In 1499, troubled by reports they had received from the faraway colonies, the Spanish monarchs empowered a judicial investigator to bring Columbus to account. The inquiry produced testimony that Columbus had forbidden the Christian baptism of Indians except by his express permission, in order to ensure an adequate supply of slaves. The admiral was said to have imposed a reign of terror on the Spanish colonists of Hispaniola, who were flogged, disfigured or executed without trial for minor infractions. Some of the allegations may have been trumped up or exaggerated by Columbus’s enemies — but after being arrested and transported back to Spain in chains, Columbus tearfully admitted to Ferdinand and Isabella that many of the charges were true. He won their forgiveness, but was never again appointed governor of the lands he had discovered. Historical relativists would urge us to keep these offenses in perspective. It was another era, they remind us, when men were governed by different moral and ethical codes. That’s a bit too facile. In 1493, Ferdinand and Isabella had directed Columbus to “endeavor to win over the inhabitants” and to “treat the Indians very well and lovingly and abstain from doing them any injury.” His conduct would make a mockery of those instructions. Columbus was roundly condemned by his own contemporaries, most damningly by Bartolomé de Las Casas, a priest who arrived in the Antilles in 1502 and later wrote a hard-hitting jeremiad entitled “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.” Las Casas denounced the false promises and unbridled greed of Columbus and his colonialist followers, and recounted the near-total annihilation of the native population of Hispaniola within 50 years of the Europeans’ arrival.
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 13:59:48 +0000
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