Christopher Columbus Report

Christopher Columbus was a skilled navigator whose goal was to travel west

and reach Asia where gold, spices, and many things of value abound. He was

very good at reading the signs of the sky, the direction of the wind, and other

weather-related signs, but he still did not reach Asia. His calculation of Asia’s

distance from Spain, where his expedition originated from, was way off. It was

about 9,000 kilometers short. He arrived instead at the New World or the

Americas. To most people, Christopher Columbus was the famed explorer who

stumbled upon the Americas, but he was actually an avid slave trader, a ruthless

governor, and he is blamed for the destruction of the native peoples of the islands he

explored.

When Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World, he saw the natives

not as a race to be left alone but as an opportunity to exploit. On his first day in the

New World, he encountered the Tainos, the natives of the first island he discovered.

He expected to meet a strong and advanced group of men, but instead he saw men

who bore no arms and who were clueless in handling the newcomers’ arms, and

people who were dirty, naked, and poor. Columbus thought “that the natives are

good servant-material as they are of good disposition and they repeat very quickly

whatever was said to them.” To the natives, Columbus was a visitation from above

for he was richly dressed and he gave away colorful beads and other things that the

natives have never seen before. Columbus, however, saw in the natives the

possibility of exploitation, enslavement, and a source of vast personal wealth.

Columbus’ grand dream to bring back riches to Europe and to acquire vast

personal wealth were slow to become true. ...

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... people, but it also took away its much needed

resources.

To the Spanish and to the rest of Europe, Columbus was a masterly navigator

who stumbled upon the New World, but to the natives of Hispaniola, he was a

merciless slave trader and a terrible governor; he and the subsequent explorations

of the islands are being held responsible for their destruction. He forcibly took the

natives from their homes and shipped them to Europe to be sold as slaves. He acted

cruelly towards the natives of Hispaniola. He oppressed them and worked them to

death. His men did horrifying things to the natives and he did nothing to stop them.

The exploration and the exploitation adversely affected the islands and the native

population. Millions of the population died due to the diseases brought by the

explorers. To me, his actions were not of a hero but of a villain.