Carol Delaney (Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem, Free Press: 2011) knows she has a problem in convincing a now-skeptical world that Columbus was not the generator of native subjugation he has been accused of in recent years. So she sets out to show that, far from “intending to commit genocide,” Columbus’s main objective was to garner the money and influence to get the Christian monarchs for whom he worked to launch a crusade to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims. As she writes early on: “The quest for Jerusalem was Columbus’s grand passion” (xvi). The problem is that even if this were the great mariner’s aim (and there is some doubt whether it was, or whether he used his conspicuously-expressed faith as a ploy to curry favor with the very Catholic Queen Isabela), it still does not excuse his behaviors. For there is no doubt that Columbus did send Native American slaves to Spain against the express wishes of Queen Isabela, nor that he was obsessed with finding gold (a percentage of which he insisted on claiming for himself), nor that he did set in motion the dreaded encomienda system which was, in effect, slavery, and which led to the decimation of the native population on the islands he “discovered.” Nevertheless, Delaney tries valiantly to convince us that Columbus was simply a devout man of his time, and that this poor mariner, son of a weaver, was intimately familiar with the Bible—not only the New Testament important to Christians, but the Old Testament, sacred to the Jews—at a time when most men of any class could not even read, let alone read and write in Latin or any other language. Yet we are shown how Columbus quotes almost entirely from the Old Testament prophets such as Isaiah, and Daniel, and Ezekiel, and from the Psalms, with a familiarity that is astonishing. Delaney even acknowledges that there have been scholars, Salvador de Madariaga most prominently, who have alleged that Columbus must have been a Jew, a converso who publicly and loudly professed Christianity (conversos who were suspected of secretly ‘Judaizing’ were subject to the tortures of the Inquisition), for one thing because only a Jew could be expected to know so much about the Old Testament. She even grants, in an endnote (p. 256, note 1) that “Columbus may have had a Jewish ancestor;” but in the same breath insists that he seemed unaware of it.
All this aside, Delaney’s passion to prove that her hero was a devout Christian who only wanted to save souls for Christ, comes through loud and clear. Perhaps too loud and clear. For it forces her to marshal arguments that sound more like special pleading than the work of a gennuine, i.e. disinterested, scholar. This is not to say that Delaney hasn’t done her homework. She has. And along the way she provides us with much compelling information about both Columbus the man, and the times in which he lived. But that cannot deter us from the fact that her mountain of information does not, in the end, make the case she wishes to make. Columbus, though a fascinating and often-sympathetic figure in her reading, remains stained by the accusations against him, mostly in his own words. Take one very important paragraph cited by Delaney near the end of her book. She is quoting from the Admiral’s lament to the world that he has been badly used by those (mainly Nicolas Ovando and Francisco Bobadilla) who have been given authority over the very lands he himself has discovered. Here is what he writes (Delaney attributes this to several sources, including the famous Lettera Rarissima he wrote to the sovereigns after the 4th Voyage, July 7, 1503):
What man has ever lived, not excluding Job, who would not have wished himself dead in my situation: seeking to save my life and that of my son, my brother and my friends. I was at that moment denied access to the very land and ports which, by the will of God and sweating blood, I had conquered for Spain (my emphasis).
