Christopher Columbus
Recently many American families came together to celebrate the Thanksgiving Holiday. Many Americans observe this holiday as a reminder of when Columbus discovered America. For centuries, Columbus has been hailed as a brave explorer whose daring, perseverance, and navigational knowledge led to the "discovery" of America. In grade schools across America children are taught that Columbus is a hero for discovering America. Although, what most schools in the past have not informed their students of, is the fact that Columbus did a great deal more that discover America. The fact is however that Columbus was no more the discoverer of America than Pocahontas was the discoverer of Great Britain. Native Americans had built great civilizations with many millions of people long before Columbus wandered lost into the Caribbean. Columbus never set foot on North America, nor did he open it to European trade. Scandinavian Vikings already had settlements here in the eleventh century. The first European explorer to thoroughly document his visit to North America was the Italian explorer Giovanni Caboto, who sailed for King Henry VII of England and became kn
Since the Indians stood in the way of unlimited access to North America's land, the Indians would have to be eliminated. He seized 1,200 Taino Indians from the island of Hispaniola, crammed as many onto his ships as would fit and then sent them to Spain, where they were paraded naked through the streets of Seville and sold as slaves in 1495. Solomon Stoddard urged the Massachusetts governor to train a large pack of dogs to hunt down those who remained. Arab scientists had developed a whole discipline of geography and measurement, and in the tenth century A. So not only did he not discover a "new" continent, he did not realize what he had found (McKay, Hill, Buckler, and Ebrey, 2000) Also, contrary to popular legend, Columbus did not prove that the world was round; educated people had known that for centuries. They took infants from their mothers and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter. Christopher Columbus opened the Atlantic slave trade and launched one of the greatest waves of genocide known in history. When the Caribbean holocaust exhausted itself around 1535, the extermination, in number of deaths and proportion of the population affected, vastly exceeded that of any of the hideous genocides that have occurred in the twentieth century against Armenians, Jews, Gypsies, Ibos, Bengalis, Timorese, Cambodians, Ugandans, and others. Although Indians probably would have traded their goods with the Spanish peacefully, it was once earnestly asked by Native Americans, "Why do you take by force what you can have by love?" Christopher Columbus reports in his personal diary that when he arrived in the Americas he was amazed. In Virginia, following on the heels of the epidemics, the British initiated a relentless series of purges. Caboto arrived in 1497 and claimed North America for the English sovereign while Columbus was still searching for India in the Caribbean. Columbus tore children from their parents, husbands from their wives. Merely killing the women, he cautioned, was like pursuing "a wolf in the hammocks without knowing first where her den and whelps were.
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