Columbus, Havidad and real History

When Columbua discovered the Bahamas and established the first military fort in Hispanola (now Haiti in the Dominican Republic) he thought he'd discovered a chain of islands off the coast of China. The Arawak natives on Hispanola numbered anywhere from less than a million to nearly eight million (depending on the historian you read) but, by 1508--a mere thirteen years later-- the Arawak nation no longer existed. He'd managed to wipe out the whole population by shipping hundreds of Arawaks back to the Puritanical Europeans for slaves, slaughtering thousands more, and working the rest to death as farm labor. Ironically he named his fort 'Havidad', the Spanish word for Christmas. Some present.