60 CHAPTER 3 THE CONQUEST OF AMERICA
The perspective of “The Vision of the Van-
quished” and new approaches in historical research
combine to give us a better understanding of the
man Columbus and his dealings with the people he
wrongly called “Indians.” A curious blend of medi-
eval mystic and modern entrepreneur, Columbus
revealed the contradictions in his thought by his
comment on gold: “O, most excellent gold! Who
has gold has a treasure with which he gets what he
wants, imposes his will on the world, and even helps
souls to paradise.” In Conquest of America, Tzvetan
Todorov subjects the ideology of Columbus (which
represented the ideology of the European invad-
ers) to a careful and subtle dissection that reveals
other contradictions. Sometimes Columbus viewed
the “Indians” as “noble savages,” and sometimes,
depending on the occasion, he saw them as “fi lthy
dogs.” Todorov explains that both myths rest on a
common base: scorn for “Indians” and refusal to
admit them as human beings with the same rights
as himself. In the last analysis, Columbus regarded
indigenous peoples not as human beings but as ob-
jects. This is well illustrated by a letter he wrote to
the Spanish monarchs in September 1498:
We can send from here in the name of the
Holy Trinity, all the slaves and brazilwood
that can be sold. If my information is correct,
one could sell 4,000 slaves that would bring
at least twenty millions.... And I believe that
my information is correct, for in Castile and
Aragon and Italy and Sicily and the islands of
Portugal and Aragon and the Canary Islands
they use up many slaves, and the number of
slaves coming from Guinea is diminishing....
And although the Indian slaves tend to die off
now, this will not always be the case, for the
same thing used to happen with the slaves
from Africa and the Canary Islands.
In fact, Columbus early on conceived the idea of
supplementing the search for a western route to the
Indies and for gold with the enslavement of indig-
enous Americans and their sale in Castile. To make
the idea more palatable to the Spanish monarchs,
he proposed to limit the slave hunting to a supposed
“cannibal” people: the Caribs. When the Tainos of
Hispaniola rose in revolt against their intolerable
treatment, it provided another legal justifi cation for
their enslavement. Between 1494 and 1500, Co-
lumbus sent some two thousand “Indians” to the
slave markets of Castile. Contrary to legend, Queen
Isabella approved the majority of these shipments.
Columbus, of course, viewed this slavery from
the background of a merchant adventurer who
was very familiar with the conduct of Portugal’s
African slave trade, in which other Genoese mer-
chants were deeply involved. He lived at a time
when slavery, under certain conditions, was al-
most universally regarded as licit and proper. His
callous lack of concern for the life and death of the
enslaved did not make him a monster. If he ar-
dently desired gold, it was not from vulgar greed
alone. To be sure, as the Spanish scholar Juan Gil
observes, he was “fascinated by the tinkle of mara-
vedis.”^1 He bargained hard with the Spanish mon-
archs for the highest possible share of profi ts from
his discoveries, and despite his lamentation in his
last years about his poverty and even the lack of a
roof over his head, he died a millionaire. But there
was another side to Columbus. He viewed gold as
a means of promoting the universal triumph of
Christianity, urged his royal masters to use the
revenues from the Indies for a crusade to wrest the
Holy Land from Muslim hands, and offered him-
self to head the crusader host. Within Columbus
raged a constant struggle between the medieval
mystic who believed the world would end in 155
years and the Renaissance man fi lled with a drive
to achieve power, titles, wealth, and fame.
To assess the signifi cance of Columbus’s achieve-
ment properly, one must accept that he was the
instrument of historical forces of which he was un-
aware, forces of transition from the dying Middle
Ages to the rising world of capitalism, whose success
rested upon conquest and the creation of a global
market. That process in turn required an ideological
justifi cation, a proud conviction of the superiority of
white Europeans over all other peoples and races. Co-
lumbus’s work in the Caribbean represents the fi rst
tragic application of that ideology in the New World.
If not the father of colonialism, he was at least one of
its fathers, and he bears part of the responsibility for
the devastating effects of that system of domination.(^1) A Spanish coin.