Behind the Bastards - Part Three: Christopher Columbus: Bringer of the Apocalypse

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

Robert is joined again by Michael Swaim for the final part of our series on Christopher Columbus.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, Michael Swame, Robert Evans, behind the bastard's sweaty, gay dance parties, which is what I said right before the recording started because Michael and I were talking about the movie Tatan, weren't we? That's most of the pertinent information. I feel like we're ready to wrap up here. Yeah, watch Tatan. It's a fun movie about some guys who like to dance and nothing

else. There's certainly nothing off-putting in it. Automobile aficionados, let's say. Do you like cars? Really like cars? Check out Tatan. Tatan might be for you. Michael, how are you doing as we sail like the Santa Maria into part three of our episode of Columbus? I'm great, Robert. Happy to be back and super excited for the third act, which we all know as the Redemption Act. Yep, this is where he figures it out. Right. He'll just finally get on an even keel about joke. Yeah. Nice one. Nice. Stop being such a prick. Learn to walk a mile in another's pantalons. Yeah, this is where he becomes the hero that we all know Christopher Columbus grows up to be. Right. I'm waiting for this to morph into friends with the Pilgrims for

Thanksgiving. That's right. That's right. It's like Better Call Saul. Exactly. This is the episode we're going to open in media res as he is managing a Cinnabon in the Midwest and then we'll go back to explain. No. Although, man, you could make a pretty good Columbus movie with Bob Odenkirk playing Christopher Columbus. I'd watch it. I'm just going to say it right now. I would watch it. Michael, on February 3rd, Michael, Small Means Network, by the way, probably should lead up front with the plugs. Yeah, we always time for that. Okay. We do it. We do it both. We do it both. Robert Evans here. I wanted to make a quick correction. You know, when I was talking about the Tano, the other airwalk peoples, the Carribs, I use terms like genocide, which is absolutely

accurate. But I also use terms, phrases like wiped out or extinct. This is not entirely accurate. I wanted to emphasize the level of destruction because it's so much in excess of what we see, even when normally talking about genocides, 16 years on most of these islands, you're lucky if 10% of the original population is around. And it's true that if you look up the Tano, you will find a lot of references to them being wiped at Wikipedia says they were a historic indigenous people of the Caribbean. But of course, they had descendants. There are people who did survive, notably on what is now Haiti, a lot of folks escaped into the mountains and later met up with escaped slaves and were part of resistance and exist to this day in that area.

Um, some 43,000 of the, I think 2.7 million people in Puerto Rico have some degree of Tano ancestry, 3.7 million people. So 42,000 of the 3.7 million people in Puerto Rico have some Tano ancestry. Obviously, the level of destruction was intense, which is why I felt like emphasizing it. But it's been pointed out to me that this is also a tactic that's used to kind of act as if these peoples are completely gone as sort of a, well, there's nothing we can do, right? There's no way to make amends to them because Columbus wiped them out. There's a lot that's problematic with this. I'm not having the time to get into it properly, and this is not that show. But I wanted to number one kind of acknowledge that I should not have said things the way I did. We tried to cut some of

that out of the episodes once I became aware of it. But I also wanted to recommend a couple of different resources if people do want to read more about this, because in addition to the fact there are a number of Tano communities that have continued to exist since First Contact. There are also Tano-descended people who are attempting to revive some of the traditions and culture and reclaim that for themselves. So if you want to look at Smithsonian Magazine has an article called What Became of the Tano by Robert Poole that was published in 2011. In Puerto Rico, Tano, there are attempts ongoing to add Tano studies to classrooms and to schools and stuff in the area and elsewhere in the United States. There's a good NBC News article on that called

Puerto Rico Seeks to Preserve Tano History, Revive Culture, and then probably the resource that is most worth reading is an article in American Indian Magazine titled Abuelas, Ancestors and Atabbe, The Spirit of Tano Resurgence. It's by Christina Gonzalez and it was published in the fall of 2018. So I would really recommend checking out that article for American Indian Magazine. Yeah, sorry for the error and please keep doing good stuff. Oh, great, double plugs. Yeah, lovely. Well, hey, all you focus people. Well, for a split second, while I have that focus, please devote your attention to the Small Beans Podcasting Network, which you can find more out about simply by Googling that phrase. Or you could head over

to patreon.com slash Small Beans if you really want to get your handle around everything we do and or completely unrelated. If you're a fan of podcasts on the iHeart Network and I know you are because you're listening to this and you like video games, check out another podcast I run with my co-host Adam Ganzer. That's called One Upsmanship, One UPS Man Ship. Wow. Wow. That's also the title of my podcast, which is about how UPS transports products and services around the world. Great. Is it break time already? It's just pronounced one UPS Man Ship, which is about there. Anyway, whatever. It's the people who write are super into the relationship between the package deliverer

and the package. That's what really draws me in about global capitalism. So on February 18th, 1493, Columbus sailed into the Azores off of the coast of Africa with several dozen crewmen on the Pinta, the only remaining ship of his fleet that was still under his direct control, which most people don't know. He loses control. He either sinks or loses control of two thirds of the fleet that he brings with him. And if I recall, he took this as a sign from God that things were going really well. The things are going great, yes. Despite the fact that, yeah, he's he's lost most of his fleet. The voyage was, one has to say, a stunning success by most reasonable standards because they are going out into the complete unknown for them via an untried

route that people had not attempted previously in boats like this. People who are members of his civilization had not attempted previously. They had established a settlement there and then they had returned home and most of his crew didn't die. So far, a lot of them actually did die, but not at this point. Upon landing in the Azores and disembarking about half of his crew, they were immediately arrested by the Portuguese over a misunderstanding. This was dealt with, though, and they were soon off, reprovisioned for the Spanish coast. In early March, a horrible storm hit the sea and Columbus was worried enough about sinking that he attached a letter to the king and queen to the front mast of his ship so that it would have a better chance of, like,

getting washed to shore if the boat got sunk. So the letters contained like a guide to how to get to where he'd sailed to and left a colony and also a grand promise. Quote, within seven years, I shall give your highnesses enough money to pay for 5,000 knights and 50,000 foot soldiers for the conquest of Jerusalem, the ultimate goal behind your decision to undertake the enterprise. So that's good. I want to know what misunderstanding Columbus was arrested for. Oh, it was just because, like, you know, Spain and Portugal are both the big Catholic countries, so they're supposed to be friends, but they actually are constantly in conflict. Gotcha. It was that sort of thing. So Columbus does make it back to Spain alive. The indigenous people he had captured and the

objects that he had brought back from the Caribbean with him were deeply impressive to his sovereigns, as were his lurid descriptions of the so-called Indies. But Columbus had not yet found what he had promised them, which is a reliable source of gold. As a result, he quickly found himself embellishing and outright fibbing to make his achievements sound more impressive in the terms that his sovereigns valued. Lawrence Beargreen writes, quote, he offered his journal as evidence bolstered by the testimony of the others who had accompanied him in the hope of claiming the riches and titles and glory to which he believed he was entitled, even divinely ordained, to have. Carefully embellished and edited to meet Ferdinand and Isabella's expectations and his contractual

obligations to them, the journal purported to demonstrate that he had accomplished and even exceeded his mission to the point of establishing a Spanish outpost in the islands he had discovered on his way to India. Now, inside of this diary, this diary that he is very carefully, this is not an objective document. This is not actually meant to be an accurate document. This is a piece of propaganda he has crafted in order to guide his sovereigns to a specific set of actions. And the whole goal of this was to convince them that if they were to give him a much larger fleet and let him return with it, he would expand the settlement he'd left behind and establish a network of three or four towns united by a series of churches, abbeys, and fortresses, which would

act as collection points for gold. So you set up these different points of what they would call civilization around the Caribbean, which the natives who are now all servants of the crown will have to bring gold to as a form of taxation. And that's how you're going to make all of this money that you need to conquer Jerusalem. Now, Columbus, who was ever the self-promoter, didn't just write this thing out and hand it to his sovereigns. He also published a letter that was quickly translated into five or six different European languages, which basically announced to Europe that the new world has been found. That's the way in which this is interpreted. It's incredible how much this parallels a tech startup. If you're familiar with Silicon Valley

Lingo, he just dropped his white paper and did a bunch of social media posts promoting the event. That's what his diary is. And it's wild to me that even in the very beginnings of the concept of America is woven, the idea of like Columbus asserting, it's the greatest country on earth, Your Majesty. Yeah. Why? Well, because it benefits me to believe that it is. Yeah, because I have the right to a certain amount of all of the trade that comes through this area. So I can convince you to like set up shop here. It's going to work out great for me. I think it's pretty keen. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things he brags about here, obviously, he talks about the potential for gold, and that he's found evidence of it, but he hadn't actually found any minds. So he has to really

hype up the other major resource that he did find in the islands, which is the human beings who lived there. So number one, he talks a lot about how he uses the word comely a lot or like the equivalent of that. He's talking about how pretty they are, right? And by the way, people are pretty much Europeans are pretty much immediately taking young women as sex slaves. That happens from the jump here. Yes. And there's a lot of writing Columbus does about like finding himself in the presence of these women and like how attractive they are and how valuable they are as slaves for that reason. Now he also interesting that in all the fibbing, he did not like Gaussian blur over that bit. That's actually an asset. It just goes to show how much cultural mores change over time.

