american-holocaust

204 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTever was there-and forced the natives to mine it for them-never did theholdings of the Indians or the products of the island's mines and riversproduce riches of the sort the soldiers had been led to expect. Unable tobelieve what was apparent, that this was no King Solomon's mine, thetroops convinced themselves that the Indians cared as much as the Spanishdid for the precious metal and that they were hoarding it in secret caches.To these men whose profession was violence, only violence could be countedon to wrest from the natives what God and the Lord Admiral had promisedthem.When the crossbow was invented centuries earlier the Church had decreedit to be such a terrifying weapon that it could be used only on infidels.25On Hispaniola, and then on Jamaica, and elsewhere in the Caribbeanit was used routinely-along with the lance and the sword and thearmored and hungry dog-to terrorize and subdue those natives whosomehow were surviving the lethal pathogens that the invaders carried intheir blood and their breath. Within a matter of months 50,000 Indianswere dead, the proportional equivalent of 1,500,000 American deaths today.Europe at this time was still excited over the mysteriousness of thesenew-found lands and their handsome and innocent people, but the men onthe front lines of the endeavor to strip the Indies of its gold had long sinceovercome their sense of wonder with their greed and their furious sadism.Even the most educated and cultured and high-minded among the voyagerson this second expedition wasted no time in expressing their contemptfor the native people. Cuneo, for example, the Italian nobleman andapparent boyhood friend of Columbus, repeatedly referred to the nativesas "beasts" because he could not discern that they had any religion, becausethey slept on mats on the ground rather than in beds, because "theyeat when they are hungry," and because they made love "openly wheneverthey feel like it." 26 This judgment comes, it will be recalled, from a manwho took a fancy to a beautiful young native woman during this trip and,when she rebuffed his advances, thrashed her with a rope, raped her, andthen boasted of what he had done.Cuneo's opinion of the natives was echoed by Dr. Diego Alvarez Chanca,a physician on the voyage who later was singled out by the Cro-Nn for aspecial award in recognition of his humanitarianism. For various reasons,including his disapproval of the Indians' method of laying out their townsand the fact that they ate cooked iguana (which the Spanish themselveslater came to regard as a delicacy), Dr. Chanca declared that the nativeswere barbarous and unintelligent creatures whose "degradation is greaterthan that of any beast in the world." 27 Cuneo and Chanca and other islandvisitors who recorded their thoughts for posterity probably had littleinfluence on the lance- and sword- and crossbow-wielding conquistadorswho accompanied them, but that is only because the conquistadors did