Thereupon the Columbian Exchange, silver took the global marketplace by storm. Exported from mines in Spanish America and Japan, said silver was imported into China for coveted goods such as silk, perfume, and porcelain. This precious metal influenced the world insofar as having both the Chinese and the Europeans seeing it profitable enough to warrant inflation, with the latter rendering it necessary for the Native American peoples to be enslaved. Contrary to popular belief, Christopher Columbus was well aware that the earth was round, not flat, and as such he sought after direct passage into Asia, free from Muslim control. But when Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, he instead landed in the New World. His landing marked …show more content…
Although still twisted and sadistic, what the white man did to the Native Americans was nothing new. He enslaved them to work both the cash crops fields and the silver mines. Theodore de Bry, a Protestant banished from the Catholic Spanish Netherlands, once deftly engraved the inhumanity forced upon the Native American peoples working the silver mines (Doc 5). Given his Protestant religion, de Bry could have perhaps illustrated the dehumanization of the natives not to deliver them, but to expose the evil of Spanish Catholicism. In layman's terms, he was ‘throwing shade’. Still, he did provide a look back into Native American history, how the silver flow consequently led to their enslavement. Pursuing this further, Antonio Vazquez de Espinosa, a Spanish priest, wrote of the harsh quagmires the natives underwent on a daily basis (Doc 3). Like de Bry before him, Espinosa may have harbored a bit of frustration toward the Spanish, considering his position as a priest intent on gathering converts. It must have been quite difficult, though, since the Native Americans probably wanted nothing more than to be left alone. Life was already ephemeral enough as is, what with their still somewhat primitive lifestyle and whatnot, but then the white man had to come along and introduce smallpox, a disease hitherto unbeknownst to their immunity. Furthermore, to add salt to injury, the white man also enslaved them, first to the Encomienda and then, more or less unsuccessfully, to