It's wild. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't find gold, but I found hot people and we can enslave them. And that's good. And we all agree. We are the head of government. This is fine. Yeah. Well, actually, the head of government's not super OK with it, although I think we will discuss a little later how much of that was also a kind of propaganda. But he notes that the indigenous people have no real religion and would be easy converts to Christianity. He talked a lot about how friendly they were saying that the men he'd left behind on Navidad were quote, without danger for their persons if they know how to behave themselves. Now, Michael, keep that line in mind because that's going to be pretty funny in a very short while. Yeah. I'm almost never in danger as long

as I never misstep and do everything correctly. Yeah. I mean that I skate through easily. Yeah. So once Columbus is back and he's doing his big victory tour, word spreads quickly that he has discovered a new route to the islands off the coast of the great cons domain. These unspoiled territories were not Christian, which in the eyes of the pope and all of the Catholics means that the most important order of business is to split them up among Christian powers, right? Because they are not Christian yet or one of the religions that we know as our enemy. It just means they're automatically ours, right? Pope Alexander VI issued a series of papal bulls ruling on how to split the control between Spain and Portugal, which are because they're the Catholic nations that are

actually powerful in this period, they're the only countries that actually matter, right? Italy gets like on that list, but not really because it's not a country, right? Like some of the city states are powerful. Is this still the era when the pope is like Tony Soprano, like more of a business interest than anything else? Yes. And that is what the pope is doing is he is demarcating basically like between these two Spain and Portugal and his eyes are kind of like franchises of the Catholic Church. And he's demarcating between them what chunks of this new discovered land mass they're going to get to to take control over. Because there's this big right that because the Portuguese have the rights to the coast of Africa, you know, which was pretty new to them

when they figured out how to sail to it. So the end result of this, he sets up this line of demarcation that extends from the north to the south pole 100 leagues towards the west and south of the islands and the Azores. Everything west of that line belongs to Spain. And given the terms that Columbus had set up with his sovereigns, this is all partially Christopher Columbus's property too, right? So technically based on the agreement he signed with the king and queen and what the pope is ruled, he gets he's he's like entitled like a quarter of all of the traffic that comes from Spanish settlement in Latin America. Wow. That's a lot, right? Potentially that's worth quite a bit of money, you know, startup turned into PayPal just now. Right. Yes, exactly. He gets a percentage

of every single transaction. Exactly. He's teeling hard. So on May 20th, 1493, Ferdinand and Isabella appointed Columbus the captain general for a second much larger voyage of discovery and conquest. They issued a document conferring rights and privileges on him and officially awarded him the title Viceroy and Admiral of the Ocean Sea and the Indies. He was ordered to very rapidly put together this new voyage and get it out to sea. Chris was now Don Christopher Columbus. Don is a noble title, right? Like that means it's kind of like having Vaughn in your name and in Germany, right? It means that you're a member of the nobility and his children are now also he's he's now permanently in the nobility and not only does he have these rights, his children

inherit them from him. So his all of his progeny are set to have part ownership and all new lands he might quote discover and acquire. The king and queen also give him the authority to punish and chastise delinquents and levy fees or taxes on the natives of this newfound land. I wonder when that thread finally ran out legally speaking, you know, like how long did it persist that they're someone they they cut they cut walking while he's alive. They're cutting back. Oh, they're cutting his kids out. In parts. I mean, his kids do all right. Don't worry about the Columbus kids. Not that you would because they suck too. The king and queen did place one set of limitations on him. I'm going to quote from a write up in American heritage here and written

instructions to Columbus issued from Barcelona on May 29 1493. The king and queen were explicit in their mandate respecting treatment of the Indians. Now, not only was Columbus to make their conversion to the Christian faith his first order of business, but the monarchs also firmly decreed that they were not to be molested or coerced in any way. They instructed Columbus as he prepared for his second voyage. And because this can best be done after the arrival of the meat in good time, the said admiral shall take measures that those who go there in and those who have gone before here shall treat the Indians very well and affectionately without causing them any annoyance, whatever. And at the same time, the admiral shall make some gifts to them in a gracious manner and hold them

in great honor. And if it happens that some persons who treat the Indians badly in any way whatsoever, the said admiral as vice-array and governor for their highnesses shall meet out severe punishment. So on paper, the king and queen are like, Hey, you have to respect these people. They're soft now. They're saying you have to respect them because there are there are servants of our crown now, right? Because they're their property. But they are saying you have to respect them. You have to treat them well, which would seem to say, I don't know about you, Michael, when I think about what qualifies as treating someone well, I think not enslaving them is high up on the list. It's part of freedom. That's right on the top. I don't. But America, freedom's never

been a vaunted trope in America. I just don't think it's, you know, doesn't have that ring to it. It's just it's the second part of the rhyme. Like we all know the 1942 Columbus sailed the ocean. Right. 1943, the court defined atrocity. Michael, how long how long were you waiting to drop that line? I barely gathered most of what you just said about what's his name, Colombo. Yeah. Yes. Yes. This is this is about Colombo thing. That's right. The primary hero of Yugoslavian. Anyway, that's it. That actually is a fun story. So this is an area in which Carol Delaney's account of Columbus's motivations diverges significantly from more mainstream interpretations of the historical act. Yes. Some might say accurate. Delaney interpretations. Delay me, Mark. Right. Anyway,

DeWightwashing, a genocide guy. I don't know. Delaney as well. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. In her account of events, Columbus remains the feverishly devoted zealot, laser focused on finding the Great Khan and bringing back wealth for Jerusalem. But Beargreen makes the case that this doesn't really line up with the history, quote, a new realism informed these instructions. There was no more talk of trading with the Great Khan, although the possibility that he existed hovered over the voyage. In other words, while he's like still writing about Jerusalem right up to this point, when they lay out shit for their next voyage, they're not talking about that so much anymore. This is all talked about

as a business enterprise. They are talking about how to get in there and start making some fucking cash. It's all the same reasons you ever make a sequel to a franchise. It's fascinating that it works in terms of film or any unit of entertainment, but also like, yeah, this exploitation went well. Let's do exploitation to exploit harder. All of these contracts, all of the logistical planning is focused on establishing storehouses and depots to enable trade. And it was all based on the example of the Portuguese in Africa, right? Which you might notice had not retaken the Holy Land. They just made a bunch of money. Like that was the goal at this point, whatever. And I do think one of the reasons I do use Delaney, I think she's right in that it is an untold aspect of

his story that he was a religious fanatic who wanted to bring about the apocalypse, right? I do think that is a worthwhile part of the man's journey. But aren't so many of them, Robert. But like you can you can think about it like you've got all these guys, these like Christian mega preachers and stuff who become multi-millionaires who preach about the apocalypse and the rapture and stuff. And I think some some of them clearly are just grifters, but I think a lot of them believe aspects of it. It's just really easy to temper your belief once you get super fucking rich, right? I think it's also such unique experience that it's almost impossible to project yourself truly into the mindset of someone who in their life knew that they were his of historical

import, right? Like good for good or bad. Like I can't imagine what it's like to be Hitler or FDR. Yeah. And I don't think I truly ever want because you'll think about, oh, what would I have done during this crisis? And you're like, well, you have to remember that you're a completely different dude who is wildly inaccessible to you. Like they think in a different way. This guy believes the world's going to end any second now. That's got to affect your behaviors. Yes. I mean, there's yeah, there's a lot to say about that. So the king and queen, I do think one of the interesting historical questions here, there's a version, a theoretical version in history of a guy who does this and isn't a monster, just like once figures there's land to the west and

wants to sail to it. It is a shame that that guy wound up being such a piece of shit. And also, all of the people he brought with him were pieces of shit and it ended in genocide. But yeah, there's there's a, I don't know, sad. So the king and queen, the wealthy nobles who backed them certainly seem to have seen this second venture is worthy of intense investment. The equivalent of many millions of modern dollars were poured into equipping a vast fleet, right? He goes there with like a couple hundred people. Like I think it's just like a hundred people on three boats. It's a very the first journey over is quite small. This new journey will be 17 ships and something like 1200 people. Like this is a so they are, you know, they've done the this is the

this is when like they get that that second round of VC funding and suddenly they're like fucking with a couple of billion dollars, right? Whereas before it didn't like a thing in the countryside. Yeah. Is this and is there any pretense that they think they might find gold there? Or is it? Yes. Yes. That is the man gold that they want. The whole goal at this point is still gold. Yes. Yes. There's other spices. Obviously they're pretty sure they're going to find some spices because they know that spices come from the East East India area and that's where they think they're sailing to, right? So the people are in this period of time going the other way around and getting spices. So they assume they're going to get spices. So it's not just gold, but

gold is the primary thing on their mind. Interesting. Especially because you said Columbus didn't really bring back definitive proof of like vast amounts of gold. There's proof there's some though. And again, they know that Asia is rich and they think they're in Asia, right? Like you do you have to keep that in mind when it's like why are they investing so much in this? Nobody's got good data on where they are. They just know how to get there. So he's also sent with a representative of the Spanish crown an official representative of the government and a noble who could speak for the Archdeacon of the Bishop of the Catholic Church. So both of these both of and in this period arguably the Spanish crown and the Pope are like the two big powers, right? Or at least two

of them. There's not a whole lot that can compete, right? In terms of their like their raw sort of like political power in Europe in this period. So on September 25th, 1493, Columbus sailed the ocean. I wrote Blee in here, Michael. I couldn't stop myself. I didn't know what else to do. It was not nearly as good as what you did. Anyway, of note is the fact that he pauses on the island of San Sebastian, Gomera, where the local ruler is a woman named Beatriz de Peraza. Her husband had been killed by the indigenous people of the island for being a prick and she's kind of like a character from an old Greek play. She's alleged of at least like luring a bunch of famous and prominent knights to her home and then executing them for petty crimes after like fucking them.

Anyway, Columbus fucked her probably. They had a preexisting relationship. It's like a thing. I don't want to get into it too much, but I think it's funny. Glossy over it then. The voyage itself was uneventful enough for our purposes. In short order, Columbus found himself back in the Caribbean and due to bad weather, he's forced to make the first landfall of his this voyage on an island dominated by a people called the Carribs. Now, the Carribs are either at war or locked into an outright predatory relationship with the Tino. On his first voyage, Columbus had seen Tino with old war wounds and been told that they were the result of Carribs slaving raids. There are historians now who will make the argument that actually the Tino and the Carribs were in the process of making

peace after a long series of conflicts when Columbus came in and disrupted that and like that that fucked up things because the Tino were like, oh, maybe we can use the anyway, whatever. This is it's just too much shock to the system and the peace talks fell apart or what have you. Yeah, there's I mean, I don't think we have great context on that because all of these people die. They were all murdered. Yeah. On his first voyage to the this area, Columbus had seen Tino with old wounds and had been told they were the result of Carribs slaving raids. Now, the Carribs raided other Arawak peoples in the area and Columbus seems to have believed because he's interacting with the people who are the enemies of the Carribs that they are cannibals. And in fact, in that letter,

he sent out many rights down friendly. Well, no, no, no, actually, this is important. He he's once he hears from the people he's friendly with that there are like dangerous cannibals here, he writes back and warns about his sovereigns about the cannibal nature of the Carribs and uses it as a selling point because since there is a group of people in the islands who are clearly dangerous and deranged, it has it's okay to enslave them. Right. But how do you win with someone who wants to enslave you because it's like, Oh, these people are so peaceable, we could enslave them easily. Oh, these people are fighting back. That's crazy. We better enslave them. The solution is enslavement. Surprise, surprise. In part because the the sovereigns don't react

super well to his suggestion that we turn the Tino or whatever into serve because like, well, you say these people are like nice and easy to Christianize. Like, so we have to do that. We're not going to enslave them. But Columbus wants to make money from selling slaves because he needs quick cash and that's the fastest way to get it. And so once he finds the Caribbean, he's like, well, fuck, this is how I can start enslaving some people. I don't have to enslave Caribbean specifically. But if I tell them there's dangerous folks here who can't be Christianized, I can enslave whoever I want and send them back and make quick cash. It's more of a war on crime, if you will. Yes. Yes. Yes. Again, very, very modern American logic here. Carol Tolaney writes,

and this is amazing, as evidence that he had been to the Indies, he wrote that he had brought a few Indios the first time in print that the name is given to the native peoples and promised the riches that he will be able to provide in the future. Gold, spices, cotton, mastic, ala wood, rhubarb, cinnamon and slaves as many as they shall order who will be from the idolaters, that is from the man eating caribs. So he's marking down these people. That's part of like the benefit of hearing that they're cannibals is now he can add them with religious justification to his list of resources in the area. Because I can't. That's what you want. I don't want to enslave the Tino. I can enslave these dangerous man eaters. That's what you want as a slave working

alongside you, I think, is someone trained for war who could eat you and would eat you. Yeah. That is exactly who I want living in my home with me. So we're going to talk a lot more about this. Despite hearing a great deal about the caribs on their first voyage, Columbus didn't really have contact with them in that first trip. Now that changes almost as soon as they arrive back in the Caribbean. And I'm going to quote again from American Heritage here. Columbus and his company had a brief skirmish with these cannibals on the island of Santa Cruz, St. Croix and one of the Virgin Islands. A Spaniard was killed by an arrow and a few of the natives were taken prisoner. The exact number is difficult to establish from the three rather confusing eyewitness accounts

we have of this encounter. But it couldn't have been more than a dozen or so, including three or four male adults and some women and children. Now again, the way that Columbus frames this is that they tried to meet peacefully and the way Delaney interprets it is they tried to have a peaceful meeting and these violent caribs attack them. Now we know that Columbus is just abducting people like this straight up abducting people all over the Caribbean. I think it's entirely possible he tried to steal some folks and they shot a guy out of hand and they shot a guy justifiably. Again, if you're looking for a group of people to travel back in time while wearing a mask so you don't get them sick and give AK-47s to the caribs in this period should be high up on your

list, right? Yeah, they're dealing with crackings and shit. They need all that help. I don't need to speak their language to teach them how to kill Europeans with a Kalashnikov. It's very easy. So after this skirmish, Columbus had his soldiers proceed in force to a carib village. Europeans who were with him at the time wrote that these people practiced the quote, a cursed vice of sodomy, which goes right up there with cannibalism on reasons why they can't be Christianized. They decided that the caribs had introduced sodomy to the other people. Basically, they noticed people doing a lot of fucking that repressed Catholics don't do and they're like, this must be the evil caribs teaching them how to fuck wrong.

And they're always like, this must be the first time anyone ever thought of that because I can't even conceive of something so disgusting. Yeah, we have to enslave and destroy these dangerous caribs to stop them. We approach the very heart of butt stuff, the origin itself. Yes, the caribs are patient zero for butt stuff. So they must be enslaved. Yeah, all respect to the caribs. They also reported that the caribs engaged in what was either castration or is perhaps more likely some form of circumcision. They seem to have been doing something surgical to the genitals of some of their young people. Now, Carol Delaney insists that it was castration, because that is the word that the Spanish doctor with the fleet used. And clearly,

he must know what he's talking about, even though this is the 1490s. And I think it's fair to say doctors are not doctors in this period. Yeah, more than fair. So maybe they were castrating boys for certain. The cultures have done that, right, to some young people at points in time. This may be an example of, again, because of the genocide, we don't have great, it may be an example of perhaps this is a thing where they had different attitudes towards gender and like some people who identified some way had a procedure that we don't really know what's going on with this. But yeah, other scholars are ready to note that back then, yeah, like again, Carol Delaney takes it as written that like they are abusing children and that that's part because

she's making the case that these this is like these are dangerous indigenous people who have vile and evil traditions that and then so then enslavement is OK. Well, that's literally the argument she's about to make. But I think it is important to note other scholars are like, we don't the doctor was not a great doctor. We don't have great content. We have no idea what was going on. And a lot of cultures, including Jewish people, right, do have have like surgeries that they do on, you know, what circumcision and stuff. We don't know what was going. We don't know what these people were doing, but we do not have enough data to say that they were abusing anybody, right? That's just racism. So anyway, yeah, the caribs that they encountered. Yeah,

anyway, there's a number of things that could have been happening. Either way, Columbus captured a bunch of these people and enslaves them and sends them to Spain. He burns all of their canoes to stop them from traveling to other islands and telling them about sodomy. And here's here's how Carol Delaney justifies this. From among the girls, mutilated boys and adults that the caribs had enslaved, Columbus rescued as many as he could, took them aboard the already crowded ships and returned them to their homes. In addition, Columbus wrote that the men found an orphaned year old baby whom he entrusted to a woman who came from Castile and said that once the child learns the language, he would send him to Spain. Columbus did not specify whether the woman was

Spanish or Indian, though it is possible that she was Columbus's domestic servant. Columbus said, I am vengeance, swear to me, and the scum fled into the night, never to return. Michael. Very, very pro Columbus bent here, I can see. Yeah, yeah, it's good. So we'll continue talking about the caribs in a bit. But after this encounter, Columbus's fleet sails on and he makes it to Navidad, where they found the settlement that had he had left there like a few months before, raised to the ground. Everyone there is dead. They're like, they all get their asses killed. So when they find the corpses of their former shipmates, all of the eyes have been removed, which is pretty rad. So eventually he gets into contact with the indigenous folks was particularly

the Kaseek that he had befriended before and he learns the whole story. And here's how Delaney describes it. The men had begun to fight among themselves had formed into groups and gone on raiding parties to the neighboring area belonging to the Kaseek Kenabo. They stole goods, raped the women, kidnapped them and took them back to Navidad as concubines. Not surprisingly, Kenabo retaliated by attacking the garrison, killing all the men and burning their village. Columbus decided to pay a visit to Guacanagari and learn his side of the story. Dressed in full regalia, he and 100 men accompanied by pipes and drums marched to Guacanagari's village about 10 miles inland. Guacanagari confirmed Diego's report. He felt responsible to Columbus and was chagrin that he

had not been able to keep his promise to protect the European men. He said that when he tried to help them, he was struck by a large stone and injured. Dr. Chanke could see no evidence of a wound, but Columbus decided not to press the issue and invited Guacanagari on board for dinner. There for the very first time, the Indian chief saw a horse. Over dinner, Columbus learned that the men had been hoarding gold that they had either found or stolen and had not reported it for the crown. They had also been taking women and even girls as concubines. So first off, what's happened here is that the many leaves behind start taking sex slaves, many of which are children and abusing them and they get murdered for it. And the guy whose Columbus's friend tries to intervene and they

like club him on the head with a rock. And I do love that like, yeah, anyway, there's a lot that's funny about that bit. So much to unpack, not the least of which is they're taking underage sex slaves and then saying it's okay for us to enslave you because you do fucked up shit like you take underage sex slaves. Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, you're abusing children. How can we abide that? Which we would have yelled at these guys if we'd caught them doing it. I promise you. Right. You know who else yells at people who take underage sex slaves, Michael? Michael. I do. But I think we should share that information with the audience so they can benefit. The sponsors of this podcast. Oh, yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah, the sponsors of this podcast.

They hate sex slavery. And we're back. Oh, Michael. Yeah. Mikhail, as you're known in Russia, where you have a huge fan base, I assume. Oh, great. I'll make the same assumption from now on. Thanks. Yeah. So this gets to one of my favorite things about Delaney's book that described because that is a for a woman who's whitewashing Columbus, pretty horrible description of these guys at Navidad, right? She very to her credit describes them as a bunch of guys who needed to get killed, you know? Yeah. That's my favorite thing about her book. She does not whitewash the brutality of the Spanish occupiers. She portrays them as all of the men Columbus takes with him are constantly depicted as rapists, enslavers and vicious gold crazed psychopaths,

which they were. But Columbus is shown as this is like this decent, hardworking man who's like constantly putting out fire. It's like, yeah, it's like if John Luke Picard, if everyone else on the the enterprise, we're just like a murderous asshole. Yeah. And he's just trying to stop it. He's like, oh boy, Picard had in hand. They've raped another village. Yeah. He's constantly trying to maintain noble and decent relationships with the locals, despite all of the viciousness of the men he puts. And that's who makes everything go wrong is these bad guys who he puts in charge and brought with him to the new world. But it's not his fault that they're all bad people. It is a very funny balance to try to strike and she does it badly. Here's one example of her

exculpate in Columbus in this passage about the fact that every town and fort he set up rebels from his control and turns into bands of armed Spaniards, murdering and raping children and taking gold for themselves. Quote, Columbus was a sailor and a navigator. He was not cut out for the job of administrator, even less as contractor. And he had no training for this role. But now he was confronted with the task of organizing his motley group of settlers in decadres for work by himself because he begged for that position because he begged for that job. It's very, you know, I think we can all talk about this now, Michael, having all worked at crack together. We were in this position of a bunch of people who wanted to be creative folks,

making videos and writing articles, being put into management positions and like dealing with budgets and dealing with like corporate stuff that we were not super well suited for. And there were some complications as a result of that. But one of the complications was not that all of our subordinates formed murder gangs and stole gold from people and carried out a genocide. I didn't have eyes on Brockway and Sean baby at all times because they were, you know, living out there. So I can't completely vouch for that. Yeah. But by and large, we got by. By and large, our company did demand that we committed genocide. And I think we should proudly say that, yeah, we stepped away, you know, we're heroes. Frankly, that's why we left. That's right. We all left

of our own volition. They said next obvious step is genocide or slavery. And we were like, I can't do it. Not funny. Frankly, not a moral thing. Just not funny. Yeah. Very few genocides were funny. It is true. She's not wrong that Chris was bad as an administrator. He is just objectively bad at that job. And he also like, it's just very funny to like, to completely divorce him from a morality of what's happening, mainly because he writes letters back talking about how he didn't want things to be so bad as they were, which is like, yeah, you're you're you're working. That's pretty sweaty, Carol. Pretty sweaty. Have you ever played Grand Theft Auto 4? Yes, of course. Where you're the guy who constantly screams, that's right. And Nico will

constantly scream things like, because he was the he was the GTA protagonist who was sad about murder. Yeah. So he would scream things like, why, why must I do this? And oh, this city, what has it made me do? And you're like, I just gunned down 45,000 people. Like, you know, that's why when we finally got Trevor, I was like, oh, this is a breath of fresh air. Your actions match your words. I guess you're supposed to be in this game. But Columbus is still in his Nico phase. Well, Columbus is a Trevor, but he's acting like a Nico. That's right. Yeah, he's he's that's that's definitely the case. So he has a damnable time actually finding and setting up gold mines. And that's all like part of why all of the administrative stuff fails is he's constantly

leaving the task of setting up working towns and trading posts to his incompetent subordinates, because all he cares about is finding gold mines, because that's what's going to make his like personal wealth bigger. But gold mines are still in short supply. He's having trouble finding them. So early on in this voyage, when there's still not a clear idea of where to start mining gold, he gets back into he gets really into the business of enslaving people in large numbers, right? We're talking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people at a time that he starts sending back in ships. Here's how Delaney tries to defend his enslaving of people. Because again, they start like grabbing shit to send back to Spain. With the ships Columbus

sent back cinnamon, pepper, cotton, parrots and sandalwood and some of the gold samples they had collected in order to show that the enterprise would be profitable. In addition to the profitable materials gathered from nature, Columbus also sent human cargo, 26 Indians from the man eating caribs. In doing this, he was following papal policy at the time, which prevented enslavement of those that captured in a just war, those who resisted Christianization and those who went against the law of nature. The caribs appeared to fit all three definitions. Not only they resisted and fought against the Christians, they contravene the law of nature by acts of sodomy and cannibalism. And this is how Delaney tries to minimize his enslaving people every

time. And it is horseshit as our other sources will make clear. So yeah, completely. Well, I was just saying that that was that was not an old timey quote either if I'm gathering from the context, right? So Delaney is saying, and you know, they do butt stuff, which is objectively contravene the natural order. Well, she's saying what he's doing. We had this discussion at the start of like judging people by the standards of their times and then trying to judge people from objective standards as to like how they measure up. And the argument that I'm making and that most reasonable people make is that Columbus was a really bad guy, even considering the morals of the times. She is trying to say, no, he was perfectly normal. The enslaving of the caribs

because they were an enemy in a war was perfectly standard. And he was not in line with the horribleness of the air. Yes. And that that is a lie. Not that that would make it okay, but that's also wrong. On February 2, 1494, two and a half months after the deadly fight with the caribs and his raid on their village, Columbus sends back several boats with a massive cargo of slaves in 12 ships from Isabella, which is this new because Navidad's burnt down. He forms a new colony called as well. Yeah. Valentine's Day is coming up. He's got to get something. Yeah, got to get something down. So these there are hundreds of people in this this cargo of ships that he sends back, all of whom had been captured against their will and all of whom are to be

sold in the slave market at Seville. Now, Columbus sends the captain on that voyage with a letter to the king and queen who had specifically ordered him not to enslave the natives. He explained that because there is no language by means of which this people can understand our holy faith, thus are being sent with these ships, the cannibals, men and women and boys and girls, which their highnesses may order placed in the possession of persons from whom they can best learn the language. He suggested that the prophet from the souls of the said cannibals would suggest the consideration that many more from here would be better and their highnesses would lie served in this manner that in view of the need for cattle and beasts and burden for sustaining the people

who are here. So in other words, what he's saying is that we need more European food because the Europeans don't like eating indigenous food. So I want you to sell these slaves who were totally cannibals and use the prophets in order to buy cattle and send them over here so that we can get a European settlement going here. Now, obviously, and they're like, we wanted gold. This is so far from what we discussed. This is not at all what we had talked about. Now, I'm going to quote again from American heritage here. There is no record of the number of slaves sent with Torres, but from all indications, they were considerably more than the handful of caribs taken in the skirmish on Santa Croix, which is again what Delaney says that he just sends over a couple of dozen caribs.

Columbus's only known encounter with these fierce natives on his second voyage. Most of Torres's wrecked cargo must have been made up of the inoffensive inhabitants of Española, whose meekness so highly praised at first by Columbus was being strained to the breaking point by the strong armed tactics of the European invaders, including Columbus's own periodic kidnappings of groups of natives to learn the secrets of the land, as he wrote. It is also worth noting that in his letters to the king and queen, Columbus explicitly compared the indigenous people of the Indies to the black slaves Portuguese traders were taking. May your highnesses judge whether they ought to be captured, for I believe we could take many of the males every year and an infinite

number of women. May you also believe that one of them would be worth more than three black slaves from Guinea and strengthen ingenuity. As you will gather from those, I am shipping out now. So Delaney is like he just the only ones he sends over for slaves are a couple of dozen people and they're all cribs he had fought with. And that was justified at the time. No, he is lying. He has enslaved a lot more than that of the people he was specifically told not to enslave by the king and queen. And he is sending them back and lying about who they are in order to make a profit. And he's eyeing future slaves. Oh, really? Yes. How many infinity infinite number. And also the fact that he notes that you can slave women and infinite number. It's because right he and

other Europeans want to rape them, right? Like that's why that's being. Well, I was going to say his complicated startup sales pitch has devolved into an internet pop up ad that just says like meet infinite women tonight. Yeah, barely legal, whatever. Any are you a lonely noble in search of infinite women? Jesus. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet

Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific

price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 11 weeks after sending off Torres in that first load of slaves to Seville, Columbus leaves his new colony in the hands of his younger brother Diego. He made a noble named Pedro Marguerite,

commander of the Spanish military forces on the island while he was gone. Both of these guys are shit at the job. And when he gets back, he does find a couple of gold mines, finally. And when he gets back, though, he's found that the whole situation on this island he's trying to colonize has degenerated. So first off, Marguerite, commander of the army, leaves his post and goes back to Spain. He's like, fuck it, I don't like it here. This isn't a good job. So he leaves all of his soldiers leaderless and they just again start raiding villages, shooting people to take what they want, and raping women at random. Ferdinand Columbus, who's Christopher's illegitimate son, describes them as, quote, committing a thousand excesses for which they were mortally hated by

the Indians. Las Casas describes that, quote, each one went where he willed among the Indians, stealing their property and wives, inflicting so many injuries upon them that the Indians resolved to avenge themselves on any they found alone or in small groups. So that's pretty bad. And again, Columbus is not ordering them to go on these raping and murdering sprees. He's just setting up a bunch of armed unhinged men on the island and then abandoning them to look for gold. And then being like, oh my God, a bad thing happened. How could I have known? Also, the weird implication is, of course, that if he stuck around, it would have stayed good. But you never get proof of that because he never sticks around. I will argue you get proof of the opposite. We're about to see what

happens when he does stick around. And guess what? It's actually worse than rape games. A local casique, Guatana Ghana, finally organizes a cohesive event defense. And this is while Columbus is still away. He organizes again, these soldiers are just running roughshot over the island, murdering and raping people. So Guataguana organizes a cohesive defense to the raiding and the raping. He and his men ambushed 10 Spanish soldiers and killed them. They killed the shit out of them. And then once those guys are dead, they find a shelter that the Spanish were living in where 46 soldiers are like recuperating, right? Because they're all sick. They can't defend themselves. So he burns the fucking shack down while they're inside it, which cool and good,

in my opinion. Fuck those guys. So Columbus gets back to the land, though, and he's found out that like a fuckload of soldiers have been murdered by the locals. I would argue justifiably. But Columbus is like, no, this is horrible. And into this situation steps another casique, Guatana Gari, who we've talked about before. This is the guy who Christopher is in love with on his first voyage. And I want to quote now from a book called The Other Slavery by Andres Recindes. Hearing that Columbus had returned after a long absence, Guatana Gari immediately visited to declare his innocence in the massacre. He had done nothing to aid or encourage the Indians who would slaughter the Spanish and to demonstrate his longstanding goodwill, recalled the goodwill and

hospitality he had always shown the Christians. He believed that his generosity towards these visitors from afar had provoked the hatred of the other casiques, especially the notorious Behecio, who had killed one of Guatana Gari's wives and the thieving Kenabo, who had stolen another. Now he appealed to the admiral to restore his wives and obtain revenge. As Guatana Gari narrated this tragic tale, he wept each time he recalled the men who had been killed at La Navidad as if they were his own sons. Guatana Gari's tears went over Columbus, restoring the bond between the admiral and the casique. As he considered the situation, Columbus realized that the emotional casique had provided valuable intelligence about conflicts among the Indians, conflicts that Columbus

could exploit to punish enemies of them both. As an alliance with Guatana Gari would enable him to settle all scores, recovering from his breakdown, Columbus marched forth from Isabella in warlike array together with his comrade Guatana Gari, who was most eager to rout his enemies, Ferdinand wrote. Now we know distressingly little about the pre-contact cultures of the Taino of the different Arawak peoples of the Karib. But one thing we know for certain is that they did not have military technology that could seriously threaten Spanish dominance in the field. They're able to carry out some ambushes that are successful when they are not organized. But once Columbus puts together an actual like battle line and sends it out to fight these

people in an organized way, it is not. There's no the end result is not in doubt. These people have guns and cannons. They're dealing with folks who have not even not particularly good bows and arrows, right? Ferdinand who is and even worse than this, honestly, like potentially the most significant weapons system they have are dogs and or betrayal, like the element of surprise. See, they they needed to red wedding these motherfuckers is like you get Columbus in a room for the peace treaty negotiation. You stab him in his belly 20 times. You know, as you always have, you've got this one local leader who's like, well, these guys will help me deal with my local opponents, right? And I'll worry about the fallout later, right? Exactly. That's the beauty part.

When winter rolls around, the guerrillas simply die. So yeah, Ferdinand, who's there with his father, reports that in one battle, quote, two squadrons of infantry assaulted the multitude of Indians, putting them to route with crossbow shots and guns. And before they could rally, they attacked with horses and dogs. By these means, those cowards fled in every direction, and the destruction was so great in that in brief time, the victory was complete. Not only did his majesty's hand guide him Columbus in achieving the victory, but he also imposed such a severe shortage of food and such varied engrave infirmities that the Indians were reduced to a third of the number they had been before. So it is clear that from his divine guidance, such a marvelous victory

ensued. What Ferdinand is writing about is that in this first like year or so that he's back in the islands, two thirds of these people, the first couple of years, two thirds of these people die out, right? They start starving, they start getting sick, and then they start getting massacred and enslaved and sent away in battles. Now, there's a number of things that cause this decline in population. We'll be talking about this quite a bit. But one of the things is that, again, he's also, he's, there's shipping going on back and forth, and some of it's taking livestock to the islands that the Europeans can eat in the matter they're accustomed to, which is what brings a lot of the diseases that become increasingly a problem here. Now, Delaney, again, frames all of

this as just tragedy stemming from the fact that Columbus, who is a brilliant explorer and a man of deep faith, just isn't a very good leader. And again, he is not a good leader. But if he was an evil genius, he could hardly have planned the situation better. And I'm going to quote from that American heritage right up again. This was all that Columbus needed to establish a steady supply of slaves. He no longer would have to maintain the fiction that they were cannibals. Despite the fact, even acknowledged by Ferdinand, that the slain Spaniards had justly earned their mortal hatred, Columbus led an expedition against the defenseless Indians that was incredibly savage in its slaughter of the naked islanders and destruction of their villages. The heavily

armed Europeans were accompanied by ferocious Greyhounds, each of which Las Casas wrote, in an hour could tear 100 Indians to pieces because all the people of the island had the custom of going nude from head to foot. Many people were taken alive and 500 were sent to slaves to be sold in Castile. Now, this is the first massive load of slaves that Columbus sends across the Atlantic. And in some ways, this is the inauguration of the Atlantic slave trade. It starts off going from the Indies across to Europe as opposed to going from Africa to the Americas. Now, Michel de Cuneo, who's an Italian adventurer who goes on Columbus to the second expedition, he returns with Torres on that boat. And in his own account, he notes that some

1,600 captives had actually been gathered at Isabella. The 500 sent were the most saleable, and the rest were given out as gifts to colonists. By the time Torres' slave ships reached Spain, 200 of the 500 captives on board had died, and their corpses were thrown into the ocean. All of the others died pretty soon after the arrival. Now, the fact that the pretense of friendly coexistence had been well and truly shattered. Right. It's like, oh, and these guys all eat people, right? Yeah. It's hard to feel that as mattering as you're shoveling hundreds of corpses into the sea. It's like, I don't even care if they did. This is now officially a system, a business. Yeah. And again, just to clarify some of the time that you have that first ship

he sends back, which Delaney says is just 26 guys. We actually have no idea how many people were on it and probably includes Tino, people that he had just enslaved because he wanted to enslave them. And then there's that massacre of Spanish soldiers. Columbus does a war, kills a bunch of people and enslaves a group of 500. He sends them back, half of them die, and all of them are dead pretty soon after they arrive in Spain. Like none of them last very long. Imagine that someone swooped down again. I hate to keep using this metaphor, but in a UFO and abducted you, raped you, brought you to the alien planet, taught you the alien language. And you're like, why did you do this? And they're like,

so we could give you our religion. And our religion says, you're blessed because you're meek. You're going to inherit the earth. So you bring me here to tell me how lucky I am and how great this is going for me is the wildest aspect of this all. The cognitive dissonance is off the charts. Yes. Now, by this point in his explorations, Columbus had discovered several gold mines and areas in which gold could be panned for in quantity. His sovereigns repeatedly told him, like as he's sending people over, they're sending letters back and being like, stop, stop enslaving people. Like we told you not to do this. It looks like you're just enslaving random locals. Like don't do that. Tax them instead. So that's what he starts to do.

He because his sovereigns are like yelling at him. And because he wants money, he decides to institute a tax on all of the people who live in the islands, right? Because they're servants of the crowd now. And so they should have to pay their taxes. And the way he sets up the taxes, you know, those hawks bells he was giving out at gifts early on, right? Instead, he sets it so that every three months, an individual has to pay enough tribute in gold to fill a hollow hawks bell, right? That's you each owe me gold. And this is the because I've been giving these out as you thought these were gifts. Wow. This is an example of how much you owe us in fucking taxes. So the hawks bells retcon a gift into a fuck. It's awesome. It's pretty fucked up. It's like sending

someone a Roomba for their birthday and open it up. And they're like, this Roomba exclusively sucks money out of your wallet and delivers it to me. So to ensure that everyone pays their taxes, he Columbus orders all of the people on the islands to wear a metal disc around their neck that shows whether or not they'd paid their taxes recently. Failure to pay could be punished. Brutally, those who rebelled as many did or tried to hide and avoid the tax were hunted down and sold into slavery, which is again basically a death sentence. Every indigenous person older than 14 was subject to the tax, which effectively turned what had been an island of free people into an island of slaves. Among the Spaniards, it was not universally agreed that this was just.

One account of horror came from a man named Washington Irving who wrote quote, In this way was the yoke of servitude fixed upon the island and its thralldom effectively ensured. Deep despair now fell on the natives when they found a perpetual task inflicted upon them. Weak and indolent by nature, unused to labor of any kind and brought up in the untasked idleness of their soft climate and their fruitful groves, death itself seemed preferable to a life of toil and anxiety. They saw no end to this harassing evil which had so suddenly fallen upon them. No prospect of a return to that roving independence and ample leisure so dear to the wild inhabitants of the forest. The pleasant life of the island was at an end. They were now obliged

to grope day by day with bending body and anxious eye along the borders of their rivers, sifting the sands for the grains of gold which every day grew more scanty, or to labor in the fields beneath the fervor of a tropical sun to raise food for their taskmasters or to produce the vegetable tribute imposed upon them. They sunk to sleep weary and exhausted at night with the certainty that the next day was to be a repetition of the same toil and suffering. So that's a nice description of what it means to bring capitalism to an island of people who don't know it, right? Like that's basically what's happening here. These people, you know, they had rulers, slavery existed, like there was nasty things, they had war, but at the end of the day, most people were able to go

about their lives living on a daily basis. But dude, no one gets it done like capitalism. It hits different. Yeah. Yeah, they are in a much worse state of affairs. You're like, now we all wear metal collars and live in gray boxes and work in a steel mill. We're not allowed to fuck anymore. Somehow it's even more depressing than it was, even though before it was still a like relatively brutal period of history. It was still a more difficult life than a lot of people live today, but it was a hell of a lot easier than what it becomes. Now by this point, Columbus has found again, he's got the primarily the mines that he finds the good gold mines are in Sabau, which is part of the the modern day Dominican Republic. But gold was also like it's not the

only precious substance that he's got armed men forcing the locals to mine for him. And I'm going to quote from the other slavery again. For sheer horror and attrition rates, the Pearl Coast was worse. Indian divers there spent agonizing days making repeated descents of up to 50 feet while holding their breath for a minute or more. Few natives could endure these brutal conditions for long. So once they find out there's pearls, he makes people like free dive to grab them all day every day, like repeatedly making these like two atmosphere descents and then going back up, which can kill you if you aren't doing it properly or even if you are just because you can't do that over and over all day. Yeah. Now, the harshness of the tax system

levied upon these people who were also beset by the disruptions. There's a war which disrupt things and makes shit. There's widespread disease now. There's crop failures because they're being taken and forced to mine because there's these wars going on. All of this makes meeting Columbus's quotas basically impossible. After three collection periods, the natives had provided just 200 pesos worth of gold out of the 60,000 pesos that Columbus decided they owed arbitrarily. Yeah, that's a good scope for this project. Since the local casiques had failed to meet their numbers, the Spaniards now have to take over, right? We tried to let you govern yourselves, but you just couldn't make your taxes. So now we're sending an armed men to take

total control of the process. Andres Recindes writes, an average size trench produced more than 6,000 pounds of dirt mixed with the tiniest fragments of gold. The Indians carried this dirt on their bare backs and loats weighting three to four aerobas about 60 to 90 pounds. These were very heavy burdens considering the slender build of most of the laborers. The work proceeded ceaselessly all day. Instead of using valuable beasts of burden, the Spanish compelled natives to do all the hauling. Horses and mules were devoted to the tasks of conquest and pacification. The Indians were even forced to carry their Christian masters and hammocks. As a result, they developed huge sores on their shoulders and backs as happens with animals made to carry

excessive loads, commented Friar Las Casas, who arrived in Española right at the time of the gold rush. And this is not to mention the floggings, beatings, thrashings, punches, curses, and countless other vexations and cruelties to which they were routinely subjected and to which no chronicle could ever do justice. And again, Las Casas is a guy who has a lot of admiration in many ways for Christopher Columbus. And he's a fucking Catholic holy man, right? So he's very much into the hole we have to convert everyone we can. But he's also a human being and enough of one that he watches this happening and is like, there is no way in which this is okay with God. This is a nightmarish crime. What I he and again, this is part of why you have to condemn these people

outside of their times because Las Casas is not looking at what the Portuguese are doing in in Guinea and being like, this is an unconscionable crime because that is it's bad, but it is a bad that is normal for the era. He looks at what is being done in these islands and he says, this is the worst thing this is outstanding. Yeah, this is an exceptional act of evil. Um, that is that deserves to ring out in history. Um, so over the next years, the late 1490s and the early 1500s, a madness for gold overtakes the Spanish and crowds of adventurers flooded the region to take command of mines and force indigenous people to labor for their wealth. At its height, the island yielded more than 2000 pounds of gold per year. It is said that the

Spanish owners threw parties attended by slaves in which the salt shakers were filled with gold dust, which is good to eat. Yeah. Kind of like rich people today will put gold leaf on shit, even though it doesn't taste like anything and has no nutritional value, just because like, look at the money we're wasting. Wow, we went full squid games before the 1500s. It did not take long at all, Michael. I always imagine that was like early 80s, like a five year process. You're snorting coke, putting gold on your burger, watching like the pores fight to the death of your amusement. But this happened immediately. Yeah, it is less than a decade between look at this unspoiled island full of beautiful people who are ready to learn the

gospel of Christ to. Let's eat gold. Yeah, pour gold on the food. Waste it. Fuck them. Let's eat gold while we watch them fight in their collars and their shackles. Jesus. God, man. It is so quick that this happens. So fast. And again, we're contrasting this to what the Portuguese are doing in Guinea, not because it's okay, because that is the start of the slave trade in Africa, which is a crime absolutely on the level of the genocide of like it is a nightmarish crime. It's just at this point in time, that's not yet what they're doing, right? It has not. They are not yet taking huge masses of people from Africa and putting them on islands to work them to death. They do that because they kill all of these people, right? That's why the

like the African slave trade really gets going is because they like they genocide enough of the people in the Caribbean that they bring in workers to kill in plantations and shit and mines. Yeah. Anyway, it's all connected is what I'm saying. It is understood that the gold is not going to last forever. And it's obvious to everyone that the local labor force is dying very quickly. The early miners and when I say miners, I mean the Spanish people who own the mines had a saying, quote, take the most advantage because you do not know how long it will last. Like there and this is you see this with this is the reason why the British Empire in a couple hundred years from now when they take over a chunk of India carry out a starvation genocide,

right? Because they're shortsightedly trying to maximize profits in such a way that makes it unable for people to feed themselves. And so 30 million people die. But they think the same logic is the same as like I as an individual have to get as much as I can out of here immediately. Because all that matters is like the quarterly balance sheet, basically these people. It's once this logic, that's what this is what's so important because the fucking people, the right wingers who raised me made a big point of talking about all of the deaths under state communism, which is an important story. And we've talked about on the show and you should not ignore the Holodomor and the Great Leap Forward and all of the different bad things that were done

by state communist regimes. The death toll of capitalism is at least as high if not much higher. And it starts here, right? I mean, it starts a little bit like these are not yet kind of the joint stock companies that will be recognizable. But the motivation is the same. We are here. Our goal is to use these human beings who we have a right to take from in terms of taxes in order to create a profitable enterprise. And all that matters for me is getting the short term profits as quickly as possible out of here. And whatever happens to them as the result, whatever is done to this land as a result doesn't matter. This is not the only time in history that this has happened, but it's the first time it's happened like this. The Romans did little versions

