Oh my goodness, it's behind the Bastards the podcast or Michael Swain and I talk about how Christopher Columbus was actually kind of a cool guy. Michael, how do you you know a lot of people get angry at him because of the slavery in the genocide. But I hadn't heard that. But have you have you considered is it Ohio that has a Columbus or is it Missouri has a Columbus? Both of them have a Columbus, don't they? Maybe both at least Ohio, at least one American state has a town called Columbus. And I'm gonna say they have good pizza. I don't know. Nobody knows. Michael. You play video games, right, your big video games guy pizza? I play video games. You are regular guy. Robert you are. I should introduce you first, not that you need in because, as you said, the format is and always has been Robert Evans and Michael Swain talking about Christopher Columbus's that's every episode of this show. Um, Michael, you are the only member of the Cracked das for a who has visited me in my new home. Um, I I guess I could say that it's probably because of the plague, but I think it's it's it's a direct personal insult. But in any case, when you were here, you brought out a machine which allowed you to play video games on my television. UM, a gaming console, right, And that made me think it's that this was like a year ago now, but it maybe I've been thinking ever since. Boy, it seems like it'd be nice to sit down on the couch and play a play a video game old fashioned style. So I don't know, I don't have a lot of hobbies anymore, Michael um, and I kept thinking about it, and yesterday I don't know why, I was feeling kind of depressed, and I was like, I am going to play a video game on the couch, but I didn't have it. I don't have a console. I don't have any way to do that. So I go down to the video game store and I'm like, I would like one PlayStation or Xbox, it doesn't matter. And they told me you can't do that. You have to get an invitation to buy a one. That's the way that all gaming consoles work now. And so I just need to ask, was a video game guy, what the funk is going on? With video games. Why you just go buy a video game machine? Well, if you collect six Steam decks, then your punch card is full and you can get a PS five. No, it's uh, my understanding is that the well full disclosure. I used to work at I g N and I would know this ship. Um, I've laughed. That was like four or five six months ago. So I believe though that that should be turning a corner soon. Actually, chip shortage and the video card shortage kind of has already broken. That's those I have no idea what I have. I I've got. I've got a gaming laptop that I bought a year or so ago in another fit of depression. And so I just I realized, eventually, why am I trying to buy a PlayStation? All I want to do is play Grand Theft Out oh five. I can just download that on Steam and buy a controller and plug it all into my TV. So it's fine now I figured it out. Um, but I was did you go back and punched that clerk in the mouth? No, he would he would like, yeah, I mean he wasn't being rude. It's just like I didn't realize we'd gotten to there with video game consis where you have to get an invitation like dinner with a shake. What is happening here? I remember at work when the PS fives were coming out, they told us all to sign up for X number of lottery tickets because if we didn't get enough consoles to go around for the staff, we wouldn't be able to cover stuff, which is the entire livelihood of the god what periods? Wild? What a weird situation? Yeah, it's it's something else, Michael, Michael, hmm, we're talking about Christopher Columbus. Michael Swain, small Bean's network. Uh, formerly of Cracked Dot. That's right, Please don't put my name director of the film kill me now, Michael, Yes, you're ready to get back to Columbus, absolutely or otherwise? Yeah, so, Michael, as our story comes back, it is two now. Columbus has unsailed his ass right across an ocean blue, and he stumbled into a Caribbean island full of people who immediately thinks are number one hot. He repeatedly comments on how good looking they are and number two good potential servants slash slaves. Now. According to his journals, the first thing he focused on trying to do was convert them to Christianity, and most importantly, to make sure that they fought thought that all white people were chill dudes. Now, he did this in a couple of ways, mainly by handing out various trinkets. Here's how he wrote about it in his diary. I in order that they would be friendly to us, because I recognized they were a people who would be better freed from error and converted to our holy faith by love than by force. To some of them, I gave red caps and glass beads which they put on their chests, and many other things of small value, which they took so much pleasure in and became so much our friends that it was a marvel. And one of the things that's like really funny here is that he thinks, like you have you get all these writing from the Spaniards at the time about how silly these people are because the like trade gold gems for like useless bobble, But none of them ever considered the fact that like maybe to these people they're both useless, that like a glass bead and gold about is valuable to each other. Right, Like neither of them do anything. They just look nice. If you've never gotten high and then have the thought gold is just a rock though, man, like it's just a rock someone, just just a rock that sat out in the sun the most according to Plato. And by the way, handing out red caps, I believe this is the official origin of the maga caps. You can play that he started it. Um you might actually you might draw. I don't know. I don't know enough about fucking Italian history in this period to know how meaningful it is. But like you gotta remember, he comes from a place where colored clothing is illegal. Um, so I don't know that's that's that's got the latest hot ship. Look his kids sucking red the color of passion. You don't tell the pope, and I won't tell the pope. My rods and cones are overwhelmed. And it's also it's worth noting that, like, while this is often referred to his gift giving, like him handing out trinkets, it seems based on the descriptions you get that like the Natives considered that that they are consciously like entering an exchange with him, Like he's giving them stuff that they assume he values, because they're giving him things that they value, right, they're assuming he's not being Yeah, they are assuming he's not being an asshole, or like, oh, we gotta give him some nice stuff. He's given us all this nice stuff that we've never seen before, Like they're giving him nice cotton thread and like live parrots, which Columbus thinks they're delicious. Um, he is. You gotta give him credit with one thing. I don't know this is I found this compelling. At least a lot of the Spaniards, especially once they start settling in these islands, refused to eat the local food. It's actually a massive problem. They have to like keep shipping livestock over from Spain because people decide that like their cuisine is gross. Columbus is not one of those guys. He actually gets sick a bunch because he will eat anything these people hand him, which credit where it's due. That's how you're supposed to travel. Yeah. Um, so one item he would give them in return are these tiny hawks bells. And these are like if you're doing falconry. These are like little bells that you tie the tight of birds and used to track them. Um when they're like flying away. I guess it's just a thing that it was easy to get a lot of so that they could have a shipload of these to hand out. But he gives out a lot of hawkspells, and that's going