La Navidad
There's a gap in the historical record
Previously… Serial Fiction in Progress
Can you tell which parts of the story below are made up?
In 1492, Columbus left 39 men at a settlement named La Navidad (in what is now believed to be Haiti). When he returned a year later, he found it burned to the ground—all but two of his men dead or missing—Eluterio Morales and Jan Spillers. And the Tainos who greeted him warmly a year earlier were now, much more apprehensive. By Columbus’ own accounts, they were acting strangely, as if withholding some key piece of information. Something had happened, but it was not at all clear what.
On arrival at the village we saw that all its inhabitants had fled… With the little that we understand, therefore, and the obscure and equivocal statements that we’ve been given, it’s been impossible to learn the truth about the death of our people.
– Chanca (1493)
What Would Happen if…
Indigenous people had developed super powers in response to their enslavement –– the human body’s equivalent of being ratcheted up to DEFCON 4… we’re talking fight or flight dialed up to the max… on-the-fly gene modification capabilities in the face of imminent annihilation? And what if this underlying capability has always been there? An escape hatch. Evolution’s hail mary. A break glass in case of emergency option – encoded right in our DNA. And what if, at specific moments throughout human history, inside the bodies of some us, the glass were broken? What if that happened in 1492 at La Navidad?
La Navidad: the Facts
The Spaniards built a fortress at La Navidad – according to Columbus’ diary: “I’ve had a fort built there, which by now should be finished, and have left enough people there to accomplish this, with arms and artillery and provisions for more than a year.”
Men of questionable character were eager to stay behind – at least some of Columbus’ men were criminals whose judicial proceedings had been suspended by the Spanish monarchy in exchange for agreeing to accompany him on his initial voyage. And according to researcher Kevin Siepel, “With gold fever burning hot among the men, there was no dearth of applicants to stay.”
39 men total were left behind – all the men were killed and the fort was burned to the ground. Many of the Taino huts were also burned.
There were at least two island groups in and around La Navidad – the Tainos and the Caribs. Columbus describes the Tainos in glowing, though condescending terms… Your highness may believe that in all the world there can be no better people. He strongly suspected the Caribs to be cannibals. Modern archaeologists call this into question.
Columbus and his official chroniclers were baffled – the Taino chieftain (Guacanagari) and the other Tainos were reticent to share any information with Columbus about what happened. And the surviving Spaniards’ accounts gave him the strong impression that his men were withholding some key piece of information.
La Navidad: the Hypotheticals
At some point after Columbus left, the men became emboldened, and began taking women. The Tainos resisted. Things escalated.
There was a tipping point. There was a breakdown of order. Columbus’ men began carrying out grotesque acts of prolonged ritualistic killings.
1 or more of the island natives, in response to an intense triggering event, underwent a metamorphosis, and subsequently went on a killing rampage.
Columbus’ men received the full brunt of this violence—perhaps 1 or 2 survived and ran away, never to return to tell their side of the story
Whoever was responsible for the massacre at La Navidad is still alive today
Folkloric stories of monsters and shapeshifters throughout the Caribbean, are in fact all rooted in this foundational mystery
La Navidad: the Consequences
Let’s suppose we give this monster business a little room to breath. And we follow this story from the 1490s to the 1800s. To the Puerto Rican sugar boom, the Haitian Revolution, the arrival of Chinese indentured servants in Cuba, the Spanish American War. To today. Reexamining formative events, all while keeping this new information in our back pocket.
Werewolves and monsters — for real?
Yes, let’s talk about genes and memes
Richard Dawkins’ watershed 1976 book The Selfish Gene permanently changed the public’s understanding of natural selection and evolutionary processes as they play out in living organisms.
It seems obvious in the year 2022, but was revolutionary in ’76: animal systems are agglomerations of DNA which simply put, are units of information (memes) transmitted reproductively through time. Dawkins’ thinking took people from a 19th century naturalistic outlook armed with sketchbooks to one steeped in systems thinking and backed up with computational firepower.
It was a paradigm shift that birthed an entirely new branch of study – memetics – which, incidentally, serves as the cornerstone of a book you may have heard of: Snow Crash.
How should we think of Evolution?
Looking at it from Dawkins’ POV – which I’ll admit, I tend to do – the unspooling of evolutionary processes has two implications for us:
Whatever happens to specific animals over long stretches of time – do they wind up with feathers or fingers, do they thrive or die out – is not the main point
The question of what happens to the smallest units of information (the genes) – this is the real point.
Genes are the true authors of evolution: billion-years old passengers, wending through the ages, encased in macro-molecular animal shipping containers (us). According to Dawkins, our primary function is to provide safe passage.
What if some of us carried genes which, under extreme duress, caused dramatic irreversible and unpredictable super adaptations?
So… The Masters is about DNA?
No. At its core, the Masters is a story of insurgencies and the unraveling of minoritarian control. And I’m not here simply talking about Spanish and Portuguese viceroys and hacienda owners. I leave it to the reader to make her own inferences. 🤔
It’s about Freedom, Memory, and Control
There’s a fascinating parallel between the psychological anxiety that underwrites modern day stand your ground laws and its colonial counterpart: plantation owners gradually realizing that they are living among, and vastly outnumbered by people they treat worse than garbage. The logical consequence of this rupture is a diverging viewpoint on the nature of freedom itself.
Slaveholders desired a state that wholly secured their individual freedom to enslave, not to mention their freedom to disenfranchise, to exploit, to impoverish, to demean, and to silence and kill the demeaned. The freedom to. The freedom to harm. Which is to say, in coronavirus terms, the freedom to infect.
Slaveholders disavowed a state that secured any form of communal freedom—the freedom of the community from slavery, from disenfranchisement, from exploitation, from poverty, from all the demeaning and silencing and killing. The freedom from. The freedom from harm. Which is to say, in coronavirus terms, the freedom from infection.
– Ibram X. Kendi (We’re Still Living and Dying in the Slaveholders’ Republic)
Who The Masters is for
The Masters is a story for people who look around at the world as it is today, and feel a sense of kinship and brotherhood with the peoples of the past who have been dispossessed, enslaved, and forgotten. It’s for people whose viewpoint aligns with that of freedom FROM. It’s a meditation on the seeming contradiction that power can be so entrenched (to the victimized), yet so easily overthrown (in the eyes of those who hold it).
On a personal note, it’s for the 1,500+ people of Iberian, African, and Amerindian ancestry I’m genetically linked to – many of whom are descended from Puerto Rican slaves.
– Ben Willenbring
Answers 1
Don Eluterio Morales and Jan Spillers are made-up characters. There were no survivors at La Navidad.