The stars filled the sky, reflected on the sea, turning into floating bands of gorgeous light. Stars and moon shone together, and rippling waves rose and fell like dreamlike reflections of flowers in a mirror and the moon in water. The people aboard the Longships gazed at the peaceful beauty of the sea and listened to the distant singing. No one spoke. No one wanted to break the stillness of this brief peach-blossom paradise.
Such quiet, peaceful lives had continued among the Taino tribes of the Caribbean islands for thousands of years. And just as the two people on the ship had sensed, the beautiful blooming flowers were about to reach their end, withering away completely amid wind and rain.
Three years later, Columbus's Exploration Fleet would arrive here and begin the massacre of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The peace, harmlessness, and abundance of the Taino would ignite the white men's cruelest brutality. Plunder, slaughter, enslavement, bestial lust. Every most terrible crime would appear upon these wealthy islands. By then, men and women, old and young alike—even newborn infants—would become torn flesh in the jaws of the hounds. Those would not be scattered crimes in twos and threes, but large-scale, systematic extermination, beyond all doubt!
When the second expedition brought enough soldiers, Columbus began to demand wealth madly and carry out slaughter at will. He declared that all the lands he saw belonged to the Spanish Kingdom, and that he was the Kingdom's governor in the New World. He ordered all the Taino islanders under his control to hand over one pound of gold dust or a great bolt of cotton cloth every three months. And all villagers who could not complete it had both hands cut off and hung around their necks for public display, bleeding dry