Christopher Columbus: The Man, the Myth, the Monster

Well, despite the fact that we are given all this information, that does not make it any less false. The history of Christopher Columbus and his missions are not only hugely revised in order to encourage a colonialist mindset but are also hugely damaging for the average person’s understanding of history and ethics.

 The stories of Columbus began during the Revolutionary War when the Americans needed a defiant non-British hero. Long ago, it was believed that each country had to have its own patron god or goddess, and in 1776, the recently formed United States chose Columbia, a goddess that represented the pioneer spirit of the fledgling American colonists and their desire to conquer the vast unknown.

They derived the name from who they had believed found America, Christopher Columbus, and rallied around this figure during the long struggle for independence. After the victory, they decided to honor Columbus as an American hero.

During the Revolutionary War, Phillis Wheatley, an African slave, wrote the poem “To His Excellency George Washington” about freedom from England. Not only did this poem quickly gain fame, but it also displayed Columbia as the goddess of liberty. She became the personification of America and was immortalized in comics, posters, costumes, poems, with important national songs, such as the de facto national anthem until 1931, and locations, such as the seat of our government, named after her.

In the late 1800s, Columbus became a symbol for another group of people, the Italian immigrants, who came in an attempt to flee the hardships they faced including poverty, disease, and violence. Due to the United State’s difficulty in the middle of a depression, The Italians were greeted harshly with this struggle.

At the time, immigrants were discriminated against due to the popular belief that they were foreigners taking jobs in addition to their Catholic beliefs in a deeply Protestant nation. This began as cartoons displaying them as subhuman criminals, which then led to them being attacked, their churches burned down, and many brutally murdered.

Finding a link between themselves and someone who was admired by the Americans, Christopher Columbus, was the Italian’s way of finding common ground and acceptance in an effort to curb the brutality they faced during this time. This led to the formation of the Knights of Columbus, a group dedicated to unite Catholic men and protect them from their conflict with the Protestants.  

After all the decades of being taught the information above, even going as far as to dedicate a day to honor this man, it feels like there’s no way that “our truth” couldn’t be built on a lie. If this was the case, wouldn’t we have figured it out about this lie by omission long before now and changed our curriculum to actually teach the full truth in school? In all actuality, there were several accounts of his mistreatment of the natives. Because this was unknown to us under the guise of making the story child friendly, we just assumed we could trust that the legends of this “hero” were the truth rather than a tall tale.

Ironically, in 1828, Washington Irving, known for his legendary tales of fiction such as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, published A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, which was what he portrayed as a biography of Columbus. In this book, Irving took the twisted truth and portrayed Columbus as the courageous sailor who paved the way for the exploration of the world as we know it today. As this book gained popularity, this false representation of Columbus continued to spread.

This very book was where the myth of Columbus being the one to discover that the world was round came about. This myth was blatantly false; many groups had proven or speculated the Earth was a sphere such the Greeks who had already proved the world to be round mathematically circa 600 B.C..

The real reason Columbus was thought to be a fool is because no one knew of the Americas. If they were not there, he would have run out of food and died before he reached the far east. Columbus was lucky that his miscalculation did not cost him his life, but the natives were not so fortunate. 

A common justification for Columbus’s subjugation of the indigenous people is that, because they were not able to defend themselves, they deserved to be conquered and in fact, they are better because of that. They were primitive and savage people, and the Europeans were only trying to save them by introducing technology and religion to these heathens.

This is an awful conclusion to reach. Not only is it historically inaccurate, but it is also racist, genocidal, and manipulative. The Taino people treated Columbus and his crew with hospitality and gifts. The natives were dressed simply and had few possessions, but this was on their accord. They were not murderous barbarians that had threatened the Spaniards; they were instead generous people who had welcomed what would soon be their slaughterers with open arms as friends and family. 

While the Taino culture may seem strange to us, so would the culture of just about anyone in the 1400s, and just because they did not wear armor or travel around the world, that does not make them lesser people.