to be noteworthy later, so just keep yeah, there the live strong bracelets of the era. If the lives strong bracelets lead directly to a suicide genocide, yes, here the people who lived on the island that Colmas had discovered and then taken possession of for the Crown were Taino's members of the arrow Wok group. Um. Now, over the coming days, he met with many different like people on this island, many different kinds of arrow walks. Because there's all these different right, like, it's pretty broad population, you know. Um, and I think these are kind of like grouping by by languages. Um. And these guys gave him a bunch of gifts of unknown types, you know, we get he writes down some of them, um, but usually he just writes his hewn as like they gave us trinkets. We don't actually know what that means. They may have been like handing him works of art, decorations, clothing stuff that like could be because these people believe a lot of them, at least believe that he's like a like some sort of celestial visitor. Right, so it's possible they're giving him like cultural artifacts of significant value to them. Um, and he's just like, yeah, they just gave me some crap because it's not gold, right, Like that's the only thing that he actually ever seems to notice. He calls their gifts tedious fishing around his ridiculous panelers, what do I got? What do I got it? Yeah? Yeah, the only things that he like shows any appreciation for are the small pieces of gold jewelry that he sees on some of their bodies. Um. Now it's worth noting that our friend Carol Delaney absolutely fawns over the descriptions Columbus rites of people in geography. Um. She glosses over the fact that he like she She talks about like what a good like anthropy, pological attention to detail that he does that he has, which is interesting because he's also like dismissing all of these different gifts they're giving him his trifles, which I would say is bad anthropology, but I'm not an anthropologist here. Um. So, in short order, Columbus takes his little fleet away from this first island, which is probably San Salvador Um. And heads towards Cuba, which he thinks is Japan, right, um, and he will think that until the day he dies. They were his last words. And yeah, I mean, look, it's you're runningto Cevicha. You think it's sushi. It's happened all of us, you know, the same food basically. Um. Yeah. So yeah, he he decides that, and and part of the reason why he's so like fired up to get to Japan number one, he's still looking for that great con right, He's still looking for like some evidence of these massive Asian civilizations that he knows you're supposed to be here and supposed to be ready for Christianity. Um. And the other thing is that based on his kind of like these conversations he's having with the locals, and they're not really conversations as well as much as like kind of gesture based discussions, but he kind of puts together that the gold he's found, the little pieces of gold, came from that island. So he's like, all right, that's where the gold comes from. And obviously that's the number one thing. So as he leaves this first island and heads for Cuba, he captures a bunch of people and takes them with him. These are random locals that he imprisons on his ship to ask his guides. Now, in her book because She's Terrible, Carol Delaney describes these people as willing and eager guests, friendly natives excited to show the white people around. This is not true. These captives told Columbus that there was an I like. Part of the evidence for the fact that these people were not willing guests is that they teld Columbus like, as they're sailing to Japan Cuba, they tell Columbus there's an island on the way, and they're like, oh, yeah, we've seen people there and they have like these huge gold bracelets that they were on their arms and legs. It's the most gold anyone has it. While, well, we'll take you there. Well will introduce you to them, right, And as soon as they get to the island, all of the Tano prisoners he's taken run the funk away. Um. They absolutely they fucking escape. Um. So he's annoyed by this, and he sends an armed party to the shore to recapture them or to capture somebody else. Um. He also he can't he feels like since he's gotten close to the island, he can't go past it without taking possession of it. Right um, The exact way he writes this is that it was my wish to bypass no island without taking possession. This is another thing Carol fails to mention. So I'm going to quote from Lawrence bear Green's book next quote. He dispatched several seamen in hot pursuit of the fugitives, chasing them ashore, but as he ruefully noted, they all fled like chickens. When another dugout canoe innocently approached with a man who came to trade a skein of cotton, some of the sailors jumped into the sea because he wouldn't come aboard, and sees the poor fellow as a replacement detainee. Observing from his vantage point on the poop deck. Columbus sent for him and gave him a red cap and some beads of green glass, which I placed on his arm, and two hawkspells which I placed on his ears. That is the standard issue trinkets of little value. And I ordered him back to his dugout. So his plan here was to bait the hook. He wanted the locals to approach him with trust so that he could capture more of them. So he like takes this guy, puts him back on his boat with a bunch of trinkets and sends him off, um hopefully so that he can like question the others about gold and all that stuff. And this tactic is pretty successful. Um. People are generally very friendly for him. Um. And there's a few reasons for this. Some of it is that he is giving people gifts from time to time, and so they'll go back and be like, there's some dude and he's handing out ship, let's go meet him. Um. And the other reason is that as club is kind of surmised, they saw him as and his men as quote men who came from the heavens. Now, it is hard for us to know precisely what their beliefs were here, right, We don't have the kind of context that we would like because they are genocided. Um. It he took all their art and ship and overboard. Yeah. Um. It is generally accepted that the people indigenous to a lot of these islands had popular beliefs. And again you're talking about multiple groups of people right there, all into these kind of broad language groups. But that doesn't mean they're like they're often at war. They have different opinions of each other, like right there there anyway, Um, it is uh very likely that some of these people had popular beliefs that divine or divinely inspired beings were going to visit them one day, and it was kind of like a prophecy. Some times. It may have been kind of like an apocalyptic prophecy maybe sort of. You might even view it as a little bit like kind of Christian rapture like readiness, you know, which is not. There are beliefs like that all over the world. It's courts almost every religion. Yeah. Ultimately, um, just that at some point in the distant future, we will meet this magical thing that's we always it's human nature to want to eventually meet or connect with or be one with the thing you made up. Yeah, yeah, exactly, And it's one of those things. So they're they're probably were some prophecies that sort of led some subset of the people he's meeting to believe that he and his Spaniards are divine visitors or celestial visitors or some something ethereal and other worldly. It's also worth noting though, that whenever we talk about prophecies like this, there's like a nasty tendency to act as if these beliefs are universal. It gets flattened. So we say, the people of these islands believed this or that, and we're talking about