Radical Collage

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, A LEGEND?

ABSTRACT

As I entered college, namely my history classes, I became aware of startling inconsistencies from what I had been taught in high school history classes. The matter I am referring to is that of Christopher Columbus. I was never taught of the brutal treatment inflicted on the Indians in this "New World," the mass murders, or Columbus' overwhelming greed for gold, until I got to college. This has bothered me that I, along with countless others, were not given the facts concerning his voyage.

In this paper I have taken excerpts from children's books, high school history books, and then other historians, and compared them in their inconsistencies. The newest high school history books do tell about murder, but it is just a vague reference in the midst of glorifying Columbus. They tell certain facts while omitting others. For instance, the books tell that Juan Rodriquez Bermejo was the first to sight land, but it fails to mention that Columbus took credit for the first to sight land along with the monetary reward that was to accompany this accomplishment.

I have written this paper in a collage. This was in order to keep my opinion from the paper and to let the readers form their own opinion as to the genuineness of falseness of the Columbus legend.

Christopher Columbus, a Legend?

Then two hours before midnight, the miracle happened. A far-off light struck his eyes. It wavered once or twice moving quickly on the horizon, like a fisherman's boat rising and failing on the waves. His heart hammered. But he dared not cry out: "Land!" He distrusted himself and his senses. He summoned the boatswain. "Your eyes are sharp, Alfredo," he whispered. "Tell me what you see yonder...." Even as he spoke, the light disappeared. "Look again!" "Ah yes, yes!" A light Over there.... Surely this was no trick of the eyes! Alfredo had seen it too. Somewhere ahead in darkness were human beings, inhabited land. But so often had hopes been falsely raised, so often dashed, that Columbus commanded Alfredo to keep silent....Then from the Pinta came a flash of flame, a war cannon. The long-awaited signal! Land in sight....the day was Friday, the twelfth of October, Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-two. (Sperry 122, 123, 124)

At 2:00 a.m. on October 12, Rodrigo Triana, the lookout on the Pinta, spotted cliffs in the moonlight. `Tierra! Tierra!' he shouted. (Davidson 57)

Whether the light is to be considered a reality or a fiction will depend on the theory each may hold regarding the position of the landfall. When Columbus claimed to have discovered it, he was twelve or fourteen leagues way from the island and where, four hours later, land was indubitably found....There was no elevation on that island sufficient to show even a strong light at a distance of ten leagues. (Winsor 209)

...Colon, standing on the sterncastle, thought he saw a light on the horizon, but `it was so uncertain a thing that he did not wish to declare that it was land'....`like a little wax candle lifting and rising! He added that `to him who first sang out that he saw land he would later give a silk doublet, ...besides the other rewards that the sovereigns had promised, which were a 10,000-maravedi annuity to whoever should first sight it.'

Sometime around `two hours after midnight' the lookout on the Pinta, Juan Rodriguez Bermejo gave out the cry of `Tierra!'...Colon appropriated the 10,000-maravedi reward to himself, on the ground that he had really seen the lights of the island earlier in the evening and deserved the stipend. (Sale 62, 63)

All the men crowded round as Columbus struck the royal standard into the earth. Taking formal possession of this land in the name of his sovereigns, the Admiral drew his sword, raised hiss head and cried: "Land of my salvation, I christen thee San Salvador, after our Saviour." (Sperry 129)

Colon went on to assign no fewer than sixty-two other names on the geography of the islands....It was not that the islands were in need of names, mind you, nor indeed that Colon was ignorant of the names the native peoples had already given them, for he frequently used those original names before endowing them with his own. (Sale 92, 93)

By friendly gestures Columbus encouraged them to approach. If the Indians did not understand the words he used, there was no mistaking the warmth of his smile. (Sperry 130)

Columbus, by causing red oaks, strings of beads, and other trinkets to be distributed among them,made an easy conquest of their friendship." (Winsor 218)

Columbus spent several months traveling around the waters of the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola. (Greenblatt 483)

