Third grade seems like such a long time ago, yet I remember the Christopher Columbus story like it was nothing. It started out with a boy named Christopher Columbus; he was born and raised in Genoa, Italy. He grew up wanting to be an explorer. He also grew up believing the earth was round, yet no one believed him, so the great explorer intended to prove it. He was going to find a westward ro

Spaniards forced Indians to work in mines rather than in the gardens which led to a spread of malnutrition. Disease, new to the Indians, played a large role in deaths, smallpox and the measles killed thousands. Some Indians tried to flee but the Spaniards just followed. An estimate population before the Spanish set foot in Haiti was around 8,000,000 people. When Christopher Columbus returned to Spain, he would leave his brother, Bartholomew in charge. In 1496 while in charge, Bartholomew took a count of approximately how my Indians there were. There remained only about 3,000,000. Yet, by 1516 only around 12,000 Indians remained. By 1542 fewer than 200 were alive and by 1555, they were gone.

"At daybreak great multitudes of men came to the shore, all young and of fine shapes, and very handsome. Their hair was not curly but loose and coarse like horse-hair. All have foreheads much broader than any people I had hitherto seen. Their eyes are large and very beautiful. They are not black, but the color of the inhabitants of the Canaries. I was very attentive to them, and strove to learn if they had any gold. Seeing some of them with little bits of metal hanging at their noses, I gathered from them by signs that by going southward or steering round the island in that direction, there would be found a king who possessed great cups of gold."

"I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men and govern them as I pleased." Columbus kidnapped ten to twenty-five Indians and took them back with him to Spain. Only seven or eight of the Indians arrived alive. He took them because he wanted to teach them Spanish in order to be translators between himself and the Indians. Ferdinand and Queen Isabella then provided Columbus with seventeen ships, 1,200 to 1,500 men, cannons, crossbows, guns, cavalry, and attack dogs for his second voyage.

Columbus gets a lot of credit for "discovering" land that already had people living on it, a land that has already been encountered by other people way before Columbus was even born. In 70,000 to 12,000 B.C. Siberia explorers sailed to Alaska. In 10,000-600 B.C., Siberians also went to Canada and the state we now call New Mexico. A little more recently the Vikings in 1000-1350 came from Greenland and Iceland. They traveled to Labrado, Baffin Land, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Cape Cod and further south. Around 1311 and 1460 explorers from West Africa came across to Haiti, Panama, and Brazil (Loewen 48). These were only a few of the many encounters of the Americas. A result of these explorations was the establishment of Indian villages and the life they began to lead.

"As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have conception and childbirth...Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children w

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Approximate Word count = 1966
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)