large, decentralized groups on many islands. Human beings just don't work that way, right, They don't all believe the same thing just because they all live in the Caribbean. Um. And oddly enough, there's a passage from Carol Delaney's book that does a decent job of making this clear. It's one of the little pieces of kind of insight we get into how varied beliefs might actually have been on the ground. Please. This is the beginning of Robert's turn to pro Carol Delaney's super pro Well, you know, I just I haven't found this anecdote and the other stuff read about Clumbus, and I found it fascinating because it answered this question I always had as a kid, when you'd hear like, oh, they believed this or that, and it's like, well they didn't, all right, because we don't, you know, like there must have been sex and schisms and anyway, I find this interesting. At one stop, an old man who had heard of Columbus approached him with a desire to engage in a theological discussion. Perhaps he had heard that Columbus was interested in religious beliefs, or he may have cleverly used this dialogue as a way to protect his people. Columbus, for his part, must have jumped at the chance to have a discussion with a learned native about their beliefs. They talked about the soul and what happens to it after death. The old man explained that his people believed that any injury to the body also affected the soul, and begged Columbus not to injure any of the people. Columbus assured him that he only hurt bad people because that was what his sovereigns had commanded. Unlike others who believed Columbus was some kind of god, this man told Columbus that to his face, that he was quote mortal like everyone else. Columbus was not offended and wrote that the old man expressed his thinking with excellent judgment and courage. So that's interesting to me. Yeah, you get these little like hints of the variety of beliefs and thoughts that might have existed in this population, just the recurring motif of don't worry, I only hurt bad. The core of all Western he is, Yeah, he is. You might we talk a lot on this show about like whiteness and the fact that whiteness is like an idea with shifting boundaries that changed over time. But you might say Columbus was the first white guy. Like he sounds like one for sure. Yeah, he's got like the talk. He's got it all right. You could you could put this guy in like the George Bush White House and he could be delivering fucking press conferences on carpet bombings. It's great. Um. So, as much as she tries to paint him as an unbiased, open minded cultural anthropologist, Columbus's own writing makes it clear that his only interest in these people was using to find and mind gold for his Jerusalem goals. He wrote very little about their actual culture. He brushed over their Again. You have to remember that what he said about their religion is they don't have one, right because he didn't he didn't understand it. So he assumed that they were just like a blank slate ready for Christianity. Um. He ignored their social order almost entirely. He didn't really understand the way they were ordered and who was in charge. He showed very little to no interest in their agriculture except to rape about the quality of their their food, and even that may have been kind of out of desperation as much as anything, because as the days will on, they keep not finding gold. Right, they get these little trinkets, but there's no sign of these gold mines that he had told the King and Queen were going to be here and like huge quantities. So he may have been playing up the only stuff that he thought was a value, right, because but yeah, he doesn't care about the people or their culture. So it's like, well, the food is pretty good. Maybe we can take just imagining flying saucers coming and we're all excited about first contact. And aliens arrive and they're like his rp's open to order a bunch of ship and we're like, do you want to have like cultural interchange? And they're like, don't bother us. I don't care about that, dude. Yeah, and then one of them writes home it gets like asked by his boss, so do the do humans? Is like religion a big deal for them? No, I don't think so, man, I don't really think it's a big deal armies though they got the mates two of these things for six collegues. It's it's like walking around Jerusalem looking for a fucking sandwich, being like, Wow, these people don't have a religion at all. Meanwhile, you have an abduction quota and it doesn't matter who doesn't have numbers. Well, we are getting to the abduction quotas. So the main thing that he does in his writing here rather than again, Carol Laney is like just fucking hard as hell about trying to portray him as like this, this like anthropological savant um. I think Lawrence bear Green gets it more correctly when he describes Columbus as writing about the new world that he's found as a quote tabula rasa in which his sovereigns would leave a lasting imprint of empire. Columbus wrote that quote your highnesses will command a city and fortress to be built in these parts, and these countries converted. And I certify to your Highness is that it seems to me that there could never be under the son lands superior to them, and fertility and mindfulness of cold and heat, and abundance of good and pure water, and the rivers are not like those of Guinea, which are all pestilential, which is obviously Portuguese have guinny. Right, So he's trying to he's he's he's not to the fact, to the extent that he describes all of this lovingly, He's not doing it out of legitimate interest. He's doing it to try to make it attractive to the King and queens. Sales pitch, sales pitch. He's shown no interest in learning these things. No, he's it's gold. It's just it's a sales in part because, as per the deally as with him, if this turns into a colony and there's trade, he gets like a quarter of the profits forever, right Like that's part of why he's trying to sell them on this place. Everything he's writing is like he's like a fucking um, I don't know if you yeah, he's he's, he's, he's a salesman, right Like. That's what he's trying to sell is this land other people live on. And part of the way he's selling that is like and they're barely even real, like they don't here, they don't care, like they do whatever you want them to do. He's playing life like it's civ three before they had all the like theism and adds it's just I clicked on your ship. Dude, it's my color. No, it's my stuff now yeah, So right up from American Heritage summarizes columbus feelings after first contact with the Arawak on San Salvador. Quote two days after the first landing of the expedition on the tiny island of Guana Honey in the Outer Bahamas, which Columbus christened San Salvador, when your Highness is so command they could all be carried off to castile or be held captive in the island itself, he wrote, because with fifty men, they could all be subjugated and compelled to do anything one wishes. He said the line, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, the Tino did try to introduce Columbus and his men to their food into various inventions of their culture. Um, and some of these did take. The most exciting invention that they found that the Europeans found was the hammock. They had not invented hammock technology yet. Um. We get our word hammock from from the the Arawak language. Um, and this is a big deal because, like among other things, right, you think about a boat and the way boats are constructed. People don't have rooms on boats in this day. So you're just all sleeping in a pile around whatever ship's boy is like too slow to evade capture by the mob. Yeah. The image is just sailors like on the