In another description it was told how every three months the Indians were required to collect a required measure of gold to be turned in to the Spanish authorities. Those who failed to do so had their fingers or hands cut off or were killed outright. It was an impossible task. Eventually mass suicides began among the natives, killing themselves with cassava poison. During a period of two years of administration by Columbus and his brother, one half of the entire population of Hispanolia was killed or killed themselves.
Estimates run from one hundred and twenty-five thousand to half a million.
These were the same natives who Columbus had earlier described as peaceful, friendly, loving and gentle, no better people in all the world. Within a period of 20 years the population of the Tainos natives declined from 8 million to 28,000, and eventually there were no survivors left to tell the tale. The answer, of course, is that he is neither. He was a man of his age and time, driven by dreams of wealth and fame and religious fanaticism, and also moved by the longing to discover unknown lands and passages to realms untraversed. He found more than he bargained for and his ignorance of what he had found brought both pain and suffering, and freedom and opportunity to millions.