topics: |  history | usa |

As with Zinn's work, many of the facts are not widely known. But this adaptation tightens the text and makes it much more readable than the original. (even for adults!)

A historian must pick and choose among facts, deciding which ones to put into his or her work, which ones to leave out, and which ones to place at the center of the story.

Part of the premise of Columbus' trips to the new world was that the court could get "as much gold as they need - and as many slaves as they ask.”

Unfortunately he found no gold, so after numerous slave raids, five hundred captives were sent to Spain. Two hundred died on the voyage. The rest were put up for sale by a local church official. Columbus, who was full of religious talk, later wrote, “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”

 
From The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought, James H. Sweet, The William and Mary Quarterly v.54(1) (Jan., 1997), p.143-166

	The issue of which came first, racism or slavery, is central to [the
	origins of slavery] debate: some historians accept Eric Williams's
	assertion that "slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was
	the consequence of slavery." 
			[EW, Capitalism and Slavery (ChapelHill, 1944), p.7]

	Many historians of colonial Latin America insist that racism was not
	present in Iberia before 1492. They argue instead that racial
	stratification was a product of American economic conditions. 

	This article contends that racism and capitalism were not
	inextricably bound together and that the racism that came to
	characterize American slavery was well established in cultural and
	religious attitudes in Spain and Portugal by the fifteenth century.

	Such attitudes were reinforced by European political turbulence and
	the decline of the Mediterranean slave trade. The racist beliefs that
	Iberians and others would later refine to a "science" were firmly
	entrenched before Christopher Columbus made landfall in the
	Americas. This racial idiom became more rigid as capitalist
	imperatives gained strength. While these views do not entirely
	contradict Williams's thesis, they move away from mechanistic
	economic explanations and attempt to show the evolution of racist
	thinking from feudalism to capitalism, from Europe to the Americas.

Ch 1 : Columbus and the Indians

Arawak men and women came out OF their villages onto the beaches. Full of
wonder, they swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When
Christopher Columbus and his soldiers came ashore, carrying swords, the
Arawaks ran to greet them. Columbus later wrote about the Indians in his
ship’s log:

	They … brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many
	other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’
	bells. They willingly traded everything they owned.… They were
	well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.… They do not bear
	arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it
	by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They had no
	iron. Their spears are made of cane.… They would make fine servants.…
	With fifty men we could subjugate [overpower] them and make them do
	whatever we want.

The Arawaks lived in the Bahama Islands. Like Indians on the American
mainland, they believed in hospitality and in sharing. But Columbus, the
first messenger to the Americas from the civilization of western Europe, was
hungry for money. As soon as he arrived in the islands, he seized some
Arawaks by force so that he could get information from them. The information
that Columbus wanted was this: Where is the gold?

...

Thirty-three days after leaving waters known to Europeans, Columbus and his
men saw branches floating in the water and flocks of birds in the air. These
were signs of land. Then, on October 12, 1492, a sailor called Rodrigo saw
the moon shining on white sands, and cried out. It was an island in the
Bahamas, in the Caribbean Sea. The first man to sight land was supposed to
get a large reward, but Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed that he had
seen a light the evening before. He got the reward.

Child sailors the ship

Source: Hoose, Phillip. We Were There, Too!: Young People in U.S. History. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2001.

Like most historians, I write about Columbus and his “men,” but many of those
who sailed with Columbus in 1492—on the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa
Maria—were children. One of those children was twelve-year-old Diego
Bermúdez, a page who sailed with Columbus on the Santa Maria. Of the ninety
sailors who sailed on the three ships, nearly twenty were boys!

The children who sailed with Columbus worked in their bare feet, took showers
by dumping buckets of seawater over their heads, and used a toilet that stuck
out from the ships’ decks over the sea. And even the youngest boys drank
strong white wine with their food.

