I voted -1 just because he was involved in some improprieties relative to his responsibilities to the Spanish crown. His treatment of natives and most of the stuff he’s hated by modern day Native Americans for to me, are 0 on the scale.
To expand a bit, it’s my strong opinion that historical figures can be fascinating and people whose lives we can learn valuable lessons from. But at the same time, they can be horrible monsters based upon modern day morality. To be quite honest, almost all of them are like this if you go very far back. There’s a few scattered figures pre-enlightenment that would pass a modern day “morality purity test” and the number increases throughout the 19th century. But to be frank, it’s an ignorant and unhelpful perspective on history to judge the past by modern moral standards.
To give some neutrality to this topic, the Native American peoples were vast in number, vast in different cultures, and themselves vast in their behaviors. Many of the behaviors of Native Americans, both pre and post Columbian Exchange are frankly the worst kind of barbarism. Slavery, human sacrifice, genocide, you name it-Native Americans did it. White men c. 1492-2013 do not have a monopoly on evil.
Most of the abuses that modern day American citizens who are Native Americans and members of tribes located here in the United States are talking about actually are directly linked to the American government’s treatment of them, and have essentially nothing to do with Columbus. Columbus’s actual interactions with indigenous peoples only covers a very small sliver of the Americas and the people living in them, and there’s little evidence he invented the idea of treating indigenous peoples who lacked military technology sufficient to defend themselves like shit, or even pioneered it to be honest.
Columbus does deserve some derision for being so ignorant of accepted science of his day, none of the truly learned men of Europe had any serious doubt about the size of the Earth. The ancient Greeks had approximated this “good enough for government work” 2000 years prior to Columbus lifetime and their methods could be reproduced by scholars of the day. Now one can argue most people in Europe were not scholars or learned me in the 1480s/1490s, but mind that Columbus was assembling a voyage based on his idea so he at least should’ve known enough to do some research. He was born and raised in Italy and was a seafarer, so he had access to the best minds and best banks of knowledge in the Christian world–Italy was a hotbed of scholarship at this time.
But on the flipside Columbus deserves a nod at least, for his fool’s errand. Three small (by our standards) wooden ships, packed with people and supplies, navigating by the stars into parts unknown, past the point of no return etc. That’s not a small thing. Anyone who has ever been on the Atlantic Ocean in bad weather knows this isn’t a small thing, and certainly not in an era where you can’t radio for help from the Coast Guard. I’ve been on really bad weather on one of the Great Lakes and my understanding is that’s small potatoes versus what you can run into in the Atlantic, Columbus did something pretty difficult and dangerous in making his crossing.