The Other Slavery (4 page)

Early sources do not mention smallpox until 1518, a full twenty-six years after Columbus first arrived in the Caribbean. This was no oversight. Sixteenth-century Spaniards were quite familiar with smallpox’s symptoms and lived in constant fear of diseases of any kind. They were keenly aware, for example, that having sex with Indian women could cause
el mal de las búas
(literally, “the illness of the pustules,” or syphilis), which afflicted several of Columbus’s mariners and spread throughout Italy and Spain immediately on their return. As early as 1493, colonists in the Caribbean also reported an illness that affected both Indians and Spaniards and was characterized by high fevers, body aches, and prostration—clinical signs that point perhaps to swine flu. Influenza is usually benign, although it is capable of mutating into deadlier forms
resulting in pandemics. The famous “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918, which wreaked havoc around the world, is only one example. Early Caribbean sources do not describe an influenza pandemic, but merely an influenza-like disease of some concern. There is no mention of smallpox or any other clear episode of mass death among the Natives until a quarter of a century after Columbus’s first voyage. Of course, it is impossible to rule out entirely the possibility of major outbreaks that went unreported, but the documentation suggests that the worst epidemics did not affect the New World immediately.
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The late arrival of smallpox actually makes perfect sense. Smallpox was endemic in the Old World, which means that the overwhelming majority of Europeans were exposed to the virus in childhood, resulting in one of two outcomes: death or recovery and lifelong immunity. Thus the likelihood of a ship carrying an infected passenger was low. And even if this were to happen, the voyage from Spain to the Caribbean in the sixteenth century lasted five or six weeks, a sufficiently long time in which any infected person would die along the way or become immune (and no longer contagious). There were only two ways for the virus to survive such a long passage. One was for a vessel to carry both a person already infected and a susceptible host who contracted the illness en route and lived long enough to disembark in the Caribbean. The odds of this happening were minuscule—around two percent according to a back-of-the-envelope calculation by the demographer Massimo Livi Bacci. The second possibility was that an infected passenger left behind the live virus in scabs that fell off his body. Since smallpox has now been eliminated from the face of the earth except in some labs, no one really knows how long the virus could have survived outside the body under the conditions of a sixteenth-century sailing vessel. But even if the virus had remained active aboard a Spanish ship that reached the New World, it would still have had to find its way into a suitable host. In short, far from strange, a delayed onset of smallpox in the New World is precisely what we would expect.
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Well before smallpox was first detected in the Caribbean, the Native islanders found themselves on a path to extinction. “La Isla Española,” the island now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was the
first home of Europeans in the New World. It is a very large landmass, about the size of South Carolina, which at the time of contact was dotted with as many as five or six hundred Indian villages—an extreme dispersion that would have militated against the spread of disease. Typically, these were small settlements of a few extended families, except for a handful of communities that had a thousand people or more—no Aztec or Inca cities, but substantial villages nonetheless. Friar Las Casas put Española’s total population at “more than three million,” but given the island’s carrying capacity, the archaeological remains, and early Spanish population counts, a more realistic number would be perhaps two or three hundred thousand. By 1508, however, that figure had fallen to 60,000; by 1514 it stood at merely 26,000, according to a fairly comprehensive census (no longer guesswork); and by 1517 the number had plunged to just 11,000. In other words, one year before Europeans began reporting smallpox, Española’s Indian population had dwindled to five percent or less of what it had been in 1492. Clearly, the Native islanders were well on their way to a total demographic collapse when smallpox appeared to deliver the coup de grâce.
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When we think of the early Caribbean, we imagine mass death caused by pathogens attacking an immunologically defenseless population. But as the case of Española indicates, this image has been deduced rather than having been directly observed. It began to take shape only fifty or sixty years ago when a group of demographers and historians proposed very high population estimates for pre-contact America. Since there was no way to count the Indian population of any area of the hemisphere in 1492, these “High Counters,” as they came to be known, derived their estimates by indirect methods, such as taking the earliest population censuses of the Spanish era and multiplying them by a factor of ten or more to work their way back to 1492, or using fragmentary population numbers for a small region and applying the same death rate to much larger geographic areas. Needless to say, such methodologies proved controversial, although their eye-popping numbers circulated widely. And, of course, these numbers raised questions about the causes of the massive decline that followed. Could Spaniards with rusty swords and cumbersome harquebuses have killed so many Indians? In the Caribbean, for
example, fewer than ten thousand Europeans would have had to dispose of an Indian population that was a thousand times larger (assuming a High Counters’ estimate of ten million). To their credit, the original High Counters in the 1960s and 1970s acknowledged that the decline had occurred for multiple reasons, ranging from warfare and exploitation to epidemics. But their successors emphasized epidemics, which gradually became the overriding and most logical explanation of the Indians’ cataclysmic demise.
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A more recent consensus is now emerging that revises down the High Counters’ numbers. But smaller population numbers for pre-contact America do not make the decline any less dramatic. More modest initial numbers do, however, have a bearing on the possible causes of the Indians’ subsequent demise. While it is hard to fathom each Spaniard killing one thousand Indians with anything other than germs, it is much easier to imagine each conquistador, possessing superior technology and motivated by greed, subduing thirty Indians, who ultimately perished through a combination of warfare, exploitation, famine, and exposure to new diseases. We may never know how many Natives died solely because of illness and how many perished due to human intervention. But if I had to hazard a guess using the available written sources, it would be that between 1492 and 1550, a nexus of slavery, overwork, and famine killed more Indians in the Caribbean than smallpox, influenza, and malaria. And among these human factors, slavery has emerged as a major killer.
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The Admiral’s First Scheme

