World History

When the two different worlds met

A historical account of Europeans meeting the aboriginals for the very first time, and a brief description of what followed

Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World. — Christopher Columbus

It was the late fifteenth century, and expansion was the holy grail of the Spanish rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella. A white-haired and red-faced man was appointed as the Admiral of a fleet of three ships set to explore the seas, in search of Japan and India, in 1492. Columbus’s flagship ‘Santa Maria’ (nicknamed ‘The Dirty Mary’ by the sailors as a slang word for prostitute) unfurled its sails and roared in the seas, unafraid of falling off the edge of the world. When asked how much time would he take to reach Japan, he exaggeratedly undermined that it would be just a four weeks’ sailing, covering a journey of 2400 miles. However, the Portuguese mathematicians had calculated the distance to be around 12,000 miles, which meant that it was a suicide to embark on a voyage in a ship of those times.

Perhaps the reward that was promised to him if he was successful in discovering a new land, got his mind rolling. He was granted the right to a tenth of everything he discovered. Ferdinand and Isabella even offered a reward of ten thousand silver pieces a year, for lifetime, to the first sailor who spotted land.

Though the greed motivated the men to sail through the tough seas, their mood matched the undulating ships. With supplies about to finish off and no sight of any landmass for weeks, gloom started setting in. The sailors thought that Columbus was a mad guy who was risking their lives for his own self-interests. The Admiral would persuade his sailors to carry on amidst the depressing atmosphere and the crew would have discussions to throw him overboard if he persisted. After about five weeks, Columbus called a meeting with his crew, who half-heartedly decided to continue for four more days. It was on 12 Oct 1492, two days after the meeting, that a sailor Rodrigo de Triana, spotted a landmass far in the front, which came to be known as ‘The Bahamas’. But the admiral was too greedy to let the discovery fall into the hands of someone else. He quickly claimed that he had seen the island already, and grabbed the reward for himself. It still remains an enigma why he wasn’t thrown overboard.

They dropped the anchor and set forth on the exotic novel island. What lay ahead was a tribe of about 200,000 people, called the ‘Taino’ (described as ‘Indians’ by Columbus). The natives engaged in hunting-gathering and some basic farming. They rolled up the dried leaves of tobacco plants and enjoying smoking them as cigars.

Columbus conveyed to the King Ferdinand that these natives could be used as slaves and forced to work in the fields. He kidnapped some of them, to be displayed to the King of Spain. The conquest would wreak havoc on the Native Americans. Columbus would rape their women and exploit the natives for his own interests. Within 18 years of him arriving on the Bahamas, 99% of the tribals were dead — owing to diseases and killings. The natives weren’t immune to the infections that the Spaniards brought along, and many of them were wiped out due to diseases such as small pox. The Europeans, in turn, got only syphilis, secondary to their lust for their women.

Subsequently, the Europeans arrived with muskets and horses, shocking the natives where the animal had long been extinct because of continuous hunting. It was out of syllabus to behold what unfolded before their eyes. They had never seen a horse or a firearm. What followed next was a paraphernalia of war, treachery and slavery. Francisco Pizzaro was a Spanish conquistador who trapped the Inca emperor Atahualpa in Peru. The slingshots and bows of the latter were no match against the advanced metal weaponry of Pizzaro, breathing fire. Atahualpa, desperate for freedom, stroke a deal with them. He agreed to fill the room in which he was confiscated, once with gold, and twice with silver, in exchange for his liberation. Pizzaro agreed but he had no notions of keeping his promise. The Inca emperor was ordered to be executed by burning except that he would be strangulated if he agreed to convert to Christianity. As it was a custom among the natives to preserve the dead bodies by mummification, Atahualpa agreed for conversion. After being garrotted, he was burned anyway.

It was the seventeenth century and the Britain possessed a formidable Navy. The country brimmed with productivity, but alongside it churned out a gargantuan number of criminals every day. Thousands of death sentences lay pending as it overwhelmed the system and the criminals had to live in filthy, overcrowded prisons. Many of them spilled over and the administration was forced to accommodate them in dingy hulls. But neither was it a long-term solution, nor was it safe.

The dark-skinned natives of the island down south were intimidated by the arrival of a fleet of ships from the Britain. They assumed them to be the white-skinned ghosts of their ancestors. The long hair of the sailors made them think that all the ghosts were women.

