He was a bit of a b@stard in a number of ways, though. He did have every intention of enslaving the natives on his estates in the Caribbean, under the explicit charter of Queen Isabella. He did, in the end, regard the more violent of them as savages - which they were.
But most of the multicultis intermingle Columbus's voyages with the Conquista, of which they weren't really a part. What Cortes and Pizarro sailed into was quite another matter from the island peoples Columbus knew.
What changed their motivation was the presence of gold in incredible quantity in the hands of an empire that was brutally repressive and homicidal and whose fall was not only helped by disease but by the active opposition of other peoples who were sick and tired of having their lands expropriated and their hearts torn out with obsidian knives. It is highly questionable if the non-Aztec natives were conspicuously worse off under the Spaniards than they were under the Aztecs. New age Azatlan enthusiasts tend to idealize the Aztec conquista or ignore it altogether, but it was solidly in place and the pyramids of heads rotting in the sun long before the Spaniards ever made shore.
But none of this was Columbus's doing. As D'Souza points out, he was no more responsible for the epidemics than the natives were for the subsequent epidemic of syphilis in Europe, which disease Columbus's boys brought back with them. It happened. Let it go.
I saw a re-creation of the Santa Maria at a Tall Ship festival one time. It was a little cockleshell wooden thing I wouldn't sail in a bathtub, and this guy got on one and headed off into open ocean. That's what we ought to celebrate. I wouldn't have the guts to do it.
Rewriting history, making heroes, explorers, and other famous individuals, out to be evildoers. I thought history was written by the winners, not the losers. We are indeed living in dangerous times. What is next, will history be revised to state that Adolf Hitler is actually a hero, and the Jewish people deserved what they got?
These revising historians need to take a flying leap outta here.
I did not have the impression the Columbus was totally vilified for the quincentenial, but rather that his discovery was not something to be celebrated since the outcome for native Americans was so disasterous.
Regarding the Aztecs, their governance was particularly brutal. If I remember correctly they were a Chichimec tribal group that moved south into the lake country of central Mexico. Their homeland was particularly dry and brutal, and they carried that mentality with them. The “flowery war” tradition had been started within the previous hundred years by a “prime minister” who said “let the neighboring tribes be our bread”. There were no large animals in Mexico suitable for food, so the population was protein short, and canibalism made up the shortfall and kept the Aztecs stronger than their neighbors.
When I studied in Mexico City I read both Bernal Diaz and Cortez’s Five Letters to King Carlos of Spain. Both accounts are pretty consistent in the horrors they describe. Another interesting book is “Heart of Jade” a novel by Salvador Madariaga.
I saw replicas of all three of his "ships" one year in Corpus Christi, TX. Dang, those things were small!!! I'd never set sail across an entire ocean in search for something that might not have even been there in one of those things. And they had how many on board?!
I didn't get the details of whether they had to take him back to the Caribbean or what. We all know, from Las Casas' later writings, how horribly the Spanish devastated the native people of the Caribbean.
But it appears the Spanish Royal policies--- or so I read --- were, in themselves, the most enlightened of all the European powers. As early as 1512, the Laws of Burgos regulated the behavior of Europeans in the New World forbidding the ill-treatment of indigenous people and limiting the power of encomenderos or landowners. In 1542 the New Laws expanded and corrected this human rights legislation.
Although these laws were not always followed across all American territories, they reflected the will of the Spanish colonial government of the time to protect the rights of the native population. They failed mostly from gross insubordination by colonial governors: lack of enforcement.
But I am just a beginner in reading this history.
What's the scoop on Queen Isabella? Slaver or anti-slaver?
Agreed. I once saw replicas of all three of his “ships” in Corpus Christi, TX. Tiny little things. I wouldn’t dare try to cross an ocean on one of those things.