Questions about Christopher Columbus

A resource for human rights activists from the movement to transform Columbus Day.

1. Question: What's Wrong with Christopher Columbus?
Answer: We've all been lied to about Columbus. Before Columbus sailed the Atlantic, he was a slave trader for the Portuguese, transporting West African people to Portugal to be sold as slaves. Columbus initiated the first Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Columbus, his brother, and his son all continued slave trading of indigenous peoples from the Americas to Europe and from Africa to the Caribbean. Under his administration as viceroy and governor of the Caribbean Islands, 8 million people were killed, making his "contribution" to history the first mass genocide of indigenous peoples. The Columbus legacy is steeped in blood, violence, and death. Public holidays celebrating Columbus not only teach children to honor a cruel and brutal man, they encourage people in this society to ignore, look away, and even support racist practices embedded in today's economic, political and judicial systems.

2. Question: Aren't these accounts of Columbus an exaggerated revision of history?
Answer: No. By conservative accounts based on Spanish surveys, the Taino numbered as many as 8 million in 1493. [Source: Cook and Woodrow, Essays in Population History, Vol. 1, Chapter VI, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
During Columbus' tenure as "viceroy and governor" of the Caribbean Islands and the American mainland from 1493 until 1500, he instituted policies of slavery (encomienda) and the systematic murder and rape of the Taino population. Dominican priest, Bartolome de Las Casas was the first European historian in the Americas. He was an eyewitness and wrote in painful detail of the tortures he witnessed. In a survey conducted in 1496, he estimated that over 5 million people had been exterminated within the first three years of the Columbus rule. [Actual survey conducted in 1496 by Bartolome de Las Casas, cited in J.B. Thatcher, Christopher Columbus, Vol. 2 [Source: New York: Putnam Sons Publishers, 1903-1904), p. 348ff Later accounts that gloss over the horrors of the Columbus regime are the revisions of history.
By the time of Columbus' departure, only 100,000 Taino were left, and by 1542, only 200 were left. Within the entire Caribbean Islands, about 15 million indigenous people are estimated to have been exterminated within one generation of Columbus' arrival. This is genocide, the wholesale killing of an entire race of people. These policies, established here, laid the foundation for extermination policies that Europeans used to justify the elimination of over 100 million native people throughout the Western Hemisphere. By any standards those numbers describe a Holocaust.

3. Question: Wasn't Columbus just a product of his times? Is it not unfair to judge a 15th Century man by 21st Century standards?
Answer: To view Columbus as violent and racist is not an imposition of 21st century morality. His own diaries reveal his brutality -- a brutality that offered no fair judgment to his victims. Bartolome de Las Casas began his days in the Americas as a beneficiary of the encomienda (slave-holding) system. However, as he watched the horror of human destruction caused as a result of Columbus' actions and decisions, as well as the actions of the soldiers under Columbus' command, De Las Casas repudiated the system. He described in vivid detail the massacre of the Indians, denounced Columbus, and published his findings in Europe in his History of the Indies.

The violence of Columbus' extermination actions was widely debated in theological and academic circles within Europe. European legal and moral principles tended to favor the rights of indigenous peoples to be free from unjustified invasion, murder and pillage by Europeans. Francisco de Vitoria, professor at the University of Salamanca in the early 1500s and often considered the father of modern international law, wrote extensively on the rights of indigenous peoples. Vitoria and others in Columbus' own lifetime rejected the view that popes and monarchs had the automatic right to enslave indigenous peoples and take their land. The rights of human beings were as much 15th Century issues then, as they are 21st Century issues today.

4. Question: But those events happened a long time ago. How could they possibly matter today?
Answer: Columbus' actions set the foundation for legal and social policies -- still used today in United States, Mexico, Canada, South America and in many countries around the world. These policies justify the theft and destruction of indigenous peoples' lands and knowledge by corporate and government interests. Media, films, judicial systems, educational systems, and other political and social institutions support this continued assault on the natural resources of indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples today remain at the margins of technological society -- struggling to overcome the destruction of land, culture and language. In many ways all peoples on this planet are impacted. These attacks on indigenous peoples and their land and their knowledge contribute to the destruction of ecosystems and the erosion of human rights for all people.

An excellent website on the movement to transform "Columbus Day" is http://www.transformcolumbusday.org/index.html where these questions and answers were originally published. It is primary focused on the Denver movement to transform Columbus Day, but their materials would provide useful resources for other locales.