The Adverse Effects of Exploration

When Christopher Columbus left Spain, the place was considered “land of violence, squalor, treachery, and intolerance.” The Spain of that day was so backwards that it was “no different from the rest of Europe.”The only thing that kept these cities from becoming ghost town was “in-migration.” The people would migrate into the city keeping the cities populated, but the diseases would kill the newcomers in a short period of time. The rich people of the day had the food. “the rich ate, and ate in excess, watched by a thousand hungry eyes as thy consumed there gargantuan meals. The rest of the population starved.” Back in these days the price of food would change overnight. The food price effected the poor population so intensely that when the prices fluctuated just a little, thousands of people would die of starvation. Famine in the countryside would force people into the city for help. This sudden increase of people in the city would cause large epidemics of disease because of the poor nutrition of the people who were there to start with. The quality of living in the countryside were slightly better. There was not as much disease as there was in the city, but the country-folk were constantly plagued with crop failure. So although there was not as much disease to cause death, there was an extensive shortage of food causing extensive death to thousands of people. The living conditions within the city were desperate enough that crime was now around every corner. The most common method of surprise would be to drop a rock or piece of masonry from a window and knock their target out. They would then ambush the target taking everything they had on them. With the death toll 1 being so high, large pits were dug in the city. When these pits we...

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...eath of tens of thousands was smallpox. Columbus returned from England on his second voyage to the islands that he had found with the disease known as smallpox. The Spanish would use the smallpox disease as a weapon in some cases. They would take a piece of clothing from someone who was or had been sick with the smallpox disease and give to one of the natives. When that native brought it back to his/her village. It would infect the entire village, effectively using that one piece of clothing as a bio-weapon. When we think of holocaust we usually think of what the Germans did to the Israelis. But in reality, what Columbus did the Indians was much more horrible. Columbus killed over eight-million people, many more than what Hitler did. This was caused by to things the greed for gold and the disregard for human life. Thankfully today we live in a better world than that.