HAITI: The Destroyers of Worlds
Posted by Evan Arnold on Feb 1st, 2010 and filed under History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
Table of contents for HAITI: The Brief History of an Island; A Story of Hope
- HAITI: The Destroyers of Worlds
- HAITI: The Middle Passage
- HAITI: The Revolution Now
Haiti. What conceptions does the name bring to mind? You may have heard of it as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Certainly, if you hadn’t heard about the island nation of Haiti before, you’ve heard of it now with the natural disaster that occurred there on 12 January 2010, leaving thousands homeless, without electricity, food, or running water.
“Until Haiti spoke the slave ship, followed by hungry sharks, greedy to devour the dead and dying slaves flung overboard to feed them, ploughed in peace the South Atlantic, painting the sea with the Negro’s blood.” – Fredrick Douglas
But underneath the wreckage and ruin, there is a story of hope in the island’s history; of how an entire people decided to rise up against their oppressors and liberate themselves. While Haiti has encountered many difficulties on its path to nationhood and independence, which plague it still today, there has always been a beacon of hope shining over the island nation; that gilded light ready to burst through dark storm clouds for the entire world to see.
The land of Haiti was originally inhabited by one of the many indigenous native tribes that called the islands of the Greater Antilles (including Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad, Barbados, and several others) their home. They were the Arawaks or Taínos people. And there is some disagreement between historians as to whether the Taínos are a sub-section of the Arawak natives, or if they are two different tribes. Whatever the case, the Taínos did speak a language that was derived from the Arawak language family. Compared to other natives inhabiting the Greater Antilles, the Arawaks/Taínos had an advanced civilization. They had a social structure, domesticated crops such as maize were regularly grown, and they had even developed long boats. Words such as barbeque, canoe, and hurricane have been adopted into English and Spanish from the Arawak language family.
If you stayed awake during your history class, we all know that Columbus landed in the New World (not discovered) in 1492; you might even recall that he landed in El Salvador on 12 October. Perhaps even more important was his second landing, which took place in Northern Haiti on 15 December of that same year. Upon hearing rumors from other native peoples that Haiti was rich with gold (a tactic used to drive the Spanish away, which often worked) Christopher Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria accidentally ran aground while trying to land in a section of Haiti on 24 December. Columbus, seeing that the wreck was unsalvageable, had his men disassemble the seventy foot vessel and build a small fort out of the remaining wood. This was the first settlement in the New World, originally called La Navidad because it was established on December 24th; the fort was to eventually be called Môle Saint-Nicolas. When the Arawak/Taínos people made their presence on the island known to the Europeans, Columbus had this chilling statement to make as recorded in his journal.
“I have ordered a tower and fortress to be constructed and, a large cellar, not because I believe there is any necessity on account of [the natives],” he noted in his journal. “I am certain the people I have with me could subjugate all this island … as the population are naked and without arms and very cowardly.”
When Columbus returned to Spain, he left roughly thirty men at Môle Saint-Nicolas to search for the gold that had been spoken of and interact with the natives. By the time he came back on his second voyage the next year, he found corpses upon the beach and the settlement destroyed. He was told by some Arawak/ Taíno natives that the settlers had mistreated the natives and they were killed. Columbus built yet another settlement called La Isabela, moving it further to the East, establishing it in 1493 as a series of hurricanes as well as disease and constant hunger disillusioned some settlers so much that they talked of stealing the caravels and heading back to Spain on their own. The colony barely survived until 1496 where Columbus abandoned it and established Santo Domingo de Guzman instead, which would eventually be known as the capital of modern day Dominican Republic. The island was dubbed Hispaniola by the Spanish.
Christopher Columbus and the Spanish crown in particular had a monopoly on the island of Haiti. Unbeknownst to the natives, the island was claimed in the name of Spain when Columbus wrecked his ship there. Before his second voyage to the New World, his brother Bartholomew Columbus had tried to catch up with him, so that they could attend the trip together; unfortunately by the time Bartholomew got to Spain, Columbus had already sailed. Not to be deterred, he followed his brother Christopher, having been given funds by the Spanish crown. When he eventually arrived in Haiti, Bartholomew was appointed Adelantado of Hispaniola in his brother’s absence (meaning one who has come first). This was a position that gave him the powers of both governor of the colony as well as a judge in all legal matters. He ruled in this position for six years.
