I had a wonderful day off from
work today. Went for a run, out to breakfast with a friend, long day in the
park: essentially just what I like to do with an extra day to myself. But
despite my idyllic October Monday away from work, I can’t help but feel uneasy
about the man behind today’s national holiday. I felt my unease trying to
explain to a non-American why the deeds of Christopher Columbus warrant a
national day of goofing off. It really hit home when I read an excellent web-comic
by one of my favorite blogs The Oatmeal. That feeling of unease came from one
simple fact: Christopher Columbus is a huge d-bag, and his history of rape,
murder, and enslavement of the native people of the Americas is something I like
to celebrate about as much as I like the thought of a staple-filled enema.
In case you don’t have time to
read the full web-comic (and I highly recommend you do, it is after all the
inspiration for this article), it’s essentially a long history of why exactly Cristóbal Colón was a human rights
violator on a grand scale, and you should all know how I feel about human
rights violators. The guy even has a section of his Wikipedia article titled
“Accusations of Tyranny and Genocide.” Maybe I’m reading the wrong Wikipedia
articles, but that seems like a tough accusation to come by unwittingly. Columbus’s
initial voyages to the “New World” started off with a trip to the Bahamas where
he lovingly wrote of his friendly interactions with the Lucayan natives he met
there, who even helped rescue some of his men who landed on the island in a
shipwreck. When the time came to return to his Spanish overlords and convince
them to fund another voyage, he brought along twenty-five new Lucayan friends,
only seven of whom survived the voyage. Yet Columbus’s next two extended
voyages to the Caribbean were about to make his first eighteen victims pale in
comparison.
When Columbus returned to the
Americas, he was set up as Governor of Hispaniola, to rule from the capital of
Santo Domingo. He was sent back to the Bahamas with a fighting force of 1,500
hundred men to eke out all the gold and wealth they could find. Now, he had
gotten Queen Isabella super hyped up over the idea of a “New World” containing
riches beyond imagining, so Columbus had to drum up some riches pretty darn
quick or find himself rotting in the dungeon of a Spanish prison. His
super-original-not-to-be-repeated-dozens-of-times-throughout-history idea was
to greet the Lucayan native friends he made from his first voyage, and demand
they hand over all their wealth. While they were at it, Columbus demanded his
men have sexual rights to the native women. When some of the natives had the
nerve to be like, “Uh, no way, bro,” Columbus hacked off their ears and noses as
a warning to the rest of the Lucayans.
