On October 13, 1492, his second day in the New World, Columbus had already begun his inquiries, writing in his log: “And by signs I was able to understand that, going to the
south or rounding the islands to the south, there was a king who had large vessels of it and had very much gold.” In a classic passage, Samuel Eliot Morison writes:
All the rest of his First Voyage was, in fact, a search for gold and Cipangu, Cathay and the Grand Khan; but gold in any event. In all else he might fail, but gold he must bring home in order to prove
la empresa
[the undertaking]
a success.
In the Bahamas, his Taino guides spoke of a large nearby island called Colba (Cuba)—but Columbus heard “China” and went off in search of gold. On Cuba, he heard a rumor of gold in the island’s interior at Cubanacan (meaning mid-Cuba)—but he heard
El Gran Can
, and thought that he would soon reach the imperial court. On the shore of Hispaniola, two days before Christmas, Columbus learned
about gold in Cibao (the local name for central Hispaniola)—and he heard Cipangu, or Japan. But this time his countrymen would find their reward.
Second, Columbus praised the kindness and hospitality of the native Tainos. He could not have proceeded nearly so well without their enthusiastic help. Yet, his commentary speaks only about ease of domination and compulsion to service, not of gratitude
or appreciation. In his very first entry for October 12, following his initial meeting and trading session with the Tainos of San Salvador, Columbus noted:
I gave to some of them red caps and to some glass beads, which they hung on their necks, and many other things of slight value, in which they took much pleasure; they remained so much our friends that it was a marvel; and later they came
swimming to the ships’ boats . . . and brought us parrots and cotton thread in skeins and darts and many other things . . . everything they had, with good will.
Columbus then made an observation with practical import:
They bear no arms, nor know thereof; for I showed them swords and they grasped them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance; they have no iron.
And he drew a conclusion
about domination, not brotherhood:
They ought to be good servants and of good skill, for I see that they repeat very quickly all that is said to them; and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, because it seemed to me that they belonged to no religion. I, praise Our Lord, will carry off six of them at my departure to Your Highnesses, so that they may learn to speak.
Two days
later, he wrote more openly about servitude: “These people are very unskilled in arms . . . With fifty men they could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished.” And, from Hispaniola, near the end of the voyage, Columbus stated a plan for enslavement more explicitly: “They bear no arms, and are all unprotected and so very cowardly that a thousand would not face three; so they are fit to
be ordered about and made to work, to sow and do aught else that may be needed.”
And history then unfolded according to the Admiral’s suggestion. The mines and estates of New Spain needed labor, and the local people, whom Columbus had called “Indians” in a mistaken belief that he had reached eastern Asia, became serfs and slaves because they could not stand against the Spanish technology of swords
and gunpowder. As the natives of Hispaniola died from disease, overwork, cruelty, and (no doubt) inner distress, the Spanish governors authorized a “harvesting” of new bodies from neighboring places. And they turned to Columbus’s first landfall—the Bahama islands, small bits ofland with good anchorages, and unarmed people with no place to hide. In his classic book
The Early Spanish Main
, C. O.
Sauer writes:
Jamaica was known to be populous . . . Its size and tracts of difficult terrain, however, would have demanded well-organized expeditions to round up natives in number. Cuba, large and less well known, would have required even more effort. The Lucayas [Bahamas] on the other hand were a great lot of small islands, lacking refuges except by flight to another island and their people
were known to be without guile; these would be the easiest to seize.
Starting in 1509, and largely under the command of Ponce de León, the lieutenant governor of Puerto Rico, Spanish ships began to capture the Bahamian Tainos to work as slaves in Hispaniola and neighboring islands. The conquerors were thorough and rapid in their grisly work. Estimates vary, but several tens of thousands may
have been thus enslaved. As the Bahamian population dwindled, the price per head rose from five to 150 gold pesos. By 1512, only twenty years after the first Columbian contact, not one Taino remained in the Bahamas. (They did not long survive in the mines of New Spain, either—and Africans were soon imported as “replacements,” thus beginning another major chapter of shame in the history of the New
World.) We all learned in school that Ponce de León discovered Florida in 1513 as part of a heroic and romantic quest for the Fountain of Youth. Perhaps, in part. But Ponce de León, the chief agent of Taino destruction, had sailed primarily to find a new source of slaves beyond the thoroughly depopulated Bahamian islands.
Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566) began his manhood as a soldier, and
sailed for Hispaniola in 1502. He participated in the conquest of Cuba and received an
encomienda
(a royal grant of land with Indian slaves). But Las Casas had a change of heart and became a priest. He preached a sermon against slavery and ill treatment of native peoples in 1514, and returned his Indian serfs to the governor. In 1515, he sailed for Spain to plead before the court for better treatment
of Native Americans. He later joined the Dominican order and, in the course of a long and active life spent writing treatises and shuttling between Spain and the New World, he became a passionate and effective advocate for humane treatment of the New World’s first inhabitants.
The same Las Casas copied Columbus’s log to use as a source for his historical writings. As he considered Columbus’s
role in the story of Indian conquest and servitude, Las Casas noted the tragic beginning that might have unfolded otherwise, had only decency been able to conquer greed. Las Casas explicitly discusses the passages from Columbus’s log cited earlier in this essay:
Note here, that the natural, simple and kind gentleness and humble condition of the Indians, and want of arms or protection, gave the
Spaniards the insolence to hold them of little account, and to impose upon them the harshest tasks that they could, and become glutted with oppression and destruction. And sure it is that here the Admiral [Columbus] enlarged himself in speech more than he should and that what he here conceived and set forth from his lips, was the beginning of the ill usage he afterwards inflicted upon them.
As a final result, and in one of history’s greatest and cruelest ironies, the first people that Europeans encountered in the New World also became the first victims of Western genocide. As one tiny consequence, no historical continuity could be maintained to preserve a human record or legend of Columbus’s first landfall—and we must therefore resort to a fable about a land snail as a hypothetical
way (though guaranteed for success if only Columbus had collected a single shell) to resolve this initial puzzle in the modern history of a hemisphere.
San Salvador remained uninhabited for nearly three hundred years (legends about transient pirate landings notwithstanding)—until British loyalists, fleeing the American Revolution, built plantations and imported slaves of African origin. The descendants
of these slaves built the second culture of San Salvador, now vigorously in force.
We may soften the old observation that a second historical cycle often replays an initial tragedy as a derived farce. Let us only note that repeat performances tend to be more gentle. The wake of Columbus destroyed the first culture of San Salvador in the most cruelly literal way. The long arm of Columbus now threatens
the second—not with death this time, but with assimilation to international corporate blandness. Most islands of the outer Bahamas remain largely “undeveloped” by modern tourism and resort culture, but the idea of Columbus’s landfall provides a hook for luring people to San Salvador. After a century of small hostelries that fit well with local culture, Club Med has just built a major establishment
that may change this small island into a playground of tinsel.
But many forces resist homogenization, and we should take heart. Of two examples, consider first the humor of
Homo sapiens.
A small establishment on the main road of San Salvador calls itself “Ed’s First and Last Bar”—because people tend to stop by both before and after their visit to a much larger and more popular watering hole up
the road a piece. But a new sign now graces the First and Last—“Club Ed,” of course!
As a second example, and if only for symbolic value, consider the tenacity of
Cerion.
Club Med and its clones may one day envelop the island, sweeping up the vestiges of local culture into a modern, rootless fairyland of more gentle (and literally profitable) modern exploitation. But
Cerion
will hang tough as
a marker of San Salvador’s uniqueness. Unless the entire island becomes paved and manicured,
Cerion
will survive.
Cerion
, hearty and indestructable, poses no threat to agriculture or urban existence, and therefore passes largely beyond (and beneath) human notice;
Cerion
also inhabits the scrubby shoreline environments least attractive for human utility.
