Part Three: Christopher Columbus: Bringer of the Apocalypse

Robert is joined again by Michael Swaim for the final part of our series on Christopher Columbus.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Oh, Michael Swam Robert Evans behind the bastards sweaty gay
dance parties, Which is what I said right before the
recording started, because Michael and I were talking about the
movie To Tan. That's most of the pertinent information that is, like, yeah,

(00:23):
watch to Tan. It's it's a fun movie about some
guys who like to dance and nothing else. There's certainly
nothing off putting in it. Automobile aficionados, let's say, do
you like cars, really like cars? Check out to Tan.
To Tan might be for you. Michael, how are you
doing as we as we sail like the Santa Maria

(00:45):
into part three of our episode of Columbus. I'm great, Robert,
happy to be back and super excited for the third act,
where which we all know as the Redemption Act. This
is where this is it out right, He'll just finally
get on an even keel about joke. Uh, stop being

(01:06):
such a prick. Learned to walk a mile on another's pantolons. Yeah,
this is where he becomes the hero that we all know,
Christopher Columbus grows up. I'm waiting. I'm waiting for this
to morph into Friends with the Pilgrims for Thanksgiving. This exactly,
exactly this, This is the episode we're going to open

(01:26):
in media rez as he is managing a cinnabon in
the Midwest, and then we'll go back to explain. Um now, um, Although, man,
you could make a pretty good Columbus movie with Bob
oden Kirk playing Christopher Columbus. I'd watch it. I'm just
gonna say it right now. I would watch it. Um.
Michael On February three, Michael Small means Network. By the way,

(01:51):
probably we should lead up front with the plugs. Yeah,
we always time for that. Okay, but we do it.
We do it both, we do it both. Robert Evans here,
I wanted to make a quick correction. You know, when
I was talking about the Tano, the other air walk
people's the Caribs, Um, I I used terms like genocide,
which is absolutely accurate. But I also used terms phrases
like wiped out or extinct. This is not entirely accurate.

(02:14):
I wanted to emphasize the level of destruction because it's
so much an excess of what we see even when
normally talking about genocides. Sixteen years on most of these islands,
you're lucky if ten percent of the original population is
around UM and it's true that if you look up
the Tano you will find a lot of references to
them being wiped at. Wikipedia says they were historic indigenous

(02:36):
people of the Caribbean UM, but of course they had descendants.
There are people who did survive, notably on what is
now Haiti. A lot of folks escaped into the mountains
UM and later met up with escaped slaves and were
part of resistance UM and exist to this day in
that area. UM. Some forty three thousand of the I
think two points seven million people UM in Puerto Rico

(03:00):
have some degree of Taino ancestry. Three point seven million people,
so forty three point seven million people in Puerto Rico
have some Taino ancestry. Obviously, the level of destruction was intense,
which is why I felt like emphasizing it. But it's
been pointed out to me that this is also a
tactic that's used to kind of act as if these
people's are completely gone, as sort of a well, there's

(03:20):
nothing we can do, right, there's no way to make
amends to them because Columbus wiped them out. UM. There's
a lot that's problematic with this I'm not having the
time to get into it properly, and this is not
that show. But I wanted to number one, kind of
acknowledge that I should not have said things the way
I did. We tried to cut some of that out
of the episodes once I became aware of it. UM.
But I also wanted to recommend a couple of different

(03:41):
resources that people do want to read more about this,
because in addition to the fact there there are a
number of Tano communities that have continued to exist since
first contact, there are also Taino descended people who are
attempting to revive some of the traditions and culture UM
and reclaim that for themselves. So if you want to
look at SMITHSNY magazine has an article called What Became

(04:01):
of the Tano by Robert Poole that was published in
two thousand eleven. UM. In Puerto Rico, U there are
attempts ongoing UM to add Taino studies to classrooms and
to schools and stuff in the area, UM and elsewhere
in the United States. There's a good NBC News article
on that called Puerto Rico seeks to preserve Tino history,
revived culture, and then probably the resource that is most

(04:24):
worth reading is an article in American Indian Magazine titled
Abuela's Ancestors and a tabby the Spirit of Tano Resurgence.
It's by Christina Gonzalez and it was published in the
fall of two thousand eighteen. UM, so I would really
recommend checking out that article, um for American Indian Magazine.
UM yeah, sorry for the error, and please keep doing

(04:47):
good stuff. Oh great dogs, yah yeah, lovely. Well. Hey,
I'll you focus people well for a split second. While
I have that focus, please devote yours engine to the
Small Beans podcasting network, which you can find more out
about simply by googling that phrase, or you could head

(05:08):
over to patreon dot com slash small Beans if you
really want to get your handle around everything we do.
And or completely unrelatedly, if you're a fan of podcasts
on the I Heart network, and I know you are
because you're listening to this and you like video games,
check out another podcast I run with my co host
Adam Ganzer. That's called One Upsmanship One ups man Ship. Wow.

(05:31):
That's also the title of my podcast, which is about
how ups transports products and services around the world. Is
it break time? It's just it's just pronounced one upsmanship um,
which is about there anyway. Whatever, the people who are
right are super into the relationship between the package deliver
and the package. That's that's what really draws me in

(05:52):
about global capitalism. So on February, Columbus sailed into the
Azors off of the coast of Africa with several dozen
crewmen on the Pinta, the only remaining ship of his
fleet that was still under his direct control, which most
people don't know. He loses control. He either sinks or
loses control of two thirds of the fleet that he
brings with him. And if I recall, he took this

(06:15):
as a sign from God that things were going really well.
The things are going great. Yes, despite the fact that yeah,
he's he's lost most of his fleet. The voyage was,
one has to say, a stunning success by most reasonable standards,
because they are going out into the complete unknown for
them via an untried route that people had not attempted

(06:36):
previously in boats like this, who people who were members
of his civilization had not attempted previously. They had established
a settlement there and then they had returned crew and home,
and most of his crew didn't die so far a
lot of them actually did die not at this point. Um.
Upon landing in the Azars and disembarking about half of
his crew, they were immediately arrested by the Portuguese over

(06:58):
a misunderstanding. This was dealt with, though, and they were
soon off reprovisioned for the Spanish coast, and early March,
a horrible storm hit the sea, and Columbus was worried
enough about sinking that he attached a letter to the
King and Queen to the front mast of his ship
so that it would have a better chance of like
getting washed to shore if the boat got sunk. Um.
So the letters contained like a guide to how to

(07:19):
get to you know, where he'd sailed to and left
a colony, and also a grand promise quote within seven years,
I shall give your highnesses enough money to pay for
five thousand nights and fifty thou foot soldiers for the
conquest of Jerusalem, the ultimate goal behind your decision to
undertake the enterprise. Um. So that's good. I want to
know what misunderstanding Columbus was arrested for. Oh, it was

(07:42):
just because, like you know, Spain and Portugal are both
the big Catholic countries. So they're supposed to be friends,
but they actually are constantly in conflict, and so it
was like it was that sort of thing. So Columbus
does make it back to Spain alive. The indigenous people
he had captured and the objects that he had brought
back from the Caribbean with him were deeply impressive to
his sovereigns, as were his lurid descriptions of the so

(08:04):
called indies. But Columbus had not yet found what he
had promised them, which is a reliable source of gold.
As a result, he quickly found himself embellishing and outright
fibbing to make his achievements sound more impressive in the
terms that his sovereign's valued. Lawrence bear Green writes, quote,
he offered his journal as evidence, bolstered by the testimony
of the others who had accompanied him, in the hope

(08:24):
of claiming the riches and titles and glory to which
he believed he was entitled, even divinely ordained to have
carefully embellished and edited to meet Ferdinand and Isabella's expectations
and his contractual obligations to them. The journal purported to
demonstrate that he had accomplished and even exceeded his mission
to the point of establishing a Spanish outpost and the
islands he had discovered on his way to India. Now,

(08:47):
inside of this diary, this diary that he is very
carefully this is not an objective document. This is not
actually meant to be an accurate document. This is a
piece of propaganda he has crafted in order to guy
his sovereigns to a specific set of actions. Um And
the whole goal of this was to convince them that
if they were to give him a much larger fleet

(09:08):
and let him return with it, he would expand the
settlement he had left behind and establish a network of
three or four towns united by a series of churches,
abbeys and fortresses which would act as collection points for gold. Right,
So you set up these different sort of points of
what they would call civilization around the Caribbean, which the natives,
who are now all servants of the crown, will have

(09:30):
to bring gold to as a form of taxation. And
that's how you're going to make all this money that
you need to conquer Jerusalem. Now, Columbus, who was ever
the self promoter, didn't just write this thing out and
hand it to his sovereigns. He also published a letter
that was quickly translated into like five or six different
European languages, which basically announced to europe that, a, you know,

(09:50):
the new world has been found. Right, that's the way
in which this is interpret Incredible how much this parallels
a text startup, Like if you're familiar with Silicon Valley lingo.
He just dropped his white paper and did a bunch
of social media posts like promoting the event. That's what
his diary is. And it's wild to me that even
in the very beginnings of the concept of America is

(10:11):
woven the idea of like Columbus asserting it's the greatest
country on Earth, your majesty. Yeah, why, well, because it
benefits me to believe that it is. Yeah, because I
have I have the right to a certain amount of
all of the trade that comes through this area. Exactly
convince you to like, here, it's going to work out.

