american-holocaust

PESTILENCE AND GENOCIDEand decapitated if they faltered. Of children trapped and burned alive intheir houses, or stabbed to death because they walked too slowly. Of theroutine cutting off of women's breasts, and the tying of heavy gourds totheir feet before tossing them to drown in lakes and lagoons. Of babiestaken from their mothers' breasts, killed, and left as roadside markers. Of"stray" Indians dismembered and sent back to their villages with theirchopped-off hands and noses strung around their necks. Of "pregnant andconfined women, children, old men, as many as they could capture," throwninto pits in which stakes had been imbedded and "left stuck on the stakes,until the pits were filled." 90 And much, much more.One favorite sport of the conquistadors was "dogging." Traveling asthey did with packs of armored wolfhounds and mastiffs that were raisedon a diet of human flesh and were trained to disembowel Indians, theSpanish used the dogs to terrorize slaves and to entertain the troops. Anentire book, Dogs of the Conquest, has been published recently, detailingthe exploits of these animals as they accompanied their masters throughoutthe course of the Spanish depredations. "A properly fleshed dog," theseauthors say, "could pursue a 'savage' as zealously and effectively as a deeror a boar .... To many of the conquerors, the Indian was merely anothersavage animal, and the dogs were trained to pursue and rip aparttheir human quarry with the same zest as they felt when hunting wildbeasts." 91Vasco Nunez de Balboa was famous for such exploits and, like others,he had his own favorite dog-Leoncico, or "little lion," a reddish-coloredcross between a greyhound and a mastiff-that was rewarded at the endof a campaign for the amount of killing it had done. On one much celebratedoccasion, Leoncico tore the head off an Indian leader in Panamawhile Balboa, his men, and other dogs completed the slaughter of everyonein a village that had the ill fortune to lie in their journey's path. Heads ofhuman adults do not come off easily, so the authors of Dogs of the Conquestseem correct in calling this a "remarkable feat," although Balboa'smen usually were able to do quite well by themselves. 92 As one contemporarydescription of this same massacre notes:The Spaniards cut off the arm of one, the leg or hip of another, and fromsome their heads at one stroke, like butchers cutting up beef and mutton formarket. Six hundred, including the cacique, were thus slain like brute beasts .. . . Vasco ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs. 93Just as the Spanish soldiers seem to have particularly enjoyed testingthe sharpness of their yard-long rapier blades on the bodies of Indian children,so their dogs seemed to find the soft bodies of infants especiallytasty, and thus the accounts of the invading conquistadors and the padreswho traveled with them are filled with detailed descriptions of young In-