The language barrier was extensive and the sailors just couldn’t make them understand what they were there for. On top of that, they were being mistaken for women. Frustrated, all of them dropped their pants and showed the morphological evidence of their gender, hanging between the legs. Upon learning that the long-haired pale ghost-like people were men, the tribe offered them their women to satisfy themselves and then return back. They weren’t welcome there, in the lands of Australia, which belonged to the aboriginals.

Captain Cook was the first to discover this strange island, and the place where his ship anchored down was called The New South Wales. Although Cook had been very gentle with the natives, strictly ordering his men to not hurt the locals as the land belonged to them, he had secret orders from Britain to seize the land. The locals would not welcome these invaders themselves and would hurt or kill any of their men when chance would permit. In order to establish communication with them(as is claimed), the Britishers kidnapped one of their men, Woolawarre Bennelong. He was taught English, taught to dress up in clothes, with buttons and all, transported back to England and sensitized with the theatres and the spas. Bennelong had many scars on his body, ranging from penetrating spears on his thighs to a human bite-mark on his left hand. The latter was given to him by a woman of another tribe whom he had abducted to satisfy his lust. This was a good excuse for the Europeans to label these people as savages. Initially, the prisoners were deported to this island, and later on many other people followed. Eventually, greed took over the British empire and they wiped out the Australian aboriginals, to establish their own colony.

Europe, for all their pride about the Enlightenment age, has always been ashamed to admit these parts of history. In order to justify the killings of the American and the Australian natives, they termed them ‘savages’, who needed to be controlled by the morally superior men aka themselves, to establish order in the society.

But this hardly concludes the brutality which Europe so easily bestowed on the helpless communities. The African slave trade was another heinous crime which propagated seamlessly under the British empire, having been started by the Arabs, originally. The common people sitting far off in England wouldn’t bother about the slaves while enjoying their sweet coffee, tobacco smoke and the cotton wardrobe. The luxury and the incoming profits from the sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations made everybody turn a blind eye.

The living conditions of the blacks was so poor that by the eighteenth century, about 850,000 slaves had been brought into the islands of Saint Domingue, and by the time the French revolution started in the 1780s, only 435,000 remained. The slave ships packed with the shackled blacks, emanated a stink so bad that their arrival could be predicted long before they reached the shores. Many would die in the gruelling journey and their bodies would be tossed overboard into the sea to feed the sharks. Such was the scale that the sharks would follow these ships as they sailed to feast on the dead bodies.

The slave trade is one of the several ugly taints on the history of mankind which makes one introspect into the inherent cruelty of human nature. It would not be abolished until the late nineteenth century, and would continue to kill millions of innocent lives.

Human history has been replete with inhumane acts of discrimination and torture. It really gets one into thinking how could all this be allowed to continue for centuries. Psychologist Philp Zimbardo’s famous ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’ (it deserves an article of its own) shows that humans can go to great lengths of torture if such an order comes up from the higher echelons. While following the commands of a crooked senior, otherwise conscientious men often brush it under the carpet, psychologically. It explains the cruelty unleashed on the Nazi Jews, the killing of aboriginals and the purchase of slaves.

The human mind has evolved to perceive an inherent bias against any other race. The fear processing centre of our brain gets activated by merely seeing the face of a human belonging to a different race or ethnicity. But, scientific studies have shown that such inherent discriminating neural circuits can be trained to switch off the primitive response as we interact and live with them peacefully.

I dream of a place where people promote peace and bonding. Where petty biases aren’t grabbed onto, and where the enlightened human nature sports itself way above the primitive animalistic behavior. It reminds me of a beautiful poem by Nicolette Sowder,

May we raise children who love the unloved things–the dandelion, the worms and spiderlings. Children who sense the rose needs the thorn

& run into rainswept days the same way they turn towards sun…

And when they’re grown & someone has to speak for those who have no voice

may they draw upon that wilder bond, those days of tending tender things

and be the ones.

Sources: 1. https://www.tumblr.com/apoemaday/642578732305072128/may-we-raise- children-who-love-the-unloved

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

3. ‘Psychology: Core Concepts’ by ‘Philip Zimbardo’

4. ‘A History of the World’ by ‘Andrew Marr’

The Unknown Doctor