Christopher Columbus Dbq Essay

In 1492 a man named Christopher Columbus was given the opportunity to find a new way to the kingdom of spice, India. He was given three boats by the Spanish king to sail west instead of east to get to India. Once he arrived although he thought he was in India he had actually arrived in the Caribbean. After this discovery of a new world to the west, many European countries set out to conquer this new land. This new world was inhabited by natives, and once the natives met the Europeans it was downhill. The Europeans conquered almost all of the land destroying empires and decimating populations, and destroying cultures. Once Columbus had arrived the natives barely clung on to survival. Because of the arrival of Columbus and this trade between

During these epidemics accounts by Europeans, and natives were taken documenting the terrible conditions people faced. “The people were overcome by intense cold and fever, The disease was rampant everywhere, It was uncountable the number of people who died this year (DOC 7)” This document shows how terrible diseases were for the native populations, because the natives had not evolved and lived in the same environment as the Europeans they could not tolerate certain illnesses that the Europeans could. In Document 8 you can see an illustration of a man in méxico suffering from a disease in which you are covered in bumps and slowly die. Another reason why disease ran so wildly at the time were because of how Europeans lived. In Europe not even kings or queens had plumbing let alone the peasants, because of these poor living conditions were garbage and feces were everywhere disease spread more quickly. The poor living conditions were observed by the Japanese when the Portuguese arrived. They are accounted by saying that the Europeans cared nothing for their hygiene, never bathed and were all around disgusting. The arrival of the Europeans created huge epidemics for the natives because of disease that the natives were just not used too and the disgusting living conditions did not help

Although this failed due to the fact that many of the natives rebelled against the European slavers, but the damage was still done. “ Due to work requirements husbands and wives could only meet every ten months and when they met they were too exhausted to work... because of the harsh work conditions many mothers could not take care of their young, sometimes out of sheer desperation mothers drownded their babies so they wouldn’t suffer (DOC 2) This Document really shows how poorly treated the natives were, because many of them had to do back-breaking work such as sugar cane harvesting and cotton picking. The Spanish felt that this was not dehumanizing, this was the fact that they were not Christians. The Europeans believed that because the natives were not Christians it gave them the right to enslave them because they were not going against God's word. This was also the case with the workforce that replaced the natives which were the captured Africans that were brought because the area of West Africa was Islamic they believed it was ok to enslave them because they were not