Episode 10: The Triangular Trade Route (I)
March 10, 2025
Therefore, in just over 100 years, the French, Dutch, Danish, and British all rushed into the Americas. Even the Duchy of Courland, a small country you may have never heard of, established its own colony there. Soon, the American continent was buzzing with Europeans.
Not only did the Europeans rob the Indians and enslave a large number of Africans, but they also took a bit out of their fellow Europeans whenever they got the chance. Even after the Holy Pope drew border lines on the American map and asked them, as his children, to be civil with each other and enjoy getting rich together, it didn’t stop them from striking one another when money and profit were involved.
Take the famous Spanish treasure fleet as an example. It was once the most delicious piece of pie for others. With support of their respective governments, pirates from Britain, France, and Holland all slinked around in the Atlantic Ocean, repeatedly raiding the Spanish fleet that was transporting gold, silver, and jewels from the Americas back to Spain.
In the end, the Spanish fleet couldn’t sail in the Atlantic without being escorted by at least five warships. A few years ago, this part of history was turned into a famous movie series, Pirates of the Caribbean.
Misery befell the Indians with the collapse of their Aztec and Inca empires, and the arrival of more and more invaders. Columbus wrote in his journal: “They are a people who can be easily subjugated and converted to our holy faith, for they have no knowledge of arms. With 50 men, we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
That’s what he wrote, and also what he did. After he returned to Europe from his second expedition, he pointed to the slaves on the boat he had brought back and shouted: “Let us, in the name of the Holy Trinity, go on sending all the slaves that can be sold”.
He was very domineering but also incredibly cruel.
Professor Samuel Eliot Morison from Harvard wrote in his book Christopher Columbus, Mariner, “The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.”
This was indeed very true. Columbus didn’t leave a legacy of harmonious coexistence with the Indians. All the evidence shows that, as soon as he realized how weak the Indians were, the word “harmony” disappeared from his mind.
二
There was one thing Columbus had never thought of but was soon realized by his successors: why bother sending the slaves to Europe? The Americas were where they should toil. The Indian slaves were rounded up and ordered to look for gold, to mine for gold and silver day and night. If they couldn’t produce enough gold to meet the quota demanded of them, their hands were cut off and left to bleed to death.
A typical example below illustrates the misery the Indians suffered at that time
The Arawak, who lived along the Caribbean Sea, were the first Indian tribe Columbus encountered. They were the ones who pulled Columbus’s ship ashore and were later whipped by Europeans into forced labor and forced to dig for gold. Unable to endure the cruelty imposed by the Europeans any longer, they committed mass suicide by eating poisonous cassava.
What’s even more heartbreaking is that the mothers in the tribe made pacts to kill each other’s babies to save them from slavery by the Spaniards.
In less than two years, the Arawak population was decimated from a quarter of a million to 120,000, and finally, in 1650, 150 years after Columbus landed on the new continent, was down to zero. The tribe that first jumped into the sea to welcome the Europeans forever disappeared from the list of humankind.
We must ask now: did all this happen because the Indians were not civilized? Was this a victory of civilization over barbarism, as described in textbooks?
I have to say, people who believe in this statement either don’t know much about history or are telling outright lies with their eyes closed.
The so-called victory of civilization over barbarism was just the victor’s self-righteous claim. They not only wanted to defeat their opponents on the battlefield but also sought to label themselves as civilized.
Similarly, a superpower today drops bombs on whoever it dislikes while advocating for freedom and human rights, well, that’s just bullshit.
When Mongol troops trampled across the Europe-Asia continent, and when the Islamic scimitar slashed open the gates of Constantinople, civilization and rationality were all cast aside.
While the Song dynasty far exceeded the Mongols in many aspects, as long as the Song lacked strong military power to protect themselves, the Song people, including women and children, couldn’t escape the fate of slavery.
This happened repeatedly throughout history, and once again, it happened to the Indians.
We may recall that the Maya had highly advanced knowledge of astronomy and calendars, the Aztecs managed their capital city with a population of 200,000 in great order—Its cleanness alone far exceeded the stinky Paris in the 16th century—and the Incas’ irrigation system and farming technologies were unparalleled on all continents.
May I ask, weren’t these civilizations?
Many history books including History of the Indians, Red, White and Black by Gary Nash and A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, have all written about how most Indians were friendly, amicable, and peace-loving.
John Collier, a modern scholar, lived with a remote Indian tribe for some time. He wrote: “If we could all live like the Indians, the world would be a heaven with long-lasting peace and prosperity.”
Wasn’t this civilization?
Whoever lags behind gets beaten up, it’s as simple as that.
三
But even in the most vicious animal world, killing is not the ultimate goal but a means to subjugate others. The same was true for the European masters: their ultimate goal was to subjugate the Indians to work for them submissively.
What type of work? To toil the rich fields and mine for gold and silver. Working as slaves soon over-exhausted the Indians.
It was a fact that the Indians were not suited to work in the plantation fields. They were best at hunting in the Amazon, but of course, they were not allowed to do that by their European masters.
In the plantation fields, group after group of Indians died only few days after they were captured. The European masters were burning with anxiety: they had unlimited number of mines as well as vast amount of rich soil, but who would do the work if all the Indians were dead?
This was certainly a huge problem, but it was eventually resolved by Bartolomé de las Casas. He proposed a solution that solved the labor shortage issue for the European masters, but it brought disaster to another race on another continent—disaster that lasted for hundreds of years and whose impact is still felt today
To be continued in our next episode.