Chapter Four - First Contact, First Atrocity

CHAPTER FOUR

First Contact, First Atrocity

IMAGINE THIS:

YOU'RE a Taino villager.
You wake up to the sound of waves, birdsong, the rhythm of a life your people have lived for thousands of years. You fish, you farm, you raise your kids, you pray to the gods of sun and storm.

And then the ships appear.
Massive. Alien. Looming. Like sea-monsters with crosses for eyes.

You don’t panic. You welcome them.

You bring food. Gifts. Hospitality.
Because that’s who you are.

Columbus? He sees you, and immediately starts measuring your neck.

“They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal… With fifty men, we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
- Christopher Columbus, journal entry, October 1492

That’s not a misunderstanding. That’s a business plan.

Within days of landing, he was kidnapping locals to use as interpreters. Testing resistance. Gauging obedience. Looking for signs of gold. When the Taino told him there wasn’t much, he didn’t believe them. Because to Columbus, truth was whatever got him a profit.

And so the violence began.

He ordered the capture of Taino men and women, chained them, beat them, and shipped them back to Spain as exotic trophies. The ones who stayed were forced to find gold that didn’t exist. Or else.

No gold? No hands.

He literally cut off their hands if they failed to meet their quota. Left them bleeding to death as a warning to others.

The fields were quiet. The rivers ran red.

This was not a clash of cultures.
This was a massacre.

And it was just the beginning.

Within a year, Columbus had set up shop. A regime of forced labor, military patrols, public torture, and sexual slavery. Nine-year-old girls were sold to Spanish men for “entertainment.” Rebellion was met with fire and blade. Entire villages were erased.

The Taino population, estimated in the hundreds of thousands, began to vanish. Not slowly. Violently. Like someone had taken a match to the edge of a map and started burning inward.

But back in Spain?
Columbus wrote glowing reports.
He called it a paradise.
He called it progress.

And the Crown believed him.

Because gold speaks louder than screams.