THE GREAT OPENING 71white man was in large part the replacement of people by cattle, fol
lowed by a repeopling with black slaves to work the sugar plantations.
The process of depopulation was hastened by massacre, barbarous
cruelty, deep despair. The natives committed suicide, abstained from
sex, aborted their fetuses, killed their babies. They also fell by the tens
and hundreds of thousands to Old World pathogens (smallpox, in
fluenza). The Spanish debated whether the savages they encountered
had a soul and were human; but the record makes clear where the sav
agery lay. When Columbus met his first Indians, he could not get over
their trust and friendliness; to this the Spaniards, frustrated for gold, re
turned bestialities unworthy of beasts:
They came with their Horsemen well armed with Sword and Launce,
making most cruel havocks and slaughters.... Overrunning Cities and Vil
lages, where they spared no sex nor age; neither would their cruelty pity
Women with childe, whose bellies they would rip up, taking out the Infant
to hew it in pieces. They would often lay wagers who should with most dex
terity either cleave or cut a man in the middle.... The children they would
take by the feet and dash their innocent heads against the rocks, and when
they were fallen into the water, with a strange and cruel derision they would
call on them to swim.... They erected certains Gallowses... upon every
one of which they would hang thirteen persons, blasphemously affirming
that they did it in honour of our Redeemer and his Apostles, and then
putting fire under them, they burnt the poor wretches alive. Those whom
their pity did think to spare, they would send away with their hands half cut
off, and so hanging by the skin.^15No need to multiply these testimonies. The reader would only recoil
from so much blood and evil. They were all there: the spontaneous ex
pressions of wanton brutality; the random, carefree, thoughdess mur
ders; the good-natured competition in imagining torments; the
refinements of pain; the unprovoked explosions of collective killer
frenzy; the hatred for life.
One surprise here: rationality was absent, even in the treatment of
valuable labor. Very early on, a group of Dominican friars wrote the
king of Spain complaining that so many miners died of hunger on
forced marches from one site to another that later groups needed no
guide to follow. (Tom Thumb dropped pebbles to mark the way; the
Spaniards left corpses.) The same letter spoke of a shipload of over
eight hundred Indians brought to a place called Puerto de Plata (Sil
ver Harbor) and held on board for two days before being disembarked.
Under what conditions? No details, but six hundred of them are said