Mother's Chronicles - Book Six

17

The Colonizers

That was the bright side of the coin. Then there was the flip side. It was Europe's unregenerated vital, full of greed and cruelty. It had grown almost unchecked. As though the Black Death had taken root in Europe's life system itself. That is why today, at the start of the twenty-first century of the Christian era, that European "civilization" seems to be in its last throes.

But in the fifteenth century the western world was just coming into its own. And it had a role to play in the world. The new-found zeal of the Europeans for exploration and discovery, pushed along by strides made by technology, sped them to colonize the world.

The Cape of Good Hope was rounded in 1488, the West Indies were "discovered" in 1492, India reached by the sea route in 1498, and Brazil "discovered" in 1500, by Portugal's Pedro Alvarez Cabral.

The Portuguese were the first off the block. In 1486 P. da Covilha was charged to find out the way to India. He managed to reach the Malabar coast, touched Cannanore, Calicut and Goa. On his way back he got lost in Africa. But before that he was able to send home some pieces of information about the

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east coast of Africa and the sailing in the India Ocean. Armed with that scanty knowledge, Vasco da Gama, then a young man of thirty, started out with four ships on 8 July 1497. Helped by Indian fishermen off the east coast of Africa, he reached Calicut on 20 May the next year.

Almost simultaneously, the Spanish rulers also turned to overseas expansion. Queen Isabella supported the Genoese, Christopher Columbus, who had garnered from books he read that the Earth was round and the Eurasian continent did not measure more than 225 degrees; he imagined that Cathay— that is how China was then known—was very close to Europe by the western route, and India was half the distance across the Atlantic as travelling east across land. A mistaken belief, of course. But, oh, how often our mistakes lead us to great discoveries !

The Genoese set out with a fleet of three ships on 3 August 1492. Seventy days later, on the night of 11-12 October, the seafarers spied land: the Bahamas. Europeans had found a new continent. Columbus, however, thought he had reached Asia, and died ignorant of his real find. It was left to later navigators to realize that it was not Asia but a newly found land. It was the voyage of the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521), the first European to go round the Tierra del Fuego, and sail the Pacific—a name he gave to the vast ocean west of the new continent—which confirmed the newness of these lands. The Europeans named the New World: America.¹ To be

' Derived from the name of the Italian merchant, Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the north coast of South America in 1499.

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precise, the 'New World' was a 'discovery' only for the Europeans, because the lands were already inhabited, and many regions had developed a civilization of their own.

Hard on the heels of the Iberians came the French and the British. They sent out their own expeditions. John and Sebastian Cabot discovered Canada for the English. Or, should we rather say 're'-discovered? Because the Norsemen under Leif Eriksson had already landed on the North American continent—Canada—about 1000 AD. The French occupied Canada (1534), but ceded it to Great Britain by the treaty of Paris (1763). Jacques Cartier (1491-1557), the French navigator, explored Canada by sailing up the St. Lawrence river. More than a hundred years later, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, missed the mouth of the Mississipi by four hundred miles, and his ship, the Belle? foundered in a storm in January 1686. He was the "first European to travel the length of the Mississipi, from the great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, claiming the entire drainage area for France, and naming it Louisiana for his patron, the French king Louis XIV."

The English settlement on Virginia in 1607 was the start of their empire building, "nothing before could be called a British Empire."

The Dutch were a little late in this colonizing game. They ousted the Portuguese from many places. Their most valuable possessions were Malacca, the Spice Islands, and the ports of India and Africa wrested from Portugal in the early seventeenth century. As a matter of fact, it was quite a merry-go-round

Recently salvaged. For details see National Geographic, May 1997.

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between the British, the French, the Dutch, after getting rid of the Portuguese from the Coromandel coast. The Portuguese ceased to be masters of the major sea routes. So lucrative was the spice trade that these West European powers muscled belligerently into it, and later became imperial powers. The Danes also were a part of that power game, and got a few toeholds in India.

If we look back, we find that after the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam, Muslim merchants had monopolized in a couple of centuries all trade between the East and the West. But canons placed aboard ships enabled European vessels to dominate foreign waters—an advantage fully exploited in the game of overseas expansion. Arab maritime powers were greatly curbed, and the Europeans had only themselves to contend with.

The Europeans had also embraced a strange religion. Christianity. As happens with 'religions' Christianity too was divided into many sects. One of these was called the Society of Jesus, a Roman Catholic order founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola, a Spanish soldier.

The Spaniards were notorious for the 'Inquisition' cruelties. Flush with the victory over Islamic Moors, they had a surplus of religious zeal. When they landed in the Americas, the Spaniards proclaimed that they came "in the service of God ... to give light to those who were in darkness, and also to acquire riches."

