Christopher Columbus: Hero Or Villain?

Christopher Columbus was known as an itallian explorer who landed upon the Americas and who’s journey marked the beginning of colonization. He wanted to find a direct water route from Europe to Asia, but instead he landed on Americas. He did not actually discover the New World, because millions of people already lived there. Although his voyages started off the beginning of colonization and exploration, what many people don’t know is that he actually caused and brought negative benefits from these voyages. In this paper, I will argue that Christopher Columbus was evil and did bad things, rather than him being a good guy.

Columbus was definitely a villain. From trying to find loopholes for his bad actions, to disobeying and going behind the back of the King and Queen of Spain, he wasn’t an honorable man in his faith. One bad thing that Christopher Columbus did was the mistreatment of natives along with mass genocide. The Catholic monarchs named Ferdinand and Isabella, signed the Capitulations of Santa Fe which was the agreement by Christopher Columbus when he undertook a voyage to the Atlantic. In the few years after this, he had conceived his enterprise of discovery. He had no acceptance of it in Portugal, so he came to Castile shortly after his wife’s death. The Capitulations provided statements about how business worked with Columbus. Father Bartolome de Las Casas wrote letters of the unjust enslavements of the Arawaks and called them the “poor innocents” which ended up in the genocide of these peacful groups. Before the genocide of these groups, the Arawak’s were very scared and saw their futures. They decided to quietly resist and got rid of all their belongings and crops. They were also eventually forced out of their villages before the result of death. When Columbus landed on the Myriad Islands, he found that only a few of the natives wore small articles of gold. Him and the colonists took advantage of these natives so that way they would trade it for anything the colonists had to offer. Soon after, he sent two of his men to the coast of Cuba on a mission. Columbus was introduced to tobacco, but was completely unaware what this discovery could do to the world’s economy. This was just an example of the greed that made him caught up in his own actions. Not only did Columbus order to get young males, he also kidnapped seven women while the men were kept busy and mistreated them as well. He called the women “heads” as a symbol of superiority that the native women were on the same level as cattle was. In his journal that he kept, he wrote that he found it “pleasurable” to whip the native women with rope.