(10:31):
Um yeah, so um. One of the things he brags
about here um obviously he talks about the potential for
gold and that he's found evidence of it, but he
hadn't actually found any minds, so he has to really
hype up the other major resource that he did find
in the islands, which is the human beings who lived there.
So number one, he talks a lot about how he

(10:52):
uses the word comely a lot, or like the equivalent
of that. It's talking about how pretty they are, right, Um,
by the way, people are pretty much Europeans are pretty
much immediately taking young women as sex slaves. That happens
from the jump here. Um, yes, uh. And there's a
lot of writing Columbus does about like finding himself in
the presence of these women and like how attractive they

(11:15):
are and how valuable they are as slaves for that reason. Um. Now.
He also interesting that in all the fivving he did
not like Gaussian blur over that bit. That's actually an asset.
It just does goes to show how much cultural maries
change over time. That's wild. Yeah, I didn't find gold,
but I found hot people and weaken in them. And

(11:35):
that's good. And we all agree, we're all the head
of government is fine, this is fine. Yeah. Um, well,
actually the head of government is not super okay with it.
Although I think we will discuss a little later how
much of that was also a kind of propaganda. But um.
He notes that the indigenous people have no real religion
and would be easy converts to Christianity. Uh. He talked

(11:55):
a lot about how friendly they were, saying that the
men he had left behind on Navidad were quote without
danger for their persons if they know how to behave themselves. Now, Michael,
keep that line in mind, because that's going to be
pretty funny in a very short while. Yeah. I'm almost
never in danger as long as I never miss step
and do everything correctly. I mean that I skate through easily. Yeah. So,

(12:18):
once Columbus is back and he's doing his big victory tour,
word spreads quickly that he has discovered a new route
to the islands off the coast of the Great CON's domain.
These unspoiled territories were not Christian, which, in the eyes
of the Pope and all of the Catholics, means that
the most important order of business is to split them
up among Christian powers. Right, because they are not Christian
yet or one of the religions that we know as

(12:40):
our enemy, it just means they're automatically ours. Right. Pope
Alexander the sixth issued a series of papal bulls ruling
on how to split the control between Spain and Portugal,
which are because they're the Catholic nations that are actually
powerful in this period, they're the only countries that actually matter. Right,
Italy gets like on that list, but not really Um
because it's not a country, right, like some of the

(13:01):
city states are powerful. Is this still the era when
the pope is like Tony Soprano, like more of a
business interests than anything else. And that is what the
pope is doing, is he is demarcating basically like between
these two Spain and Portugal, and his eyes are kind
of like franchises of the Catholic Church, and he's he's
demarcating between them what chunks of this new discovered land

(13:25):
mass they're going to get to to take control over
Um because there's this big right because the Portuguese have
the rights to the coast of Africa, you know, which
was pretty new to them when they figured out how
to sale to it. So the end result of this,
he sets up this line of demarcation that extends from
the north to the south pole one hundred leagues towards
the west and south of the islands and the Azors.

(13:46):
Everything west of that line belongs to Spain, Um and
given the terms that Clubus had set up with his sovereigns.
This is all partially Christopher Columbus's property to write. So technically,
based on the agreement he's signed with the King and Queen,
what the Pope is ruled, he gets he's like entitled
like a quarter of all of the traffic that comes
from Spanish settlement in Latin America. Wow, that's a lot, right, potentially,

(14:12):
that's worth quite a bit of money. He has a
startup turned into PayPal just now. Yes, he gets the
percentage of every single transaction exactly. He's tealing hard. So
on May, Ferdinand and Isabella appointed Columbus the Captain general
for a second, much larger voyage of Discovery and conquest.
They issued a document conferring rights and privileges on him

(14:35):
and officially awarded him the title Viceroy and Admiral of
the Ocean, Sea and the Indies. He was ordered to
very rapidly put together this new voyage and get it
out to see. Chris was now Dawn. Christopher Columbus Dawn
is a noble title, right like that? That means it's
kind of like having Vaughan in your name in Germany.
Rights that you're a member of the nobility, and his

(14:56):
children are now also, He's now permanently in the nobility.
And not only does he have these rights, his children
inherit them from him. So his all of his progeny
are set to it have part ownership in all new
lands he might quote discover and acquire um. The King
and Queen also give him the authority to punish and
chastise delinquents and levy fees or taxes on the natives

(15:20):
of this Newfoundland. I wonder when that thread finally ran
out legally speaking, you know, like, how long did it
persist that they cut They cut while he's alive. They're
cutting back, They're cutting his kids out in parts. I mean,
his kids do all right, don't worry. Don't worry about
the Columbus kids. Not that you would, because they do.

(15:43):
The King and Queen did place one set of limitations
on him. I'm gonna quote from a write up in
American Heritage here and written instructions to Columbus issued from
Barcelona on May. The King and Queen were explicit in
their mandate respecting treatment of the Indians. Now, not only
was us to make their conversion to the Christian faith
is first order of business. But the monarchs also firmly

(16:05):
decreed that they were not to be molested or coerced
in any way. They instructed Columbus as he prepared for
his second voyage. And because this can best be done
after the arrival of the meet in good time, the
said Admiral shall take measures that those who go therein
and those who have gone before here, shall treat the
Indians very well and affectionately, without causing them any annoyance whatever.
And at the same time, the Admiral shall make some

(16:26):
gifts to them in a gracious manner, and hold them
in great honor. And if it happens that some persons
to treat the Indians badly in any way whatsoever, the
said Admiral, as Viceroy and governor for their highnesses, shall
meet out severe punishment. So on paper, the King and
Queen are like, hey, you have to respect these people.
They're so now they're saying you have to respect them
because there are there there are servants of our crown

(16:48):
now right because they're their property. But they are saying
you have to respect them, you have to treat them well,
which would seem to say I don't know about you, Michael.
When I think about what qualifies as treating someone well,
I think not enslaving them is high up on the list.
Part of freedom, that's right on the top. I don't
but America. Freedom has never been a vaunted trope in America.

(17:09):
I just don't think it's you know, doesn't have that
ring to it. Uh, it's just it's the second part
of the rhyme. Like we all know the forty two
Columbus three, the court defined atrocity. Michael, how long how
long were you waiting to drop that line? I barely
gathered most of what you just said about what's his name? Colombo? Yes, yes, yes,

(17:34):
this is this is about Colombo thing the primary hero
of Yugoslavian anyway. That's that Actually is a fun story. Um.
So this is an area in which Carol Delaney's account
of Columbus's motivations diverges significantly from more mainstream interpretations of
the historical act. Yes, some might say accurate delay interpretations

(17:55):
delay me mark right? Anyway? Um, the whitewashing a genocide,
guy E, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, there you go.
In her account of events, Columbus remains the feverishly devoted
zealot Leezer focused on finding the Great Con and bringing
back wealth for Jerusalem. But bear Grin makes the case
that this doesn't really line up with history. Quote, a

(18:19):
new realism informed these instructions. There was no more talk
of trading with the Great Con, although the possibility that
he existed hovered over the voyage. In other words, while
he's like still writing about Jerusalem right up to this
point when they lay out shipped for their next voyage,
they're not talking about that so much anymore. This is
all talked about as a business enterprise. They were talking
about how to get in there and start making some

(18:41):
fucking cash. It's all the same reasons you ever make
a sequel to a franchise. It's fascinating that it works
in terms of film or any unit of entertainment, but
also like, oh, this exploitation went well, Let's do exploitation
to exploit harder. All of these contracts, all of the
legiti stickle planning is focused on establishing storehouses and deposed

(19:03):
to enable trade. And it was all based on the
example of the Portuguese in Africa, right, which you might
notice had not retaken the Holy Land. They just made
a bunch of money, like that was the goal at
this point whatever. And I do think one of the
reasons I do use Delaney, I think she's right in
that it is an undertold aspect of his story that
he was a religious fanatic who wanted to bring about

(19:24):
the apocalypse. Right. I do think that is a worthwhile
part of the man's journey. But aren't so many of
them like you can You can think about it, like
You've got all these guys, these like Christian mega preachers
and stuff who become multimillionaires who preach about the apocalypse
and the rapture and stuff. And I think some some
of them clearly are just grifters, but I think a

(19:44):
lot of them believe aspects of it. It's just really
easy to temper your belief once you get super fucking rich, right.
I think it's also such unique experience that it's almost
impossible to project yourself truly into the mindset of someone
who in their life knew that they were his of
historical import like good for good or bad. Like I

(20:06):
can't imagine what it's like to be Hitler or FDR,
And I don't think I truly ever will because you'll
think about what would I have done during this crisis,
and you're like, well, you have to remember that you're
a completely different dude who is wildly inaccessible to you.
Like they think in a different way. This guy believes
the world's gonna end any second. Now, that's got to

(20:28):
affect your behaviors. Yes, I mean there's yeah, there's a
lot to say about that. Um So the King and
quin I do think one of the interesting historical questions
here there's a version, a theoretical version in history of
a guy who does this and isn't a monster, just
like once to figures there's land to the west and
wants to sail to it. Um. It is a shame

(20:48):
that that guy wound up being such a piece of ship,
and also all of the people he brought with him
were pieces of ship and it ended in genocide. Um
but yeah, there there's there's a I don't know sad
uh So the King and Queen, the wealthy nobles who
backed them certainly seem to have seen this second venture
is worthy of intense investment. The equivalent of many millions

(21:08):
of modern dollars were poured into equipping a vast fleet.
Right he goes there with like a couple hundred people,
Like I think it's just like a hundred people on
three boats. It's a very The first journey over is
quite small. This new journey will be seventeen ships and
something like twelve hundred people. Like this is a so
they are you know, they've done the this is the

(21:29):
This is when like they get that that second round
of VC funding and suddenly they're like fucking with a
couple of billion dollars, right whereas before the countryside, Yeah,
is this and is there any pretense that they think
they might find gold there or is it? Yes? Yes,
that is the whole goal at this point is still gold. Yes, Yes,

(21:52):
there's other spices. Obviously, they're they're pretty sure they're gonna
find some spices because they know that spices come from
the East East India area and that's where they think
they're sailing to. Right, So the people are in this
period of time going the other way around and getting spices,
so they assume they're going to get spices. So it's
not just gold, but gold is the primary thing on

(22:13):
their mind. Um, especially because you said Columbus didn't really
bring back definitive proof of like vast amounts of gold.
There's proof, there's some though, and again they know that
Asia is rich and they think they're in Asia, right,
like you do. You have to keep that in mind
when it's like, why are they invest doing so much
of this? Nobody's got good data on where they are. Um,

