Columbus, Part IV

They Weren't Sensitive Ethnologists. In one of his first communications from the New World, Columbus described the Tainos of the Carribbean:

I see and know that these people have no religion whatever, nor are they idolaters, but rather they are very meek and know no evil. They do not kill or capture others and are without weapons. They are so timid that a hundred of them flee from one of us, even if we are teasing. They are very trusting; they believe there is a God in Heaven, and they firmly believe that we come from Heaven. They learn very quickly any prayer we tell them to say, and they make the sign of the cross. Therefore Your Highnesses must resolve to make them Christians.

Columbus reveals a naivete about the state of these people, as if they were somehow above the regular lot of good and evil which makes up the human condition. In fact, the Tainos were partaking in the tribal raiding, slavery, and cannibalism that existed in the Americas long before any European arrived. For a while, Columbus was on good terms with the Tainos who used the Spaniards to their advantage against their enemies. But the cultural distance was very great and later Columbus complained about the unprecedented situation he found himself in:

At home they judge me as a governor sent to Sicily or to a city or two under settled government and where the laws can be fully maintained, without fear of all being lost. . .I ought to be judged as a captain who went from Spain to the Indies to conquer a people, warlike and numerous, and with customs and beliefs very different from ours.
(The Four Voyages of Columbus)

Today we might look at Columbus and his contemporaries and criticize them for not having the sensitivity to a newly encountered culture that we expect from a modern anthropologist or ethnologist. "Overlooked in this condemnation," Robert Royal points out, "is the fact that it was precisely out of these tumultuous conflicts that the West began to discern principles and to create disciplines by which we seek to deal with and to understand different cultures as objectively as possible in their own terms."

Next Time: The World Impact of Fifteenth-Century European Culture.