Older boys, called “criados,” assisted ships’ officers, or apprenticed as
“gromets,” climbing ropes high above to trim the sails. Gromets became expert
at tying different kinds of knots. They hung lengths of rope from their belts
and carried knives at all times to help them in their work. Younger boys like
Diego worked as “pages,” who cooked and scrubbed the decks, though their most
important job was to tell time. There were no clocks on board, so they kept
time by using an ampolleta, which was a half-hour glass filled with sand. As
soon as all the sand ran out, the page turned it over and ran to the poop
deck, where he rang a bell and sang out a prayer to signify that another
half-hour had passed. Pages had to learn sixteen different prayers by heart,
each one for a different half-hour of the working day. Here is one of them:

		Blessed be the hour God came to earth,
		Holy Mary who gave him birth,
		And St. John who saw his worth.
		The guard is posted,
		The watchglass filling,
		We’ll haue a good voyage,
		If God be willing.

They got in trouble if they were caught rubbing the glass between their hands
to warm it up and make the sand run faster. That led to the utterance of
Columbus's favorite oath, "By San Fernando!" and sometimes a thrashing. Pages
also helped measure how fast their ships were going by throwing a piece of
wood out onto the water and counting how many seconds it took the object to
pass between two marks on the ship's rail.

What Happened to Diego Bermúdez?

Little is known. Records show that he made it back to Spain. He did not
return to the New World on any of Columbus's other three voyages, but his
brother Juan did. In 1515 Juan stopped to explore a group of islands and left
behind a few pigs. Later, when British explorers found the islands, they were
overrun with the pigs' wild descendants. The Bermuda Islands are named after
Diego's brother Juan.

[end extract from Philip Hoose]

The Arawaks’ Impossible Task

The Arawak indians who greeted Columbus lived in villages and practiced
agriculture. Unlike the Europeans, they had no horses or other work animals,
and they had no iron. What they did have was tiny gold ornaments in their
ears.

Those little ornaments shaped history. Because of them, Columbus started his
relationship with the Indians by taking prisoners, thinking that they could
lead him to the source of the gold. He sailed to several other Caribbean
islands, including Hispaniola, an island now divided between two countries,
Haiti and the Dominican Republic. After one of Columbus’s ships ran aground,
he used wood from the wreck to build a fort in Haiti. Then he sailed back to
Spain with news of his discovery, leaving thirty-nine crewmen at the
fort. Their orders were to find and store the gold.

The report Columbus made to the royal Spanish court was part fact, part
fiction. He claimed to have reached Asia, and he called the Arawaks
“Indians,” meaning people of the Indies. The islands Columbus had visited
must be off the coast of China, he said. They were full of riches:

	Hispaniola is a miracle. Mountains and hills, plains and pastures, are both
	fertile and beautiful … the harbors are unbelievably good and there are many
	wide rivers of which the majority contain gold.… There are many spices, and
	great mines of gold and other metals:

If the king and queen would give him just a little more help,
Columbus said, he would make another voyage. This time he would come
back to Spain with “as much gold as they need … and as many slaves as
they ask.”

Columbus’s promises won him seventeen ships and more than 1,200 men for his
second expedition. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island
to island in the Caribbean, capturing Indians. But as word spread among the
Indians, the Spaniards found more and more empty villages. When they got to
Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at the fort were dead. The
sailors had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and
children as slaves, until the Indians had killed them in a battle.

Columbus’s men searched Haiti for gold, with no success. They had to fill up
the ships returning to Spain with something, so in 1495 they went on a great
slave raid. Afterward, they picked five hundred captives to send to
Spain. Two hundred of the Indians died on the voyage. The rest arrived alive
in Spain and were put up for sale by a local church official. Columbus, who
was full of religious talk, later wrote, “Let us in the name of the Holy
Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”

But too many slaves died in captivity. Columbus was desperate to show a
profit on his voyages. He had to make good on his promises to fill the ships
with gold. In a part of Haiti where Columbus and his men imagined there was
much gold, they ordered everyone over the age of thirteen to collect gold for
them. Indians who did not give gold to the Spaniards had their hands cut off
and bled to death.

Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war? Why are you jealous of us? We are unarmed, and willing to give you what you ask, if you come in a friendly manner... - Amerindian chief Powhatan to Jamestown elder John Smith

The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits
of gold dust in streams. So they ran away. The Spaniards hunted them down
with dogs and killed them. When they took prisoners, they hanged them or
burned them to death. Unable to fight against the Spanish soldiers’ guns,
swords, armor, and horses, the Arawaks began to commit mass suicide with
poison. When the Spanish search for gold began, there were a quarter of a
million Indians on Haiti. In two years, through murder or suicide, half them
were dead.

When it was clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were enslaved on
the Spaniards’ huge estates. They were overworked and mistreated, and they
died by the thousands. By 1550, only five hundred Indians remained. A century
later, no Arawaks were left on the island.


see also: 
http://ushypocrisy.com/2013/10/29/christopher-columbus-father-of-white-supremacy-2/





[The next is one of the most important sections that underlines the importance
of perspective in historical narrative, and outlines the importance of
historiography - in a narrative that children can understand.]

Telling Columbus’s Story

We know what happened on the Caribbean islands after Columbus came because of
Bartolomé de Las Casas. He was a young priest who helped the Spanish conquer
Cuba. For a while he owned a plantation where Indian slaves worked. But then
Las Casas gave up his plantation and spoke out against Spanish cruelty.
(see A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1544)

Las Casas made a copy of Columbus’s journal, and he also wrote a book called
History of the Indies. In this book, he described the Indians’ society and
their customs. He also told how the Spaniards treated the Indians:

	As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers,
	overworked and famished [starving], had no milk to nurse them, and
	for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7,000 children died in three
	months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer
	desperation.… In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at
	work, and children died from lack of milk.… My eyes have seen these
	acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write.…

This was the start of the history of Europeans in the Americas. It was a
history of conquest, slavery, and death. But for a long time, the history
books given to children in the United States told a different story—a tale of
heroic adventure, not bloodshed. The way the story is taught to young people
is just beginning to change.

Columbus, genocide and the writing of history

The story of Columbus and the Indians shows us something about how history
gets written. One of the most famous historians to write about Columbus was
Samuel Eliot Morison. He even sailed across the Atlantic Ocean himself,
retracing Columbus’s route. In 1954 Morison published a popular book called
Christopher Columbus, Mariner. He said that cruel treatment by Columbus and
the Europeans who came after him caused the “complete genocide” of the
Indians. Genocide is a harsh word. It is the name of a terrible crime—the
deliberate killing of an entire ethnic or cultural group.

[
In the original People's History, Zinn says that this statement by Morison
appears in the middle of a page "buried halfway into the telling of a grand
romance."

"In the book's last paragraph, Morison sums up his view of Columbus: 

	He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects
	of the qualities that made him great-his indomitable will, his superb
	faith in God and in his own mission as the Christ-bearer to lands
	beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty
	and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the most
	outstanding and essential of all his qualities-his seamanship." ]

Morison did not lie about Columbus. He did not leave out the mass murder
(which would risk later discovery). But he mentioned the truth quickly and
then went on to other things. By burying the fact of genocide in a lot of
other information, ["is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm:
yes, mass murder took place, but it's not that important"] in the big
picture.

By making genocide seem like a small part of the story, he took away its
power to make us think differently about Columbus. At the end of the book,
Morison summed up his idea of Columbus as a great man. Columbus’s most
important quality, Morison said, was his seamanship. 

A historian must pick and choose among facts, deciding which ones to put
into his or her work, which ones to leave out, and which ones to place at
the center of the story. Every historian’s own ideas and beliefs go into
the way he or she writes history. In turn, the way history is written can
shape the ideas and beliefs of the people who read it. A view of history
like Morison’s, a picture of the past that sees Columbus and others like
him as great sailors and discoverers, but says almost nothing about their
genocide, can make it seem as though what they did was right.

The story of any country includes fierce conflicts between conquerors and the
conquered, masters and slaves, people with power and those without
power. Writing history is always a matter of taking sides. 

