The facts clearly show that they did. As I said, the gold from the West Indies was disappointing, and they clearly didn’t produce the spices, silks, and other goods of the Far East. Despite this Spain colonized all the islands in short order, establishing plantations. Brazil began to be colonized by the 1530s despite the lack of gold.
Once they were in the New World, Europeans found things to exploit and trade. The most important early trade item from Brasil was brasil-wood, from which the country takes its name.
I want to quibble and say that opponents of an individual are known to be eager to cast aspersions. I can show evidence that the Germans who sank the Lusitania got a medal for their premeditated attack. But the truth is that this was wartime propaganda.
What’s getting lost in all this is that Columbus Day was intended to celebrate Italian-American achievements. So change it to Camille Paglia Day or something.
Other Spanish conquistadors and officials had enemies and were not subject to the same accusations. (Some were, but Columbus was among the most brutal.)
Bricker, with all due respect, it’s rather evident that your defense of Columbus is based on ignorance of the historical record rather than familiarity with it. As such, I don’t think your opinion on the matter is particularly relevant.
Schools don’t necessarily even close for it. It’s a state holiday in Ohio, but my community’s schools are open today. I went to a public university as well, and “Columbus Day” was observed…on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
prim·i·tive
ˈprimədiv/ a person belonging to a preliterate, nonindustrial society or culture.
Of course that make Europe “primitive” also.
Still, the Americas didnt have metallurgy, except for gold, silver and a little copper. Few were Utilitarian. Literacy was confined to the priestly caste, perhaps the royals and only of a few civilizations. Maya, Aztec, Mixtec, maybe Inca. Outside Mexico, all of North America was Preliterate, and so was most of South America.
Even so the literature was primitive, about on a levl of Egyptian hieroglyphs, which had died out 2000 years before Columbus.
wiki:Geoffrey Sampson distinguishes between two kinds of writing. One kind of writing he calls Semasiographical, this covers kinds of pictorial or ideographic writing that is not necessarily connected to phonetic language but can be read in different languages, this kind of writing is for example used in roadsigns which can be read in any language. The other kind of writing is phonetic writing called by Sampson Glottographic writing and which represents the sounds and words of languages and allows accurate linguistic readings of a text that is the same at every reading.[1] In Mesoamerica the two types were not distinguished, and so writing, drawing, and making pictures were seen as closely related if not identical concepts. In both the Mayan and Aztec languages there is one word for writing and drawing ((tlàcuiloa in Nahuatl and tz’iib’ in Classic Maya)) Pictures are sometimes read phonetically and texts meant to be read are sometimes very pictorial in nature. This makes it difficult for modern day scholars to distinguish between whether an inscription in a Mesoamerican script represents spoken language or is to be interpreted as a descriptive drawing. The only Mesoamerican people known without doubt to have developed a completely glottographic or phonetic script is the Maya, and even the Mayan script is largely pictorial and often shows fuzzy boundaries between images and text. Scholars disagree on the phoneticity of other Mesoamerican scripts and iconographic styles, but many show use of the Rebus principle and a highly conventionalised set of symbols.
Most pre-Columbian Americans were stone age, no literacy but in some cases with pretty advanced agriculture. Overall, however, they were about 2000+ years behind Europe- politically, literacy,Metallurgy, etc. In some cases 7000 years behind. Yes, they had some large cities and organized agriculture in a few areas- but both of these were around in Europe in 2000BC or so and earlier in North Africa and Asia.
No more than was common at that time. Mesoamerican practiced mass human sacrifice at that time. Slavery was endemic in Africa and of course in America*from Canada to South America. Torture was common across the globe. Raping your foes women was still common almost everywhere. Aztecs practiced cannibalism.
While there’s been all kinds of theories as to Columbus’s origin, I think the bulk of the evidence points to Columbus being born in Genoa. However, it’s curious that Columbus almost never wrote, even to family, in Italian (although there was no standardized Italian language at the time). It is clear at any rate that Castilian Spanish was not his first language. Some have speculated that Columbus didn’t learn to read and write proficiently until he arrived in Portugal as a young man, which accounts why some of the idiosyncracies in his Spanish indicate a Portuguese influence.
From my cite above:
*A testimony of the time accuses Columbus of brutality against the natives and forced labor. Las Casas, son of the merchant Pedro de las Casas who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, described Columbus’s treatment of the natives in his History of the Indies.[13] The writings of Las Casas are seen by some historians as exaggerated and biased. Their anti-Spanish sentiment was used by writers of Spain’s rivals as a convenient basis for the Black Legend historiography. They were already used in Flemish anti-Spanish propaganda during the Eighty Years’ War. Today the degree to which Las Casas’s descriptions of Spanish colonization represent a reasonable or wildly exaggerated picture is still debated among some scholars. For example, historian Lewis Hanke considers Las Casas to have exaggerated the atrocities in his accounts and thereby contributed to the Black Legend propaganda
*
Unfortunately a lot of that comes also from the time a whitewash (Heck, historians did cal it the “White Legend”) was being made to hide a lot of the history. Not coincidentally, during the days when in the USA Columbus was being seen as a good model to follow in the days of the “big stick”.
There were others among the conquerors who were equally brutal and avaricious. But there were also many decent people who tried to protect the Indians, like Las Casas. (And Las Casas didn’t have a vested interest in making the accusations. He was a Spaniard himself, not an enemy of Spain or rival of Columbus. There is no real reason to think he was being biased.) Ferdinand and Isabela themselves were more concerned about the welfare of the Indians than Columbus was, as I said having forbidden him to enslave them. And as I also said, Columbus was accused of brutality not only against the Indians, but against his own subjects, something that was much more unusual.
If you want to defend Columbus on the grounds that others were just as brutal, go ahead, but the evidence suggests that he was worse than most.
I would be curious where you dug up that definition.
As far back as the early 1970s, anthropologists had dropped “preliterate” from any definition of primitive.
Not that I’m overly-concerned with such things, but isn’t celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day just another form of cultural appropriation by evil white imperialists? Shouldn’t we let the indigenous people themselves decide how or when to celebrate their heritage (or something like that)?
On another note, I found this article interesting: http://www.wsj.com/articles/straight-talk-about-christopher-columbus-1476050242 Basically, people have been mean to each other for a long time now.
Moreover, to go back to the title of the thread, if true that Columbus was, as a man of his times, merely averagely awful, why should he be celebrated? “He was merely as unpleasant and brutal as were most people of the times.” does not sounds like me to be a ringing endorsement of the man.