(22:35):
they just know how to get there. So he's also
sent with a representative of the Spanish Crown, an official
representative of the of the government, and a noble who
could speak for the archdeacon of the Bishop of the
Catholic Church. So both of these, both of and in
this period, arguably the Spanish crown and the Pope are
like the two big powers, right, or at least two

(22:57):
of them. There's not a whole lot that that can compete,
right in terms of their like they're raw sort of
like political power in Europe in this period. Um so
on Septem Columbus sailed the ocean. I wrote blee in
here at Michael, I couldn't stop myself. I didn't know
what else to do. It was not nearly as good
as what you did. Um. Anyway of note is the

(23:20):
fact that he pauses on the island of San Sebastian Gomera,
where the local ruler is a woman named Beatrice did Parraza.
Her husband had been killed by the indigenous people of
the island for being a prick, and she's kind of
like a character from an old Greek play. She's alleged
of at least like luring a bunch of famous and
prominent knights to her home and then executing them for

(23:41):
petty crimes after like fucking them. Um. Anyway, Columbus fucked her.
Probably they had a pre existing relationship. It's like a thing.
I don't want to get into it too much, but
I think it's funny. The voyage itself was uneventful enough
for our purposes. In short order, Columbus found himself back
in the Caribbean, and due to bad whether, he's forced
to make the first landfall of his this voyage on

(24:04):
an island dominated by a people called the Caribs. Now,
the Caribs are either at war or locked into an
outright predatory relationship with the tino Um. On his first voyage,
Columbus had seen tino with old war wounds and been
told that they were the result of carib slaving raids.
There are historians now who will make the argument that
actually the Tino and the Caribs were in the process

(24:25):
of making peace after a long series of conflicts when
Columbus came in and disrupted that and like that that
fucked up things because the Tina we're like, oh, maybe
we can use the anyway. Whatever this is, it's just
too much shocked the system and the peace talks fell
apart or what have you. Yeah, there's I mean, I
I don't think we have great context on that because
all of these people died or all murdered. Yeah. Um.

(24:47):
On his first voyage to this area, Columbus had seen
Tino with old wounds and had been told they were
the result of carib slaving raids. Now the carib rated
other Arawak people's in the area. Um. And Columbus seems
to have believed, because he's interacting with the people who
are the enemies of the Caribs, that they are cannibals. Um.
And in fact, in that letter he sent out and

(25:09):
he writes down friendly yeah, um, well no, no, no,
actually this is important. He's once he hears from the
people he's friendly with that there are like dangerous cannibals here,
he writes back and warns about his sovereigns about the
cannibal nature of the Caribs and uses it as a
selling point because since there is a group of people

(25:29):
in the islands who are clearly dangerous and deranged, it
has it's okay to enslave them, right, But how do
you win with someone who wants to enslave you, Because
it's like, oh, these people are so peaceable, we could
enslave them easily. Oh these people are fighting back. That's crazy.
We better enslave them if the solution is enslavement. Surprise surprise,

(25:50):
in part because the sovereigns don't react super well to
his suggestion that we turn the tyno or whatever into
serve because like, well, you say, these people are nice
and easy to christianize, Like, so we have to do that.
We're not going to enslave them. But Columbus wants to
make money from selling slaves because he needs quick cash
and that's the fastest, and so once he finds the Caribs,

(26:12):
he's like, well, fuck the this is how I can
start enslaving some people. I don't have to enslave Caribs specifically,
but if I tell them there's dangerous folks here who
can't be christianized. I can enslave whoever I want and
send them back and make quick cash. It's more of
a war on crime. If you will, yes, yes, yes
again via very very modern American logic. Here Um carol

(26:33):
to Laney writes, and this is amazing as evidence that
he had been to the Indies. He wrote that he
had brought a few indios the first time in print,
that the name is given to the native people's and
promise the riches that he will be able to provide
in the future gold spices, cotton, mastic, allowood, rhubarb, cinnamon,
and slaves as many as they should order. Who will
be from the idolatrs, that is, from the man eating Caribs.

(26:55):
So he's marking down these people. That's part of like
the been a fit of hearing that they're cannibals. Is
now he can add them, with religious justification to his
list of resources in the area. Because the Tino I
can slave these dangerous man eaters, you know, that's what
you want as a slave working alongside you, I think

(27:15):
is someone trained for war who could eat you? And
would he here living in my home with me? Um?
So we're gonna talk a lot more about this. Despite
hearing a great deal about the Caribs on their first voyage,
Columbus didn't really have contact with them in that first trip.
Now that changes almost as soon as they arrived back

(27:37):
in the Caribbean. And I'm gonna quote again from American
heritage here, Columbus and his company had a brief skirmish
with these Cannibals on the island of Santa Cruz St.
Croix and one of the Virgin Islands. A Spaniard was
killed by an arrow and a few of the natives
were taken a prisoner. The exact number is difficult to
establish from the three rather confusing eyewitness accounts we have
of this encounter, but it couldn't have been more than

(27:57):
a dozen or show, including three or four male adults
and some women and children. Now, again, the way that
Columbus frames this is that they tried to meet peacefully,
and the way Delaney interprets it is they tried to
have a peaceful meeting and these violent Caribs attack them.
Now we know that Columbus is just abducting people, like
straight up abducting people all over the Caribbean. I think
it's entirely possible. He tried to steal some folks, and

(28:20):
they shot again, and they shot a guy justifiably. Um again.
If you're looking for a group of people to travel
back in time while wearing a mask so you don't
get them sick and give a k forty sevens to
the Caribs in this period should be high up on
your list. Right, they're already dealing with krakens and ship

(28:40):
They don't need to speak their language to teach them
how to kill Europeans with a collash. It's very easy.
So after this skirmish, Columbus had his soldiers proceed in
force to a Carib village. Europeans who were with him
at the time wrote that these people practiced the quote
a cursed vice of sodomy, which goes right up there
with cannibalism. On reasons why they can't be Christianized, they

(29:04):
decided that the Caribs had introduced sodomy to the other people. Basically,
they noticed people doing a lot of fucking that repressed
Catholics don't do, and they're like, this must be the
evil Caribs teaching them how to fun. And they're always like, uh,
this must be the first time anyone ever thought of that,
because I can't even conceive of something so discussing. We

(29:25):
must be the save and destroy these dangerous Caribs to
stop this, like we approached the very heart of but stuff,
the origin itself. Yeah, yes, the Cribs are patient zero
for butt stuff. I would wear that crowd. Yeah, all

(29:45):
all respect to the Caribs. Um. They also reported that
the Caribs engaged in what was either castration or is
perhaps more likely, some form of circumcision. They seem to
have been doing something surgical to the genitals of some
of their young people. Now, Carol Delaney insists that it
was castration because that is the word that the Spanish
doctor with the fleet used, and clearly he must know

(30:08):
what he's talking about, even though this is the fourteen
nineties and I think it's fair to say doctors are
not doctors in this period. Yeah, more than so. Maybe
he maybe they were castrating boys. For certain, the cultures
have done that right to some to some young people
at points in time. This may be an example of
again because of the genocide, we don't of great and

(30:28):
maybe an example of perhaps this is a thing where
they had different attitudes towards gender and like some people
who identified some way had a procedure that we don't
really know what's going on with this, but yeah, other
scholars are ready to note that back then. Yeah, like
again Carol Delaney takes it is written that like they
are abusing children and that that's part because she's making

(30:49):
the case that these this is like these are dangerous
indigenous people who have vile and evil traditions that has
and then so then enslavem Okay, well that's literally the
argument she's about to make. Um, but I think it
is important to other scholars are like, we don't the
doctor was not a great doctor, We don't have great content.
We have no idea what was going on. And a

(31:10):
lot of cultures, including Jewish people, right, do have have
like surgeries that they do on you know, uh, circumcision
and stuff. We don't know what was going We don't
know what these people were doing, but we do not
have enough data to say that they were abusing anybody, right, Um,
that's just racism. Uh So anyway, um, yeah, the Caribs

(31:34):
that they encountered. Yeah, anyway, there's a number of things
that could have been happening either way, Columbus captured a
bunch of these people, uh and enslaves them and sends
them to Spain. He burns all of their canoes to
stop them from traveling to other islands and telling them
about sodomy. And here's here's how Carol Delaney justifies this.
From among the girls, mutilated, boys, and adults that the

(31:55):
Caribs had enslaved, Columbus rescued as many as he could,
took them aboard the already crowded and returned them to
their homes. In addition, Columbus wrote that the men found
an orphaned year old baby whom he entrusted to a
woman who came from Castile, and said that once the
child learns the language, he would send him to Spain.
Columbus did not specify whether the woman was Spanish or Indian,

(32:15):
though it is possible that she was Columbus's domestic servant.
Um Columbus said, I am vengeance, swear to me, and
the scum fled into the night, never to return. Oh, Michael,
very very pro Columbus bent here. I can see. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's good. So we'll continue talking about the Caribs

(32:36):
in a bit. But After this encounter, Columbus fleet sails
on and he makes it to Navadad, where they found
the settlement that had he had left there like a
few months before, raised to the ground. Everyone there was dead.
They're like anymore. They all get their asses killed. So
when they find the corpses of their former shipmates, all

(32:57):
of the eyes have been removed, which is pretty rad um.
So eventually he gets into contact with the indigenous folks,
was particularly the Casique that he had befriended before, and
he learns the whole story. And here's how Delaney describes it.
The men had begun to fight among themselves, had formed
into groups and gone on rating parties to the neighboring
area belonging to the Casque Canabo. They stole goods, raped

(33:19):
the women, kidnapped them, and took them back to Novadad
as concubines. Not surprisingly, Cannabo retaliated by attacking the garrison,
killing all the men and burning their village. Columbus decided
to pay a visit to Guacan to guacan Ar Guacanagari
and learn his side of the story. Dressed in full regalia,
he and one hundred men, accompanied by pipes and drums

