Christopher Columbus' Atrocities

A detailed Summary of Christopher Columbus' Atrocities

Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy in 1451. As a boy he became initiated to sailing by one of his kinsmen (a sea captain), which is what forced him to become a Spanish navigator. He pleaded with the Spanish and the French governments, Spain's King Ferdinand V and Queen Isabella I gave him a grant to lead an expedition to the west across the Atlantic Ocean in search of new routes to Asia. He wasn't very successful in finding new routes to Asia but he got the credit of discovering the Americas, Jamaica, Hispaniola and many more islands found in the New World. Columbus sailed to the New World in search of a western route to the Indies. Upon Columbus' arrival to the New World he found some islanders. He thought that he had arrived at an island of the East Indies near Japan or China so he named the islanders Indians. It was not until thirty years after that people found out that Columbus hadn't really been to Asia. His goals for going on his many voyages were to search for gold, silver, precious stones, spices, riches; and to spread Christianity to the people he found there which in return he was "promised by the King and the Queen of Spain that he would receive ten percent of the profits, governorship over the new-found la

Columbus' goals caused him to mistreat the humble, innocent indigenous people he found on the island. Among the evil thing Columbus did to the Indians were: "At one part of the island he got into a fight with the Indians who refused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two were run through with swords and bled to death" (Zinn 3) and "Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death." (Zinn 4) When there was no more gold to accumulate from the Indians, Columbus started using them as slave labor on huge plantations (encomiendas), they were worked so badly. Columbus and his crew also forced their way into native settlements and slaughtered everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were butchering a cow.

nd, and the fame that that would go with the new title: Admiral of the Ocean Sea." (Zinn 2)

Columbus was so evil he raped and used the women for his own comfort; whenever the Indians ran away they were tracked down by search dogs and sometimes even chewed to pieces by these dogs. There was this one encounter where one of the dogs wa

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Approximate Word count = 1012
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: History