Columbus, the Taíno, and the People Who Fed the Pilgrims

That was written on the day of first contact. Not after a betrayal, not after a war, not in the heat of anything. On the first day, having been met by people who swam out to his ships bringing parrots, cotton and food, Columbus's recorded reaction was a labour assessment and a force estimate.

This chapter has two halves, because the user's question has two halves. The first is what happened in the Caribbean, and how it was judged by Spaniards at the time, not by us, by them. The second is what English settlers found further north, and why they described a managed, productive, well-fed landscape as an empty wilderness.

Who was there

The people Columbus met in the Bahamas and on Hispaniola called themselves, in the terms Europeans recorded, Taíno. They were Arawakan-speaking horticulturalists who had been in the islands for centuries: they grew cassava, sweet potato, maize, beans, squash, peanuts and cotton in raised earth mounds called conucos, an intensive system well adapted to the soils; they fished with nets, weirs and remoras; they lived in villages of a few hundred to a few thousand under hereditary chiefs called caciques; they played a ball game in built courts; they had a religious life organised around carved figures the Spanish transcribed as zemís; and they had trade routes connecting the islands to the mainland.¹

They were not a paradise and not a fantasy. They fought with neighbours; the Caribs to the south were rivals, and Taíno society was stratified. But on every point that matters for the encounter, the European record agrees with itself: they were generous, they were unarmoured, they gave things away, and they did not attack.

What was done, in the sources' own words

The second voyage in 1493 was not exploration. Seventeen ships and around 1,200 men sailed to occupy. What followed on Hispaniola is documented in Spanish sources written by Spaniards, several of them Columbus's own supporters.

The tribute system. From 1495, every Taíno above the age of fourteen in the gold-bearing districts was required to deliver a set quantity of gold dust every three months, and to wear a token proving they had. In districts without gold, cotton was substituted. There was not enough gold in the rivers of Hispaniola to meet the quota; it was not physically possible to comply. Las Casas records that the punishment for non-compliance included the cutting off of hands.²

The slave shipments. In February 1495 around 550 captives were loaded for Spain. Michele da Cuneo, an Italian gentleman sailing with Columbus and writing to a friend at home, records that about 200 died on the voyage and were thrown into the sea. The same letter describes, in a boastful register, Cuneo's rape of a captive woman whom Columbus had given him.³ This is not the testimony of an enemy. It is a participant, writing socially, expecting approval.

The war of 1495–96. Cavalry, war dogs and crossbows against people who fought with wooden weapons. Mass hangings and burnings are described by Las Casas, who as a boy in Seville watched Columbus's triumphal return, later went to the islands as a colonist and slaveholder himself, and changed sides.

Judged criminal at the time, by Spain

The claim that Columbus was "a man of his time" fails on the documents. His own government investigated him, arrested him, and stripped him of his governorship.

In 1500 the Crown sent Francisco de Bobadilla to Hispaniola as royal commissioner with authority over Columbus. Bobadilla took testimony from twenty-three witnesses, including Columbus's own allies, and sent Columbus and his brothers back to Spain in chains. The report was long thought lost; it was located in the Spanish national archive at Simancas and published by the historian Consuelo Varela in 2006. Its contents include: a woman paraded naked and whipped through the streets on the accusation of falsely claiming pregnancy; a man's ears and nose cut off; colonists hanged for minor offences; the sale of Indigenous girls, with the note (attributed to Columbus's brother) that girls of nine or ten were in demand.⁴

Columbus was released and given further voyages; the Crown's objection was as much to his misgovernment of Spaniards as to his treatment of Taíno. That does not weaken the point. The standard being applied was a fifteenth-century Spanish standard, and by it, his conduct was excessive enough to warrant arrest. A century of argument followed inside Spain about the legality of the conquest: the Valladolid debate of 1550–51, Las Casas against Sepúlveda, Vitoria's lectures at Salamanca on whether the Indians had rights. Spain argued about this. It concluded, mostly, in favour of conquest. But it argued, which means the alternative was thinkable at the time and was thought.

The collapse, and how to describe it honestly

Pre-contact population figures for Hispaniola range from around 100,000 to several million, and the range is a genuine scholarly disagreement rather than a rhetorical one. What is not disputed is the direction and the speed: by the 1514 repartimiento count there were roughly 26,000 Indigenous people left on the island under Spanish authority; within another generation, the Taíno had ceased to exist as organised polities in the Greater Antilles.⁵

Most of the deaths were from disease. That is true and it is not exculpatory, for three reasons. Enslaved labour in mines and the destruction of the conuco system produced famine and exhaustion, which is what turns an epidemic into a demographic collapse. Reproduction collapsed as families were broken up and people were worked to death. And when the labour force failed, the Spanish replaced it: first by raiding other islands, then by importing enslaved Africans, the first shipments arriving in the 1500s.

One correction that matters. "The Taíno were exterminated" is itself partly a colonial claim: genetic studies of modern Caribbean populations show substantial Indigenous ancestry, and communities in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba assert Taíno descent and identity today.⁶ A people can be destroyed as a political and cultural order without every person dying, and declaring them extinct was administratively convenient.

The other half: what the English found

Move north and forward a century. The standard story is of a small band of religious refugees landing on a wild coast and surviving by faith and industry, helped by a friendly Indian who spoke English.