(33:39):
marched to Guacanagari's village, about ten miles inland. Guacanagari confirmed
Diego's report. He felt responsible to Columbus and was chagrined
that he had not been able to keep his promise
to protect the European men. He said that when he
tried to help them, he was struck by a large
stone and injured. Dr Chanka could see no evidence of
a wound, but Columbus decided not to press the issue
and invited Guacanagari on board a dinner. There for the

(34:01):
very first time the Indian chief saw a horse. Over dinner,
Columbus learned that the men had been hoarding gold that
they had either founder stolen and had not reported it
for the crown. They had also been taking women and
even girls as concubines. So first off, what's happened here
is that the many leaves behind start taking sex slaves,
many of which your children, and abusing them and they

(34:21):
get murdered for it. And the guy who's Columbus's friend
tries to intervene, and they like club him on the
head with a rock, and I do love that. Like, Yeah, anyway,
there's a lot that's funny about that bit so much
so I'm paying not the least of which is they're
taking underage sex slaves and then saying it's okay for
us to enslave you because you do funked up ship
like you take under age sex slaves. Yeah, exactly, like, yeah,

(34:42):
you're abusing abide that, um, which we would have yelled
at these guys if we'd caught them doing it, I
promise you, right. You know who else yells at people
who take underage sex slaves? Michael, I do, But I
think we should share that information with the audience that
they can bonsors of this podcast. Oh yeah, yeah, the

(35:03):
sponsors of this podcast. Um, they hate sex slavery and
we're back, ah Michael, Yeah, Mikhail, as you're known in Russia,
where you have a huge fan base, I assume I'll
make the same assumption from now on. Thanks. Uh yeah. Um.

(35:26):
So this gets to one of my favorite things about
Delaney's book that described because that is a for a
woman who's whitewashing Columbus, pretty horrible description of these guys
at Novedad right, She very to her credit, describes them
as a bunch of guys who needed to get killed,
you know, Um, that's my favorite thing about her book.
She does not whitewash the brutality of the Spanish occupiers.

(35:47):
She portrays them as All of the men Columbus takes
with him are constantly depicted as rapists in slavers and
vicious gold christ psychopaths, which they were, But Columbus is
shown as this this decent, hard working band. He was
like constantly putting out fire. It's like, yeah, it's like
if John Luke Piccard, if everyone else on the enterprise,

(36:08):
we're just asshole. Yeah. And he's just trying to stop
it in hand. Yeah, he's he's constantly trying to maintain
noble and decent relationships with the locals despite all of
the viciouses of the men he puts. And that's who
makes everything go wrong, is these bad guys who he

(36:29):
puts in charge and brought with him to the New World.
But it's not his fault that they're all bad people. Um.
It is a very funny balance to try to strike,
and she does it badly. Here's one example of her
exculpaid in Columbus in this passage about the fact that
every town and forth he set up rebels from his
control and turns into bands of arms spaniards, murdering and

(36:50):
raping children, um and taking gold for themselves. Quote. Columbus
was a sailor and a navigator. He was not cut
out for the job of administrator even less his tractor
and he had no training for this role. But now
he was confronted with the task of organizing his motley
group of settlers in Decadres for work by himself, because
he begged for that position, because for that job it's

(37:14):
very fun, you know. I think we can all talk
about this now, Michael, having all worked at Cracked together,
we were in this position of a bunch of people
who wanted to be creative folks making videos and writing articles,
being put into management positions and like dealing with budgets
and dealing with like corporate stuff that we were not
super well suited for. And there were some complications as

(37:34):
a result of that. But one of the complications was
not that all of our subordinates formed murder gangs and
stole gold from people to genocide. I didn't have eyes
on Brockway and Sean Baby at all times because they were,
you know, living out there, So I can't completely vouch
for that. Yeah, but by and large we got by

(37:56):
company did demand that we committed genocide, and I did.
We should probably say that, Yeah, we stepped away. You know,
we're heroes France. Why we left. That's what we all
left of our own volition. They said, next obvious step
is genesis, genesis slavery, and we were like, I can't
do it. Not funny, frankly, not not a moral thing,
just not funny. Very few genocides were funny. Um. Um.

(38:26):
It is true. She's not wrong that Chris was bad
as an administrator. He is just objectively bad at that job. Um.
And he also like, it's just very funny to like
to completely divorce him from a morality of what's happening. Um,
mainly because he writes letters back talking about how he
didn't want things to be so bad as they were,
which is like, yeah, you're you're you're working. That's pretty sweaty, Carol,

(38:51):
pretty sweat Have you ever played Grand Theft Auto four? Yes,
of course, where you're the guy who constantly that's right,
the Nico will constantly scream things like because he was
the he was the g T a protagonist who was
sad about murder, so he would scream things like why
why must I do this? And oh this city? What

(39:11):
has it made me do? And You're like, I just
gunned down forty people like you know. That's why when
we finally got Trevor, I was like, Oh, this is
a breath of fresh air action. Smash your work. You're
supposed to be in this game. The Columbus is still
in a nace. Columbus, well, Columbus is a Trevor, but
he's acting like a Nico. That's right, Yeah, he's he's

(39:34):
That's that's definitely the case. Um. So he has a
damnable time actually finding and setting up gold mines, and
that's all like part of why all of the administrative
stuff fails is he's constantly leaving the task of setting
up working towns and trading posts to his incompetent subordinates
because all he cares about is finding gold mines, because

(39:55):
that's what's going to make his like personal wealth. Bigger
gold mines are still in short supply, he's having trouble
finding them. So early on in this voyage, when there's
still not a clear idea of where to start mining gold,
he gets back into he gets really into the business
of enslaving people in large numbers, right, We're talking hundreds
and hundreds and hundreds of people at a time that

(40:17):
he starts sending back in ships. Here's how Delaney tries
to defend his enslaving of people, because again they start
like grabbing ship to send back to Spain. With the ships,
Columbus sent back cinnamon, pepper, cotton, parrots, and sandalwood, and
some of the gold samples they had collected in order
to show that the enterprise would be profitable. In addition
to the profitable materials gathered from nature, Columbus also sent

(40:38):
human cargo twenty six Indians from the man eating Caribs.
In doing this, he was following papal policy at the time,
which pervented enslavement of those that captured in a just war,
those who resisted Christianization, and those who win against the
law of nature. The Caribs appeared to fit all three definitions.
Not only have they resisted and fought against the Christians,
they contravene the law of nature by acts of sodomy

(40:59):
and can ballism. And this is how Delaney tries to
minimalize his enslaving people every time, and it is horseship,
as our other sources will make clear completely. Well, I
was just saying that that was that was not an
old timey quote either, if I'm gathering for the contents, right,
So Delaney is saying, and you know they do, but

(41:20):
stuff which is objectively as contravenes the natural order. Well,
she's just saying what he's doing. Because we had this
discussion at the start of like judging people by the
standards of their times and then trying to judge people
from objective standards as to like how they measure up.
And the argument that I'm making, and that most reasonable
people make, is that Columbus was a really bad guy,
even considering the morals of the times. She is trying

(41:42):
to say, No, he was perfectly normal. The enslaving of
the Cribs because they were an enemy in a war
was perfectly standard, and he was he was in line
with the horrible nous of the era, and that that
is a lie. Not that that would make it okay,
but that's also wrong. On February two four, two and
a half months after the deadly fight with the Caribs
and his rate on their village, Columbus sends back several

(42:02):
boats with a massive cargo of slaves in twelve ships
from Isabella, which is this new heat because Novadad's burnt down,
he forms a new colony called Valentine's Days coming up.
He's got to get something, You got to get something down.
So these there are hundreds of people in this this
cargo of ships that he sends back, all of whom
have been captured against their will, and all of whom

(42:23):
are to be sold in the slave market at Seville.
Now Columbus sends the captain on that voyage with a
letter to the King and Queen, who had specifically ordered
him not to enslave the natives. He explained that because
there is no language by means of which this people
can understand our holy faith, thus are being sent with
these ships the cannibals, men and women, and boys and girls,
which their highnesses may order placed in the possession of

(42:44):
persons from whom they can best learn the language. He
suggested that the profit from the souls of the said
cannibals would suggest the consideration that many more from here
would be better, and their highnesses would lie served in
this manner, that in view of the need for cattle
and beasts, and burden for sustaining the people who are here. So,
in other words, what he's saying is that we need
more European food because the Europeans don't like eating indigenous food.

