american-holocaust

PESTILENCE AND GENOCIDE 101in London was routinely the same as that suffered by natives in Spanishcaptivity, there also was a similarity in the fate of those Indians, north andsouth, who remained at home. By the time the English announced thesettlement of Jamestown in Virginia (marking their dominion, as did theSpanish, with a cross), the lands the Spanish and Portuguese had conqueredalready were an immense and bone-strewn graveyard. Indians inthe many tens of millions had died horribly from the blades and germs oftheir Iberian invaders. As far north as Florida and southern Georgia, forevery ten Timucuan Indians who were alive in 1515 only one was alive in1607. And by 1617, a short decade later, that number was halved again.According to the most detailed population analysis of this region that everhas been done, in 1520 the number of Timucuan people in the area totaledover 720,000; following a century of European contact they numberedbarely 36,000. Two-thirds of a million native people-95 percent of theenormous and ancient Timucuan society-had been obliterated by the violenceof sword and plague. 17But the Spanish didn't stop at Florida and Georgia. As early as thesummer of 1521, while Cortes and his army were still completing the destructionof T enoch titian, Spanish ships under the command of Pedro deQuejo and Francisco Gordillo landed on the coast of what is now SouthCarolina, near Winyah Bay, north of Charleston. Each man independentlyclaimed possession of the land for his particular employer-and each onealso denounced the other for doing so. But on one thing, at least, theyagreed. Their mission was to find and capture as many Indians as possibleand to bring them back to labor in the Bahamas, whose millions of nativepeople by then-less than 30 years after Columbus's first voyage-hadlargely been exterminated. They did their job well. After two weeks offriendly contact with the Indians living around Winyah Bay, Quejo andGordillo invited them to visit their ships. Once the natives were on board,however, the two captains raised anchor and set sail for Santo Domingo.There is some dispute as to how many Indians were captured that dayby the Spanish-somewhere between 60 and 130-but there is no disagreementabout what happened next. Upon their arrival in Santo Domingothe natives were enslaved and put to work on plantations, though forfood they had to fend for themselves. They were reduced to scavengingthrough decaying garbage and eating dead and decomposing dogs anddonkeys. By 1526, four years after their capture, only one of them wasstill alive. 18It was a fitting start for all that was to follow. For the next half-centuryand beyond, the Spanish and French and English plied the waters off thecoast of Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia-with raiding partiesmarching inland to capture slaves and spread disease and depredation.Before the last of the slaves from the Quejo-Gordillo expedition had beenkilled, Giovanni de Verrazzano was leading a fleet of French ships into the