Columbus Day Research Paper

I feel that Columbus Day shouldn’t be a national holiday. It should not be a holiday because Columbus was an awful person. He murdered hundreds of natives causing genocide, killing off half of the population either by overworking them or making them starve. He also brought harmful germs and diseases to the indigenous people such as smallpox, influenza, typhus, and typhoid. Lastly, he enslaved the Natives so that he could have gold. Indians that couldn’t find any gold got their hands cut off by the Spaniards and bled to death.

Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer and navigator. Columbus set sail from Spain in 1492, his goal was to find an alternate route to Asia in order to find spices. Thirty-three days after leaving waters known

So they ran. The Spaniards hunted them down with dogs and killed them. When they took prisoners, they hanged them or burned them to death.”(Howard Zinn, page 9) Unable to fight against the Spanish soldiers' guns, swords, armor, and horses they began to commit mass suicide with poison. When the Spanish searched for gold began, there were a quarter of a million Indians on Haiti. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and starved, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while Columbus was in Cuba, 7,000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation...In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work and children died from lack of

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. The sailors that roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves, until the Indians had killed them in battle. They had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with something, so in 1495 they went on a great slave raid. After they picked five hundred captives to send to Spain. Two hundred of the Indians died as captives to send to Spain. Two hundred of the Indians died on the voyage. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by a local church official. Columbus, who was full of religious talk, later wrote, "Let us in the name of Holy Trinity go on sending all of the slaves that can be sold. Columbus and the Spaniards had shattered the Natives way of