Notes on Chapter 1: Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress

Summary of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States

Zinn uses Chapter 1: Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress, not to address the first known Europeans to actually step foot on what we now call the United States, but the moment imperialism begins in this part of the world. He also uses this time to explain his purpose for writing People’s History of the United States.

For the latter part, he uses the Kissinger quote to make his point, “History is the memory of the states”. Good ol’ Henry quoted that in a history book he wrote using the point of view of the world leaders in Europe in the 19th century. Howard was going to do better. He wouldn’t focus just on the leaders, as he knew they never truly represented the people as a whole. 

He wrote, “One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts”. Basically, he is saying we can’t change the past, but we can learn not to accept the atrocities as just prices to pay for progress and actually try to learn from them what not to do.

So, we begin.

The year is 1492 and Columbus convinced the King and Queen of Spain (Ferdinand and Isabella, respectively) to finance his trip. Columbus was looking for a better route than what the Portuguese had been using around South Africa since the Turks shut off the land roads to China. 

Gold was becoming more important for status than property and his benefactors wanted as much as they could get. Columbus talked them into believing he was the man for the job. If he brought them the gold they desired, he would get 10%, governorship over any lands and a lovely title, Admiral of the Ocean Sea. 

Howard mentions a story within this chapter about how it was a sailor named Rodrigo that discovered the signs of land first. There had been an offer of 10,000 maravedis every year for life to the first person to spot land. However, Columbus claimed that he actually saw the signs first the night before. The dude couldn’t even give the sailor his due. Hero? 

Zinn opens the chapter with the Arawaks standing on their Bahama Island watching as the 3 ships come in. We can only gather what the idiginous people were thinking from Columbus’s log. He describes their awe, how generous they were and how they were well-built. Columbus also notes with 50 men they could “subjugate them all and make them do what we want.”

Probably the first thing Columbus himself actually spied was the small gold studs the Arawaks wore in their ears. This convinced him he hit the jackpot. He kidnapped a few Arawaks onto his ship and demanded that they bring them to the source of the gold.

From there he went to what is now known as Haiti (the Spaniards called Hispanola) and his largest ship, the Santa Maria, ran to ground so he constructed the first European military fort out of the timbers there and called it Navidad (Christmas). He left 39 men there and sailed with the rest plus a few Arawaks he would offer to the King and Queen. 

In Spain, he exaggerated his findings enough so that he was given 17 ships and 1200 men. On his second trip back to Spain in 1495, still not finding that gold source, he brought 500 Arawaks out of the 1500 his men captured, 200 of them died en route. 

Since the natives kept dying in captivity, Columbus was desperate to make good on his promises to fill his ships with gold. He ordered each Native 14 or older to round up a certain quantity of gold and return with it every 3 months. In doing so, they would get a copper token to wear around their necks. If a native did not have this token, the Spaniards would cut their hands off and let them bleed to death. Since there was not much gold there, the natives fled and were hunted down with dogs and killed.

The Natives tried to resist but the Spaniards had armor, muskets, horses and swords. When the resisters were caught they were hung or burned to death. The Arawaks turned to suicide by cassava poisoning to escape their fate. 

Within 2 years, the population of 250K Arawaks on the island of Hispaniola were cut in half. The ones that survived were used as slaves at the large estates called encomiendas. By 1515 there were about 50K Natives left. By 1550 about 5K. 

Besides Columbus's logs, another source for information at the time came from a priest named Bartolome de las Casas. He did own a plantation at one time but gave it up and became a "vehement critic of Spanish cruelty". Las Casas, in his fifties, wrote a multivolume history of the West Indies. He describes the natives as agile and good swimmers. He talks about how they do battle from time to time but more for individual reasons and not for a ruler.

He thought Black slaves would make better workers but took that back after watching how the Spaniards treated slaves, such as riding the backs of Natives & making them carry big leaves to fan them. They got more cruel as time went on and there was no defending themselves.

This is not only imperialism at work but the birth of capitalism. 

Zinn writes as he segues the book to what is now known as the United States, "What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortes did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots." 

In 1585, the Englishman Richard Grenville brought 7 ships to what is now Virginia and was greeted by the natives there much like Columbus was by the Arawaks with curiosity and generosity. So yeah, when he believed a silver cup was stolen by one of the members of the Aquascogoc, he burnt down their village and cornfields.

In the winter of 1609-1610 came the "Starving Time" and a few of the English ran off to the Natives because they knew they would get fed there. When the colonists didn't return after the winter was over the governor asked the Natives to return them which they refused.

Soldiers were sent out “to take Revenge”. Zinn writes, “They fell upon an Indian settlement, killed fifteen or sixteen Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing around the village, took the queen of the tribe and her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard...The queen was later taken off and stabbed to death.”

Twelve years later, the English settlers kept coming and the Natives tried to destroy the English food source and also killed 347 settlers and from there on “it was total war”. The English, knowing the indigenous did not make for good slaves, decided they needed to exterminate them. 

The historian Edmund Morgan is quoted here, “Since the Indians were better woodsmen than the English and virtually impossible to track down, the method was to feign peaceful intentions, let them settle down and plant their corn wherever they chose, and then, just before harvest, fall upon them, killing as many as possible and burning the corn... . Within two or three years of the massacre the English had avenged the deaths of that day many times over.”

Now Zinn moves north to Massachusetts and the Puritans that landed there in 1620. There was an uneasy truce with the Pequots but the Puritans wanted land and that was not to hold for long. In 1636 they used the murder of Captain John Stone, who Zinn describes as “a white trader, Indian-kidnaper, and troublemaker”, as an excuse to go after the Pequots in earnest. 

The Natives didn’t have the weapons to use against the English. They were used to fighting each other on the same level of weapon technology but also, the English had no problem breaking promises and they took no mercy. 

It is estimated that there were 10 million indigenous living in North America before the Europeans came, and about the time of the King Phillip’s War which began in 1675, there was less than 1 million. This was both due to the disease that the Europeans brought and the wars.

Zinn writes, “Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property. It was a morally ambiguous drive; the need for space, for land, was a real human need. But in conditions of scarcity, in a barbarous epoch of history ruled by competition, this human need was transformed into the murder of whole peoples.”

Zinn talks about how the indigenous of these lands were much more egalitarian than the Europeans. The women were treated much better and no one person owned the land but it was shared for the common good. There was a stark contrast in how the Europeans lived, in a patriarchal society with classes of rich and poor, the haves and have nots. 

Howard ends chapter one with this: “Even allowing for the imperfection of myths, it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western civilization.”