Sweet-Tooth Politics: African in the Caribbean - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 322

WHAT HAPPENED TO CARIBBEAN INDIANS?
The year 1492 was history's hinge of conquest. [284] As Eric Williams notes, when the Span-
ish landed in the New World, they fell first on their knees in prayerful thanks. Then they
fell upon the Indians. Slavery was an established institution in the Old World. As Colum-
bus suggested to his monarchs, the Indians of the Caribbean were a sweet, gentle, people
who would make excellent servants.
Very quickly the Indians were forced into servitude: searching for gold, tending crops,
and building shelter for their Spanish masters. Abuse, overwork, punishment, and mutil-
ation came with the Spanish overlords. And so, too, did viral visitations. Smallpox, diph-
theria, measles, and mumps quickly took their grisly toll. The Caribbean Indians vanished,
but like the Cheshire cat who vanished, leaving nothing but a smile, the Indians left us a
smile of words: canoe, hammock, hurricane, cannibal, cacique, cassava, and tobacco.
Use, misuse, and abuse of the Indians became so scandalous that the Spanish crowns
interceded. A Dominican Friar, Bartolemé de las Casas, was appointed Indian Protector,
but his devotion to his Indian charges was not matched by a comparable devotion to another
preyed-upon people, African blacks. The protecting friar was pleased to let African slaves
take the place of New World Indians.
WHY AFRICAN SLAVES?
The origins of slavery are lost in the mists of time. Pharaonic Egypt, ancient Greece, and
Republican Rome relied on slaves, not only as overworked toilers on public works and in
mines but as tutors for their children, as household servants, and as concubines. Until the
fifteenth century, most European slaves were chattel by right of war and conquest. Then,
as Portuguese explorers ventured into the Atlantic and down the coast of Africa, sometime
around 1450, African black slaves entered the maws of European commerce. Destined for
the Spanish New World, traffic in slaves started slowly (in 1505, seventeen slaves were
imported into Hispaniola for work in the island's copper mines), and then it increased to a
swift flood. By the time the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended in the mid-nineteenth century,
upwards of ten million blacks (perhaps as many as fifteen million) had come from Africa
to the New World. Prior to the twentieth century, it was history's greatest mass migration.
Employment varied for those transported, but no job was more destructive of health and
life than the sugar trade.
WHY DID DEATH AND SUGARCANE GO HAND IN HAND?
Sugar cultivation was labor intensive. Agronomists estimate that in the American South,
one slave could work from thirty to forty acres of corn, five to ten acres of cotton, but only
two acres of sugarcane. The conditions of work in the sugar trade were horrendous. From
sun up to sun down, there were hard cutting and heavy hauling of the six-foot stalks. And