Looking back, it becomes quite clear who the real murderous barbarians were: the Spaniards. The well-armed and merciless Spaniards devastated the Caribbean, discovering how to enslave these people in a mere three days, later causing the Taino to go extinct by the end of the 1500s.

Within 50 years of Columbus’s arrival, the population of the Taino dropped from an estimated 3 million to a shocking 200. It is also important to note that there is no evidence of any kind of plague, such as smallpox which was introduced to the Americas in 1520, that would have ravaged their population. This is an attempt to try and figure out how exactly Columbus and his men managed to kill millions within such a short time.

The natives of the Caribbean were enslaved, the men worked to death, women sold as sex slaves, and children murdered and mutilated. Christopher Columbus, using his knowledge of the Portuguese slave trade, began transporting slaves to Spain and established the encomienda, a system that somehow managed to be worse than the chattel slavery of the American south. At least American slave owners had the incentive to keep their slaves alive; encomienda slaves were replaced free of charge when they dropped dead.  

Many Americans attempt to defend colonization by saying it was great as it opened up many opportunities for our country and gave us the land that we have today. While it may have been beneficial for Columbus and the United States, it was absolutely catastrophic to the Native Americans.

To help you better conceptualize this question, this would be similar to someone coming in in an attempt to take over a place, calling it their own, and then taking everyone as slaves. This person would take all of your belongings, leaving you with nowhere to live, while even trying to eradicate the population of your home because you come from an inferior dwelling, and they live in a better, more developed area.

Now imagine this on a national level. Throughout the past 70 or so years, we have produced countless stories regarding alien invasions wiping out humanity and colonizing Earth, and I am willing to wager that you weren’t rooting for the alien armada. This scenario was the reality of what the Taino and other Caribbean tribes faced. Invaders with massive ships arrived from an unknown place with powerful weapons that surpassed the Natives’ imagination, and these invaders came to kill, enslave, and conquer you and your kin. 

Did Columbus’s greed justify the enslavement, torture, destruction of their civilization, and the death of most of the Native population? 

The colonization of the West Indies set a dangerous precedent for European influence in the New World, with a notable example being our very own Manifest Destiny. John O’Sullivan described the Manifest Destiny, the American westward expansion, as “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” By saying this, O’Sullivan meant that the continent was provided to the Americans by God, and therefore was meant for them to take it as their own land despite the fact that there were already people living in this area.

The land in the west had caught interest from many people due to the vast amount of resources. Not only did this land draw in farmers and miners, but it also produced many opportunities for work that served them.

In 1862, the Homestead Act was passed, meaning that anyone who had not gone against the government above the age of 21 and enhanced the land could claim 160 acres of government land. In this same year, the Pacific Railway Act was also passed, meaning that the time it took to travel to the other side of the country dropped from five months to six days. This in turn made the land more accessible.

Although these acts contributed to the acceptance of expanding westward, a main cause of action was the fact that people felt as if it was their duty and service to God to do so. 

Many Americans began to believe that they had superiority over all other countries and cultures. Before this, lands in the midwest and south west were inhabited by other groups of people such as Native Americans and Mexicans. This toxic mindset caused the Americans to see other peoples as obstacles standing in the way of fulfilling their destiny: conquering the west.

As Natives were seen as competition for resources, many Americans acted out of fear and violence, kicking them off of their lands and sending them to reservations, better known as land that the white settlers had no use for. Americans slaughtered the buffalo, a critical source of food and resources for the plains tribes, en masse, making them totally dependent on the government within their dry and arid reservations. Within the next ten years, 80% of the Native American population in California were killed as an attempt to eradicate all who Americans thought stood in their way to consolidating more wealth.

This brutality was not limited to just these groups as the Chinese communities were affected as well. In 1877, vigilante groups attempted to destroy China Town, while the government raised taxes on immigrants.