Cerion
will survive to provide an unbroken
continuity with Columbus and the original Taino inhabitants. Any snail among thousands crowded around the first Columbian monument on Crab Cay may be the great-great-great-great grandchild of a forebear that looked back at the
Pinta
—and wondered about the future in its aimless, snail-like way—when Rodrigo de Triana first raised his cry of
“Tierra!”
and altered human history forever.
12
THE DODO IN THE CAUCUS RACE
M
OST MEMBERS OF MY IMMIGRANT
J
EWISH FAMILY TOOK PRIDE IN THEIR
supposed assimilation (often more imagined than real), and derided as “greenhorns” those who stuck to old ways and tongues. Nonetheless, I well remember the lilt of Yiddish, liberally sprinkled into heavily accented English, used exclusively for a wide range of jokes and stories, or spoken as a mother
tongue by the recalcitrants. In 1993, the last native Yiddish speaker of my extended family died. She was one hundred years old.
When such valued parts of natural or human diversity disappear as active, living presences, we take special interest—verging sometimes on zealous protectionism for the merest scraps—in preserving the “fossil” artifacts of extinguished vitality. And when we discover
such a vestige as a pleasant and entirely accidental surprise, we feel doubly blessed for a gift bestowed by a normally uncaring world—all without our seeking, or expecting. Two recent and personal examples struck my heartstrings more than my brainstuff, and channeled my thinking to the general topic of extinction and preservation.
I saw a ten-story building, standing tall among the tenements
of East Broadway on New York City’s Lower East Side. I noted some Hebrew letters in raised and decaying metal along the top story. (The first
raysh
has fallen off entirely, but the outline of the Hebrew
r
can still be discerned in the incised stone beneath.) I soon recognized the word as Yiddish, not Hebrew, as I began to spell:
fay, alef, raysh
(in the incised stone) . . .
Farvarts
, or “Forward.”
I had found the old home of the greatest Yiddish newspaper in a once-vibrant press. Many of my relatives bought the paper daily, and I knew both the pathos and bathos of a publication that seemed almost organic in intensity—the campaigns for social justice in the sweatshops, and the
Bintel Brief
(or bundle of letters), the advice column, chockablock with questions from parents bemoaning the modern
ways of their children. I felt so happy to know that the site has survived in recognizable form, even if the institution must eventually perish. (
The Forward
, now published uptown, maintains health in the altered form of weekly English and Russian editions—but the Yiddish edition drops continually in circulation, as the last speakers die.)
A few days later, I went to the movies to see
Independence
Day
, the outer-space summer blockbuster of 1996. (Even the most committed intellectual can’t survive on an unalloyed diet of Jane Austen remakes.) I had never noticed this unprepossessing theater on Second Avenue and Twelfth Street. But then I went inside and saw the surprising, if faded, beauty of the interior, with wonderful multicolored tilework of Moorish design. The popular film occupied
the largest theater of this multiplex—the old main hall of the original building. Here, the tilework glowed in a particularly sumptuous pattern. As the film began, and the alien ships hovered over our cities, I looked up at the ceiling and noted the central pattern of dark tiles arranged in an enormous oval—almost exactly, eerily, and (obviously) quite unintentionally, mimicking the flying saucers
on the screen. And then I saw the Star of David at the center of the tilework!
Independence Day
had unfolded in the finest surviving memorial to another great institution of my ancestral culture: a Yiddish theater. I hadn’t realized that any building of the old “Yiddish Rialto” on Second Avenue still existed in recognizable form, and I remembered my relatives reminiscing about the quality of
a Yiddish King Lear, or the tunefulness of old Yiddish musicals. I later read that I had been visiting the Louis N. Jafee Art Theater, built in 1925, and presenting performances in Yiddish until 1945, with a brief revival between 1961 and 1965. I could only think of a favorite line from Wordsworth: “The sunshine is a glorious birth / But yet I know . . . that there hath passed away a glory from the
earth.”