(43:06):
So I want you to sell these slaves who were
totally cannibals and use the profits in order to buy
cattle and send them over here so that we can
get a European settlement going here. Now obviously, and they're like,
we wanted gold. This is so far from what we discussed,
is not at all and we had talked about. Um. Now,

(43:29):
I'm gonna quote again from American heritage here. There is
no record of the number of slaves sent with Torres,
but from all indications, they were considerably more than the
handful of Caribs taken in the skirmage on Santa Croix,
which is again what Delaney says, that he just sends
over a couple of dozen Caribs. Columbus is only known
encounter with these fierce natives on his second voyage. Most
of Torres's wrecked cargo must have been made up of

(43:51):
the inoffensive inhabitants of Espaniola, whose meekness so highly praised
it first by Columbus was being strained to the breaking
point by the strong armed tactics of the European vaders,
including Columbus's own periodic kidnappings of groups of natives to
learn the secrets of the land. As he wrote. It
is also worth noting that in his letters to the
King and Queen, Columbus explicitly compared the indigenous people of

(44:11):
the Indies to the black slaves Portuguese traders were taking,
may or highnesses judge whether they ought to be captured.
For I believe we could take many of the males
every year, and an infinite number of women. May you
also believe that one of them would be worth more
than three black slaves from Guinea, and strength and ingenuity
as you will gather from those I am shipping out now.
So Delanney is like he just the only ones he

(44:33):
sends over for slaves are a couple of dozen people,
and they're all Caribs. He had fought with him that
was justified at the time. No, he is lying. He
has enslaved a lot more than that of the people
he was specifically told not to enslave by the King
and Queen, and he is sending them back and lying
about who they are in order to make a profit,
and he's eyeing future slaves. Oh really, how many? Infinity

(44:54):
and infinite number? And also the fact that he notes
that you can enslave women an infinite number. It's because
he and other Europeans want to rape them, right, Like,
that's why that's big I was gonna say. His complicated
startup sales pitch has devolved into an Internet pop up
ad that just says like, meet infinite women, girl, barely

(45:18):
legal whatever, any are you a lonely noble in search
of infinite women? Jesus. Eleven weeks after sending off Torres
and that first load of slaves to Seville, Columbus leaves
his new colony in the hands of his younger brother Diego.
He made a noble named Pedro Marguerite, commander of the

(45:39):
Spanish military forces on the island while he was gone.
Both of these guys are shipped at the job, and
when he gets back he does find a couple of
gold mines. Finally, and when he gets back, though, he's
found that the whole situation on this island he's trying
to colonize has degenerated. So, first off, marguerite commander of
the army, leaves his post and goes back to Spain.
He's like, funk it. I don't like it here. This

(45:59):
is the this isn't a good job. So he leaves
all of his soldiers leaderless, and they just again start
raiding villages, shooting people to take what they want, and
raping women at random. Ferdinand Columbus, who's Christopher's legitimate son,
describes them as quote committing a thousand excesses, for which
they were mortally hated by the Indians. Las Casas describes
that quote each one went where he willed among the Indians,

(46:22):
stealing their property and wives, inflicting so many injuries upon
them that the Indians resolved to avenge themselves on any
they found alone or in small groups. So that's pretty bad.
And again Columbus is not ordering them to go on
these raping and murdering sprees. He's just setting up a
bunch of armed, unhinged men on the island and then

(46:42):
abandoning them to look for gold and then being like,
oh my god, a bad thing happened. How could I
have known? Also, the weird implication is, of course that
if he's stuck around it would it would have stayed good.
But you never get proof of that because he never
sticks around. I will argue you get proof of the
opposite to see what happens when he does stick and

(47:03):
guess what, it's actually worse than gags. A local casique Guattanagana,
finally organizes a cohesive event defense, and this is while
Columbus is still away. He organizes again. These soldiers are
just running rough shot over the island, murdering and raping people,
so gut Iguana organizes a cohesive defense to the raiding

(47:24):
and the raping. He and his men ambushed ten Spanish
soldiers and killed them. They killed the ship out of them,
and then once those guys are dead, they find a
shelter that the Spanish we're living in where forties six
soldiers are like recuperating, right because they're all sick, they
can't defend themselves, so he burns the fucking shack down
while they're inside it, which cool and good in my opinion.

(47:44):
Um funk those guys. So Columbus gets back to the land, though,
and he's found out that like a funkload of soldiers
have been murdered by the locals. I would argue justifiably,
but Columbus is like, no, this is horrible. And into
this situation steps another casique, guacana Ari, who we've talked
about before. This is the guy who Christopher is in
love with on his first voyage. And I want to

(48:04):
quote now from a book called The Other Slavery by
Andres Ricindez. Hearing that Columbus had returned after a long absence,
Guacanagari immediately visited to declare his innocence in the massacre.
He had done nothing to aid or encourage the Indians
who would slaughter the Spanish, and to demonstrate his long
standing goodwill, recalled the goodwill and hospitality he had always
shown the Christians. He believed that his generosity towards these

(48:27):
visitors from Afar had provoked the hatred of the other casiques,
especially the notorious Bahecio, who had killed one of Guacanagari's wives,
and the thieving Kennabo who had stolen another. Now he
appealed to the Admiral to restore his wives and obtain revenge.
As Guacanagari narrated this tragic tale, he wept each time
he recalled the men who had been killed at Le
Navedad as if they were his own sons. Guacanagari's tears

(48:49):
won over Columbus, restoring the bond between the Admiral and
the Cacique. As he considered the situation, Columbus realized that
the emotional Caseique had provided valuable intelligence about conflicts among
the Indians, conflicts that Columbus could exploit to punish enemies
of them, both as an alliance with Guacanagari would enable
him to settle all scores. Recovering from his breakdown, Columbus
marched forth from Isabella and warlike array, together with his

(49:11):
comrade Guacanagari, who was most eager to rout his enemies.
Ferdinand wrote, now we know distressingly little about the pre
contact cultures of the Tyno, of of the different Arawak
people of the carib But one thing we know for
certain is that they did not have military technology that
it could seriously threaten Spanish dominance in the field. They're

(49:32):
able to carry out some ambushes that are successful when
they are not organized, but once Columbus puts together an
actual like battle line and sends it out to fight
these people in an organized way, it is not there's
no The end result is not in doubt. These people
have guns and cannons. They're dealing with folks who have
not even not particularly good bows and arrows, right, Ferdinand,

(49:56):
who is and even worse than this, honestly, like potentially
the most nificant weapons system they have are dogs and
or betrayal, like the element of see they needed to
read wedding. These motherfucker's is like you get Columbus in
a room for the peace trade negotiations, stab him in
his belly twenty times as you always have. You've got

(50:17):
this one local leader who's like, well, these guys will
help me deal with my local opponents, right, and I'll
worry about the fallout later. Exactly. That's the beauty rolls around.
The girl is simply dieure um so yeah um. Ferdinand,
who's there with his father, reports that in one battle quote,

(50:38):
two squadrons of infantry assaulted the multitude of Indians, putting
them to route with crossbow shots and guns, and before
they could rally, they attacked with horses and dogs. By
these means, those cowards fled in every direction, and the
destruction was so great, and that in brief time the
victory was complete Not only did his Majesty's hand guide
him Columbus and achieving the victory, but he also imposed
such a severe shortage of food and such varied and

(51:01):
grave infirmities that the Indians were reduced to a third
of the number they had been before. So it is
clear that from his divine guidance such a marvelous victory ensued.
When Frindan is writing about is that in this first
like year or so that he's back in the islands,
two thirds of these people are the first couple of years,
two thirds of these people die out right, They start starving,
they start getting sick, and then they start getting massacred

(51:23):
and and enslaved and sent away in battles. Now, there's
a number of things that caused this decline in population.
We'll be talking about this quite a bit um, but
one of the things is that again he's also he's
they're shipping going on back and forth, and some of
it's taking livestock to the islands that the Europeans can
eat in the matter they're accustomed to, which is what
brings a lot of the diseases that that become increasingly

(51:44):
a problem here. Now, Delaney again frames all of this
is just tragedy stemming from the fact that Columbus, who
is a brilliant explorer and a man of deep faith,
just isn't a very good leader. And again he is
not a good leader. But if he was an evil genius,
he could hardly have planned the situation better. And I'm
gonna quote from that American heritage right up again. This

(52:05):
was all that Columbus needed to establish a steady supply
of slaves. He no longer would have to maintain the
fiction that they were cannibals, despite the fact, even acknowledged
by Ferdinand, that the slain Spaniards had justly earned their
mortal hatred. Columbus led an expedition against the defenseless Indians
that was incredibly savage and its slaughter of the naked
islanders and destruction of their villages. The heavily armed Europeans

(52:26):
were accompanied by ferocious greyhounds, each of which Las Casas wrote,
in an hour could tear one hundred Indians to pieces.
Because all the people of the island had the custom
of going nude from head to foot, many people were
taken alive, and five hundred were sent to slaves to
be sold in Castile. Now, this is the first massive
load of slaves that Columbus sends across the Atlantic, and

(52:46):
in some ways this is the inauguration of the Atlantic
slave trade. It starts off going from the Indies across
the Europe, as opposed to going from Africa um to
to the America's um. Now. Ms. Shel de Cuneo, who's
an Italian adventurer who goes on Columbus to the second
edition expedition. He returns with Torres on that boat um

(53:08):
and in his own account he notes that some six
hundred captives had actually been gathered at Isabella. The five
d were the most salable, and the rest were given
out as gifts to colonists. By the time tours as
slave ships reached Spain, two hundred of the five hundred
captives on board had died um and their corpses were
thrown into the ocean. All of the others died pretty
soon after the arrival. Now, the fact that the pretense

(53:31):
of friendly coexistence had been well and truly shattered, right,
it's like, yeah, oh and these guys, I'll eat people. Right.
It's hard to feel that as mattering as you're shoveling
hundreds of corpses into the sea. It's like, I don't
even care if they did this. Is this is now
officially a system of business. Yeah, and again the just
to clarify some of the time that you have that

(53:53):
first ship he sends back, which Delaney says is just
twenty six guys. We actually have no idea how many
people were on it, and probably includes Taino people that
he had just enslaved because he wanted to enslave them.
And then there's that massacre of Spanish soldiers. Columbus does
a war, kills a bunch of people and enslaves a
group of five hundred. He sends them back. Half of
them die and all of them are dead pretty soon

(54:14):
after they arrive in Spain. Like none of them last
very long. Imagine that someone swooped down again. I hate
to keep us in this metaphor, but in the UFO
and abducted you, raped you, brought you to the alien planet,
taught you the alien language, and they're and you're like,
why did you do this? And they're like, so we
could give you our religion and our our religion says

(54:36):
you're blessed because you're meat. You're going to inherit the
earth thing like, so you you bring me here to
tell me how lucky I am and how great this
is going for me. Is the wildest aspect of this all.
It's the cognitive dissonances off the charts. Yes. Now, by
this point in his explorations, Columbus had discovered several gold
mines and areas in which gold could be pannedful in quantity.

