As in any military conquest, women came in for especially brutal treatment. One Italian nobleman named Cuneo recorder an early sexual encounter. The “Admiral” he refers to is Columbus, who, as part of his agreement with Spanish monarchy, insisted he be made an Admiral. Cueno wrote:

“…I captured a very beautiful Carib women, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me and with whom…I conceived desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her finger nails in such manner that I wished I had never begun. But seeing that, I took a rope and thrashed her well…. Finally we came to an agreement.”

There is other evidence which adds up to a picture of widespread rape of native women. Samuel Eliot Morison: “In the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola they found young beautiful women, who everywhere were naked, in most places accessible, and presumably complaisant.” Who presumes this? Morison, and so many others.

Morison saw the conquest as so many writers after him have done, as one of the great romantic adventures of world history. He seemed to get carries away by what appeared to him a masculine conquest. He wrote:

“Never again may mortal men hope to recapture the amazement, the wonder, the delight of those October days in 1492, when the new world gracefully yielded her virginity to the conquering Castilians.”

The language of Cueno (“we came to an agreement”), and of Morison (“gracefully yield”) written almost five hundred years apart, surely suggests how persistent through modern history has been the mythology that rationalizes sexual brutality but seeing it as “complaisant.”

The rest here.