Caribbean and Conquest

Class: RESEARCH. Compiled documented record. Primary witnesses are labelled [PRIMARY WITNESS]. Their testimony is evidence of what they saw and claimed; their numbers are not censuses.

1. Hispaniola and the Taíno

Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) was the first site of sustained Spanish colonisation after 1492 and of the first catastrophic collapse.

The population debate — sourced range

• Bartolomé de las Casas [PRIMARY WITNESS], History of the Indies (written by 1561; Las Casas arrived on Hispaniola in 1502/1508 in different passages of his account): "There were 60,000 people living on this island [when I arrived in 1508], including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this?" In other writings Las Casas gave 3–4 million for the island.
• Modern scholarly position: researchers today doubt Las Casas's pre-contact figures and generally consider them exaggerations (standard assessment in the Taíno literature). Karen Anderson Córdova estimates a maximum of ~500,000 for the island. Modern scholarly estimates have generally run ~250,000 to 1,000,000; Bartholomew Columbus's contemporary figure was 1.1 million.
• The low end: a 2020 ancient-DNA study (Reich laboratory, Harvard; published in Nature, 2020) estimated the pre-contact Caribbean population at no more than a few tens of thousands across the region — at least tenfold below earlier archaeological estimates. This genetic inference is itself an estimate from effective-population modelling and is contested by archaeologists; it is recorded as the current low end, not as a settlement of the question.
• Stated range for this record: published estimates for Hispaniola in 1492 run from a few tens of thousands (2020 genetic study) through a scholarly mainstream of roughly 250,000–1,000,000, to Las Casas's 3 million-plus, which most historians reject as a count while accepting his testimony on the mechanisms of destruction.

The documented collapse, whatever the starting figure

Spanish counts after conquest are documentary and grim on any starting estimate: roughly 60,000 Taíno remaining by ~1508 (Las Casas's figure, consistent with the direction of the official counts); the 1514 repartimiento (Repartimiento de Albuquerque) counted only about 26,000–32,000 Taíno to be divided among settlers; by the mid-16th century, counts of unmixed Taíno on the island were in the hundreds. Taíno people and ancestry did not wholly vanish — modern Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban populations carry substantial Taíno ancestry, and Taíno descendant communities assert continuity — but the Taíno polities and language community of Hispaniola were destroyed as functioning societies within two generations. Disease (including the 1518–19 smallpox epidemic) arrived after the first catastrophic decline was already under way from war, enslavement, famine, and the mines — a sequence Reséndez and others stress for the Caribbean specifically.

Encomienda

The encomienda was the legal institution under which the Spanish Crown granted a settler (encomendero) the right to exact tribute and labour from a specified Indigenous community, nominally in exchange for protection and Christian instruction. In practice on Hispaniola it delivered Taíno labour to gold mines and estates under lethal conditions. Las Casas [PRIMARY WITNESS], A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552, addressed to Prince Philip), described the system from inside — he had himself been an encomendero before renouncing his grant in 1514. David Stannard (1992) characterised encomienda as "a genocidal system that 'had driven many millions of native peoples in Central and South America to early and agonizing deaths'" — that characterisation is Stannard's, labelled as his. The Crown's New Laws (1542), influenced by Las Casas's lobbying, attempted to abolish Indigenous enslavement and phase out encomienda; enforcement in the Americas was partial and resisted. Hispaniola's gold economy collapsed with its labour force and the focus of colonisation shifted to the mainland.

2. Mexico — documented conquest-era atrocities

• Cholula, October 1519. One of the most documented events of the conquest, preserved in more than ten accounts: Cortés's own second Carta de relación, Bernal Díaz del Castillo's memoir, Tlaxcalan sources, the Mexica account in Book 12 of Sahagún's Florentine Codex, and Las Casas. Cortés himself claimed 3,000 Cholulteca killed in about two hours after he assembled the city's leaders in a courtyard — by his own account a pre-emptive strike against an alleged planned ambush. Indigenous accounts describe unarmed people trapped in the courtyard. The fact of a mass killing of thousands, including unarmed leaders and retainers, is attested by the perpetrator's own letter; the justification is contested between the sources. Later figures of 5,000–10,000 come from secondary retellings and are not used here in place of Cortés's own stated figure.
• Toxcatl massacre, Tenochtitlan, May 1520. While Cortés was absent fighting Narváez, his lieutenant Pedro de Alvarado attacked Mexica nobles and celebrants gathered, unarmed, for the festival of Toxcatl in the Great Temple precinct. Spanish and Indigenous accounts agree the celebrants were unarmed and the attack unprovoked in its immediate circumstances; they differ on Alvarado's motive (Spanish claim of pre-empting a planned rising/human sacrifice; Mexica account in the Florentine Codex points to the gold the celebrants wore). The massacre triggered the uprising in which Moctezuma died and the Spanish were driven out on the Noche Triste (30 June–1 July 1520).
• The siege of Tenochtitlan (1521) combined warfare, smallpox (which killed the emperor Cuitláhuac), starvation, and the cutting of the aqueduct and food supply; the city fell on 13 August 1521 with mass killing and enslavement of survivors documented in both Spanish and Indigenous accounts. These three episodes are analysed as "genocidal massacres" in the chapter on Xaragua (1503), Cholula, and Toxcatl in The Cambridge World History of Genocide, Vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) — a scholarly characterisation, cited as such.

