Was Christopher Columbus was a bad man?

Answer 1

Yeah he was the worst explorer....He treated native Americans as slaves and had done many crimes....Many People had visited America before CC.Even Before Christopher Colombus there were Viklings and English Fisherman who saw this new land.Christopher never thought tht he was in America.He thought he was in Indies.Check Do Not Open An Encyclopedia of the World's Best-Kept Secrets

Answer 2

What he is, mainly, is dead.

What he was, is another thing.

Christopher Columbus wasn't good or evil, he was a man of his time on a mission. It's easy to discredit his motives five hundred years later but for the period in which he lived, his efforts were heroic as perhaps the mission to the moon in our time.

Columbus undoubtedly changed the world, but it's impossible to say with any reliability what would have happened without him. It was a time of exploring, sooner or later someone would have stumbled on to America anyhow. Maybe fairly soon, maybe decades later. But probably not enough later to make Europeans treat the continent much different.

Answer 3

NO! What gives people the idea that Christopher Columbus was a bad person? If you have an answer to this, please tell me! Christopher Columbus is the most famous explorer ever! How could he be so famous if he was a bad person???? That's because HE WASNT A BAD PERSON. Maybe he did some harsh things, but remember...THE WORLD WAS HARSH IN THE 1400's!

Edit: The original answerer should do some fact checking and research. Christopher Columbus practiced forced labor, human enslavement, human mutilation, child prostitution / child sex slaves, theft, and brutality on the natives whom he governed. He didn't even discover America, Amerigo Vespucci did, hence why we are named after him. Why we idolize and give a holiday to such a horrible person is beyond me.

I am going to add to the second answer, the first one is not a very good answer.

Christopher Columbus did horrible things to the Taino, I will say what he did.

In 1492 he landed in the Bahama's (People say he landed in the America's but that is not true.)

When Christopher Columbus landed on the islands he wrote in his journal, the first thing he said was this: "They... brought us parrots and balls of cotten and spears and many other things... They would make fin servants... With fifty men we could subjygate them all and make them do whatever we want." That is exactly what he wrote. After his ship the Santa Maria fell he built a mansion called the Navidad. He left back to England, leaving 42 of his men at the island.

When Cristopher Columbus returned he found that all 42 of his men were dead. Yes the Taino attacked, but why did they attack? This letter was found while Cristopher Columbus was looking around. It was written by one of his men.

" band feeling had arisen and had broken out of warfare because of the licentious conduct of our men towards the Indian women, for each Spaniard had five women to minister to his pleasure."

That being said, the reason the Taino attacked is because Columbus's crew had used those women as sex slaves.

There are a lot more things that Christopher Columbus did to those innocent Taino people. I encourage you to research and learn how badly he treated those people. He is not a hero at all.

Answer 4

One could reasonably argue that Columbus was not necessarily evil, but that he was amoral and motivated by glory and avarice. It is certainly true that he was convicted of crimes related to brutality by the Spanish courts (though he was pardoned by King Ferdinand II for financial reasons). Contrary to what elementary school children are taught, he was not the brilliant maritime navigator who first advanced the idea of a round Earth. This fact was already established at the time.

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The three groups of natives that Columbus encountered were the Lucayans, Taínos, and Arawaks. These people did NOT attack Columbus and he was never in any danger from them. In his correspondence with Ferdinand and Isabella Columbus described these people as healthy, peaceful, generous, and scrupulous. He also observed that they had no military capacity and were very naive. He then went on to elaborate that these qualities would make them easy to enslave and subjugate.

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Upon returning to the New World with armies, Columbus's men used natives as dog food (especially small children), hunted them for sport (a practice known as the infernal chase), enslaved them to work in mines, and sold thousands of them in the slave trade. The practice of hunting non-Christians with hunting dogs (and feeding them to dogs) was already well established in Spain at that time. The Lucayans of the Bahamas soon ceased to exist.

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The explorers raped native women constantly. Columbus once gave a native woman to an associate, Michele de Cuneo, as a gift. When she would not perform his associate flogged her into submission. Michele later wrote a letter about the experience, stating that after he beat her she performed as though she had been raised in a brothel.

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This is all documented in the correspondence of the literate sailors in the service of Columbus (not all of them were literate) to their associates abroad and some of it is even documented in Columbus's own correspondence with the Spanish royals, though he chose his words carefully.

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Again, his behavior on the first few trips doesn't necessarily make him evil as the men in his service were essentially mercenaries and criminals. In order to guarantee their loyalty under the difficult maritime conditions he basically had to let them do whatever they wanted to the natives or they would have killed him. However, he did punish natives who refused to work in mines by decapitating them or cutting their ears off. He also punished natives for not working hard enough in mines by cutting off their hands. This is documented by observers.

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Columbus WAS convicted of crimes of brutality by the Spanish government in 1500 for these acts. This also resulted in the loss of his governorship of Hispaniola (modern day Haiti). However, he made so much money for the royals that they pardoned him and basically told him they didn't care what he did as long as he kept bringing them back gold. Instead of imprisoning him, they financed yet another expedition into the New World.

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Columbus was more or less amoral and motivated by profit alone. Although other explorers of the time behaved in basically the same way, it doesn't change the fact that he caused death, loss of freedom, and grievous injury to thousands of innocent people. A simplified way to look at it is that if all of your neighbors feed babies to dogs, it doesn't make it okay if you do it too. It is still wrong.

