Posted on 10/10/2023 2:06:01 AM PDT by Recovering_Democrat
Oh, surely, he was quite brave.
Anybody going where nobody got before is brave.
But without the miscalculation, he would have to count on discovering some land in between Asia and Europe.
Magallanes finally made it to Asia and most of his people died from scurvy. On shorter rout across just across Pacific!
BTW.
Pedro Alvarez Cabral discovered independently America in 1500.
He was going to India around Africa and was blown off the course, landing in Brazil!
So if not for Columbus, it would be Pedro Alvarez Cabral eight years later and we would be celebrating Cabral day now!
I always thought he did a great job on WW II considering what he had to work with at the time he wrote it. I have thought taking issue with him was an attempt by lessor historians to burnish their own credentials in an attempt to approach his stature.
If not Christopher Columbus, it would have been some other 15th Century European.
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Eight years later, AD 1500, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, from Portugal, on his way to India around Africa, was blown off his course and landed in Brazil!
He is credited with discovering Brazil, but, really, he independently discovered America.
Without Spanish funding!
Actually, Queen Isabella was right. She send Columbus to his way, because she was afraid that the Portuguese will get there first. If she waited 8 years, it would happen!
As many on this thread have pointed out, the indigenous people when Columbus arrived in 1492 had their own issues with other indigenous peoples, specifically the Caribes (from which the word “cannibal” is derived)
The Caribs were brutal and vicious, apart from simply eating those they conquered.
They were rightfully feared by other tribes who I will simply refer to as “Others”, because that is how it generally broke down. The “Others” whoever they were, were pretty happy to see Columbus and wished to have good relations with him (probably until they figured out they fully intended to stay at some point) because they were a powerful counterpoint to the feared Caribs.
The myth of an idyllic, peaceful environment of indigenous people is just that. But like both the Caribs and the “Others”, when they encountered Europeans, cannibalism may not have been the primary issue, but warfare, slavery, and being conquered by others were still issues, ones they could not overcome due to the disparity in cultures.
Whatever later Europeans did, Columbus did not bring slavery or war to the Americas.
He even forbade his men to take advantage of the Indians.
He even forbade them from assaulting/having sex with the women.
But he did bring a priest on each voyage to convert the natives.
I agree 🤣
Agreed.
Samuel Eliot Morison, who is the foremost North American historian of Columbus, viewed him as mostly benevolent in his treatment of native populations. And Morison knew of what he wrote, which can’t be said of the douchebags at media like CNN and colleges all over the world. He did real primary research.
Columbus didn’t advocate killing the natives and taking from them, even when his men were starving and in need. He wasn’t averse to tricking them into giving him supplies, as he humorously did by using the event of a solar eclipse to make them think they had incurred the wrath of God by not sharing their provisions with him.
He did not bring slavery or war, as you stated, but Europeans eventually did bring it to all of them, including those of them who had warred on their rival tribes, enslaved their rival tribes, and even eaten them. There was just a bigger fish in the neighborhood. It is what happened in those days.
But it wasn’t Columbus who was a sinner. He did his best to be humane.
As Samuel Eliot Morison said: “Slavery was so taken for granted in those days, both by Europeans and Muslims, some of whom still practice it. But Columbus never gave a thought to the morality of slavery. If he had, he would doubtless have reflected that the Indians enslaved each other, so why should we not enslave them, particularly if we convert them to Christianity and save their souls?”
On his second voyage to The New World, upon returning to Hispanola, he found that all the men (39 of them) he had been forced to leave there had been slaughtered by natives, angry that the Spaniards had raped some of their women. They were told by a Chieftain that a rival tribe had done it, so they marched in force (400 men) and had a battle with the natives, who lost badly in a rout, and Columbus’s men took 600 of them captives as slaves after the battle, and those they took back to Spain with them.
(I view these as war slaves, which in those times, was a given. Granted, those natives were fighting an injustice of rape and mistreatment, but they did engage in battle. That was up to then, a timeless custom to take the losers as slaves. However, Columbus decided to take them back to Spain and get some money for them, so in that sense, he did take slaves, but at that time, it was not “the slave trade”, it was conquest in battle. A fine point, perhaps, but that is what was done, not by just Europeans and Muslims, but Indians too.)
Morison related an interesting anecdote, in which food began to run out, and in a particularly violent storm, there was talk about throwing the slaves over the side to save the food, and some even suggested that they eat some of them, especially those who were Caribs, and that eating them would be justified in paying them by their own coin. Columbus put that down, and stated that they may be Caribs, but they were still men, and forbade it. I view that as telling of his attitudes.
And the Indians turned out in any case to be poor subjects for slavery. They didn’t handle confinement, the weather, or the food, and wasted away to nearly nothing.
When he got back, Ferdinand and Isabella were hostile to slavery in the New World, and forbade him from selling the slaves to regain his losses, but once those two passed on, other people had other ideas and slavery was on.
Nice lesson on another example of Divine Providence
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