For Spain, the voyages of Christopher Columbus and his successors were positive in the sense that they opened up a New World and gave that country the largest empire in the world, but they were a disaster for the Native Americans. Within 100 years, the Native population of the islands Columbus visited had been reduced to zero because of warfare, disease and slave labor. This also occurred in Mexico and Peru after they were conquered by Hernan Cortez and Francisco Pizarro in the 1520s and 1530s, to the point where the indigenous population fell 80-90% within a century. No one had really expected to find these new continents by sailing to the west, although Columbus may have had some hint that new lands existed in that area, and his discoveries literally redrew the map of the world.
Columbus made no secret of the fact that he hoped to discover gold and silver in the islands he discovered, or that he regarded the Native American population as a source of slave labor. He had promised Ferdinand and Isabella that he would find a new trade route to Asia, and for a time he was quite badly confused about where he really was when he arrived in the Caribbean islands. Even so, his letters, diaries and other writings show that he was most concerned about personal wealth and status, particularly since he had been promised 10% of the profits. As he got older, he also came increasingly to believe that he was literally on a mission from God and communicated with the Almighty in person (Columbus 37)). He regularly kidnapped the Natives and sold them into slavery, and in 1493 also presented Isabella with a “procession of naked Indians adorned with gold and accompanied by multicolored parrots” as an indication of the potential riches in these new lands (Vilches 201).
Columbus frequently complained that he never received his full 10% share, and in reality the mineral wealth of these islands turned out to be very limited compared to the later conquests in Mexico and Peru. Even so, he died a very wealthy man with an aristocratic title, which was actually quite an accomplishment in that era for a man of very obscure and humble origins (Morison 1974). Columbus never quite overcame the fact that he failed to reach Asia at all, which was much further away than he had calculated, and that “there was little gold to be found” in the places he did conquer (Vilches 205). Isabella had forbidden the outright enslavement of the Native peoples, but the Spanish practice of encomienda turned out to be slavery in everything but name. In the West Indies, however, the indigenous population died off in such numbers that they were replaced by African slaves. Columbus was also very familiar with this practice of the African slave trade from his time as a merchant in the Canary Islands, and his introduction of African slavery in the New World was another highly negative consequence of his voyages (Morison 1974)
Later conquests in Mexico and Peru did provide the Spanish monarchy with vast amounts of gold and silver made Spain the world’s first superpower. Precious metals produced by black and Native American slave labor in the Americas were the “base of the Spanish economy until the 18th Century” (Brown 192). These voyages of conquest and discovery literally created new maps of the world, such as the famous 1507 map of Martin Waldenseemueller, which showed a more accurate picture of the globe for the first time in history. Not until the voyages of Ferdinand Magellan in 1520-21, however, did Europeans realize “just how unexpectedly broad” the Pacific Ocean truly was, or how far away the Americas were from Asia (Pardon 8). Spain became wealthy from imports of gold and silver, yet it was also a “dry, barren, and impoverished land” that “produced no wealth of its own in the form of precious metals or commodities” (Padrom 19). In the years 1500-1800, about 100,000 tons of gold and silver arrived in Europe from the Spanish colonies, and in the 16th Century this led to unprecedented inflation of 300-400%, followed by a major depression in the 17th Century (Padron 22). Other countries like England and Holland ended up benefiting more from the expansion of trade, commerce and shipbuilding than did Spain, which continued to have a relatively stagnant domestic economy compared to its imperial rivals (Houseman and Johnson 247).
Thanks to Columbus, Spain ended up controlling most of the Americas except for Brazil, including one-third of the future United States, and it retained this empire until the 19th Century. Gold and silver from these colonies flowed out of Spain and created a price revolution in Europe, followed by a major crash and depression in the 17th Century. Most of the wealth from the colonies did not benefit Spain in the end, though, since it was spent to finance the Wars of Religion against the Protestant Reformation, and in fact by the 17th Century Spain went bankrupt. Blacks and Native Americans paid a heavy price for all this empire-building, of course, and turned out to be its main victims.
WORKS CITED
Brown , Christie, “Crosses of Silver”. Forbes, Vol. 155, No. 2, June 5, 1999: 192.
Columbus, Christopher. Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus. Penguin Classics, 1992.
Houseman, Jocelyn and David A. Johnson. “Spanish-American Silver: An Interdisciplinary Bonanza”. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol. 16, No. 3: 245-57.
Morison, Samuel E. The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages 1492-1616. Oxford University Press, 1974.
Padron, Ricardo . “A Sea of Denial: The Early Modern Spanish Invention of the Pacific Rim”. Hispanic Review, Vol. 77, No. 1, Winter 2009: 1-27.
Vilches, Elvira. “Columbus’s Gift: Representations of Grace and Wealth in the Enterprise of the Indies.” MLN, Vol. 19, No. 2, March 2004: 201-25.
