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became the first European colony in America. Although Columbus had formally taken possession of every island he found, the act was mere ritual until he reached Española. Here he began the European occupation of the New World, and here his European ideas and attitudes began their transformation of land and people.
    The people of Española were the handsomest that Columbus had encountered in the New World and so attractive in character that he found it hard to praise them enough. “They are the best people in the world,” he said, “and beyond all the mildest.” They cultivated a bit of cassava for bread and made a bit of cottonlike cloth from the fibers of the gossampine tree. But most of the day they spent like children idling away their time from morning to night seemingly without a care in the world. Once they saw that Columbus meant them no harm, they outdid one another in bringing him anything he wanted. Never had there been such generosity. It was impossible to believe, he reported, “that anyone has seen a people with such kind hearts and so ready to give the Christians all that they possess, and when the Christians arrive, they run at once to bring them everything.”
    To Columbus the people of Española seemed like relics of the golden age. On the basis of what he told Peter Martyr, who recorded his voyages, Martyr wrote, “If we shall not bee ashamed to confesse the Trueth, they seeme to live in that golden worlde of the which olde writers speake so much, wherein menne lived simply and innocently without enforcement of lawes, without quarreling, judges, and libelles, content onely to satisfie nature, without further vexation for knowledge of things to come.”
    As the idyllic Arawak Indians of Española conformed to one ancient picture, their enemies the Caribs conformed to another that Columbus had read of, the anthropophagi. According to the Arawaks, the Caribs or Cannibals were man-eaters, and as such their name eventually entered the English language. The Caribs lived on islands of their own and met every European approach with poisoned arrows, which men and women together fired in showers. They not only were fierce but, by comparison with the Arawaks, also seemed more energetic, more industrious, and, it might even be said, sadly enough, more civil. After Columbus succeeded in entering one of their settlements on his second voyage, a member of the expedition reported, “This people seemed to us to be more civil than those who were in the other islands we have visited, although they all have dwellings of straw, but these have them better made and better provided with supplies, and in them were more signs of industry, both of men and women.”
    Columbus had no doubts about how to proceed, either with the lovable but lazy Arawaks or with the hateful but industrious Cannibals. He had come to take possession and to establish dominion. The Arawaks of Española would obviously make good subjects. He had no sooner set eyes on them than he began making plans. In almost the same breath he described their gentleness and innocence and then went on to assure the king and queen of Spain, “They have no arms and are all naked and without any knowledge of war, and very cowardly, so that a thousand of them would not face three. And they are also fitted to be ruled and to be set to work, to cultivate the land and to do all else that may be necessary, and you may build towns and teach them to go clothed and adopt our customs.”
    So much for the golden age. Columbus had not yet prescribed the method by which the Arawaks would be set to work, but he had a pretty clear idea of how to handle the Caribs. On his second voyage, after capturing a few of them, he sent them in slavery to Spain, as samples of what he hoped would be a regular trade. They were obviously intelligent, and in Spain they might “be led to abandon that inhuman custom which they have of eating men, and there