![]() Columbus sailed home from his second voyage with over a thousand captives bound for slave auctions in Cádiz (many died en route, their bodies tossed overboard). Against the Caribs the Spaniards had a tougher time, fighting pitched battles but capturing hundreds of slaves as well. Taínos who resisted the Spanish were set upon by dogs, disemboweled by swords, burned at stakes, trampled by horses-atrocities “to which no chronicle could ever do justice,” wrote Friar Bartolomé de las Casas, a crusader for Indian rights, in 1542. Indigenous and Euro-American slave systems evolved and innovated in response to each other. Whether the systems were pre- or postcontact indigenous, European colonial, or US national, they grew into complex cultural matrices in which the economic wealth and social power created using slavery proved indivisible. North America was a vast, pulsing map of trading, raiding, and resettling. As Bonnie Martin and James Brooks put it in their anthology, Linking the Histories of Slavery: North America and Its Borderlands: A similar discrimination based on age and gender would prevail throughout the next four centuries of Indian-on-Indian servitude. The Caribs of the Lesser Antilles, a more aggressive tribe, regularly raided the Taínos, allegedly eating the men but keeping the women and children as retainers. The Spaniards also exploited the forms of human bondage that already existed on the islands. The easy-going Taínos were transformed into gold-panners working under Spanish overseers. First came the demand for miners to dig for gold. What was soon imposed was “the other slavery” that the University of California, Davis, historian Andrés Reséndez discusses in his synthesis of the last half-century of scholarship on American Indian enslavement. As they stayed on, relations with local Indians degenerated. The following year, Columbus led seventeen ships that dropped 1,500 prospective settlers on Caribbean beaches. Columbus returned to Barcelona with six Taíno natives who were paraded as curiosities, not chattel, before King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Aside from one flare-up, there were no serious hostilities. Glints in the ornaments worn by natives promised gold, and they presumably knew where to find more. In exchange for glass beads, brass hawk bells, and silly red caps, the seamen received cotton thread, parrots, and food from native gardens. He found the men tall, handsome, and good farmers, the women comely, near naked, and apparently available. On the day after Columbus landed in 1492 on an island in the present-day Bahamas and saw its Taíno islanders, he wrote that “with fifty men they could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished.” Soon the African trade was changing life in Spain within another hundred years most urban families owned one or more black servants, over 7 percent of Seville was black, and a new social grouping of mixed-race mulattos joined the lower rungs of a color-coded social ladder.Ĭolumbus liked the “affectionate and without malice” Arawakan-speaking Taíno natives. The ensuing Age of Discovery, with its expansions of empires and exploitations of New World natural resources, was accompanied by the seizure and forced labor of human beings, starting with Native Americans.Īppraising that commercial opportunity came naturally to an entrepreneur like Columbus, as did his sponsors’ pressure on him to find precious metals and his religion’s contradictory concerns both to protect and convert heathens. ![]() The European market in African slaves, which opened with a cargo of Mauritanian blacks unloaded in Portugal in 1441, and the explorer Christopher Columbus, born in Genoa ten years later, were closely linked. ![]() The book includes essays by Bill Broyles, Ann Christine Eek, and others, and is published by the University of Texas Press. Carl Lumholtz: Tarahumara Woman Being Weighed, Barranca de San Carlos (Sinforosa), Chihuahua, 1892 from Among Unknown Tribes: Rediscovering the Photographs of Explorer Carl Lumholtz. ![]()
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