Christopher Columbus Research Paper

The saying, “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” is one of the first things that we learn as children when we start school. We are taught about the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock and how the first Thanksgiving came to be and why we celebrate that historic coming-together of the first European immigrants and the Native Americans. We see both of these events as a time for celebration and the start of how this great country got its start. There are two main viewpoints on the discovery of America; miracle or misfortune. I believe that the discovery of America was one of the greatest human achievements of the fifteenth century (apart from the printing press), and also one of the biggest disasters that this world has ever known.

The actual discovery of America is what I would consider a disaster because we saw genocide, the decline of great civilizations, and the start of the largest forced migration the world has ever seen.
During this time in history, the world saw the formation of the Crusades. “The Crusades were a series of religious wars between Christians and Muslims started primarily to secure control of holy sites considered sacred by both groups. In all, eight major Crusade expeditions occurred between 1096 and 1291. The bloody, violent and often ruthless conflicts propelled the status of European Christians, making them major players in the fight for land in the Middle East” (History.com). The purpose of Christopher Columbus’s expedition was to find quicker trade routes to Asia without having to go through the Middle East. On October 12th, 1492, Columbus and his crew spotted land for the first time. Unexpectedly, this land was not Asia, but it was the first-time European eyes set sight on modern day Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic). It is believed that other Europeans have traveled to the New World before but had not been able to return to Europe to share the news. In 1455, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, and this allowed the news of Columbus and his expedition team to spread rapidly throughout Europe. Columbus saw the natives of these islands as inferior to him and his fellow Spaniards. He noticed that they traveled in canoes or by foot, lived in rather small villages made up of hut-styled homes, and most did not wear any clothes. But the biggest thing Columbus noticed was how these natives wore gold in their noses, as bracelets, and around their arms and legs. Columbus almost immediately enslaved these native people using superior advancement of weaponry in Europe. He then ordered these natives to bring him a quota of gold to him and his men, and for those who did not finish out this request, were often killed. I remember reading one book for a history class that stated that the Spaniards would actually make natives carry them places on piggyback. These men would rape the native women, steal the gold that belonged to the locals, and began killing for fun. This is where we see the disaster of the discovery of America to unfold.
Twenty-seven years after Columbus sailed to the Bahamas, another Spanish expidention gets underway under the command of Hernan Cortes. Cortes sailed to modern day Mexico and encountered the Aztec people. The Aztec calendar was in the “year of one reed”, which is an Aztec belief that the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl would return to bring an end to Aztec civilization. He would return to them from the East and would be a “fair-skinned”, bearded man. Coincidentally, Cortes was a fair-skinned, bearded man that showed up to the Aztec Empire from the east coast of Mexico. Cortes had eleven ships with a total of around 600 men with guns and horses, both were never seen before by the natives of Mexico and clearly overpowered the ancient weapon technology of the Aztecs. Cortes pushed further into Mexico and discovered an abundant amount of gold and silver. He was able to set up ship routes from Mexico to Cuba and then to St. Augustine, which was the first Spanish settlement in what we now know as Florida and was meant to protect the Spanish silver fleet from pirates, and then back to Spain. This specific conquest brought many riches to Spain and was one of the main sources of the extinction of the Aztec people. Cortes and his people wreaked havoc among these people and took advantage of their superior technology. They captured many of their women and this resulted in Mestizos. Mestizos are defined as the mixture of race, and culture, mostly offspring from Spanish men and American Indian women. This was a major disaster because the once great Aztec Empire and civilization declined rapidly as a result of Cortes and his men traveling to Mexico.
Constantinople was the last remaining part of the Eastern Roman Empire until it was taken by the Turks in 1415. The Christian authors fled and headed west, taking their libraries and literature with them. A lot of their writings were in Greek and they were able to teach Greek to European scholars. Some would say this would kick-start reformation, because Christian scholars started studying the Bible and in news ways. For example, these scholars started reading the Bible in its original language, Hebrew. This was all taking place during the Renaissance, which means “rebirth” or “reawakening”. Also, during this time, we saw an explosion in scientific thinking. Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler were all Renaissance scientists. With these new ways of thinking, patrons of the Catholic Church were starting to notice that the Church was corrupt and that the Church controlled pretty much all of Europe. For example, every church claimed to have nails from the cross, or the Virgin Mary’s pillowcase, and one priest even claimed to have the foreskin of Jesus Christ. Monks also were the ones educating students of universities, was the source of news, and were somehow very wealthy.