of this. The Romans never completely wiped out a people, right? Even as bad as the shit they did in Israel was. They didn't do this. This is new. This is a destruction of a people on a scale that has not maybe some of the shit that Genghis Khan was doing compares. And it sets the stage for some uniquely American thoughts like money over everything, or it's just business, you know, like this. It's amazing how early on it set the tone for in this place, it is like gold crushes the end like might makes right. We carry that tradition on to this day. It's fascinating to hear about these people that he left behind that go hog wild and Viking all over everything. And you're like, yeah, it's like ever since the beginning, America has been a barrel full of single

bad apples. And whenever you cover for it, you point to one and go, well, there was a bad apple, or like Columbus couldn't lead. And you're like, right, what about all the other stuff and the other stuff and the other stuff? It's bad apples all the way down. As we taught you and I talked about, in fact, in episodes about like the first corporations, the West Indie company, the Dutch and the British East Indie companies, which are two separate companies. When we talked about those, we were talking about actual recognizable corporate in a modern sense. They function basically the same way as a modern corporation does. And that is like an actual capitalism and that like it is a group of people using their capital in order to own the rights to the

profit of labor of other people, right? What's happening here, you do not have that advanced an idea like these are not corporate, they're doing this for the crown, but also for their own individual benefit. But what you do have here is this idea that has led to most of the problems we are encountering now with stuff like climate change with Chevron covering up what they knew about climate change since the 1970s. It's like the forging of the ethos itself. The sacred thing is short term profits. And anything that gets in the way of that, that's actually like a problem. But you know what else is sacred, Michael? What timing? Just perfect. The products and services that support this podcast. Wow. Sacred and obviously separate from any of the ideas going

on with the Spaniards massacring people here. We're not taking part in a gold rush over a new type of media that is easy to exploit profitably now and perhaps in ways that are short sighted. No, it's not legally a fact that you must do anything to achieve shareholder growth, no matter what. That's not the law of the land. That doesn't occur anywhere anymore. We got over it. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good, bad ass way. It's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can

imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so despite regular admonishments from the royals, Columbus continued to send enslaved human

beings back to Europe during this period where he's also tax genociding them. Due to the high death rate, each boat was crammed as full of people as possible, which is again, this is where we, because again, I really am not, I hope people do not read that I'm trying to minimize the Portuguese slave trade in Guinea, but the stuff that becomes so famous about the African slave trade, how crammed they are into these nightmare ships where millions of people literally die. It is a slavery genocide that is eventually carried out there. That is not the way the slave trade looks quite yet in Africa, right? Which is not to say that it's not horrible. They are enslaved people. That's ugly. They are not, this is the start of, well, because the death rate is

going to be so high, we have to jam as many people as possible on the boats as we can. And like we have this kind of, this arithmetic of death for profit, right? This is where a lot of that is starting. Oh, you're going to lose expected losses, this percentage. Yes, exactly. This leads to problems as well, such as when a flotilla of five ships were stuck in San Domingo Harbor for two and a half weeks, while Columbus negotiated with a guy, so he puts this guy in charge of his militia. When he's away, finding gold, this guy rebels again, and then Columbus has to like talking down, right? That never happens. This is like the third time it's occurred. So while he's negotiating with this guy to like figure out this issue and get trade restarted,

he has boats in his harbor that are crammed full of people that he has captured, and he leaves them there for two and a half weeks, crammed into the hold while he's negotiating. Just leaving your baby in your truck with the windows rolled out. The sun is so, like they suffocate. Las Casas writes that, quote, unable to breathe from anguish in the closeness of their quarters, they smothered and an infinite number of these Indians perished and their bodies were thrown into the sea downstream. Columbus is like preoccupied dealing with this guy that he's got like a bit and that he like comes and go, oh, they all died. I left them all in the boats and they all died. Throw their corpses in the water. Let's grab some more. That's the again. And that is

bad for the time. That is an exceptional act of human evil, which is what he's guilty. I know that I just Delaney's Columbus. It's like Delaney's over here writing, so he wasn't the best businessman. Yeah. So he lost. There was a lot of shrinkage in the trade he was engaged in. I'm so fucking angry at this woman. Her Columbus never loses his missionary zeal or his desire to find the great con and the horrors that occur is Spanish domination because she doesn't deny that there's a genocide occurring, right? She does not try to whitewash the genocide. This is all but it's portrayed as tragic results of the evils of other men. The reality is that Columbus, the governor, writes back to his sovereigns regularly, nearly overcome with glee at the financial prospects of this new

slave trade. From here, one can, in the name of the Holy Trinity, send all the slaves that can be sold, of which, if the information I have is correct, they could sell for 4,000 and at minimum value, they would be worth 20 millions and 4,000 quintals of Brazil wood, which would be worth at least as much at an expense of six millions. It would appear that 40 millions could be realized if there is no lack of ships, which I believe with the aid of the Lord, there will not be once they are filled on this voyage. So again, he's very much thinking about this purely from a, here's what they're worth. Here is the cash value because I'm getting a cut from it, right? He's getting like a quarter of all of the value of the trade. Las Casas, who is also doing math,

just pulling shit out of his ass, that he's like, yeah, like, well, I mean, they're worth this much per unit. And according to my previous letter, there's infinite women. So if you scale it at infinity, that's quite a lot. There's no way he can have firm numbers on this shit. I just don't buy it. And he doesn't. Yeah. Right. So when it comes to properly condemning a man like Columbus, we must note again, others of his peers at the time, people who are watching this are horrified. Las Casas, who's utterly unsparing in his description of what Columbus is doing. What greater or more supine hardheartedness and blindedness can there be than this? In the name of the Holy Trinity, he Columbus could send all the slaves which could be sold in all the said

kingdoms. Many times, I believe blindness and corruption infected the admiral, which is, you know, I don't think blindness is, but certainly corruption. Yeah, no, this is the same speech my dad gives me every Thanksgiving and it's devastating every time. It's quite a takedown. Well, you know, Michael, you you do operate a pretty, pretty brutal business enslaving people. You know, I happen to think that it's justified that you're sending them to Blue Aprons Island, where they'll be hunted. But but a lot of people probably shouldn't be enslaving children for the Blue Apron Corporation. They'll be served tastefully in a like cost impactful, ready to eat way. Yeah. Wrapped in an unfortunate amount of plastic as well. Blue Apron product, which makes

all my users cannibals, which then justifies me enslaving them and the whole system perpetuates itself. It's great. It's not set enough. A canny businessman. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I learned it from Columbus. Yeah, we all did, you know, the only businessman, Chris C. So Christopher Columbus, the king and queen initially accept his claims that the people he's sending them are all cannibals captured in war and thus fair targets for enslavement. But they start to grow concerned as he just keeps on sending back ships full of dead people, right? So because they're they're they're worried they get framed often as like being super sympathetic to the natives because some of the stuff they write is in terms of writing very

sympathetic. The main thing they do is they convene a council of like scholars and religious experts to try and determine if it's OK to enslave these people. We don't actually know what this committee decided. Eventually it came to some decision. We have no idea what it was that that information has been lost, because again, record keeping wasn't perfect this period. But we know that their concerns did very little to slow this process. It is probably worth noting that Queen Isabella did late in life, makes something of a name for herself as an advocate for indigenous rights. By 1499, she was horrified by the constant shiploads of dead and dying enslaved people and asked, who is this Columbus who dares to give out my vassals as slaves?

She and her husband did free a lot of these people. A decent number of these people are freed when they arrive because they're like, what the fuck? He sent us another ship of people. We didn't want this. And some of them even make it back to the new world. Nearly all of them choose to go back in the times when they're given the option. By the end of the 1500s, Columbus's star had faded at court. In late 1498, he sent a letter back to his masters proposing a sale of 4,000 slaves. The letter came with several, so these colonists who rebel when he's sitting there with the boats full of people, he sends a bunch of them back to Spain with him. And in order to keep them happy, he gives each of them a slave. So he

enslaved 600 Tino to give these rebellious colonists as slaves when they return home. So they come home with a dude, or as is often the case with a young woman. And this fleet, so when this fleet arrives back in Spain, he's number one, all of these people who rebelled have been given enslaved people. And number two, Columbus is like, I want to enslave 4,000 more people and send them back. Is that cool with you guys? And if not, is there a way I could throw slaves at the problem? Yes, yes. And this comes back with number one, the fact that all of the colonists he's sending back are people who had rebelled and been sent back means like the king and queen are like, he might not be good at running this colony. But also other people are coming back from the

new world at the time and being like, hey, he's kind of sucks at everything. You might not want to leave him in charge of this. And after four or five ships full of dead bodies, I'd be like, is this a threat? Are you threatening us? Or what are you trying to say? I don't think he's good at this. I'm going to quote from American heritage here. The 16th century historian Antonio de Herrera de Torresila, also a great admirer of Columbus, wrote that many of the charges brought by the white residents of Española against the admiral was one that he would not consent to the baptism of Indians who the friars wished to baptize because he wanted more slaves than Christians, that he made war against the Indians unjustly and made many slaves to be sent to Castile.

