Columbus – World Navigator, Slaver And Mass Killer

By James Donahue

For years the American history books gave Christopher Columbus the credit of "discovering America" and proclaimed him to be a hero for daring to sail his frail craft across the Atlantic when European scholars believed the world was flat.

They even named cities and highways and created a national holiday in his name.

But now that the real story of what Columbus did, and how he treated the natives he found on the various Caribbean Islands, the truth has thrown a pall of shame over the very name.

Columbus never discovered the North American continent. He and his men perceived the kind and friendly Arawak natives found living on the islands as nothing more than animals with access to gold that was being used to make ornaments.

Columbus made four voyages to his "new world," and all were on quests to capture the native people for a slave trade. The Arawaks were raped, slaughtered, enslaved, and forced to mine for gold. The Europeans brought deadly diseases like smallpox with them to the islands, which spread like wildfire through the indigenous people.

After making his initial discovery, which Columbus always believed were islands off the coast of China, the Spanish government financed additional trips with more ships and men. They arrived on the islands now known as the Dominican Republic and Haiti, Cuba and the Bahamas. They came with guns, swords and horses while the natives knew nothing about warfare, wealth and property ownership.

Thus, as one historian wrote, was set into motion "a relentless wave of murder, rape, pillaging and slavery that would forever alter the course of human history."

Many were put on ships and taken to Spain where they were paraded around like animals from a zoo.

The vile things that went on under Columbus’ leadership might have been forgotten had it not been for Bartolome de las Casas, a Catholic priest, who years later transcribed Columbus’ journals and produced a multi-volume historical record titled "History of the Indies."

What De las Cacas described in his book was a firsthand account of a state-sponsored genocide financed by the Spanish empire. From Columbus’ own eye-witness accounts, the plan was to eradicate the islands of the indigenous people and establish the islands as the property of Spain.

He wrote: "From 1492 to 1508, over 3,000,000 people had perished from war, slavery and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable witness can hardly believe it."

Thus it was that Columbus, on behalf of the Spanish royalty, decimated the natives of the Caribbean islands. Their bones must still cover the landscape.

What is so ugly about this story is that Columbus established a pattern of how the European settlers would treat the natives they encountered all across the North and South American continents in the years that followed. To this day the surviving Native Americans remain largely herded like cattle into "reservations" and live under the control of the United States government.

Columbus Day should not be a holiday in the United States. Rather it should be a day set aside as a day of mourning for the millions of natives left dead and dying by the conquering invaders of their land.