(54:58):
His sovereigns, repeat lee told him like, as he's sending
people over there, sending letters back and being like stop
stop enslaving people, like we told you not to do this.
It looks like you're just enslaving random locals, like, don't
do that. Tax them instead. Um. So that's what he
starts to do. Um. He because his sovereigns are like

(55:19):
yelling at him, um, and because he wants money, he
decides to institute at tax on all of the people
who live in the islands, right because their servants of
the crowd now and so they should have to pay
their taxes. And the way he sets up the taxes,
you know those hawks bells he was getting out, it
gifts early on. Instead, he sets so that every three
months um an individual has to pay enough tribute in

(55:40):
gold to fill a hollow. Hawks bell right, that's you each,
oh me gold. And this is the because I've been
giving these out is you thought these were gifts. This
is an example of how much you owe us and
fucking taxes. Um So, the hawkson a gift into awesome.
It's pretty fucked up. It's like sending someone a roomba
for their birth day and they open it up and

(56:01):
they're like, this room but exclusively sucks money out of
your wallet, yeah, and delivers it to me. Um So.
To ensure that everyone pays their taxes, he Columbus orders
all of the people on the islands to wear a
metal disc around their neck that shows whether or not
they'd paid their taxes recently. Failure to pay could be
punished brutally. Those who rebelled, as many did, or tried

(56:22):
to hide and avoid the tax, were hunted down and
sold into slavery, which is again basically a death sentence.
Every indigenous person older than fourteen was subject to the tax,
which effectively turned what had been an island of free
people into an island of slaves. Among the Spaniards, it
was not universally agreed that this was just One account
of horror came from a man named Washington Irving, who wrote, quote,

(56:44):
in this way was the yoke of servitude fixed upon
the island, and it's thralled them effectively ensured. Deep despair
now fell on the natives when they found a perpetual
task inflicted upon them. Weaken, indolent by nature, unused to
labor of any kind, and brought up in the untapped
idleness of their soft climate in their fruitful groves, death
itself seemed preferable to a life of toil and anxiety.

(57:05):
They saw no end to this harassing evil which had
so suddenly fallen upon them, no prospect of a return
to that roving independence and ample leisures. So dear to
the wild inhabitants of the forest. The pleasant life of
the island was in an end. They were now obliged
to grope day by day, with bending body and anxious eye,
along the borders of their rivers, sifting the sands for
the grains of gold, which every day grew more scanty,

(57:27):
or to labor in the fields beneath the fervor of
a tropical sun to raise food for their taskmasters, or
to produce the vegetable tribute imposed upon them. They sunk
to sleep, weary and exhausted at night, with the certainty
that the next day was to be a repetition of
the same toil and suffering. So that's a nice description
of what it means to bring capitalism to an island
of people who don't know it, right, Like, that's basically

(57:48):
what's happening here. These people, you know, they had rulers,
Slavery existed, like, there was nasty things, they had more,
But at the end of the day, most people were
able to go about their lives living on a daily basis.
Did no one it's been done like capitalism, it hits different. Yeah, yeah,
they are in a much worse state of affairs. Like
now we all wear metal collars and live in gray

(58:10):
boxes and work in a steel mill. We're not allowed
to fuck anymore. Somehow, it's even more depressing than it was,
even though before it was still a like relatively brutal
period of history. It was still a more difficult life
than a lot of people live today, but it was
a hell of a lot easier than what it becomes.
Um now by this point Columbus has found again, He's

(58:32):
got the primarily the minds that he finds the good
gold mines are in Sabow, which is part of the
modern day Dominican Republic. But gold was also like, it's
not the only precious substance that he's got armed men
forcing the locals to mind for him. And I'm gonna
quote from the other slavery again for sheer horror and
attrition rates. The Pearl coast was worse. Indian divers there

(58:54):
spend agonizing days making repeated descents of up to fifty
feet well holding their breath for a minute or more.
Few natives could endure these brutal conditions for long, so
ace they find out there's pearls, he makes people like
free dive to grab them all day, every day, like
repeatedly making these like two atmosphere descents and then going
back up, which can kill you if you are doing
it properly, or even if you are just because it's

(59:17):
not a day. Yeah. Now, the harshness of the tax
system levied upon these people who were also beset by
the disruptions. There's a war which disrupt things and make
sure there's widespread disease. Now there's crop failures because they're
being taken and forced to mind because there's these wars
going on. Um. All of this makes meeting Columbus as

(59:37):
quotas basically impossible. After three collection periods, the natives had
provided just two hundred pacos worth of gold out of
the sixty thou pacos that Columbus decided they owed arbitrarily. Yeah,
that's a scope for this project. Since the local caciques
had failed to meet their numbers, the Spaniards now have
to take over, right. We tried to let you govern yourselves,

(59:59):
but you just couldn't make your taxes. So now we're
sending an armed men to take total control of the process.
Andres Rescindez writes an average size trench produced more than
six thousand pounds of dirt mixed with the tiniest fragments
of gold. The Indians carried this dirt on their bare
backs and loats, waiting three to four arobas about sixty
nine pounds. These were very heavy burdens considering the slender

(01:00:21):
build of most of the laborers. The work proceeded ceaselessly
all day. Instead of using valuable beasts of burden, the
Spanish compelled natives to do all the hauling horses and
mules were devoted to the tasks of conquest and pacification.
The Indians were even forced to carry their Christian masters
and hammocks. As a result, they developed huge soars on
their shoulders and backs, as happens with animals made to

(01:00:42):
carry excessive loads, commented friar Less Cassas, who arrived at
Espaniola right at the time of the gold rush. And
this is not to mention the floggings, beatings, thrashings, punches, curses,
and countless other vexations and cruelties to which they were
routinely subjected into which no chronicle could ever do justice.
And again, las Casas is a guy who has a
lot of admire ration in many ways for Christopher Columbus,

(01:01:02):
and he's he's he's a fucking Catholic holy man, right,
so he's very much into the hole. We have to
convert everyone we can. But he's also a human being
and enough of one that he he watches this happening
and it's like, there is no way in which this
is okay with God. This is a nightmarish crime. What
I he And again, this is part of why you
have to condemn these people. Outside of their times, because

(01:01:25):
Las Casas is not looking at what the Portuguese are
doing in a um and Guinea and being like, this
is an unconscionable crime, because that is it's bad, but
it is a bad that is normal for the era.
He looks at what is being done in these islands
and he says, this is the worst thing standing. This
is an exceptional act of evil. Um that is that

(01:01:49):
deserves to ring out in history. Um So, Over the
next years, the late fourteen nineties and the yearly fifteen hundreds,
a madness for gold overtakes the Spanish and crowds of
it and jrews flooded the region to take command of
minds and force indigenous people to labor for their wealth.
And it's height, the island yielded more than two thousand
pounds of gold per year. It is said that the

(01:02:09):
Spanish owners through parties attended by slaves in which these
salt shakers were filled with gold dust, which is good
to eat. Ye kind of like rich people today, we'll
put gold leaf on ship, even though it doesn't taste
like anything and has no nutritional value, just because like,
look at the money we're wasting. We went full squid
games before and it did not take long at all. Mike.

(01:02:34):
I always imagine that was like like a five year process.
You're snorting coke, putting gold on your burger, watching like
the pores fight to the deaths happened immediately. It is
less than a decade between. Look at this unspoiled island
full of beautiful people who are ready to learn the
Gospel of Christ to let's see on the food wasted.

(01:02:56):
Fuck them, let's see gold while we watched them fight
in their collars and their shackles. Jesus so quick that
this so fast. And again we're contrasting this to what
the Portuguese are doing in Guinea, not because it's okay,
because that is the start of the slave trade in Africa,
which is a crime absolutely on the level of the
genocide of like it is a nightmarish crime. It's just

(01:03:17):
at this point in time, that's not yet what they're doing, right,
it has not really they are not yet taking huge
masses of people from Africa and putting them on islands
to work them to death. They do that because they
kill all of these people, right, That's why the the
that that like the African slave trade really gets going
is because they like they genocide enough of the people

(01:03:38):
in the Caribbean that they bring in workers to kill
in plantations and ship and mind um. Anyway, it's all connected,
is what I'm saying. Uh. It is understood that the
gold is not going to last forever, and it's obvious
to everyone that the local labor force is dying very quickly.
The early miners, and when I say miners, I mean

(01:03:59):
the Spanish people who own the minds, had a saying quote,
take the most advantage because you do not know how
long it will last, like there there and this is
you see this with um. This is the reason why
the British Empire in a couple hundred years from now,
when they take over chunk of India, carry out a
starvation genocide right because they're shortsightedly trying to maximize profits

(01:04:20):
in such a way that makes it unable for people
to feed themselves and so thirty million people die. But
they think the same logic is the same. It's like, I,
as an individual, have to get as much as I
can out of here immediately, because all that matters is
like the quarterly balance sheet. Basically, these people it's once logic.
That's what this is what's so important because the fucking people,

(01:04:41):
the right wingers who raised me, made a big point
of talking about all of the deaths under state communism,
which is an important story and we've talked about on
the show, and you should not ignore the Holodomor and
the Great Leap Forward and all of the different bad
things that were done by state communist regimes. The death
toll of capitalism is at least as high, if not
much higher. And it's starts here, right, Um, I mean
it starts a little bit like yeah, like these are

(01:05:04):
not yet kind of the joint stock companies that will
be recognizable, but the motivation is the same. We are here.
Our goal is to use these human beings who we
have a right to take from in terms of taxes um,
in order to create a profitable enterprise. And all that
matters from me is getting the short term profits as
quickly as possible out of here um and whatever happens

(01:05:26):
to them as the result, whatever is done to this
land as a result, doesn't matter. This is not the
only time in history that this has happened, but it's
the first time it's happened like this. The Romans did
little versions of this. The Romans never completely wiped out
a people, right, even as bad as the ship they
did in Israel was um, they didn't do this. This

(01:05:48):
is new. This is a destruction of a people on
a scale that has not Maybe some of the ship
that Genghis Khan was doing compares um, but it's that's
the stage for some uniquely American thoughts like money over everything,
or it's just business, you know, like this, it's amazing