And again, one of Delaney's big defenses is he only enslaves people who are fighting him and he doesn't he doesn't want to he wants to Christianize people, which means he can't have wanted to enslave them all. And again, we have contemporary historians being like, no, a bunch of people at the time were like, hey, it seems like you're starting wars specifically to justify enslaving people. And you're refusing to allow friars to baptize people who want to be Christians, because you want to enslave them. That seems bad, Christopher. And the counterargument is no, no, no, he was just trying to enslave their mind and soul. Not exactly. Not their body. What the Catholics here who call him out as bad are want isn't always

all that much better. But relatively speaking, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, there's Catholic missionaries who return home, they send letters back to the Cardinal and the Archbishop of Toledo accusing Columbus and his brothers of actively attempting to like harm efforts of the missionaries to convert the natives to Christianity. They claim that one of the things they keep pointing out in their complaints to the to the Pope and whatnot is that like, hey, like the fact that we're being so shitty to these people makes them not like Christianity. And this is a problem for us as friars like fucking figure figure. So Columbus's downfall, harsh and humiliating, came within weeks of this decree. The sovereign summarily removed him from his highest state of viceroy and

governor of the New World colonies and appointed the commander Francis de Bobadilla as a successor. And what many historians regard as an excess of zeal, Bobadilla sent Columbus and his two brothers back to Castile in chains. The sovereigns ordered the brothers released and authorized a fourth voyage by Columbus, but mandated he never set foot in Hispaniola again. Now, this is that was just a quote from American Heritage. Carol Delaney makes Bobadilla out to be the bad guy of the whole thing, which he also sucked, right? He is a brutal Catholic soldier who had helped like repress uprising shit and shit for the yeah. But if you're whitewashing some shithead, you need a scapegoat. This is a classic maneuver. Yeah, like it's true that he

sucked so did Columbus. And by the way, Columbus deserved a lot worse than chains. Obviously, the king and queen who also get whitewashed a lot because of their purported care for the indigenous people also sucked. They sent him on another fucking voyage after this. So like, fuck those people, right? Like, let's not wait. Nobody nobody's good here. Columbus is just the worst of them. After all the dead bodies. Yeah, they commissioned spider man turn off the dark too. They were the motherfuckers who were like, yes, another one, please. So Christopher Columbus died on May 20th, 1506. Despite his many failures and crimes, he maintained many of the benefits promised to him by the Spanish crown and passed a considered amount on to his sons. What little

justice he experienced was not enough to save the Arawak, particularly the Taino, who were completely extinct by the early 1500s. There are still some Arawak peoples around, but the Taino are extinct. I think the Carribs are as well. Most of the peoples who had existed when he arrived in the area that he arrives in are absolutely wiped out in like 20 or ish years. And it's worth discussing precisely how this happened, because this is a part of the story that seldom gets told. Now, we don't know how many people were in these islands at the time of first contact. Friar Lascas estimated Espanola's population at around 3 million people. Archaeologists suggest a more realistic number might be 300,000. If that is the case, by 1508, 16 years after first

contact, only 60,000 remained. So if you assume 300,000 people or so, by 16 years after first contact, 60,000 are left. That means 80% have died in the first 16 years. And was the bubonic plague was like a third or a quarter? Yeah. I mean, in some places it was 75%, right? Like there were some parts of Europe. But we're talking plague numbers. We're talking. We are talking bubon. This is apocalypse. This is end of the world shit. Many of these people were killed by disease or violence, but also a lot of them committed what some scholars say was essentially a form of race suicide. And to close us out, I'm going to read for you, Michael, one of the most harrowing passages I have ever read in my research for this show. This is from the book, The Other

Slavery by Andres Recindes. Okay, I'll think of a joke, Robert. Go ahead. Yeah, you'll be cooking on that one, Michael. Thanks for inviting me. This has been wonderful. Demoralized by the Spanish Tribute System and unnerved by their own prophecies, many Indians took steps to escape in the only way left to them. Columbus became aware of the dimensions of the tragedy decimating the Indians when, quote, it was pointed out to him that the natives had been vexed by a famine so widespread that more than 50,000 men had died. And every day they fell everywhere like sickened flocks in the word of Peter Martyr. The reality was even more terrible than famine. It was self inflicted. The Indians destroyed their stores of bread so that neither they nor the invaders would be able

to eat it. They plunged off cliffs, they poisoned themselves with roots, and they starved themselves to death. Oppressed by the impossible requirement to deliver tributes of gold, the Indians were no longer able to tend their fields or care for their sick children and elderly. They had given up and committed mass suicide to avoid being killed or captured by Christians and to avoid sharing their land with them, their fields, groves, beaches, forests, and women, the future of their people. It was an extraordinary act of despair and self-destruction, so overwhelming that the Spanish could not comprehend it. All of them, 50,000 Indians, dead by their own hand. The dwindling number of survivors found themselves trapped in a survivalistic endgame. Some took

refuge in the mountains, where Spanish dogs set upon them. Those who avoided the dogs succumbed to starvation and illness. Although estimates of the population are in exact the trend is plain. Of the approximately 300,000 Indians in Hispaniola at the time of Columbus' first voyage in 1492, 100,000 or so died between 1494 and 1496, half of them during the mass suicide. Las Casas estimated that the Indian population 1496 was only one-third of what had been in 1494. What a splendid harvest and how quickly they reaped it, he wrote acidly. Twelve years later, in 1508, a census counted 60,000 Indians, or one-fifth of the original population. And by 1548, Fernandez de Oviedo found only 500 Indians. The survivors of the

hundreds of thousands who had populated the islands when Columbus arrived, and who had seen him as the fulfillment of a long-standing prophecy. It was only now that the meaning of that prophecy became clear. His presence meant their extinction. Wow. So that's pretty bad. It's sick that they started with the word decimated and I think that means one-tenth are killed. Imagine being decimated over and over and over and over until there's only 500 left. Out of 300,000 and how a huge chunk of the death was people making a conscious choice to kill themselves so that they wouldn't have to live with these. Which I think speaks to how rapid the changes were because any student of history will tell you, you can actually get a

population to suffer mightily over a long period of time and not kill themselves if you do it slowly. So that means these changes were so rapid that a whole generation of people were like, I cannot even grapple with, let's just, that's that. Which is just very telling. I don't think there's even an inclement periods of history where shit is really, really upsetting. You don't usually get 50,000 people checking out at once as a conscious decision. No. We're almost an act of rebellion or defiance. This is an act of them taking agency and we cannot fight these people. We are too weak and they are too strong for us to combat them militarily. But we recognize their religion and their belief system as sick and wrong and we will not live under it. And so we're

going to do the only thing that we can do. And this is not the only time things like that will happen. You have cases of like slave ships mutinying in ways that will kill them all and they're like, but this is better than living with these people. So yeah, that's the story of Chris Columbus, director of the Home Alone movies. They were the United 93 of islands really. Yeah. They were like, these terrorists have taken control. We're just going to crash this shit. Yeah, this is the only thing we can think of to do. Wow. You sapped all funny out of me. Unspeakably bleak. One of the worst stories I have ever encountered in my life. How could it not be? It's the story of America. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is the story of America.

Well, Michael. Robert. Mikhail. Robotar. I don't know what they call you in Russia. You got any pluggables to plug? Robert. Push your business here. I guess if I can stammer a little bit and blank people's minds and separate the taste in their mouth that they have now with the thing that I'm about to say. But yeah, if you want to hear me podcast about stuff, I was going to say ranging from less to more bleak, but no, all less bleak than this, including depression, addiction and trauma, but still all less bleak than this shit. Look us up over at Small Beans. You can find it, you know, wherever you get podcasts or a patreon.com slash Small Beans. If you're into video games, check out my other podcasts

on the iHeart Network. One Upsman ship. I guess Columbus was kind of the original one UPS man ship, right? Yeah. I think that's ultimately what I learned. Yeah. That is, that is the lesson. He was shipping men. He was shipping men. And to add insult to injury, the fact that I'm sorry, you mentioned this tiny detail, but it's rankled me the whole time. They made them carry them in hammocks. They invented hammocks. You dirty piece of shit. Even worse, right? We gave you hammock technology, you motherfuckers. You couldn't figure it out on your own and then you stole it and made us carry you, you sons of bitches. I'm so mad now. Great. So yeah, I think the only thing I can say at the end of this harrowing series learning about Columbus is folks at home, if you

want to stick it to Christopher Columbus and the people like him, go fire bomb a pizza restaurant. Doesn't matter which one. Stick it to the Italians. That's the only way. Take out, find the local pizza restaurant, fuck them up. Sure. That'll teach him. I legally endorse this statement as well. Good. Good. I wanted a little bit of extra cover on that one. All right, everybody, that's our legally binding advice to you is destroy all pizza restaurants in vengeance for Columbus's crimes. Hey, do the right thing. Do the right thing. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?

Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.