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Christopher Columbus Greed Essay

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The first Europeans came to South America and the Caribbean searching for the East Indies and stumbled across a new world in which they would ravage and dismantle the Native people’s previous way of life. The explorers came with the goal to spread Christianity, but also sought the fortune that the new land would bring European voyagers stumbled across a vast landscape full of flourishing societies, not just roaming tribes, and they saw nothing more than opportunity for their own greed. This greed would lead to the once self-sufficient people becoming slave workers before eventually disappearing from the region altogether.
Spanish royalty gave explorer Christopher Columbus the power to travel east in exploration to gain wealth for Spain and …show more content…

Archeologists Clark Erickson and William Balée studied portions of the Bolivian landscape, for example, where they found remnants of a civilization that left behind “roads, causeways, canals, dikes, reservoirs, mounds, raised agricultural fields and possibly ball courts.” Furthermore, Erickson and Balée discovered massive geoglyphs that these tribes were not only developed but had the labor with the ability to plan and execute these marvels.
Christopher Columbus would encounter many non-sedimentary tribes that did not have the capitalistic mentality that the Europeans did. These Indigenous tribes traded for utility purposes, which is why they had no issue giving their gold to the invaders. The survival mindset allowed for the Natives to make unimaginable advancements. Charles Mann notes how the ancient Indian farmers had taken teosinte, a rather nutritious lacking crop, and turn it into modern day maize. Mann states it is “a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades how it was …show more content…

Upon Columbus’ first arrival, the Natives brought them parrots, cotton, javelins, etc. and the Spanish traded glass beads and bells in return. According to Chasteen, when encounters that “had begun with trading but rapidly degenerated into slaving.” Unfortunately, disease and abuse would lead to the Caribbean people disappearing, and the slave trade would bring African slaves across to run the newly founded plantations. Disease and death not only ravaged the Caribbean but the mainland as well. In Brazil, the Portuguese had begun colonizing the coastline around 1530 and within years the “Tupi society was swept away by disease and replaced by Brazilian sugar

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On October 12, 1492, an Italian merchant by the name of Christopher Columbus landed on an island in the New World. With him he brought three ships and a small crew of Spaniards. After exploring other islands, Columbus came one that he called Hispaniola; here, they found seemingly primitive and naϊve natives that they immediately began to take advantage of. However, little did they know that this first meeting would bring exploration of South and Central America that would wreak havok among the Natives. Throughout the period of European Expansion, Natives were ripped from their home and forced to work day in and day out.

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In Europe during the fourteen hundreds there was a large demand for spices however, by the time the spices had traveled all the way up from India their price had reached large levels. As time went on and merchant empires became prominent in Europe, Europeans became more and more frustrated with the price of spices that had become a large part of daily life. To cut out the middleman they sailed to India to get the spices themselves. Christopher Columbus, who was a long time sailor, claimed that he knew of a shorter way to India. Columbus, an Italian explorer who had a major contribution to the colonization of the Americas, was a persistent, intelligent, and selfish individual.

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In the year of 1492, a man by the name of Christopher Columbus sailed the Atlantic Ocean in search of a western sea route to China, India, and the Spice Islands of Asia. While searching westward, Columbus discovered a new world which nobody had ever seen before. This land was large and unexplored. Here, there were natives, and Christopher Columbus decided to take back some of them to England to show the Queen. While at this new world, he murdered and enslaved the natives and took over their land.

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For starters, Christopher Columbus and all of his european pals sailed the ocean to try and find a faster way to india so they could trade more things and make more money and just being greedy in general. But, instead, he sailed right into the land that today is now known as North America, but back then it was called the new world because it was new, and he made contact with the indian’s living their. He and the

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Because of them Columbus started his relationship with the Indians by taking prisoners, thinking they could lead him to gold. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, capturing Indians. But the word spread among the Indians, the Spaniards found more and more empty villages. When they got to Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at the fort were dead.