Reformation was the start of people breaking off from the Catholic church and translating the Bible the way they wanted to. These people are referred to protestants. Martin Luther was the emerging leader of reformation that was started in Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. He is one of the most influential and controversial people in Christian history. Martin Luther was a German monk who started out protesting indulgences, which were contributions of grace during purgatory. Following Luther, we saw John Calvin, who converted to Protestantism around the time he was twenty. Calvin had a more systematic way of thinking than Martin Luther and thought that worship should be very plain and strict. Opposite of the Catholic church, who had artwork, crucifixes, and relics, Calvinists believed that a church service should only contain four walls and a sermon. King James came in to power after the death of Queen Elizabeth. His tutor was a rigid Calvinist but had a strong love for the English church. Queen Elizabeth wanted to purify the church and promised the Puritans a church more like Calvin’s in Geneva. But as soon as James took the throne, he stated that if the Puritans do not conform to Catholic ways, he would have them exiled to the New World.
The British colonies in America were founded as refuge for religious groups from England, and in 1607, Jamestown was established. Jamestown was the first permanent British settlement. The first encounters with American Indians were at Jamestown, and the settlers claimed that these natives did not have any gold or silver, and they were only savages. This settlement in Virginia did not produce anything besides timber. But the colonists started growing Spanish tobacco and it became extremely profitable. The Virginia summers were brutal to the colonists and many died during these months. The average life span was two-and a half to three years. Because of the brutal conditions and the constant need for workers, colonies became a dumping ground for convicts and young street children. This was an act of King James, who stepped in when he figured out how profitable tobacco farming was. “By 1620, Virginia was fifty-thousand pounds of tobacco to England annually and by 1670, Virginia and Maryland were exporting fifteen million pounds annually”. Tobacco planters started purchasing indentured servants, who were colonists that exchanged several years of labor for the cost of passage to America and an eventual grant of land. This was the primary source of laborers in English America during the colonial period. Out of five-hundred thousand people who came to the colonies, it has been said that roughly three-hundred and fifty thousand of these people were indentured servants. As previously stated, the summer months were rough and life spans were short, and fresh workers were needed constantly. Coincidentally, in 1619, a Dutch ship came ashore in Jamestown and sold the colony twenty slaves. This is when the need for slaves became high demand. The book states that enslaved Africans made up eleven percent of the total population in the American population. There were not many large plantations in New England, so most of the African slave population was in the Chesapeake and the Carolinas. In total, around ten million Africans would be captured, traded, or bought from their homeland and forced into slavery throughout the English colonies, West Indies, and Brazil.
Colonists and the Indians did not always have the greatest relationship. Settlers would land in America and run out the Native Americans from their homes and holy lands. With these new “white men” came all types of different weeds that would kill native crops, honey bees, horses, and many new diseases that came from domesticated animals. One of these diseases was smallpox. If Indians did not want to sell their land to these colonists, the colonists would give the Indians these blankets as a sort of peace offering. But to the Native Americans’ surprise, these blankets were laced with smallpox and entire tribes would be wiped out using this tactic. As more Europeans immigrated, more men and weapons would come, and this would be beneficial in the fight for land with American Indians. European technology was vastly superior to that of native tribes of Indians and this made it much easier for colonists to grow their colonies by taking land from natives, and murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Between the smallpox epidemic and the taking over of land and people, this is one of the largest genocides ever seen.
As children, we are taught how Christopher Columbus and his expedition team sailed to this great land and how he was greeted with open arms from the native tribes that he encountered.

We also had false narratives instilled in our brains from an early age about how our colonial ancestors and the native tribes of the New World were great allies, when it turns out that they were our greatest adversary, whom we fought for four-hundred years over this land. As a result of Columbus discovering America; his men were able to accumulate large amounts of wealth by stealing from natives, and they would kill without remorse. Ancient civilizations, like the Aztecs, may still be standing today if Cortes never would have heard about this New World and landed in modern day Mexico that resulted in his men raping native women, creating Mestizos and having no more pure Aztec people. Slavery made a huge dent in the reputation of not only this country, but more specifically, the south, with over ten million Africans being rounded up like cattle while being shipped across the ocean and forced to come work on plantations. Great things, like huge population booms and the creation of this country, resulted Columbus’s discovery, I cannot help but think of the mass genocides, the wiping out of ancient language and culture, and slavery when I am asked the question: “Was the European discovery of America a

disaster?”