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It makes no sense to compare Columbus to great thinkers like Thomas Edison or other scholars. Columbus did actually have innocent people executed and was not an innovator of new technologies. He did little more than establish the presence of trade winds which enabled less perilous travel to and from the New World. Although children are taught Columbus was the first to advance the idea that the Earth was round, most literate Europeans already knew the Earth was round. Columbus was also wrong as he believed he found an easier way to reach Asia, not an entirely different continent. In fact, Columbus died thinking that the lands he conquered were part of Asia.

The practices established by Columbus regarding the treatment of Natives were horrific. He wasn't responsible for the entirety of the mistreatment of the Natives of North and South America, but he did help establish an accepted trend.

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The Natives in the Americas had a comparable population (estimates range from 50 to 100 million) to that of Europe (roughly 75 million) prior to colonization. Due to disease, war, famine, and exploitation, that population was reduced dramatically. Disease alone reduced the population of the Natives of the Americas by 90 percent (and that is a low estimate). The death toll due to factors other than disease was at the very least comparable the civilian victims of the World War II holocaust (which has been estimated in the range of 15 to 20 million). This means that between 1492 and 1600, somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 million people were wiped-out (roughly a 10th of the world's entire population). All of these estimated figures can be verified on the internet.

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The reason that Christopher Columbus ever started being celebrated in the colonies is that the explorer who actually discovered North America was John Cabot, who did so for the English Crown. The American Colonists did not want to celebrate an English Explorer so they simply switched him for Columbus. To the American Colonists who were fighting the English, celebrating a criminal was better than celebrating an English explorer (or even an Italian explorer working for the English). The choice of Columbus was meant to show that the Colonists despised the English more than it was meant to show that they esteemed Columbus (who had nothing to do with the discovery of North America).

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Generations later, a lack of due diligence on the part of educators led to old stories about Columbus from the days of the Colonies being regurgitated as fact. As late as the 1980's many students were taught that Columbus first advanced the idea that the Earth was round and that he knowingly discovered North and South America. Most literate Europeans already knew the Earth was round. He never set foot on North American soil. He actually died believing he had discovered part of Asia.

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Columbus was also not a very nice person by all accounts. The Natives welcomed him with open arms, fed his men, and helped repair his ship. He returned their good will by selling them into slavery and allowing his men to rape their wives and daughters, hunt them as animals, and feed their children to dogs.

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Here is an actual quote from Columbus upon landing in the Haitian Islands:

"They traded with us and gave us everything they had, with good will..they took great delight in pleasing us..They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal..Your highness may believe that in all the world there can be no better people ..They love their neighbours as themselves, and they have the sweetest talk in the world, and are gentle and always laughing. With 50 men you could subject everyone and make them do what you wished..."

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It should be noted that Christopher Columbus was officially convicted in a Spanish court for "Crimes of Brutality". This amounted to his treatment of the Natives during his governorship of Hispaniola in which he established the following practices:

• Natives executed for refusing to work in gold mines;
• Natives being forced to work in gold mines until they died of exhaustion;
• Natives sold into slavery after he was told by Queen Isabella to end the practice; and
• Natives disfigured by cutting off their ears and hands due to not producing enough Gold.

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23 witnesses testified against him, but it is unclear if the charges referred to atrocities committed by his own command or by his men following his established policies.

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The "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" (Columbus's popular name) arrived for the second time in 1493 with 17 war ships. At that type the official surveys of the Spanish navy estimated the Native population to be roughly 15 million (independently confirmed). By the time he was arrested and returned to Spain in 1500 that population was reduced by at least 90 percent. To be fair, many of these deaths were due to diseases introduced by the Europeans which the Natives' immune systems could not withstand.

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That being said, he was still responsible for as many deaths as any typical despot in history.

The statistics quoted above have no basis in fact. The European casualties of WW2 (Hitler's responsibility) are currently estimated at 50-62 million, military and civilian. Germans themselves suffered 6.8 million casualties; Russia lost 20.6 million; and Poland 6.1 million. But, the question is not about who has responsibility for the most casualties in history.

Columbus was not EVIL. Columbus was a man of his time, no more evil than Marco Polo, Thomas Edison, or Neil Armstrong. Evil is in the intent. Columbus's motives may have had an element of personal gain but European social and economic imperialism is the world that Columbus was born into. He believed in his mission to find a more direct (thereby more economical) route to the riches of Asia.

Columbus's voyage(s) were also 'an idea whose time had come'. If Columbus had failed to raise the means to make the trip, any number of other Europeans would have soon succeeded; the Dutch, the British, Portuguese, etc. All of them motivated and all of them preparing. The end result would not have been much different.

Rebuttal: Actually the statistics have a basis in fact (to be fair they were recently revised to exclude speculation) and can be verified. If Columbus was simply a man of his time he would not have been charged with serious crimes and convicted of those crimes in a formal court. As far as "Evil being in the intent", he wrote in his own correspondance to Spain that the Natives he encountered would be easily enslaved because they were trusting and non-violent. That isn't exactly a friendly intention.

While it could be argued (and we're really reaching here) that he was not technically evil, he was certainly not in the same category as a magnanimous genius like Thomas Edison. Additionally, ethics and morality are not relative. We don't go around saying that it is okay that someone was a mass murderer if his neighbors were also mass murderers at that time in history. This is why Ivan the Terrible and Vlad Tepes III were considered wicked rulers generations ago and are still considered that to this day.

Answer 5

From the perspective of his day, he was an incredible man. We do not have the right, nor is it valid, to put the morals of our day on heroes of the past. He was a great human, with accomplishments that should not be diminished by the opinions of narrow minded humans of the present.

Answer 6

bad man