If Columbus was only acting with his eye on the main chance, so were most of the other people who lived in the 'real world' there and then. Life came hard and short for most everyone, New World and Old alike. Money may not be everything, but it certainly isn't nothing. Even if the commander hadn't been Columbus, even if the country hadn't been Spain, conditions throughout the seagoing Continental powers were much alike. Portugal, France, England...all the nations rich enough to mount and equip a trans-Atlantic expedition had monarchies at the top, privileged landowning nobles, merchants who ran shipping houses, craftsmen of the guilds, freeholder farmers and the stoop-laboring serfs and slaves who had no practical hope of changing their lot... all of them endlessly jockeying for whatever advantage they could squeeze out. Is this evil - or just "life"? And isn't much the same thing true of society at large today? Absolute monarchy is an endangered species, granted. The open-eyed person must, however, concede that slavery and indentured servitude yet exist in the world, under cover of different names and legalese. Corporations, industries, labor unions all still maneuver for optimal influence, in place of the older social structures. "Just looking out for Number One", whether it be said by an individual or a group, has been humanity's unofficial motto since Cain did in Abel. Being good and kind to people is nice and welcome, sure, but it rarely pays anything.
Then, too, the Taino and Arawaks were peaceable folk for the most part, but didn't they also suffer from previous depredations at the hands of the aggressive Carib people from other islands? They must, then, have had at least a nodding acquaintance with violent men. They were human enough at least to fight back when the Spaniards began to use them badly on a regular basis.
Columbus was not an evil man. Nor were the great bulk of men who went with him. Just as it takes much effort to be a really good person, so too it requires a certain amount of dedication to be a genuinely evil person. The tragic part is, you don't have to be determinedly evil to do evil deeds. If evil actions were done only by evil men, the world would be a much pleasanter place than it is. Indifference, selfishness and arrogance are all only too common currencies among men.
By all contemporary accounts ( admittedly biased ), Columbus was a humane and wise leader of men. But was he the true villain when it came to the natives? Remember, he was operating under certain constraints. Most of the men under him ( particularly on his three follow-up voyages ) were gentlemen adventurers - younger sons of the nobility, with all the arrogance of their class to back up their enthusiasm - out for gold and land, and quite beyond the Admiral's control. Then, too, there was his funding agency to consider - Ferdinand, Isabella, and the royal court - and their requirement of some kind of acceptable return on their investment. Columbus had promised them gold, and gold he would have to come up with if he wanted to keep exploring. But though there was some gold to be had in the islands, it was nowhere near the amount to satisfy the powerful who he most needed to impress. What else could he come up with? There were new and exotic plants for importation, whether for eating, smoking or decoration. There were new and strange animals to exhibit in royal menageries.
And, of course, there were the native humans.
Columbus, in his journal, seems quite affected by the peacefulness of the Arawak and the Taino. A merchant has to be a good diplomat if he is to be a success, so it is probable that he got himself in good with the natives. Perhaps he came eventually to admire them, as he left them for the first time. Perhaps he genuinely thought, or hoped, that the men he left behind at La Navidad could succeed in keeping up the good relations. Perhaps it was with a sinking feeling that he wrote of their technological inferiority and recommended them as a slave labor force in his official report to the Crown. He does not say. We can speculate to the contrary. We shall never know.
Could it all have been different? Was this the way it had to be all along? European diseases would have worked their mindless horrors in any case, but it would have had to take a most impropable chain of circumstances for the two Worlds to meet and stay good friends. Two impulses are paramount in driving men ever onwards and outwards - curiosity and greed. There wasn't much, I suppose, that most nobles of Europe were curious about. Columbus, too, had a dark side of his own, but he does seem to have been a genuinely curious man. Would the world really have been better off without him and those like him? Maybe so...certainly so for the next few generation of the Arawak and Taino. But apart from the Caribs, remember, there were other aggressive human tribes in the Americas. Contact across the Atlantic was more or less inevitable at that point - but even supposing that the Americas had been left alone, they would not have been left in peace. The Tenochca were a rapidly rising power in Mexico. They could conceivably, given the space for development, have devised and refined long-distance sea travel of their own. How, I ask you, might the Arawak and Taino have fared under the Aztecs?
Human is as human does. And humans are much alike, all over the Earth.
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