[conspire] Federales in Portland?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):

> And the boats often didn't make it.  Columbus left 38 men in the Western
> Hemisphere when he left.  They had no fresh water, limited food, they
> got sick and they died a lot.

It's funny you should mention the fort 'La Navidad' he had the 39 (not
38) men establish using the wood from the Santa Maria on the shore of
present-day Haiti.  On his return a year later, he found the burned 
ruins of the fort.  The evidence suggests that the settlers had gotten
pushy with the local Taino people over a gold mine and also taking Taino
women.  The local Taino headman, Caonabo, thereupon decided that if
there were no Spaniards, there would be no Spaniard problem.

> It was a brutal world.  

Quite.  However, there is brutal, and then there is being a sadistic
mass-murderer.

Mr. Columbus had the distinction of (1) cutting the ears and noses off
most of the villagers of the Lucayan people of the Bahamas (a Taino
offshoot), because they hadn't found for Columbus enough gold, or given
Columbus and his men entirely unrestricted access to the women.  (2) 
When the remaining Lucayans finally rebelled, Columbus hunted all of the
warriors down and fed them to hunting dogs.  (3) He found about 500
Lucayans still alive, chained them below decks and sold off in Spain the
approximately 300 who survived the trip.  Another 500 were enslaved in
place and used, among other things, as beasts of burden to carry
Columbus's men, who hunted for sport any who escaped to the wild lands.

(4) From that point forward, villagers under military control of
Columbus's men had to produce an annual gold quota.  If they failed to
meet the quota, their hands would be cut off and hung around their necks
as a warning to others.  (5) Columbus remarked that Taino women between
the ages of nine and ten were particularly suitable for use as currency.

(6) Disease and starvation visited on these people over the following
fifty years are estimated to have killed 3-5 million.

(7) The flood of gold into Europe from Columbus's extortion campaign in
the Caribbean inadvertently disturbed the gold trade coming from the
Gold Coast in West Africa, which inadvertantly caused the traders there
to switch from gold to slaves as the preferred product.  So, indirectly, 
Columbus was also the father of the transatlantic slave trade.  (No, he
didn't intend this, but yes, he caused it.)


So, sorry, don't try to pull 'it was a brutal world' bullshit.

Some people even in brutal days were a lot more brutal than others, and
Columbus was among the worst of his day.