Columbus invited seven of the Indians to sail with him, hoping that they might learn to speak Spanish and so become interpreters at other islands. Eagerly the invitation was accepted. (Sperry 132)

He took away by force seven men of Guanahani....He does ont seem to have even imagined that there was anything wrong with it. (Madariaga 219)

Columbus gives us his first intimation of the desirability of using force to make these poor creatures serve their new masters....He had seized some natives, who were now on board....The natives on board told him that the people here wore gold bracelets. Columbus thought this story might be a device of his prisoners to obtain opportunities to escape....Two of the prisoners continued to escape. One of them jumped overboard and was rescued by a native canoe. (Winsor 220, 221)

No clothes, no arms, no possessions, no iron, and now no religion...not even speech; hence they were fit to be servants, and captives. It may fairly be called the birth of American slavery. (Sale 97)

Here is the beginning of the New Slavery which the Christians introduced in America....He does not seem to be aware of the contradiction implied between his intention to enslave these native souls ... to the law of Christ. (Madariaga 216)

One might even say the Admiral was driven by this quest, and at times he was even apologetic about it: `There may be many things that I don't know, for I do not wish to delay but to discover and go to many islands to find gold.' (Sale 107)

You must remember that these Indians, savage though they seem, are subjects of the Spanish Crown, even as you yourselves. You are to treat them with all kindness. Obey your commander, who serves in my stead. I take leave of you in pride of the honorable mission that eery one of you has to fulfill. (Sperry 154)

As early as the fifth of November, the Sea of Darkness had been safely crossed and a new island rose on the horizon. It was here that they had their first encounter with the dreaded Caribs (cannibals) ....

Clusters of human skulls hung from the door posts of the houses....gnawed bones and portions of human limbs roasting on spits over the embers. (Sperry 167, 168)

The anthropologist W. Arens, in his wide-ranging The Man-Eating Myth, says that he was `unable to uncover adequate documentation of cannibalism as a custom in any form for any society'....An even more complex explanation for the tenacity of the myth of man-eaters is that it permitted the denigration, and thus the conquest and exploitation, of peoples whose lands were seen as increasingly desirable in European eyes. (Sale 133, 135)

...the Admiral dispatched twelve caravels back to Spain for fresh supplies, sending with them a score of Indians who were to be trained as interpreters and converted to Christianity.(Sperry 174)

In January 1493, Columbus boarded the Nina and headed back to Spain. He brought with him pieces of gold, parrots, cotton, other plants and animals, and a few Indians. (Cox 484)

They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend....

they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children,...

then picked the five-hundred best specimens to load onto ships.

Of those five-hundred, two hundred died in route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale....

Columbus later wrote: `Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold. (Zinn 4)

...the fleet did take several dozen Caribs...and sent them back with the first returning ships...along with a memo of Colon's proposing a regular shipment of humans from the Indies in exchange for cattle and supplies from Castile....`Payment for these things could be made to them in slaves,...he rounded up no fewer than 1,600 from the interior of Espanola...where 550 of them...were loaded in chains. (Sale 138)

What had come to pass after his departure from Hispaniola he could only imagine, but Griacanagari confirmed his worst suspicions. The Indian king, who had indeed been wounded, was found lying in an improvised hut, surrounded by a handful of retainers. The Chieftain wept bitterly as he pressed the Admiral's hand. In broken voice he said: `Greed and jealousy destroyed your men, Don Admiral. Their brutal treatment turned my people into enemies. Your men sought gold in Caonabo's province. All were slain. Those at the fort quarreled among themselves. There were none to defend La Navidad against Caonabo when he came." (Sperry 171, 172)

When the Admiral's fleet arrived at La Navidad, it found a scene of devastation. The reasons may have been multiple—there are suggestions of the Spaniards' fighting among themselves over gold and women, of their cruelty to the Tainos and attacks in revenge—but Colon's explanation is probably truest: `Bad feeling arose and broke out into warfare because of the licentious conduct of our men towards the Indian women,...the husbands and relatives of the women, unable to take this, banded together to avenge this insult and eliminate this outrage,...and attacked the Christians in great force.' (Sale 139)

