Christopher Columbus Rape

For generations upon generations, students have been taught about the “hero” Christopher Columbus who had discovered our new world. However, to say he was a hero would not exactly be the truth; Columbus was an eccentric man who cared much more about his profits than the well being and even lives of the natives. It is documented in journals that he and his crew had slaughtered entire villages at a time, and that he had even killed people just for the point of testing how sharp his sword was. Not only did Columbus and his crew have a thing for violence, on multiple accounts crew members wrote down every single successful rape of women; and used the voyage to help begin a slave export for the royalty of Spain.

Right from the beginning of

his journey, Columbus’ morality and goals were questionable. On October 12, 1492, the first day Christopher Columbus arrived, he had written this: “They should be good servants .... I, our Lord being pleased, will take hence, at the time of my departure, six natives for your Highnesses." This statement written directly by Columbus shows some of the ulterior motives that were really in this journey; and it was not solely about discovering some new land. Only one year later, Columbus’ exports were not personal exports for the queen to have, it began to be a full-blown slave trade with him stating: "their Highnesses may see that I shall give them as many slaves as many as they shall order to be shipped." Following his actions, just a few years less than two decades after his journey Columbus had indirectly created “The Requirement”, a document stating that all Natives must convert to and practice Catholicism, with the first line of that document being this: “We shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them…”.

Not only was Columbus and the Spanish royalty interested in slaves, they were also greatly interested in finding gold. Now Columbus’ crew was not particularly looking for gold to mine, rather they were looking for gold that they could loot. Only on the second day of his journey, he had written how he saw natives “Hanging small pieces of gold from a hole in their nose.”. Then within the first week of being in the new world, Columbus captured some natives, in hope that they would tell them where to find gold. He wrote in his journal “ I am beginning to believe that all they want to do is escape and they will tell me anything I want to hear.”, showing how he had no care for treating these people ethically and only had interest in where he could loot gold off of people. After this did not work for him, he began taking the women from the families of natives in hope that he could force them to show him the better trade route.

Stealing and making slaves out of natives was not all that Columbus had did, the voyagers performed far worse deeds.

He and his crew raped countless Taino women, often even describing the act in detail in a journal. They even began what could be seen as a prostitution ring, although not exactly prostitution as it was completely involuntary on the women’s side. An excerpt from “A Short account of the Destruction of the Indies” Writes: he Christians punched them, boxed their ears and flogged them in order to track down the local leaders, and the whole shameful process came to a head when one of the European commanders raped the wife of the paramount chief of the entire island.” Then, in a letter to a friend Columbus directly wrote "A hundred castellanos 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 (years old) are now in demand.”, showing exactly the morals of Christopher Columbus and his

men.

Violence, is something one could say that Columbus and his men were best at.

They would kill people for seemingly no reason; they would even make games and bets from it, making their own games. “They even laid wagers on whether they could manage to slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual's head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes.”- An account from “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies”. This was not even the worst of it. “They forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen.”. Yet, these are still not perhaps even the greatest atrocities committed by the European invaders of

Hispaniola.

The expedition of Christopher Columbus was responsible for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of deaths; both directly and indirectly. When Columbus first arrived at the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, it was estimated to have over 1,000,000 inhabitants. A mere twenty years after Columbus’ expedition, more than one third of the population had died. Many of these deaths were caused by columbus and his original crew slaughtering, torturing or starving the native settlers, but in reality that only made up a small percentage. In the years after his first voyage, many more Spaniards had came to the island, essentially recreating what columbus had did to them, yet only on a much larger scale. However, murder and torture were not the main culprit of all these deaths, there was a much larger, or rather smaller culprit at hands. This was smallpox. At the time of Columbus, europeans knew of smallpox but they had built immunities of it, so it was not an epidemic. However, when Columbus and his crew originally introduced this indirectly to the natives, it did not treat them well. Having never been exposed to this disease before, the people of Hispaniola were ravaged by the disease, with it spreading quickly, killing people left and right. Since the europeans had a strong immunity to the disease, they however thought nothing of this even as they saw it occur right in front of them.