Consumed by greed and a religious zeal, Columbus and his successors, enthusiastically aided by the ruthless Jesuits, destroyed the Aztec and Inca civilizations and what was left of the Maya. "The last vestige of Mesoamerica's cultural splendour,"

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wrote James Shreeve, "was abruptly extinguished with the capture of the ruler Moctezuma by Spaniards seeking gold, glory and souls."¹

"A harvest of souls," says the present Pope. The Christians were, and are, bent on converting the natives. Converted— more often by force than otherwise—"by their conquerors, native laborers and artisans erected Roman Catholic shrines and churches." Sixteenth-century Spanish gold seekers, French and British empire builders, brought with them diseases till then unknown in the New World. "From the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, diseases brought to the Americas by Europeans killed at least half and perhaps as much as ninety-five percent of the native population," wrote J. L. Swerdlow.²

Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566) was a Spanish historian and missionary. He lived among Indians in Spanish American colonies. He recorded in his work, The Devastation of the Indies' that according to secular Spaniards who had been in Latin America for many years, "the goodness of the Indians is undeniable Yet into this sheepfold ... there came some Spaniards

who immediately behaved like ravening wild beast.... And Spaniards have behaved in no other way during the past forty years, down to the present time____" He goes on to list savage devastation in detail, giving the number of victims in millions. We skip. But a little description will give the readers a clear enough

¹'Uncovering Patagonia's Lost World' (National Geographic, December 1997).

²National Geographic (February 1998).

³Quoted in Dead Sea Scrolls and the Crisis of Christianity by N. S. Rajaram (Minerva Press, London). My account is based mainly on this book, with additional facts and figures taken from the National Geographic.

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picture. "And the Christians," wrote Las Casas, "with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them [natives of Hispaniola]. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in child-bed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces........" The natives were repaid their initial hospitality by being enslaved, driven from their own lands.

The Portuguese in no way lagged behind their Spanish neighbours. The brutalities perpetrated by the Portuguese in Brazil are another horror story. The British too joined in the game of exterminating the native population. Not so much by massacring them, because the British were more cunning and, maybe, less given to savagery than the Iberians. Some English officers gave the Red Indians blankets from the local smallpox hospital. The commander-in-chief of the British army told his subordinate to try to 'inoculate' the natives "by means of blankets as well as try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race."

"Execrable race"! We can but wonder. The Mesoamericans were already tracking the movements of celestial bodies—sun, moon, stars and planets—by the third century AD. The unbiased or secular Europeans found the native population 'rational,' and innately good. "The goodness of the Indians is undeniable."

It was really the greed and cruelty of the Westerners that wrought havoc in the lives of the natives wherever the former established colonies. Gold from the New World, all the silver from the mines of Mexico and Bolivia and Peru; coffee and cacao ... oh, so many new consumer goods and raw materials

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that flowed into West Europe were produced by the labours of the enslaved nations.

As though all those unspeakable atrocities they had committed were not enough, "the priests accused the victims of being instruments of the Devil. At Yucatan in Mexico, after destroying a large quantity of ancient manuscripts containing priceless records, Bishop of Landa wrote: 'As they contained nothing but superstitions and lies or the Devil, we burned them all, which the Indians regretted to a great degree and which caused them great anguish.' "

It was only during a brief voyage to a charming little island in the Pacific that the full import of the destruction of ancient manuscripts by the Christian clergy sank in. Being an Indian I innocently asked a local young woman who their ancient gods were. She shuddered. "Oh, they are not 'gods'! they are 'devils.' " That is how the Church Fathers converted the old 'pagan' gods into demons and devils, from Greece to the remotest island in the Pacific. Thereby erasing their cultural past. Thereby cutting off peoples from their roots. Thereby obliterating from the converts' consciousness any attachment to their own country. A total alienation.

'Superstitions' ? It is the Catholic Church that seems extraordinarily obsessed by demons and devils.

"How loathsome is God-defying bestiality under the cloak of religion, becomes quite visible if we open our eyes a little," said Rabindranath Tagore.

The aim of the Jesuits, the Dominicans, and other Christian sects, was the 'soul count.' They never batted an eyelid in taking the name of the 'Apostle of Peace and Love' to indulge

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in their brutal depravity. Killing and destroying such a countless number of humans. All in the name of 'true religion.'

In a few deft sentences, Sri Aurobindo draws a telling picture of Christianity.

"The mentality of the West," he wrote in The Foundations of Indian Culture, "has long cherished the aggressive and quite illogical idea of a single religion for all mankind, a religion universal by the very force of its narrowness, one set of dogmas, one cult, one system of ceremonies, one array of prohibitions and injunctions, one ecclesiastical ordinance. That narrow absurdity prances about as the true religion which all must accept on peril of persecution by men here and spiritual rejection or fierce eternal punishment by God in other worlds. This grotesque creation of human unreason, the parent of so much intolerance, cruelty, obscurantism and aggressive fanaticism, has never been able to take firm hold of the free and supple mind of India ... Intolerance has been confined for the most part to the minor forms of polemical attack or to social obstruction or ostracism; very seldom have they transgressed across the line to the major forms of barbaric persecution which draw a long, red and hideous stain across the religious history of Europe."

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