columbus

Their spears are made of
cane….They would make fine servants….With fifty men we could subjugate them all and
make them do whatever we want.”

Las Casas says…

“Endless testimonies…prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives…But our
work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they
tried to kill one of us now and then…The admiral, it is true, was blind as those who came
after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes
against the Indians.

Las Casas says…

“Endless testimonies…prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives…But our
work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they
tried to kill one of us now and then…The admiral, it is true, was blind as those who came
after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes
against the Indians.

“Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and
when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides…they ceased to
procreate.

Las Casas says…

“Endless testimonies…prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives…But our
work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they
tried to kill one of us now and then…The admiral, it is true, was blind as those who came
after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes
against the Indians.

AS for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked
and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000
children died in three short months.

Zinn on history:

“To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and
discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an
ideological choice.

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…and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful an
fertile…was depopulated…My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and
now I tremble as I write…

Morison says…

“He (Columbus) has his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the
qualities that made him great---his indomitable w...

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…and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful an
fertile…was depopulated…My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and
now I tremble as I write…

Morison says…

“He (Columbus) has his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the
qualities that made him great---his indomitable will, hi...