This Day in Labor History: October 12, 1492

On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus stumbled upon Hispaniola. Part of the revolution he wrought was transforming work in the Americas, because what he wanted and how he treated the Taino there would be repeated throughout the Americas by every European colonial power. What he wanted was goods and how he treated the people living there was slavery backed with violence. Work and genocide are very much related here.

First, Columbus was both a smart guy and an idiot at the same time. In case anyone still thinks this, everyone knew the world was round. The idea that everyone thought the world was flat and Columbus was this genius who thought it was round was complete bullshit made up by Washington Irving in the early 19th century to create his beloved American mythology. The Greeks had more or less figured out the circumference of the Earth a long time ago. Their predictions about the Earth’s size were pretty close to accurate too. It’s just that everyone thought there was nothing out there between Europe and Asia. Columbus wasn’t some genius. He had his own personal calculations of the planet’s size that claimed the Greeks were wrong and the Earth was in fact much smaller. So he convinced the King and Queen of Spain to fund a trip–after all, what did they have to lose? If Columbus died, who cares? Then of course he gets to Hispaniola, sees nothing there that has anything to do with what the Spanish expected due to the goods they got through Muslim middlemen from southeast Asia, and remained determined that this was the Spice Islands by God. Even though everyone else was like, wait a minute, this is something new.

I still remember when I first found out that the Columbus thought the world round thing was a myth, which was my senior year of college when a professor discussed it. I was outraged at being lied to my whole life and I don’t think I’ve ever fully recovered.

Anyway, on the first voyage, Columbus took maybe two dozen Tainos back to Spain. Were they slaves? Well, they weren’t really conceptualized as such. They were examples, evidence. Some may have chosen to go. It was after all a life-changing experience for everyone involved and some may have desired to see what all this was about. But some were captured too. One man volunteered to go when his wife and children were captured. It’s certainly not a good story, but the true horrors were to come.

It’s really the second voyage in 1493 that things get awful. He had left some men in Hispanola. He went back to Spain and by the time he returned on the second voyage, all the men he had left were dead, killed by Tainos after they argued over gold and then stole indigenous women as sex slaves. Finally, a Taino leader named Canoabo led forces to kill the rest of the Spanish. Columbus’ men then captured Canoabo and sent him to Spain. He died on the voyage. Columbus routinely used torture and mutilation in governing Hispanola, with cutting off ears and noses a popular punishment.

By this time, Columbus saw himself as an outright slave trader. This was the future for European wealth. Columbus had seen the new fort in Guinea the Portuguese had constructed that already sold some slaves, though it would be a long time before this became the infamous slave trade. But in February 1495, he sent 550 Taino and other peoples from the islands he explored on a ship back to Spain for that nation’s slave markets. Already, some were being used as sex slaves, a side to slavery we still don’t talk about often enough. We know this from the diaries of some of the officers Columbus had brought along who enslaved young Carib girls for sex. In fact, those 550 slaves were just a fraction of the people Columbus and his men had captured, at least 1,600. The reverse Middle Passage was pretty well as brutal as the more infamous one from Africa to the Americas later. About 200 of the people died on the voyage to Spain.

Columbus proposed to turn Hispanola into the next Guinea, the center of slavery. But Ferdinand and Isbella were not interested in this. In fact, while they had approved the sale of the surviving Natives when they arrived in Spain, four days later, they changed their minds and issued a counter-order. There were theological and spiritual considerations to be made. What were these people? Did they have souls? The Spanish had a long slavery tradition, but generally that was under the idea of enslaving enemies at war. Were these indigenous people enemies? So they created a body of theologians and lawyers to work all this out. They took a full five years to come up with an answering, not until 1500. We also don’t know the answer–the document no longer exists. But we do know Queen Isabella particularly came out against Native slavery. When Columbus sent another group of Indians to Spain as slaves in 1499, she exploded in rage, stating “Who is this Columbus who dares to give out my vassals as slaves?” We also know that in 1500, she gave a bunch of Indians the choice to go back and almost without exception, they did.

But see, there’s another side to this. What the Spanish really needed was not more slaves in the Spanish markets. They needed workers in the islands to develop them for Spanish needs. This is what Columbus could not understand (well, he couldn’t understand a lot of things). The Spanish wanted gold a lot more than they wanted slaves in Spain. Columbus wanted that too. There was some in Hispanola and Native slavery there, well that the Crown was fine with, to the extent that they even knew any real details about it. The goldfields of Cibao were bad, forcing indigenous people to dive for pearls off the coast was even more deadly. Of course, later, the real gold and silver despots were uncovered in Mexico and Peru. Indigenous people were enslaved there too. But as the Spanish colonies grew, so did the need for labor, beyond what local enslavement could provide. So the answer was Africans. While Native people died quickly, the market opened up for Africans. A bit later, the priest Barolomé de las Casas decried the enslavement and horrible treatment of indigenous people in Mexico and was brave in his stance, but he openly welcomed the African slave trade as the only reasonable arrangement for Spanish power in the New World. After all, he was just as much an agent of Spanish empire as anyone else.

Thus began a long, horrible, and still continuing enslavement of people of color by Europeans in the Americas.

Andrés Reséndez’s The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America is excellent on all these issues.

This is the 539th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.