Christopher Columbus: Hero Or Villain

Stories can often be retold to portray a character differently; a perfect example is Christopher Columbus. Retold differently, and altered over the centuries, Columbus is seen as a hero to many, and villain to others. Originally only told from the Spanish’s point of view, the story of Columbus and the Arawaks is particularly difficult to analyze because of how many variations there are. From Howard Zinn to children’s books, the portrayal of Columbus is always different. While a source may be credible or accurate, authors can still bend the truth to support their idea of someone.
One source, Howard Zinn’s A Young People’s History of the United States, shows the more violent, and what some would say, more accurate side, of Columbus’s story. The book contains excerpts from the writing of Bartolomé Las Casas. Las Casas made a copy of Columbus’s diary and wrote his own book describing the life of the Indians. This is how we know exactly what happened on those Caribbean islands. He writes about how the Indians were treated by the Spaniards, saying “...In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk…” (Zinn 9). Other pieces in his book include a description written by Columbus, of the Spanish and Arawaks’ initial interaction. He says, “They would make fine servants…

With fifty men we could subjugate them and make them do whatever we want” (1), thus proving that the Spaniard’s intentions were violent.
While Zinn wanted to educate his readers on the less popular side of the story, many books still portray Columbus as the heroic explorer who discovered America.

Stephen Krensky’s children’s picture book, Christopher Columbus, depicts Columbus as brave and courageous. The author describes him as the only one with hope, saying, “The sailors are afraid. But not Columbus.” (23). The book even contains a line that states blatantly, “Columbus is a hero.” (46). While Krensky does say, “Columbus has also forced six Indians to come with him” (41), a majority of the text canonizes him, and ‘forced’ does not exactly cover the concept of raped, enslaved, and

murdered.
While there are two main sides to this story, some sources remain neutral, for instance, Diane Hart’s textbook, The United States Through Industrialism. However to quote Desmond Tutu, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”. While the textbook depicts Columbus as neither a hero nor villain, our class agreed that his neutrality caused him to appear to be siding with those calling him a hero. The textbook also mainly blames disease for the death of so many Natives, mentioning less of the enslavement and mass genocide of the Arawaks. Simply saying, “The Europeans who came to America brought with them germs that caused smallpox and other diseases deadly to Native Americans” (19), makes the Spanish sound more innocent. It uses disease as an excuse for the high death rate, rather than the murder and mass-suicide that followed the Europeans discovering the New W0rld.
Because stories are so often altered to portray a character or event differently, it’s important to evaluate different sources. Decide which stories seem to bend the truth in order to change the description of any character or situation. Some stories, like that of the Spanish and the Arawaks, are so inconsistent and different it’s hard to agree on what we think the truth really is. It’s crucial to identify words or parts in a book that may be intentionally changing your view of something the way these books do. Credibility and accuracy do not account for the way an author can describe something.