Christopher Columbus: A Man Unworthy of a Holiday
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, landed, and proceeded to terrorize, rape and kill the native people. Yet, despite these major atrocities, the time has come for Americans to once again celebrate the “accomplishments” of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus. Maybe this year, instead of schools admiring and praising him for “discovering” America and proving that the earth wasn’t flat, Columbus Day could be spent acknowledging and understanding everything wrong with this “holiday.”
To begin, let’s agree that everything taught about him in elementary school was a lie. He was not the first person to discover the Americas– that title likely belongs to the Vikings — nor did he prove the earth was round. In fact, according to Dr. Alan Smale and the rest of the StarChild Team from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the earth has actually been known to be round since the time of the ancient Greeks when Pythagoras first proposed the idea in 500 B.C. And, Columbus actually made four voyages, each one more devastating than the previous.
His first trip, made in 1492, landed him not in Asia as he thought, but rather on an island in the Bahamas. After months of scouring for gold and riches and finding nothing, he left 40 men behind to lead a settlement he created in present-day Haiti, returning to Spain empty handed.
After six months in Spain, he voyaged back in 1493 and found both the settlement and crews’ ship destroyed, but, to his excitement, was met with an abundance of enslaved natives. In 1495, he crammed nearly 1,200 of these Taino Indians onto his ships, and sent them back to Spain, where they were paraded naked through the streets and later sold as slaves. Even though he already enslaved people, he and his crew then began hunting Indians for sport. According to diaries and studies, the captured were raped, beaten, tortured and killed. He even began to use their bodies as food for his hunting dogs.
On his third voyage in 1498, he once again returned to his settlement, but this time, brutality and harsh conditions were so prevalent that Spain had to send authorities over to bring Columbus back in chains. Even after all of this, Spain’s king granted Columbus another trip to Panama in 1502. Upon hearing news of his landing, Panama natives met his four ships with a brutal attack, destroying two of them. Columbus finally returned back to Spain empty-handed again and died there four years later.
However, regardless of his horrific morals, it must be acknowledged that Columbus did introduce a few good developments into the world. The most noteworthy being the Columbian Exchange, a period of cultural and biological exchanges between the New and Old Worlds which occurred after his first voyage and which shaped the future of America forever. Yet, even though there is a certain importance in acknowledging this achievement, one constructive deed does not cancel out a lifetime of destructive ones. It is ridiculous that America is widely known for freedom and tolerance, yet still chooses to recognize Columbus Day as a public holiday. He was a murderer, rapist and cruel human. He does not deserve a day devoted to him. Instead, we should choose to celebrate and honor all of the natives whose lives and cultures were destroyed by his despicable acts of terror.
