In movies, books and paintings, we’ve all absorbed the scene of Columbus, or John Cabot or another European ship captain with his armed thugs, sometimes with a priest, planting a flag or banner, and making a proclamation. In many cases, they had little idea about where they were – the northern buffer regions of Cathay? Japan? If they ran into the people who lived there, they didn’t understand the language, even as they read something aloud.
So what were they doing, reading aloud to no one who understood? It was a proclamation of the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ based on a set of three ‘Bulls’ issued by the Pope in Rome that made the land and peoples they were standing on now under the ownership and sovereignty of whatever kingdom that financed them. They only had to know two, maybe three, things. 1. The native peoples were heathen; 2. They were previously unknown in Europe; and 3. they were not part of a class-divided social order, subject to kings or princes of their own. Since the last one was hard to determine, it was often ignored.
What was the reason for this ‘Doctrine?’ In the early 1400s, the Islamic world was making it hard for the kingdoms of Christendom to trade with the far east via the Silk Road, the Red Sea and other routes. The pressure was on to find new trade routes. Henry the Navigator went to work for the Portuguese king, taking over the Canaries, working his way down the African coast, finding gold and ivory, and finally making it around the Cape into the Indian Ocean. On the other hand, Columbus started claiming islands beyond the Azores for Spain. So Spain and Portugal clashed and took it to the pope. To shorten the tale, his Holiness drew a line down the middle of the Atlantic–everything to the West was Spain’s, and to the east, Portugal’s. That’s why Brazil primarily speaks Portuguese.
But what about the rest of the Kingdoms of Europe? Were they cut out? No, there was a loophole. They could claim lands ‘unknown’ to Portugal or Spain. An early rival was John Cabot, working for English merchants with some help from Henry VII. His first trip failed, but the second, around 1497, got him to what most think is Newfoundland. He got on the beach, planted the English banner, read his little speech, walked around for about 100 yards, found a vacated native campsite, then returned to the ship and headed home. He corresponded with Columbus, comparing notes and correctly concluding that ‘Turtle Island’ was unknown to Columbus, so bingo, North America now belonged to the English king. Except John Cabot died somewhere on his third voyage, and the new king, Henry VIII, was too busy marrying, divorcing, and breaking with the Pope to care much about ‘the newfound lands.’ To our modern ears, the ‘Doctrine’ sounds weird and dead. Not so. It’s embedded not only in ongoing international law but also, thanks to Thomas Jefferson and an 1820s Supreme Court ruling, part of our law. It was recently cited by none other than Ruth Bader Ginsberg in a ruling she made against the Oneida tribe of native peoples. But Charles Mills, in his ‘Racial Contract,‘ makes the key point about the Papal Bulls. They marked the turning point where the Christendom of Europe became the motherland of ‘superior’ people noted for their white skin, and the rest of the planet had no rights they were bound to respect.
The indigenous peoples along the North Atlantic were familiar with Europeans even before Columbus and John Cabot. These days we all know of the visits of the Norse and Leif Erikson, even their settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland around the year 1000, and more probable camps down to Massachusetts. But after a decade, the Norse retreated.
The Basques were more regular but less known, frequently hunting whales and fishing for cod in North American waters. Again the Catholic church had a hand in it, forbidding eating meat every Friday and dozens of other holy days. Thus there was a hot market for fish of all sorts, especially for the upper crust. Whale meat and oil were also in high demand. A lot of this in earlier years was caught in European waters, but they were being over-plundered.
The Basques, being excellent fishermen, sailors, and whale hunters, also kept their mouths shut, as best as they could. They didn’t want to share news about the location of the new unplundered fishing waters west of Iceland, from Labrador and Newfoundland, all the way down to Massachusetts.
They had a settlement called ‘Red Bay’ in Canada near Newfoundland, mainly used to render whale blubber into oil and salt down the Cod for the return voyage. Some Native peoples recalled contact and trade with these fishermen, but none was extensive or permanent. They were most impressed with metal tools and colorful cloth, along with the size of the Basque ‘canoes’ and the beards on men. And as noted earlier, the English Crown largely ignored the matter until the late 1500s, save for the few English who fished with the Basques.
So that leaves Spain as the principal early and deadly intruder into ‘Turtle Island.’
As we know, Columbus landed in 1492 and named the place ‘San Salvador’ in the Bahamas. What is less known is precisely which island it was. It’s still debated. The people who lived there, the Taíno (see graphic), called their home ‘Guanahaní.’
In December 1492, Columbus also landed in Hispaniola, home to the Taíno. He left about 30 men with the wreckage of the Santa Maria to form a colony. He also seized a dozen or so Taíno to take back to the King and Queen of Spain as slaves. Columbus had no scruples about brutality toward ‘heathens.’ When he returned to the ‘colony’ on his second voyage, Columbus found it empty, save for a few dead bodies of his men. The story goes that while seizing women and gold jewelry, the men fell out among themselves. A Taíno chieftain named Caonabo gathered an insurgent force against the harsh treatment and wiped the Spaniards out. Later, the Taínos would face genocide, but from the first years, we can see ‘wherever there is oppression, there is resistance.’
Carl Davidson is a former student leader of the New Left of the 1960s, serving as a Vice President and National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society. From 1968 to 1976, he worked on the Guardian newsweekly as a writer and news editor. He continues to write prolifically.