All of these acts came together to not only destroy the culture and civilization that the Native Americans already cultivated, but to actively replace them with a diverse population of second class citizens all separated by various language barriers and the inability to unify against their common oppressor.

It is important to note that people tend to defend Columbus by saying what he did is what any other ordinary person would have done in his situation, and that it is unfair to hold him accountable for these perfectly normal crimes against humanity. This is utter nonsense as among his contemporaries, some of which being colonizers, he was seen as extremely and unnecessarily cruel. It says a lot when people who endorse and fund you for the subjugating of entire nations worth of people begin to turn against you (and even arrest and depose) you when you begin enslaving, torturing, raping, mutilating, and further destroying these conquered peoples.

Columbus repeatedly tried to have King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella endorse his plans for an indigenous slave trade, which included the innovatively inhumane idea of packing hundreds of slaves into a single ship; this idea was later adopted by nearly every other slave trader. The king and queen of Spain rejected his idea as it was too barbaric for their own imperialist tastes, yet Columbus continued to try to entice them with more native slaves and letters every so often.

As his domestic form of slavery under the name of the Spanish feudal system, encomienda, became more and more popular among colonists, the King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella discovered the effects of Columbus’s system. They were so mortified that they passed laws to improve the conditions of the indigenous slaves. Unfortunately, the encomienda remained in place and unchanged alongside the ignoring of the Spanish monarch’s legislation while colonial Spanish America was under the reign of Governor Columbus. 

There were countless gross atrocities committed by Columbus and his subordinates, too many to include within this piece, but it is important to clarify that even within the context of the 15th and 16th century, his activities were not seen as normal or okay. Bartolomé De Las Casas embarked on Columbus’s journey with starry eyes and a heart filled with nothing but hope and admiration for the admiral, but he later went on to write many of the most scathing primary sources about the man that was once his hero.

An outstanding example of this is Las Casas’s A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Within this account of the recent events on the island, Las Casas recorded, “In this Isle, which, as we have said, the Spaniards first attempted, the bloody slaughter and destruction of Men first began: for they violently forced away Women and Children to make them Slaves, and ill-treated them, consuming and wasting their Food, which they had purchased with great sweat, toil, and yet remained dissatisfied too.”

This piece of literature serves as evidence of the Spaniard’s entrance with ill-intentions and immediate greetings of violence. Horrendous behaviors such as those presented by Columbus show that he is undeserving of the glorification and praise that he has received for the past hundreds of years.

Despite everything we’ve been told, if we look at the facts, Christopher Columbus isn’t anything close to the hero we’ve admired for most of our lives. On the contrary, he was responsible for countless instances of crimes against humanity, many of which are beyond our own comprehension of the word evil.

In addition to what he directly did, he also set a precedent that led to the greatest genocide in known history: the multicentury campaign to destroy the soverignty, dignity, and humanity of indigineous people. This war is still being waged in many places across the globe, such as Australia, Canada, Bolivia, Chile, and even the United States.

Despite this, we still appropriated and whitewashed the name, face, and legacy of a worthy candidate for “Most Evil Man in History” in order to further our own invasive and imperialistic goals. Even though we know better, his legacy remains omnipresent across our nation. What we learned as children through silly cartoons and colorful worksheets was a band aid covering up an evil that none of us can comprehend, and having the bandage torn off opened our eyes to a truth that we cannot help but feel incomprehensibly devastated by.

These atrocities may have happened hundreds of years ago, but we cannot deny the truth of its occuring, and we do not talk nearly enough about the centuries of warring, treaty breaking, cheating, slaughtering, and erasure that we have waged against the people who welcomed our ancestors into their villages as fellow human beings. We do not address the dishonest representation of the long and bloody history we share with native people, and while we can never truly make amends for what our ancestors have done, we cannot regard ourselves with any esteem without first looking into the mirror and facing the fact that our nation was built on the deliberate genocide of those that were here before us. One of the first facts we must face is Christoper Columbus’s role in this horror story.