It is those last few words that I think bear scrutiny. For Delaney has been arguing all along that Columbus’ true aim stems from his Christian faith, his mission to save souls for Christ, to find the means to liberate Jerusalem. And yet, what he writes here for all to see, is that he views himself not as a missionary, but as a conqueror. Another quote from his Letter to Dona Juana de Torres in 1500, reinforces this point:
I should be judged as a captain who went from Spain to the Indies to conquer a people numerous and warlike, whose manners and religion are very different from ours, who live in sierras and mountains, without fixed settlements, and where by divine will I have placed under the sovereignty of the King and Queen our Lords, an Other World, whereby Spain, which was reckoned poor, is become the richest of countries. (emphasis mine)
He has conquered a whole world for Spain, he says; and living in that world are a myriad of conquered people, whom his very first encounter with led him to write that “with fifty men, I could subjugate them all.” Which he subsequently did. Many of whom he sent to Spain as slaves—for that, according to Delaney, accorded with the laws of war. Conquered people could be enslaved, she writes. So could those who resisted Christianization. Or those who engaged in battle with Christians to resist the Christians’ violent depradations. No universal right to self-defense here—which is what native people had been doing all along: defending themselves. No. If you as a native resisted what Europeans—who claim to have “discovered” you—wanted to do to you, you were a combatant and could be enslaved at best, slaughtered at worst.
This is the kind of European arrogance that Carol Delaney wants us to accept as the excuse for all Columbus did (this arrogance is accentuated in the Papal Bull of 1493, issued by the notorious Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, which granted Spain all the lands ‘discovered’ by Columbus, and later divided the entire ocean between Spain and Portugal—not considering in either bull, needless to say, the existence of the millions of natives there). Though she is right that he himself did not commit, or even order genocide (which the most rabid of his detractors claim), she is also wrong, in this writer’s opinion, that Columbus was blameless. He was not. For he it was who almost immediately thought it was perfectly legitimate to seize six natives as specimens to display in Spain as ‘proof’ that he had found the Indies. And upon his return on the second voyage, he saw it as perfectly legitimate to send back to Spain, on Feb. 2, 1494, no less than twelve supply ships, consisting of “profitable materials from nature—including twenty-six Indians—from the man-eating Caribs” (p. 141). Note that Delaney is careful to add that the enslaved were cannibals, and more:
In doing this, he was following papal policy at the time, which permitted enslavement of those captured in a “just war,” those who resisted Christianization, or those who went against the law of nature (Delaney, p. 141).
In other words, Carol Delaney is justifying, in every way possible (she cites Columbus in his memo to the Queen, making the case that, by capturing the “unnatural” Caribs, Spain would gain great credit because the Indians would respond favorably to the Spanish system of justice by their eagerness to become the Queen’s vassals) what not even Queen Isabela, herself a devout product of her time, would do. And Carol Delaney admits this:
When the sovereigns received Columbus’s memo, they responded that, in the future, they would prefer that he try to convert the natives while still in the islands…however, when he elaborated a plan to send more Caribs back as slavesas a way to defray the costs of supplying the settlement, the sovereigns demurred (142; all emphases mine).
In short, the Queen saw right through Columbus’s rationale for slavery, and tried to nip it in the bud. So did Bartolome de Las Casas, who lived in the islands for many years, and translated much of Columbus’s writing in his Historia de las Indias. Las Casas writes about this shipment:
In this notable document occurs the first mention of slavery in the New World. The Admiral directs Torres to inform the sovereigns that he has made slaves of some Indians captured (in) the cannibal islands, and has sent them to Spain to have them taught Spanish in order that they may later serve as interpreters. The justification he advanced for this measure was that by taking (them) from their surroundings they would be cured of their cannibalism, converted to Christianity, and their souls saved…(Las Casas, as cited in Francis A. McNutt, Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings, (Nov. 2007).
Father Las Casas went on to elaborate what was worse, in his opinion:
The next suggestion, despite any possible excellence of his motives, was a frank proposal to establish a thriving trade in human flesh as barefaced as could be made by the least scrupulous "blackbirder." The Admiral, always dwelling upon the spiritual welfare of the cannibal natives, proposed that the more of them that could be captured, the better it would be, and then, mingling temporal advantages to Spaniards with spiritual blessings to the natives, he explained that the quantities of livestock and other necessaries required by the colonists, might be paid for by the sale of slaves sent back to Spain in the ships which would bring these supplies several times a year to the colony (Ibid).