floor on a shelf sleeping. Yeah. The hammock is going to revolutionize sleeping on boats. Um. You know. Anyway, so you know there was a genocide, but at least the world got the hammock. We got the hammock. It's a great it is. I just I want to see that packaged as a Pis a hammocks worth it, we think, so, the United hammock ad pitch. It's just like a devastated land masquerade, the hammock worth it a Native American in a hammock. Yeah, a single tier. We know that. We know the drill. So slowly, as the days turned into weeks, Columbus and his crew began to learn bits and pieces of the local language. Now, the most important phrase that they learned was don't be afraid and pro tip, somebody chilling, that's chilling. It's really fucked up. Right. If anyone starts a conversation, that's the number one way to know someone means to hurt you. If they start by saying, don't be afraid, then you need to be very frightened. That's a shooting word, Michael. That is that is a shooting phrase. Um. If an alien comes to my door saying that I Am not going to assume that what my trinkets? Yeah, what is your word for it? Come with me to a second location? Is that? How do your people say, leave your cell phone behind? Um? So, Carol Delaney gives Christopher big ups for realizing that quote. The natives were not speaking Gibberish, as later so many Europeans attributed to primitive people's and that it was important to learn their language. Yes, figured out that humans speak language. Christopher, yes, one of his many achievements, but still he and his He and his men were not very good at the task of learning the local language. Six weeks into their journey, he wrote, quote, I do not know the language, and the people of these lands do not understand me, nor do I nor anyone else that I have with me them. And many times I understand one thing, said by these Indians that I bring for another it's contrary, nor do I trust them much because many times they have tried to flee. But now, pleasing our Lord, I will see that the most that I can, and little by little I will progress an understanding and acquaintance, and I will have this tongue talk to persons of my household, because I see that up to this point it is a single language. Now, first off, it is like a group of languages, but it's probably broadly like you know, you go to like the Balkans and there's like the different kind of Serbo Croatian sort of dialects and they're all different languages. But like like Ukraine, if you if you speak Ukrainian, you can communicate to someone in Russian with vice. Right, It's probably is kind of like that, but these are different islands, so you have to assume they are not, in fact, just one single language. Um. But yeah, anyway, it's interesting to me that he's like, there's a that's interesting here to me, including the fact that he's like, I can't trust them very much because they keep running away when I capture them. Weird things I've learned about these people don't like kidnapping, real anti kidnapping vibes on the natives on the islands. It's just weird to imagine the because I know, because I know the way history and human beings work, that there must be areas where I live with a similar level of delusion, and I just swallow it. But the idea that he can think that and just be like, that's weird, Like how does that not hammer home the core value of Oh, I see they're like me. They're having the same experience I'm having. But if they were kidnapped, it's just bizarre. The people their brains that much. I don't know that. I don't know that. I think you do live with that level of delusion. I think we all live with areas in which our our level of knowledge is that incomplete. But what he's saying is a delusion. And it's a delusion because, as both a religious fanatic and an obsessive narciss he is incapable of looking at anything that happens to him through any lens other than how it affects his ambitions right, and so his interpretation of reality has to be tortured and twisted in order to make further those ends right. No matter what, no matter what is happening, he has to find a way to translate it in that way. And I don't think you have that my having known you for a while. Well, if I'm losing in a video game, I do blame the controller. That we all do a degree of this. Yes, yes, In his case, the controller is several hundred thousand people with their own culture and religion. It's weird and bad that they want to not be abducted. It's like, because I want to abduct them, what is the problem here? I call it their fatal flaw. Lovely people. Otherwise, the fact that he needs to learn this language so that he can better convert and capture them is what convinces According to Delaney, this is what convinces Columbus that he needs to quote take six Indians back with him when he left for Spain so that they could learn Spanish. Now, she assures us that the experience was meant to be reciprocal, so that his family could learn that. It's like, you know, it's like a gap here cultural exchange for these people. That's how Carol describes it. It's also the very first iteration of this is America Speak American. Damn, I gotta learn Spanish. Sure, it's just gonna learn Spanish. That's just gonna be easier here. I'm gonna be honest. It is amazing, Like there is there is a type of person, and maybe Columbus is the first that like when you stumble upon, like find yourself in a place surrounded by people who speak and believe differently than you, like, your first thought is like, well, I gotta make everybody a little bit more like me. This is what gonna do. Someone's got to help these people in what do you call this place, Lisbon, No, that ain't gonna work, No, nope, nope. So she she describes this as like, yeah, these people are excited to learn from him, and he's going to learn from them, and it's just this lovely cultural exchange that's going down. Bear Green describes this is a much uglier process where there do seem to be some Tino who were excited I did to see Spain as you'd expect, because again, they're not all one people and any time you get like effectively aliens coming, some people are going to be like, well ship, yeah, I want to see what I got. I see what's going on there right um. The whole process was in fact closer to abduction than anything. Quote. On Sunday, November ten, a dugout canoe arrived with six men and five women to pay their respects. Columbus returned their hospitality by detaining them. That's Columbus's words. In expectation of returning to Spain with them, he bolstered their number with seven additional women and three boys. He explained his thinking this way. I did this because the men would behave better in Spain with women of their country than without them. His decision, he said, was based on his experiences detaining the inhabitants of Africa's west coast to Portugal. Many times I happened to take men of Guinea that they might learn the language in Portugal, and after they returned, it was expected to make some use of them in their own country, owing to the good company that they had enjoyed and the gifts they had received. But matters never turned out as hoped. The problem, he decided, was that without are women, the men would not cooperate. This time the result would be different. His latest captives, having their women, will find it good business to do what they are told and these women would teach our people their language, which he assumed is the same in all these islands of India at is indistinguishable from an m z U super villain. It is it is if if we threaten their wives, they'll do what we want. Now, Michael, you didn't mean to do this, but you actually made it a little bit less fucked up in your head