Indians. The two aims of policy were almost immediately in collision.
Exploiting the natives was usually easy and sometimes profitable; bringing
them into the Christian fold was neither.
Isabella was not deterred. Encouraged by the pope, she sent with
Columbus on his second voyage the first group of what would ultimately
become thousands of priests. And she sought to prevent others who might
contaminate the natives from going there. Insofar as possible, the Spaniards
sought to quarantine the New World. Migrants were screened, not for
criminal activity—even Columbus’s first crew on the Santa Maríawere
former convicts—but for religious conviction. Muslims, Jews, and later of
course Protestants (called luteranos) were excluded.
Spain was obsessed not only with religious purity and administrative
order but also with judicial justification for its dominion. Only by trying to
save their souls, the Spaniards believed, did it acquire the right to exploit
the natives. Since, like the people of the Canaries, these natives were primi-
tive barbarians, the state as agent of the church had a sacred obligation to
convert them. They were to be issued with the requirement (in Spanish,
requerimiento) that they accept the authority of the state and the faith and
leadership of the church. Those who resisted were to be read a warning by
the local military authority (in Spanish, of course, which few natives could
have understood): “The resultant deaths and damages [of your rebellion]
shall be your fault and not the monarch’s or mine or the soldiers’.” Against
those who remained recalcitrant, war was just, and the legal penalty for
those who survived was enslavement. It was on these conditions that the
aims of the conquistadors and the priests united. The impact on the
Indians was catastrophic.
When Columbus first encountered them, the gentle Arawak people of
Hispaniola probably numbered at least 1 million. A contemporary observer
described Hispaniola as “perhaps the most densely populated place in the
world,” and some modern scholars put the number of inhabitants at as
many as 8 million. Within thirty years, enslaved to grow sugar, decimated
by European diseases, and killed off almost casually, they were nearly
extinct. Fray Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevissima Relación de la Destrución
de las Indiasmakes sickening reading. He wrote in 1544 that even after half
a century of occupation, the Spaniards
Sugar, Slaves, and Souls 45