In other words, Fr. Bartolome de Las Casas was not fooled by Columbus’s protestations about his concern for “the spiritual welfare of the natives.” He saw through it, just as the Queen had, and condemned it. Especially, as even Carol Delaney admits, because “In reality, the distinction between ‘good’ natives and those who attacked the Spaniards and resisted Christianization was probably often blurred” (Delaney, 154). Furthermore, justifying slavery because of the customs of the enslaved (and an anthropologist like Delaney should know that cannibalism can be often attributed to conditions where a plentiful protein source is lacking, as it was on the Caribbean islands) simply won’t do. Arrogant conquerors backed by a Pope may justify the enslavement of a conquered people in this way, but history cannot accept this justification.
Then there is the encomienda system mentioned above. Though the islands were initially viewed as a place for setting up trading posts, soon grants of land were made to settlers who followed on subsequent voyages. And natives who lived on those lands were considered part of the property, and expected to pay tribute. Here is what Las Casas has to say about this:
Columbus laid a tribute upon the entire population of the island which required that each Indian above fourteen years of age who lived in the mining provinces was to pay a little bell filled with gold every three months; the natives of all other provinces were to pay one arroba of cotton. These amounts were so excessive that in 1496 it was found necessary to change the nature of the payment, and, instead of the gold and cotton required from the villages, labour was substituted, the Indians being required to lay out and work the plantations of the colonists in their vicinity. This was the germ of the cruel and oppressive repartimientos and encomiendas which were destined to depopulate the islands…(op cit, McNutt)
This cruel system, which made subjects of all the natives and forced them to first pay tribute and then labor for the Spanish, who had now become colonists, is blamed by Las Casas for no less than “depopulating” the islands. And how does Carol Delaney justify this part of Columbus’s legacy? First, she claims that the system of tribute was “nothing new,” as a similar one already existed with regard to Spanish land taken from Muslims, and given to Spanish hidalgos. Then she maintains that the original idea for the encomienda system was not Columbus’s at all, but rather that of the rebel leader Francisco Roldan, who had led a rebellion in the western half of Hispaniola. When Columbus went to meet him in 1498 to forge a truce, Roldan insisted on allowing his rebels to keep the land they had colonized, along with all the natives on them as laborers. Delaney says that this was the origin of the encomienda system, which even she describes as “quasi-serfdom” (179). But the fact remains that Columbus agreed to allow the encomienda system to be maintained, and not just in the rebel lands, but throughout the islands. Whether initially instituted by Columbus or simply ratified by him, it was a brutal system that led, as Las Casas maintains, to the depopulation of the islands. In his Brevissima Relacion, or Short Report of the Destruction of the Indies, written in 1541, Las Casas gives us some idea of the extent of the damage:
whereas there were more than three million souls, whom we saw in Hispaniola, there
are to-day, not two hundred of the native population left.
Three million to two hundred. And this refers to just the one island of Hispaniola, which Columbus colonized first. Las Casas gives us more in this devastating text, but we mostly know the rest.
One final reference to Delaney’s book deserves mention. On her very last page, which encompasses her summary of the millennial age (which she claims explains why Columbus was so obsessed with liberating Jerusalem—it was believed, she writes, to be the precondition to the Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ to redeem the entire world), Delaney adds her own plea for ending the dangerous apocalyptic myth that still prevails. Here is what she writes:
How can we diffuse the power of the apocalyptic myth before its destructive, self-fulfilling prophecy becomes a reality? On that the fate of our world may depend (244).
These are her last words, the concluding words of her book, which for most writers are revised again and again, receiving intense scrutiny to get them right. The problem is, that scrutiny was either haphazard or in vain, for she uses the word “diffuse” (to disperse or spread widely) rather than “defuse” (to reduce the danger of, originally to remove the fuse from an explosive device). This appears to be a serious blunder, one which makes this writer, at least, question the value, aside from its other weaknesses, of her entire attempt to exculpate Columbus.
Lawrence DiStasi
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