there. So this is an interesting point in bear Green's write up. It just sounds like he has detained these guys with their wives, right, Like he's detained men with the women that they were like in relationships with. That's right, buddy, he doesn't. They're interchangeable to him. I'm gonna I'm gonna quote from another write up from American Heritage that makes a point I did not see noted elsewhere. And this is them quoting from Columbus's journal. Afterwards, I sent to a house which is in the area of the river to the west, Columbus says in his journal. And they brought back seven head of women, small and large, and three children. I did this because the men would come with themselves better in Spain having women from their land, when without them. So again he is kidnapping seven head of women to keep the male captives docile. Um. He uses the phrase the the exact way he writes, this is cabezz um, which is the way you it's the way you'd say. He's saying seven ahead of women exactly the exact same way. Um. So number one, that's pretty bad, um. And number two he is he is like he doesn't understand that people have individual rooms. He's just taking He's like, well, I've got guys, I gotta get girls, gotta collect the set. He's just grabbing random women to go with these men, seven girls. And because like they are all traveling, all of the natives in here travel on canoes from island to island. He doesn't I don't think he actually even knows that, like the men and the women come from the same island. Like he may have grabbed people from different villages. And just like, now you got your women with you, why aren't you happy? Um? And it's interesting. Um. Spanish a story in jose A Cinceo writes, quote and this is a guy kind of writing. Around the time, this was a great abuse and bad judgment on the part of the admiral, which was to set a most lamentable precedent and act so apparently trifling, which was to have fatal consequences. And that's interesting because number one, it does show that like people at the time are are recognizing this is an abuse and bad This is like a bad thing to do to people. But also it does say a lot that a Censeo calls kidnapping a bunch of people apparently trifling, trifling to think that this minor kidnapping of like a dozen people would leading perfect. Yeah, Um, so anyway, that's pretty bad. Um. Father Less Casas is even more kind of clear when he writes in his historia quote one might ask whether it was not a most grievous sin to pillage with violence women who had their own husbands. Who was to give an accounting to God for the sins of adultery committed by the Indians whom he took with him and to whom he gave those wives the sexual partners. And again that's also you can see where lost Causas is where he's like, well, my God, they've broken the sacred bonds of marriage. Who's going to explain this to God? Um, it's very funny, it's not. So Now again, there are again some people here and there who do show interest in hanging out with Columbus Um, but Columbus was not always interested in the people who wanted to go with him willingly. There's one point in his diary where a canoe with a man, two women, and three kids rose up to his ship and the man begs to join Columbus and like go back to Spain with him, and Columbus is frustrated because the guy is old and can't do hard work, so he's like, well, he's not gonna make a very good slave. I don't want this guy. Come on the reason I'm kidnapping the young strapping ones? Um just lying in a hammock judging people's lives. Yeah, now, Michael, you know who won't kidnap random groups of men and women from a culture and jam them into the hold of a sailing vessel together to take act to Seville our sponsor, Big hammock, Come on down to gigmmock, hammocks. We didn't start this situation. Look, all we do is make hammocks. Now, it's fine, it's just woven thread. Yeah, hammocks. The genocide was created prior to the start of the corporate charter couldn't be hammocks that ultimately ended the genocide causality connection. I don't know, I'm just a hammock. I'm just yeah, this is just selling hammocks. Um okay, here's ads. Oh we're back, Michael. So on every island he visits, Columbus sets himself to the task of erecting gigantic crosses. Delaney notes that this is more evidence that he had no intention to enslave the locals, because this is her logic. If he converts them to Christianity, they can't be enslaved, right, So the fact that he keeps building crosses on their land evidence that he doesn't want them all enslaved. Right. He's a good guy. Oh yeah, when someone puts a cross up in your yard, it's not It is historically always a good thing usually. Um So. Bear Green brings up parts of Columbus's notes that Delaney seems to ignore. At one point in November, he did write that the indigenous people were quote very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil, neither murder nor theft. And they are without arms and are so timid that a hundred of them flee before one person of ours. He recommended to the Queen, quote, your Highness ought to resolve to make them Christians, For I believe that if you began in a short time, you would achieve the conversion to our holy faith of a multitude of folk, and would acquire great lordships and riches and all their inhabitants for Spain. Now, the source of these riches is quite clear in his mind. Quote because without doubt there is in these countries a tremendous quantity of gold. And in case the extent of his meaning hasn't sunk in yet, gold needs to be mined. The indigenous folks acquired the small amounts of gold that they had mainly through like searching riverbeds, right sifting through rocks and riverbeds and stuff to find little bits of gold. But to actually take the quantities necessary to fund his conquest of Jerusalem, proper minds would need to be open and converted. Indigenous people couldn't be enslaved, because you know, Christians can't be enslaved, but they could be forced to labor in gold mines as part of their taxes to the new enslavement exactly, And is there like assaying technology at this time? Like is he right that there's a bunch of gold. Does yes? I mean they do find gold right, like he sees like when there are it is like a reasonable conclusion that if you see a bunch of people with little bits of gold, well somewhere there has to be a place where that gold's coming. His thinking on that matter is not like delusional or anything. He's seeing like pieces of gold and he's like, well, there's got to be a place that's coming from. But as far as reasonable conclusions go, he's not making a lot of them. So I know you're respect that for a second. They do find this, that is, unfortunately where the story is going. They do find old mines. So on November eleventh, the admiral's fleet anchors off the coast of Cuba, which he thinks again is Japan. He and his men quickly put to shore, expecting to find gold. This was where all the people he'd met in islands along the way had told him the gold came from. But only a few of the folks he meets on the shore are wearing gold jewelry, and again it tends to be pretty small pieces of gold jewelry. Now Columbus is seriously starting to worry. At this point, he's burning through days. He can't stay out here forever, and he can't just return with some gold drinkets, he feels, because that's not going to be enough to entice the King and Queen. So increasingly he starts to focus on what has he seemed to be like, and what he's come to see is the most readily available source of wealth in this new world, which is its people. Right. If I can't find gold, I can at least take and sell the people from a right up. In an American Heritage quote, on