As might have been expected, Pedro Margarit’s band of plunderers had caused serious problems on the island. Raiding the interior regions for treasures, the Spaniards had quickly found that they could not exist for very long on Indian maize and fruits, and after eating some ‘Indian rats’ and lizards, many were suddenly overcome by sickness as much as by hunger. Margarit never made any attempts at controlling his men’s lust for plunder and young girls, and as complaints by the natives began to pour into Isabela, Margarit also began to argue with Diego Colon over the command of the island. In the end, Margarit and a band of other unhappy Spaniards managed to seize the caravels that Bartholomeo had just brought from Spain; they sailed back home to Spain and there began a vicious rumor campaign against the Colon brothers. Many of the dissatisfied men left behind by Margarit had meanwhile gone out on their own again, ravaging the island and killing any natives who resisted. Finally even the peaceful Indians of Hispaniola could take no more; during the following months they began a series of reprisals, waylaying and killing any white man who dared to leave the safety of Isabela.
Late in 1494, while the Admiral was still recuperating, Antonio de Torres returned from Spain with four more caravels, again loaded with provisions and necessities. With these supplies came for the first time a few women who, it was hoped, would restore some of the morale at Isabela. Torres also brought a letter from Ferdinand and Isabella; in it the Sovereigns thanked Columbus for what he had already accomplished, and asked for more details about new discoveries. They also replied to his earlier suggestion for a slave trade with Hispaniola, and made it clear that they were firmly opposed to any such trade, whether in Caribs or any other Indians. They also informed their Admiral of the final treaty with Portugal, settling the Pope’s Demarcation Line, and asked him to return to Spain to advise on the practical application of this line.
Columbus, however, was not yet prepared to return to Spain. He could not face his king and queen without any of the promised gold or valuables, and he certainly was not willing to admit that his vice-royalty was in chaos. Always a proud man, Columbus felt compelled to master the local situation before returning home, and neither would he go empty-handed. In the process, the representatives of Spanish civilization turned the once tropical island paradise of Hispaniola into a depressing wasteland of human miseries.
Against the clear and express wishes of the Spanish rulers, Columbus began by sending out expeditions to punish any natives who had dared to attack the white men. The Spaniards closed in on the Indians with fire and sword, with horses and dogs, and now that they were acting on orders of the Governor-General himself, they killed more brutally than ever. Those Indians who survived the slaughter were taken prisoners, and the settlement of Isabela eventually held more than 1,500 natives in chains. Torres packed over five hundred of the “choicest” of these miserable people in the cargo hold of his caravels to take them back to Spain, and Columbus then allowed every Spaniard on Hispaniola to help himself to as many as he wished. “When everybody was satisfied,” wrote Cuneo, “there were some 400 left, and they were allowed to go . . . among them were many women with infants at the breast. In order to escape us quickly, and for fear that we might set about catching them again, they left their infants lying on the ground, and ran away . . .”
Those were the lucky ones. The Indians shipped to Spain, however, faced a cruel fate. Torres sailed from Hispaniola, accompanied by Diego Colon and Michele de Cuneo, who reported that more than two hundred of the captives died at sea, and when the survivors were landed at Seville, another two hundred were seriously ill. Most, however, were quickly put up for sale, “naked as they were born,” though Cuneo added that “they were not very profitable since almost all died, for the country did not agree with them.”
But for once the Indians had a terrible revenge on all of Europe. In 1494, the French army suddenly experienced the first recorded outbreak of a previously unknown illness – syphilis, which quickly became known as the French disease. Syphilis had been around for a long time among the Indians of the Caribbean; so long, in fact, that most had become immune to it. But among the Spaniards, who first contracted it from the natives on Hispaniola, the disease quickly assumed the most hideous forms, and many of the settlers died from it. Once these Spaniards began to return home again, the disease rapidly spread throughout Europe, wiping out thousands upon thousands beginning with the 16th century.
On Hispaniola, the Columbus brothers had meanwhile begun to systematically organize the island and subjugating the Indians in order to get as much gold as possible. It was there that began the infamous repartimientos system, which later spread to all Spanish American possessions. Under this system, grants were made to individual colonists, “with the natives there living,” who were theirs to own, to exploit and punish, to treat as they chose, though always subject to the Laws of the Indies which, technically at least, mandated kind treatment of the natives. Several forts were now built in the interior, and armed troops set out to force the Indians to deliver a gold tribute. In the beginning, everyone over the age of fourteen was to pay enough gold dust to fill one large hawk’s bell, all others were to contribute 25 pounds of cotton. Whenever an Indian had delivered his tribute, he was given a token of copper and brass to wear around his neck as a sign that he had fulfilled his obligation. Any Indian encountered without such a token was to be punished severely.
Few of the Indians ever managed to scrape together the required amount of gold, and Columbus was soon forced to reduce the demand by half. The truth was, there simply were no gold mines – not in Cibao, not anywhere in all Hispaniola. The metal had to be panned out of the rivers or dug out of old river beds in such small amounts that most of the island’s natives found it impossible even to come up with the half portion. The result usually was savage punishment at the hands of the Spanish collectors. An outraged Dominican missionary, Bartolome de Las Casas, trying desperately to protect the Indians, provided a graphic description of his fellow Spaniards’ brutal tactics against the helpless people: “They came with their Horsemen well armed with Sword and Launce, making most cruel havocks and slaughter . . . Overrunning cities and villages, where they spared no sex nor age; neither would their cruelty pity women with childe, whose bellies they would rip up, taking out the infant to hew it in pieces . . . The children they would take by the feet and dash their innocent heads against the rocks . . . They erected gallows . . . upon every one of which they would hang 13 persons, blasphemously affirming that they did it in honor of our Redeemer and His Apostles, and then putting fire under them, they burnt the poor wretches alive . . .”
The Indians were totally bewildered by this sudden ferocious cruelty of a people to whom they had never shown anything but hospitality. Wrote Las Casas again: “Since violence, provocation, and injustice from the Christians never ceased, some fled to the mountains, and others began to slay the Christians in return for the wrongs and tortures they had suffered. When that happened, vengeance was immediately taken; the Christians called it punishment, yet not the guilty alone, but all those who lived in a village or district were sentenced to execution or torture.” One Indian chief named Hathvey was captured and about to be burned alive; during the last moments, when a monk tried to tell him of the glory of the Christian Heaven he was about to enter, the chief replied: “Then let me go to hell that I may not come where they are.”
The effects of such wholesale slaughter of the native population proved disastrous. Many of the Indians who survived the Spanish attacks died of starvation, and others poisoned themselves and their families in order to escape the misery and suffering. Within an amazingly short time, Hispaniola was nearly deserted of its native people. Columbus himself made a triumphal march across the island in 1496, and it was reported that by that time any Spaniard could safely go wherever he pleased and help himself to the Indians’ food, their possessions, and even their women. While the estimated population of Hispaniola in 1492 had been 250,000 people, less than eight years later their numbers had shrunk by more than 100,000. By 1538, no more than five hundred Indians still clung to life against this relentless genocide, which by that time had already spread throughout the West Indies.