Chapter Five - The Gold Delusion

CHAPTER FIVE

The Gold Delusion

COLUMBUS DIDN’T SEE people.
He saw resources.

The thing that drove him above everything else, the thing that rewired his brain and warped every decision he made, was gold.

It wasn’t just greed.
It was religion.
He believed God wanted him rich.

Everywhere he went, he asked the same question: Where’s the gold?
The Taino told him there wasn’t much. They wore tiny decorative pieces. They traded it and treasured it. But they weren’t sitting on piles of Inca-tier treasure. They didn’t live that way.

Columbus didn’t care.
If it wasn’t there, it should be.
And if they weren’t handing it over, they were hiding it.

So he built a system.

Every Taino over the age of 14 was ordered to deliver a certain amount of gold every three months. If they succeeded? They got a token, a tiny piece of copper they could wear around their neck.

If they failed?

He cut off their hands.

Let me repeat for what I think is the third time in this book.
This man, praised in statues and honored with a holiday, cut the hands off Indigenous people for not producing gold that didn’t fucking exist.

The mutilated were left to bleed out. Their stumps cauterized by fire or left open to infection. Publicly. As a lesson.

This wasn’t just sadism. It was policy.

And it got worse.

To speed things up, Columbus ordered massive roundups. Whole villages emptied. The strongest were sent into the hills and mines to dig. The rest were enslaved on plantations or forced to carry supplies for Spanish expeditions, often dropping dead along the way.

Some fled into the mountains.
Some took their own lives.
Some killed their children so they wouldn’t grow up in chains.

Let that sink in.

People were killing their own children… to keep them from growing up in Columbus’s world.

That’s not myth. That’s not politics.
That’s the historical record.

And yet, even as the bodies piled up, Columbus wrote glowing letters to Spain. “Plenty of gold,” he promised. “More on the way.” “Just need more time.” “Send more ships.”

He was either lying through his teeth, or he believed his own fantasy.

But either way?
He kept digging.

And Europe kept paying.