Monday, December three, the Admiral assured the sovereigns that ten men could cause ten thousand of the natives to flee, so cowardly and faint hearted are they. And they carry no arms except some rods at the end of which are pointed sticks which are fire hardened. And again Delaney is like portraying him is in love with these people and building these deep relationships, and everything he's writing is like, we could fuck these guys up, no problem, they can't stop us where God's here. It's just it's wild that he's like, I don't know, I'll you want to make them our religion you want to use him as slaves, you want some rocks, like whatever. What's important is they're here and we can suck them up. I mean he's literally is willing to denude the landscape that he's discovering, of whatever, as long as he gets what do you know, something valuable. Now, by December sixte his ideas in this respect have taken definite form. Quote and here's Columbus again. They have no weapons and are all naked, without any skill in arms, and are very cowardly, so that a thousand would not challenge three. Thus they are useful to be commanded and to be made to labor and so and do everything else of which there is need, and build towns and be taught to wear clothes and learn our customs. I call them. Think they can be talked to walk and speak as a man. It is also like you come across these people and you recognize, Wow, everyone here looks very healthy and very healthy, happy, and their food is delicious, and it's like a paradise. You know it would be great is teaching them how to labor and forcing them to build towns and wear pants. Yeah, well you hate to see it. Um, it's the seaside. I don't think his interest is improving their lives, but sure, yeah it is. It is not um. Now. I want to contrast these things which Columbus writes himself during his travels with how Carol Delaney describes the exploration of Cuba slash Japan by Columbus quote, he sent some men ashore, giving instructions as usual that if the natives fled at their approach, the men must not touch or take anything from their houses. From the very beginning, Columbus notes how generously the natives shared whatever they had, and he did not want his crew to take advantage of them. He demanded that there must be an exchange, for example, beads and bells for needed food supplies. It was unequal, to be sure, but trade. Nonetheless, he continually recounts having to restrain his crew from looting villages when the residents fled at their approach. Throughout the diary, he repeats, I did not allow anything to be taken, not even the value of a pin. Now it's interesting because she's not wrong, and that he does repeatedly tell his men not to loot. He writes regularly back to his sovereigns that I said not to loot. But when you just include that part of the story, you get this vision of like a guy who's really just trying to meet people and explore, and he's constantly dealing with the fact that his men are unethical and want to just rob things. Already, question why you have a corporate culture where everyone under you is like champing at the bit exactly exactly, but when, Because what Carol has done here is cut out every time he's written, like, boy, literally three of us could beat all of these people in a war, and then we could own them and make them work for us. Like I'm not going to kill you, but like that dude, like that it would be easy. Right. Um. Yeah, So again, when you're leaving all that out, perhaps you are doing a disingenuous job of writing about a guy's backstory. Um. I'm not an anthropologist like Carol Delaney, but I see that as perhaps missing a key part of the story. Um. Now, one thing we're not going to be getting into a lot in these episodes is the story of the Pinzon brothers. Um Delaney leaves them out, mostly to all she kind of notes is that in late November, Martin Alonso Pinzon, who's the captain and owner of the Pina. Right, all of these ships had other guys who owned them. They were just kind of in service to the Spanish ground. He abandons the fleet out of greed, right, like, not that long after after they arrive, he takes the Pina and he just goes separately and does his own thing for a while. And she makes Pinzona out to be basically the villain of the Columbus story, this dangerous and competent buffoon who tries to like ruin. He's trying to like steal gold while he's away, and he's not listening to Columbus. And it is true that Pinzon takes the Penta and kind of leaves the fleet and returns Spain eventually, like separately, it is inaccurate to portray him as some buffoonish foil. Penzona and his brothers basically hand all of the expedition's logistics. Martin Pinzone was the only reason Columbus was able to find a crew. He was a very respected sailor in Palos, and he basically convinced others to join the journey. Interviews we have with crew members and their families from a later court case between the two suggests that he basically ran all of the day to day business of the expedition because Columbus wasn't good at it and no one trusted him. Um. Evidence that maybe people were right not to trust Columbus as an expedition leader comes right around Christmas, when the Santa Maria sinks like a motherfucker off the coast of what is today Haiti. Now the precise cause of the accident is unclear, and it is partly unclear because Columbus wrote and revised his own account of the disaster repeatedly in order to like blame different people. Um. At first, he blames the ship's boy, who he says is at the tiller at the wrong time and screws up Um. But as time goes on, he starts to claim that the ship hit an invisible reef while he slept, and then, finally, as bear Greenwrights quote now, he insisted it was caused by the treachery of the master and the people He's talking about. Pen Zone here, refusing to run out the anchor from stim to Kedge that his hall off the ship is the admiral ordered there was no more mention of the hapless boy at the tiller, or Columbus's fatigue, or the holiday celebrations, treachery had taken their place. So basically, he's having issues with his crew. A lot of them trust these pen Zones, and like one of the pen Zone brothers fucking leaves with his guys, and Columbus initially is like, this thing sank because we were celebrating for the holiday and like I was tired. We didn't like pay enough attention. Then he's like, no, it was this boy. And then he's like, no, it was treachery from the men of Palos who wanted to ruin the expedition and like didn't do what I told them do. Um. I don't know. I think Columbus maybe literally fell asleep at the wheel, Like it is entirely possible that he just kind of like passes out and the Santa Maria crashes. Um. But yeah, anyway, it's very funny. UM. And what's interesting here is that kind of by that last revision of the story, and what we're seeing is an increasingly paranoid Christopher Columbus because he's he's under a lot of stress. He has to justify this expedition, and he also has come to increasingly believe that like God is directing him right, God brought him here, and he is like achieving a sacred end for the Lord. And so finally a good turn in the story because God's good. God's going to know what to do. This is gonna be great. Well, God is telling him that all of the crewman he has are conspiring against him to stop him from achieving his goals. So the good news is that Columbus, his men and most of their possessions get rescued by a local leader a caseique, which is kind of I don't know, vaguely speaking, it's like a chief, right. A caseque is like kind of a local kind of villager town level leaders. Something. They seem to have pretty widely differing kind of like numbers