15/10/2024
Someone submitted this description of Columbus for our dictionary. I fixed it. Happy Indigenous Peoples Day!
Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer and navigator who completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean. He lived from 1451 to 1506 and was an emissary of the Roman Catholic Church commissioned by the Holy King and Queen of Spain [The Catholic Monarchs] to find a western passage to the East Indies. He was the first European to see Cuba and Hispaniola and established a colony in what is now Haiti. He also explored South and Central America where he found many interesting, intact and well-educated cultures and civilizations that understood advanced mathematics, engineering, astronomy and innovative agricultural methods as evidenced by archeological excavations, a few remaining manuscripts that were not burned by Franciscan Friar Diego de Landa Calderóna of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Yucatán during the Yucatán’s auto de fé (1562) and immense solar calendars that still function accurately today. These peoples also understood the ecosystems that provided food security and medicines to support these complex civilizations. Columbus viewed these Indigenous peoples as commodities not people. He was especially proud of the profits being made from the s*x slave trade of Indigenous girls as noted in a letter dated 1500 to Doña Juana de la Torre, a nurse in the royal court of the Holy Queen Isabella: Por una mujer tan bien se falla çient castellanos como por una labrança, y es mucho en uso, y ay fartos mercaderes que andan buscando muchachas, de nueve a diez son agora enprençio, de todas hedades ha de tener un bueno. [A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a girl as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.] As an emissary of the Roman Catholic Church, Columbus and those that followed brought gunpowder, STD’s and other unknown diseases that decimated the Indigenous populations, genocide, an unquenchable thirst for riches, developed Indigenous slave labor and eventually the transatlantic slave trade.