(01:06:09):
how early on it's set the tone for in this place.
It is like gold crushes the end, like might makes right.
We carry that tradition onto this day, like I don't.
It's it's fascinating to hear about these people that you
know that he left behind, the go hog wild and
viking all over everything, and you're like, yeah, it's it's

(01:06:31):
like ever since the beginning, America has been want a
barrel full of single bad apples, and whenever you cover
for it, you point to one and go, well, there
was a bad apple, or like Columbus couldn't lead you,
like right, what about all the other stuff and the
other stuff and the other stuff. It's there's bad apples
all the way down as we taught you and I

(01:06:52):
talked about in fact in the episodes about like the
first corporations the West the British Eastern companies, um, which
are two separate companies. Um. When we talked about those,
we were talking about actual recognizable corporate in a modern sense.
They function basically the same way as a modern corporation does. UM.
And that's what and that is like an actual capitalism

(01:07:14):
and that like it is a group of people using
their capital in order to own the rights to the
profit of labor of other people. Right, UM, what's happening here?
You do not have that advanced an idea like these
are not corporate they're doing this for the crown but
also for their own individual benefit. But what you do
have here is this idea that has led to most
of the problems we are encountering now with stuff like
climate change, with Chevron covering up what they knew about

(01:07:37):
climate change since the nineteen seventies. Is like the forging
of the ethos. The sacred thing is short term profits
and anything that gets in the way of that, that's
actually like a problem. But you know what else is sacred? Michael?
What what just products and services and support? This podcast

(01:07:59):
Sacred and ad as Lee separate from any of the
ideas going on with the Spaniards massacring people. Here, We're
not taking part in a gold rush over a new
type of media that is easy to exploit profitably now
and perhaps in ways that are shortsighted. Um. No, it's
just the fact that you must do anything to achieve

(01:08:21):
shareholder growth, no matter what that's occur anywhere anymore. We
got over it, okay. So, despite regular admonishments from the Royals,
Columbus continued to send enslaved human beings back to Europe

(01:08:42):
during this period, where he's also tax genociding them. Due
to the high death rate, each boat was crammed as
full of people as possible, which is again this is
where we because I really am not. I hope people
do not read that I'm trying to minimize the Portuguese
slave trade in Guinea. But the stuff that becomes so
famous about the African slave trade, how cram They aren't
these nightmareeships where millions of people literally diet. It is

(01:09:04):
a slavery genocide that is eventually carried out there. That
is not the way the slave trade looks quite yet
in Africa, right, which is not to say that it's
not horrible. They are enslaving people. That's ugly. They are
not this is the start of well, because the death
threat is going to be so high, we have to
jam as many people as possible in the boats as
we can, and like we have this kind of um,
this rhythmetic of death for profit. Right, that is, this

(01:09:27):
is where a lot of you are going to lose
expects exactly. Um. This leads to problems as well, such
as when a flotilla of five ships were stuck in
San Domingo Harbor for two and a half weeks while
Columbus negotiated with a guy. So he puts this guy
in charge of his militia when he's away finding gold.
This guy rebels again and then Columbus has to like

(01:09:48):
talking about right, but this is like the third time
it's occurred. Um. So he's while he's negotiating with this
guy to like figure out this issue and get trade restarted.
He has boats in his harbor that are crammed full
of people that he has captured, and he leaves them
there for two and a half weeks, crammed into the
hold while he's negotiating, just leaving your baby in your

(01:10:11):
truck with the window the sun is so like they suffocate.
Las Casas writes that quote, unable to breathe from anguish
in the closeness of their quarters, they smothered, and an
infinite number of these Indians perished, and their bodies were
thrown into the sea downstream. Columbus is like preoccupied dealing
with this guy that he's got a bit. And then
he like comes, oh, they all died. I left them

(01:10:31):
all in the boats and they all died. Throw their
corpses in the water. Let's grab some more. That's the again.
And that is bad for the time. That is an
exceptional act of human evil, which is what he's guilty.
I know that. I just Delaney's Columbus's writing. So he
wasn't the best business man, so he lost. There was

(01:10:53):
a lot of shrinkage in the trade. He was engaged.
And I'm so fucking angry at this woman, her color.
This never loses his missionary zeal or his desire to
find the Great Khan and the horrors that occur as
Spanish domination. Because she doesn't deny that there's a genocide occurring,
right she does not try to whitewash the genocide. This
is all, but it's portrayed as tragic results of the

(01:11:14):
evils of other men. The reality is that Columbus the
governor writes back to his sovereigns regularly nearly overcome with
glee at the financial prospects of this new slave trade.
From here one can, in the name of the Holy Trinity,
send all the slaves that can be sold, of which,
if the information I have is correct, they could sell
for four thousand and at minimum value, they would be

(01:11:35):
worth twenty millions, and four thousand quintalls of Brazil would
which would be worth at least as much. At an
expense of six millions. It would appear that forty millions
could be realized if there is no lack of ships,
which I believe, with the aid of the Lord, that
will not be once they are filled on this voyage.
So again he's very much thinking about this purely from
a here's what they're worth. Here is the cash value,

(01:11:55):
because I'm getting a cut from it. Right, He's getting
like a quarter of all of the value of the trade.
Las Casas, who was also doing math, just pulling shit
out of his ass that He's like, yeah, Like, well,
I mean there worth this, And according to my previous letter,
there's infinite women. So if you scale it at infinity,

(01:12:16):
that's quite a lot. There's no way he can have
firm numbers on this ship. I just don't buy it,
and he doesn't, right. Um, So when it comes to
properly condemning a man like Columbus, we must note again
others of his peers at the time, people who are
watching this are horrified. Las Casas, who is utterly unsparing
in his description of what Columbus is doing. What greater

(01:12:37):
or more supine hardheartedness and blindedness can there be than this?
In the name of the Holy Trinity, he Columbus could
send all the slaves which could be sold in all
the said kingdoms. Many times, I believe blindness and corruption
infected the Admiral, which is you know, I don't think
blindness is, but certainly corruption. Yeah no, this this is
the same speech my dad gives me every Thanksgiving, and

(01:12:59):
it's devastating every time. It's quite a takedown. Well, Michael,
you you do operate a pretty pretty brutal business enslaving people. Um,
you know, I I happen to think that it's justified
that you're sending them to Blue Apron's island where they
will be hunted. Um but but a lot of people
think probably shouldn't be enslaving children for the Blue Apron corporate.

(01:13:20):
They will be served tastefully in a like cost impactful
ready to way, Yeah, wrapped in an unfortunate amount of
plastic as well, which makes all my users cannibals, which
then justifies me enslaving them, and the whole system perpetuates it. Michael,
it's not said enough. Anny a candy businessman, thank you,

(01:13:43):
thank you. Um I learned it from Columbus. Yeah, we
all did you know the only businessman Chris sie um
so h. Christopher Columbus. The King and Queen initially accept
his claims that the people he's sending them are all
cannibals capture it in war and thus fair targets for enslavement.
But they start to grow concerned. Is he just keeps

(01:14:04):
on sending back ships full of dead people? Right? Um?
So because they're they're they're worried. They get framed often
as like being super sympathetic to the natives because some
of the stuff they write is in terms of its
writing very sympathetic. The main thing they do is they
convene a counsel of like scholars and religious experts to
try and determine if it's okay to enslave these people. Um,

(01:14:28):
we don't actually know what this committee decided. Eventually it
came to some decision. We have no idea what it was.
That that information has been lost because again record keeping
wasn't perfectly speriod, but we know that their concerns did
very little to slow this process. It is probably worth
noting that Queen Isabella did late in life, makes something
of a name for herself as an advocate for indigenous rights.
By four she was horrified by the constant shiploads of

(01:14:52):
dead and dying enslaved people and asked, who was this
Columbus who dares to give out my vassals as slaves.
She and her husband did free a lot of these people.
A decent number of these people are freed when they
arrived because they're like, what the funk he sent us
another ship of people We didn't want this um, and
some of them even make it back to the New World.
Nearly all of them choose to go back when they're
giving in the times when they're given the option. By

(01:15:16):
the end of the fifteen hundreds, Columbus Star had faded
at court. In late four he sent a letter back
to his master's proposing a sale of four thousand slaves.
The letter came with several so these colonists who rebel
when he's sitting there with a boats full of people,
he sends a bunch of them back to Spain with him,
and in order to keep them happy, he gives each

(01:15:38):
of them a slave. So he enslaves six hundred Tino
to give these rebellious colonists as slaves when they return home.
So they come home with a dude or as is
often the case, with a young woman Um and this fleet.
So this when this fleet arrives back in Spain, he's
number one. All of these people who rebelled have been
given enslaved people. And number two Columbus is like, I
want to enslave four thousand more people and send them back.

