american-holocaust

66 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTI certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter intoyour country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners thatwe can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church andof Their Highnesses. We shall take you and your wives and your children,and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them asTheir Highnesses may command. And we shall take your goods, and shalldo you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do notobey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and contradict him. 33In practice, the Spanish usually did not wait for the Indians to reply totheir demands. First the Indians were manacled; then, as it were, they wereread their rights. As one Spanish conquistador and historian described theroutine: "After they had been put in chains, someone read the Requerimientowithout knowing their language and without any interpreters, andwithout either the reader or the Indians understanding the language theyhad no opportunity to reply, being immediately carried away prisoners,the Spanish not failing to use the stick on those who did not go fastenough." 34In this perverse way, the invasion and destruction of what many, includingColumbus, had thought was a heaven on earth began. Not that areading of the requerimiento was necessary to the inhuman violence theSpanish were to perpetrate against the native peoples they confronted.Rather, the proclamation was merely a legalistic rationale for a fanaticallyreligious and fanatically juridical and fanatically brutal people to justify aholocaust. After all, Columbus had seized and kidnapped Indian men,women, and children throughout his first voyage, long before the requerimientowas in use, five at one stop, six at another, more at others, fillinghis ships with varied samples of Indians to display like exotic beasts inSeville and Barcelona upon his return.On at least one occasion Columbus sent a raiding party ashore to capturesome women with their children to keep his growing excess of capturednative males company, "because," he wrote in his journal, his pastexperience in abducting African slaves had taught him that "the [Indian]men would behave better in Spain with women of their country than withoutthem." On this date he also records the vignette of "the husband ofone of these women and father of three children, a boy and two girls,"who followed his captured family onto Columbus's ship and said that ifthey had to go "he wished to come with them, and begged me hard, andthey all now remain consoled with him." 35But not for long. As a harbinger of things to come, only a half-dozenor so of those many captured native slaves survived the journey to Spain,and of them only two were alive six months later. On his second voyageColumbus tried an even more ambitious kidnapping and enslavementscheme. It is described by an Italian nobleman, Michele de Cuneo, whoaccompanied Columbus on this voyage: