In 1503, every atrocity had reached a legal recognition. Labor was forced; the slaves were carried whither the colonists willed; and for eight months at least in every year, families were at pleasure disrupted without mercy. One feels some satisfaction in seeing Columbus himself at last, in a letter to Diego, December 1, 1504, shudder at the atrocities of Ovando. When one sees the utter annihilation of the whole race of the Antilles, a thing clearly assured at the date of the death of Columbus, one wishes that that dismal death-bed in Valladolid could have had its gloom illumined by a consciousness that the hand which lifted the banner of Spain and of Christ at San Salvador had done something to stay the misery which cupidity and perverted piety had put in course. When a man seeks to find and parades reasons for committing a crime, it is to stifle his conscience. Columbus passed years in doing it.

Talavera.