(01:15:59):
Is that with you, guys? Um? And if not, is
there a way I could throw slaves at the problem? Yes? Yes?
And this comes back with number one the fact that
all of the colonists he sending back are people who
had rebelled and been sent back means like the king
and Queen are like, he might not be good at
running this colony um. But also other people are coming

(01:16:20):
back from the New World at the time and being like, hey,
he's kind of sucks at everything. You might not want
to leave him in charge of this um. And I'm
after four or five ships full of dead bodies. I'd
be like, is this are you to say, I don't
think he's good at this. I'm gonna quote from American

(01:16:40):
heritage here. The sixteenth century historian Antonio di Herrera de Tortresila,
also a great admirer of Columbus, wrote that many of
the charges brought by the white residents of Espanola against
the admiral was one that he would not consent to
the baptism of Indians whom the Friars wished to baptize,
because he wanted more slaves than Christians, that he made
war against the Indians unjustly and made many slaves to

(01:17:02):
be sent to Castile. And again, one of Delany's big
defenses is he only enslaves people who are fighting him,
and he doesn't he doesn't wonder what he wants to
christianize people, which means he can't have wanted to enslave
them all. And again we have contemporary historians being like, no,
a bunch of people at the time we're like, hey,
it seems like you're starting wars specifically to justify enslaving people,
and you're refusing to allow friars to baptize people who

(01:17:24):
want to be Christians because you want to enslave them.
That seems bad Christopher. Um. And the counter argument is no, no, no,
he was just trying to enslave their mind and soul,
not what the Catholics here who call him out as
bad are want. Isn't always all that much better, but
relatively speak, yeah yeah um and yeah. There's Catholic missionaries

(01:17:50):
who return home. They send letters back to the cardinal
who the and the Archbishop of Toledo accusing Columbus and
his brothers of actively attempting to like harm efforts of
the missionaries to convert the natives to Christianity. Um. They
that one of the things they keep pointing out in
their complaints to the to the Pope and whatnot is
that like, hey, like the fact that we're being so

(01:18:11):
shitty these people makes them not like Christianity. Um, and
this is a problem for us as friars figure figure.
So Columbus's downfall, harsh and humiliating, came within weeks of
this decree. The sovereigns summarily removed him from his highest
state of viceroy and governor of the New World Colonies
and appointed the Commander Francis D. Bobadilla as a successor.

(01:18:33):
And what many historians regard as an excess of zeal
Bobadilla sent Columbus and his two brothers back to Castile
in chains. The sovereigns ordered the brothers released and authorized
a fourth voyage by Columbus, but mandated he never set
foot in Espaniola again. Now this is that that was
just a quote from American Heritage Carol de Lady makes
Boba Dela out to be the bad guy of the

(01:18:54):
whole thing, um, which he also sucked. Right, he is
a brutal Catholic soldier who had helped like repress Uprising
ship and shipped for the But if you're white washing
some ship head, you need a scapegoat, right, Yeah, Like
it's true that he sucked, so did Columbus. And by
the way, Columbus deserved a lot worse than chains Um. Obviously,

(01:19:15):
the king and Queen, who also get whitewashed a lot
because of the purported care for the indigenous people, also sucked.
They sent him on another fucking voyage after this, So like,
funk those people right, Like, let's not nobody nobody's good here.
Columbus is just the worst of them, I think for
all the yeah they commissioned Spider Man turn off the
Dark two, they were the motherfuckers who were like, yes,

(01:19:36):
another one please. So Christopher Columbus died on May fift
oh six. Despite his many failures and crimes, he maintained
many of the benefits promised to him by the Spanish
crown and passed a considerate amount on to his sons.
What little justice he experienced was not enough to save
the r Walk, particularly the Tino, who were completely extinct

(01:19:57):
by the early fift hundreds. There's still some arrow up
peoples around, but the Tino or extinct. I think the
Caribs are as well. Most of the people who had
existed when he arrived in the area that he arrives
in are absolutely wiped out in like twenty y ish
years and it's worth discussing precisely how this happened, because
this is a part of the story that seldom gets told. Now,

(01:20:18):
we don't know how many people were in these islands
at the time of first contact. Frireless Cosas estimated Espaniola's
population around three million people. Archaeologists suggest a more realistic
number might be three hundred thousand um. If that is
the case, by fifteen o eight, sixteen years after first contact,
only sixty thousand remained. So if you assume three hundred

(01:20:38):
thousand people or so, by sixteen years after first contact,
sixty thousand or left, that means eighty percent have died
in the first sixteen years. The plague was like a
third or a quarter. Yeah, I mean in some places
it was sev right, like there were some parts of Europe.
But we're talking plague numbers. We're talking this apocaly this

(01:21:00):
this end of the world shit. Many of these people
were killed by diseaser of violence, but also a lot
of them committed what some scholars say was essentially a
form of race suicide. And to close this out, I'm
going to read for you, Michael, one of the most
harrowing passages I have ever read in my research for
this show. Um. This is from the book The Other

(01:21:21):
Slavery by Andres Ruscindez. Quote. Okay, I'll think of a joke, Robert,
go ahead, you you you'll be You'll be cooking on that.
Thanks for inviting me. This has been wonderful. Demoralized by
the Spanish tribute system and unnerved by their own prophecies,
many Indians took steps to escape, and the only way
left to them. Columbus became aware of the dimensions of

(01:21:42):
the tragedy decimating the Indians when quote it was pointed
out to him that the natives had been vexed by
a famine so widespread that more than fifty thousand men
had died, and every day they fell everywhere like sickened flocks.
In the word of Peter Martyr, the reality was even
more terrible than famine. It was self inflicted. The Indians
destroy avoid their stores of bread so that neither they

(01:22:02):
nor the invaders would be able to eat it. They
plunged off cliffs, They poisoned themselves with roots, and they
starved themselves to death. Oppressed by the impossible requirement to
deliver tributes of gold, the Indians were no longer able
to tend their fields or care for their sick children
and elderly. They had given up and committed mass suicide
to avoid being killed or captured by Christians, and to

(01:22:23):
avoid sharing their land with them, their fields, groves, beaches, forests,
and women, the future of their people. It was an
extraordinary act of despair and self destruction, so overwhelming that
the Spanish could not comprehend it. All of them fifty
thousand Indians dead by their own hand. The dwindling number
of survivors found themselves trapped in a survivalistic Indo game.

(01:22:44):
Some took refuge in the mountains, where Spanish dogs set
upon them. Those who avoided the dogs succumbed to starvation
and illness. Although estimates of the population are in exact,
the trendis Plaine. Of the approximately three thousand Indians and
Hispaniola at the time of Columbus's first voyage, in a
hundred thousand or so died between fourteen ninety four and
fourteen ninety six, half of them during the mass suicide.

(01:23:06):
Las Casas estimated that the Indian population fourteen ninety six
was only one third of what had been in fourteen
ninety four, What a splendid harvest, and how quickly they
reaped it, he wrote acidly. Twelve years later, in fifteen
o eight, A Cinsus counted sixty thousand Indians, or one
fifth of the original population, and by fifteen forty eight
Fernandez de Oviedo found only five hundred Indians, the survivors

(01:23:30):
of the hundreds of thousands who had populated the islands
when Columbus arrived, and who had seen him as the
fulfillment of a longstanding prophecy. It was only now that
the meaning of that prophecy became clear. His presence meant
their extinction. Wow, So that's pretty bad. It's sick that
they It started with the word decimated, and I think
that means one tenth are killed. Yeah, Like, imagine being

(01:23:52):
decimated over and over and over and over every year left, Yeah,
out of three hundred thousand and how a huge chunk
of the death was people making a conscious choice to
kill themselves so that they wouldn't have to live with
these which I think speaks to how rapid the changes were.
Because any student of history will tell you you can

(01:24:13):
actually get a population to suffer mightily over a long
period of time. And not kill themselves if you do
it slowly. So that means these changes were so rapid
that the whole generation of people were like, I cannot
even grapple with let's just that's that, um, which is yeah,
just very telling. I don't think there's even an inclement

(01:24:34):
periods of history where ship is really really upsetting. You
don't usually get fifty people checking out at once as
a conscious decision. And you know, we're almost an act
of rebellion. This is this is an act of them
taking agency. And you know, we cannot fight these people, right.
We are are too weak and they are too strong
for us to combat them militarily. But we recognize their

(01:24:57):
religion and their beliefs them as sick and wrong and
we will not live under it. And so we're going
to do the only thing that we can do. Um.
And you know this is not the only time things
like that will happen. You know, you have cases of
like slaveships mutinying in ways that like will kill them all,
and they're like, but this is better than living with
these people. UM. Yeah, it's That's the story of Chris

(01:25:22):
Columbus uh, director of the Home Alone movies. They were
the United of Islands. Really yeah, they were like, these
terrorists have taken control. We're just going to crash this ship. Yeah,
this is the only thing we can think of to do.
Um sapped funny out of unspeakably bleak. One of the

(01:25:42):
worst stories I have ever encountered in my life. How
could that be? It's the story of America? Yeah, yeah, yeah, um,
it is the story of America. Well, Michael, Robert mchaale
W wrote, you got autar I don't know what they
call you in Russia. You got any pluggables to plug?

(01:26:05):
You want to art, Robert, push your business here. I
guess if if I can stammer a little bit and
blank people's minds and separate the taste in their mouth
that they have now with the thing that I'm about
to say. But yeah, if you want to hear me
podcast about stuff I was gonna say, ranging from less
to more bleak, but no, all less bleak than this Uh,

(01:26:27):
including depression, addiction and drama, but still all less bleak
than this ship. Uh. Look us up over at small Beans.
You can find it, you know, wherever you get podcasts
or a Patreon dot com slash. Small Beans if you're
into video games. Check out my other podcasts on the
I Heart Network One Upsmanship. I guess Columbus was kind

(01:26:48):
of the original one ups man ship, right, Yeah, I
think that's ultimately what I learned. Yeah, that is that
is the lesson he was shipping men. He was shipping men.
And to add in old to injury, the fact that
I'm sorry you mentioned this tiny detail, but it's rankled
me the whole time. They made them carry them in hammocks.

(01:27:08):
They invented hammocks, you dirty pizza. Worse right, gave you
hammock technology. You motherfucker couldn't figure it out on your own,
and then stole it, made us carry you you sides.
So yeah, I think the only thing I can say
at the end of this harrowing series learning about Columbus is,

(01:27:29):
folks at home, if you wanna stick it to Christopher
Columbus and the people like him, go firebomb a pizza restaurant.
Doesn't matter which one. Stick it to the Italians. That's
the only way. Take out. Find the local pizza restaurant,
buck them up. That'll teach him. I legally endorsed this

(01:27:49):
statement as well. Good Good. I wanted a little bit
of extra cover on that one, all right, everybody. That's
our legally binding advice to you is destroy all pizza
restaurants in vengeance for Columbus's crimes. Hey, do the right thing.
Do the right thing. Behind the Bastards is a production
of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,

(01:28:11):
visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.