“Cortez went on to overthrow the empire of the Aztecs, it was clear that Spain’s empire of the Indies had come to stay.”- Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830, John Huxtable Eliot, p20. Unfortunately for the Indian natives this was well and truly the case.
There should be total regret for the ravaging and diminishing treatment of the native peoples that inhabited the lands of the Americas. There can be nothing to celebrate when brutality and violence were inflicted on native peoples during the colonisation of these lands. The natives of islands such as Hispaniola were innocent, meek and naïve. The Spanish completely exploited this vulnerability and wielded brutality and violence in order to take over native lands and bask in pillaged wealth and riches. This inhumane treatment by the Spanish is explored through the accounts of Bartolome de Las Casas, a Spanish priest and historian. He recalls the population
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Firstly, the idea of deadly diseases that the Europeans brought into the Americas will be discussed. This resulted in a staggering number of deaths. “The death tolls from the newly introduced European diseases often reached 80-90 percent. Entire groups of people vanished before the tidal wave of disease”- Americannetroots.net December 28, 2009 by Ojibwa. If a comparison was made between the native Indians and Europeans, it was true to say that the Indians were slightly healthier. This was for two reasons: (1) Indians faced less chance of starvation as Indian political leaders distributed their wealth in terms of food to those in need. (2) The Indian populations did not have many of the infectious diseases that were being experienced throughout Europe. This completely changed as the Europeans brought a number of killer diseases to this continent. These included chicken pox, whooping cough, measles, influenza, typhus, bubonic and pneumonic