A Ruthless Conquest of the Natives of the New World

     Most people are aware of the Aztec's unfortunate experience with Hernan Cortez.  Just as unfortunate for the Inca king Atahualpa was his first sight of Pizarro and his band of marauders, charging on horseback toward him, lopping off heads with glittering steel swords the likes of which no Incan had ever seen.  Later, after the city was looted of its gold and silver, as Atahualpa was ready to be garroted and burned for devil worship, he asked Pizarro why he must possess so much gold.  “We Spanish have a disease,” he was alleged to have told the Incan king, “which only gold can cure.”  Perhaps he was being brutally frank about himself, or perhaps he was just making a cruel joke.  Nevertheless, the statement serves to illustrate the continual brutality with which the Spanish conquistadors treated the Indians of the new world in the 16^th and 17^th Century.

     This was never truer than on the island of Hispaniola shortly after Columbus discovered it.  He reported back to the Spanish King that the indigenous people were gentle and compliant and would make good servants and slaves.  With Columbus’ brother as the first Corregidor of Hispaniola by 1496, the treatment of the Indians became so brutal that an outraged Spanish Dominican Friar, Bartholomew de las Casas, published a book which he called ‘A Brief Chronicle of the Devastation of the Indies’.  It was later translated into French and English, complete with colorful drawings of how far Spanish cruelty had come.  According to Friar Bartholomew, the Spanish demanded that the natives find gold for them and instituted a quota of how much they must bring forth every day, lest they be punished.  This was rather difficult, since there was virtually no gold on Hispaniola or anywhere else in the eastern islands.  When the natives began to resist the demands, the Spanish pursued them with packs of hungry dogs.  Friar Bartholomew even detailed how the Spanish soldiers roasted the natives alive over fires or chopped off their hands and hung them around their necks, a message to the others whom might resist.  It was also noted by the friar that Spanish soldiers herded the natives into their tall wooden dwellings and burned them all alive, while inside. 

     It is hard for a nation to survive this kind of cruelty without stigma, as we’ve seen with Nazi Germany during the holocaust, Japan with the rape of Nanking, the Turkish genocide of Armenians, and even the United States with the starvation and relocation of native Americans in the Trail of Tears (there are many other historical examples throughout the world, of course).  The Spanish slaughter of the Indians became known as the ‘Black Legend of Spain' and haunted the Spanish for centuries.  There were many Spanish who abhorred the way their countrymen treated the native peoples, like Friar Bartholomew, and their numbers were considerable.  However, when it comes to what motivates the deeds of many, greed and gold has far too often trumped conscience. 

     Spanish mining interests in South America kept the natives in terrible servitude, slavery and early death for centuries afterward while Spanish fortune seekers looked for silver in Potosi, Peru, and other places.  However, while Spain's "guns, germs, and steel" was a formidable triad to resist, a few native civilizations fought back, and viciously.  The Araucanian natives of Patagonia fought fiercely and remained free of Spanish domination.  Though Conquistadors tried again and again to defeat them, they were never successful.

For much more on the subject, you can also read my historical novel, The Brethren Prince, available as an e-book at the Amazon Kindle store, Apple iBooks, Barnes and Noble, and other major e-book retailers.

The Holy Spanish Empire, Part I: Undisputed Ruler of the New World

     It’s no coincidence that Spanish is spoken so widely in South America and Catholicism is the predominant religion.  In the late 15^th Century, the Iberian kingdoms of Aragon and Castille, under the rule of Isabelle and Ferdinand, united as one to become the nation of Spain.  They went on to defeat the last Moorish Emirate in the southern part of the Iberian peninsula.  After their victory, the Genoese opportunist Cristobal Colon (Christopher Columbus) perceived that the two rulers needed a source of wealth for their up and coming superpower.  There were vast trading opportunities in the orient and Columbus proposed to the Spanish monarchs a new route to India directly across the Atlantic, where some warned that he would sail off the end of the earth.  Ferdinand and Isabelle weren't so sure.  They consented to give him a few small ships to explore the possibilities, not necessarily having terribly high expectations.  The rest, as they say, is history.

     Spain’s first financed expedition was not a raving success, Columbus never found anything except a few islands and some natives (which he immediately called 'Indians' after continent he was seeking, and promptly subjugated them).  He died an ignominious disgrace after three voyages, not having fulfilled his promise to find the riches sought by the two monarchs.  However, after the stunning conquest by Hernan Cortez of the Aztec and the discovery of a huge cache of gold and silver in the great city of Tenochtitlan, the race was on to find more.  This success fired the imagination of every Spanish adventurer and a mad rush for gold ensued.  But unlike the gold rushes that we are used to hearing about, the gold accumulated by the Spanish was not unearthed from mines, but was pried from the dead hands of South America’s royalty.  Hernan Cortez, in other words, looted the Aztec treasury, melted down the artwork of generations into gold bars and shipped it all back to Spain as his personal fortune.  Unconscionable numbers of the natives perished from disease, starvation, and murder.

     As tales of cities of gold abounded among Spanish hidalgos (adventurers), many more soldiers of fortune came to the New World to stake claims.  Pizarro’s brutal conquest of the Inca made him the richest man in Spain.  It could be said, unequivocally, that the first great return on Spain’s modest investment came from outright pillaging.  However, many hidalgos never found their treasure, as one might expect.  Ponce de Leon never found the fountain of youth.  Coronado, who searched through the a huge area north of New Spain (now Mexico) failed to find ‘Eldorado’, where the streets were supposedly paved with gold.  In our times one would call this kind of thing a ‘wild goose chase’ but the successes of Cortez and Pizarro fueled a gold fever among the Spanish that far exceeded the 1849 gold rush to California.  It was a fever that continued for centuries.  By the mid 1500’s the Spanish had taken all the gold and silver from the Indian treasuries, slaughtered or enslaved the indigenous populations, and set up silver mines to extract the glittering metal still remaining in the earth. 