The Spanish crown never intended to commit genocide or perpetrate the wholesale enslavement of the Native inhabitants of the Caribbean. These outcomes were entirely contrary to Christian morality and to Spain’s most basic economic and imperial interests. Yet a handful of individual decisions, human nature, and the archipelago’s geography led to just such a Dantean scenario. Christopher Columbus’s life offers us entrée into this tragic chain of decisions and circumstances.

Columbus was a visionary mariner, but he was also a businessman, a role that has not attracted the same level of attention in the literature. Born to a family of weavers and merchants from Genoa, he spent his whole life in the company of people who turned a profit by buying and selling. When he conceived his extraordinary project of reaching the East by sailing west, he patiently negotiated with various European courts, insisting on terms that often became sticking points and deal breakers. We can see what a hard-nosed negotiator Columbus was in the famous Capitulations of Santa Fe, the agreement he signed with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in April 1492. Although he did request titles and honors for the rest of his life, which he could then bequeath to his heirs and successors for all eternity, he placed two commercial clauses at the heart of the contract. First, Columbus requested one-tenth of “all the merchandise, whether pearls, precious stones, gold, silver, spices, and any other marketable goods of any kind, name, or manner that can be bought or bartered.” Evidently, at the time of the negotiations, Columbus was still thinking about spices, silks, and other products from the Orient. But the inclusive formulation of merchandise “of any kind, name, or manner” would have important repercussions for his New World enterprises. Columbus was also able to extract a second concession in the form of an option—which functioned in much the same way as a present-day stock option—whereby he would be able to invest one-eighth of the total cost of fitting out all present and future expeditions and in return receive an additional one-eighth, or 12.5 percent, of the profits reaped by such ventures. These two clauses meant that Columbus—a single individual—would be able to control close to one-quarter of the overall trade between the Spanish empire and the Orient.
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Columbus’s first voyage to the New World was successful, and his return to Spain in the spring of 1493 was triumphal. On his way to Barcelona, where
Ferdinand and Isabella were holding court, Columbus received an encouraging letter from his sponsors, addressing him with the full titles promised: “To Don Cristóbal Colón, our Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Viceroy and Governor of the Islands that he discovered in the Indies.” On his arrival, the entire court and city came out to greet him, “and the crowds could not fit in the streets.” The next day Ferdinand and Isabella received the Admiral at the Alcázar warmly but with great solemnity. The Catholic monarchs rose from their thrones when Columbus approached. And when he knelt down to kiss the hands of his benefactors, they gave him the greatest accolade, reserved only for a handful of grandees: they made him rise and requested a chair so that he could be seated in their presence. The Admiral of the Ocean Sea then regaled Ferdinand and Isabella with tales of his voyage and all the marvelous things he had seen. He presented his patrons with some forty tropical birds, which had “the most brilliant plumage”; strange jewels made out of gold; and the six Indians who had survived the passage. As one of Columbus’s principal biographers has observed, “Never again would he know such glory, receive such praise, enjoy such favor from his Sovereigns.” Between celebrations and toasts, the monarchs approved a second and much larger expedition: not just three smallish caravels as before, but a fleet of seventeen ships; not just a few sailing families and convicts from Palos and Moguer, but a contingent of fifteen hundred colonists from all over the Iberian Peninsula transported by professional naval crews. It is hard to imagine the excitement during the summer of 1493 as preparations for that journey proceeded at full tilt. Great promise lay beyond the horizon. And Columbus could only congratulate himself for having insisted on very favorable terms for a venture that had once seemed like a harebrained scheme but was now likely to be a marvelous, and potentially very lucrative, reality.
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The fleet first sailed to the Lesser Antilles, passing the southern coast of Puerto Rico before reaching Española. Columbus had visited Española on his earlier voyage, and one of his captains had traded for gold with the Indians there. So the second time around, the Spaniards surveyed the island’s north coast quite carefully, asking the Natives about the source of the metal. The locals said that the gold was in the mountainous interior, in a region called Cibao, in what is now the Dominican Republic. Although encouraged by the presence of the yellow metal, the explorers quickly discovered that panning the riverbeds and mining the alluvial placers of Cibao would require time and considerable labor.
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The voyagers also looked for plants. A few sackfuls of cloves, nutmeg, or saffron would sell at outrageous prices in Europe and thus could help offset the costs of the fleet. The exotic and varied Caribbean vegetation fooled the explorers at every turn. Columbus thought he saw rhubarb and cinnamon, but none of these prized substances existed in the Caribbean. Chile pepper was the only spice to be had, and even though capsicum would in time transform the cuisines of the world, from South Asian curries and Sichuan stir-fries to Hungarian
paprikás,
it commanded little attention and no market value at the time. All in all, the colonists’ findings were paltry: some gold but no spices or silks, nor any of the other legendary products from the Orient. And in the meantime, the costs of their journey were mounting.
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