"In fourteen hundred ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." So starts the grade school rhyme that condensed Christopher Columbus' first voyage from Europe to the "New World." Columbus was not the first person to discover the Americas. Native Americans had been in the New World for millennia before Columbus was born. He was not even the first European to arrive on our shores. That distinction belongs to the Norsemen.
Why Columbus' shadow endures and exceeds that of others including, the Tainos and Arawaks who were decimated within half a century of his arrival in the Caribbean is because his voyages accomplished two things. First, it publicized to European powers that there was a vast world within their grasp and that it was defended by people still using bows and arrows. Second, Columbus' arrival and presence in the New World established the pattern of exploitation and genocide of Native peoples that became the norm. The implications of these actions in present day.
When Columbus reached the Bahamas and later the coasts of Cuba and Hispaniola, he genuinely believed that he had reached India. He therefore called the Taino, indios. The Taino were peaceful and certainly vulnerable to the European's advanced weaponry. To Columbus, the Taino and truly, all Natives he encountered, were fodder for servitude and conquest. In his journal he wrote, "They ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them." More ominously, he noted that "I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men and govern them as I pleased." Columbus kidnapped 6 Tainos to take back to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.
During Columbus' second voyage, he exacted tribute in gold and spun cotton from adults over the age of fourteen. Punishment for failure to come up with the gold and/or cotton was severe. Columbus' men would cut off the hands of the "offender" and leave him or her to bleed to death. During his third voyage, Columbus abandoned all pretense of converting the Native population to Christianity. He enslaved them. Why? The answer is not so trite as to say "because they were there", but close. Rather, he refused to convert the Natives because Spanish and Canonical law forbade the enslavement of Christians. Columbus essentially created a loophole, perhaps the first loophole in a long line of broken promises, treaties, and pacts with regard to Native American rights. He would not convert the Natives so that he could have his "good and skilled servants", i.e., slaves to do his bidding and that of the Spanish overlords.
The rest is, as they say, history. Entire cultures wiped out. Millions killed by violence or disease or enslavement. Grafting onto the cultural DNA of Native folks that the European is the more advanced. Perhaps it is simplistic to place over five centuries of enduring imperialism at Columbus' feet. It is. He certainly was not responsible for the atrocities committed by Cortes, Pizarro, Padre Junipero Serra, Andrew Jackson, and Custer and to this date, the economic and ecological rapaciousness of Halliburton. But, Columbus cast the mold in the furnace of imperialistic greed. That mold has yet to be shattered.
Of course, I understand, as I type this piece on my laptop, that Columbus' exposure of the New World made exploration inevitable and that we are who we are today, in large part because he triggered that European curiosity. But, I don't have to celebrate the man, his misdeeds, or his arrogant, short-sighted waste of hum
Bob Schulman: St. Ursula and the Virgins of the Caribbean
1. Stop using technology that otherwise would never be invented if the Americas were never discovered and conquered by the white Europeans. For starters, that include: a car, cell phones, computers. If Americas were never discovered and conquered, would Microsoft, Google, Apple still exist today? Maybe maybe not, chicken or the egg, we would never know.
2. Stop speaking the language of your conquistadors or else you'll be spitting on the graves of your ancestors. Of all population of the Spanish speaking world, other than of course the European country of Spain, who brought over the disease, how many of them can still speak their native American languages?
Kind of misses the point that the so-called Native Americans came from somewhere else too. And that there is good evidence that they were the SECOND wave of immigrants way back when, the First wave culture vanishing when the interlopers came.
It's also unfortunate that Italian-Americans have chosen this man as the historical figure around which to celebrate their ethnicity. Wouldn't Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was so instrumental to unifying Italy be a better hsitorical figure?
As far as being "insensative" to the so-called "native" peoples of America, would that be the same "native" peoples whose highest example of civilization was the bloody Aztec Empire? You recall, enslaving all their neighbors, making war as far as they could reach, bloody public spectacles of human sacrifice involving hundreds--somtimes thousands--of captives having their beating hearts ripped from their chests. Those guys?
What would pizza be like without tomatoes, pepper and zucchini. Thanks Mexicans for contributing to this wonderful Italian dish called pizza.
Love Italian food and of course Mexcian.
Since I am one of the extremely wealthy, my trash was collected today. It was collected, but I am hardly wealthy - merely good looking and very modest.
Fanned.
It is pure idiocy to celebrate someone who perpetrated gruesome and inhumane treatment of people who, by Columbus' own account, were kind and helpful to the people who landed with his initial ships. It's utterly disgusting to celebrate this "man" at all.
Even though North American INDIGENOUS people did not directly encounter Columbus, they did get the shaft from the explorers who followed. And for all Indigenous people, including the descendents of the ones he did encounter, it is entirely right and good to stand with them and disparage Columbus for the vile things he did. But go ahead and be a dismissive dilettante.