On this upcoming October 8, every elementary school child will be exposed to the achievements of a man fondly remembered by history, as a visionary, daring explorer, and adventurous leader of the first step towards the globalized world we live in today.
The only problem with that narrative is that Christopher Columbus was none of these things. In fact, he was a man who should be more demonized than put on a pedestal.
For one thing, Christopher Columbus didn’t discover America, or anything of the sort. It’s hard to discover a whole continent, let alone one which was already home to millions of people, and yet in many minds Columbus receives the credit for unearthing the entire landmass. Perhaps the word “discover” meant something different in 15th century Europe, but today it doesn’t make sense.
On top of mistakenly being accredited with “discovering” America, as if nobody had ever been there before, Columbus wasn’t even the first European to reach the continent. That distinction belongs to the Norse, who settled in Greenland and Newfoundland at roughly the year 1000 CE.
Not only is Columbus’s title as the first European in America misleading, but it gives a heroic connotation to a man who doesn’t deserve it. Simply put, Christopher Columbus was not a very nice guy.
Upon landing in America and encountering Native Americans for the first time, he wrote in his logbook: “They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance… They would make fine servants… With 50 men we could subjugate them and make them do whatever we want.”
Ultimately, Columbus would follow through with his statement. He began to enslave natives to both search for gold in the Caribbean and to be sent back to Spain. Many Native American slaves died en route across the Atlantic, and those who stayed in the Americas but failed to find gold were severely punished.
Bartolome de las Casas, a priest involved in the Spanish settlement of Cuba and the writer of the multivolume work “History of the Indies,” witnessed unfathomable brutality towards the natives on the island. He wrote of Spaniards “killing, afflicting, and torturing the native peoples” using “the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty.”
Las Casas wrote that “[the Spaniards] thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.” This level of savagery most certainly should not be condoned, yet in America a holiday commemorates the man who started it all.
In a modern America which attempts to distance itself from a history of slavery and racism, it seems rather hypocritical to celebrate Christopher Columbus, one of American history’s somewhat overrated and rather despicable characters. Perhaps it is time to eliminate Columbus Day.