Start with that Indian, because he is the whole story compressed. Tisquantum (Squanto) spoke English because he had been kidnapped in 1614 by Thomas Hunt, one of John Smith's captains, taken to Málaga in Spain and sold. He made his way to England, worked there, and got home around 1619 to find his village of Patuxet empty. An epidemic between 1616 and 1619, almost certainly introduced by earlier European contact, had killed most of the coastal Wampanoag; mortality in some communities is estimated at 75 to 90 per cent.⁷

The Pilgrims settled on the site of Patuxet in 1620. It was cleared, it had fields already broken, and it was empty because its inhabitants had died. Their own account, Mourt's Relation, describes finding and taking baskets of stored corn from Native caches; they record it plainly, and note an intention to pay later. The colony survived its first winter on that corn and on the diplomatic decision of Massasoit, sachem of the Wampanoag, to ally with a weak band of newcomers against rival powers.

The "wilderness" was a farm

The English described the country as a howling wilderness, and their descriptions of its abundance are simultaneously ecstatic: strawberries under the horses' hooves, rivers so full of fish you could walk across on their backs, oaks like an English park. Both descriptions were sincere, and both were wrong in the same way. William Cronon's Changes in the Land is the classic demonstration: the abundance was produced.⁸

• Controlled burning. Southern New England's open, park-like woodland was maintained by deliberate fire, set twice a year to clear undergrowth, improve travel and hunting, and encourage the browse that supported deer. The colonists admired the effect and did not recognise the cause.
• Polyculture. Maize, beans and squash grown together in the same mound (the "three sisters"), with the beans fixing nitrogen, the maize providing the pole, and the squash shading out weeds and retaining moisture. It is a system that outperforms the same crops grown separately, requires no plough, and does not exhaust the soil the way English monoculture did.
• A seasonal round. Coastal groups moved between planting grounds, fishing sites, shellfish beds and winter camps, taking each resource at its peak instead of forcing one landscape to produce everything year-round.
• Fisheries as infrastructure. Stone weirs, and on the Northwest coast clam gardens, engineered intertidal terraces raising shellfish productivity many times over, some of them thousands of years old.⁹

And this is where the settlers' complaints become evidence. English observers wrote repeatedly that Indian men were idle: that they hunted and fished, which in England was aristocratic leisure, and left the fields to women. What they were describing without understanding it was a system that met its needs with far less drudgery than English agriculture, because it was working with the ecology instead of against it. The precise figure often quoted (four or five days of work a week) cannot be documented for New England the way it can for the Kalahari studies of chapter 1, and this chronicle will not invent a number. What can be documented is the pattern: seasonally concentrated labour, high nutritional return, substantial time not spent working, and European observers who saw that and called it laziness.¹⁰

The legal consequence was not incidental. English law took possession of land through improvement, vacuum domicilium, the empty dwelling: land not enclosed, ploughed and permanently settled was legally available. Defining Indigenous land management as non-agriculture was therefore not an aesthetic mistake. It was the title deed.

The detail nobody teaches

Across the colonial period, a striking number of Europeans captured by or living among Indigenous peoples refused to return. When captives were repatriated by treaty, many had to be brought back by force, and some escaped again to go back. The reverse (Indigenous people voluntarily taking up settler life) was rare. James Axtell assembled the evidence; Benjamin Franklin remarked on it in 1753, unable to explain it and slightly embarrassed by it.¹¹

Whatever else that tells us, it demolishes the premise on which four centuries of conquest were sold. People who had experienced both, and could choose, frequently chose the society that was supposed to be inferior.

Chapter 10 turns to the institution that made the choice unavailable to almost everyone else.

Footnotes

1. Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); William F. Keegan and Corinne L. Hofman, The Caribbean before Columbus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). ↩
2. Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias, book I; and his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552). Las Casas's figures are widely regarded as inflated; his descriptions of practices are corroborated by other sources. ↩
3. Michele da Cuneo, letter to Gerolamo Annari, 15–28 October 1495, in Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, ed. and trans. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Heritage Press, 1963), pp. 209–228. ↩
4. Consuelo Varela and Isabel Aguirre, La caída de Cristóbal Colón: el juicio de Bobadilla (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2006). ↩
5. On the demographic dispute, Massimo Livi Bacci, "Return to Hispaniola: Reassessing a Demographic Catastrophe," Hispanic American Historical Review 83:1 (2003), pp. 3–51; and Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge, 1998). ↩
6. Hannes Schroeder et al., "Origins and genetic legacies of the Caribbean Taino," PNAS 115:10 (2018), pp. 2341–2346. ↩
7. Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 2011), ch. 2; on the epidemic, John S. Marr and John T. Cathey, "New Hypothesis for Cause of Epidemic among Native Americans, New England, 1616–1619," Emerging Infectious Diseases 16:2 (2010), pp. 281–286. ↩
8. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), esp. chs. 3–5. ↩
9. Dana Lepofsky et al., "Ancient Shellfish Mariculture on the Northwest Coast of North America," American Antiquity 80:2 (2015), pp. 236–259. On Californian systems, M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). ↩
10. Cronon, Changes in the Land, pp. 51–57, collects the colonial complaints about "idleness" and reads them against the seasonal round. ↩
11. James Axtell, "The White Indians of Colonial America," William and Mary Quarterly 32:1 (1975), pp. 55–88; Benjamin Franklin to Peter Collinson, 9 May 1753. ↩