Bartholomew’s position made him answerable only to the Council of the Indies—an administrative branch of the Spanish government that oversaw the colonies and reported back to the king of Spain. This was a step towards taking the land away from the Conquistadors and putting it in the hands of the Spanish crown. It was the first seat of colonial rule for the Spanish, and set a pattern of interaction with the natives for many years to come. Unfortunately for the native peoples of the islands, that pattern of interaction left a great deal to be desired. When Christopher Columbus fell from favor with the Spanish crown and was imprisoned, his brother was also removed from office.
The rule of the Columbus brothers had been described by colonists as both tyrannical and cruel; those colonists who disagreed with them were tortured and in some cases put to death. Their treatment of the natives was equally appalling; for even a small offense, cutting off a nose or an ear was considered acceptable, after the punishment was doled out the ‘offender’ was sent back to their village to show the wrath of Spain. They began demanding anything and everything, women, food, spun cotton, but especially gold. The previous colonies set up by Columbus had not been profitable, and he was quickly running out of ways to appease the crown at home.
At first, the Arawak/Taínos people resisted passively, at first they moved away from Spanish settlements, refused to plant any crops that the Spanish gave them to farm, and attempted to avoid contact all together. Finally, the Arawak/Taínos people had enough of the Spanish cruelty and brutality. They began to fight against their oppressors. An account of Christopher Columbus’ reaction to this as recorded by Bartolomé de Las Casas is as follows.
“Since the Admiral perceived that the people of the land were taking up arms, ridiculous weapons in reality, he hastened to proceed to the country and disperse and subdue, by force of arms, the people of the entire island. For this he chose 200 foot soldiers and 20 cavalry, with many crossbows and small cannon, lances, and swords, and a still more terrible weapon against the Indians: this was 20 hunting dogs, who were turned loose and immediately tore the Indians apart…The soldiers mowed down dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed the dogs to rip open limbs and bellies, chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer them on sword and pike, and with God’s aid soon gained a complete victory, killing many Indians and capturing others who were also killed.”
Bartholomew himself was a priest who had owned enslaved Indians at first, but began to see what his countrymen were doing as not only wrong but completely inhumane. He was a first hand witness to many cruelties and recorded them in his multiple volume work, “History of the Indies.” This work shows the depths of depravity to which the Spanish had sunk in their conquest of the island. He spoke of the “strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty” inflicted upon the natives in order to prevent the “Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings.”
The Spanish began killing the natives for sport and dog meat. Columbus, upset at not being able to find much gold on the island on his own, and still convinced that there was gold present, set up a tribute system. Ferdinand Columbus, his son, describes how this process worked.
“The Indians all promised to pay tribute to the Catholic Sovereigns every three months, as follows: In the Cibao, where the gold mines were, every person of 14 years of age or upward was to pay a large hawk’s bell of gold dust; all others were each to pay 25 pounds of cotton. Whenever an Indian delivered his tribute, he was to receive a brass or copper token which he must wear bout his neck as proof that he had made his payment. Any Indian found without such a token was to be punished.”
When the natives were given the token it made them safe for three months, during this three month grace period, it took nearly all of this time to gather the material. Those that failed to have the token had their arms cut off and died of blood loss. In October of 1499, Columbus sent two ships to Spain requesting that the Court of Spain send a commissioner to help him rule the isle of Hispaniola. The court appointed Francisco de Bobadilla to the job. Upon his arrival in the New World, while Columbus was absent, he was petitioned by everyone to put an end to Columbus’ tyrannical rule and take him back to Europe for imprisonment. Francisco, who actually had the full powers of a Governor (granted to him by the Spain crown who thought Columbus too wild) had his rival’s family arrested and shipped back to Spain on trial for their many crimes just a year later. Columbus and his family, while found guilty, were later pardoned by Spain’s monarchs and although they mounted a fourth unsuccessful expedition to the New World, they were never again to hold unbridled power in the manner they had done before.