     At this point in time, the Protestant Reformation was in full swing back in Europe and the Papacy’s most loyal subject, Spain, proudly brought their new wealth to bear against the upstart heretics.  They financed religious wars with their plunder in attempts to quell the rising tide of Protestant heresies in England and Holland.  Spain’s religious exuberance was not contained only to Europe, however.  From the very beginning, the Spanish brought along their many idols of saints and their Dominican and Jesuit priests to the new world in attempts to save--- or purge--- the heathen natives from their idolatries.

For much more on the subject, you can also read my historical novel, The Brethren Prince, available as an e-book at the Amazon Kindle store, Apple iBooks, Barnes and Noble, and other major e-book retailers.

Tortuga; the First Haven of the Buccaneers

     In the decades of the 1630's, 40's and into the 50's, robbing the Spanish became the principal activity of many Buccaneers.  They aggregated on the northwest tip of Hispaniola near the Windward Passage, where Spanish shipping passed, coming from and going to Europe.  Several miles off the north coast of this finger of land lay an island which the Buccaneers called ‘Tortuga’, for its resemblance to a huge sea turtle basking on the ocean’s surface.  The north coast of the island was pounded with rough surf and laced with treacherous reefs, which made landing difficult.  The southern side, while calm, was mostly dense mangrove jungle, except for a single natural harbor where a fair number of ships could be moored. 

     The Buccaneers needed a port to trade, disperse and sell their contraband and given that it was a stone's throw from the Windward Passage, Tortuga was a natural spot for such a port.  It was vulnerable, however, and the Spanish raided and burned it several times in the 1620’s and 30’s.  Since the largest portion of the Buccaneers were French in origin, the island of St. Christopher, then a peaceful French planting settlement, sent a civil engineer named Jean LeVasseur, to act as governor in 1649.  The idea was to establish some semblance of order in this otherwise lawless island. 

     LeVasseur was surprisingly successful at developing Tortuga, but not so much at "gentrifying" it.  He declared Tortuga to be a French protectorate and in doing so, he established a formal port and built a fortress on a rocky pinnacle overlooking the harbor.  He named it simply the ‘Rock Fort’ and it sported 24 cannons.  Having created infrastructure on the island, the land surrounding the fort became worthy plantation fields and LeVasseur sold the land to entrepreneurs.  With a port, plantations and a fort to protect them, LeVasseur recognized that one important element was missing from his budding community. 

     He wrote back to France and offered to take ‘undesirable ladies’ if the French prison system wished to empty their dungeons of female prostitutes, thieves and petty criminals.  LeVasseur hoped with the arrival of women that the Buccaneers might be enticed to settle down to a more manageable life of planting and family.  A few did, but most men held to the fast life of stealing from the Spanish.  That's not to say that LeVasseur was at all disappointed by this illicit activity.  Quite the contrary.  In a few years he came to be regarded as a kind of "pirate king."

     Having given into the riches of plunder, LeVasseur became a partner in many contraband businesses in Tortuga.  He named the harbor "Basse Terre," built a quayside warehouse to sell the contraband, and took his percentage from everything coming and going.  In only a matter of a few years the town of Cayone had grown up around his Rock Fort.  Cayone was a conflict of many styles of architecture, reflecting the nationality of the man who had built it, and taverns and inns abounded.  These were wild, lawless, rough and dirty places, full of ‘drunkenness and wickedness of the most varied forms’ as the historian Esquemeling tells us.  After a night of carousing and visiting houses of prostitution, men lay drunk in the unpaved streets or occasionally, slumped against buildings and bleeding to death.  Fights and grudges over a pittance were settled routinely with crossed swords, pistols, ambushes, knives, throat cutting and every other form of revenge.  Needless to say, the lifespan of these brigands, and even Jean LeVasseur himself, would be commensurate with his business.  In 1654, LeVasseur was killed, stabbed to death by one of his lieutenants, a conflict alleged to have something to do with a pair of young trollops. 

     Chevalier DeFontenay was the next governor of Tortuga, but he never had a chance to earn a reputation equal to LeVasseur.  In 1655, the Spanish brought five war galleons and a number of troop transport ships to Tortuga in a massive effort to destroy the pestilence dogging their shipping.  They bombarded their way into the harbor, chopped through the forest to a place above and behind the Rock Fort while the defenders hunkered down.  There, the Spanish garrisons blasted the fort to rubble, then spread out across the island, burning all the residences, taverns, baudy houses, and even the Huguenot Church.  All the crops being grown on the island, including the tobacco, were burned as well as all the ships for transport.  Many of the defenders were killed, others escaped across the channel to Hispaniola, but most of the indian and negro slaves were taken into Spanish custody. 

     This did not deter the Buccaneers from their profession though, for the Spanish abandoned the place as quickly as they had decimated it, and the Buccaneers washed back like the incoming tide.  Tortuga would still be a port of call for freebooters, privateers and pirates for a short time, but there was a new and much larger port in the making.  Very soon after the Spanish raid on Tortuga, Jamaica was taken by the British and officially declared a protectorate.  The Buccaneers flocked there, finding a new and better protected home for even bigger escapades against the Spanish Empire.  

     Next week we will be examining the Buccaneers "victim" of choice:  The Holy Spanish Empire, Undisputed Ruler of the New World.

For much more on the subject, you can also read my historical novel, The Brethren Prince, available as an e-book at the Amazon Kindle store, Apple iBooks, Barnes and Noble, and other major e-book retailers.