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Many European explorers wanted to become wealthier in their travels. This is shown in Letter of Christopher Columbus to Luis de Sant Angel, where the text states, “I can give them as much gold, spices, cotton, and as many Indian slaves as they choose to send for.” Christopher Columbus is requesting that King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella fund his journey. He promises to make them rich in return. This demonstrates how explorers, like Columbus, were seeking gold and other treasures when they began exploring.

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The end of the fifteenth century is attributed as the time period in which Christopher Colombus “discovered” the Americas. Although he was allegedly the first European to have reached these unknown lands at the time, many sought to reach the new world, for a variety of reasons. Most of those people could be divided in two: the settlers and the conquerors. In North America, there were more of the former, people looking for a new home where they could rebuild their families and lives. In Meso-America, however, the goal was to exploit the lands in order to produce and extract new goods which they could trade.

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Next, Columbus’s conquering of the Caribbean islands. When initially arriving on the islands he respected the

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Throughout the late 1400’s and the 1500’s, the world experienced many changes due to the discoveries of new lands and peoples that had been never been visited before. The new-found lands of the Americas and exploration of Africa by the Europeans led to new colonies and discoveries in both areas. It also brought different societies and cultures together that had never before communicated, causing conflict in many of these places. While the Europeans treated both the Native Americans and West Africans as inferior people, the early effects they had on the Native Americans were much worse. Beginning in the late 1400’s, many different European explorers started to look for new trade routes in the Eastern Hemisphere in order to gain economic and religious power.

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This topic was one of the many topics that I found quite interesting. When Europeans first arrived at the shores of the Americas, their main motivation was to find new land filled with riches, golden cities, and opportunities, and establish ideal communities based on the lives of early Christian saints. Many European settlers each had their own motivation to explore but they ultimately wanted one thing, access to more money. They treated people who were already living on that land as mere means to get what they wanted. The Columbian exchange was the stepping stone for the rise of industrialization in the new

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Before Indians had been living there long before Columbus came and even before that Vikings had sailed Greenland and Newfoundland in the 11th century. Christopher Columbus started a new surge in exploration after he went on his expeditions. Columbus’s explorations also took a huge toll on the natives who lived there. They brought diseases that killed off many of the indians and they also had a huge impact on the environment. They started to extract natural resources from the earth.

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The Columbian Exchange refers to the monumental transfer of goods such as: ideas, foods, animals, religions, cultures, and even diseases between Afroeurasia and the Americas after Christopher Columbus’ voyage in 1492. The significance of the Columbian Exchange is that it created a lasting tie between the Old and New Worlds that established globalization and reshaped history itself (Garcia, Columbian Exchange). Worlds that had been separated by vast oceans for years began to merge and transform the life on both sides of the Atlantic (The Effects of the Columbian Exchange). This massive exchange of goods gave rise to social, political, and economic developments that dramatically impacted the world (Garcia, Columbian Exchange). During this time,

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When the settlers went to start up the agricultural industry in the rural areas of Latin America, there was obviously a smaller population of both natives and Europeans in that region. Colonisers needed workers and locals needed work; both parties had no choice but to interact with one another. Ortiz states that everybody was “snatched from their original social groups, their own cultures destroyed and crushed under the weight of the cultures in existence here” (Ortiz 1947: 98). As the Europeans needed to raise funds in order to pay for their transportation costs from home, they required gold, silver and sugar for export. For the workers gathering these resources, the indigenous people supplied them food and clothes.

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They resorted to violent methods and tried to make the Natives take them to the real gold thinking that they were just hiding it from them. One reason as to why the Europeans began their exploration of the Americas was that they wanted to find a new trade route to Asia. Columbus believed that if he sailed west, he could reach Asia faster than traveling on land or going around Africa. Asia had the spices

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During the late 1400s and the early 1500s, European expeditioners began to explore the New World. Native Americans, who were living in America originally, were much different than the Europeans arriving at the New World; they had a different culture, diet, and religion. Eventually, both the Native Americans and the European colonists exchanged different aspects of their life. For example, Native Americans gave the Europeans corn, and the Europeans in return gave them modern weapons, such as various types of guns. This type of trade was called “the Columbian Exchange.”

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