Christopher Columbus: Hero or Villain?

As the second Monday in October arrives every year, Americans across the country celebrate Columbus Day.  Schools, banks, post offices and government agencies are all closed as many people get the day off.  Students and adults alike are not quick to question this national holiday as it is a nice break from work.  Yet, the question of why we celebrate this day still occasionally arises.  Most people would give the same answer that their second grade teacher first told them: Columbus Day celebrates the great Spanish explorer, Christopher Columbus, and his discovery of America on October 12th, 1492.  This answer is good enough for most people, as they continue their day picking pumpkins, drinking apple cider and running through corn mazes.  But is this polished tale of Christopher Columbus the whole story?  One would be surprised after flipping over the pancake and seeing the uncensored version of Columbus' affairs.

There are many points that tarnish Columbus' patriotic image.  First off, his intentions were never to discover America.  He simply was trying to find a quicker route to the Indies.  Knowing that the world was round, Columbus assumed that if he went west then it might be shorter than going around the tip of Africa.  Yet a little continent called America just happened to get in his way.  And when Columbus did make his arrival he falsely thought that he had reached the Indies. This mistake is the origin for why Native Americans have been referred to as "Indians", even though they are thousands of miles from India. Therefore Columbus' "discovery" was far from a discovery in that he didn't even know he had discovered anything new.  And while talking about this "discovery", it should be noted that Columbus was not even the first European to run into America.  This discovery should be credited to Leif Erikson, a Norse explorer, who was truly the first European to set foot in America.


So Columbus made a few miscalculations, what's the big deal?  He was still an admirable leader, right?  Even more surprising than his misconceptions about his location is his corrupt personality.  Once aboard the ships headed to the Indies a reward was set for the first person to see land.  A crew member named Rodrigo was the first to see land, yet Columbus cheated him out of his reward by stating that he himself was the first to see land the day before.  Yet, the treatment of his crew is not what should give him a notorious view.  How he handled the natives however, truly shows what type of person Columbus was.


In his personal log of the journey, Columbus himself noted how generous the native Arawak people were after his arrival.  They offered many gifts and showed no signs of being any sort of threat to Columbus and his crew.  Yet Columbus did not care for their hospitality, and instead was in search of two things only; slaves and gold.  He quickly enslaved some Arawak people in hopes that they could show him where the "fields of gold" that filled his dreams were located.  And after realizing that these fields did not exist, Columbus turned to enslaving the remaining 250,000 Arawak people to mine for what little gold there was.  Even though gold was not nearly as plentiful as Spain had imagined, Columbus still sent reports of how amazing Hispaniola was, so that more Spanish ships were sent over. If quotas were not met, the hands of the Arawaks were cut off leaving them to bleed to death.  Also after a native resistance was defeated, many were hanged or burned to death.  This terrible treatment of the Arawaks soon led to mass suicides as the only way to escape Columbus and his wicked ways.


The problem with this story is that it is simply not what Americans want to hear about our country's supposed discoverer.  A mass genocide of a peaceful people is not what people want to celebrate and have a day off for, so these truths are often buried.  Along with this, it would most likely not fly if second grade teachers told their students how Columbus and his friends would cut off slices of the Natives to test the sharpness of their blades.  So to answer the question of whether Columbus was a hero or a villain, it hopefully should be clear that he was no hero.  Columbus should be regarded as a villain, and ideally Columbus Day should be a remembrance of the cruel things that have been done to create our country.