of people following the little management. No, I mean definitely, I know it just yeah, it doesn't it doesn't look like there's like a long chain. But yeah. One of these guys is named Um guacanagari Um, and Guacanagari is either, depending on kind of how you interpret things, either one of these guys who sees the Spaniards is maybe some semi divine or he's just a very savvy local politician who sees them as powerful military allies against his enemies. Right, he recognizes, well, these guys have good weapons, and if I get in their good books, they will help protect me from my enemies. Right. So, after he rescues Columbus and his men from this sinking, he offers to build houses for the admiral and his men and like let them live there. And he presents them with several gold gifts, like he gives them kind of some of the biggest pieces of gold Columbus has found um and he tearfully expresses his intense desire for friendship. Now, Carol Delaney writes about this at length and presents it as a beautiful example of platonic cross cultural love between these two men into Charlie Brown special effire exactly yeah, yeah, he had, he had. Guacanagari are like just the best of buds um Bear. Green's writing makes it clear that the caseque was motivated as much by real politique as anything else. Quote. Striding past groves of trees next to the houses, the Spaniards found themselves escorted to their guest quarters by a good thousand people, all naked except for Guacanagari, who out of respect for his guests, now wore a shirt and gloves that the Admiral had given him, and over the gloves he made more rejoicing than anything. They talked of strategic matters of the Indians, fierce rifles, the Caribs, who carried bows and arrows reminiscent of the Spaniards, exhausted weapons but made without any iron, and of the way the Caribs captured the Indians at will. At once the Admiral said by signs that the sovereigns of Castile would order the Caribs to be destroyed and would order them all brought with their hands bound. To reinforce his show of strength, Columbus ordered a lombard and must get to be fired. The two shots, powered by gunpowder technology unknown to the Indians, shattered the Caribbean calm and the Indians fell to the earth. So this guy is like, you can stay here, we can be friends. Um. You know, by the way, would you help us out with these local enemies of ours who are like rating us and taking some of our people captive. And Columbus is like, oh, once I tell the Queen this, you know she's going to approve a genocide, will wipe them out. Don't worry. Look at look at our guns. Um. And this is going to be note where they lay here, because now that the Caribs are kind of in the picture, we've established basically everyone he's met before is like peaceful and and friendly. Um, the Caribs are not peaceful, or at least it is. He has have agendas. They're doing things well there. They can at least be portrayed that way. And if there is a group of people here who are aggressive, well then suddenly a whole world of military options opens up. Right. I guess that's like me. That's like me sticking my fist to do a wasps nest and going, well, this man, you see that I had no choice. Um. That is basically what happens here. Now. The show of modern arms has two purposes for Columbus. For one thing, obviously, it does establish his value as an ally to this guy, but it also acts as a show of force to Guacanagari and his people, because with the Santa Maria sunk, Columbus doesn't have space on his boats to take all of his people back to Spain. But when the Cacique offers him a home on the island. The admiral is like, well, wait a second, I can make a fortress here, Like I can leave some guys behind. We can fortify it, and I'll have built the first strong point for Spanish power in the region. It'll be like the start of our of our trading system and stuff throughout the islands Um and Columbus. Now, because he's kind of taken with this vision, he starts to see the loss of his flagship, the sinking of the Santa Maria, as divinely inspired. He was. He decided quote preordained to run aground and to meet Guacanagari. And while his initial mission had been simple exploration, he was obligated now by Holy Fiat to actually start colonizing this new land. Quote now I have given orders to erect a tower and a fortress, all very well done, and a great mote. Not that I believe it to be necessary for these people. For I take it for granted that with this people, I could conquer all this island, which I believe to be bigger than Portugal, and double the number of inhabitants. So he's like, I'm building a fortress, even though I don't really need one, right, like I could conquer it without one, But I'm gonna make one. Um now of the people who are already there, Columbus showed now no real pretense of kindness. He described them as cow wardly and beyond hope of cure. It is right that this tower should be built, he insisted. And it is as it should be. Being so far from your Highness is that they may recognize the skill of Your Highness's subjects and what they can do, so that they may serve them with love and fear. So he's like, part of what he's saying here is that the reason we should build a fortress here is to show these people is to have, is to provide a physical, like a physical example of the power of the Spanish crown. Right. We don't need this fortress because to defend ourselves from them, because they're harmless. What we need it for is that they never forget that now they're subjects of the kingdom. Here exactly we are, pennywise. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna build us a little death star in the middle of their nice little Caribbean islands so they never forget that the empires on their fucking absolute construction on the town. The death that is, that is his brilliant idea. So he said, he leaves about forty of his guys there to create a new settlement, and they're meant to build up infrastructure using native labor to hell and collect gold for Spain that's going to be there upon their return. Carol Delaney writes that the men he left behind were just super jazzed for the opportunity. Quote, Well, once his men had desperately feared they would not be able to return to Spain, they now began to happle who over who would be fortunate enough to stay on the island while Columbus and the rest of the crew would attempt to return to Spain on the tiny Nina. That's good, now, Michael. Let's let's let's let's think here. Let's wargame this out right. You've got these people who Columbus has already said every single time they come upon a village with the people that he has to stop them from stealing, right, And now he's like, I'm going to leave some of you here alone with weapons, and they're all suddenly very excited to be in that crew. Do you think they have plants? Meanwhile, I'm gonna put this fox in this grain and the suck in my boat all together, and I'm gonna go over there. Do you think maybe something bad might be about to happen with these guys? But you know who would never for rob an island of people blind because I don't think it's physically possible. If you're going to say what I think you're gonna say, yeah, that's right. The products and services and support this podcast when sets up the island that you can hunt children on, which, by the way, Michael, you and I should hang out on one of these days. It's a great, great place for a vacation. They're not they're not robbing, they're island off the coast of Indonesia. They're creating value. You know, that island was just uninhabited by anything other than people when they came here. And now they've turned it into a hunting preserve. You know that's