Christopher Columbus Negatives

Christopher Columbus was not the man many tell him to be. As a society, we tend to look at all the great and glorious things he did, most notably discovering the Americas. Almost all of the time, however, we do not look at all the negatives, which there are arguably many more of. These include his harsh treatment of natives, thirst for wealth and the terrible acts he committed as governor of the Indies. Upon first reaching the natives, Columbus describes them as very friendly, extremely willing to trade all they had with the Spaniards. He states that they are very well built and of good stature, but that they did not have weapons to defend themselves with. In his journal he writes, “With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want”. With this statement, Columbus is showing how he wants to enslave these natives and force them to do whatever he wants to better increase his profit. Upon arrival in the Indies Columbus goes on to prove this point true, taking some natives captive by force in order to learn more about the islands. On Hispaniola, he takes many more slaves to fill his quota with Spain. Again proving his violent ways, Columbus stabs two Indians with swords and lets them bleed to death, all because they didn’t trade as many arrows as his men wanted. Ending his first journey, he brings back all the slaves he has collected, many of whom die when the weather turns cold, no doubt because of Columbus’s neglect to provide them with clothes to warm them. Being allowed a second journey, Columbus went to his base on Hispaniola and sent several expeditions into the main island and surrounding islands, intent on finding gold. After several expeditions turned up with no gold, he again had to fill up his quota with Spain, so of course a great slave raid was put in place. He and his men went and forcibly took fifteen hundred people of all ages and genders from their homes, and put them through hellish ordeals. He had them penned up and guarded by soldiers and attack dogs. He sent the 500 most fit back to Spain, and, under lack of proper care and treatment, 200 of them died before ever reaching Spain. Wanting to find gold, Columbus made everyone old enough work to collect a certain quantity of gold in a specific time period. If one failed to produce, he or she had their hands cut off and were left to bleed to death. The Indians occasionally fought back, but were hopelessly out-gunned and out-manned. Once caught, they would be burned or hung. Several would flee and hide in the jungle, but to make an example of them Columbus sent men and dogs to find them and had …show more content…
Because of this, his attitude and demeanor towards his crew and the natives were not in the slightest pleasant. This is shown even before they first land in the Americas. On October 12, 1492, a sailor named Rodrigo de Triana was the first to spot land. He shouted to alert everyone on his ship, the Pinta, who then alerted Columbus on the Santa Maria. The first to sight land was supposed to receive a lifetime pension from Ferdinand and Isabella, but Rodrigo never got this because Columbus said he had seen a distant light on the land earlier. This just goes to show that Columbus was willing to steal money that was rightfully his crewmembers, in order to further richen himself. Besides the fact that he would already receive 10 percent of all profits he brought back to Spain. In order to find gold, which was only scarcely available in the form of dust in streams throughout the island, Columbus forced the men to work in mines and in streams to gather as much gold as they could. This task was nearly impossible, and when they did not reach their quotas they were hung or burned. While the men were forced to work in horrific mining conditions for months at a time, the women were made to work the farms, a job that they were not accustomed to. So Columbus took these people, who had been left alone and prospered for centuries, and made them work