section_path: Legacy/Criticism and defense/Brutality
section_name: Brutality
paragraph_text: Brutality
  
  Some historians have criticized Columbus for initiating the widespread colonization of the Americas and for abusing its native population. On St. Croix, Columbus's friend Michele da Cuneo—according to his own account—kept an indigenous woman he captured, whom Columbus "gave to ", then brutally raped her.
  
  According to some historians, the punishment for an indigenous person, aged 14 and older, failing to pay a hawk's bell, or cascabela, worth of gold dust every six months (based on Bartolomé de las Casas 's account) was cutting off the hands of those without tokens, often leaving them to bleed to death. Other historians dispute such accounts. For example, a study of Spanish archival sources showed that the cascabela quotas were imposed by Guarionex, not Columbus, and that there is no mention, in the primary sources, of punishment by cutting off hands for failing to pay. Columbus had an economic interest in the enslavement of the Hispaniola natives and for that reason was not eager to baptize them, which attracted criticism from some churchmen. Consuelo Varela, a Spanish historian, stated that "Columbus's government was characterized by a form of tyranny. Even those who loved him had to admit the atrocities that had taken place." Other historians have argued that some of the accounts of the brutality of Columbus and his brothers have been exaggerated as part of the Black Legend, a historical tendency towards anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic sentiment in historical sources dating as far back as the 16th century, which they speculate may continue to taint scholarship into the present day.
  
  According to historian Emily Berquist Soule, the immense Portuguese profits from the maritime trade in African slaves along the West African coast served as an inspiration for Columbus to create a counterpart of this apparatus in the New World using indigenous American slaves. Historian William J. Connell has argued that while Columbus "brought the entrepreneurial form of slavery to the New World", this "was a phenomenon of the times", further arguing that "we have to be very careful about applying 20th-century understandings of morality to the morality of the 15th century." In a less popular defense of colonization, Spanish ambassador María Jesús Figa has argued, "Normally we melded with the cultures in America, we stayed there, we spread our language and culture and religion."
  
  British historian Basil Davidson has dubbed Columbus the "father of the slave trade ", citing the fact that the first license to ship enslaved Africans to the Caribbean was issued by the Catholic Monarchs in 1501 to the first royal governor of Hispaniola, Nicolás de Ovando.