...the Spaniards rebelled against the irksome labor of building this settlement called Isabella. They had not come out to the New World to toil like slaves in the sun. Even if it called for the whip, let the Indians themselves be put to such degrading tasks, not them' Grimly Columbus overheard the matters.... (Sperry 173)

The natives would not work. For the first time, the European came against this conflict: he born and bred in the belief that work is holy, used to seeing in man's wants the source of work, and in work the source of wealth, and in wealth, the sign of civilization the civilized and hard-working European found that the native of warm lands had another answer for the problem of life -- little or no work, few or no wants, and let the sun do the rest. What was Colon to do?

All administrators of African Colonies know the answer: to lay a tax on the natives. That is exactly what he did. But the tax yielded little, despite assurances to the contrary to the King and Queen; and it was most difficult to collect it from a race of swift and slippery Indians who did not know the use of shirts. (Madariaga 302, 303)

The colonists soon grew discontented because they did not find enough gold to make them rich. They forced the Indians to work for them. When the Indians revolted, colonists killed or enslaved them. (Davidson 58)

The tribute system instituted by the Governor sometime in 1495 was a simple and brutal way of fulfilling the Spanish lust for gold....Every Taino over the age of fourteen had to supply the rulers with a hawk's belly full of gold every three months (or in gold-deficient areas, twenty five pounds of spun cotton); those who did were given a token to wear around their necks as proof they had made their payment; those who did not...had their hands cutoff...and left to bleed to death. There was no way that they could meet their quotas, even dredging all the known auriferous areas, nor any way that their sparse cotton plants could supply enough spools to provide a substitute. (Sale 155)

A rebellion broke out against the Spanish in which thousands of Tainos were killed. (Davidson 59)

Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Berah of the University of California at Berkeley...come up with an estimate of the original island population at just under 8 million people....By 1542, according to Las Casas, who was there at the time, only 200 Tainos remained on Espanola, probably the last of that people anywhere in the islands. Within a decade or two of that, they were extinct. Dark indeed, the legend. (Sale 161)

WORKS CITED

Davidson, James West and John E. Batchelor. A History of the Republic. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1986.

Grunblatt, Miraim, F. Kenneth Cox and Stanley S. Seaberg. Human Heritage, A World History.

Columbus: Merrill, 1985.

Madariaga, Salvador De. Christopher Columbus. New York: MacMillan, 1940.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. The Conquest of Paradise. New York: Knopf, 1990.

Sperry, Armstrong. The Voyages of Christopher Columbus. New York: Random House, 1950.

Winsor, Justin. Christopher Columbus. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1892.

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. New York: Harper, 1990.

—Stephanie Dixon / English 102, Fall 1991

My comments: This may be the most unusual essay you have ever read; certainly it is one of the most unusual research papers I have read. It is a very personal paper, and yet other than the Abstract, there is not a single word of the writer's own language in this paper. I call this a radical collage paper because, much like the collages of modernist painters, it is constructed of materials the writer found appropriate to the subject. This paper is more like an artistic creation, yet it is scholarship demonstrating an active, highly motivated, search through materials that were personally challenging. Given the nature of the subject of this paper, it is hard for me to find a more appropriate way to write it than how this writer did it. This paper is convincing because it does not have the personality of the writer in it. The reader discovers along with the writer just what the subject is.

Stephanie's paper has much in common with the collage techniques of not only modern painters but also of poets and novelists. Poets like Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson use found materials (historical documents, letters, diary entries); the novelist Paul Metcalf has written complete books all quoted from historical texts. A near perfect example of a poem as collage research paper is Muriel Rukeyser's Highway One a documentary of the infamous Hawks Nest tunnel tragedy in which the Union Carbide company's negligence of basic safety precautions resulted in the deaths of hundreds of minors.

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