During Columbus’ governorship of Hispaniola the Arawak people were either sold into slavery or forced to supply a certain quantity of gold every three months. Those who failed to meet the quota had their hands cut off. That’s when the mass suicides began.

Modern scholarship places the population of Hispaniola in 1492 at no less than four million people. By 1520 it had fallen to 20,000. Do the math! The Niña, Pinta, and Santa María had brought Death to the Americas.

Bartolomé de las Casas, a young Spanish priest with the Columbus expedition, was so appalled by the barbaric cruelty of his fellow “Christians” that he spent the rest of his life documenting the abuses.

Regarding the practice of forcing native men to work in the mines while the women worked in the cassava fields, La Casas writes,

“Thus husbands and wives were together only once every 8 or 10 months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed they ceased to procreate.

As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, seven thousand children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation.

In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk. In a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile, was depopulated. My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and I now tremble as I write.”

Do we tremble as we read?

We should.

As you may have guessed I’m not so keen on making Columbus the object of any kind of holiday (holy day).

Amen