For example, I choose to tell the story of the discovery of America from
the point of view of the Arawaks. I will tell the story of the
U.S. Constitution from the point of view of the slaves, and the story of
the Civil War from the point of view of the Irish in New York City.

I believe that history can help us imagine new possibilities for the
future. One way it can do this is by letting us see the hidden parts of the
past, the times when people showed that they could resist the powerful, or
join together. Maybe our future can be found in the past’s moments of
kindness and courage rather than its centuries of warfare. That is my
approach to the history of the United States, which started with the meeting
between Columbus and the Arawaks.

Killings in the US : Virginia settlers

The tragedy of Columbus and the Arawaks happened over and over again. Spanish
conquerors Hernan Cortés and Francisco Pizarro destroyed the Aztecs of Mexico
and the Incas of South America. When English settlers reached Virginia and
Massachusetts, they did the same thing to the Indians they met. 

Jamestown, Virginia, was the first permanent English settlement in the
Americas. It was built inside a territory governed by an Indian chief named
Powhatan. He watched the English settle on his land but did not attack. In
1607, Powhatan spoke to John Smith, one of the leaders at Jamestown. The
statement that has come down to us may not truly be Powhatan’s words, but it
sounds a lot like what other Indians said and wrote at later times. We can
read Powhatan’s statement as the spirit of what he thought as he watched the
white men enter his territory:

    I know the difference between peace and war better than any man in my
    country. Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love?
    Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by
    war?  Why are you jealous of us?  We are unarmed, and willing to give you
    what you ask, if you come in a friendly manner, and not so simple as not
    to know that it is much better to eat good meat, sleep comfortably, live
    quietly with my wives and children, laugh and be merry with the English,
    and trade for their copper and hatchets, than to run away from them, and
    to lie cold in the woods, and feed on acorns, roots, and such trash, and
    be so hunted that I can neither eat nor sleep.

In the winter of 1609–1610, the English at Jamestown went through a terrible
food shortage they called the “starving time.” They roamed the woods looking
for nuts and berries, and they dug up graves to eat the corpses. Out of five
hundred colonists, all but sixty died. 

Some of the colonists ran off to join the Indians, where they would at least
be fed. The next summer, the governor of the colony asked Powhatan to send
them back. When he refused, the colonists destroyed an Indian
settlement. They kidnapped the queen of the tribe, threw her children into
the water and shot them, and then stabbed her.

Twelve years later, the Indians tried to get rid of the growing English
settlements. They massacred 347 men, women, and children. From then on it was
total war. The English could not enslave the Indians, and they would not live
with them, so they decided to wipe them out.

To the north, the Pilgrims settled in New England. Like the Jamestown
colonists, they came to Indian land. The Pequot tribe lived in southern
Connecticut and Rhode Island. The colonists wanted this land, so the war with
the Pequots began. Massacres took place on both sides. The English used a
form of warfare that Cortés had used in Mexico. To fill the enemy with
terror, they attacked civilians, people who were not warriors.

---

Extract from Mintz, Steven. Huck’s Raft: A History of American
	Childhood. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 7, 8, 15, 35.

“White Indians”

English colonists captured in battle by Native Americans who found that they
preferred life in Native American communities over their own were referred to
as “white Indians.” Eunice Williams was one such example. She was seven years
old when she was taken prisoner by the Kahnawake Mohawks [1704]. Her mother
and two of her brothers were among those killed. Her other two brothers
were also captured. Two and a half years later, her father, Reverend John
Williams, negotiated the return of Eunice and her brothers, but Eunice
refused to leave the Native American community [her brothers came back]. As
a Mohawk, she converted to Catholicism and married another Mohawk.

It was said that the Mohawks were kinder to children and that females were
respected as the equals of males. Where European parents considered physical
punishment essential, the Native Americans believed that children should be
“reproved with gentle words,” and that corporal punishment would weaken
character and make children submissive. In Native American cultures, the goal
was to imbue children with independence and courage.

Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1753, 

	When white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by
	the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their
	Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with
	them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become
	disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are
	necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of
	escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming
	them.


--- end extract