The REAL Christopher Columbus.
Christopher Columbus was a murderous, enslaving, torturing and sexual-abusing monster. However, Columbus Day is still a federal government holiday.
Columbus took sale in 1492 not to prove the earth was flat but to search for fortune and wealth. When Columbus arrived in the Bahamas, he immediately went to work looking for gold and enslaving the Native population (Arawaks). The Arawaks were so hospitable with a desire to share. They came out of the forests bearing gifts. Columbus wrote this in his journal,
“They’re so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They would make fine servants . . . with fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
You would think after reading that the Arawaks were so full of love and without greed, Columbus would be grateful and treat them well. Sadly, quite the opposite. Columbus looked at it differently and thought they were so naive that he could do whatever he pleased with them. He would soon go on to beat, rape, torture and enlist them as slaves. The Arawaks had gold studs in their ears so he rounded many of them up to lead him to where the gold was. This led him to present day Haiti. They found specks of gold in the river but nothing like what he was expecting. Instead of filling his ships up with gold, he filled them up with a different currency — slaves.
When slavery did not pay off., Columbus turned to a tribute system. He forced the Taino (Haiti) people (14 and older) to fill a hawk’s bell with gold every three months. If successful, they were safe for another three months. If not, he would order them to be punished by having their hands chopped off or chased down by attack dogs. They would then make the punished victims wear the hands around their necks. Bartolome de las Casas wrote, “The tribute system was impossible and intolerable.”
According to the journals, Columbus and his crew bragged about how they would break the women. Taking away their will to resist by raping them over and over again. Columbus wrote,
“A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.”
Columbus would leave and then return to the New World with cannons and more attack dogs. If a native resisted slavery, he would cut off a nose or an ear. If slaves tried to escape he would have them burned alive. If the crew (Spaniards) ran short of meat to feed the dogs, Native babies were killed for dog food. (Source: Huffington Post)
In a single day the Spanish soldiers dismembered, beheaded, or raped 3000 native people. “Such inhumanities and barbarisms were committed in my sight as no age parallel,’ De Las Casas wrote. “My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature that now I tremble as I write.”
Experts agree that within 20 years of Spanish arrival, Columbus and his men were responsible for the deaths of more than 3 million Indigenous Natives.
Gen·o·cide noun the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation.