I would have to dig back into 20 year old papers when I was working  
on this to provide full citations for each of the comments I made,  
but I assume you are referring to the sex slave trade and  Columbus,  
and also the mass suicides, and I did find a few things to hand.

This from a letter Columbus wrote to a friend in 1500:

"A hundred castellanoes (a Spanish coin of the period) are as easily  
obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there  
are plenty of dealers (slave traders) who go about looking for girls;  
those from nine and ten [emphasis added - SAS] are now in demand."

Columbus letter quoted in Eric Williams' Documents of West Indian  
History (port-of-Spain, Trinidad: PNM 1963), and Peter Martyr, De  
Orbe Novo (1516).

  Also take a look at the surviving journal of Miguel Cuneo, who was  
part of Columbus' crew:

"When our ships... were to leave for Spain, we gathered...one  
thousand six hundred male and female persons of those Indians, and of  
these we embarked in our ships on February 17, 1495."

He goes on to describe how he selected one particular young girl as  
his sex slave, and when he tried to have sex with her "she resisted  
with all her strength" so, as he unashamedly describes it, he  
"thrashed her mercilessly and raped her."

Thus began what became for Columbus, and later his brother  
Bartholomew, a lucrative trade which helped to make them rich.

As to the mass suicides see the letter Pedro de Cordoba wrote King  
Ferdinand in 1517:

"As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the  
Indians choose and have chosen suicide.  Occasionally, a hundred have  
commmitted mass suicide.  The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned  
conception and childbirth... Many, when pregnant, have taken  
something to abort and have aborted.  Others after delivery have  
killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them  
in such oppressive slavery."

Hope this is helpful.  Frankly, when I learned all this from digging  
into old archives back in the early 80s, I was appalled that it was  
so little known, particularly to people who teach history to school  
kids.  I went to dinner one night with Roger Smith, now the director  
of marine archaeology for Florida, then at Texas A&M's Institute for  
Marine Archaeology, and was going on about this and he said to me,  
"You think that's something.  Would it surprise you to know that  
Columbus left diaries which haver never been published, or even made  
available to scholars, because the family knows this is all in there,  
and doesn't want Columbus' legend disturbed?"  Just reading this  
note, which I wrote in my day book so many years ago, rekindles my  
sense of outrage about this whole thing.

One final gloss:  The story that the Arawak/Taino were cannibals, was  
almost certainly started by the Spanish to justify what they had  
done, and so there would be no sympathy for the Amerinds. The whole  
history of this epoch is really quite disgusting.

-- Stephan

On 15 Jun 2007, at 12:11, Paul Heinegg wrote:

> Hi Neil. The quote was from Stephan A. Schwartz's earlier post. I  
> cannot vouch for its veracity. But I have read enough about  
> Columbus from various sources to believe he played a significant  
> role in eliminating the South American Indian population and was  
> not someone we should be teaching our children to emulate.
> Paul