The fact is however that Columbus was no more the discoverer of America than Pocahontas was the discoverer of Great Britain. Native Americans had built great civilizations with many millions of people long before Columbus wandered lost into the Caribbean. Columbus never set foot on North America, nor did he open it to European trade. Scandinavian Vikings already had settlements here in the eleventh century. The first European explorer to thoroughly document his visit to North America was the Italian explorer Giovanni Caboto, who sailed for King Henry VII of England and became kn

own by his anglicized name, John Cabot. Caboto arrived in 1497 and claimed North America for the English sovereign while Columbus was still searching for India in the Caribbean. After three voyages to America and more than a decade of study, Columbus still believed that Cuba was a part of the continent of Asia, South America was only an island, and the coast of Central America was close to the Ganges River. So not only did he not discover a "new" continent, he did not realize what he had found (McKay, Hill, Buckler, and Ebrey, 2000)

third century B.C. Arab scientists had developed a whole discipline of geography and measurement, and in the tenth century A.D., Al Maqdisi described the earth with 360 degrees of longitude and 180 degrees of latitude. The Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai still has an icon - painted 500 years before Columbus - that shows Jesus ruling over a spherical earth ("Explaining the Reputation," 2001).

merchants of Japan, Columbus decided to pay for his voyage with the one important commodity he had found in ample supply - human lives. He seized 1,200 Taino Indians from the island of Hispaniola, crammed as many onto his ships as would fit and then sent them to Spain, where they were paraded naked through the streets of Seville and sold as slaves in 1495. Columbus tore children from their parents, husbands from their wives. On board Columbus' slave ships, hundreds of died and the sailors tossed the Indian bodies into the Atlantic.

Bartolome De Las Casas, a skilled politician, wrote a passionate tract called "A Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies." In graphic and sometimes exaggerated detail, he recounted Spanish cruelties to the Indians, describing, in one instance, how Spaniards hanged natives in

William of Orange, the Dutch nobleman who led the Protestants of Holland in revolt against Spanish authority, railed in 1580 that Spain "committed such horrible excesses that all the barbarities, cruelties and tyrannies ever perpetrated before are only games in comparison to what happened to the poor Indians."

Now in the Caribbean and in Meso-and South America they enslaved the native people, chaining them together at the neck and marching them in columns to work in gold and silver mines, decapitating any who did not walk quickly enough. They sliced off women's breasts for sport and fed their babies to the backs of armored wolfhounds and mastiffs that were with the Spanish soldiers. "They would test their swords and their manly strength on captured Indians," wrote a Spanish witness to the massacres, "and place bets on the slicing off of heads or cutting of bodies in half with one blow." (Stannard, 1992).

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Approximate Word count = 1991
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)