american-holocaust

84 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTdian children routinely taken from their parents and fed to the hungryanimals. Men who could take pleasure in this sort of thing had little troublewith less sensitive matters, such as the sacking and burning of entirecities and towns, and the destruction of books and tablets containing millenniaof accumulated knowledge, wisdom, and religious belief.Even when supposedly undoing the more extreme acts of violence perpetratedby their compatriots, the conquistadors seemed unable to restrainthemselves from one last act of savagery. For a number of years Indianswho were enslaved had their chattel status burned into their faces withbranding irons that stamped them with the initials of their owners. Whensold from one Spaniard to another, a replacement brand was made. Consequently,some slaves' faces were scarred with two or three or four brandingmutilations identifying them as transferable pieces of property. Once,however, writes William Sherman, "when a ship put in at a Nicaraguanport loaded with illegally enslaved encomienda Indians, the governor freedthem and sent them home. But first the natives, some of whom were womenand suckling children, had their face brands canceled. Fresh letters spelling'libre' were burned into their scarred faces." 94The treatment of Indian females is particularly revealing, in light of theCatholic machismo ideology of the Spanish that celebrated the purity oftheir own women. The tone for such treatment was set at the start, withthe first description that exists of a sexual encounter between a Europeanand an Indian woman. It occurred during Columbus's second voyage andwas described by the protagonist himself, not a Spaniard in this case, butthe Italian nobleman Michele de Cuneo:While I was in the boat I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom thesaid Lord Admiral gave to me, and with whom, having taken her into mycabin, she being naked according to their custom, I conceived desire to takepleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want itand treated me with her finger nails in such a manner that I wished I hadnever begun. But seeing that, (to tell you the end of it all), I took a rope andthrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard of screams that youwould not have believed your ears. Finally we came to an agreement in suchmanner that I can tell you she seemed to have been brought up in a schoolof harlots. 95Cuneo here expresses an attitude toward raped women that soon wouldbecome a staple of violent pornography and male sadistic fantasy: she enjoyedit. While still in the Caribbean, a report to the king's minister by agroup of Dominicans provides a different, but equally vivid, example ofthe other classic function and fantasy of rape-the demonstration of powerand the degradation of both the victim and her loved ones. Typically, whenan enslaved workman returned from the mines at the end of a day, thefriars reported, "not only was he beaten or whipped because he had not