As Christopher Columbus set foot on shore, he was ushering in one of the most brutal conquests of one people over another. It is odd, and saddening that this man is so almost completely absolved of the atrocities he committed, and even given a holiday where we celebrate the beginning of many years of bloodshed. His success can not even be attributed to his own skill, apart from having the gall and ability to sail into the unknown. While it's the miscalculation that led him to the Americas that is most remembered, it should be the horrible things he did to the natives that should be ingrained in the minds of Americans. But the hundreds of thousands of Natives lives were lost in the name of progress? Zinn makes the argument that even though these terrible things happened that they shouldn't be condemned, but accepted as history. This doesn't mean that he should be condemned as an executioner, but that his impact on history is more than "sailing the ocean blue in 1492". But even if he was a man of high morals, his task lent itself to cruelty. He landed on the Americas with a very specific mission: to find gold and natives to bring back as slaves. This led to him forcing the natives to work in mines and in rivers to find gold, and if they didn't produce they had their throats cut and hands cut off. Many of the natives were captured and transported back to Europe but many died along the way. In one specific ship only two hundred of the initial five hundred made it back to Europe. His exploitation and treatment of the natives was not unlike that of the conquistadors that came after him, but yet he is somehow set above them. They are murderers and he is an "explorer", a term that is used very loosely in Columbus's case. So in the end, in my eyes, Columbus has fallen from the high pedestal that he was placed upon.
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