american-holocaust

214 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTbeen destroyed-the long dreamed-of gold mine was discovered on Hispaniola,producing for a time between three and six tons of gold per year.) 50"Similarly," writes Ralph Davis, "while the first attempts to settle themainland coast were organized from Spain, the series of expeditions after1516 which culminated in Cortes's conquest of Mexico were backed byCuban resources; and the wealth of Mexico paid for the northward andsouthward extension of exploration and gave some backing to the colonizationof the Panama isthmus and, a decade later, to the conquest of Peru."Thus, one after another, Caribbean and American locales were raided anddrained of their wealth, a portion of which was divided among the Crown,the conquistadors, and those who provided the conquistadors' financialsupport, while the rest was used to mount further depredations. By andlarge the Spanish were uninterested in building New World colonial societies,but rather in draining the New World of its wealth. "Indeed," notesDavis, "by the 1570s the investment movement had been reversed andreturning colonists were investing capital accumulated in America in entirelySpanish financial and industrial enterprises." 51The first waves of Spanish violence denuded the Caribbean of its wealthin gold and, as we saw earlier, of its wealth in people as well. Once theislands were thus made barren, the Spanish found goals to pursue elsewhere,and moved on. There were about 8000 Spaniards living on Hispaniolain 1509, for instance, forcing the few surviving Indians to produce theremaining dregs of gold that the white men hungered for, but within adecade only a few hundred Spaniards remained to begin slowly buildingsugar plantations on the backs of growing numbers of imported Africanslaves. Not only had the island's gold supply been depleted and its millionsof native people effectively exterminated by then, but most of those whohad done the exterminating had left for richer fields of exploitation. Davisdescribes well the pattern that was repeated for decades still to come:Many of the early conquerors shared in the gold finds, from the small onesin the islands to the hoard in the treasure house of Atahualpa that astoundedPizarro's followers in 1533. Yet these hoards were quickly distributed andwhen the king's share and the leaders' big portions had been taken out fewrank-and-file soldiers secured enough to take them home to the longed-forlife of luxurious idleness in Castile. . . . The followers and hangers-on ofthe conquerors, restless, unreliable material for permanent colonial settlements,were therefore constantly on the move to seek fresh opportunities offortune. The opening of Cuba rapidly drained Espanola of most of its Spanishpopulation after 1513; news of the entry to the mainland accelerated thisexodus after 1517 and it turned into a stampede from all the island settlementswhen Cortes secured a firm grip on the Aztec Empire in 1521. But thepalace and temple hoards of Tenochtitlan were not adequate to satisfy thecravings of all the Spaniards who followed Cortes. Large numbers of them. pushed on, under other leaders; into the jungles that separated Mexico from