Francisco ruled the island for two years until a hurricane killed him, wrecking twenty one of the thirty ships present on the colony. He was replaced by Nicolás de Ovando, a distant relative of Hernán Cortés; the man who would destroy and enslave the Aztec empire. Nicolás arrived with thirty ships—the largest fleet yet seen on the isle. Unlike previous expeditions to the region, he brought with him a cross-section of Spanish people, numbering roughly two thousand five hundred. His intentions were to put down the natives, and develop the island as well as the rest of the Greater Antilles, economically, in order to further Spain’s sphere of influence in the New World. Francisco Pizarro, who would conquer the Inca Empire in modern day Peru, also came with him. Hernán Cortés was to join the fleet but was prevented by an injury sustained while fleeing the bedroom of a married woman.
He arrived in 1502, and immediately began putting down the native insurrection in a number of bloody and barbaric campaigns. Mass suicides became common; natives simply chewed manioc leaves or threw themselves off cliffs rather than face the Spanish. Among the few native peoples who were friendly to the Spanish was Queen Anacaona. Queen Anacaona was ruler of the southernmost part of the five kingdoms in Haiti, and was certainly one of the most powerful nobles left. Before Nicolás came to the isle; she had worked out a deal with Bartholomew Columbus, whereby her people would be left alone as long as they paid a tribute of food and cotton to the new invaders. However, Nicolás still suspected her of leading the insurrection, because her husband had been responsible for the attack on Môle Saint-Nicolas (La Navidad) several years previous. During a feast in her honor with several other nobles, Nicolás found out about the meeting and approached them. Here is an account of what happened:
“But it happened one day, that the Governour of an Island [Nicolás de Ovando], attended by 60 Horse, and 30 Foot (now the Cavalry was sufficiently able to unpeople not only the Isle, but also the whole Continent) he summoned about 300 Dynasta’s, or Noblemen to appear before him, and commanded the most powerful of them, being first crouded into a Thatcht Barn or Hovel, to be exposed to the fury of the merciless Fire, and the rest to be pierced with Lances, and run through with the point of the Sword, by a multitude of Men: And Anacaona, herself who (as we said before,) sway’d the Imperial Scepter, to her greater honor was hanged on a Gibbet. And if it fell out that any person instigated by Compassion or Covetousness, did entertain any Indian Boys and mount them on Horses, to prevent their Murder, another was appointed to follow them, who ran them through the back or in the hinder parts, and if they chanced to escape Death, and fall to the ground, they immediately cut off his Legs; and when any of those Indians, that survived these Barbarous Massacres, betook themselves to an Isle eight miles distant, to escape their Butcheries, they were then committed to servitude during Life.”
Queen Anacaona is celebrated as one of Haiti’s primordial founders. She is listed among other important figures such as Toussaint L’ Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines as a figure of Haitian independence. Nicolás, while governor, also introduced sugar cane plants from the Canary Islands, set up gold mines, established cities and went on expeditions of exploration. But who would work in these mines and sugar fields? Certainly, not the Spanish.
Nicolás used the subjugated native population to mine the gold and tend the fields. Those that refused to work were either killed or sold into slavery; diseases like small-pox for which the natives had no immunity devastated their numbers even further. He also set up the encomendia system, a word meaning ‘charge’ or ‘patronage’. This granted groups of enslaved natives to Spanish soldiers, merchants, or other officials, to be used as forced labor. Combining these factors with a steadily dropping birth-rate due to societal disruption, along with malnutrition caused a near extinction of an entire way of life and population.
Bartolomé de Las Casas writes:
“…there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it.”
Perhaps the most horrible thing to come out of the cruelty of the Spanish rule over the New World isn’t just the initial victims and the suffering they had to go through. That in itself is terrible, but far from the worst. The worst is that they set up a pattern of interaction between Europeans and Indigenous peoples that lasted for hundreds of years, vestiges of which can still be seen today. European technological advancements, coupled with religious zealotry and their own belief in the superiority of Europeans above all other peoples as well as their desire for rampant expansionism, set upon the New World like an apocalyptic nightmare. Spreading sickness, only sated by material goods, capable of committing extreme acts of cruelty and even nearly exterminating whole populations without so much as a single thought. Enslavement. Torture. Death. These were the daily realities that people subjugated by the Spanish had to face. One cannot help but ask, “Were these men or were these demons? How could men act in such a fashion and still be called human?”
