Christopher Columbus Was A Slave Trader Responsible For The Deaths Of Millions

Christopher Columbus Was A Slave Trader Responsible For The Deaths Of Millions

October 6. 2020

Christopher Columbus

A very pertinent question in society today is should we really be celebrating explorer Christopher Columbus. His name is now sullied in modern times as movements to remove his name and monuments that were erected in his honor are happening all over the world.

Columbus is a mass murder who wreaked havoc on the Caribbean. Columbus left his native Italy and later arrived in Spain, where he befriended Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II. Columbus procured small ships from the king and queen to fully explore the Caribbean. When Columbus landed in my native Jamaica, he immediately decided to exploit the natives.

The original Jamaicans are the indigenous people known as the Arawaks. They were a peaceful people who arrived in Jamaica hundreds of years prior to Columbus, having traveled there from south America. The Arawaks discovered Jamaica, not Columbus as some would like to falsely state.

What the Arawaks and Taino people look like

Columbus brought men with him to Jamaica (and other islands), whom he temporarily left behind, to return to Spain. Columbus did so to gather more ships, supplies and men to fully exploit the island in heinous ways. When Columbus returned to the islands he found some of his men dead. The Arawaks had killed them for stealing, as well as raping women and children. Columbus began murdering Arawaks in retaliation.

Columbus was a slave trader. He forced the Arawaks into slavery. He began shipping Arawaks to Spain as slaves. Many slaves did not make the journey across the Atlantic, as they became ill from maltreatment and were thrown overboard as shark food.

Slaves who did not find enough gold in the mountains of Jamaica (and other islands) would be killed by Columbus, via cutting their hands off and leaving them to bleed to death, among other methods of mass murder. Columbus went on a rampage in the Caribbean. He is responsible for the deaths of over 8,000,000 people in the region. He was brought back to Spain, tried, convicted and imprisoned for mismanaging the Caribbean. He brought massive suffering to the world. He is no hero. He is a greedy, lazy villain who enslaved others.

My tweet on the subject

Columbus' conduct also laid the groundwork for what British and European colonizers would do in the slave trade, via kidnapping Africans from Africa and shipping them to the Caribbean and America, where they faced unspeakably heinous and horrific human rights abuses, including torture and murder. Columbus is an abomination who brought great suffering to the world and showed others how to become despicable slave traders.

STORY SOURCE

The Taino Indians: Native Americans of the Caribbean

“Who are the Tainos? The U.S. Government says they are extinct, but they are not. Most likely you might know them as Latinos, a Spanish speaking person of Latin American (the Spanish speaking part of the Americas, south of the U.S.) descent. Not all, but many modern day Tainos are unaware of their lineage. To understand how that could happen you must know the story from the beginning.
Approximately 1,500 years ago, the Arawak people of South America began migrating northward along the many scattered islands located between South and North America, an area we now refer to as the Caribbean. For a thousand years their population grew and the people lived in harmony.

The people covered all the islands of the Caribbean, the major ones as they are now known: Cuba, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola as well as all the smaller ones: the Bahamas, Bimini, Jamaica etc. Certain groups of island people identified themselves as Lokono, Lucayan, Carib, Ciboney, Arawak, but most islands were primarily inhabited by people who called themselves Taino, which stood for “the good people” in their language. The different groups intermarried extensively to strengthen ties amongst themselves.

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