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AP Photo: The Orange County Register, Paul Bersebach (interesting photo on MSN today)
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Some say
Columbus should be celebrated as an explorer and for opening up new worlds.
Others say not so fast.
Many historians
argue that Columbus’s fateful voyages produced many long-term benefits. As the
journalist Paul Gray notes, “Columbus’s journey was the first step in a long
process that eventually produced the United States of America. . . a symbol and
a haven of individual liberty for people throughout the world.”
VS.
Some
historians have questioned the traditional view of Columbus as a hero. The
historian Hans Konig argues that Columbus’s legacy should be deplored rather
than celebrated: “The year 1492 opened an era of genocide, cruelty, and slavery
on a larger scale than had ever been seen before.”
1. “It would
be unnecessary to build . . . [a fort here] because these people are so simple
in deeds of arms. . . . If Your Highnesses order either to bring all of them to
Castile or to hold them as captivos [slaves] on their own island it could easily
be done, because with about fifty men you could control and subjugate them all,
making them do whatever you want,” quoted in Columbus: The Great Adventure
2. From the
Log of Christopher Columbus: “I have been very attentive and have tried very
hard to find out if there is any gold here.” Columbus said exploring the
islands of the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola.
3. “It was
my wish to bypass no island without taking possession.”
4. “These
countries will be easily converted.” Columbus said about converting Native
Americans to Christianity.
5. “Convinced
that he had landed on islands off Asia known to Europeans as the Indies,
Columbus called the people he met los indios. The term translated into ‘Indian,’
a word mistakenly applied to all the diverse peoples of the Americas.”
6. European
soldiers, priests, and colonists, and the many others that followed Columbus to
the Americas occupied and imposed their will on the Native Americans who lived
there.
7. European “arrival
on Hispaniola, the island presently divided between Haiti and the Dominican
Republic, signaled the start of a cultural clash that would continue for the
next five centuries.”
8. Native
Americans were introduced to new disease such as measles, mumps, chicken pox, smallpox,
and typhus, which devastated their population because they had not developed
any natural immunity to these diseases.
9. An
estimated 300,000 inhabitants died in Hispaniola during Columbus’s time there.
10. “Europeans
learned the advantages of using the plantation system. They also realized the
economic benefits of using forced labor. Finally, they learned to use European
weapons to dominate a people who had less sophisticated weapons.”
(Based on
information from The Americans, Holt McDougal)
No matter
what side of the Columbus issue you take, we cannot deny that Columbus made a
significant impact on our society today.
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