value. Right before then, we weren't aware that cloth could be cut in the shape that shape, that apron shape. It isn't worth it for the apron. The april alone. An has made their island worthwhile Michael, here's some AD's Okay, we're back. So you know, Columbus is uh. It's interesting here because, like he is, he's leaving these guys behind, and a lot of them are very excited to get to stay on the island and get up to the ship they're going to get up to. But it's also worth noting that like Columbus is potentially dooming them all based on his own vanity and desire for advancement, because he's very good at navigating, right, he has navigated his way to and through the Caribbean with extreme facility, But the notes that he's written on how to get there and back are totally nonsense from a nautical point of view. Purposefully, he has written the wrong way to get there and back in his notes because he doesn't want to risk getting intercepted by a foreign power and giving them directions to the New World. Right now, that's reasonable in a way, right, because this is a valuable secret and when you do it in code or in some way that you could still understand where you're going. Well, he can, he knows how to get but no one else he's so here's the thing, though, He's leaving all these dudes behind, and no one else is going to be able to find them, like where he to have died on the voyage in people died for no fucking reason back then, all of those guys would have just been doomed. It's also the screenwriter, and he just can't get over what a huge turn in like dooming so many lives. That that moment is where he decides in his sick little brain, Yeah, oh I was supposed to stay here. Why because I'm supposed to take dominion of this land, all of it. You're like done done Dune, Yes, fuck um. But it is it is funny that he is essentially gambling the lives of his men on the hope that he, a middle aged guy in the four hundreds, isn't going to like die and leave them stranded forever. I just do I find I find that also funny. Obviously that's not a particularly great crime in the Columbus canon, but it does say a lot about him as a dude that he just doesn't even think about it, not for a second time. Is there is an ounce of concern, what if we need to get back what you know, left at the Big Rock or whatever. I gotta just say, like, come on, figure it out. So Columbus begins his journey home on January two, but despite days of begging from the Cacique that he's stayed to provide protection from the Caribs. Before he left, he christened his new settlement on his Spaniola Novedad and wrote in a letter to his sovereigns that when he returned to the island, he was sure that he would quote find a barrel of gold that those who were left behind would have acquired by exchange, and that they would have found the gold mine and the spicery and those things in such quantity that the Sovereigns, before three years are over, will undertake to go and conquer the Holy Sepulcher. For this, I urged your highnesses to spend all the profits of this my enterprise on the conquest of Jerusalem. All right. So yeah, he's like, it's gonna be great, it's going to change the world. It is well, because what he's saying here is that what I'm leaving them on the island to to collect gold and find a mind and find spices, which number one Carol Delaney is like he just wanted them there to watch his friend and to set up a settle it so people could live essentially set up a human Bitcoin mine. Yeah, that that's actually what he's doing, and he wants he's doing it all for Jerusalem, baby. So one of the last things Columbus did was he delivered a letter to the man he was leaving in charge of navadad Uh. It contained instructions and was signed instead of with Columbus's usual signature, it was signed with something new. This is the first time he starts using what instead of like his signature. Is this bizarre glyph that he invints for himself during the voyage um and he creates this like glyph to sign things with because he's now grown convinced that he's being guided by God to some holy end. And here's how Carol Delaney describes this. The sigil resembles a ship in full sale and consists of three rows of letters in the shape of a triangle. The meaning of the last line is clear. Expo Ferends is a combination of Greek and Latin words meaning Christ bearer. Columbus must have believed that he had made good on his identification with his namesake St. Christopher, though during the voyage, Columbus must have gotten much thought to the letters in their arrangement. To this day, they remain undeciphered, despite the efforts of many people through the ages. What interpretation is that the initials stand for serve Us at the top, and then some altissimy Salvadorus on the second line and Christe Maria Jesu on the third, all of which translates as I am the servant of the Most High Savior, Oh Christ Mary Joseph. Another interpretation is servadors who's als Teca's sacras Christo Maria Isabel, that is, the humble servant of their most sacred Majesty's Christ Mary and Isabella. So he's he's he's kind of gone full extremist here. Um, he's he's. He's like built himself a logo. That doesn't that number one. He's like among primarily himself. Yeah, he is, he is, he is. He is signing himself now as like the agent of God, right, like the person who is going to like bring about the apocalypse and designs of Jerusalem. Yeah, like put it in a little cool triangle. He's spending a lot of writing figured it out. Yeah, he's got we never got his notes, his little trapper keeper as he figured out how to do all the fail the alternate ones, and takes some little ship he was gonna doodle anyway. That's that we're now at like full christ Bearer Columbus, who is number one, convinced that he and by like he and the sovereigns now own this place right because again he part of his deal with them is that if they take it, he gets to be the governor and he gets a cut of all the profits um. And he's also convinced that he is being directly guided by God to take possession of this in order to fund the Holy War. So that's it is striking how often people who have acquired or on the verge of acquiring completely like you know, unevenly levered, like advantage over something, or to suck a huge amount of resource up, suddenly decide that it's good. This is happening, and God one to this to happen, and it's great. And that's why it's fine. I love it. I love being on the show, Robert. I'm glad this is all we ever do together, episode after episode. Yes, next we will be talking about Christopher Columbus's feet. Now, this is largely going to be based on you know my personal theories um slash erotic dreams. But I think people will still get a lot out of it. Michael, I hope you do. I'm turgid, So let's go. Do you have any plugs you want to plug before we roll out? God? Not after that. Thanks for the opportunity, Robert, always have a blast here. Uh yeah, my name's Michael Swain. You can find me on Twitter mostly at swain Underscore Corp. And if you want to hear me on a whole variety of podcasts, search up small Beans, which is the name of my imprint, or head over to patreon dot com slash small Beans. I've also got another show that's not on that network called One Upsmanship, a brand new video games podcas test on the I Heart network. Check it out if you're interested in video games as an art form, because that's what we think it is. By we, I mean myself and my co host Adam Ganzer again that's the number one and then ups men ship check it out. Excellent. Alright, so the episodes over go home. Everybody Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, 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.