Christopher Columbus

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Christopher Columbus : biography

c. 1451 – 20 May 1506

Based on these testimonies and with Bobadilla denying him the chance to offer a defense, Columbus, upon his return, was chained and imprisoned to await return to Spain.

On 1 October 1500, Columbus and his two brothers, likewise in chains, were sent back to Spain. Thus also ended Columbus’ Third voyage to the Indies. Once in Cadiz, a grieving Columbus wrote to a friend at court:

A recently discovered report by Francisco de Bobadilla alleges that Columbus regularly used barbaric acts of torture to govern Hispaniola. Bobadilla, who had already replaced Columbus as governor of the Indies at the time of the report, had been asked by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand to investigate accusations of brutality made against Columbus.The 48-page report, found in 2006 in the state archive in the Spanish city of Valladolid, contains testimonies from 23 people, including both enemies and supporters of Columbus, about Columbus and his brothers’ treatment of colonial subjects during his seven-year rule.

According to the report, Columbus punished a man found guilty of stealing corn by having his ears and nose cut off and then selling him into slavery. Testimony recorded in the report claims that Columbus congratulated his brother Bartolomé on "defending the family" when the latter ordered a woman paraded naked through the streets and then had her tongue cut out for suggesting that Columbus was of lowly birth.

"Columbus’ government was characterised by a form of tyranny," Consuelo Varela, a Spanish historian who has seen the document, told journalists.

Other testimony from the period accuses Columbus of systematic brutality against the natives and engineering a program of forced labor that reduced their population from millions to thousands in little over a decade. The priest Bartolomé de las Casas, son of the priest Pedro de las Casas who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, described Columbus’ treatment of the natives in his History of the Indies: Endless testimonies…prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives… But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then… The admiral (Columbus), it is true, was blind as those who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians.

Under Columbus and subsequent governors, enslaved Hispaniola natives were forced to toil under brutal conditions in mining and farming camps. According to Las Casas, up to a third of the male slaves died during each six- to eight-month mining operation. The mines were many miles away from the farms, and the enslaved men and the women only saw each other every eight to ten months. This segregation, along with the grueling conditions, took its toll on the native population: Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides. . . they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation…. In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk . . . and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile … was depopulated…. My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write…."

De las Casas records in stark numbers the genocide that took place under Columbus and the Spaniards, writing that when he first came to Hispaniola in 1508, "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…."