3. Peru — Cajamarca and after

• Cajamarca, 16 November 1532. Francisco Pizarro's force — 168 Spaniards (106 foot, 62 horse) — ambushed the Inca emperor Atahualpa in the plaza of Cajamarca, where he had arrived with 3,000–8,000 unarmed attendants (figures across the Spanish chronicles), his main army of tens of thousands camped outside. The Spanish chronicles (Xérez, Mena, and others — participant accounts, labelled as such) and later histories agree on the structure: after Friar Valverde's requerimiento and the Bible episode, cannon and harquebus fire and cavalry charges into the trapped crowd; Atahualpa captured alive.
• Death toll: the sources do not agree, so this record gives the range. Modern reference works summarise the chronicles at 2,000–3,000 killed (the figure carried by the standard modern battle summaries); Encyclopaedia Britannica gives 7,000 killed; popular accounts repeat 5,000–7,000. Spanish losses were effectively nil (one wounded in some accounts; Pizarro himself received a hand wound seizing Atahualpa). The 7,000 figure should not be presented as settled — it exceeds the lower chronicle-based summaries, and no count was made. What is not in dispute: thousands of unarmed attendants were killed in the plaza in a planned ambush, and the emperor was seized.
• Atahualpa was held for the famous ransom (a room filled with gold, and silver), then tried by his captors and executed by garrote on 29 August 1533 (some chronicles give 26 July 1533; the August date is the widely used one) after baptism averted burning. The conquest wars, the encomienda and later mita mine labour drafts (notably Potosí silver and Huancavelica mercury), and epidemics drove the Andean collapse documented in demographic-collapse.md.

4. Enslavement across the Americas — Reséndez

Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016; National Book Award finalist).

• Reséndez's central estimate, labelled here as his scholarly estimate: between 2.5 million and 5 million Indigenous people were enslaved in the Americas between 1492 and 1900.
• His argument, in brief: Indigenous slavery was not a brief early episode but a four-century system that coexisted with African slavery, surviving formal Spanish prohibitions (New Laws, 1542) by changing legal form — encomienda, repartimiento, debt peonage, convict leasing, "apprenticeship" and child-indentures (e.g., California's 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians), and outright illegal slave-raiding. Its defining features, in his definition: forcible removal, inability to leave, violence or its threat to compel work, and nominal or no pay.
• Geographic scope: the Caribbean, Mexico and its mining economy, South America, and — in the book's second half — the regions that became the United States (New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, California), including enslavement conducted by some Indigenous groups as suppliers within colonial markets.
• Reséndez also argues specifically for the Caribbean that demographic collapse there was already far advanced before the first documented smallpox epidemic (1518–19), making slavery and violence, in his assessment, leading causes in that region. That regional claim is his argument, and is noted where this record uses the Hispaniola sequence.

5. What cannot be held to standard

• Las Casas's 3–4 million for Hispaniola presented as fact, and, equally, the claim that because his number is inflated his testimony on encomienda, slavery, and the mines is worthless — the sources support neither move.
• Cajamarca "7,000 killed" as a settled count (see range above).
• Cholula figures above Cortés's own 3,000 without naming their later, secondary source.
• Any statement that the Taíno are wholly "extinct" as a people — polities and language were destroyed; ancestry and descendant identity continue and are documented genetically.

Sources for this file

Las Casas, History of the Indies and A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) [primary witnesses] • Anderson Córdova, Taíno population study • Reich et al., Nature (2020) • Cortés, Second Letter (1520) [primary] • Díaz del Castillo [primary] • Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 12 [Indigenous testimony, compiled primary] • Cambridge World History of Genocide, Vol. 1 (2023), chapter on Xaragua/Cholula/Toxcatl • Spanish chronicles of Cajamarca (Xérez, Mena) [primary] and modern battle summaries; Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Battle of Cajamarca" (for the disputed 7,000 figure) • Reséndez (2016).